Soldiers of Memory: World War II and Its Aftermath in Estonian Post-Soviet Life Stories (review)

In the twenty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, numerous books have appeared in, and also about, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, works that detail the complex experience of World War II. Among these titles are several fine oral history works not only on combat-related experiences but also on civilian lives in the crucible of war and under German occupation. All too few of these accounts have been translated into English and thus made available to scholars and students of history unfamiliar with the languages of the region. Soldiers of Memory, on the Estonian experience during the war period and the years after, is an excellent addition to a growing number of translated works organized around personal accounts. Specifically, this book examines the viewpoints of eight men who fought during the war, either on the side of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany.

Ene Kõresaar, an Estonian historian and senior researcher of memory culture studies at the University of Tartu (Estonia) and author or editor of several works on memory and identity in this Baltic republic, has paired together detailed life histories with scholarly articles that explore each narrator's account and help to provide context and meaning. As a result, the book is well organized and approachable, even if the subject matter itself is less familiar. Strictly speaking, these are not oral histories but "autobiographical narrations" (1); as Kõresaar explains, the narrators wrote or recorded their own life histories in response to a 1990s Estonian national campaign that aimed to preserve individual stories from this period. The editor makes no reference to the existence of audio recordings.

An opening chapter, "Remembrance Cultures of World War II and the Politics of Recognition in Post-Soviet Estonia: Biographical Perspectives," provides some needed context of the complicated situation Estonians faced during the war: this nation, independent only since 1918, was first occupied by the Soviets, then from 1941-44 by the Germans, then from late 1944 by the Soviets again. Loyalties proved fluid. Of one hundred thousand Estonian men in uniform during the war, Kõresaar reports, an estimated one-third fought for the Germans; some men fought on both sides. Kõresaar also describes how the post-1945 period saw the imposition of a Soviet version of World War II, a standardized collective memory, resulting in silencing many individual histories. Completing this initial section is a helpful chronology of Estonia during 1939-45.

After this introductory material are the book's two main sections. The first of these contains the eight edited life histories, richly detailed narratives that average twenty-five pages in length. Here are the accounts of Estonian men born between 1914 and 1926, with specifics on village and town life before and after the war began; military experiences in both the Soviet and German armed forces; in some cases life as a prisoner of war; and the varied, sometimes troubled paths followed after 1945. One example is the amazing tale of a man who, having served with the German occupation forces, spent nearly eleven years in Soviet work camps, facing horrendous conditions and with almost no information about, or from, his family. As with the other life histories here, it is the level of detail about everyday life and hardships from a largely unknown time and place that make this volume so valuable.

The second main section features the eight scholarly pieces that comment on each narrator's story and seek to place it in a larger historical context. The authors are all Estonian academics or researchers; their contributions, averaging twenty pages in length, employ a variety of perspectives, including national identity, the construction of memory, and subjectivity, to analyze the narrator accounts. The majority of these pieces are helpful and readable: examples include Aigi Rahi-Tamm's article on Aleksander Loog's life story and Olaf Mertelsmann's on...