Consuming Dark Histories in Santa Claus Village

Santa Claus Village and the Arctic Circle line in the midst of winter (image from Santatelevision).

Santa Claus’ office and workshop sit along the Arctic Circle in Rovaniemi, Finland, and from his arctic headquarters Santa spends the year checking his list and entertaining visitors to Santa Claus Village.  Nestled in the Lapland woods, the village’s highlight is perhaps Santa Claus’ office, where Saint Nick and his elves hold forth for reviews of children’s behavior and photographs.  The Village’s attractions also include a post office, reindeer, a husky park, snowmobile trails, and shopping ranging from jewelry to log houses.  Not far away sits Santa Park, an underground labyrinth of caves including an elf school, gingerbread bakery, ice bar, and an Angry Birds Activity Area; for good measure, Santa’s “hidden command center” Joulukka sits in the heart of the forest in the same area.

It may be tempting to dismiss the Finnish holiday attractions as shallow consumer experiences, and a variety of scholars and ideologues routinely scorn places like Santa Claus Village and Disney World or reduce them to yet another post-modern self-delusion.  Much of contemporary tourism may be a search for pure diversionary pleasure in such places that embrace spectacle, celebrate patently inauthentic narratives, and offer unadulterated joy. In the midst of the Santa attractions’ imagination of the Yuletide, though, a quite concrete and even dark history exists in an especially fascinating relationship with the theatrical Christmas narrative woven in Santa Claus Village.

The Arctic Circle line in the Santa Claus Village.

Santa Claus Village began as a cabin placed along the Arctic Circle in June, 1950 to welcome Eleanor Roosevelt, and from the cabin the former First lady sent a letter with the Arctic Circle postmark to the President.  The Arctic Circle cabin and post office remained modest tourist attractions for visitors traveling into Lapland after Roosevelt’s visit.  In 1984 the Finnish Tourist Board resolved to promote Lapland as Santa’s authentic home, and a year later the newly dubbed Santa Claus Village opened.  The holiday tourist trade has been quite lucrative: in December 2013, Lapland hotels recorded 381,981 accommodation nights, and 1.75 million rooms were rented in Lapland over the whole year.  Foreign guests accounted for 57% of all Rovaniemi’s overnight guests in 2013; visitors from the UK accounted for nearly 116,000 rooms in December 2013 alone (a figure that does not include the legion of day-trippers who take direct flights to Rovaniemi for a holiday visit with Santa Claus).

The Santa tourist fantasy is perhaps a predictable confirmation of global Christmas ideologies that may simply promote consumer culture.  Santa Claus Village may invoke a sort of contrived “authenticity” in its presentation of holiday folks legends, a winter landscape, and Finnish cultural referents, but it is patently contrived theater akin to Disneyland’s Main Street USA; that is, few tourists descend on Santa Claus Village oblivious to holiday avarice as much as they seek an imaginary experience that is made especially compelling by Lapland’s remote winter landscape. Santa Claus Village is “real” in the sense that it reproduces Santa Claus mythology in a distant landscape whose isolation is underscored by the white Arctic Circle line cutting through the middle of Santa’s office.

Rovaniemi Market Square in the October 17, 1944 aftermath of the German retreat (image SA-Kuva).

The escapist pleasure-seeking at Santa Claus Village might seem profoundly complicated by the landscape that today surrounds Santa’s headquarters.  Roughly 220,000 German soldiers were stationed in Northern Finland between June, 1941 and September, 1944, a period of World War II known in Finland as the Continuation War.  For more than three years the Germans and Finns were co-belligerents against the Soviet Union, who had attacked Finland in the November, 1939 Winter War before a treaty in March, 1940.  Fearing renewed Soviet attacks, the Finns joined the Germans as co-belligerents against the Soviets, and the Germans’ main operational headquarters was established in Rovaniemi.  Of the Luftwaffe’s nine regional airfields in Finland and northern Norway the base at Rovaniemi was the largest.  Two grass airfields had been built at the site in 1940, and that field was significantly expanded when the Germans arrived in 1941.

The Germans destroyed all the supplies they could not take with them from Rovaniemi, and on October 20, 1944 these Rovaniemi residents picked over the remaining cans among destroyed German supplies (SA-Kuva).

When the Finns reached a cease fire agreement with the Soviets at the beginning of September, 1944, the Soviets demanded that the Germans evacuate northern Finland in roughly two weeks.  This was an impossible deadline because of the extent of German troops and equipment in northern Finland, and the Soviets expected the Finns to take up arms against their former German comrades.  The Germans and Finns secretly agreed in mid-September that retreating Germans would systematically destroy bridges and roadways essential to pursuing armies and that the Finns would strategically avoid battle with their former comrades.  However, by late September there had been a series of conflicts between Finns and the retreating Germans; the Germans had systematically mined much of Finnish Lapland; and the region was leveled in the Germans’ wake.  Perhaps no event in this final phase of the war (known to Finns as the Lapland War) is more deeply part of wartime lore than the October burning of Rovaniemi. Even today Rovaniemi continues to be routinely referred to as a city that rose from the “ashes of war,” and when Finns entered the town they found nearly nothing standing except the emotionally powerful aesthetics of lone chimneys protruding from the ashes of the town.  Following the war Rovaniemi was rebuilt under the direction of Alvar Aalto, perhaps Finland’s most famous 20^th-century architect and designer, so it is today a quite distinctive cityscape.

