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Hans Naumann's gesunkenes Kulturgut and primitive Gemeinschaftskultur
Dow, James R. Journal of Folklore Research 51.1 (Jan­Apr 2014): 49­100.
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Abstrakt
Hans Naumann is known primarily for the term gesunkenes Kulturgut, to such a degree that he is inseparable from the term. Hans Naumann assumed a theoretical stance
in 1920 that thrust him into a maelstrom of controversy he could not possibly have anticipated, the final results of which affected his reputation and cost him his academic
position and nearly his life. This paper will survey much of that scholarship for the English­speaking world. It will probe the contents of the two works in which his primary
concepts are presented. There will be detail on Naumann's excursions into Nazism­based to some degree on information found in a 2001 "biographical novel" by his son
Andreas Naumann, which has not yet been assessed by Naumann scholars. Finally, in order to contribute to people's understanding of the role Hans Naumann has played in
folklore, translations into English of the two works where his concepts appear will be presented.
Plný text
Headnote
Abstract: Hans Naumann is known primarily for the term gesunkenes Kulturgut, to such a degree that he is inseparable from the term. It is rarely translated but just left in
the German original. It was, however, his conception of primitive communal culture that caused the harshest reaction to his work, evoked negative criticism during Nazism,
and was condemned to the end of the twentieth century. Hans Naumann assumed a theoretical stance in the 1920s that thrust him into a maelstrom of controversy he
could not possibly have anticipated, the final results of which affected his reputation and cost him his academic position and nearly his life. This paper will survey much of that
scholarship for the English­ speaking world; it will probe the contents of the two works in which his primary concepts are presented; there will be detail on Naumann's
excursions into Nazism­based to some degree on information found in a 2001 "biographical novel" by his son Andreas Naumann, which has not yet been assessed by
Naumann scholars. Hans Naumann's work will be treated by shifting our gaze away from "sunken goods" and toward "primitive communal culture," suggesting why such a
reassessment is important today. Finally, in order to contribute to our understanding of the role Hans Naumann has played in folklore, translations into English of the two
works where his concepts appear will be presented.
Meinem Kollegen Wolfgang Jacobeit gewidmet.
Hans Naumann is known first and foremost outside the German world of folklore for the term gesunkenes Kulturgut, to such a degree that he is inseparable from the term. It
is rarely translated but just left in the German original, like a leitmotif. Students of folklore out­ side the German­speaking world have long known about Naumann's
gesunkenes Kulturgut, but they have been dependent for the most part on diluted synopses and rough translations, all of which present it negatively1­e.g., "cultural slag"
(Dorson 1972, 19), "abased cultural values" (Cocchiara 1981, 532), "degenerated imitations" (El­Shamy 1997, 421), "debased elements of culture" (Brunvand 1998, 50)­or
as part of a "devolutionary premise" (Dundes 1975, 18). Naumann's term gesunkenes Kulturgut, however, was not very controversial among German scholars of the early
twentieth centur y; rather, it was viewed as merely descriptive. It was, on the other hand, his conception and description of primitive communal culture that caused the
harshest reaction at the time, evoked negative criticism during the period of Nazism, and continued to be condemned well into the latter decades of the century.
Virtually every attempt to address the history of Volkskunde in the German­speaking world­Germany, Austria, and Switzerland­has had to deal with the Naumann
phenomenon, but his core concepts have not yet, in my opinion, been sufficiently analyzed. Furthermore, too little is known about Naumann's troubled membership in the
Nazi Party: his participation in book burnings, his salutary comments on Hitler's birthdays, or the terrorization he faced by Nazi "scholars" for his views on the German Volk.
As we will see, Naumann assumed a theoretical stance that thrust him into a virtual maelstrom of contro­ versy he could not possibly have anticipated, the final results of
which affected not just his reputation but also cost him his academic position and nearly his life.
This paper will survey much of that scholarship for the English­ speaking world; it will probe the contents of the two works in which his primary concepts are presented,
including Naumann's nascent ideas on creativity; it will provide considerable detail on Naumann's excursions into Nazism­based to some degree on information found in a
2001 "biographical novel" by his son Andreas Naumann that has not yet been assessed by scholars. Hans Naumann's work will be treated by shifting our gaze away from
"sunken goods" and toward "primitive communal culture," suggesting why such a reassessment is important today. His aristocratic­elitist attitudes and their influence on his
thinking, particularly on primitive communal culture, will be addressed. Finally, I would also like to contribute to our understanding of the role Naumann has played in folklore
scholarship by offering translations into English of the works where his concepts are pre­ sented. First, however, we must analyze the two concepts as concisely and
systematically as possible.
Naumann's Core Concepts
In 1921 Hans Naumann's Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur (Primitive com­ munal culture) appeared,2 followed one year later by his Grundzüge der deutschen Volkskunde
(Basic principles of German folklore).3 With these two works Naumann quite dramatically entered discussions on folklore theory that had begun around the turn of the centur
y but which had been interrupted by World War I. He introduces the term gesunkenes Kulturgut in his first work, and associates it with his thoughts on primitive communal
culture.
In Germany we have long known that the term gesunkenes Kulturgut can be traced directly to ideas used as early as 1906 by John Meier in his Kunstlieder im Volksmunde
(Art songs among the folk), and enhanced in 1917 in his Volksliedstudien (Folksong studies).4 In a carefully worded statement Reinhard Schmook (1993, 68) says, "Hans
Naumann had drawn the terms 'communal goods' and 'sunken cultural goods' from the results of modern folksong research" (emphasis added). In his stud­ ies of folksongs,
Meier does not actually use the word gesunken­thus Schmook's word bezogen, translated here as drawn­but he repeatedly describes the movement of songs attributed to
specific authors that are then acquired and spread by the Volk. One example is sufficient: "Poems by Minister Bayer in Partschendorf have been taken over completely into
folk tradition and have been spread as folksongs . . . a series of songs by clergy and other educated people [were] composed, and then disseminated amongst the folk orally,
or by broadsides, and have become their very own" (Meier 1906, iv).
Naumann would subsequently present this pattern of movement as part of his more inclusive treatment of primitive communal culture: materials originating in higher strata
had a way of sinking or trick­ ling down to lower strata. Thus, while gesunkenes Kulturgut is certainly Naumann's term, the concept of "goods" from higher, more educated
levels of society "sinking" to a lower level, to the Volk, was current think­ ing at the time. The term was low­hanging fruit easily accessible to his critics, especially abroad. In
these early writings Naumann described the process by which items of folklore sank to lower levels, but he never returned to it in subsequent writings, never attempted to
systematically present an underlying theoretical basis, and for the most part offered only generalized examples in support, as we will see in the translation. For this reason we
might view gesunkenes Kulturgut as nothing more than a functional term with little conceptual clarity. This was certainly not the case with his thoughts on primitive
communal culture.
Without exception, all studies of Naumann suggest that he drew heavily on both the past and the present in developing his rather naïve and clichéd concept of
"primitiveness." Here too his notions were hardly different from those that were in vogue during his life­ time in European arts, popular culture, and scientific disciplines like
anthropology and ethnology (Völkerkunde and Volkskunde). Regina Bendix (1997, 39­40) says Naumann's views on the primitive may in fact reach back to Herder's
eighteenth­century conception of the Volk, but they also clearly reflect work by a prominent contemporary folklorist, Eduard Hoffmann­K rayer of Basel, Switzerland. In 1902
Hoffmann­Krayer laid out a two­strata theory of society, contrasting the German romantic peasant­Volk theory with his own concept of a vulgus in populo, interpreting populo
as the political­national, and vulgus as the social­civilizational elements of society. In contrast to cultural history, which investigates the "individual­civilizational moment" in
culture, Volkskunde, according to Hoffmann­K rayer, is not concerned with the entirety of national life but exclusively with the "generally stagnating cultural moment" of the
vulgus. This led to the famous and often cited obser vation by Hoffmann­K rayer (1902, 60) that "the folk does not produce, it reproduces."5
Others associated with the early developments of folklore in the German world offered similar thoughts on perceived different levels of society, two in the same year as
Hoffmann­Krayer's work. Adolf Strack (1902) advanced the psychological concept of a communal folk soul, and Albrecht Dieterich (1902, 175) viewed basic forms of religious
thinking as the "expression of an organically cohesive lower stratum for all historical folk life, from whose native­soil all individual forms and personal creation have grown."
According to Dieterich, recognizing the soul and the perceptive world of this lower stratum is the business of folklore. It was, however, the Frenchman Lucien Lév y­Bruhl's
Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910)­translated into Ger­ man as Das Denken der Naturvölker in 1921­that Reinhard Schmook (1993) singles out as
having the most direct and profound influence on Naumann. Lév y­Bruhl is widely known for proposing two thought systems in different societies: "primitive or pre­l ogical"
versus "civi­ lized." We may safely assume Naumann was familiar with all of these ideas­he sometimes cited them in his works but was not consistent in his attributions­and
they clearly informed his writings in the 1920s.6
Naumann's concept of a primitive communal culture was not par­ ticularly nuanced, but it was also not simply derivative. Still, it is obvious that there is a clear path from
Meier's terminology on folksongs, as well as the theoretical writings of Hoffmann­Krayer and Lév y­Bruhl, to Naumann, all of whom divided human culture into two strata.7 A
forced amalgam of these ideas reveals that "natural man" was "primi­ tive or pre­l ogical," part of a "political­national element," and be­ longing to an "organically cohesive
lower stratum"; he is also blessed by a "communal soul," a "folk soul." However, in my reading of his work, Naumann distinguishes himself conceptually by pointing to the
"native soil" [Mutterboden; literally mother soil] of the lower stratum, out of which individual forms and personal creations have grown. Further, and much in contrast to the
others, Naumann emphasizes a reciprocity here: not only do "goods" sink to a lower stratum but this same lower stratum continues to feed into our modern world. Is this
some kind of recognition of creativity in the lower stratum? We need to read the essay closely.
Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur
The opening chapter of Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur bears the same title as the book: it has been translated in English as "Primitive Com­ munal Culture" at the end of this
article (Appendix 1). The reader should be aware that it is difficult to read and follow Naumann's logic in German and thus also in the translation. The German text is obtuse
and sometimes vague or hazy; it reads more like an enhanced version of the lecture he gave for a winter semester course in 1920 ­21, titled "Introduction to German
Volkskunde."8 In fact, the introduction to his 1922 Grundzüge is nothing more than a rewording of this same lecture, its two published versions, and chapter 1 of Primitive
Gemeinschaftskultur.
In "Primitive Communal Culture" (Appendix 1), Naumann pre­ sents a few programmatic statements but he never develops a consistent theoretical basis for what are for him
apparently nascent concepts of creativity and reciprocity. The essay is filled with ellipses, generaliza­ tions about other cultures, and numerous brief references to myths and
legends from the Germanic continuum and around the world. Naumann apparently assumed that his readers knew what he was ref­ erencing without offering full details, but
such writing easily leads to confusion on the part of readers both inside and outside Germany. He seems to delight in pursuing tangents on ideas and concepts that he
introduces along the way, ending them on occasion with abrupt and unsubstantiated one­line conclusions. For example, paragraph nine ends with "Modern communal life is
thus also returning back to the primitive." I have nevertheless sought to find the core of his ideas by adhering to the stated purpose of the piece, a treatment of primitive
communal culture.
In the first three paragraphs Naumann says there are two concepts that he feels must be clearly delineated to bring order to the realm of folklore endeavors: the communal
song [Gemeinschaftslied] and the sunken art song [gesunkenes Kunstlied]. Throughout the essay he refers to the idea of sunken goods eleven times, treating the process of
sink­ ing down like a truism. By separating "sunken goods" from "primitive communal goods," Naumann maintains that modern folklorists can now perceive the very essence
of the primitive and thus see its relation­ ship to higher and more individualistic culture. Fittingly, he devotes most of his text to what he conceives to be the constituent parts
of this primitive culture and associates them with what might still remain for us in contemporary society. He associates numerous descriptive terms with his concept of the
primitive. An amalgam can also be drawn from the essay text: primitive man is close to nature and animals; his psyche is like that of a child; he is impulsive, languid, and
vengeful; he dances and plays; he is religious; he dies easily and does not fear death; and he is pre­logical and pre­moral in his collective thinking.
In paragraph four, however, we begin to see the development of a process of reciprocity, when the author focuses our gaze on the primitive while drawing a direct line for a
"special flower that grows up out of the roots of a primitive community," up to the pinnacle of individuality and the fulfillment of personality. Naumann seems to suggest, at
least metaphorically, a recognition of folk creativity with his description of the influence of primitive communal culture on modern society.
Having suggested an axis of movement­from higher to lower­ and the influence from lower to higher strata, Naumann then offers some generalized examples of the trickling­
down process. Art songs [Kunstlieder] of the eighteenth century, well documented in muse al­ manacs, became the folksongs of 1900. Likewise, there are narratives from
earlier times that became chapbooks, costumes that reflect the dress of earlier ages, etc. Naumann makes a shallow attempt to asso­ ciate such movement within and in
relationship to other cultures­ Greek, Estonian­Latvian­Lithuanian, Tongan Islanders, and cultures in Senegal, Brazil, New Zealand, and Mexico­but with few specifics.
Naumann then devotes several paragraphs to the religious nature of primitives, the lengthiest tangent in his essay. He writes mostly about death, trying to establish that
primitives lack a fear of death. Then in a forced analogy, Naumann comments that Gypsies are most like the primitives he describes, except that Gypsies fear death. In
another digression, Naumann writes about games, dance, mime, and folk drama before he slips back to the topic of religion, this time nautical and agrarian religious practices.
In a sweeping generalization, he describes the loss of the primitive primarily in the Protestant states of Germany: "The Catholic Church . . . is more distant from individualism
and closer to communal life, and . . . knowingly accepted ever ything that was worthy of saving in agrarian heathendom."
Returning to narratives, Naumann seems to support the concept of polygenesis. He then ventures into some brief statements about variants of folktales and individual motifs
found abroad, calling for a comparative ethnolog y. Then he returns to religion once again by seeing heroic legends rising up out of the Germanic Æsir religion.9 He offers
some rambling comments on folk art, furniture, costumes, and gestures as examples of sunken goods. Houses and cityscapes are the next on the list of items under
discussion, but again he offers little in the way of specific examples or documentation.
