The Nazification of an Academic Discipline [antikvár]

FOREWORD"The infamy of scholars who went astray."Nathan Altermant II t1This is a book about the infamy of scholars and scholarship; it is also a book about the restoration of the moral foundation of knowledge. The epigraph for this foreword comes from "Where Will We Carry the Shame" by Israeli poet Nathan Alterman (1910-1970); this poem was composed as part of the poetic cycle Feast of Beggars in 1940, and was published a year later. Largely symbolic, the poems in the cycle vibrate with the anxiety and fear that gripped the Jewish population of what was then Palestine as war crouched at the gate. The poem "Where Will We Carry the Shame," like other poems in this cycle, resonates with topical concerns yet transcends them. Infamy acquires existential dimensions. It is every single humiliation, defeat, and mistake that people experience individually and collectively in the course of their lives and the personal and social burden of their sum total. At times, Alterman anthropomorphizes infamy the way the Book of Proverbs treats wisdom, but while wisdom is elusive, often escaping those who must seek its company, shame is always present, oppressive without respite, because infamy is the indignity that we bring upon ourselves through our own actions.The essays in the present volume concern moral and scholarly responsibility, and the attempts to avoid responsibility when history and hindsight prove people wrong. They do so by accounting and analyzing decisions made and actions taken by German folklore scholars under the Third Reich. These are studies in history and meta-history, providing accurate accounts of events, actions, and people, and at the same time subjecting them to evaluation and judgment. The folklore scholars who collaborated with the Nazis made deliberate and conscious choices. Under the same circumstances there were others who did not take the path toward infamy and who, at great risk to their lives, chose to take a stand against National Socialism rather than adjust and gain personal benefits from sham scholars, politicians, and ideologues. A dictum in "The Chapters of Our Fathers," a mishnaic tractate from the second century, states, "Judge not thy fellow-man until thou hast reached his place" {Pirkei Aboth 2:4). "Place" in this admonition has a broader meaning than location, and is a metaphor for social, political, and moral situation. The dictum is generally wise and generous, espousing cultural and historical relativism, but in this particular case it is incumbent upon us to make judgment. The Nazi collaborators eroded the scholarly and moral foundation of the discipline of folklore. The restoration of folklore as a science requires a fresh moral and scholarly start.ix