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 Speaking about Experience: A Cultural Scientific Analysis of Consciousness in Narration, he offers a broad survey of folk narrative and contemporary narrative research in a format that lends itself to usage as a textbook.
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 homo narrans, and narrative transmission across generations. The second chapter, “Telling Atmospheres,” reflects on developments in narratology since the departure from narrowly text-centered studies of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Although it receives brief mention, performance-centered folkloristics in the U.S. is characterized as an “extreme form” of inquiry that sees the world as a stage and emphasizes the social function of speech in specific narrative situations to the neglect of other considerations. Lehmann calls for greater scholarly attention to the influence of mood or “atmosphere” on subjective life experiences and social situations. He credits several philosophers (for example, Hermann Schmitz´s 1969 The Philosophy of Feelings) with important work on the concept of atmosphere and in identifying the influence that feelings or atmosphere have on aesthetic perception. He also praises Linda Dégh´s Folktales and Society for probing the emotional and social conditions in which ideal narrative storytelling situations are created. Other examples discussed in this chapter include the numinous atmosphere of legends and the particular atmosphere of a landscape or region.
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 Wochenschau (the weekly newsreel produced by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry and shown before feature films in movie theaters) provided material for everyday storytelling on the home front. While some newsreels tried to combat rumor about losses on the Eastern front with happy images of men at war, others were designed to incite hatred for the enemy among the civilian population with reports of “murderous crimes of the Bolsheviks.” It is interesting to learn that the Propaganda Ministry was encouraged to create time for “spontaneous storytelling” following the newsreel on the assumption that the intended messages from the newsreels could be more effective and work their way into “mouth propaganda” if people were encouraged to talk with others about the newsreel before the start of the feature film.
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 Volkskunde) for failing to adequately define what constitutes “Europe” or produce politically relevant research for EU institutions and EU-specific problems. It is regrettable that the author ends the book on this sharply sour note, for in doing so, the last chapter misses one last opportunity to advance the ostensible goal of the book: the analysis of consciousness and its origins in varieties of human experience.
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[Review length: 980 words • Review posted on September 17, 2014]