Rohelend says history cannot fit one simplified narrative

Estonia has reached a point where the past can be discussed in all its contradictions rather than through a single permitted story, Birk Rohelend writes in an opinion article published by ERR.

For the past two years, Rohelend has taken on a new role as a volunteer producer of the summer production “Now I Am Learning in Mustamäe”. The project began when Andra Teede proposed telling the story of the technical university’s history. Rohelend said she had no idea that the idea would grow into a major project involving 123 people, most of them volunteers.

Teede’s idea was “positively crazy”, Rohelend writes. Why should anyone be interested in the past, Mustamäe and a university whose remarkable courtyard is known only to its members and alumni? And why would today’s digital generation want to spend time outdoors with their grandparents and share a common experience?

Yet Rohelend immediately felt deeply connected to the idea. At its core were questions she had considered privately for many years.

“Mother, you do not understand anything”

Rohelend’s teenage daughters have sometimes used that sentence with her. The last time, she replied that the opposite was true: she had been 15, remembered that time and knew what her daughter was feeling. It was her daughter who had never been 45. It would be more accurate to say that her daughter did not understand her.

Rohelend remembers feeling the same way about her own mother. Born in 1941, her mother attended university during the same period in which the summer production is set. Although she died 17 years ago, Rohelend still remembers how a simple word such as “fashion” confused her.

Her mother had not grown up as a young woman in the capital, but on a farm far away in the forest. When Rohelend begged for another piece of clothing from a shop, her mother would ask what difference it made what she wore. In her day, she said, everything was sewn at home and everyone did things as they knew and wanted.

Her mother also never fully understood Rohelend’s desire for toys. She had grown up with forests and meadows, birds and butterflies, horses and dogs, and never understood the fascination with plastic Barbie dolls.

Rohelend says she has often felt the same lack of understanding, or absence of a shared frame of reference, in Estonia. The feeling runs deep, beneath all experience and wisdom.

As a child born in 1981, she remembers the Estonian SSR, red five-pointed stars, parades and street names written in Cyrillic. She also remembers the cumbersome additional name Antoevna that the state gave her, because her father’s first name did not fit Russian language rules.

At the same time, Rohelend acknowledges that she does not understand today’s young people. She cannot imagine growing up on the internet, constantly being watched and commented on, in a world of endlessly altered images where no one is as they appear through their virtual persona.

In this almost schizophrenically divided world, everyone appears happy in photographs, while more and more people secretly suffer from depression. Depression is both an everyday reality for many people and a social stigma, she writes, because everyone is expected to be equally successful, wealthy and famous.

Can history be discussed, and when?

As a child of the early 1980s, Rohelend says she did not grow up only in Estonia. She also grew up, at least mentally, partly in Germany after satellite television became available to her family.

Although she lived in the Soviet Union, she says she does not truly know what that period meant. No one took the time to explain to her as a child where they came from or where they were going. She remembers hearing a warning about tanks on the radio and standing in the Baltic Way, but at the time she had no deeper understanding of why she was there.