In the last two paragraphs Naumann returns to his primary thesis and lists the values found in primitive communal culture, with a clear implication that modern man still
draws from it. He concludes his essay with a strong comment on the movement from lower strata to the higher ones: "From the goods of primitive communal culture
streams a delicately fresh, earthily young, eternally native force." These lower strata provide higher culture with its "eternal, deep, and strong native soil." A sub­text is
emerging.
In the second chapter of Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur, titled "Primi­ tive Totenglaube: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Animismus" (Primitive belief in death: A contribution to the
theory of animism), Naumann lays out his theory of primitive communal culture. It is an expanded version of the lecture "Der lebende Leichnam: Ein Beitrag zur Frage des
Präanimismus" (The living dead: A contribution to the question of pre­animism), given on December 10, 1920, at the Association of Ethnologists in Leipzig.10 He had also
treated this theme in a lecture given in the fall of 1920 to representatives of the League of German Societies for Folklore in Weimar.11
There are three sections in this second chapter: "The Living Body," "Pre­animistic Demons," and "The Dangerous Dead." In all three sections, Naumann concentrates on pre­
animism as representative of primitive communal culture, particularly its understanding of death and dying. For Naumann, animism is a complicated dualism of body and
soul, but it is not the oldest form of religion since this would re­ quire abstract thinking, of which primitives were thought to be inca­ pable. "But generally accepting the
existence of a soul, however it may appear to us­whether animal, thing, breath, shadow, or in human shape­presumes an abstraction which we cannot today attribute to
primitive man as an original stage [of development]. Thus criticism of animism . . . leads to the presumption of a period of pre­animism" (1921, 19). For Naumann, primitive
man simply does not yet "grasp the essence of death, just as a small child does not" (22).
In the first section, Naumann suggests primitives believed in a "liv­ ing body"­after all, there has long been a belief that hair, beard and fingernails continue to grow after
death. He points to the continuation of this belief in later evidence, as in the Germanic myth when Odin's fallen warriors will bodily come out of Valhalla and participate in a
final earthly battle, the singing bones in the Grimms' fairy tales (no. 28), and the Christian belief in the resurrection of the flesh. Ranging widely around the world, he offers
examples of humans communicat­ ing with the dead, sometimes fetching their lovers down into their graves.12 In one bizarre example, Naumann (1921, 33) describes the
practice of boring a hole in a grave near the head and calling down the name of the deceased, then lying on the grave and listening for an answer; he concludes that such
beliefs reach far back into the age of pre­animism (37). In section two of this chapter, Naumann describes pre­animistic demons as our continuing belief in the living dead:
rev­ enants, vampires, werewolves, witches, and body devourers [Nachzehrer]. Section three describes the fear of these living dead that has led, for example, to burning of
such creatures, like the witch in "Hänsel and Gretel," until they are "deader than dead" (56).
The entire chapter is intended to document human existence prior to animism and represents one of Naumann's few attempts to offer detailed applications of his concept of
primitive communal culture. In his thoughts on death and animism, Naumann seems to subscribe to common early twentieth­century critiques of the psyche and presents
us with society as a collective but still anonymous in its homogeneity. As we will presently see, he applies such notions to rural peasantry, or what he perceives as "primitive"
in both German and non­German groups.
It should be apparent that Naumann is not simply describing what had been obvious for some time, that cultural goods do in fact "sink " down and become popular among
the wider folk. He also argues­ using considerable detail, although the line of argument is not as precise and logical as we would like­that the "primitive" can still be found in
numerous expressive forms and continues to contribute to contemporary culture. We must, of course, be aware of "sunken" goods, but we must pay particular attention to
the "roots," the "native soil" that continues to feed into our modern world.
Grundzüge der deutschen Volkskunde
Naumann's introduction to his Grundzüge der deutschen Volkskunde (Basic principles of German folklore) is translated at the end of this article (Appendix 2). The introduction
is merely a briefer version of the first chapter of Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur; it thus repeats the ideas presented in "Primitive Communal Culture," although it is even more
obtuse. Still, the work is important for our understanding of Naumann's thinking. The word sunken is only used three times, and no specific examples are offered. Admitting
that the pattern is superficial, Naumann says that we can nevertheless determine the very essence of the primitive, which is still his primary theme.
In the introduction, Naumann speaks of a "conscious return from individualism back to primitivism, to reestablishing what the primitive community really was." Out of this
unconscious primitive he sees the development of an agrarian state in which all "groups," including the religious, were still intact. A heroic stage follows, with what he calls a
warrior caste, in which honor, belief, taste, and to a degree, group religion from the agrarian age, are dominant.
Naumann says that "absolute primitivity" is hard to find today, ex­ cept perhaps among Gypsies and peasants, adding that contemporary "peasant society . . . constitutes the
main object of German folklore." German Romantics have long bemoaned the loss of folklore items, but Naumann finds that folklore's expressive forms don't really dis­
appear, though they do change their appearance and their character, and "live on a hundredfold in the urban and educated upper strata of our nation." He concludes by
restating what has become his primar y thesis: "That which is individual is the very essence of higher culture, but its roots lie, and of this we may be sure, in the primitive
community, which is its eternal, deep, and strong native soil."
Naumann's Grundzüge represents an attempt to apply the concept of gesunkenes Kulturgut by offering specific examples from the canon in several chapters (see endnote 3).
Chapter 1 clarifies that folk costume is "the dress mode of the educated upper stratum as developed by the uneducated rural lower stratum" (1922b, 7). In chapters 2, 3,
and 5, the primary topics discussed are houses and churches, settlements, and festivals. Chapters 6 through 10 apply the theory of gesunkenes Kulturgut to various versions
of oral folk traditions. It is, however, in chapter 4 that Naumann dispenses with examples of sunken cultural items and gives us his view of European peasantry, which is most
troublesome and would divert our attention away from his developing ideas on the importance of contemporary primitive communal culture. Central to this chapter is
Naumann's (1922b, 57) comparison of Lithuanian peasants to ants in an anthill: they both "think in packs [armies]" and "act in packs." They have a "pre­historic­primitive,
completely uniform life," and "primitive man is a socially limited herd animal" (58). It is interesting to note that the "herd" terminology was used in Wilhelm Jerusalem's
foreword to Lévy­Bruhl's (1921, xiii­xiv) Das Denken der Naturvölker cited above: "Lévy­Bruhl clearly recognized that here on earth primitive man is a socially bound herd
animal. The soul of an individual is completely filled with 'collective images.'"
Prior to the publication of the two works treated here, Naumann had in fact published very little, and almost nothing in folklore. He was, after all, a Germanist. In 1911 he
completed his dissertation on old Nordic names, and in 1913 he submitted his Habilitation on Boethius, a sixth­century philosopher. In 1914 and 1915 he produced an Old
High German grammar and a reader, then a small volume on German syntax. His journal publications consisted of a summary of his dissertation, a short article on elements
in German Romanticism, and a west Germanic bibliography. His first published work on folklore was written in 1916, during his World War I military service in Lithu­ ania
while he was working as the editor of two military newspapers, one in Vilna and one in Lida. It was in Lida where he published his "Bauernhaus und Kornkammer in Litauen"
(Farmhouse and grain bins in Lithuania). The original newspaper has not been located, but a version was republished in Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur (1921) and republished
again in an abbreviated form in chapter 4 of Grundzüge (1922b); there are minor but insignificant changes in this final version. An excerpt from 1921 is included here, since
this brief text provides detail of the anthill analogy just presented and perhaps best exem­ plifies what Bendix (1997, 114) has called Naumann's description of the "creative
impotence of the primitive." In a rather vivid picture, Naumann offers us his description of one example of European peasantry at that time:
If the peasant situation has preserved the characteristics of primitive communal culture in any pure way, [we must view it as] . . . a petrified [form of] this prehistoric
communal culture in Eastern Europe. . . . There is no individualism here. One should shy away from using comparisons with the animal kingdom, but still it offers the closest
parallels. . . .
When the peasants of a Lithuanian village go to the market in the next town, perhaps to Lida, they move along their streets like ants, each one following the next. And just
like them, they are indistinguishable for strangers [looking on]. In addition to a common shaped beard and a similar haircut they also have common facial characteristics and
a similar [body] shape. . . . The clothing is the same, their demeanor is the same, the small sleds or the wagons that the Lithuanian peasants are sitting on are all the same.
In front of them they all have the same small horses with the same harnesses, and behind them they all seem to have the same woman sitting on a bundle of hay, her head
covered, her upper body in a short sheep skin [jacket] and her lower body in a brightly colored skirt made from coarse homespun linen: in brief, the concept of a primitive
communal culture appears to be convincingly displayed among the Lithuanian peasants. . . . At the marketplace they stand around in bunches, they all make the same
movements, they are all spirited by the same viewpoints and thoughts. When one laughs they all laugh along; when one curses they all do the same thing. . . . And just as
they all arrived at the market­ place following one another, they all disappear at the same time, follow­ ing one another, they go waddling home like geese, all walking there
the same way, completely without any individualism and conduct their completely uniform life. (Naumann 1921, 150 ­51, emphasis added)
Naumann says that Lithuanian peasants are afraid of anything new or different, and implies that they are not conservative but backward. They don't like to work, do only
what is necessary, and prefer living from hand to mouth. Still, he does not judge them morally, and says that they do not think illogically but rather pre­logically. Naumann
(1922b, 66) refers to "pre­moral character traits," thus aligning them with his concept of primitive communal culture.
For Naumann, European peasantry may well be the starting point and the best extant example of the continued existence of primitive communal culture, but his approach is
filled with educated and elitist arrogance, and he continued throughout his life to describe simple people from this vantage point. Absolute primitiveness, in which hu­ mans
were still an almost unconscious piece of nature and in which primitive man was viewed as socially limited by their herd instincts, was hardly recognizable among German
folklorists at the beginning of the twentieth century; his description could certainly have "touched a nerve," as Utz Jeggle (1988, 57) said. It is possible and very likely that
these images contributed to the negative responses to Naumann's new books, and may have indeed caused readers to look past the concept of reciprocal influence he was
developing and most interested in and focus instead on the term for which he became known, gesunkenes Kulturgut.
"A Noble­Nazi and a Foolish Germanist"
By 1932 Hans Naumann's personal affinity to the rapidly growing fascist ideology was apparent. In Leiden an Deutschland (1946), Thomas Mann said that Naumann became
a "kind of intellectual noble­Nazi and a foolish Germanist," and that he was one of those "unhappy intel­ lectuals . . . who confused the ugly travesty of their dream of a great
and pure Germandom with their [National Socialist] dream" (quoted in Hübinger 1974, 270 ­71; Schirrmacher 1992, 383 ­ 84).13
Naumann continued his teaching and research primarily as a Germanist, and there is little evidence that he conducted research in folklore during the 1930s. It is clear,
however, that Naumann was as­ sociating his concepts of a noble Germanic culture with a Germanic reawakening [germanische Wiedererstehung] and with the developing
National Socialism movement. His university lectures reflected this thesis, and we have a firsthand report from one of his students: "As we approached the unrest of the year
1931 at the university, one could perceive in Naumann's lectures the signs of a political change. . . . Not just a few of his students were then shocked, when he translated
[the German poet] Walther von der Vogelweide's [1170­ca. 1230] admoni­ tion to the Kaiser, that enemies of the Reich should 'hengen bí der wide' [they should be hung
from a rope], and by coquettishly, more than coquettishly using the words of Doktor Josef Goebbels 'Heads must roll'" (quoted in Assion and Schmook 1994, 45 ­46).
In a new book published in 1932, Deutsche Nation in Gefahr (German nation in danger), Naumann outlined his own personal wishes for the National Socialist Party and for
Hitler. In the reawakening of the Führer principle, he saw Germanic continuity experiencing a fröhliche Urständ ( joyous rebirth), and he writes of a unification of national and
social thought, contrasting this to the false paths Germany had taken after 1918 (Naumann 1926, 25, 263).14 In June of 1932, Naumann joined three professors at the
University of Bonn and fifty others from Germany and Austria in signing a call in the National Socialist newspaper Völkischer Beobachter to the German populace in support of
National Socialism. Naumann then became a member of the NSDAP Party (Nazionalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei ) on May 1, 1933 (his Party membership number
was 2 086 867). Nine days later, on May 10, 1933, Naumann participated in a book burning as one of his first acts of public avowal and allegiance to National Socialism.
Because of his knowledge about and devotion to Germanic antiquities and be­ cause of his commanding presence when he lectured, Naumann was called on for the oration,
which he delivered, as he said in his postwar descriptions of his involvement in National Socialism, in the tone of a cultic­religious dedication ceremony. It was, in fact, very
reminiscent of the kinds of poetry readings associated with the Stefan George circle:15
Thus burn, academic youth of the German nation, today at midnight at all of the universities in the Reich­burn what you have certainly not worshiped but that could seduce
and threaten you and all of us. . . . If one book too many flies into the fire tonight, that does not do as much damage as if one too few were thrown in. . . . This fire is a
symbol and shall also be a challenge to us, to clear our own hearts. . . . Heil then to new German writing! Heil to the highest Führer! Heil Deutschland! (quoted in Schmook
1993, 28­29).
Shortly thereafter, on November 4, 1934, Hans Naumann was ap­ pointed Rector of the University of Bonn. His inaugural lecture (Naumann 1934, 15) was titled "Great
Courage and a Free Spirit" and included unambiguous references to Hitler as "a soldier who begins the march alone; filled with belief in the work begun, and in himself;
fearless and irreproachable, and thus our Führer!" and concludes with: "German folk comrades, dear colleagues and students: to our Führer and Chancellor: Sieg­Heil!"
