Baltic Relations

I took overland transport all the way from Helsinki to London so I had quite a lot of time for reading and, thanks to wi-fi, even spent time online. So many different worlds to choose from. Very 21st century you might say, very globalization, this being online.

Setting off from the Olympic Terminal (so named because it was built for Helsinki’s 1952 Olympics)  I travelled Helsinki-Stockholm-Köbenhavn-Köln-Bruxelles-London. On the way I was reminded of how much there is here in this relatively small part of a very, very small continent.

It all made me think a lot about the invention of the nation-state, the short history of the passport, national styles of music, languages, local foods and propensities to say ‘var så god’, ‘danke’ and ‘pardon’ [no stereotypes, please, Ed.]. I kept coming back to the fact that mixtures and rubbings of shoulders and exchanges have been the order of the day for one heck of a long time around the Baltic and, of course, in Helsinki itself, which was a multilingual, cosmopolitan, outward-looking harbour town 100 years ago if not earlier. According to Kjell Westö’s fiction, the area around Malminkatu was even called Babel for the mix of languages heard there.

My grandmother (born 1903) spoke Finnish but also Russian, Swedish and English, the last three very badly. But she did use them all in her own way. Then there have been all those people for whom Tatar, Romani, Yiddish and possibly other langauges are the most fluent. My grandmother seemed quite nostalgic, I thought, for the days of many languages and the exoticism it suggested to her (she wasn’t PC!).

Then at some point Helsinki perhaps turned away from the sea, and away from the places and people it had always connected it to (had other stuff to worry about, I suppose). And then Finns became famously similar to each other, most homogeneous country in Europe, sort of thing. For my father, the aforementioned Olympics meant seeing for the first time ever, a) black man and b) a full beard on a young man, and his first taste of Coca Cola, but I think he too assumed that multilingualism and different religions in a city were normal, even desirable qualities, and he was certainly keen on cultural exchange even through the darkest days of Finnish consensus politics.

Back to now or the week-end. On the boat, as I enjoyed a dinner of fish washed down with a glass of wine and the only time I saw the entertainment venue was early evening before it filled with its drag show.

And with nobody to talk to (the waiter seemed a bit surly, surprisingly) I read that marvellous free rag, Voima. An article on migrant workers at the EU HQ in Brussels asked why eurocrats don’t find it uncomfortable to have their needs catered to by an almost uniformly non-white catering staff and went on to a damning critique of migration policies and the European blue card, a vehicle for poaching highly qualified people to work underpaid in Europe.

When I got back online I discovered that the mainstream in Finland has waffled stupid about restricting immigrants, as if that “conversation” wasn’t already far enough gone. Facebook has groups trying to fight back with Finnish varieties of anti-racism and cosmpolitanism (and probably with less charitable groups too along with the cowardly and bilious racist parts of the blogosphere). Interestingly, the Finnish-language HS.fi article on the SDP spokesman’s wishes to keep out migrant labour, was illustrated with a picture of a building site. (English article here).

Depressing! But to stop this post getting too worthy or too long, and to try and loop things back somehow to the built environment, I’ll just add a couple of links to other news stories, about Britain and Dubai, which demonstrate that the mainstream is happy with racist commentary here too, and that cheap labour and double-standards are a widespread contemporary phenomenon. Not, I hasten to add, that this makes the Finnish gits’ comments any less worrying.

Multiculture in the news

Because yesterday’s copy of The Usual reported (but only to those who subscribe, it seems) on the opening of the Punavuori Reception Centre for asylum seekers with a picture that included the Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral on Katajanokka I thought I’d share the link. (Or should that be in Katajanokka? Comp. Katajanokalla).

The very last line of the article draws attention to the religious/ethnic difference of those seeking asylum and so to Finns’ current preoccupation with questions of difference/multiculturalism. Meanwhile the Italians are having to digest the news that crucifixes will no longer be allowed in school classrooms, the result of a court case pitting Italy vs. a Finn with Italian citizenship. And a columnist berates the True Finns/Basic Finnish far-right party and others for debasing the quality of debate over the country’s language politics. It makes one wonder how much of the views around the HDHD have to do with the Swissness of the starchitects.

Of course the HDHD could just be about love for an area by both ordinary citizens and experts. About a built environment that serves a range of people and businesses and gives locals and visitors alike a rare sense of being embedded in a solid, even comforting history?

