Ajakirjanikutöö ja selle konteksti kajastusi läbi Tõnis Braksi eluloo 1920.-1930. aastate Eestis. Biograafilise meetodi rakendamise katse

Date

2008

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Tartu Ülikool

Abstract

Description

The main idea of this dissertation is to show to what extent and how Estonian journalism of the 1920s and 1930s is reflected in the life-story of a journalist active during that era. For that the biographic method is used. The goal of the biographic approach is to understand – through the life-story of one person – how the personal (work life) matters are linked to a wider social context. During the past twenty years researchers have started showing more and more interest in this method. In Estonia there was interest in biographical material already during the years of the Estonian Republic in the 1920s and 1930s. Gathering biographical material started to boom during the late 1980s when social interest in and possibilities for gathering and publishing materials expanded. In the Institute of Journalism and Communications of Tartu University, there have been only a few researches conducted exploiting the biographical method. On the other hand, two compilations have been published, containing the life-stories of journalists from the beginning of the 20th century onwards. In the 1980s and 1990s a database for collecting the life-stories of journalists was created, by now containing already more than 2,000 names. There is more than one way of implementing the biographical method. In this dissertation two volumes containing memoirs of Tõnis Braks were used. In these the journalist mainly describes his journalistic work during the 1920s and 1930s, including the years spent working at Estonia’s biggest daily Päevaleht and the newspaper Sotsiaaldemokraat that went bankrupt in 1922. The memoirs of Braks were compared to and supplemented with various other sources, e.g. articles published in pre-war Estonia and later sources containing historical overview of the Estonian Republic before World War II. The methodological approach is based on Tom Wengraf’s rhombic model that offers four components as the basis of a biographical study: history (the lived life), narrative, context, and subjectivity. In this study, I mainly focused on two main aspects. Firstly, how Tõnis Braks’s life story and memoirs reflect the Estonian journalism of his time and its context. Secondly, how the biographical method can be suited to study history of journalism. I divided the memoirs of Tõnis Braks chronologically, roughly between the 1920s and 1930s. Compiling an exact chronology was difficult as Tõnis Braks mentions no dates in his memoirs and even the names of his acquaintances are rare. As working in the field of journalism, the social context and bond are important; the study is supplemented with the description of Tõnis Braks’s childhood and youth. Tõnis Braks’s memoirs show that though bathetic and noble-minded articles on journalism were published in the publications of his working days, the ideas and values expressed in those were not always implemented in practice. E.g. though the editor-in-chief of Päevaleht, Hans Rebane, wrote in the Estonia’s journalists’ organization’s year-book Õitsituled that journalistic work and the profession of a journalist require real commitment, Tõnis Braks mentions that Mr. Rebane actually sat in his office and did not actually commit himself much on journalistic work. In this respect, Tõnis Braks’s memoirs offer a realistic view on the journalism of his working days, instead of the idealized view sometimes over-stressed. There is no idealization of the journalistic work in Braks’s memoirs. On the other hand, the memoirs offer a lot of information that has not been published in other sources – e.g. detailed descriptions of the chaotic working environment at Päevaleht and Braks’s colleagues. The main historical events of his working years are not stressed in Braks’s memoirs. E.g, the Silent Era that had an influence on journalism in Estonia and the daily work at editorials, narrowing the freedom of journalism, is not mentioned by Braks. As autobiographers usually stress the aspects that have influenced them most, and the aspects that they wish to bring back to life (sometimes not apprehending this, themselves), we can assume that for Braks the Silent Era did not change much. There even seems to be more influence on the journalistic work and content from the shareholders of papers. The Soviet occupation brought along a jail sentence for Tõnis Braks. This made Braks and his family extremely cautious. According to a relative, Braks and his family feared further sanctions from the Soviet regime. This might be one of the reasons for Braks mentioning some facts and expressing some opinions in his diary, and for leaving some out. I concluded that the biographical method, though it has its cons, is one of the possible research methods for the research of the history of Estonian journalism on individual level. Interview, for example, would give researchers more possibilities to concretize the facts and opinions expressed. On the other hand, using memoirs as a source for a research allows the researcher to stress the most important and memorable parts of journalistic work of some era - an interviewer might mislead the interviewee. I as a researcher could not influence how Tõnis Braks expressed his thoughts, feelings, and opinions – thus I could use them in the most “honest” and “pure” way. Besides, conducting an interview with a deceased person is not physically possible. This study could be developed further by including analyses of Braks’s texts. On the one hand, text analysis could include his journalistic material, on the other hand also his diaries. A possibility for further study would also be comparing Braks’s memoirs to those of some of his colleagues in pre-war Estonia.

Keywords

bakalaureusetööd, ajakirjandus, ajakirjanikud, elukutsed, ajakirjandusajalugu, Braks, Tõnis, 1885-1966, biograafilised meetodid

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