For ten years after the ending of the Cold War the results for the western world, it seemed, were all positive. For Finland, certainly, although the collapse of the Soviet Union was among the causes of the country’s most serious economic recession of the 20th century, the past ten years have been a period marked by political and economic self-determination – a new age characterised by the success of the Nokia mobile telephone and network company and membership of the European Union, and symbolised by the impending introduction of the euro: by the desire to build a new, prosperous and egalitarian Europe.       Since September, however, the West has learned to fear again. Finland, it is true, seems curiously distant from the war in Afghanistan. Where the crises of the Cold War always had their implications for Finland, the current crisis has seemed to pass the country by. Finland has, of course, signed up with the alliance against terrorism, but the closest the war itself has come to the country was in a curious death notice that appeared in the main national paper, Helsingin Sanomat, early in November. Placed by a 58-year-old Finnish woman, it mourned the death of one Mohammed El-Amir, otherwise known as Mohammed Atta, suspected to have been the pilot of one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 11 September. The notice quoted ‘words found on a Tomb’: ‘Deep in my Heart / A Memory is kept / Of the One I Love / And shall never forget’.       The woman, who studies archeology, had ‘met’ Atta, who characterised himself as ‘an Egyptian architect’, in an internet chatroom. They had become ‘very close friends’, she said. And that was that – there are no suspected links with terrorism; it is, apparently, just an everyday story about two solitary souls passing their time in developing a relationship on the internet.       But more broadly, the events of the past few months, in America and in Afghanistan, have made us all think – more perhaps than at any point since the end of the Second World War – about the impact of war on ordinary lives. For Finland, whose experiences in that conflict were particularly bloody, they have brought the experiences of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation much closer. For the poet Katri Vala (see page 264), a member of the Torch-Bearers’ group of young writers, her flapper days of dressing up in exotic costumes and ostrich feathers in the 1920s and 1930s must have seemed like part of a different world in the dark days of the Second World War. Illness is no respecter of armed conflict, and much of Vala’s war was spent in an ultimately futile struggle against tuberculosis, separated from her husband, who had been interned on account of his Communist sympathies. Vala herself was no Communist, but by nature a champion of the poor and a pacifist; for her, the tragedy of war held a comic aspect in the sense that God is always on both sides.       Peace treaties, of course, do not mark the end of conflicts, and on page 285 Olli Jalonen writes of his exploration of the Porkkala peninsula, an area not two dozen kilometres from Helsinki which was leased to the Soviets for 50 years after the Second World War. However, the Russians left the base early, in 1956, and on returning, the original inhabitants found a completely unrecognisable landscape in which fields had been allowed to grow wild, houses had been painted in unnaturally brilliant shades and messages in an unfamiliar alphabet had been daubed on the walls. A strange gap was left in Finland’s emotional and intellectual climate; it was as if a piece of memory had been lost; but at the same time, the memory of the threat remained.       And then there are the wars of the present. In his new novel, Laituri matkalla mereen (‘A jetty on its way to the sea’), Daniel Katz writes about people, both Finns and immigrants, whose memory is troubled by the recent war in Bosnia. The main character, who ends up – to his own surprise – as a member of the peace-keeping forces in Bosnia, observes: ‘All acts of violence can be seen as pre-emptive defence measures in order to prevent the enemy from realising his own bloody plans.... People try manfully to forget the violence of the foregoing war, and that is why they cannot get them out of their minds.’ In Katz’s humorous, sympathetically romantic novel, however, love overcomes the pain caused by war – even though not all personal love wishes are consummated.       But that’s another story, and one to be told in a future issue of Books from Finland. We wish you happy and peaceful holidays, and look forward to meeting you here again next year!      Soila Lehtonen & Hildi Hawkins      Editors-in-chief, 2001     Top of page