A Useless War Memory: Erotic Fraternization, German Soldiers, and Gender in Finland

This chapter analyzes how Finnish women who had fraternized with German soldiers were socially stigmatized in the post-war era because Finnish-German collaboration was eclipsed from the national narrative. The author argues here that fraternizing women were a convenient scapegoat as ‘the symbolic image of a German’s whore provided a usable and efficient counter-image to affirm the central themes of the grand narrative: national unity, heroic masculinity and self-sacrifice.’