It did not take long, however, for Naumann to fall out of favor with the regime. On February 15, 1935, only three months after his inau­ gural lecture and in spite of receiving
six out of seven votes in a vote of confidence by a faculty commission, Naumann was removed as Rector of the university by decree of the Minister of Culture, Bernhard Rust
(Schmook 1993, 33­34). Naumann had dared to support a faculty member, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, who had refused to sign an oath of allegiance to Hitler and was
subsequently driven from his professorship. One year later, in 1936, Naumann found himself once again under pressure by the regime when the honorary doctorate awarded
to the Nobel laureate Thomas Mann was taken away. Nau­ mann was the only German professor who made a public statement on this "tragedy." In the Danish newspaper
Ekstrabladet, Naumann said it was "unfortunately too late to do away with this silly happening" (March 11, 1937, 24).
As a result of this statement, Naumann soon came under sur­ veillance by the Gestapo [Geheime Staatspolizei] and was accused of "anti­German behavior." More accusations
were made, and by April 17, 1937, the Ministry had written him off as "disapproved because of unclear statements" (Hübinger 1974, 277). Soon the sixth edition of his
Deutsche Dichtung der Gegenwart (Contemporary German literature) was banned because he had not removed Jewish writers, and the third edition of his Grundzüge was
seized from the publisher and destroyed.
Still, just three days later, on April 20, 1937, Naumann spoke at the university on Hitler's birthday. He began with a scholarly treatment of Old German songs to the gods,
this time commenting only super­ ficially on his own belief in Hitler as the embodiment of a Germanic ideal and on the unity between the old Germanic world and National
Socialism. But Naumann then concludes: "We greet here our Führer of the reawakening, our master of rebuilding, on the day that he was given to us. What we feel for him
and what we wish for him, we sum up with the call: Our Führer and Chancellor Adolf Hitler: Sieg Heil!" (Naumann 1937). On Hitler's fiftieth birthday on April 20, 1939,
Naumann once again spoke publically in praise of the Führer.16 "May we place before him our complete faithfulness, our unity, and our disciplined obedience, . . . Everything
we feel for the Fifty Year Old, what we wish him and praise him for, is found in our call: Our Führer Adolf Hitler Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil!"
Nazi reviews of Naumann's works, however, continued to deliver harsh responses. Matthes Ziegler in his infamous "Folklore on a Ra­ cial Basis" said: "According to Hans
Naumann, folk costume is merely sunken cultural property, 'fashionable clothing of the upper stratum in the minds of the uneducated lower stratum.' . . . For him these are
all manifestations of a bottomless primitivity" (translated in full in Lixfeld 1994, 178 ­89). Far more critical, as might be expected, was the Nazi reaction to the third edition of
Naumann's Grundzüge of 1937. A 152­page book titled Deutsche Volkskunde im Schrifttum (Ger­ man folklore in print) and subtitled Ein Leitfaden für die Schulungs­ und
Erziehungsarbeit der NSDAP (A guide for the teaching and educational work of the NSDA P) was published in 1938 by the Party's Working Community for German Folklore, in
conjunction with the Office for Literary Promotion of the Führer's Commissioner (Alfred Rosenberg) for the Super vision of all Intellectual and World View Schooling and
Education of the NSDAP. A summary of Naumann's work reads as follows: "Naumann's Volkskunde . . . remains a constant reminder of the penetration of the liberal spirit
into German folk research. . . . Clearly Neumann's [sic] 'ordering principle' was Marxist and what re­ sulted was that confessional groups were able to use it in its scholarly
disguise" (16).
By 1938, Naumann's life was in danger. One of his students later recalled: "We students in Bonn feared for the very existence of Nau­ mann" (Schmook 1993, 60).17 It is of
utmost importance to note that it was precisely the ver y same twin concepts under discussion in this paper­sunken cultural goods and primitive communal culture­ that
were at the center of the negative National Socialist response to Naumann, even though he promoted the myth of Germanic­German continuity and supported it with his
writings and speeches on the con­ cept of allegiance to a leader, the Führer. Naumann was accused of dividing a unified folk into two different strata, showing "disdain for folk
thinking," thereby countering their notion of a folk community arising from common blood ties: Blut­ und Boden (Bendix 1997, 118). The Nazis never ceased to pay lip
service to the German Volk, but their concept was far less precise than Naumann's.
A New Source
In 2001, Andreas Naumann, Hans Naumann's third son and the only one to survive World War II, published a two­volume, 858 ­page "bio­ graphical novel" of his father. To
my knowledge, this article is the first treatment of the work in the scholarship on Hans Naumann. The two volumes are fascinating, but the reader must proceed with caution
since the author chose to label his work as fiction. For the most part, the historical information that forms the basis of the novel is presented accurately, but the tone is what
one might expect from a son writing admiringly about his father's academic career. Many who work with the offspring of German and Austrian Nazis or Nazi­sympathizers
encounter attempts to deny, justify, or clarify their parents' roles or activities during the NS era.
The book contains no critical apparatus, but there are photos of Hans Naumann, his family, and the University of Bonn. Lengthy dialogues between Naumann and many of
his academic colleagues are reconstructed, most likely the reason for the term novel. For our purposes it is interesting to note that the terms gesunkenes Kulturgut and
primitive Gemeinschaftskultur appear in only two places in the entire work. In volume 1 Andreas Naumann writes, "The views and theories presented in both works,
especially the theory of gesunkenes Kulturgut, soon became trend setting" (272). Then in volume 2, citing Thomas Schirrmacher, he writes that no concept was so
vehemently attacked in the Third Reich as was gesunkenes Kulturgut (150). The National Socialists were more interested in "removing racial and individualistic foreign
influences from racially pure folk goods." Nothing more about the concepts appears in the entire work. In contrast, there is a good bit about the book burnings, a long
treatment of his father's inaugural address in 1934 as the Rector of the University of Bonn, and a dis­ cussion of the orations on two of Hitler's birthdays, already outlined
above. These inclusions are significant, though in fairness it must be said that they are only a small portion of the two­volume set. We will look at only a few examples.
Titled Aktion gegen den undeutschen Geist (Action against the un­ German spirit) the book burning of May 10, 1933, followed a series of on­campus disturbances (A.
Naumann 2001, 2:72­92). Elements of the German Student Association sympathetic to the Party clashed with others, particularly the old and very traditional fraternities.
Handbills were passed around encouraging students to confront professors with whom they had ideological disagreements­especially if they were Jewish­to post negative
comments about them on a Schandpfahl (column of shame), and to participate in the Reich­wide book burn­ ing being organized in Berlin, ostensibly by soon­to­be
Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels.
According to his son, Hans Naumann called in the student leader, Walter Schlevogt, and solicited help in putting a stop to such actions. When first asked, Naumann refused to
participate in the book burn­ ings since the early targets were books by Jewish authors, many of whom he had published in his very successful collections of German
literature, Deutsche Literatur der Gegenwart (Contemporary German lit­ erature), published in six editions between 1923 and 1933. The faculty of the university then asked
Naumann to participate so that the burn­ ings would not be left completely in the hands of the German Student Association; because he was a Party member, it was
assumed Naumann would be able to exercise some control over the activities. The organiz­ ers distributed names of blacklisted authors, identified libraries and bookstores,
and formed "Selection and Control Services."18 Increas­ ingly, Naumann was looked to as something of a bulwark, but he still had trouble with which books were to be
included. When the larger target became Schmutz und Schund (depraved and trashy)­meaning sexual and Marxist literature­ Naumann agreed to participate "in order to
control excesses" (A. Naumann 2001, 2:72­73).
Andreas Naumann (2001, 2:89) then quotes lengthy passages from the oration, which emphasizes "bonds and purity, nobility of thought . . . that's what we want for our
hearts and that's what we want for our books." He presents his father's comments in the mode of a secret initiation ceremony, but his words do not fit the image of those
stand­ ing before him. Hans Naumann is addressing students he knows and who respect him, but there are also the uncomprehending brown­ uniformed SA
(Sturmabteilung) troops standing in the crowd. Naumann continues, "We want a literature that is holy to families, our land, to our folk and our blood. . . . We no longer want
literati, we want responsible writers." Hans Naumann's conclusion to this speech­"Heil then to new German writing! Heil to the highest Führer! Heil Deutschland!"­is missing
in the biographical novel presentation.
According to his son, Hans Naumann's election as Rector of the University of Bonn fulfilled one of his and his wife's dreams. The inau­ gural address on November 4, 1934,
was devoted to an understanding of the spirit of Germanic man amidst the perils of the world. As might be expected, Naumann used medieval German literature to search for
"great courage and a free spirit," the title of the lecture: "We have never deceived ourselves about our basic situation in the world. There is a path of sorrow from the Edda to
Goethe's Faust, and if we look at the ancient Germanic worldview, it's as if we are talking about the present. Threats are everywhere, . . . the world is a human creation, and
over it hangs an absolute feeling of downfall" (A. Naumann 2001, 2:137).
Hans Naumann presents these ideas as being at the very core of Germanic mythology, and so the question arises of how to deal with such worldly angst, remorse, and lowly
(worm­like) feelings. The an­ swer is simple, according to his son Andreas: with decisive prepared­ ness, as a matter of honor. The question among those in the audience was
whether this response would lead to praise of the Führer. Was Naumann backing Hitler? But then Hans Naumann offers his ideal, the medieval Christian knight who defeats
dark fate with his High Courage, embodying the virtues of chivalry that characterized the Staufer dynasty (1138 ­1254) of German kings (A. Naumann 2001, 2:141). God's
virtue fills his knight's soul with energy, compelling him to do his best, to strive ever higher. As an example, Naumann points to the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival), who
does not lose his High Courage when condemned, and also to the artist Albrecht Dür­ rer's knight who rides between death and the devil, bravely pursuing his knightly
path.19 According to his son, Hans Naumann's goal is to raise the present to something like a Staufian past by suggesting how noble spirits are to act in difficult times.
Missing from this lengthy description of the inaugural lecture are the lines quoted above: "A soldier who begins the march alone; . . . fearless and irreproachable, and thus our
Führer!"
In Andreas Naumann's presentation of his father's oration on Hitler's birthday in 1937, he again leaves out the concluding remark: "What we feel for him and what we wish
for him, we sum up with the call: Our Führer and Chancellor Adolf Hitler: Sieg Heil!" When Hans Naumann was asked to celebrate Hitler's birthday again in 1939, Andreas
Naumann writes that his father was overjoyed with happiness and amazement for the man. After all, Austria, the Sudetenland, and East Prussia, all the way to the Memel
River bordering on Lithuania, were once again part of Germany. Missing again, however, is the con­ clusion: "Everything we feel for the Fifty Year Old, what we wish him and
praise him for, is found in our call: Our Führer Adolf Hitler Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil!" (H. Naumann 1939, 34).
Andreas Naumann describes his father in terms of nobility, due to both his interest in older Germanic literature and due to his per­ sonal behavior. Andreas Naumann speaks
of a "courtly element being embodied in his person" (2001, 2:57). Hans Naumann is comfortable among the nobility and wishes this noble class for the newly devel­ oping
society, because it is the "bearer of an ancient cultural stratum" (A. Naumann 2001, 2:165). There are rumors around the household that Naumann might become a
Reichsredner, a laureate of the Reich, thus aligning him with medieval German bards like Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walter von der Vogelweide. There is even unrequited
love: Naumann was infatuated with a woman of the nobility but be­ haved in a chaste manner and only showed his love in a chivalrous way to the woman he courted, like a
knightly Minnesinger (A. Naumann 2001, 2:346­56). There is a brief but most interesting account of Hans Naumann's oldest son Eberhard, who had been stationed as a
medic in Königsberg and who had gotten a young merchant's daughter preg­ nant (A. Naumann 2001, 2:267). Both parents were devastated, since their hopes for him were
a professorship in a medical school and a wife who was a professor's daughter or from the nobility. The young woman's father was in fact a butcher who had expanded his
business into several retail opportunities and certainly did not represent the world of the mind, education, or nobility. Naumann's hopes for the new regime were to make the
proletariat a new class, for the peasantry to regain its class character, to create a new bourgeoisie and a new German nobility (A. Naumann 2001, 2:363).
It is not the purpose of this paper to offer a revisionist view of Hans Naumann's association with the Nazi regime. It is, however, impor­ tant to note that his approach to
National Socialism concentrated on the concepts of reawakened leadership, Germanic continuity, and the union of national and social thinking as the path for saving the
German nation, all of which were intended to counter what many conceived of as the false paths of the recent past, particularly those of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, until
he finally did yield to National Socialist demands to align [Gleichschaltung] his thinking with the Party, Naumann seems to have accepted Nazi ideology only where it fit his
image of Germanic continuity. Andreas Naumann clearly wanted to present his father's academic career in this light. Hans Naumann, however, paid dearly for his concepts;
he was indeed a "foolish Nazi."
Reception
Soon after the publication of Hans Naumann's two major works, every folklorist of renown in the German­speaking world responded, pri­ marily through book reviews but also
through articles that produced counter­theories. Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur was reviewed at least twenty­seven times between 1921 and 1927. The first edition of
Grund­ züge was reviewed at least thirty­two times between 1922 and 1925,20 and the second and third editions were reviewed seven and five times respectively between
1929 and 1937. Initially, criticism of Naumann's ideas was somewhat muted and cautious; in time, however, the reviews would become increasingly negative. Virtually all of
the reviews focus on Naumann's views on primitive communal culture, not on his term gesunkenes Kulturgut.
The first and perhaps most important negative criticism was by Adolf Spamer, Naumann's assistant in Frankfurt. In regard to Grun­ dzüge, he wrote: "Naumann's slim little
book, so heav y in content, will be viewed in later years as a reference point for folklore research" (1924, 76). In his approach to Naumann and his writings, Spamer had
developed his own theory and methodology by attempting to de­ termine the "folk soul," working with a fictionalized Volksmensch (folk man).21 He criticized Naumann's
theoretical concepts, occasionally rejecting "excessive" formulations but then stating that they scarcely affect the "essence and value" of Naumann's work (1924, 90). There
are three points to Spamer's critique. First, he writes, Naumann equates the peasantry with the primitive community, a criticism more likely leveled against Naumann and his
elitist attitude than his theory. In essence Spamer (1924, 92) simply rejected Naumann equating Ger­ man peasantry, "our contemporary peasantr y," with primitive man.
