Table Of ContentFolklore and Fascism
F O L K L O R E S T U D I E S IN T R A N S L A T I O N
General Editor, Dan Ben-Amos
ADVISORY BOARD
Eleazar M. Meletinsky Juha Y. Pentikäinen
Institute of World Literature of the University of Helsinki
Russian Academy of Sciences Helsinki
Moscow
Tzvetan Todorov Vilmos Voigt
Centre National de la Recherche Loränd Eötvös University
Scientifique Budapest
Paris
Donald Ward Masao Yamaguchi
Center for the Study of Comparative Institute for the Study of Languages
Folklore and Mythology, UCLA and Cultures of Asia and Africa
Los Angeles Tokyo
German Volkskunde: A Decade of Theoretical Confrontation, Debate, and Reorienta
tion (1967-1977), translated and edited by James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld.
The European Folktale: Form and Nature by Max Lüthi, translated by John D. Niles.
The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait of Man by Max Lüthi, translated by John
Erickson.
Nordic Folklore: Recent Studies, edited by Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf
(in collaboration with Elizabeth Simpson).
Kalevala Mythology by Juha Y. Pentikäinen, translated and edited by Ritva Poom.
Folk Culture in a World of Technology by Hermann Bausinger, translated by Elke
Dettmer.
Folktales and Reality by Lutz Röhrich, translated by Peter Tokofsky.
Principles for Oral Narrative Research, translated by Kirsten Wolf and Jody Jensen.
Folklore and Fascism
The Reich Institute for
German Volkskunde
Hannjost Lixfeld
Edited and translated by
James R. Dow
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Indiana University Press
Bloomington & Indianapolis
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The generous support of the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs
Foundation has made the Folklore Studies in Thinslation series possible.
Publication of this volume was made possible in part by grants from the
Sophie and Hermann Freyling Stiftung and the Liberal Arts and Sciences
College, of Iowa State University.
© 1994 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American
University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only
exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lixfeld, Hannjost.
Folklore and fascism : the Reich Institute for German Volkskunde /
Hannjost Lixfeld ; edited and translated by James R. Dow.
p. cm. — (Folklore studies in translation)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-33512-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Folklore—Germany— History— 20th century. 2. Folklore—
Political aspects—Germany. 3. National socialism—Germany—
History. 4. Germany— Politics and government— 1933-1945. I. Dow,
James R. II. Title. III. Series.
GR166.L59 1994
398'. 0943' 0904— dc20 93-10014
1 2 3 4 5 99 98 97 96 95 94
//!£C 7;:,. - 7
With gratitude to Wolfgang Jacobeit
Contents
Foreword by Dan Ben-Amos be
Foreword by James R. Dow xi
Introduction xix
1. Bourgeois-National Volkskunde between the Monarchy and Fascism /
2. The Reich Community for German Folk Research: Forerunner of
Fascist Folklore Scholarship 31
3. Fascist Volkskunde and Folk Renewal during the Third Reich 61
4. The Rise and Fall of the Reichsinstitut für deutsche Volkskunde 121
Guide to the Appendixes 151
Appendix I. Documents of the Rosenberg Bureau ¡53
Appendix II. Documents of the SS Office of Ancestral Inheritance 190
Appendix III. Documents by German Folklorists 201
Translations, Terminology, and Abbreviations 214
Notes 229
Bibliography 264
Name Index 3°4
Foreword
Dan Ben-Amos
This is a book about a grim chapter in the history of German folklore. Hannjost
Lixfeld approaches his task with clinical precision, recounting the ways folklore
fell prey to Nazi politicians, ideologues, and sham scholars. He deliberately con
centrates on individual personalities, establishing dates, noting locations, document
ing memoranda, and citing sources with exacting care. This historical methodology,
which he follows with an orthodox dedication, also serves a psychological function.
It enables him, and other modern .German intellectuals who share his- approach,
to relieve themselves of the burden of collective guilt. In such a narration the
blame is individual rather than social or cultural. The careful documentation also
enables him to separate the guilty from the innocent. Under National Socialism
some German folklorists took a firm stand against the regime, and some paid with
their lives for their struggle to maintain their personal and scholarly integrity.
