ABSTRACT
Mika Lietzén’s “1917 – Libau” is a comic which was originally published simultaneously in Finnish and Swedish in his collection of short stories that fictively treat the Finnish Jägers in the early 20th century. As Finnish men who volunteered to be sent to Germany for military education in a period when Finland still was a part of the Russian Empire, the Jägers played a crucial role in the Finnish Civil War in early 1918. Lietzén’s comic captures the moment when some of the Finnish Jägers had been moved from Germany to Libau (in contemporary Latvia), where they were awaiting deployment back home. Through the story of a Jäger and a local prostitute, Lietzén depicts the transnational contacts and linguistic border crossings connected with this phase in Finnish history.