Secondly, and somewhat unclearly, not only does Spamer accept Nau­ mann's "sharp division" of primitive human culture into two strata, he also emphasizes the "uniquely
creative activity by the lower stratum" in acquiring this sunken cultural material (1924, 87­91); thus the basic paradigm, as well as the concept of a "primitive mind" within a
"primitive communal spirit" are not challenged. Thirdly, the matter of origins, which Naumann viewed as primar y, is treated only as a pre­ liminary question by Spamer. For
Spamer (1924, 97, 106), it aided in the analysis of the development of "sunken cultural goods," for recog­ nizing the folk soul, the "group spirit," and the "spiritual
stratification of the entire populace." Spamer doesn't actually refute the core of Naumann's concept of primitive communal culture, but he argues that it conceals the social
and class divisions of society, the social specificity of cultural expressions and processes, and promotes a consciously anti­democratic elitist theory where "leadership and
cultural develop­ ment are in the hands" of the latter. Indeed, Naumann's (1921, 17) own words clearly demonstrate his scholarly perspective: "Volkskunde tends away from
democracy."
The Austrian Viktor von Geramb (1927­28) was critical of both Naumann and Spamer but tried unsuccessfully to combine their ideas. For Geramb the dynamic movement
between the upper and lower strata would lead to cultural Besonderheiten (exceptions) found in the Mutterboden, the native soil and source of German essence. Geramb's
attempt was, however, too vague and unclear and found little reso ­ nance. It was Julius Schwietering's (1927) historical and sociological approach that would most seriously
challenge Naumann's theoretical stance. He called for research on folklore goods­expressive forms­ within their own life circles, on their meaning and function. This was
clearly a call to look at real people as the bearers of culture, not some elusive folk soul, and certainly not a fictional primitive communal culture. Schwietering was approaching
more modern concepts of folk­ lore, context, and folklife.
German­speaking folklorists would continue to examine Hans Naumann's work for the next eighty years, for the rest of the twentieth century. Three dissertations have been
written on Naumann, all in German, two of which have been published. Zita Ponti's unpublished 1950 dissertation, written in German with an English title, "Critical Analysis
of the Implementation of Rosenbergian National Socialism in the Field of the History of Culture by Professor Hans Naumann," presents Naumann's thinking "as typical of NS
cultural­hist orical interpretation" (1). In 1937­38 Ponti had been a student in German­ istik at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, where "less prudent and versatile
individuals" eagerly tried to "naumanneln" (to think like Naumann). This was a term coined by students describing Naumann's thoughts about the "eternal German" that he
found in everything, even in un­Germanic realms, in all forms of expression of the cultural and literary life in the past. Ponti says: "back then, something wasn't right, this
wasn't scholarship, it was politics" (1). She was clearly trying to associate Naumann directly with Alfred Rosenberg, and thus scarcely deals with the concepts we are looking
at in this paper.22
Reinhard Schmook's 1988 dissertation, "Gesunkenes Kulturgut, primi­ tive Gemeinschaft": Der Germanist Hans Naumann (1886­1951) in seiner Bedeutung für die
Volkskunde (Gesunkenes Kulturgut, primitive Gemeinschaft: The Germanist Hans Naumann [1886 ­1951] and his importance for folklore)­which was then published in 1993
­was written at Hum­ boldt University in East Berlin in the last days of the former German Democratic Republic. Schmook's wording and analysis throughout re­ flects the
time in which he wrote; he describes a "culture of domination and suppression," and argues that Naumann had no "materialistic­ dialectical historical understanding" (70).
Schmook's work empha­ sizes, however, an important aspect of Naumann's early career; he was able to enliven theoretical discussion in Volkskunde that had been
interrupted by World War I. Schmook says in a subsequent publication: "His [Naumann's] kind of questioning would of necessity lead to real phenomena being placed at the
forefront, whether from intellectual or material culture, and an evaluation of their origins and meaning as part of their life. In this way the social processes and conditions, as
well as their functions, which make up their lives, are placed in the background. The history of these discussions on creativity and their expression in theories and
methodology in folklore, must still be writ­ ten" (Assion and Schmook 1994, 44). Here, Schmook recognizes that Naumann at least sees that "creativity" might be a basis for
his thinking.
Thomas Schirrmacher's 1989 dissertation, published in 1992, rep­ resents the best collection of Naumann data in print. It includes all stages of Naumann's academic career,
details of his published work, lists and summaries of all the reviews, accounts of the years under the influence of Nazism, a full presentation of his attempts in the postwar
years to regain his career, etc. Schirrmacher (1992, 2:430­50) high­ lights Naumann's consistent use of religious terminology in all of his work, agreeing with Andreas
Naumann's statement that his father's goal was to raise the present to a medieval past, in which the chival­ rous Christian knight defeats dark fate with High Courage.23 The
title of Schirrmacher's dissertation comes from quotations by Naumann: "Der göttliche Volkstumsbegriff" und der "Glaube an Deutschlands Größe und heilige Sendung" ("The
godly concept of a folk­nation" and the "Belief in Germany's greatness and sacred mission"). Schirrmacher addresses Naumann's National Socialist inclinations in two
chapters: "Religious Honoring of Hitler" and "Religious Honoring of National Socialism." Schirrmacher (1992, 26) says in his abstract: "While [Naumann] venerated Hitler as a
religious hero and was a propagator of National Socialism and therefore was rightly dismissed by the Americans in 1945, he never adopted racism and anti­Semitism but
hoped that the Nazis would eventually put his theories into practice. Therefore he was used and opposed by the Nazis at the same time."
Beginning in the 1960s and continuing until at least the 1990s, reactions to Naumann can be found in little more than brief, often one­l ine statements, first with Hermann
Bausinger (1966, 18) who speaks of a "dangerous 'organic' metaphoric" in Naumann's work, but praises his practice of "carefully differentiating individual observa­ tions on
the history and life in individual cultural items." Wolfgang Emmerich (1971, 102­3) was much harsher in his evaluation, stating that Naumann's ideas "are not just false,
they are reactionar y," and as a "consequence they are anti­emancipatory." Martin Scharfe says that Naumann should at least have referred to the "existence of social
classes, of domination and suppression as a preliminary clarification" (Bausinger et al. 1978, 199). Ingeborg Weber­Kellermann sees the fatality of Naumann's Grundzüge in
his "identification of the 'bearers of individual­lacking cultures' with herd animals, his comparison of their animal­like life with those of ants, bees and monkeys­and in no
sense of the word as empirical behavioral research­[and] as un­ surpassed arrogance" (Weber­Kellerman, Bimmer, and Becker 1985, 82). Utz Jeggle (1988, 57), however,
reacts differently and suggests that Naumann's ideas might have been misunderstood by his critics, and were certainly misinterpreted when the National Socialists came to
power and summarily rejected his concept of the German Volk.24 Finally, Regina Bendix (1997, 113), summarizing early responses to Naumann's books in somewhat more
detail, describes his "new" con­ cepts as "the antithesis of the amalgamation of reverence, scholarly interest, documentary fervor, protectionist impulse characteristic of folk
endeavor of the day." We really must ask, did rabid Nazis misunder­ stand and reputable scholars overlook Naumann's conception of primitive Gemeinschaftskultur?
Summarization and Assessment
First. Hans Naumann was a Germanist by education and training, in­ terested primarily in older forms of German­language literature. He was not a folklorist, but then at the
beginning of the century no one really was; there were no departments or programs devoted exclusively to the discipline. Departments of folklore were created under
National Socialism, even though proto­folklore scholars had long taught at many universities in all of the German­speaking countries. Naumann never conducted fieldwork
investigations other than from his sideline view of peasants entering Lida in wartime Lithuania. He borrowed without at­ tribution the concept of gesunkenes Kulturgut from
Meier's 1906 and 1917 treatments of folksongs, and he adopted the concept of two­strata society from a series of precursors and contemporaries. He did, however, offer a
different approach to the latter concept and assigned a dynamic of movement­between upper and lower strata­to different intellectual spheres, ethnolog y and cultural
history, with folklore as a bridge. In 1933 he became a member of the Nazi Party and rather clumsily tried to politically coordinate his thinking on the two intertwined
concepts, only to be thrown out of his academic position, banished from the classroom, personally terrorized, then relieved of any teaching pos­ sibility by the British occupiers
in the postwar Rhineland. Naumann died ingloriously in 1951 from complications of a hernia operation, after being "de­Nazified" and shortly before he was given license to
teach again at the university; he was to receive a professor's retirement benefits. Assessments of his personal elitist attitude throughout his ca­ reer, both factual and
fictional, leave little room for misunderstanding.
Second. Hans Naumann has always been of interest to folklorists in Germany and elsewhere, but primarily due to his usage of the term gesunkenes Kulturgut. Even Stith
Thompson (1946, 438) may have been influenced by Naumann in his own research, particularly in the mat­ ter of American Indian tales "running down hill culturally."25
Much later, in 1998, Carl Lindahl (93) says that "some critics maintain that the fifteenth­century poems are examples of gesunkenes Kulturgut," a "trickling down" in
Chaucer's works.26
Those who study the history of our discipline pay continuing devo­ tion to individuals who present the early intellectual and theoretical history of folklore. We have also
become particularly interested in those early studies that add to our understanding of the politics of culture, and Naumann's work was certainly part of this. Recent assess­
ments, primarily by Utz Jeggle (1988)27 and Peter Assion and Reinhard Schmook (1994, 44),28 suggest that Naumann's emphasis on the influ­ ence of the "primitive" on
upper strata of society may well have led to missing more subtle points, e.g., whether the "primitive community" itself possessed creative abilities or was simply dependent on
sunken cultural goods it received from the dominant higher stratum of society. Most criticism of Naumann has focused on the latter, i.e., gesunkenes Kulturgut.
Unfortunately, by focusing our attention on Naumann's description of the process of "sinking down," our attention has been diverted away from his developing ideas on the
creative role that primi­ tive communal society played on modern individualistic society.
Personal Assessment. Two terms have been used to characterize Naumann. The first, Schwarmgeist, means something like a "woolly headed enthusiast"; the second,
schwärmerischer Geist, suggests a uto­ pian, enthusiastic, or visionary spirit. Both terms imply his inability to associate with the real world he was living in and what has been
presented as his elitist attitude. I prefer the first term because of the emotional load the word carries. In any case, Naumann seems to have delighted in making wide­ranging
presentations and writing in the same mode. He particularly liked to do this in blustery lectures on Germanic mythologies and their protagonists, filled with assertions about­
and unusual interpretations of­Middle High and Old High German texts. His introduction to Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur has revealed how wide­ranging and generalizing
Naumann could be.
It is worth repeating that Naumann dealt with gesunkenes Kulturgut and primitive communal culture only in the two works published in 1921 and 1922, and specifically in
the two chapters outlined above where he expanded on his concepts. Naumann was primarily a philolo­ gist, not really a theorist of folklore, and thus never developed his
con­ cepts beyond the way he first described them, not even when he tried to defend them during the Nazi period. I have emphasized throughout this paper that Naumann
saw the sinking down of items from higher to lower strata as a given that had been widely accepted in the German world, at least since Meier's time. In my opinion, no
further discussion on this term gesunkenes Kulturgut is necessary.
Naumann did stimulate theoretical debate in the emerging field of folklore, perhaps his real strength and his most enduring accom­ plishment. However, his comparisons of
Lithuanian peasants to herd­like animals shadowed him throughout his career and resulted in nearly a century of negative responses to his concepts by German­ language
scholars. Non­German scholars, because of gesunkenes Kul­ turgut, adhered to Naumann's statement that Volkskunde was exclusively devoted to studies of peasants, even
following the momentous 1967 to 1977 "decade of confrontation, debate, and reorientation" of the discipline in Germany (Dow and Lixfeld 1986). His involvement with
Nazism caused him no end of personal anguish, and his aristocratic­ elitist attitudes further perverted his efforts. When he tried to present his ideas on noble knighthood, he
slipped all too easily into praise of the Führer and saw him as the instrument of a Germanic reawakening.
It was in primitive communal culture that Naumann was most in­ terested, but his presentation was anything but clear. At the core of his concept was the idea of the "root"
or a "rootstock" that he used five times in his essays and embedded in repeated references to the "native soil" and an "eternally native force." There is, however, little or no
follow­up on these ideas in subsequent publications, and thus he never really developed what I have implied were nascent thoughts on creativity in primitive communal
culture. There would be no return to such waxing concepts, and it would be difficult, even inappropriate to try to discern them from the printed record. Whatever positive con­
tributions Hans Naumann might have made to the study of primitive communal culture, its reciprocal effect on both individuality and the fulfillment of personality has simply
been subjugated to his descrip­ tion of the sinking­down process.
Iowa State University
Ames
Acknowledgments
My gratitude goes to William Clements of Arkansas State University for his reading of and helpful comments on an early stage of this paper, and to Cora Lee (Nollendorfs) K
luge for her help in documenting Hans Naumann's visiting professorship to the University of Wisconsin.
Footnote
Notes
1. For example, Richard Dorson (1972, 19) notes: "Whole theories may be synopsized in phrases such as Hans Naumann's gesunkenes Kulturgut describing folklore as the
cultural slag that works its way down from the elite to the folk."
2. 196 pages. Chapter headings are: (1) Primitive Communal Culture; (2) Primitive Belief in Death; (3) Fairy Tale Parallels; (4) Ida Naumann: Belief in Protective Spirits; (5)
Primitive Communal Drama; (6) Stetit Puella: A German Folk Riddle in Latin; (7) Farm Houses and Corn Bins in Lithuania; (8) Studies of the Bänkelgesang.
3. 158 pages. Chapter headings: Introduction; (1) Costume and Household Items; (2) Farm House and Village Church; (3) Settlement and Agriculture; (4) Primitive
Communal Spirit; (5) Private and Agrarian Festivals; (6) Folk Drama and Community Plays; (7) Folk Book and Puppetry; (8) Folksong and Community Song; (9) Riddle and
Proverb; (10) Legend and Fairy Tale. In the third edition, an eleventh chapter, "Folk Speech," was added and chapter 10 was renamed "Primitive Community Festivals."
