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350 Eda Kalmre The Meaning of Photos in the Context of Memory and Remembering Photos visualise our memories of places, people, and historical periods. I first contemplated the role that historical photos play in keeping our memories when I was selecting photos and caricatures to illustrate my research about a local post-war rumour. My first book on this topic dwelled also on this issue and was published both in Estonian and English (Kalmre 2007, 2013). The book describes one specific rumour, according to which there was a factory that made sausages out of human flesh in the ruins near the open-air market in the centre of Tartu. After the Second World War, two different cultures and ideologies faced each other in Estonia. One of these, representing the position of the foreign rulers, had clear political, economic and social advantages. Since physical conflict was out of the question, the other, oppressed group had only a linguistic and cognitive arsenal at their disposal. Spreading rumours gave the Estonian population the opportunity to safely release their discontent and distrust towards the foreigners who had come to power. For this reason, people were cager to spread and believe the sausage factory rumour (Kalmre 2013). The sausage factory story was silenced in Soviet period (which lasted from the end of WWII until the 1990s)—it was one of many memories that could only be talked about later, in independent Estonia’. Today, the rumour is still significant for the pre-war generation, and many believe it to be true as it pertains to their personal fate and empiric experience from the time. During my research | interviewed more than 30 people who were children or adolescents shortly after the war, most of whom had visited the place near the market in the ruins. In the interviews, they described the rumour as originating among people who visited the open-air market beside Emajégi river in the centre of Tartu. Thus, the post-war city with its buildings, streets and bridges became part of the rumour my interviewees reminisced about. Looking for suitable photographs for my publication, I worked in several archives and browsed my informants’ personal photo collections. My primary goal in choosing the photos was to visualise the distant past for the present-day reader. In selecting historical pictures of Tartu I tried to emulate the manner in which my informants remembered and described the city: before the war, and later, when it was in ruins. To achieve this, the majority of photographs are positioned between chapters in threes, and each triplet tells its own story about a place important for ' Estonian independence was re-established in 1991.
