The German Village as Site of Ethnographic Knowledge

Abstract

In Germany, the disciplines of folkloristics (Volkskunde) and sociology had such different origins and divergent trajectories between 1933 and 1945 that it is both surprising and instructive to discover so many commonalities in their postwar studies. Before commenting on possible reasons for similarities among ethnographic portrayals of community in the German state of Hesse, I will briefly review prewar and Nazi-era developments in the two disciplines in order to situate these studies in their historical and intellectual contexts. The Zeitgeist of the founding periods of folklore (nineteenth-century Germany) and sociology (Weimar Germany after the First World War) could not have been more different. From its nineteenth-century beginnings, Volkskunde emerged as a conservative social science. Since the time of Johann Gottfried Herder and the Grimms, the Volk had been equated with the peasantry. Romantic nationalists assumed the peasantry embodied the purest aspects of German culture. Nazi ideology and Volkskunde converged in their orientation toward the traditional, the national, and the belief that the peasantry constituted the foundation of the German folk-nation. Both the material and the