Abstract
The community study approach acquired a somewhat unexpected popularity among German researchers from both the humanities and the social sciences in the first decades after World War II. During the 1950s and 1960s, numerous village communities were chosen as fieldwork sites by sociologists and folklorists who were looking into issues of social change and rural restructuring in postwar Germany. This case study addresses Hesse, one of the German federal states founded after World War II, where a number of community studies were conducted from the late 1940s well into the 1960s. We consider the publications that resulted from fieldwork studies in village communities as a specific textual genre. Our study interrogates the writing conventions of village monographs and their capacity to convey academic knowledge to wider audiences. Knowledge transfers between academic research and policy makers became topical, as did the relationship between sociological research and the community study approach in Volkskunde.
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