The document discusses the history of labour camping communities in Helsinki, Finland and Berlin, Germany from 1910-1935, which were organized spaces for working class families and youth to spend leisure time engaged in healthy outdoor activities, sports, and politics. These camps served both recreational purposes and as places to socialize and organize amongst labour activists. The camps aimed to offer an alternative working class culture and lifestyle through proper leisure activities while also practicing citizenship and labour politics.

1. Labour camping
and politics
in Helsinki and Berlin
districts in 1910-1935
Adjunct Professor,
Dr. Soc. Sci.
Anu-Hanna Anttila
University of Turku

2. Leisure policy and outdoor living
• The explicitly argued purposes of leisure time were to
– give time to rest from work (and for work)
– bring variety to everyday life
– permit own time for labour
– support the general idea of ‘good life’
• One feature of these discourses was the demand for organised
leisure activities as a way to prevent social problems.
• The proletarian youngsters and labour families were seen as
the main targets of care.

3. A trickle-down effect
• With the ‘right’ lifestyle one could enforce his or hers general
vitality.
• The ‘right’ meant self-discipline and high activity with the
purpose of building one’s character.
• One’s character must also become cultivated by reading
and other exercises of science and arts.
• Outdoor living, hiking and other physical exercises were
seen as good for one’s health as well as cold and salty sea
baths and vital sun baths.
• The basis of this kind of holistic thinking of vitality was
mainly on belief, for example, like in ‘vitalism’ or ‘nudism’.

4. A ‘proper’ leisure
• The ‘other’ places in which one could spend leisure time
were neither at home nor in the workplace, and therefore
society needed to organise facilities for R & R.
• A proper leisure time was supposed to include stimulating
activities that would be edifying in various ways, and would
advance one’s scientific and aesthetic skills. (Burns 1932.)
• Suitable activities for these purposes were outdoor pursuits,
like camping and hiking, and visits to public parks, gardens,
libraries and museums.
• Resources, funding and time for these would make people
happy, healthy and active.

5. A ‘proper’ leisure
• The ‘proper’ use of leisure was subsumed into the project
of nation-building.
• Among the Nordic countries in particular, the vitality and
‘people hood’ of a nation was expressed through its self-
image as having a special relationship with its own ‘unique’
nature and also being a modern and technologically
oriented civilisation (Löfgren 2001).
• The themes of vitality, the unique landscape etc. were
commonly presented in representations like in short films
(Anttila 2009).

6. The combination of play and politics
• Public open parks, camping areas, swimming baths and
organised day-trips were offered particularly to those, who did
not have other possibilities to enjoy their holidays and free
weekends.
• Not only in meetings, but also in their ‘own’ organised leisure
activities, like gymnastic and sport clubs, theatres and
orchestras, camping sites etc.
• Another idea of all kinds of play and fun was to induce
potential new members.
• To that end, the working class had to understand their own
good and to aid progress towards enduring socialism by
political action and agitation.

7. Kivinokka in Helsinki (1916- )
• The first camping community in Helsinki was based in 1916 in
the headland of Kivinokka.
• Organised by the youngsters of a socialist Sörnäinen Labour
Association and later also by labour sports and gymnastic
clubs.
• Other camping communities: in Herttoniemi ‘Mölylä’ (1901),
and Lammassaari (1903).
• Kivinokka was near the city-centre and the tract of the labour
residential districts of Sörnäinen, Kallio and Vallila.
• Since the 1930s, hundreds of tiny cabins started to replace
the tents in Kivinokka peoples’ park .

8. Kivinokka in photos
• Youngsters and oldies in Kivinokka holiday and
weekend camping in summertime in the 1920s.
• A licence to “stay” in Kivinokka area in 1925 with the
stain of Ponnistus, a local gymnastic and sport club in
Helsinki.
• In the 1930s, labour families camping in their own
(collapsible) wooden or laminate cabins in the
common land.

9. Kuhle Wampe in Berlin (1913-1935)
• The first area for labour camping in Berlin, Kuhle Wampe, was
based in 1913 on Müggelsee region.
• Organised by the local swimming organisation Berliner
Freibäder-Vereine.
• The first years activity was quite minor: there were about ten
tents.
• Other weekend camping communities were based nearby in
the mid-1920: Kleen Kleckersdorf and Tsinmulpo .
• In the early 1930s, it was the largest area for labour outdoor
living: almost 100 tents and place for more than 300 berths.
• Closed down by Nazis in 1935.
• A place for permanent living because the expansion of
residents in Berlin district and the deep depression in the
1930s. People become unemployed and homeless.

10. Kuhle Wampe (1932)
„Kuhle Wampe: Proletarisches
Zwanziger-Jahre-Idyll am
Miggelsse und Mittelpunkt des
gleichnamigen Films von Bertold
Brecht, Ernst Ottwalt und Slátan
Dudow.“
(Frankfurter Allgemeine 8.12.2012)
“‘Kuhle Wampe’ was a camp for
the dispossessed: the film’s
heroine rejects the docility of
the camp – filmed in semi-
documentary style – in favour of
class solidarity and revolution.”
(BFI /Distribution 2012)

11. The combination of play and politics
The annual meeting
of TUL, the central
union of labour
sports, in Kivinokka
in 1934.
The so-called Lads of Rajamäki
started to play ”journeyman songs”
in Kivinokka stage in the mid-1920s.
They became professionals
and started to use the name Dallapé,
which became one of the most
famous bands in Finland.

12. The combination of play and politics
• The explicit purposes of the
labour camping organisers were:
– offer a proper way for rest &
recreation
– support health outdoor living
– encourage to swimming and
other sports
– give a place to stay on
weekends

13. The combination of play and politics
• Leisure policy of labour organisations was political.
• The organised working-class leisure, holidaying and
labour tourism was a part in construction of own ‘red’
counter-culture which offered alternative way to think
and act.
• Generally thinking, the camping communities were
designated to labour activists to
– get together to enjoy fun and play ‘properly’
– practice active citizenship and labour politics
– associate and get organised
– exercise the (possible) forthcoming mobilization

14. Literature (just some)
• Anttila, A-H. (2009). An Integrated and Recreated Nation: Socio-semiotic
Approaches to Finnish Vacation Propagandist Short Films in the late 1940s.
Visual Studies, 24:1, 36−53.
• Anttila, A-H. (ed.) (2011). Kesämaja appelsiinilaatikoista: Kivinokka Stadin
kupeessa. Helsinki: Kivinokkalaiset ry.
• Anttila, A-H. (forthcoming): No Motels without Highways: The Finnish
Democratic Model of Tourism from the 1940s to the 1970s. The Journal of
Tourism History 5:2. (Will be published in June 2013)
• Baranowski , S. & Furlough, e.(eds.) (2001). Being Elsewhere: Tourism,
Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Burns, C. D. (1932). Leisure in the Modern World. Washington: McGrath
Publishing Co.
• Sandell, K. & Sörlin, S. (eds.) (2000). Friluftshistoria: Från ’härdande
friluftslif’ till ekoturism och miljöpedagogik. Teman i det svenska
friluftslivets historia. Stockholm: Carlsson.
• Sprink, C-D. (2001). ”Wir waren alles einfache Leute”. Die Geschichte der
Arbeiterzeltstadt Kuhle Wampe. Müggelheimer Bote. 7. 06/2001. Internet:
http://www.mueggelheimer-bote.de/0106/seite6.htm