Here Katajanokka Customs Building from 1901, protected in a masterplan/zoning ordinance (sorry, this isn’t precise, but you get the idea) from the 1980s aimed at respecting the valuable built heritage of the harbour-side architecture from the 1860. Not my favourite building by a long shot, but fit for purpose (as renovated) and rather unusual in Helsinki’s streetscape which is predominantly classical even in its modernism.

Upside-down in Helsinki not in English

It’s not gone unnoticed by us here at JeesJees that questions of difference and sameness keep cropping up in Helsinki conversations. Along with the simple-minded monocultural bigotry to be found on-the-street or online, there’s also been some publication of lucid and quite informative texts – and in English too!

Helsinki is an interesting place to trace changes in understandings of cultural variation. Many visitors arrive to find two sets of (road) signs all over Helsinki never having heard that Finland is officially bilingual – Finnish-Swedish. Many are relieved as Swedish is at least an Indo-European language with some resemblance to things like English, French, German, Russian … while Finnish looks like nothing they’ve ever seen before.

100 years ago Helsinki’s signs were in three languages (Russian the third). In parts of Finland today the second language isn’t Swedish but Sami (spoken across Lapland).

And increasingly in Helsinki the “third domestic language” is English.

Two heart-warming events can’t go unblogged in this context.

The first is the publication, in Finnish, of the originally French Atlas 2009 – Un Monde à l’Envers (the world upside-down), and the publicity and interest it received. With inventiveness, expertise and self-conscious of its own limitations of time and place, its international team of authors make global politics look (literally as well as metaphorically) truly interesting. But what’s such fun about the project is its Frenchness. Or rather its non-Englishness. By which I’m not mouting a critique of any sort on English/Anglo anything, but merely pointing out that to reduce international (or “KV” as it is in Finnish these days) to the English language is to mock the idea of global and to have a sad and sorry sense of human existence. That there should be an interest in a French perspective on things, feels refreshing and enriching.

Speaking English may count as cosmopolitan in early 21st century Helsinki (among some, including politicians) but 100 years ago this required a lot more. Languages I mean. Finnish, Swedish, Tatar, Yiddish, Russian, French, German …

And so the second event worth noting in this context is an exhibition of 100-year-old photographs of Helsinki by Signe Brander which gives us glimpses of that world. Many of here photographs have text within them, in Russian, in Swedish and in Finnish mostly, of shops, of street names, of advertising early 20^th-century style. This aspect of Brander’s Helsinki has somehow managed to be forgotten over the last century. Until the Second World War Helsinki was remarkably multi-lingual. (Note to self – what about Finland beyond Helsinki, Tampere & Turku?)

This photo with its Swedish-language exhortation to shop for fabrics and factory (fabrik, in Swedish) prices, is of the corner of Iso-Roobertinkatu and Yrjönkatu from 1907.

The names on display sounded and looked nothing like Finnish-Finnish surnames which all seem to end in -LA and -NEN and where double-consonants, double-vowels too, make it all look oddly squat and, well, just odd. Even today one assumes locals don’t hesitate to think of Fazer, Mannerheimintie, Stockmann, Fiskars, Bukowski, Sibelius, Enso … as belonging here.

French names don’t seem to have been so prominent – except as pseudonyms for artists and in words absorbed into Swedish like “atelier” or “jour” (still used for a hospital’s emergency service). Oh, and people did use French 100 years ago to prove they were posh.

Anyway, the exhibition has just opened at the City Museum. This first Sunday since its opening it was heaving. The 170-year old double windows (I’m guessing here) of Hakasalmen Huvila steamed up with enthusiasm and extraordinarily careful examination of the photos. Old and young alike seemed enthralled. Each time two teenage girls watching a film comparing the old and the new recognised a streetscape they exlaimed “Oh My God”. (In English. Quod erat demonstrandum my earlier point.)

Miss Brander’s documentation of Helsinki was actually commissioned by the newly established Commission for Ancient Memorials (that’s my effort at a suitably poetic translation of Muinaismuistolautakunta). She took hundreds of photographs between 1907 and 1913 explicitly aiming to create a record of something in the process of being lost. An exhibition of her photos was held in 1909 in the very space they’re being displayed in today. Their technical quality allows a detailed and sharp view not just of old one and two-storey wooden houses and craggy landscapes awaiting roads, pavements and taller buildings to cover them over, but the faces of probably hundreds of people, many of whom posed or just looked back at the photographer with serious faces.