Peuckert’s Handwörterbuch and the Making of Twentieth-century Encyclopedias

The following is a comment on Michaela Fenske’s essay “The Undoing of an Encyclopedia: Knowledge Practices within German Folklore Studies after World War II,” published in this special issue on Ethnological Knowledges

(Journal of Folklore Research 47/1–2, 2010).

In response to Michaela Fenske’s explanation of why Will-Erich Peuckert failed to compile his Handwörterbuch der Sage (Encyclopedia of legends), I consider here ways in which Peuckert’s venture foreshadows two related phenomena. The first is the intensification of folklore scholarship in the United States that followed in the wake of World War II and thus overlapped the German encyclopedia project. The second closely linked development is the process for creating encyclopedias and other specialized reference works that evolved in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Early in her article, Fenske asserts that Peuckert’s compulsion to edit the monumental Handwörterbuch der Sage arose as “a reaction to the mental and physical destruction of World War II” (this issue). Ripples from this event extended across decades, but Fenske’s primary focus is on what Peuckert identified as “a kind of encyclopedic epidemic,” one that demanded that “knowledge had to be collected and contained in representational formats again, a new gathering of wits and energies was needed.” The entanglements of the National Socialist Movement, individual folklorists, and Volkskunde as a discipline produced a unique situation in Germany after the Second World War (e.g., Dow and Lixfield 1994).

The resurgence of folklore studies during this period was not an isolated phenomenon. Social upheavals during the first half of the twentieth century provided an impetus for the revitalization of folklore documentation during the post–World War II period in the Americas as well. During the 1930s Benjamin A. Botkin, sometime editor of the journal Folksay: A Regional Miscellany, had become a leading figure in the Federal Writers’ Project (like the revitalization of German folklore studies following World War II, the FWP was also the product of a social disaster—the Great Depression). In 1944, as the European phase of World War II reached its crescendo, Botkin also edited Treasury of American Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the People. Closely following Botkin’s collections were numerous tributes to American regional folk culture, such as Mody C. Boatright’s Gib Morgan, Minstrel of the Oilfields (1945) and Vance Randolph’s collections from the Ozarks, among many, many others. While these 1940s collections celebrated American folklore, the collectors generally stopped short of analyzing or, like Peuckert, obsessively classifying their materials.

During the next decade, folklorists earnestly considered the interaction between American folklore and its environment. The pioneers of the 1940s were followed in the next decade by scholars who attended to the complex relationships among history, ethnicity, physical environment, and traditional folklife and folklore. Classic examples of this period are Richard Dorson’s Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of the Upper Peninsula (1952) and Américo Paredes’s in-depth analysis of songs commemorating the exploits of Gregorio Cortez, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and its Hero (1958). Thus, the political, geographic, and ethnic identities manifested in folklore served American as well as German ambitions to reorganize and redefine peoples and polities in the aftermath of widespread calamity. Unlike German scholars, however, American academics did not place encyclopedia-making at the top of their agendas. In the absence of academic efforts to produce reference works, the publishing industry stepped up to fill the void with a reference work aimed at a general readership. In 1949, Maria Leach published the first volume of her Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend.

In contrast to the U.S. scholars noted above—who comprised two distinct American academic movements, the regional collectors and the regional analysts—Leach took a more global view in her two-volume work, which was completed in 1950 and totaled over 1,200 pages.¹ According to Fenske, encyclopedias “claim to be all-embracing, objective, and systematic, and to offer lasting and valid knowledge” (this issue). In her introduction...