Making an Emotional ‘History of the People’

Abstract

Chapter 1 explores how historians, political elites, and cultural figures since the National Awakening have been involved in the writing of a ‘collective story of Estonians’. The chapter shows why ‘Estonia’s story’ has become an emotional story of rupture. The independence activists of the Singing Revolution, being non-political actors, have mobilized a sense of collective responsibility among the masses for creating and preserving the nation. As ‘a people’ they wrote a new national history, literally based on Estonians’ personal stories. Since the late 1990s, the intellectual and cultural elite increasingly voice a more open, critical narrative, while remaining loyal to the former independence activists and their family’s stories. In politics a fairly non-pluralist narrative of rupture prevails.