This book is dicht (dense, heavy). The layout is layered, with four specific legend texts, followed by two chapters that delve into more recent narratives, e.g., urban legends and conspiracy theories, interspersed among historical and theoretical chapters, for a total of thirteen chapters. Annotation appears at the end and is followed by a list of twenty-two illustrations, cited authors’ names, and a very brief subject index. An epilogue traces the origin of many of the legend chapters to Helge Gerndt’s own professional career: dissertation, Habilitation, invited lectures, seminars, and such. It seems he has studied under, worked with, or has had close contact with, virtually all European and several American folklorists since the middle of the last century.
Chapter 1 lays out some basics, including the role of the Brothers Grimm collection, which seems to be something of a wobbly North Star of legend studies for Gerndt. He offers a quick overview of legend scholarship, emphasizing that it must be both diachronic and synchronic (11), briefly mentioning some of the more wayward studies, like those of the Viennese school of the 1930s, whose authors sought an unbroken tradition-continuity from Germanic antiquity. In the last two sentences of this brief introduction, the author establishes a new requirement for legend scholarship, from the late twentieth century to the present: “renewing the description of legend material from a decidedly historical perspective. In the end, this could only mean turning legend research on its head” (13). More about this below.
Chapters 2, 4, 6, and 8 present well-known German legends: the “Flying Dutchman,” “Auerberg” legends, “Heinrich der Löwe,” and the “Klabautermann,” while chapters 10 and 12 are devoted to more recent legends of the “Flying Cow” and the “Anthrax Attacks.” The presentation of the “Flying Dutchman” establishes a pattern for subsequent chapters: first older versions, then nineteenth and twentieth centuries ones, and finally a detailed comment on the nexus of the many variants. It is the story of a ship and its crew cursed to sail eternally and never allowed to land because of some transgression, a story that waned after the arrival of steam and motorized ships. The Auerberg, a mountain in Bavaria, is said to contain the remnants of a sunken Celtic city named Damasia, and has numerous legendary figures associated with it: horses, saints, witches, dragons, and dwarf-like creatures. “Heinrich the Lion” is the historical/legendary German duke who went on a crusade that led to a wide array of stories about him, now depicted in statues and carvings from Germany to Iceland. The Klabautermann is the unearthly male figure that appears to seamen to warn them of and sometimes rescue them from harm.
Chapter 10 presents the humorous story of cattle rustled by Russians and transported by air, only to have one fall out of the airplane, because of turbulence, then crash into and sink a Japanese trawler. Chapter 12 builds on the 9/11 attacks in New York and Pennsylvania and then expands into the subsequent anthrax legends and their spread throughout the world by social media.
Chapter 3, the first of six analytical chapters, begins with an analysis of the “discovery” of Volkssagen around 1800. Gerndt takes time to clarify the word Sagen, based on the German verb sagen, to say (cf. English “saga”), as compared to the word “Legende” derived from the Latin leg?re, meaning “to read” (aloud, as in a religious recitation). The pattern followed here is the same as that with the interspersed legend/narrative chapters: predecessors of the Grimms, development of interest in Sagen, a comparative assessment, and placement of the idea of national identity in the foreground; it is noted that “the Brothers flee into a myth of antiquity” (45). Chapter 5 focuses on the case of legends in Bavaria, chapter 7 on oral versus written legends, while chapters 9 and 11 present legends as a sign (gauge) or numina of the time. Chapter 13 explores all of the above as an “Archimedean Point,” probing everyday stories, fantasies in respect to fact and fiction, and concludes with a challenging commentary on our fascination with the mysterious. All through these chapters Gerndt offers his own methods for scholarly study of legends, and he frequently quotes scholars of the past–not exclusively but often the Brothers Grimm—with something of a tongue-in-cheek statement: “The legend progresses with differing steps and sees with different eyes than those of history.” This is an eighteenth-century version of our now famous wording, “alternate facts.”
I return now to my opening statements: “This book is dicht,” and “the layout is layered.” It is quite apparent that Gerndt’s choice of narratives reflects typical legend topics: mysterious happenings, places, figures, and historical individuals, then followed by twentieth-century legends that focus on modern unusual events such as cows falling from the sky and potential genocide from a chemical agent. Far more significant, in my opinion, is that there are, throughout the book, two subtexts, the first being the very obvious emphasis on establishing a clear historical context for each story. During the postwar years in German—not so much Austrian—academic departments, and coming especially from folklorists at the universities of Kiel and Munich, there was vigorous promotion of presenting in depth the historical, i.e., social, atmosphere of most of the traditional folklore canon: narratives, songs, and most especially, customs. It was not just “seeing with different eyes”; it was an absolute necessity to look at the specific item in its complete environment. This necessity is found in the patterns I suggested above: past history, more recent history, and location in contemporaneous society, in both the legend and the analytical chapters. Helge Gerndt learned well during his student years from his teachers, and continued to learn from his colleagues when he became professor in Munich. In his epilogue he clearly states his gratitude to these German and Austrian fellow folklorists.
More subtle is the author’s placement of his legend study within the modern discipline, no longer called Volkskunde but now for the most part Europäische Ethnologie, or some similar-sounding designation like Kulturanthropologie. Gerndt’s book would have been in the past basic for a seminar or course on legend, but such courses are now rare in Germany and Austria, found today more likely in language and literature departments. This book intertwines these narratives with past and present societies, fulfilling the “Decade of Theoretical Confrontation, Debate, and Reorientation (1967-1977)” when the discipline underwent its call for viewing history from below. In this way Sagen could still be an exciting topic for students who appreciate a history of the discipline, integrating the past with the present.
The epilogue lays out Gerndt’s early curriculum vitae, identifying the individuals he has studied with, who led him to pull together as emeritus all that he learned from them, and how he locates this study in a new and very different academic setting—it would be most useful in a German or Austrian university setting. Finally, a personal recommendation. The text is not such that someone with only a little ability in reading German can easily master. Chapter 13, however, pulls together so much of the preceding chapters that I would recommend (but not volunteer to do it) that it be translated and published in an English-language journal. Students in the US, UK, and elsewhere would profit immensely from it.
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[Review length: 1216 words • Review posted on December 4, 2020]