Ilmari Krohn, Otto Andersson, Armas Otto Väisänen ja tieteen suuri tehtävä

Suomalaisen musiikintutkimuksen suhteet Saksaan

Abstract

This article is research of an important social segment of Finnish society, university intellectuals, in a multi-faceted, problematic and tragic political context. I refer to the time period of 1930s and 1940s, which has been a hothouse for passionate debate of Finnish historians for at least two decades. Finland’s political alliance with Germany in WW 2 has, of course, been at the centre of the debate. Musicologists, both in Finland and abroad, have had their share in the debate as far as Sibelius’s alleged ties to Nazi Germany and his possible support of Nazi ideology are concerned. Musicology itself, however, has not been studied in that time period, as far as its research paradigms, institutional, ideological and personal ties to Nazi Germany are concerned.

Otto Andersson, professor of musicology at the Åbo Akademi, the Swedish-speaking university in Turku, was the chair of a Nazi-sympathizing organization Svenska Tysklandsvänner i Finland (Swedish Friends of Germany in Finland) in the 1930s and even gave public lectures on the societal aspects reflected in Mein Kampf. Also, we know that A. O. Väisänen, one of Krohn’s students, had close connections to the Ahnenerbe institute, an institute in Nazi Germany purposed to research the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race in the 1930s and 1940s. German musicologist Fritz Bose was affiliated with the institute and made an expedition to Carelia in 1935. The larger personal and institutional affiliations that Finnish musicology had with Germany in the 1930s and 1940s remain uncharted. That research is long overdue.

This re-evaluation entails not only a scrutiny of institutions and microhistory of the prominent scholars but also a more theoretical scrutiny of the musicological research as such. For instance, Ilmari Krohn’s musical hermeneutics was a research paradigm strongly influenced by German musicological scholarship. Thus, we need to study not only the personal networks but also the diffusion and spread of research paradigms, theories and institutional models.