The Power of Song: Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution

4. Songs of Warrior Nations

107 chapter four Songs of Warrior Nations The 1990 Lithuanian National Song and Dance Festival published a songbook for public singing events. On the first page is a song with a motif common to Lithuanian folk songs about war: a group of brothers riding horses. The singer tells the riders to stop, listen, and look at the mystical black poplar. There is music coming from the mythical tree, whose branches, Lithuanians know, stretch up into the heavens while its roots reach down into the netherworld.1 (The refrain words Slaunasai žolyne rugeli [proud dear rye plant] sung after each line do not carry literal meaning but add a meditative atmosphere): Black poplar standing by the roadside, Kankles ringing at the roots, Honeybees humming in the center, Hawk’s little children nest at the top, There rides up a squadron of brothers, Stop now, stop, oh young brothers, Listen to the ringing kankles, Listen to the humming bees, Look at the hawk’s little children. The Singing Revolution’s historian must likewise stop and listen to its songs. At the core of a nonviolent, singing political movement, one might expect songs of peace and unity, and songs that reject or at least avoid martial themes. But nine out of thirty songs in this 1990 Lithuanian songbook are explicitly about war. Among them are two of the five songs that Lithuanians would sing in 1998 at the Smithsonian Songs of Warrior Nations 108 festival: “On the Hill There Stood a Maple Tree” and “Oh Don’t Weep, Dear Mother.” More than a century of war songs were deeply embedded in the national cultures—as deeply as the peaceful songs presented in the preceding chapters. War has long played an important role in the formation of ethnic identity, and it is a common theme in the discourse of nation building.2 It is, however, a theme that is contested in conflicting attitudes toward the soldier’s experience and killing enemies. Herder’s assertion that “the warlike nation sings of feats, the gentle nation sings of love” offers a starting point for interpretation. Some war songs valorize the defeat of enemies, and others empathize with the trauma of soldiers and civilians. At the outset of the Singing Revolution, both kinds of songs were available in the Baltic national song repertoires. songs of war, real and imagined Herder’s folk song project belonged to his study of differing national identities, based in his belief that a nation’s spirit was revealed in its songs. He brokered this worldview particularly well when he published the Estonian folk song in which a sister pragmatically advised her brother to avoid getting killed in battle. The song preserved images of war as truly experienced by Estonian serfs in the late eighteenth century . When it depicted a returning soldier who was not recognized by his parents, for example, it described the true experience of men conscripted into military service for twenty five years, returning home in old age. The song’s singers, like the soldier in the song, could intensely experience the absence of love and separation from kin that was part of every soldier’s life. For a lowly serf, war was involuntary, a brutal carnage with no higher purpose, and its violence was to be avoided. Estonian serfs expressed this experience in oral poetry, and Herder’s published translations brought their world to life for readers. In Herder’s writings, this particular song connected well to a rhetorical image of peaceful, gentle nations of farmers who, in contrast to Europe’s warlike nations, were not preoccupied with pride and bravery . Another Estonian song in Volkslieder evoked empathy for serfs, and Herder’s comments nudged Baltic German serf owners toward emancipation. But this song embraced a wider readership, Baltic and other, by giving voice to a soldier who was also a victim of war. The true nature of war lay not in proud victory and loyalty to leaders but rather in killing and alienation from humanity. This Herderian view Songs of Warrior Nations 109 of war was marginalized by nineteenth-century European governments who followed Napoleon’s model of national mobilization, and by poets and singers who embraced policies of military nation building . These added new songs to the mass-mediated national repertoire, displacing problematic oral texts such as Herder’s Estonian war song. Poets imagined more useful pictures of war, and their imagination extended to the...