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Paper short abstract

This contribution discusses troubled ancestry relations in more-than-human ruins of northern Norway’s WWII legacies. By examining forest soils as material archives of violent pasts we ask for how these material testimonies can become sites for collective reimagination, care and repair.

Paper long abstract

Scattered broken glass fused together with rocks, partly overgrown with moss in the forests of Finnmark (Norway) – these are persistent remains of burnt-down food stores of the Nazi occupation. There are variants of plants and fungi that presumably arrived with the occupants’ horse-drawn supply carts. Ammunition depots hastily blown up (to prevent them from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet army) left bare spots without a single blade of grass, bearing witness of the violent ‘scorched earth’ Nazi policy. WWII legacies are entrenched in further historical layers: Arctic settler colonialism, Norwegianization, pollution from industrial mining and nickel smelters, state borders of Norway, Russia and Finland cutting through Sápmi lands. The Nazi occupation in Finnmark has materialized in specific more-than-human relationalities with soil, rocks, plants, nematodes, wind and weather. Encountering those enmeshed legacies today, its layered sedimentations of war, forced labor and white supremacy, begs uneasy relationalities not least for us as scholars with (West) German background. Following the memorialization practices that work as reminders of ‘never again’ as to Nazi atrocities committed in Eastern Europe, attention to the material archive and testimony of soils invites us to rethink ancestry in view of the current global rise of fascisms. How can we understand the more-than human relationalities of such sites in ways that allow reimaginations of antifascist futures? This contribution is an attempt to grapple with kinships that result from troubled ancestries, asking for how remains of violent pasts can become sites of care, repair and collective world-making.