In July of 1933 Richard Beitl successfully defended his Habilitation on the Mythologie des Kindes (Mythology of the Child) in Berlin, a brief six months after Hitler seized power in Germany. His work was never published and the editors offer two reasons: the accompanying maps were too difficult and costly, and the work did not show sufficient obeisance to the new regime. This study has just been published, sixty-five years after its completion, and as with all studies that were produced in Germany between 1933-1945, during the period of National Socialism, some clarification is necessary.
Throughout the 1980s German scholars addressed their past involvement with National Socialism in numerous publications in an attempt to come to terms with folklorists’ behavior during that period. It soon became clear that the massive amounts of research conducted during the Hitler era lay quietly in archives or in the private holdings of scholars. In the recent past some of these archives have been mined to produce major studies, e.g., Nussbaumer (2001), Petzoldt (2001/2002); Dow (2008). Now we have Richard Beitl’s study, using materials assembled by Wilhelm Mannhardt from the mid-nineteenth century to produce his Monumenta Mythica Germaniae, and from the Atlas der Deutschen Volkskunde (ADV), created in 1928. Both of these studies give one pause, since Mannhardt comes from that mythology-friendly age when items of folklore were thought to have their origins in ancient Germanic vegetation or animal worship. The ADV has been viewed by modern scholars as a justification for a pan-German scholarship that included border regions and language islands where ethnic Germans (called at the time Volksdeutsche) lived and whose homelands were considered to be German territories. Richard Beitl chose to make a comparison for his study between materials collected by Mannhardt in the 1860s and the newly assembled work of the ADV. His work was based on an historic-geographic presentation, but at the same time suggests a certain modernity in its approach, particularly in his lengthy presentation of child psychology. Most significantly, the work utilizes a linguistic-cartographic method developed in the late-nineteenth century by Georg Wenker at the University of Marburg. Linguists were interested in dialect geography while folklorists looked for concentrations and the dissemination of specific items of folklore, in this case the demons and bogeymen that lived in fields of grain, in the forests, and even in private houses. Richard Beitl compares the results of questionnaires assembled in 1865 (150,000 sent out, 2500 returned) with those garnered by the ADV in 1930 (20,000 sent to 10,000 villages and cities, with 13,000 returned on the topic of demons and scary figures). The ADV used an almost verbatim version of the question on such demons as that sent out by Mannhardt. As a young assistant at the University of Bonn, where the ADV was housed, Beitl not only had full access to the questionnaires and the maps being drawn, but he himself was one of those who archived the information and also helped produce the maps. Thus his early pages are devoted to this rather complex methodology.
Two primary chapters detail the so-called Korndämonen (demons found in grain fields) both in their multitudinous forms and their geographical spread, and Kinderscheuchen (bogeymen), including likewise their many names and wide distribution. The first are primarily female and have some few common characteristics, including large breasts of iron or wood that are filled with tar, black milk, or burn the lips when suckled. Many carry a sickle, a stick, a shovel, and all threaten death, kidnapping, and blinding, and disguise themselves by shape-shifting. Along the Slavic boundaries many of these figures have taken on German names, but some retain their original Baba Yaga-like names. There are, however, also male figures; the best known throughout most of the German world is the Bilwis, whose name is still evoked today when grain fields are leveled by the wind or there is some mysterious new path found there. Animals also play a role, particularly the wolf, fox, and bear, but there are even such seemingly innocent creatures as hares, weasels, turtles, snakes and the lowly mouse.
Beitl separates the bogeymen into figures found in nature: hunters, nixes, and the seasonal Nikolaus, Krampus, and Blutschink. For the latter he offers an interesting etymology, associating the word Blut (German: blood) with the Slavic word b?ud (kidnapper) and the schink with the German word for ankle (Schenkel). This creature is particularly known for chopping off the lower legs of children who wander through high grass or grain fields. Then there are the household spirits, like the schwarzer Mann (black man) who is found behind heating ovens, under beds, or in the stalls of barns. Finally there are the homeless and nomadic people, robbers, murderers, Gypsies, Jews, and even the ever-present Schornsteinfeger (chimney sweep), always dressed in black.
