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4

Folktale, Germandom, and Race

The German folktale gained significantly in status and popularity during the National Socialist Regime, as the Party promoted it actively within the context of German folk education. A Party official put it quite plainly in 1935: “The German folktale shall become a most valuable means for us in the racial and political education of the young.”¹ To the already fairly large German folktale collections in the libraries the Nazis added a great number of new publications early in the thirties, and the markets were flooded with series of paperbacks promoting the German folk heritage. The schools, too, officially supported this trend by paying close attention to the German folktale at all levels of education.²

On the surface, the folktale revival during the Nazi period resembled a similar one during the German Romantic movement. The Party emphasized this similarity while giving the impression that they were merely continuing a well established conservative trend based on a “neo-Romantic” faith in the German peasant. The wave of enthusiasm about the folktale revival could be felt particularly strongly among educators, writers, and philologists who had set their minds and hearts on Rüttgers’ ideas pertaining to a renewal of German national identity through German folklore and “roots” research. During the German National Book Congress in Berlin in 1933, the main speaker focused on a recollection of nostalgic sentiments that the German folktale had provoked among writers of German literature. Among others, he referred to a writers’ meeting not long before, when the host had taken from his book shelf a small, brown, leather bound volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen by the Brothers Grimm, while reflecting how much the simple yet vivid folk language of this work had inspired his grandfather. The speaker remembered that from there the conversation had turned to patriotic ideas and the present state of the nation. All of them had agreed whole-heartedly that it was their love of the German folktale and their love of their ancestors that had united them in spite of many individual differences. If ever again something new and creative would arise in German literature, he concluded, then it would have to reach the level of the simple German folktale, for in its sincerity and honesty it reflected the true spirit of Germandom.³

Patriotic sentiments of such a nature dominated the attitude of folklorists, educators, philologists, and writers during the early years of the Nazi Regime. An obvious racial bias was already evident in some of them, although in many cases there was more of an ethnocentric attitude toward the German folk tradition. In general, comparative and international folklore studies were on a decline, while there was a pronounced interest in the inherited folk tradition of the German peasant. Folklore of the city, too, became less popular as the cult of the German peasantry reached its peak. The German peasant evolved as a symbol of German “rootedness” in the Nordic Germanic past, and his village community out of which the German folktale originally had been born, now emerged as a symbol of the German folk community as a whole. In children’s literature circles, and elsewhere, the German folktale was no longer considered a mere reflection of folklore or literature but “realistic evidence” of a community life founded in the Nordic Germanic past that had a special relevance to the present time. When during the Heidelberg Folklore Congress in 1935 the main speaker called the German folktale a “community forming agent” that had a bearing upon the community life of the German nation,⁴ the ideological implications of such a statement could not be ignored, as it corresponded with the Nazis’ own ambiguous Volkish terminology. At that time, all former theories pertaining to the German peasant community (like those developed by Tönnies, Sombard, Jahn, and Riehl, for example), had been officially assimilated by the National Socialist ideology that overshadowed all other interpretations, and it had become increasingly difficult for folklorists to pursue professional methodologies outside of its domain. Such innocent terms as Volk (folk), community, and national unity were endowed with a political meaning that was well understood by the majority of the population—particularly when they were used in a public address subject to Party surveillance.⁵

