Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945), the Reich Leader (Reichsführer) of the Nazi Party 1929-1945, became part of a huge ideological enterprise that positioned him as the most powerful man next to Hitler in Germany during World War II. Himmler was also the instigator of the largest mass murder in history. Here in James R. Dow’s book, we do not delve into a deep history of this man’s ill-effects. Instead, we come to know what Dow identifies as “programmed plunder in Italy and Yugoslavia” that Himmler and his colleagues realized in South Tyrol in Italy and Gottschee in today’s Slovenia (former Yugoslavia), regions where ethnic Germans (Volksdeutscher) were to be resettled in 1939. The German-speaking population of South Tyrol had two options: either to immigrate to Hitler's German Reich or to remain in Mussolini's fascist Italy. The Volksdeutscher in Gottschee also had to decide on their resettlement in a referendum in 1941, many opting to stay in Germany before the project “Resettlement South Tyrol” collapsed in 1943.

In 1939, Heinrich Himmler became the State Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationality (Reichskommissar für die Festigung des deutschen Volkstums), handling the relocation of the Volksdeutscher. Himmler also set up a National Socialist (henceforth NS) science organization for research and teaching, Forschungsgemeinschaft Deutsches Ahnenerbe, the ancestral heritage project “to explore” the settlements, traditions, and material culture of Nordic/Indo-European culture and to mediate the research results about ethnic Germans. Accordingly, the ancestral heritage activities in South Tyrol and the Gottschee were formed and subdivided into ethnographic and linguistic working groups, extensively documenting and evaluating the supposedly “Nordic-Germanic culture” in the region.

The German version of the book under review was published with the title Angewandte Volkstumsideologie: Heinrich Himmlers Kulturkommissionen in Südtirol und der Gottschee, which in my view captures the semantics better than the author achieves in titling the English version. A reader perceives in the German title the consequences of folklore being an “applied” science (Angewandte Volkskunde), which enabled Nazi folklorists to actively contribute to Nazism. James Dow, a respected expert in the history of German folklore scholarship who is widely known in the literature on this topic in English, has been following this rouge fil that is the guiding framework of the disciplinary history of folklore in Germany and Austria over the last thirty years. He authored work along these lines in German Volkskunde: A Decade of Theoretical Confrontation, Debate and Reorientation, 1967–1977 (1986) and The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich (with Hannjost Lixfeld, 1994), which became oft-consulted books in folklore’s disciplinary history. Especially in the latter, Dow traced the roots of Nazification of folklore to the Nazis’ exploitation of eighteenth-century philosophy. Dow also collaborated with well-known German and Austrian scholars, including one of the most important of them, Hannjost Lixfeld (to whom, together with Peter Assion, he dedicates this book), who explored the genesis of the Reich Institute for German Folklore during World War I and the time of the Weimar Republic in Folklore and Fascism: The Reich Institute (1994, edited and translated by James R. Dow). Last but not least, Dow published, together with his best folklore “buddy,” Olaf Bockhorn, The Study of European Ethnology in Austria (2004, see Birkalan 2009). In these works, the name Heinrich Himmler is mentioned several times.

Dow’s “In Search of All Things Nordic, in South Tyrol (Italy): The SS Ancestral Inheritance's Cultural Commission 1940-1943,” a prelude to this book, was published in 2014. And now, in the book under review here, Dow examines Himmler’s activities in six chapters. The introduction, though a little brief, sets the general mood for the book. Dow argues that German scholars were pioneers in folklore studies and historical linguistics. As the Nazis rose to power, these disciplines were distorted and turned into racist pseudoscience. Dow supplies a preliminary summary and evaluation of the Ahnenerbe Culture Commission and its research activities by way of case studies and personal biographies.

In the first chapter, “October 21, 1939,” Dow treats the beginning of the accord on ethnic Germans, including those in South Tyrol and the Gottschee. However, this chapter only sketches the history of the problem and does not provide much detailed information. Dow refers to his own efforts to understand the actions of the commission participants, and developes this leitmotif throughout the book. He asserts that these cultural commissions produced “popular or pseudo-knowledge,” which he identifies as “shadows.” I was surprised, though, that he explains the term “junk science,” or “pseudo-science,” in a footnote with the help of Wikipedia (249).

The second chapter deals with the intellectual atmosphere of the time, and Dow examines notions of science and pseudo-science, for example, through “shadows” of pseudo-science in Hanns Hörbiger's confused Welteislehre and in Hans F.K. Günther’s Rassenkunde. Günther, as the director of Alfred Rosenberg’s National Socialist Department of Racial Studies, argued for the Germans being the dolichocephalic (long-skulled) “race” (30). A growing body of literature deals with the activities of folklorists and ethnologists who willfully worked with and built a career as Nazi ideologues during World War II. In certain cases, the folklorists were better known than the anthropologists for working with NS cadres or for being NS cadres themselves. The German Ethnologen (anthropologists) were less noticed than the folklorists (for example, physical anthropologist Eugene Fischer was among the more explicit cases) when it comes to the NS relations to scholars and scientists. Thus, Heinrich Himmler’s building the Forschungsgemeinschaft Deutsches Ahnenerbe and the fact that certain folklorists took part in its “research,” can be understood as “scientists” aiming to secure positions in the NS regime.

