The Institute of Ethnology CAS, Department of Memory Studies, invites you to a lecture by Tilman Kasten (Institut für Kulturanalyse der Deutschen des östlichen Europa, Freiburg), titled "Memories on demand? German expellees and ethnographic audio recordings from the 1950s.”
The presentation focuses on a chapter in the history of German folklore studies. After World War II, the so-called folklore of the German expellees (“Volkskunde der Heimatvertriebenen”) was established in West Germany. The central actors were scholars who had already been studying German-speaking minorities in the 1930s and 1940s in the context of “völkisch” or national socialist science. After 1945, they continued to pursue their highly problematic research interests – albeit under changed social and political conditions.
The lecture presents a folklore collection project that began in the 1950s and resulted in an extensive collection of audio recordings with German expellees. In addition to the canon of folklore at that time, which focused on oral traditions such as songs and tales, the tapes also contain biographical narratives and memories. Which source value do these recordings have today? Are they documents of contemporary witness “avant la lettre”? The lecture reflects on these questions on the basis of a scientific-historical contextualization using a selected example – a recording with a person from western Bohemia looking back on the immediate post-war years.
Photo: German folklorist Johannes Künzig (1897-1982) in his audio archive during a tape recording, presumably in the 1960s. (© Institut für Kulturanalyse der Deutschen des östlichen Europa, Freiburg)
The lecture can be attended online via Microsoft Teams (Připojit se ke schůzce hned, Meeting ID: 383 236 887 213 4, Passcode: MJ796jY7).