The exclusive Nordic Germanic interpretation of the German folktale became particularly evident in an article by Lorenzen, published in the same year in the Jugendschriften-Warte. Lorenzen demanded that teachers focus on a unified world view that reflected the old Germanic peasant culture, in order to guarantee that the discussion would have relevance to the folk Reich of the present.⁶ All other approaches should be discarded, regardless of whether they applied to the theories of the Brothers Grimm, Benfey, Bédier, von Sydow, or renowned anthropologists and psychologists, as they had nothing to offer to enhance the current community spirit under National Socialism. Rothemund, Director of the Bayreuth Office for Youth Literature, officially sanctioned such a one-sided approach to the German folktale when he wrote: “Next to Norse mythology, the German legends, and the Nordic hero tales, it is the German folktale that helps most decidedly to develop a new racial consciousness and a positive attitude toward life under National Socialism.”⁷ Friedrich Panzer, too, saw in German folktales no longer simply an aspect of folklore or literature, but a reflection of the “true character” of the German nation. In his essay on “The Significance of Saga and Folktale for the Life of the Nation” he wrote in 1938 that teachers in particular should pay close attention to the Nordic Germanic origins of the German folktale, because folktales were older than myths and truly revealed the sources of Germandom.⁸ He did not bother to supply the reader with evidence for such a theory. Like Karl von Spiess, in an essay on “The Folktale” that was published a few years later,⁹ he assumed the position that the present time demanded an emphasis on those elements that made the German folktale “unique” in the world, while simultaneously, it required a rejection of all previously accepted approaches. In the preface to the work Deutsche Märchen—Deutsche Welt (German Folktales—German World), von Spiess further elaborated that many “foreign influences” had infiltrated the German folktale, and that now it was the task of folklorists, philologists, and educators to “purify” it to such an extent that its original Nordic Germanic roots would become evident to the reader. If thoroughly cleansed from all “un-Germanic” elements, the folktale would once more emerge as the “true mirror of the German folk soul.”¹⁰ At the present time it was of greater necessity than ever to restore the German folktale to its original meaning. He left no doubt that this “original meaning” could be viewed only in relation to selected themes and characters in Norse mythology which, in their turn, had a special significance within the context of the Nazi ideology.

The idea of “cleansing” the German folktale from “alien influences” represented yet another step in the direction of censorship. The Brothers Grimm, too, had drawn upon parallels between the German folktales and certain themes in Norse mythology, yet they had not gone so far as to exclude some tales, or portions of tales, from their collection, merely because they did not fit their theory. Neither had they done so in the interest of promoting “race consciousness” in a narrow and exclusive sense, for at all times they had kept alive their genuine interest in the folktales and myths of other nations.¹¹

Such narrowing perspectives on folktale analysis had a definite impact on the selection and publishing trends of folktale collections for children. Whereas the censors generally left the older German volumes untouched, they altered newer editions by emphasizing the “German” and “Nordic Germanic” orientation and by using in their table of contents such sub-titles as “Of German Courage,” “The Quest for Honor,” and “The Stronger One Always Wins,” or such book titles as Deutsche Heldenmärchen (German Heroic Folktales), Germanische Märchen (Germanic Folktales), Nordische Märchen (Nordic Folktales), and Märchen des Nordens (Folktales of the North). In the case of the last mentioned volume, they even mixed the genres of the German folktale and of Norse mythology, so as to underline more strongly the spiritual relationship between the two.¹² While there was no shortage of older and newer works pertaining to the German and Nordic Germanic folk traditions, children were more and more deprived of folktales lying outside of this cultural area—with the exception of the Arabian Nights which the Nazis tolerated throughout the duration of the Third Reich. The German folktales themselves were “cleansed” from Christian tales and “foreign” elements, although such a process took time, and it was not consistently carried out in all new publications. The bulk of the German folktales were still re-told in the simple folktale style, and teachers and librarians generally were conscious of loyalty to the oral tradition in a given work, at least as far as its stylistic qualities were concerned.¹³ From that point of view, German children in Hitler’s Germany still benefited from the legacy of the Brothers Grimm, even though to a very limited degree.

Plate 16

Archetypes and Nazi “Symbols”: Grimms’ Folktales as a “Mirror” of Female Virtues

One of the most pronouncedly racial folktale interpretations was Maria Führer’s Nordgermanische Götterüberlieferung und deutsches Volksmärchen (North Germanic Myths and the German Folktale), which was published in 1939. Führer analyzed in this work ninety folktales of the Brothers Grimm from a new “symbolic” perspective that endowed the age-old Nordic Germanic mythical traditions with ideological meanings promoted by the National Socialist Party. “In the folktale we grasp the German character at its very roots,” she wrote in the preface of her work,” . . . for we all feel instinctively and unconsciously that both the Nordic myths and our folktales have sprung from the same source.”¹⁴ What she really wished to imply in this statement was that the Nazi ideology, too, had sprung from these roots, and that folktales should be used effectively to enhance it.