A stone foundation from the German military base.

The former Luftwaffe field is now the Rovaniemi airport and known as Santa Claus’ Official Airport, sitting roughly a kilometer from Santa Claus Village and about 10 KM from the town itself.  The support base around that Luftwaffe airfield reached to the present-day Santa Claus Village, and within 50 yards of Santa’s Office sit exposed foundations from the myriad support structures that once dotted the spaces around the airfield.  The remnants of the Nazi support structures are perhaps mundane: that is, the woods contain scattered remains of barracks, workshops, railroad tracks, roadways, bakeries, trenches, and assorted support and storage structures that may lack the traumatic impact of prisoner of war and concentration camps.  Snowmobile paths and walking trails are scattered throughout the woods around the eroding remnants of the Luftwaffe base, which have been preserved but remain un-interpreted for the legion of tourists who have come to consult Santa Claus.

Foundation lines run throughout the woods around Santa Claus Village.

The foundations and scatters of German-era discards surrounding Santa’s headquarters are perhaps an awkward contrast to Yuletide consumption.  Sharon Macdonald has argued that consumption is often “predicated upon forgetting,” and Macdonald suggests that many people in post-war Germany see the nation’s post-war consumer boom as “an unhealthy repression of the awkward past.”  The tension between consumption’s historical evasions and the material presence of contentious heritage was perhaps most clearly illuminated in Nuremberg in the late 1980s.  In 1987, the largest surviving Nazi-era structure, the Congress Hall at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, was proposed as the location for an upscale shopping center. The structure is protected, but if its exterior is maintained its interior could be remodeled with some limitations (though the plan was eventually rejected).

Dark histories exist as part of much of the contemporary landscape, and they may appear to some observers as an awkward material presence in the face of contemporary life.  That may seem particularly jarring at Santa Claus Village, where the German presence is well-preserved but meaningless ruins whose heritage remains unclear to all but the best-educated tourist.  Sharon Macdonald approaches interpretations of such potentially unsettling histories as “intervention.”  She argues that such intervention is commonly “couched partly in terms of a countering of crass consumerism or commercialism,” a maneuver that approaches heritage as “an ethical space.”

The German War Memorial at Norvajärvi.

However, the contrasts between ethical heritage sites and consumer spaces like Santa Claus Village risk being drawn in over-polarized terms in Rovaniemi.  The history of the Finnish co-belligerency with the Germans may be unclear if not utterly unknown to many foreign tourists, but there is no evidence that contemporary Finns have been ignoring their wartime heritage.  On the contrary, the war has possibly more resonance in Finnish public memory than any other single historical event.  After the war soldier’s cemeteries and heroes’ monuments were built all over Finland mourning the losses of the war, and that memorial landscape was eventually extended to German dead as well; just a few kilometers away from Santa Claus Village on Norvajärvi’s shores sits a German War Memorial that opened in 1963 and holds the remains of 2530 German soldiers who fell in central and southern Finland.  The wartime heritage seems far from disappearing: for instance, Petri Raivo estimated in 2000 that more than half of Finland’s World War II commemorations have been erected since 1975.

German prisoners of war in Tornio, October 19, 1944 (SA-Kuva).

Ville Kivimäki’s study of Finnish collective wartime memory argues that Finnish discourse has revolved around an effort to illuminate a continuing Finnish struggle for survival in the face of global powers like the Soviets.  In the wake of the Winter War, Finns were desperate to preserve their autonomy and embraced the Germans as Waffenbrüder, cementing generally warm feelings for their German brothers-in-arms (notwithstanding the complications of the Germans’ devastation to Lapland).  The dilemma for Santa Claus Village’s scores of non-Finnish guests may be that this discussion distances Finland from National Socialist atrocities that occurred beyond Finland itself; for many people outside Finland, the war’s narrative has become a moral tale of inhumanity, and visitors may be reluctant to risk granting German foot soldiers a humanizing historical analysis that could be extended to National Socialism.

Petri Raivo estimated in 2000 that perhaps 170 World War II battlefields were preserved in Finland, but the traditional notion of a battlefield with a historical marker does not accommodate the legion of wartime spaces like the Rovaniemi base.  Most of Finland was more akin to a home front like London than a battlefield, so contemporary Finland is not characterized by a host of epic battle sites as much as the landscape is marked by a range of modest traces of the military.  The universal presence of traces of World War II has made places like the Rovaniemi base’s ruins seem somewhat more prosaic to Finns than they may appear to many visitors (although many Europeans would understand the complications of living in the midst of heritage landscapes).