Chapter 3, “Who is Who,” deals with a genealogy—not only of persons but of ideas as well. Dow informs his readers about the most active members of the South Tyrol Cultural Commission, in other words, persons involved in Nordic Indo-European research. Important is Hugo Hassinger, the head of the commission, who founded the South East German Research Institute in Vienna, as well as Richard Wolfram, the head of the Ahnenerbe, who also taught at the Forschungsinstitut. By chapter 4, “Much Ado about Nothing?,” readers have gathered that the proof of Germanness of the areas under discussion and their inhabitants was supported by a pseudo-science based on völkisch ideas. Here Dow shows that the activities of the South Tyrolean Cultural Commission involved the use of trains and military trucks so that cultural assets declared to be German could be archived or put into museums. However, because of violent disputes between the Germans and the Italians about the origin and ownership of these assests, it was a failed project. In chapter 5, “Gottschee,” Dow focuses on this particular site of the resettlement project. After the occupation of Yugoslavia in April of 1941, the country was divided between Germany and Italy. In the German part, the South Tyrol, a cultural commission was supposed to receive and process the intellectual and material heritage of the resettling Volksdeutsche. The geographer and SS officer Hans Schwalm headed this cultural commission, whose activities form the core of this chapter. Again, according to Dow, Germanness was about old German farmhouses, customs, folk dances, stories, costumes, and folk songs as well as the “biological and social” structure of the Gottscheer (153). The largest working group, under Viktor Rudolph, took care of the farmhouses. The working group on customs and popular beliefs under Richard Wolfram was very active. But only the last pages of this chapter refer specifically to Schwalm's work report, and thus this account offers few starting points for a well-founded source criticism (165-166).

Chapter 6, “Then and Now,” the concluding chapter, is where Dow once again puts in question the value of the research activity of the Ahnenerbe culture commissions. Although the number of records is significant, the material is problematic because of the Ahnenerbe statutes: these materials cannot be separated from the underlying ideology, even though they were intended for use by the Optanten, those who would decide about their future resettlement (171). Of course, this plebiscite never took place. Dow raises questions about the core “qualified academics” Bruno Schweizer, Alfred Quellmalz, and Richard Wolfram—the true “believers”— as he finds their epistemologies overwhelmingly “Nordic” (186).

In conclusion, Dow diligently shows the power of his archival work, which extends from church registers in South Tyrolean State Archives in Bozen to the two major German Federal Archives, in Berlin/Lichterfelde and Koblenz. The work is completed by five appendices related to the official correspondence and to letters and statements of the Optanten—only a portion of the amazing material which deserves examination, but this is what can be presented out of the huge archival resource in one scholarly book!

The history of German Volkskunde presents its critics with important themes and concepts such as Volkstumpolitik, völkisch racism, and Volkstumsideologie, important epistemic lines of thought that determined the study and practice of folklore in Germany for a long time. The discussion of whether Volkskunde has been fascistic from the beginning, and whether folklorists in the NS period only adapted it to the Volkstumsideologie, is a political one and currently debated among German folklorists and ethnologists. Starting with Hermann Bausinger’s student-initiated lecture series, “Deutsches Geistesleben und Nationalsozialismus,” in Tübingen in 1965, several German folklorists questioned the state of post-war German Volkskunde. Wolfgang Emmerich revealed (1968, 1971) the fascistic commitments of some folklorists in the twentieth century, and Bernd Jürgen Warneken (1999) showed the ways that academic Volkskunde was established as a nationalist endeavor only after the First World War.

I think that it is important to critically analyze these viewpoints in detail before one reaches a conclusion about the history of German Volkskunde, its folklorists, and their relation to the NS. It does surprise me, though, that Dow is aiming only to “understand” the NS activities, as he does not present a thorough critical analysis. By now, the number of works on the history of German folklore is more than a dozen, and one can ask: where do we go from here? Though I am deeply appreciative of this meticulous work on an immense body of data, an important service to readers and to the history of the field, I feel that we need to bear in mind that description is but the first step in the process of critical inquiry, especially needed with regard to the ideological baggage of Volkskunde. Coming to terms with the past, evidently, is still a process in the making.

Works Cited

Birkalan, Hande. 2009. Review of James R. Dow and Olaf Bockhorn,The Study of European Ethnology in Austria, Journal of American Folklore 122: 233-4.

Dow, James, and Hannjost Lixfeld, eds. 1986. German Volkskunde: A Decade of Theoretical Confrontation, Debate and Reorientation, 1967–1977. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

_____. 1994. The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Dow, James, and Olaf Bockhorn. 2004. The Study of European Ethnology in Austria. New York: Routledge.

Emmerich, Wolfgang. 1968. Germanistische Volkstumsideologie: Genese und Kritik der Volksforschung im Dritten Reich. Tübingen: Vereinigung für Volkskunde.

_____. 1971. Zur Kritik der Volkstumsideologie. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.

Lixfeld, Hannjost, and James Dow, ed. and trans. 1994. Folklore and Fascism: The Reich Institute. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Warneken, Bernd Jürgen. 1999. “Völkisch nicht beschränkte Volkskunde: Eine Erinnerung an die Gründungsphase des Fachs vor 100 Jahren,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 95: 169-196.

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[Review length: 1889 words • Review posted on December 5, 2019]