4. John Meier was the founder and director of the German Folksong Archive in Freiburg im Breisgau.
5. Regina Bendix (1997, 117­18) describes Hoffmann­Krayer's response to Naumann's concepts eight years after they were first published.
6. Naumann's thinking was also very much in tune with the ideas of German­ Jewish critical thinkers who were his contemporaries and successors, e.g., Sig­ mund Freud,
Walter Benjamin, and Arnold Zweig.
7. Naumann consistently uses the German word Schicht, which I have translated as "stratum," not as "class" in the Marxian sense.
8. Naumann was well known both at home and abroad as a dynamic speaker. In my opinion, this was the reason why Alexander Hohlfeld, Chairman of the German
Department at the University of Wisconsin, invited him to Madison in 1928­29. Naumann helped rebuild a department devastated by the anti­German sentiment that
coursed through America during and following World War I (cf. Nollendorfs 1988).
9. The two major divisions of Germanic gods were the Vanir and Æsir, as in the Icelandic Eddas.
10. Naumann (1922a, 96n1) said: "The detailed and expanded lecture appeared in the summer of 1921 under the title Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur," by which he meant
chapter 2.
11. See Schirrmacher (1992, 52) for details on these lectures.
12. Much German scholarship of this period sought global examples of the liv­ ing communicating with the dead. One need only look at the Handwörterbuch des Deutschen
Aberglaubens (Handbook of German superstition) published between 1927 and 1942 to see how widely the net was cast.
13. In German the term edel (noble) is sometimes used in a derisive way, e.g., calling someone an Edel­Baier (noble Bavarian), meaning someone who dresses in costume
and speaks in dialect.
14. The term fröhliche Urständ is archaic and in modern German is used some­ what ironically in reference to something nearly forgotten, a cliché that many do not fully
comprehend.
15. George's poetry is characterized by an aristocratic, formal style that revolts against the realist trend in German literature at the beginning of the twentieth century.
16. In a clarification and an attempt to be reinstated to his faculty position in postwar years, Naumann wrote to University of Bonn officials on August 25, 1945: "The
birthday wishes were anything but military in nature. May I now not have to regret . . . that I was a good speaker! And that I so obediently gave in to the wishes of the
Rectors" (Personnel File of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Bonn Archives).
17. Private letter dated June 19, 1987, from Professor Gerhart Lohse (Aachen) to Reinhard Schmook.
18. Group organizers were responsible for selecting books and making sure they would be available when the burnings took place.
19. Albrecht Dürer's engraving Ritter, Tod und Teufel (1913) depicts the medieval knight riding on horseback between death and the devil. Death is presented as an old man
with snake­like hair holding a sandglass and riding an old nag. The devil figure is made up of various animals. A dog as faithful companion follows along below the knight.
20. Both Thomas Schirrmacher (1.153­69) and Reinhard Schmook (1993, 150 ­52) list the many reviews, but their lists are not identical.
21. See Jacobeit (1965, 103 ­43) and Emmerich (1971) for the early discussion of Spamer's theoretical disposition.
22. For a detailed analysis of Rosenberg's association with Volkskunde, see Lixfeld 1994.
23. Andreas Naumann's "biographical novel" was published in a series edited by Thomas Schirrmacher.
24. Utz Jeggle (1988, 59) writes, "There are in Naumann's presentations for­ mulations that are understandable in regard to Emmerich's estimation, . . . but they are not
acceptable from an historical standpoint; since Naumann's turning away from Romanticism is being misinterpreted by these political judgments."
25. Thompson (1946, 438; emphasis added) states: "[Walter] Anderson is per­ suaded that stories usually proceed from culturally higher to culturally lower peoples. This
principle is naturally hard to apply in a place like Europe with so many claimants for leadership, but even there it may be something of a guide in particular instances.
Certainly, there is no doubt of the direction of transmission in the case of European settlers in America and the native tribes. About fifty Eu­ ropean tales are current among
the American Indians and not one tale has been borrowed in exchange. The only way to test Anderson's contention in Europe would be to take obvious examples of simple
cultures next to more highly devel­ oped ones; for instance, the Lapps and the Norwegians. Anderson himself cites the Finns who have received their stories from the
Russians and the Swedes. If the principle is really valid we may ask whether tales must keep running down hill culturally until they are found only in the lower ranges."
26. Lindahl (1998, 93) states: "Some critics maintain that the fifteenth­century poems are examples of gesunkenes Kulturgut (sunken cultural items), a process in which
elite forms 'trickle down' to the lower classes. At least as plausible, however, is the possibility that Chaucer's work was popular with the lower classes precisely because he
employed the popular idioms of his own time, and did so with such talent that his poems were, in essence, popular poetry, imbued with folk values from the beginning. As late
as the sixteenth century, the anonymous Complaynt of Scotlande states that Scottish shepherds told the Canterbury tales, which sug­ gests that many of Chaucer's poems
grew from, immediately reentered, and long sur vived as part of living British storytelling traditions."
27. Jeggle (1988, 59) writes: "In the final analysis the age of individuality is the very essence of this development­Renaissance and Humanism are for Naumann 'the pinnacle
of all cultural development.' Even though Naumann repeatedly emphasized the return of elite culture to 'the rootstock of the primitive com­ munity,' his main hypothesis
that folk culture is created in the upper stratum was vigorously criticized; the sharpness of the accusations indicate that Naumann had touched a real nerve. . . . His range of
impact was greater . . . and his concept of gesunkenes Kulturgut was taken as an insult, because the creator of the idea was obviously convinced of his own elite creativity."
28. Schmook writes: "Naumann's conception of cultural progress, with person­ ality, consciousness and intellect seen as the driving forces, come from a basic idealistic
position; [but] his theory is historically­dialectically incorrect. His approach, however, is significant and his observation is correctly based on the thesis that folk goods are
created in the so­called upper stratum. They imply the idea of a cultural exchange between the ruling classes and the classes and strata of those who are dominated and
exploited, where the creative moment plays an essential role. Just how this cultural exchange takes place, and what role it plays in conflicts between the classes, are
important questions that we must address in special investigations." He continues, "This kind of questioning would of necessity lead to real phenomena being placed at the
forefront, whether from intellectual or material culture, and an evaluation of their origins and meaning as part of their life. In this way the social processes and conditions, as
well as their functions, which make up their lives, are placed in the background. The history of these discus­ sions on creativity and their expression in theories and
methodology in folklore, must still be written" (Assion and Schmook 1994, 44; emphasis added).
29. Seventeenth­century German poets: Johann Rist (1607­67), Simon Dach (1605­59), and Philip von Zesen (1619­89).­Trans.
30. Tilemann Elher von Wolf hagen (d. 1402).­Trans.
31. The Limburg Chronicle (ca. 1361) included flagellation and supplication songs and popular love songs of the period.­Trans.
32. Minnesang, courtly lyric, love songs of the Middle Ages derived from Pro­ vençal troubadours.­Trans.
33. Chapters in the book Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur.­Trans.
34. Dietmar von Eist (1140­70), Lower Austrian knight who composed songs.­ Trans.
35. See, for example, Alfred Vierkandt (1896, 283).
36. Schwäb[ischer] Bund 1920, 477.
37. Richard Andree (1904, 16).
38. Eduard Hahn (1915).
39. See note 9 above.­Trans.
40. Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831­80), German comparative mythologist.­Trans.
41. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778 ­1852), known as Turnvater Jahn [Father of Gymnastics], wrote very nationalistic works.­Trans.
42. Globus 92, 157.
43. Tacitus, Germania 40. "Non arma sumunt, clausum omne ferrum" (They do not take up arms; all iron is locked up).
44. Note I 51 inermos [unarmed].
45. Isis, Tamfania, and Nehalennia are all goddesses mentioned by Tacitus in his Germania (AD 98).­Trans.
46. KHM 41; the name supposedly means bogeyman.­Trans.
47. Kâra was a Valkyrie, the daughter of Hâlfdan, and the wife of the hero Helgi Haddîngskaði in Saemunds Edda.­Trans.
48. Miðgarð Somr (world serpent) wraps itself around the world and Thor will have to slay it when the world comes to an end, Ragnarök.­Trans.
49. Wieland belonged to the Norse Mîmir; a healing plant Wielands­wurz is named after him, and his skill in smith­work resembles that of Prometheus.­ Trans.
50. In Beowulf.­Trans.
51. Sigrûn was a Valkyrie, and the lover of Helgi Hundîngsbani.­Trans.
52. Hervör alvitr, daughter of king Löðver, was united with Völundr, lives with him seven years, and then escapes to pursue her old trade of war again.­Trans.
53. Waltharius manu fortis (ca. 850), a poem in Latin hexameters; Waltharius was married to Hildegund of Burgundy, both of whom were held hostage by the Huns.­Trans.
54. Refers to Krîmhilt, the name of a Valkyrie armed with the helmet of ter­ ror.­Trans.
55. Ninth­century German heroic lay, featuring a battle between father and son, Hildebrand and Hadubrand.­Trans.
56. A seventeenth­centur y German religious movement whose watchword was renunciation and whose thoughts were fixed on the millennium.­Trans.
References
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Lixfeld, and Olaf Bockhorn, in cooperation with James R. Dow, 39­50. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag.
Bächtold­Stäubli, Hanns, and Eduard Hoffmann­Krayer, eds. (1927­42) 1987. Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Bausinger, Hermann. 1966. "Folklore und gesunkenes Kulturgut." Deutsches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde 12:15­25.
Bausinger, Hermann, Utz Jeggle, Gottfried Korff, and Martin Scharfe. 1978. Grundzüge der Volkskunde. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Bendix, Regina. 1997. In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Brunvand, Jan Harold. 1998. The Study of American Folklore. 4th ed. New York: W. W. Norton.
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Dieterich, Albrecht. 1902. "Über Wesen und Ziele der Volkskunde." Hessische Blätter für Volkskunde 1:169­94.
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Dow, James R., and Hannjost Lixfeld. 1986. German Volkskunde: A Decade of Theoretical Confrontation, Debate, and Reorientation (1967­1977). Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Dundes, Alan. 1975. "The Devolutionary Premise in Folklore." In Analytic Essays in Folklore, 18 ­27. The Hague: Mouton.
El­Shamy, Hasan. 1997. "Gesunkenes Kulturgut." In Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art , edited by Thomas A. Green, 2:419­21. Santa
Barbara: ABC
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Emmerich, Wolfgang. 1971. Zur Kritik der Volkstumsideologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Geramb, Viktor von. 1927­28. "Zur Frage nach den Grenzen, Aufgaben und Methoden der deutschen Volkskunde." Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde 37­38:163­81.
Hahn, Eduard. 1915. "Der Gottesfriede." Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde 25: 89­95.
Hoffmann­Krayer, Eduard. 1902. Die Volkskunde als Wissenschaft. Zurich: Commissions­Verlag und Druck von Fritz Amberger vorm. David Bürkli.
Hübinger, Paul Egon. 1974. Thomas Mann, die Universität Bonn und die Zeitgeschichte. Munich: R. Oldenbourg.
Jacobeit, Wolfgang. 1965. "Gedanken zur Geschichte der deutschen Volkskunde." Finnisch­Ugrische Forschungen 39:115­18.
Jeggle, Utz. 1988. "Volkskunde im 20. Jahrhundert." In Grundriß der Volkskunde. Einführung in die Forschungsfelder der Europäischen Ethnologie, edited by Rolf W. Brednich,
51­72. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
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1921. Vienna: W. Braumüller.
Lindahl, Carl. 1998. "Canterbury Tales." In Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature, edited by Mary Ellen Brown and Bruce Rosenberg, 91­94. Santa Barbara: ABC
­CLIO.
Lixfeld, Hannjost. 1994. Folklore and Fascism: The Reich Institute for German Folklore. Translated and edited by James R. Dow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Meier, John. 1906. Kunstlieder im Volksmunde. Materialien und Untersuchungen. Halle: M. Niemeyer.
­. 1917. Volksliedstudien. Strasbourg: Trübners Bibliothek.
Naumann, Andreas. 2001. Ein Mann fürs Deutsche. Leben und Werk des Germanisten Hans Naumann. Ein biographischer Roman. Vol. 1, Lieb, Leid und Zeit. Vol. 2, Was ich
für wirklich wähnte. Bonn: Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft.
Naumann, Hans. 1921. Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur. Beiträge zur Volkskunde und Mythologie. Jena: Eugen Diederichs.
­. 1922a. "Der lebende Leichnam: Ein Beitrag zur Frage des Präanimismus." Jahrbuch des städtischen Museums für Volkskunde zu Leipzig 10:94­96.
­. 1922b. Grundzüge der deutschen Volkskunde. Leipzig: Quelle and Meyer.
­. 1926. "Vom Wesen der Volkskunst." Hessische Blätter für Volkskunde 25:260­ 64.
­. 1932. Deutsche Nation in Gefahr. Stuttgart: Metzler.
­. 1934. Der Hohe Mut und das Frei Gemüte, Rede beim Antritt des Rektorats 1934­1935. Bonn: Bonner Universitäts­Buchdruckerei.
­. 1937. "Rede zum Geburtstag des Führers." Bonn: Bonner Universitäts­ Buchdruckerei.
­. 1939. Ansprache zur Feier des 50. Geburtstages des Führers. Bonn: Bonner Universitäts­Buchdruckerei.
Nollendorfs, Cora Lee. 1988. "The First World War and the Survival of German Studies: With a Tribute to Alexander R. Hohlfeld." In Teaching German in America, edited by
David P. Benseler, Walter F. W. Lohnes, and Valters Nol­ lendorfs, 176­95. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Ponti, Zita. 1950. "Critical Analysis of the Implementation of Rosenbergian National Socialism in the Field of the History of Culture by Professor Hans Naumann" [in German].
PhD diss., University of Maryland.