While such a careful exposition is necessary, the detailed narration could easily
hide a lesson which goes far beyond the boundaries of Germany, then and now,
and which touches upon the very nature of human society as a whole. The very
historical occurrence of National Socialism evidences humankind’s potential to sink
to the lowest moral depths. Unfortunately, historical events since that period confirm
a continuing willingness to use ideas as a reason for murder. The killing fields
of Cambodia and the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia may be smaller
in scale but are no different in nature from the Nazi crimes.Inthe name of imagined
communities and imagined, utopias, people committed unimaginable atrocities.
Therefore the testimony of this book does not implicate just German scholars and
German society during the Third Reich, but the entire community of our species.
Its relevance is current and global as a constant reminder of the potential culpability
of humankind.
Paradoxically the eeriness of Lixfeld’s narrative grows tenfold because its prin
cipal players are not the customary set of characters we have learned to associate
with the rise of National Socialism and the holocaust. They are not the gas chamber
operators or the SS officers; they are not the scientists who performed experiments
on human beings, not the bureaucrats who managed the entire Nazi machine of
destruction. Rather, Lixfeld tells the story of people who believed, like Voltaire,
that the pen is mightier than the sword— people who provided the scholarly and
ideological basis for genocide. He describes their surrender to political totalitar
x Fbreword
ianism, reducing the abstractness of evil to minute actions, conversations, meetings,
notes, and memoranda. The shameful picture that emerges from these details shows
scholars crossing from the domain of academic freedom to political servitude,
not because of coercion, but following the seductive lure of financial support, pro
motions, prestigious positions, and public recognition. And as they made this pas
sage, neither naive nor innocent, and well understanding the nature of the pact
they signed, they lulled themselves into self-deception, believing they could continue
to pursue truth in the household of the totalitarians.
Such self-deception could occur whenever the boundaries between the state
and the university erode and the politicians, of whatever persuasion, take control
of science. Research becomes prescriptive rather than open-ended. By accepting
these conditions the folklore scholars might have thought that they were adjusting
to a new political situation. But with their decision to adapt to new realities rather
than to fight, they entered into the prison-house of political thought, where they
served ruling dictators rather than scholarly ideals.
Lixfeld refers to them as bourgeois-national scholars. Name-calling notwith
standing, the fact of the matter is that most scholarship around the world is carried
out by the bourgeois. Even intellectuals of Marxist persuasion share in the relative
comfort of the middle-class. The scholars who collaborated with the Nazis and
abdicated their moral and scholarly principles, started their careers following a
set of values common to most intellectuals. Their story would therefore serve all
of us as a constant reminder that excellence in scholarship without a firm moral
foundation is a vacuous achievement.
The troubling fact for modern-day folklorists is that their predecessors’ cross
over was also made easier by the very proximity between folklore ideas and Nazi
ideology. Nationalism was an idea that motivated folklore research in Germany
and many other countries; it is also one of the principles of fascism. For them,
a transition from analysis to advocacy of these ideas did not conflict with their
fundamental disciplinary assumptions. Folklore theory and Nazi ideology drew
upon the shared intellectual resources of German romantic-nationalism. The con
cept of folk (Volk) and folklore (Volkskunde) were fundamental both to the discipline
of folklore and to National Socialist ideology. The notions of nationalism.and prim
itivism, the idealization of the peasantry, the “fatherland,” and the community, have
been motivating ideas for both discipline and party. Scholars constituted these ideas
as subjects of research, while politicians used them as rally slogans for action.
But the proximity between them allows no room for comfort.
Therefore modern German folklore scholars take great care to distance them
selves from the aberrant use of romantic ideas and seek to reconstitute their dis
cipline on the basis of social-scientific and humanistic concepts and terms. Lixfeld’s
historical analysis is part of the effort to reformulate the purposes of folklore schol
arship and to establish the discipline of folklore— in Germany in particular and
in the academies of the world in general— in scholarly terms and in such a way
that it will never again become a political tool.
