Reaching a State of Hope by Mikael Byström & Pär Frohnert

Author:Mikael Byström & Pär Frohnert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789187351587
Publisher: NORDIC ACADEMIC PRESS
Published: 2014-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Ethnic encounters, narratives, and counter-narratives

Estonian refugees in the Swedish engineering industry after 1945

Johan Svanberg

As soon as the great metalworkers’ strike was over that had stirred up the Swedish labour market in the spring and summer of 1945, employers all over the country started to recruit workers from among the tens of thousands of refugees still left in Sweden. A car body manufacturer, Svenska Stålpressnings AB (the Swedish Steel Pressing Company, or SSAB) in Olofström, was one of these companies, and its management chose to recruit Estonians. Between 1945 and 1947, it employed hundreds of Estonian refugees who had fled to Sweden in the autumn of 1944. In the early 1950s, SSAB’s management continued this strategy by recruiting about a hundred Estonians directly from West German refugee camps.1

The aim of this essay is to analyse the first encounters between Swedes and Estonians through a local workplace study at SSAB (now AB Volvo Olofströmsverken), with special attention paid to their retrospective narratives about one another. I stress that the social memories of the Estonian refugees differed from the social memories which the native-born workers in many respects shared, besides their differing background experiences, and that these differences affected the outcomes of their first encounters.

In this essay, I chart some of the areas of conflict in the relations between Swedes and newly arrived Estonians, defined as important by contemporaries. What was thought problematic in the late 1940s and early 1950s is then discussed in relation to the Swedes’ and Estonians’ narratives told in interviews later on. Finally, I touch on the question of how social memories can change over time by highlighting shifts in the narratives of the interviewees, and thereby analysing the narratives in terms of the different background experiences and social memories of the groups concerned.

Oral history and social memory

The source material for this essay consists primarily of oral histories, in the shape of interviews with Swedes and Estonians, analysed as socially constructed narratives.2 Even if interviews often shed light on unknown events in the past, they usually say more about the meaning of these events for the narrator than about the events themselves, as the oral historian Alessandro Portelli points out.3

The complex interplay between the interviewee and the special situations described is discussed by Samuel Schrager. He asserts that the narrator determines his or her own social position in the narrative partly in relation to the situation described, partly in relation to other actors included in the narrative. Interviewees frequently mix their own experiences with those of others when they talk about the past. Schrager suggests that by analysing which pronouns interviewees use, it is possible to study their subjective group-belonging, both in inclusive and exclusive terms. The narrator often takes a starting-point in a perspective that he or she shares with others, and this sharing of perspective is a form of identification. ‘I’ represents what the narrator wants to remember as his or her own actions, while ‘we’ designates ‘the speaker’s memberships in groups’.4 Jointly created, then shared

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