Schirrmacher, Thomas. 1992. "Der göttliche Volkstumsbegriff" und der "Glaube an Deutschlands Große und heilige Sendung": Hans Naumann als Volkskundler und
Germanist im Nationalsozialismus: eine Materialsammlung mit Daten zur Geschichte der Volkskunde an den Universitäten Bonn und Köln . 2 vols. Bonn: Verlag für Kultur
und Wissenschaft.
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Humboldt Universität.
­. 1993. "Gesunkenes Kulturgut, primitive Gemeinschaft": Der Germanist Hans Naumann (1886­1951) in seiner Bedeutung für die Volkskunde. Edited by James R. Dow and
Olaf Bockhorn. Vienna: Riegelnik.
Schwietering, Julius. 1927. "Wesen und Aufgaben der deutschen Volkskunde." Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 5:748­65.
Spamer, Adolf. 1924. "Um die Prinzipien der Volkskunde. Anmerkungen zu Hans Naumanns Grundzügen der deutschen Volkskunde." Hessische Blätter für Volkskunde 23:67­
108.
Strack, Adolf. 1902. "Volkskunde." Hessische Blätter für Volkskunde 1:149­56.
Thompson, Stith. 1946. The Folktale. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Vierkandt, Alfred. 1896. Naturvölker und kulturvölker: Ein Beitrag zur socialpsycholo­ gie. Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot.
Weber­Kellermann, Ingeborg, Andreas C. Bimmer, and Siegfried Becker. 1985. Einführung in die Volkskunde/Europäische Ethnologie. Eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte. 2nd ed.
Stuttgart: Metzler.
AuthorAffiliation
James R. Dow is Professor Emeritus of German Folklore and Lin­ guistics at Iowa State University. He was a Guggenheim Fellow from 2005­2006. His many books include an
edition of Bruno Schweizer's Zimbrische Gesamtgrammatik. Vergleichende Darstellung der zimbrischen Dia­ lekte (2008), German Volkskunde (1986), The Nazification of an
Academic Discipline (1994), and The Study of European Ethnology in Austria (2004). He edited the Internationale Volkskundliche Bibliographie for ten years and was a senior
bibliographer for the Modern Language Associa­ tion. His folklore articles have appeared in such journals as Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Asian
Folklore Studies, and International Folklore Review. He has just received a grant from the American Philosophical Society to continue work on folklore work car­ ried out under
the auspicies of the SS Office of Ancestral Inheritance during the Nazi era in Germany and Austria. ( [email protected])
Appendix
Appendix 1
"Primitive Communal Culture," from Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur, by Hans Naumann (1921)
­Translated by James R. Dow and Reuben Peterson
Translators' Note: The original German text includes only brief references to some works and no bibliography. When possible, we have included these works in the main
References Cited section following the appendices. Notes in the appendices are by Naumann, unless otherwise indicated.
The longstanding dispute concerning the definition of the folksong has, as I would like to believe, brought two extraordinarily fruitful concepts to light: the concept of a
communal song [Gemeinschaftslied] and that of a sunken art song [gesunkenes Kunstlied]. Using these two concepts, which in general sound like "communal goods"
[Gemein­ schaftsgut] and "sunken cultural goods" [gesunkenes Kulturgut] we must continue our inquir y if we want to bring a degree of order and structure to that vast and
colorful body of materials that one calls folk goods and that is found in the realm of folklore work (poetry, belief, customs, times and festivals of the year, hearth and home,
settlement, and costume). Are we dealing with communal goods or sunken cul­ tural goods?
With this basic question we can begin to view the objects [of folk­ lore]. Their analysis and clear separation into both words and material objects, poetry as well as realia, is, in
my opinion, the primary working goal of modern folklore.
We can thus [also] define the essence of that which is primitive, i.e., of the non­individualistic community, and furthermore we can see its relationship to higher culture that
has advanced to individualism and differentiation. Here among us, the rustic populace almost alone still represents primitive communal culture.
We can add to our understanding by obser ving the psyche of a child, the life and culture of primitive people, and from the research conclusions on prehistoric Europeans. The
life of the bearers of this primitive culture is a communal life whose closest parallels we should not shy away from looking for in the realm of animals, among ants, bees, apes,
etc. Settlements, husbandry, habitation, costume, games, and dances are based on their community; their religion and their faith are based fundamentally on two very
primitive viewpoints­on the fear of death and on the agrarian situation [at that point in time]; their customs, practices, and festivals, their legends, fair y tales, and myths are
based on these two articles of faith, and their poetry is based on the psychic­associative, not on the logical mechanics of the soul. This culture lives on in a hundred different
ways­in remnants and relics, even in the educated upper stratum of the nation. This upper stratum itself is always merely a special flower that grows up out of the roots of a
primitive community. The first stage of this special flower always appears to be heroic [in nature], with a culture and sensitivity more akin to an externally differentiated
aristocratic upper stratum, of a warrior caste. But the community still retains its agrarian orien­ tation. The last stage, however, appears to be pure individualism, with a
spiritual and intellectual differentiation and an absolute inner dis­ similarity among people and their social ranks. The heroic is united everywhere with the primitive; primitive
man dies very easily because it is not clear to him what he is losing, and, much too realistic, there is, of course, a lively [concept of] continuity as [part of] his dogma. From
this primitive attitude much still lives on in chivalr y: it lives on in the old themes and motifs of primitive communal culture, glorified by its heroism, but which easily changes
into something tragic. How­ ever, the mythological­associative manner of thinking and many of the characteristic and spiritual qualities­impulsive, languid, venge­ ful,
discerning, vain­all are still the same. Other [qualities] such as cowardice, distrustfulness, and especially in the Germanic world, the strong social instinct and inclination
toward forming armed gangs, all these disappear gradually on the path from primitiveness through warriordom, toward heroism. Pure individualism, however, bends backward
again and points from its pinnacle down toward primi­ tiveness. During our age we have learned that it is not so large a step from what is so intensely called for, "the
fulfillment of personality," to a renewal, "a rebuilding of community" during our life, our work, and elsewhere.
Today we know that the most beloved folksongs of the period around 1900 were the art songs of the eighteenth century that sank down and were changed through frequent
singing. This has been fully authenticated and it has also been documented that these songs em­ bellished various muse almanacs [by contemporary poets], or at least that
they were written in the sentimental and moving romantic style of the eighteenth century, but never in the artistic style of art poetr y of 1900. In my opinion this is where
differing views concerning the "origin" of the folksong "among the people" are united. It is correct to say that the bearer of popular poetry is the lower stratum of a cul­ tured
nation and that the taste of this lower stratum lags behind the taste of the upper stratum by a goodly span of time. But this theory is to be understood [both] more deeply
and in a more general way. To be sure, uneducated song writers, "people of the folk," can be not just bearers but also authors of folksongs. However, they write them in the
style of the preceding age, which is now sunken literary poetry, and not in the style of the artistic poetr y of their age. Otherwise they would be literary poets, much like
active poets in our time. It really is not so much a matter of finding individual poets in the muse al­ manacs of the eighteenth century as it is a matter of recognizing that the
whole body of poetry from the end of the eighteenth century has now become folk­national [volkstümlich]; even less so, that individual poems of the eighteenth century
have become common property, and that this entire poetic style has become popular with the people. Folksongs can originate from among the masses, from maids, soldiers,
woodsmen, etc. They are on the one hand clearly distinguishable from the poetry of our active poets, and on the other they are also distinguishable from primitive communal
songs. They come from art songs, but from art songs of bygone days. In this way, I believe we can accomplish a unifying of opposing views. It is to a certain degree a
biogenetic law that popular poetry­not primitive communal poetry, note this well!­recapitulates in its own way the development of earlier art poetry. Here the Hoffmann­K
rayer [1902] thesis is valid: the folk does not produce, it reproduces.
It has never been otherwise. In the seventeenth century those clearly folk­national songs of art poetr y find their way into collections of folksongs. Songs by Rist, Simon
Dach, Zesen,29 among others, are found in a little "Venusgarten" alongside older folk and social songs­a typical picture! The songs become popular, make their way into col­
lections and become folksongs. Others appear new in their style. They become the model. The folksong of the fourteenth and fifteenth cen­ turies clearly reveals the freer
view and fresher spirit of an age that was breaking away from forms and associations, and there was a slow de­ velopment of personality. In style, form, themes, and motifs,
however, [we must look] basically at the sunken chivalrous poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. That which the leprous and barefoot monk30 from the Main [River
area] sang in the fourteenth centur y and which then immediately became a folksong­the Limburg Chronicle31 has yielded a few notes and verses­reveal to us traits of the
Minnesong.32 Today we do not accept that there were any folksongs prior to the Minnesong, just primitive communal songs that have left clear traces in the Minnesong,
especially in the earliest examples. Such things as articulated and modulated "chants," work songs, children's songs, dit­ ties, love songs, wedding songs, lamentations for the
dead, marching songs, war songs, cult songs, festival songs, little short four­liners, are for the most part primitive. There are also ancient verses that have nothing to do with
lyrical poetry. They represent poetry of the folk, not individualistic poetry­such things really did exist. Relics have been preserved; they continue to be reborn even today, from
the womb of primitive society, here among us as well as among savages; magical sayings and folk riddles also belong to this category (cf. chapter 6).33 Of course individual
songs originate with a certain individual, but any other individual could have composed it. Structures, rhymes, images, melodies are firmly fixed and traditional. Reflections are
not active; rather, there are associations of a formal and material kind that act according to an instinctive, non­logical mechanism of the soul, with a "leaping ability" of
fantasy. Educated people can scarcely relate to such a close relationship to nature, earth, plants, and animals. This relationship is born from a pre­animalistic and completely
undiffer­ entiated feeling of relationships, even close identity with these things (chapter 6).
All of this has nothing directly to do with the "folksong," although much of it has subsequently gone into our understanding of the folk­ song. If a sinking folksong takes on
primitive style and structure, we say "it is being sung to pieces" [zersungen]. Of course a strong element of the primitive communal spirit is found in the "folksong," especially
in older forms. It is also found in the artistic songs of the Middle Ages, but it is not expressed so strongly there because the ties to the original have become less clear. Here
they become more secure, since the direction goes from above to down below, "because the original source gives them life again, just as it always has." It is not the folksong
and communal song, but rather art poetr y and the communal song that stand closest historically and reveal a direct relationship. Love songs of the Greek Sappho are closely
related to Estonian­Latvian­Lithuanian communal songs; marching songs of the Greek Tyrtaios are closely related to the marching songs of the Tongan Islanders and the
Senegalese Bambaras; Brazilian snake songs are closely related to the cricket and swallow songs of Anacreon; love songs of New Zealand Maori women are closely related to
Middle High German women's songs, particularly those of Dietmar von Eist.34 This connection is imperceptible in the lyric verse of the people of East Asia. Art lyric is nothing
less than advanced, cultivated, individualized communal song, just as religion and myths are nothing other than spiritual, civilized, cultivated communal belief. Folksong is
sunken art poetr y, but not everything that belongs to the folk has always sprung from its deepest roots, as believed in Romantic folklore (chapter 8).
The so­called chapbooks originate in large part from the chival­ rous romances of humanistic literature. The formless chivalrous novel could soon become a chapbook because
the folk had the same taste as the nobility had in a previous age. Based on the subject matter, we are dealing with sunken poetry from [a higher social] rank. What we
generally call folk drama is composed in large part from spiritual and sundr y literary traditions, but only a small fragment reaches back to the depths of the folk (chapter 5).
It is precisely this that leads us deeply into communal culture. Karl Bücher's beautiful book Arbeit und Rhythmus [Work and rhythm] (1899/1902) was one of the first and
most significant thrusts in this direction, even if we no longer share his basic thought that the origin of the arts had an entirely economic beginning and no religious prin­
ciple. Primitive man does not like to work and only does that which is most necessary; we have already mentioned above that the hero is sluggish and lazy. Still, primitive
communal culture devotes a huge amount of time and effort to religion and festivities. The alternative, "work or doubt," was not yet known. Primitive society therefore did
not work so as to have no doubt. This somewhat desperate justification [of life] is reserved for the nineteenth century. We feel very good and happy when we do not have to
work; it was certainly not merely the view of chieftains that work desecrates us. There was also something of this primitive feeling in Greek society: the enormous meaning
and number of festivals, a resistance to work, and the situation that one was at least not yet doubting when one was not working. We also think that the folk are quite
distant from that maxim found among the modern cultured strata. Our [current] primitive folk too earn only what they need, and they don't need ver y much, in southern
regions less than in the north. Modern communal life is thus also returning back to the primitive.
Accordingly the economic aspect plays a lesser role in the genesis of the arts than the religious. However, for primitive communal reli­ gion, for cults and belief, both elements
are necessary for [our] under­ standing. We must use the word religion here in a lesser sense, where it has not been separated from science. This differentiation is first and
always the fruit of higher culture. Primitive thought is in a certain sense always both religious and "scientific"; one need only look at magical charms where belief in demons
rules completely. Demon belief has developed out of belief in continuing life after death, whether it is considered pre­animistic or animistic, because belief in demons falls
within the realm of beliefs about death [Totenglaube]. Thus primitive religion is rooted in death beliefs (cf. chapters 2­5). But no fear of death exists in primitive communal
culture; the peculiar idea of an increased authority after death (chapter 2) and the firm belief in a continuation of life even leads to suicide among primitives.35 But there is
nevertheless fear of the dead. Primitive people, however, did occupy themselves starkly with the sudden and seemingly arbitrary escape by a member from the community of
the living into one of the dead, [and] with the extraordinary, unusual and completely different continuation of life [after death]. I do not believe in the fundamental meaning
of astral occurrences for primitive religiosity. The mythology of the Mexi­ cans is not proof for me, because their entire culture is not sufficiently original. The entirely primitive
person does not notice nature at all, be­ cause he himself is still a part of nature. Nature religions are not at all natural, if and where they exist. The regular course of the sun
and the moon, the regular changes from day to night, the eternal and regular rising and setting of the stars, these do not excite the curiosity of the completely primitive
person; neither does the surprising transition from life to death. Nothing occupies the soul of the primitive person so much as the sinister puzzle of death; anyone who denies
this has never lived among the primitives­whether in Europe or elsewhere. Even among such an agrarian oriented people as the Lithuanians, death beliefs are at the center
of [their] religious thought. The Gypsies of Europe, who confess none of the European state religions, and who are thoroughly heathen without being agrarian, have a
tremendous fear of death. It is a fear that also enlivens savages [die Wilden], and the only oath by which the Gypsy swears the truth is "in the [name of the] dead!"36
Beliefs concerning death and demons dominate in primi­ tive "experiences" and tales, legend and fairy tale motifs (chapter 3); they govern the rites of birth, marriage, death,
calendar festivals, and warding off evil. [These beliefs] also represent the original contents of mime dances which take place at festivals and therefore govern the rhythm in
primitive communal drama (chapter 5), and is the basic core of mythology. Dance in itself, however, reaches further back into the pre­human era, back into the age of
animals (chapter 5).