In the final chapter Richard Beitl summarizes his findings first and then reviews the literature on child psychology. In his summary he attempts to suggest specific times when these scary figures are particularly dangerous, e.g., night time, spring, Advent, and during the period known as the Zwölften (Twelve Nights), some time between St. Thomas Day on December 21, and Three Kings’ Day on January 6. Closely associated with this time period is the belief that the dead and the spirits are out and about. By using the Mannhardt and the ADV materials Beitl is able to lay out patterns of growth, disappearance, and stability of the grain demons and bogeymen. In his presentation on the psychological development of the child he spends considerable time on Erbfurcht (hereditary fear), suggesting even a palaeo-psychological fear of animals, water, and the unknown in general. Children may indeed learn fear of open spaces (fields) or dark places (under beds), but Beitl then documents the continuance of fears among adults: the number 13, open windows, wolves, etc. We still wear amulets, genuflect, and act out other methods to ward off perceived evil, by fleeing from the devil into a chapel.
Now, in an attempt to justify the publication of this study sixty-five years after it was written, we need to look at Richard Beitl himself. Beitl’s study does not represent work done under the auspices of the Nazi Party; indeed, there is clear evidence in the text that he was not beholden to the “Brown” powers, particularly in the one place where he might have shown his allegiance, his brief treatment of Jews in the section on scary homeless and nomadic people. His statement is worth quoting here at length:
“Since the time of Mannhardt, Judaism in Germany has increased both in number and spread, while proverbial expressions [about them] have decreased relatively in their frequency. There must be a special reason. We may view this as the [result of] a European enlightenment that made room for a Jewish [sense of] internal and external freedom as well as acquiring basic laws that postulated human rights and thereby hindered a further spread of the folk myth of ritual murder of children. This represents a path from the bloody Jew to Nathan the Wise. Just how slowly this path took in the overall consciousness of the folk can be seen in the materials from 1865; that it has taken place, however, we are able to see through our modern cartographic work. We do not believe that the new (political, economic, racial-biology) system, anti-Semitism, will bring any change for the sole reason that the Jew will not be satisfied [simply] with his new historical freedom, since he has for a long time now been actively involved in the social and cultural strata of the folk. Whether he will nevertheless retreat or merely return to his family, only a map of folk-national children’s bogeymen based on a questionnaire sent out in the year 1980 will tell us” (146).
Richard Beitl was a member of the “Battle Union for German Culture,” founded in 1929 but which had its beginnings in the year 1927. It had as its goal “to defend the values of the German essence in the midst of cultural degeneration at the present time and to promote all racially pure expressions of German cultural life,” as well as “to create the prerequisites for an education in school and university which recognized the folk-nation as a first value” (Lixfeld and Dow 1994: 76-77). Richard Beitl has come under vehement criticism for his involvement with this Battle Union, and for his statements about purity in German folklore, e.g., in the main entry on “Volkskunde” in his dictionary of German folklore (1974: 885). Still, he has produced in his Habilitation a work that does not reflect this earlier and later association with German racist ideology. His work points out the difficulty that we have with publishing, and thus making available for a wider readership, archived materials that had their beginning in a most troublesome period for the German-speaking world. Bernd Rieken and Michael Simon have done a careful job in making this study available.
Works cited:
Dow, James R., ed. Zimbrische Gesamtgrammatik: Vergleichende Darstellung der zimbrischen Dialekte, by Bruno Schweizer. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2008.
Erich, Oswald A., and Richard Beitl, eds. Wörterbuch der deutschen Volkskunde. Dritte Auflage. (Kröners Taschenbuchausgabe Bd. 127). Stuttgart: Kröner Verlag, 1974.
Lixfeld, Hannjost, and James R. Dow. Folklore and Fascism: The Reich Institute for German Volkskunde. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Nussbaumer, Thomas. Alfred Quellmalz und seine Südtiroler Forschung (1940-42): eine Studie zur musikalischen Volkskunde unter dem Nationalsozialismus. Bibliotheca musicologica 6: Tirolensia. Innsbruck & Wien: Studien Verlag, 2001.
Petzoldt, Leande, ed. Sagen, Märchen und Schwänke aus Südtirol. Gesammelt von Willi Mai. Band 1 und 2. Innsbruck-Wien: Tyrolia Verlag, 2000/2002.
--------
[Review length: 1606 words • Review posted on July 1, 2008]