Albrecht Lehmann of the University of Hamburg is a prolific scholar of contemporary
narration, whose research has spanned five decades. His major publications have focused
on storytelling in a proletarian village, autobiographical narration, German prisoner of
war stories, and personal narratives of refugees and expellees at the end of World War
II from the Eastern territories to West Germany. With the present volume, which
translates as
The book´s three main premises, Lehmann states, are that people relate experiences, values, views, and desires both in and through stories; scholars and other recipients of stories can draw conclusions about the thoughts and actions of people as individuals as well as social beings through the stories they tell; and as part of a larger, unfolding history, the individual continues to change over the course of a lifetime (3). While none of these premises is earth-shattering, the author illustrates and expands upon them with many fine examples drawn from his own research and that of scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Absent an over-arching argument, however, the organization of the book and the studies discussed in this volume appear somewhat random. The reader might reasonably question the rationale behind the inclusion of some topics and the omission of others. The profound influence of newer technologies and social media on everyday experience, interpersonal communication, and storytelling, for example, receives little to no attention.
The volume is divided into four chapters of unequal length, with the third chapter
constituting nearly half of the book. The first chapter, “Experience as a Key Concept in
Cultural Scientific Folk Narrative Research,” introduces the book’s central concepts of
experience and consciousness. Edmund Husserl and Wilhelm Dilthey get a quick mention,
before the author moves on to Andre Jolles´ simple forms, problems of genre
classification, collective and individual memory as applied to Kurt Ranke´s concept of
The third chapter, “Fields of Research,” offers an overview of fairly recent topics and
studies in narrative research, divided into five categories: narration and contemporary
history; the creation of modern myths and legends; home, environment, and loss;
comparisons and intercultural communication. Many, but not all, of the examples are
drawn from German history, especially the Third Reich and World War II. Some notable
exceptions are the discussion of Russian folklorist Kirill V. Chistov´s study of the
legend of the “good czar” and the Swiss historian Philipp Sarasin´s study linking
hysteria about anthrax in the wake of 9/11 to the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The
topics in this chapter are too diverse to treat individually but it is fair to say that
Lehmann´s expertise is most evident when he discusses different aspects of everyday
narration during WW II and the post-war years. From rumor to stories about the enemy,
and jokes about revenge, fear and anxiety created a unique narrative atmosphere during
the war. Not surprisingly, the Nazis went to great lengths to manipulate and monitor
popular opinion. Lehmann notes, for example, how the
Beyond the survey of directions in narrative research, Lehmann proposes at the outset of
the volume to answer what he calls “open questions” (9). These are largely reserved for
the final, nine-page chapter entitled “Folk Narrative Research in Contemporary Cultural
Scientific Scholarship” and have more to do with ongoing debates within the German
Folklore Society than with narrative research. This reader was perplexed by the pointed
criticism of European Ethnology and certain scholars publishing under the name of
European Ethnology (as opposed to scholars and institutes working under the name of
--------
[Review length: 980 words • Review posted on September 17, 2014]