We obviously want to keep anthropology and natural science at a distance from folklore, but a dose of biology certainly contributes to an understanding of the primitive
communal psyche. In the past one believed that a game with rules was based on folk custom, acting out the intervention of the gods during the game. That was a
romanticized view; however, it is no less romantic, it seems to me, when today a ball game is explained in all seriousness as an imitation of the course of the sun. As if the
instinct to play could not be observed in an entirely analogous way with cats, dogs, or monkeys! To play and to dance is a psychic necessity for children and primitive people,
for whom dance and play replace work. Dance in itself has no deeper and no symbolic meaning in primitive drama, rather it belongs simply to the stylizing of mime. A
conscious observation of nature and the stars begins with the attainment of certain situations, which are no longer entirely primitive, [for example] with agriculture and
navigation. Just as there is a nauti­ cal religion, there is likewise an agrarian religion, but they are both grounded in the belief in life after death and in demons. Therefore,
warding­off rites [Abwerriten] at large annual agrarian festivals are the very same as those at births, weddings, and death. Vegetation demons are restylized demons of death,
just as the "Persephoneia myth" is a reinterpreted myth of death (chapter 5). And just as the relationship to nature is documented here, the relationship to the stars can be
documented elsewhere. The moon and sun, and the personifications of certain star constellations, can then be viewed as the images of heal­ ers and demons; certain
astrological occurrences can be viewed in the images of vampire myths; likewise, when a god parts a storm cloud with lightning and a blessing springs forth, this can be
perceived as the victory over an evil spirit in a treasure­filled grave. But those are no longer entirely primitive perceptions: they represent transitions from a firm belief in
death toward images of an artistic nature, which a more advanced folk attains after it has learned to observe nature and stars beyond economic necessity.
Economics are also a basic characteristic of festive slaughtering. Because great slaughters are necessary in the autumn, they overlap with autumn demon festivals and
become a part of cultic activities. Out of necessity comes virtue, while gluttony, drunkenness, laziness, and the urge to play are consecrated among the cults. We know that
the slaughter of pigs still today represents a kind of festive activity, and be­ lief in magic and sacrifice bring forth a spiritual character (chapter 3).
"Among our people an agrarian religion of a much earlier time still survives today, veiled in Christianity, but changed."37 Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and St. John's Day
belong to the "economic year of cultivation," from whose depths at one time the treuga dei arose, the peace of God, which was a peace associated with plows and which
today is still to be found in the blessing of field implements.38 Seasonal fires [Notfeuer]; kissing of trees; baked goods [Saatwecken]; planters on horseback [Saatreiter];
processions to influence the weather; the sanc­ tity of the time of sowing in Transylvania; bread and corn sacrifices; consecration of the first and last sheaves; the especially
ancient sacrifice of sowing flax seed; belief in a grain wolf, a grain mother, grain old men, and a rye mummer; the bride's bed in the field; sprinkling the plow, draft animals,
and plowmen; processions with a blessed plow; respect for loaves of bread; the probable original identity of the temple and the corn granary (chapter 7)­all of these and many
more are remnants and symptomatic of this former beautiful agrarian religion, in which a serene joy of life and a certain Greek spirit ruled, but which also blessed the Vanir
gods [Wanengötter].39 This family of gods, as the character of its individual members proved, stood in closest proximity to this agrarian­economic religion. What Caesar says
about Germanic people honoring the sun, the moon, and volcanos (without mention­ ing a Germanic Mars), what the West­Swedish stone carvings present (sun, ships,
plows, steers, horses, a phallus)­all of these exemplify the agrarian culture of the Vanir religion and contribute to a peaceful and economic well­being. It is the religion of large
agrarian festivals, of forest and field cults, whose meaning, contents, and remnants have been disclosed to us in the writings of [Wilhelm] Mannhardt40 as well as Ulrich
Jahn.41 The peace of God rules, there are food ways and games, dance and song; weapons rest, as Tacitus confirms what [Konrad Theodor] Preuß42 says of primitive people
concerning the festival of Nerthus43 and in regard to the festival of Tamfania44­it is a cautionary measure against the dangers of intoxication. The Swebic Isis and the
Batawic Nehalennia45 likewise belong to this realm. Ship processions emphasize the fishermen, wagons and plow processions [emphasize] the peasant. Soldiers are not found
among the founders of the Ne­ halennia stones, but rather merchants and sailors. Myths of the dead and demons receive uncommonly humane, mild, and beneficial traits
when influenced by such an agrarian orientation.
Unfortunately our people have lost too much of this primitive agrarian communal religion, especially in the individualistic Protes­ tant states. The Catholic Church, on the
other hand, is more distant from individualism and closer to communal life, and with its finest instincts it knowingly accepted everything that was worthy of saving in agrarian
heathendom. It is a charming agrarian belief that forms the basis for Easter sprinkling­a folk is pious and healthy when it believes in the sacredness of bread and grain. May
one protect himself from false enlightenment! It is part of the essence and of the concept of a hardworking people that it is deeply rooted in these things, in the soil of
primitive communal culture.
Popular belief is not sunken mythology, but rather reaches far beyond into the world of belief among the primitive peoples of the earth. Fair y tales and legends do not
themselves have to be ancient, but their individual traits and motifs reach back almost completely to the very foundation of primitive communal life, the belief in life after
death, and magic, the unrestrained life of wishes, dreams, and fantasies. The conceptualizations of life and death, body and soul, sleep and dream, man and animal, man and
plant, are the same all over the earth. Throughout the ages they reappear in all regions with the same basic traits, they are eternally young and new and almost un­
changeable. Thus, the bases from which fairy tale and legend motifs originate do not always have to lie in a gray and primeval past. And therefore many customs and
practices, superstitions, rhymes, fairy tales, and legends are so commonly similar ever ywhere in the world that through ethnology we can document an amazing array of
perceptions and relationships, parallels, confirmations, and additions. Just as the fairy tale "Herr Korbes"46 can only be understood by [using] variants from other countries
(chapter 3), in the same way the Nordic belief in protective spirits can only be understood [as part of] a primitive belief in animals (chapter 4). All of these serve as criteria [for
us]. Whatever parallels are found among the peoples of the earth, they all originate from the depths of primitive communal culture. Primitive peoples are just as similar and
undifferentiated as children are, while civilized people, like grown­ups, are differentiated among themselves. Higher culture means uniqueness and differentiation. Mythologies
and religions are only differentiated blossoms of society's beliefs, nothing more than spiritualized and cultivated, poetic, heroic, ethical, or philosophically formatted folk belief,
transitory in contrast to that which is unchangeable. For this reason the mythologies of cultured people are relatively dissimilar, and Indo­Germanic mythology even [bears
resemblance to] a shipwreck. Thus also, someday a comparative mythology of primitive people will produce uncommonly rich results.
As mythology is nothing other than culturally understood popular belief, likewise the heroic legend is nothing other than the cultivated heroic popular legend of certain
centuries, attached to historic figures or those considered to be historic. The turn toward the heroic, which includes the tragic, was for us, so it seems, associated with the rise
of the Æsir religion. The Valkyries in the past were evil­eyed hostile witches who then became leaders in battle, beautiful shield maidens and wish­ ful images. At that very
moment Wodan, their lord, transformed him­ self from a frightening demon, riding over the field of battle, into an aristocratic warrior, chief of the gods and of Valhalla, the hall
of the warriors and princes. The primitive motif of a man and his beloved animal, the wild boar, is transformed historically into the tragic stor y of Helgi and the swan maiden K
ara,47 of Ragnar and Thora and their snake48 (chapter 4). The primitive motifs of the marten capture and of the fettered monster are transformed in the splendid Wieland
legend49 (chapter 3). The struggles with the haunting revenant are transformed from Grettir to Grendel50; the gruesome motif of the return home of the dead spouse is
transformed into the beautiful account of Helgi and Sigrun51 (chapter 2); the legend of grave robberies, like those told by Grettir, are transformed into the splendid Song of
Hervör52 (chapter 2). Bride stealing is transformed into the Waltharius legend53 and into the Hilde myths54; the werewolf becomes a renowned warrior, and we find the
primitive motif of the tale of the final return home of a living spouse and father in the heroic­tragic transformation in the Older Lay of Hildebrand [Hildebrandslied].55 It is a
matter of modes of action by a certain upper stratum, the Germanic warrior caste, which they acted out using traditional communal motifs. The possibility of being cursed by
cowardice is counter­balanced in Hildebrand by a child's love for and pride in his father. It is called the honor of higher social rank! Primitive communal custom calls for
protection and preservation of descendants, and is drawn from motifs found in beliefs about death. Honor of rank goes far beyond that. Here the contrasts between honor of
the upper class and primitive communal custom are so apparent today that it is no wonder that the motif and the song sank down as themes and were rewritten in the
Younger Lay of Hildebrand [Das Jüngere Hildebrandslied]. And therefore that folk ballad is certainly nothing less than a sunken democratized heroic song.
Realia can also be traced back to the primitive, up to their cultural separation and refinement. Just as the Germanic king's hall developed from a one­roomed primitive house,
the ancient temple developed from the granary (chapter 7). Genuine folk art, however, is based on communal art; and the non­individual, the communal, and the social
provide the basis for agriculture and pasturage, settlement and village design, house construction and farmyard layout. Parallels are found in the communal life of a beehive
or a flock of swallows. One is valid for all, each does the same; the peasant is both his own carpenter and wheelwright; the primitive peasant's wife spins, weaves, and turns
the crocks with her own hands. [In regard to] the crafting of weaponry, the warrior caste needs the class and the artisanship of a smithy, but fishermen build their own skiffs
and weave their own nets. Exceptions, personal traits, individual works, and individualism do not exist­the communal soul rules. The same skill, the same sense of form,
produce the simple beauty of the practical, but even with the priceless authen­ ticity of the material [used], only products of mass culture result: from a house to a wooden
shoe or a backpack, from a farmyard to a cake board or a yoke. Strict communal order exercises control over dress, house construction, and [field] cultivation. Based on
peasant wisdom, no exceptions in the communal order are tolerated, not even in the smallest details: roads and the open areas between houses, the amount and the size of
[logs for] lumber, the threshold and the chimney, rail­ ings and gates. The layout of rooms, furnishing, furniture and its form, placement, arrangement, and quantity:
everything is determined by the communal spirit, and rural uniformity is thus regulated.
But the traditional costume and the covering and style of furni­ ture also come from above; they are sunken cultural goods. It is well known that so­called folk costumes do
not represent a creative spirit of any folk, as romantic folklore liked to believe, but rather that they are the fashionable clothing of the nobility and bourgeoisie, frozen in time
from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Along with these costumes come the gestures, which at festive events are dignified and courtly and
which in the past were common among our ancestors. There are also a lot of sunken cultural goods left over from the ceremonies and formalities of wooing, socializing with
guests, and the like. It has already been shown that the bridal wreath does not support the principle of disguising the bride so that an evil demon is not able to pick her out,
since all bridesmaids are similarly clad, and that the wedding menu rejects the potato in favor of rice and raisins. The style of Dutch ovens, trunks, armoires, and beds is the
style of the Renaissance and the Baroque; colorful dishes, beautifully painted pots, jugs and pewter plates, brass implements, wainscoting, covers for hope chests, moldings,
and door and window frames all preser ve the taste of earlier cultural strata. The stone or marble grave cross has long since found its way from city to village cemeteries;
instead of straw or wooden shingles, the tile roof has domi­ nated in many regions for years. Spiritual sentiments have been added to taste, but here too those who are
educated lag behind considerably. The peasants of the Württemberg Black Forest, for example, still find themselves in the midst of Pietism,56 a matter here of an eternal law.
We are experiencing just how the materialism of the 1880s brings its fruits to maturity in the lowest levels of the cities, how democratic thought, which is basically an
inheritance of Romanticism, is based on the romantic overestimation of the folk and is just now taking hold among the broad masses.
But just as the sunken art song has been changed by being sung to pieces [zersungen], likewise the sunken costume is restylized according to the will of rural communal
culture. In addition to a certain sim­ plification and change reflecting local rural needs, rural communal culture still strictly regulates material, color, ornamentation, ribbons,
decorations, and finery­regulations that tolerate nothing unusual. The same is also true in regard to furniture, and so forth. Peasants' trunks and armoires, even if they are
Baroque in style, do not have to have originated during that period. Only their style originates from that time; the same is the case with clothing. Even beard styles reflect a
certain historical relationship in peasants' taste: the German peasant of 1900 had a smoothly shaven face, like Frederick the Great. Coat, hat, knickerbockers, and buckled
shoes of his Sunday dress reflect the same era. But just as we have changed, he has also slowly changed. Long pants were Sunday attire by 1900 in many areas; in other
regions the so­called [folk] costume had vanished, i.e., the peasant had already acquired modern, urban, individualistic clothing. As a result of this hist orical perspective, our
lamentations over the disappearance of costumes, peasant furniture, and peasant dishes, not to mention the folksong, come from a misunderstanding. It is not at all a
matter of peasant goods. And just as we no longer have these things ourselves, so we cannot require of the peasant that he should retain the style of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.
