Dolmetschen am Ende der Welt: Zur narrativen Rolle und Repräsentation von Dolmetscher*innen in drei historischen Romanen des 21. Jahrhunderts

The Finnish war effort in World War II features an established trope in the Finnish public memory and history culture. This is displayed in contemporary literature and in recent historiography, which are connected and contribute to and transform the discussion on the nation’s past. To discuss this dynamics, the present paper analyses three contemporary Finnish novels situated in Northern Finland during the Finnish German military alliance (“Waffenbrüderschaft”, 1941–1944) in World War II: Leiri mailman
laidalla by Seppo Saraspää (2002), Dora, Dora by Heidi Köngäs (2012), and Tuhkaan piirretty maa by Petra Rautiainen (2020). In all three novels the figure of a military interpreter has a central, visible role as a narrator. By focusing on the interpreters’ visibility, the paper takes a closer look into their narrative role as witnesses of wartime cruelties in prisoners-of-war camps of the North. Following this, the paper shows how their statements can be associated with recent historical research on the presence of the “Third
Reich” in Finland. Finally, the paper touches upon the representation of interpreting and interpreters in fiction, closing with a hypothesis that these representations open a view into a collective, social understanding of interpreting.