The celebrations of Konstantin Päts’ 65th birthday in Estonian newspapers, 1939.

• In Event: Interwar Estonian Authoritarianism

Abstract

The establishment of Konstantin Päts’ personal dictatorship in Estonia in 1934 transformed, among others, the involvement of the state in promoting national consciousness. As such, the holiday associated with Estonia’s Declaration of Independence (24 February 1918) became Estonia’s most significant national holiday. As Päts’ birthday took place one day earlier (February 23), by the late 1930s, the holiday had acquired a double character that directly linked the figure of Päts to the existence of the Estonian state. Drawing from a collection of over 200 newspaper clippings from the period, the proposed paper examines how Estonian newspapers portrayed the double holiday celebrating Päts’ birthday and the Declaration of Independence. The focus will be given to the largest celebrations in 1939, which marked Päts’ 65th birthday. The paper draws from the work of the Czech scholar Dagmar Hájková on the celebrations of the First Czechoslovak President T.G. Masaryk’s birthday as a formative holiday meant to strengthen national identity. While the Estonian and Czechoslovak cases present significant differences, they also share certain similarities in how the birthdays of their heads of state were celebrated and their meaning for their respective societies. Through this comparison, the proposed article looks at how the double celebration of 23-24 February in 1939 played a role in legitimizing Päts’ government.

Short Bio

Anna Herran is a second-year PhD student at the University of Toronto’s history department. She specializes in twentieth-century history with a particular focus on the interactions between memory, identity, and history in Central, Southeastern Europe and the Baltic countries and their diaspora communities in Toronto. She holds an MA in European Studies from the University of Toronto (2019), where her thesis examined contemporary attitudes toward the symbol of T.G. Masaryk in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Her current research, from which part of the material for this paper is drawn, looks comparatively at the first experiences of statehood during the interwar period, their role in collective memory, and the celebration of related national holidays in Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia and their successor states.

Author

• Anna Herran, University of Toronto