Folklore Theory in Postwar Germany

1. Mega Legacies: German Folklore Studies in Historical Perspective

11 Chapter 1 Mega Legacies German฀Folklore฀Studies฀in฀Historical฀Perspective The legacy of Romanticism is inseparable from the very idea of folklore studies as that is where the roots of the discipline lay. Folklore has been studied under the discipline of Volkskunde in Germany. The study of folklore, however, had not been initiated as Volkskunde, but as part of German philological studies called Germanistik. The Brothers Grimm, the world famous collectors and narrators of German folk and fairy tales, are seen as the initiators of both the disciplines— Germanistik and Volkskunde (Mieder 1973, 34), particularly Jacob Grimm is seen as the “Gründungsvater” (founding father) (Brunner 2000, 11). The discipline was understood as the study of German language and culture. However, the study of language and culture depends on what the scholars treat as representative of language and culture. Classical philology based itself on the study of ancient and medieval written texts in foreign and ancient languages. The Brothers Grimm gave philology a new turn with their study of folklore and folk language. Their philology emanated from the study of ordinary people’s spoken German language and oral cultural expression. In the early nineteenth century when German philology came into being, the question was which way the new discipline will follow: that of classical philology, or that of the Brothers Grimm. Classical philology was already instituted within the university system. A new chair was established in the Berlin University for German Studies. Jacob Grimm was seen as one of the candidates for it, the other was Karl Lachmann. The chair was given to Karl Lachmann, already a professor of Classical Philology (Bontempelli 2004, 14–16). The subsequent development of the discipline was determined by this event, and it can Parallel to History 12 be said that Jacob Grimm—the one seen as a founder of the discipline until present—was institutionally marginalized within his lifetime. Horst Brunner considers this to be due to Grimm’s nationalist politics , radical for the time (Brunner 2000, 19). Lachmann promoted German philology in the likeness of classical philology as the study of written texts as a way of understanding German language and culture, while Jacob Grimm would have promoted the study of living language and cultural expression of the people. In Jacob Grimm’s own words, his philology could be identified as “wilde Philologie” (wild or unruly philology) instead of the disciplined and domesticated philology that Germanistik evolved into (Wyss 1983). Jacob Grimm’s writings favor the growth of a discipline that would study cultural discourse across the divide created by writing and orality. He seems to be pointing toward a discipline that today is called “culture studies” and not a discipline that studies only written and literary language. Writing about this early phase of the development of German studies , Pier Carlo Bontempelli explains what the philological method was and how it came to be applied in the study of German language and culture. Philological method was originally concerned with the study of foreign and classical languages (Greek and Latin), and the task of the scholar was to explain the importance of the texts in their original language (Bontempelli 2004, 14). The study of German language and culture began not as a philological discipline, but as an enthusiastic study by an “amateurish community” (Bontempelli 2004, 17). The appointment of Lachmann to the first chair of German studies in Berlin led to another line of transformation. “While Grimm was the representative of an unruly philology, deeply sensitive to the voice of nature in all its nuances, Lachmann was the great normalizer” (Bontempelli 2004, 16). Lachmann was a professor of classical philology and became responsible for the Philologisierung (Bontempelli 2004, 16) of German studies. He insisted on disciplining the study of German language and culture through studies of ancient and medieval German texts, like epics. The methods of classical philology worked well for medieval German texts as their language could be treated as a foreign language, but Lachmann applied the method to modern literary texts as well. He edited Lessing’s works and established the value of the German Folklore Studies in Historical Perspective 13 last edition by the author, ignoring variants in earlier texts. Lachmann “cleansed” the texts of any impurities, and on medieval texts, even imposed his own sense of meters (Bontempelli 2004, 16–18). “The fact that German Studies lacked an academic tradition caused it, praradoxically , to emphasize its disciplinary...