Folklore Theory in Postwar Germany

5. Röhrich beyond German Borders

109 Chapter 5 Röhrich beyond German Borders Folk/Fairytales are utopias with compensatory function, who owe their trajectory to concrete social and economic relations. —Lutz฀Röhrich, Folktales and Reality With the exception of critics like Michele Rak, Rudolph Schenda, Lutz [Röhrich], and some other European folklorists , very few critics have been concerned with explaining the socio-political connection between the folk and fairy tale. —Jack฀Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell Knowledge, as it is said, has no boundaries. I read Lutz Röhrich from two perspectives: one, within the context of German folkloristics; and two, as an Indian folklorist. In this chapter I show the relevance of Röhrich beyond German context at two levels: one, his relevance to the contemporary scholarship on European and American folk and fairy tales and literary fairy tales; two, the relevance and significance of his ideas for the study of contemporary South Asian folklore studies. To fulfill my first task, I discuss a recent work by another great scholar of German and European folktale and fairy tale: Jack Zipes. Trained as a scholar of English and comparative literature, and a Germanist by discipline, Zipes is not only a renowned Grimm scholar , but he has also translated tales of the famous collection KHM. He has taken his research further and studied the two other fascinating and influential European folklore collectors: Giovan Francesco Straparola and Charles Perrault. Zipes’s study of European folktales, literary fairy tales, and their collectors and writers is connected with his study and concerns with the dissemination of these tales and Continuity of Folklore 110 literature in the United States in the most modern and technological forms of cultural expression. Indeed, it is difficult to sum up the expanse of Zipes’s scholarship, and I am not attempting to do so, either. My focus on Zipes also does not imply that I ignore other significant scholars of German folk and fairy tales, like Donald Haase and Maria Tatar. I focus on Jack Zipes because one of his recent works came across to me as in the same line of thinking as that of Lutz Röhrich’s. Through analysis I compare and juxtapose Zipes’s thesis in Why Fairy Tales Stick of 2006 to that of Röhrich’s as articulated in Folktales and Reality (1956). To fulfill my second task of showing Röhrich’s relevance for the study of South Asian folklore today, I draw on my own researches in the history of folkloristics in South Asia and its roots in colonialism, and on my ongoing study of folk performers in contemporary India and the evolution of certain performative genres in the context of freedom from colonialism and division of the subcontinent in 1947. Röhrich’s฀Relevance฀for฀Contemporary฀Western฀ Folkloristics In his study Why Fairy Tales Stick Jack Zipes approaches the subject of continued popularity of some of the best known Western fairy tales in literature, film, and other media “by including recent research on relevance theory, social Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, and linguistics ” (Zipes 2006, xii). Elaborating on his intellectual references and locations he says, “I still very much believe that fairy tales have formed a relevant discourse within the Western civilizing process as analyzed by Norbert Elias and more recently by Pierre Bourdieu. But I have found that it is important to know something about genetics , memetics, linguistics, and evolution to explain how the literary fairy tale originated in an oral mode and was formed over thousands of years to stick in our brains in very peculiar ways” (Zipes 2006, xii). Building on this new approach to the analysis of oral and literary fairy tales, Zipes lays special emphasis on the concept of “meme” from genetics. “Memes are instructions for carrying out behaviour, stored in brains (or other objects) and passed on by imitation. Their Röhrich beyond German Borders 111 competition drives the evolution of the mind. Both genes and memes are replicators and must obey the general principles of evolutionary theory and in that case they are the same. Beyond that they may be, and indeed are, very different—they are related only by analogy . . . . Memes are no more ‘mythical entities’ than genes are—genes are instructions encoded in molecules of DNA—memes are instructions embedded in human brains, or in the artifacts such as books, pictures, bridges or steam trains.”1 Jack Zipes bases his reading of the fairy...