Folklore Theory in Postwar Germany

4. Folksong for History from Below

82 Chapter 4 Folksong for History from Below The wide spectrum of Röhrich’s research interests, sociopolitical concerns , and methodological shifts become significantly visible when we examine his writings over a long period of time. Gesammelte Shriften zur Volkslied- und Volksballadenforschung (Collected Writings on Folksong and Folk-Ballads Research), published 2002 contains sixteen articles on subjects as varied as Heimatslieder and Auswandererlieder (Homeland-Songs and Emigrants’ Songs) from analyzing representations of the divine and the devil to those of women, from loose printed sheets to radio campaigns, and from ancient motives to politically contested physical territories. In this referential list we can notice the coexistence of old and new categories. These articles were written at different times in separate contexts over a period of three decades. Folksong research in Germany is older than folktale research and bears the mark of pioneer Johann Gottfried Herder, who coined the term Volkslied in the 1770s. His ideas were also the inspiration behind the famous folktale collectors: the Brothers Grimm. Herder was a philosopher who compiled the first collection of folksongs in Germany in 1777. As a philosopher Herder stood at the cusp of premodern and modern. On the one hand, he struggled to challenge the establishment of Kantian rationalism in philosophy and Lessing’s rationalist bourgeois concept of literature and creativity, and on the other, he reflected the emerging consciousness of the “modern” in his own writings. His concept of Volkslied signified a counter to Kantian rationalism as Herder argued that there was no known way of the creation of these oral songs. All logical constructs like education and conscious aesthetics were missing from among the folk who created these beautiful Folksong for History from Below 83 songs. Creative genius was thus not completely dependent on those rational constructs. Herder’s ideas and personality intensely influenced the young Goethe, who expressed these in his cult novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) and particularly Faust, which was in the making since 1772, though the first part finally appeared in 1808. Herder gave a decisive counter to rationalist concepts of poetic creativity with the way he defined his collection of oral songs. His understanding of his coinage Volkslied was reflected in the title of the book: Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (Voices of the People in Songs). He presented songs collected from the rural German-speaking populace framed by his definition: that they reflected the language, spirit, and nation of a people. The importance of this definition is best understood with reference to its historical context: that of German-speaking kingdoms that were yet a century away from being welded into a nation, and industrialization had not made a definite entry. Intellectually, Enlightenment was influential and progress seemed to lie only in the future. Herder showed with his songs that people are not enlightened in the rationalist sense, but they follow the rationale of nature, live a life connected to nature, and derive their poetic and aesthetic sense from nature. Creativity is natural and the collective creativity of a people is reflected in their songs that are created collectively. This stood in contrast to the new phenomenon of professional writer who was an educated bourgeois individual. The debate on Herder’s contribution reaches yet another point when Regina Bendix recognizes the construction that he proposed, but also the value of that construction: “Herder’s gift to his peers was to single out folk poetry as a locus of folkness, inspiring contemporaries and an entire social and literary movement to abstract and initiate the authentic aesthetic of the folk. Herder and the Sturm und Drang Romantics solidified the link between the search for personal, moral authenticity and its artistic expression and communication” (Bendix 1997, 17). Herder himself was an educated individual with an established reputation as a philosopher. His route into the intellectual world had come through the life of a pastor in the Baltic town of Riga. As such he would have experienced the orality of people as personal and fictional narratives and as poetry in everyday songs. His different sensibilities Lutz฀Röhrich:฀The฀Advocate฀for฀Folklore฀ 84 charged a new generation of urban intellectuals and writers from Strasbourg in southwest Germany to Weimar in the east. The fact remains that his influence on future generations of collectors and scholars was pan European. Herder’s spirit transformed into the more definite works of romantics...