The village house also succumbed to city culture in the last century. Roof tiles were replaced by tarred pasteboard material, while inside we find cheap warehouse
merchandise. Certainly our aesthetic sensitivity is offended by that, but is that the peasants' fault? Is it not much more the fault of the upper stratum? The folk lags behind
in their taste. If we do not offer them anything better, they cannot take on anything better. If love of amusement, immorality, and the movie craze take over the masses
these days, who provided them with bad examples over the last decades? One can also engage in applied folklore, which we all do, but then we only practice a good and
meaningful [folklore] if we devote ourselves to a solid, genuine, and pure cultural life.
Progressive individualism in our culture must not necessarily bring us to ruin. It is well known that one can see in many things the kind of decline that it can cause, for
example, in the new cityscapes. Just compare the marketplaces of older and newer cities: for example, the marketplace of Calw perhaps with that of Pforzheim. The latter be­
came quite barbaric through modern individualism, but the former still exhibits beautiful and harmonious traits, the uniform character of the not­yet­f orsaken communal
culture of the Middle Ages. In Pforzheim all the houses around the marketplace are different, each one in itself void of culture and style, unfortunate imitations, all con­
trasting and lacking a unified and overall city image. Every swallow's nest colony, every Hottentottenkral [African circular village] reveals in principle more culture [than this].
Here we can see unconscious beauty that comes from the compulsion to build in primitive communal cul­ tures; but [in the city] there is an outpouring of individualism that
loses sight of all laws of conscious beauty.
It is clear that we could have selected examples of this decline from very many domestic regions, but it is also false to see the fate of German culture in the Renaissance and
in Humanism simply because they are associated with the rise of individualism. We see, however, now as before, the solid foundation for the essential education of the spirit
and soul during the Renaissance and Humanism. Neverthe­ less, the previously mentioned recent return from an exaggerated individualism to primitivism is worthy of note.
It is obvious that both Impressionism and Expressionism are related in large measure and not just in an artistic sense; but they are also differentiated [in regard] to the
primitive. I view the following as criteria for a return to primitive nature: striving toward communal learning; filled with religion and striving to relate everything to God; lack
of regard for and rejection of finely developed norms and forms; a return to the fantastic and the associative in art; a lack of differentiation in regard to what is true and what
is untrue, beautiful and ugly, but a strong differentiation between good and evil; the confusion of external political freedom with the inner freedom of the Christian, to which
Luther's simple peas­ ants were subjected; and finally, a new feeling about land and nature. We no longer differentiate among things in nature­animals, trees, mountains,
lakes, rivers­as the artist of the nineteenth century did. Instead [we now differentiate by] that native feeling of affinity and identity that enlivened primitive man. He saw only
others in animals; he animated the constellations, mountains, and trees in his image; he came to a belief in sympathetic animals and trees whose life was as­ sociated with
his own; and he saw mother earth as his equal, his sister in a birch tree, his father in the heavens, his brother in a deer­they were his ancestors and were his kin.
All things considered, the objects of folklore escape the researcher like sand running through one's hands, and are lost either in the broad areas of comparative ethnology and
folk­psychology, or lead at other times to the heights of art poetry and intellectual histor y. While folklore unites those opposing parts, which it must clearly sort out and
separate, it assumes a mediating role between ethnology and intellectual history. It is easy to see that [folklore] can influence both of these areas of scholarship in substantial
ways, just as it also receives essential influences from them. There is an eternal give­and­t ake, rising and falling, dying and becoming, and a peculiar light from folk­ lore is
cast onto the intellectual­historical world view of humankind. Everything "folk­national" [volkstümlich], as nice and intimate as it may be, belongs to that which has been
overcome and which has sunken down; but from the goods of primitive communal culture there flows a delicately fresh, earthily young, eternally native force. Spirit reigns
over the masses, and while personality, conscience, and spirit reveal schisms within a community, they still represent progress. These are the products of the upper stratum
and indeed are constituent parts of this upper stratum. Viewed in this way, folklore leads away from democracy­at least as it is crudely conceived­and leads toward a
recognition of an educated aristocracy and creative individuality, in whose hands leadership [Führerschaft] and cultural development lie. That which is individual is the very
essence of higher culture, but its roots lie, and of this we may be sure, in the primitive community, which is its eternal, deep, and strong native soil.
Appendix 2
"Introduction," from Grundzüge der deutschen Volkskunde [Basic principles of German folklore], by Hans Naumann (1922b)
­Translated by James R. Dow and Reuben Peterson
Folklore has reached the point today that we can treat it and its con­ clusions as belonging to the humanities. A first modest but inclusive attempt to do so will be undertaken
in the pages [of this book].
Like Germanic antiquities, German folklore is essentially beholden to [German] Romanticism for its scholarly origins. Just as with the former, the beginnings [of German
folklore] have had a lasting effect on the latter and today we can still distinguish Romantic folklore from a more modern and much more sober and rational discipline. In the
earlier stages of Romanticism there was an overestimation of our be­ ginnings, while today there is overestimation of the folk soul, especially the folk soul in the past. Both
[Romanticism and the folk soul] are related insofar as in each case a primitive condition is falsely assumed, in a psychic, spiritual, moral, and cultural sense. However, those
who have learned to evaluate this primitive condition correctly­through the mediums of biology, ethnology, and child psychology, with con­ siderable experiences and
uninhibited obser vations­cannot return to a Romantic folklore.
With advances in our understanding, we have left behind the con­ ceptual unity that Romantic folklore still had at its disposal. Modern folklore has become a bridge between
two areas of scholarship, eth­ nology and intellectual or cultural history, and thus its goals have become twofold. The objective manifestations with which modern folklore
works are like those in ethnology and archaeology, consisting of both ideas and material objects: folk poetry and folk belief; custom and practice; the festive times of the year
and the celebrations of birth, coming of age, marriage, death, and name­giving; hearth and home, settlement, agriculture, and village layout, costume­everything that
reflects the folk soul. Into this massive and colorful array of objects we can only bring order and clarity when we approach them with the basic question that is characteristic,
in our opinion, of modern Volk­ skunde, namely: is it with each detail, however small it may be, a matter of primitive communal goods that have come up from below, or of
sunken cultural goods that have come down from above? In which of the two areas, in ethnology or in intellectual and cultural histor y, do we find the antecedents for all
those things whose representation and description are necessar y for [accurately] reflecting folklife? The dis­ section and pure division of items in this way, into words and
things, poesy and objects, establishes in our opinion the primary working goals of modern folklore. Source, age, and for the most part, an ex­ planation of [folklore] items is
the result, and from all of this comes a kind of systematic folklore study. Above all clear lines are thus drawn for the entire discipline.
Such a seemingly superficial classification of things, however, is of far­reaching importance. We can determine the essence of [what we are referring to as] primitive, i.e.,
society devoid of individualism, and we can also see its relationship to higher culture that has advanced to individualism and differentiation. Vast perspectives are thereby
opened up for the folklorist who then gains a certain vantage point from which to judge individual expressive forms through the ages. He brings this to bear on both concepts
and contrasts that are again today affecting the widest circles, e.g., individual and society, personality and community. Thus it should come as no surprise that folklore is just
now beginning to become "interesting" as scholarship. One can see how the battle is being carried out, with a certain consistency today, against Humanism and Renaissance
culture. With the development of modern personality culture, they have been relegated to the his­ torical past and have become almost insignificant [for folklore]. We can see
this in socialistic and communistic political undertakings, in expressionistic endeavors in art and ethics, and in völkisch [pure Ger­ man] teaching and education. We are
dealing here more or less with a conscious return from individualism back to primitivism, to reestab­ lishing what the primitive community really was. We have experienced in
our time how that intensively sought­after "complete fulfillment of personality" does not represent in any way a great step toward renewed communal growth in life, work,
art, play, dance, culture, etc. This all­ too­boundless individualism may have actually led to the ruination of much in our culture, but it is wrong to simply seek the fate of
German culture in the age of the Renaissance and Humanism. On the whole they represent the pinnacle of all cultural development, and we see in them a firm foundation
for the real development of the spirit and the soul. Every cultural development leads to its own forms and seeks its own essence, and it is completely immaterial whether a
foreign, in some cases ancient, culture has furthered and helped this development or not. After all, the Renaissance and Humanism are characteristic of the culture of an
upper stratum. Thus it appears to us that a culture of individual personality, spiritual and intellectual differentiation, and the complete inner dissimilarity of a people and of
their social posi­ tions [Stände], reflects the final stage of prior cultural developments, beyond which there is nothing more [to be accomplished]. Even here, however, a
higher unity unites individuals so that everything doesn't just disintegrate. This is an essential inheritance from the depths of the primitive community, and individualism
may, indeed must, only go so far that the individual and his personality are free, undisturbed, and irreplaceable within such a higher unity.
We thus soon arrive at a point where we can distinguish three stages of culture, preceded by a stage of absolute primitiveness in which man himself is an almost unconscious
part of nature. The final stage is that of individualism, as we have already said. Disregarding overlapping and transitional periods, the final [individual] stage is preceded by
agrarian and heroic orientations. The agrarian stage still encompasses the whole community; there are entire peasant folk groups, entire fishing and shipping folk groups, as
well as entire hunting folk groups, that make up our own past. The heroic stage, however, represents a first blossoming of uniqueness, of the culture and feelings of a more
externally differentiated aristocratic upper stratum. [The heroic stage represents] a warrior caste which then takes on inner and unique viewpoints about honor, belief, and
taste, resulting in a crude contrast with the concepts of the [prior] primitive community. At the agrarian stage, the lowest core of beliefs looks different, and a special agrarian
religion draws on primitive belief concerning the dead [Totenglaube]. However, this remains a communal belief and a communal religion­ which becomes a group religion
during the heroic period­but the peasantry retains the psyche and the culture of the primitive com­ munity, its way of thinking and its spirit. Because the condition of
absolute primitivity is hardly still in existence among our folk and in our folklife today­with the exception of the wandering and foreign Gypsy folk­peasant society necessarily
constitutes the main object of German folklore, although the remains and the relics of primitive communal culture live on a hundredfold in the urban and educated upper
strata of our nation. The culture of the educated upper stratum is, in all its material and ideal manifestations, still just a flower on the rootstock of the primitive community.
Just as it is the task of folklore to follow the movement from above to down below, it is the task of cultural history to follow it in reverse, from below to up above, and to
concentrate on the expressive forms, including material objects, from primitive culture all the way to their cultural differentiation, their refinement, and their unique and
individual aspects.
The eternally repeated complaint concerning the disappearance of folk goods, folksongs, costumes, household goods, etc., is little more than the previously mentioned
Romantic approach [to folklore]. From a modern and more sober perspective the complaint proves to be un­ justified. On the one hand it is based on insufficient collecting;
greater care and better methodology have brought folksongs from isolated areas to light, hundreds and thousands of overlooked but living songs. On the other hand that
Romantic complaint was based on a lack of historical information. Folk goods cannot disappear completely so long as there is a folk. They simply change their appearance and
their character because the times change; because the upper stratum moves on from one cultural form to the next; because nothing that the upper stratum does is in vain,
since ever ything, no matter how small, finds an echo in the lower stratum. "The folk doesn't produce, it reproduces"; "the folk is always backward, it receives its
nourishment from the table wastes of the rich"; so go well­known slogans of modern folklore. We will find them partially verified, as in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, where
the intellectual aristocracy overlapped with an inherited aristocracy, or as in the recent past, where the two are indeed separate. To believe that progress comes from the
community is Romanticism; the movement is downward, or at least toward level­ ing. Folk costume, folk books, folksong, folk drama, peasant furniture, etc., are sunken
cultural goods, right down to the smallest detail, and this has happened slowly, in almost calculable intervals. In other words: folk goods are created in the upper stratum .
Even if we just leave the movies, the gramophone, the operetta, and the department store as a field for applied and practical folklore, we shouldn't be surprised when the
character of new folk goods is not especially pleasing. It has not disappeared, it has just gotten worse, but the guilt is borne by the upper stratum. The culture of knighthood
once left behind pleasant and beautiful "folk dances"; the upper stratum of our day leaves be­ hind one­step dances. Folklore presents a serious face to the upper stratum and
makes it aware of the enormous responsibility it has. Adult education, folk libraries, folk educational associations are more or less gradually realizing this. All things considered,
we see the objects of folklore running like sand through the hands of the researcher. On the one hand they are then dispersed into the broad expanse of ethnology, but lead
on the other hand to the pinnacle of cultural and intellectual history. Insofar as folklore unites these opposing aspects of [cultural study], it must sort out and correctly
separate them, thereby assuming a mediating and clarifying position between folklore and intellectual history. It is easy to see that folklore can influence these two scholarly
endeavors in essential ways, just as it receives primary influence from them. There is an eternal give­and­take, a rising and falling, dying and becoming, and there is a unique
light from folklore that shines on the intellectual­historical worldview of mankind. Every­ thing "folk­national," as beautiful and familiar as it may be, belongs to what has been
overcome and has sunk down; however, from the goods of primitive communal culture streams a delicately fresh, earthily young, eternally native force. Spirit reigns over
mass, and progress is accomplished only by separation within the community, by the indi­ vidual, by conscience, and by spirit, but these are the products and characteristics
of the upper stratum. That which is individual is the very essence of higher culture, but its roots lie, and of this we may be sure, in the primitive community, which is its
eternal, deep, and strong native soil [Mutterboden].
Copyright Indiana University Press Jan­Apr 2014
Detaily
Název
Hans Naumann's gesunkenes Kulturgut and primitive Gemeinschaftskultur
Autor
Dow, James R
Název publikace
Journal of Folklore Research
Svazek
51
Číslo
1
Strany
49­100
Počet stránek
52
Rok vydání
2014
Datum vydání
Jan­Apr 2014
Rok
2014
Vydavatel
Indiana University Press
Místo vydání
Bloomington
Země vydání
United States
Předmět publikace
Folklore
ISSN
07377037
Typ zdroje
Scholarly Journals
Jazyk publikace
English
Typ dokumentu
Feature
Další obsah dokumentu
References
ID dokumentu ProQuest
1510263710
URL adresa dokumentu
http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.is.cuni.cz/docview/1510263710?accountid=15618
Copyright
Copyright Indiana University Press Jan­Apr 2014
Poslední aktualizace
2015­05­30
Databáze
ProQuest Central
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