Perhaps no other historical narrative could so effectively remove the traumatic shadow of National Socialism in northern Finland than Santa Claus himself: after all, in the fantastic Santa tale woven in Rovaniemi, it was “around half a century ago that Santa Claus started to frequently visit the Arctic Circle near Rovaniemi,” just as the Germans retreated.  Reluctant to tackle the complexities of the Luftwaffe’s presence in the midst of the Marimekko outlet, Santa’s handlers may have decided to let the ruins of the military remains silently crumble in place.  The interpretation of the German military presence alongside Santa’s village may risk reducing the Finnish wartime experience to a trite experience, but turning a complex or even traumatic heritage into a commodity is a danger in nearly any heritage tourism.  The northern Finnish war narrative actually might be told in no more powerful if unexpected terms than it could be in Santa’s shadow.

 

References

Sirkka Ahonen

2001 Politics of identity through history curriculum: narratives of the past for social exclusion-or inclusion? Journal of Curriculum Studies 33(2): 179-194. (subscription access only)

2008 Finnish History Textbooks in the Cold War.  In The Cold War and the Politics of History, eds Juhana Aunesluoma and Pauli Kettunen, pp. 249-268. Edita Publishing, Helsinki.

 

Anne Bundschuh

2006 The Magic of the Line: an analysis of the Arctic Circle as a tourist destination.  Unpublished paper.

 

Henry L. deZeng

2014 Luftwaffe Airfields 1933-45 Finland.  http://www.ww2.dk/Airfields%20-%20Finland.pdf

 

Alain A. Grenier

2007 The diversity of polar tourism. Some challenges facing the industry in Rovaniemi, Finland.  Polar Geography 30(1-2): 55-72.  (subscription access only)

 

C. Michael Hall

2008 Santa Claus, place branding and competition. Fennia 186.1 (2008): 59-67.

 

Nigel Halpern

2008 Lapland’s airports: Facilitating the development of international tourism in a peripheral region.  Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism 8(1): 25-47. (subscription access only)

 

Ville Kivimäki

2012 Between Defeat And Victory: Finnish memory culture of the Second World War.  Scandinavian Journal of History 37(4):482-504.

 

Mika Kylänen (editor)

2007 Articles on Experiences 3 – Christmas Experiences.  University of Lapland Press, Rovaniemi.

 

Mike Kylänen and Marcello M. Mariani

2012 Unpacking the temporal dimension of coopetition in tourism destinations: evidence from Finnish and Italian theme parks.  Anatolia 23(1): 61-74.

 

Henrik O. Lunde

2011 Finland’s War of Choice: The Troubled German-Finnish Alliance in World War II.  Casemate Publishers, Newbury UK.

 

Sharon Macdonald

2008 Unsettling memories: intervention and controversy over difficult public heritage.  In  Heritage and Identity: Engagement and Demission in the Contemporary World, eds Marta Anico and Elsa Peralta, pp.93-104.  Routledge, New York.

2009 Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond.  Routledge, New York.

 

Tuomo Polvinen

1986  Between East and West: Finland in International Politics, 1944-1947.  University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

 

Michael Pretes

1995 Postmodern Tourism: The Santa Claus Industry.  Annals of Tourism Research 22(1):1-15.

2007 Santa Claus Tourism in Lapland.  In Articles on Experiences 3 – Christmas Experiences, Mika Kylänen (editor), pp.22-31. University of Lapland Press, Rovaniemi.

 

Petri J. Raivo

2000  “This is Where They Fought”: Finnish War Landscapes as a National Heritage.  In The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, eds. T. G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Rope, pp. Routledge, London.

2002  The Finnish landscape and its meanings. Fennia 180(1–2):89–98.

2004  Karelia lost or won – materialization of a landscape of contested and commemorated memory. Fennia 182(1):61–72.

 

Oula Seitsonen and Vesa-Pekka Herva

2011 Forgotten in the Wilderness: WWII German PoW Camps in Finnish Lapland.  In Archaeologies of Internment, edited by Adrian Myers and Gabriel Moshenska, pp.170–190.  Springer, New York.

 

Sandra Wallenius-Korkalo

2010  Remembering and Forgetting the Second World War in Finland: The Politics of Memory in Online Discussions.  In Progress or Perish : Northern Perspectives on Social Change, eds. Aini Linjakumpu and Sandra Wallenius-Korkalo, pp.65-82.  Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Burlington, Vermont.

 

Ylimaunu, Timo, Paul R. Mullins, James Symonds, Titta Kallio-Seppä, Hilkka Heikkilä, Markku Kuorilehto, and Siiri Tolonen

2013 Memory of Barracks: World War II German “Little Berlins” and post-war urbanization in Northern Finnish towns. Scandinavian Journal of History 38(4): 525-548. (subscription access)

 

Earl F. Ziemke

1959 The German Northern Theater of Operations, 1940-1945.  Department of the Army Pamphlet No. 20-27.  Department of the Army, Washington DC.

 

Images

Market Square Rovaniemi October 17, 1944, canned goods ruins October 20 1944, and German Prisoners of War in Tornio October 10, 1944 images from SA-kuva (Finnish Armed Forces).

Santa Claus Village winter image from Santatelevision