Karl Felix Wolff

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Karl Felix Wolff ( Italian also Carlo Felice Wolff, born May 21, 1879 in Karlovac ; † November 25, 1966 in Bozen , South Tyrol ) was an autodidactic South Tyrolean folklorist .

Life

Wolff was born in Croatia as the son of an Austrian officer and a mother who came from the Non Valley . Because of the Romansh language spoken in the Non Valley , Wolff is occasionally presented as the son of a Ladin woman . Wolff did not have a state school education, but was raised by his father. He was a journalist by profession.

From 1881 until his death in 1966 he lived in Bolzano.

Wolff was politically close to the Pan-Germans for a long time and published in the Pan-German papers . In dealing with Italian irredentism , he refused to allow the Italian part of Tyrol ( Trentino ) to join Italy and worked in this sense in the radically German national magazine Tiroler Wehr, from which he withdrew when its articles against Italy became too violent for him . In 1908 he took the view with regard to Trentino that it was "entirely justified to expect German tourists to prefer those inns that belong to German-friendly Ladins". Already early and for a long time he occupied himself with race theory and published the monograph race theory in the series of the Mannus library edited by Gustav Kossinna in 1927 . New thoughts on anthropology, politics, economics, people care and ethics . Until 1932 he also published articles in the magazine Mannus , but with the rise of National Socialism he was ousted from there because of his too " pacifist " attitude.

During the time of the National Socialist occupation of South Tyrol , Wolff headed the “Volkstumsforschung” department in 1943/45 on behalf of the Supreme Commissariat stationed in Bolzano. He also published in the Nazi journal Bozner Tagblatt .

Honors

In 1957 he became an honorary member of the University of Innsbruck and in 1960 he was the first to receive the Walther von der Vogelweide Prize from the South Tyrolean Cultural Institute . A school is named after him in the Rentsch district of Bolzano .

meaning

As a folklorist, Wolff was self-taught due to a lack of proper schooling , which is why his works were critically examined by the guild during his lifetime.

His lasting merit is to have collected and published Ladin legends before the First World War , which, as Wolff himself bitterly discovered, would have been forgotten a few years later or could no longer be completed because there were no longer any sources. Wolff concentrated on legends that seemed typical of Ladin to him, while he largely ignored those Ladin legends that were also told similarly elsewhere. Overall, Wolff has significantly enriched the material on South Tyrolean legends .

 Since then, his approach of " reconstructing " the mythical material found when it appeared to him to be contradictory and incomplete has met with criticism - as with Ulrike Kindl . Science is faced with the task of reversing such subjective edits.

plant

  • Monograph of the Dolomite Road and the area it traverses. A manual for travelers in the Dolomites with tourist, historical and scientific explanations. Bolzano 1908.
  • Dolomite legends. Legends and traditions, fairy tales and stories of the Ladin and German Dolomite inhabitants. With two excursions, Berner Klause and Lake Garda. Unchanged reprint of the sixteenth edition published in 1989 by the Tyrolia publishing house. Verlagsanstalt Athesia Bozen 2003 [1913], ISBN 88-8266-216-0 ( South Tyrolean sagas ; limited preview in the Google book search).

literature

  • Ulrike Kindl : Critical reading of the Dolomite sagas by Karl Felix Wolff. Volume I: Individual Legends. Istitut Ladin "Micurà de Rü" . San Martin de Tor 1983, DNB 890933146 .
  • Ulrike Kindl: Critical reading of the Dolomite sagas by Karl Felix Wolff. Volume II: Legends Cycles - The stories from the empire of the Fanes. Istitut Ladin "Micurà de Rü". San Martin de Tor 1997, ISBN 88-8171-003-X .
  • Ulrike Kindl: The narrated Dolomites. Karl Felix Wolff as a poet and travel writer in the service of the early tourism promotion of the Dolomites region. In: Ladinia . Volume XLIII [= 43] (2019), pp. 47-78 ( micura.it ).
  • Michael Wedekind: From mythical creatures and leader races. The Tyrolean alpine researcher Karl Felix Wolff. In: Messages from the Brenner archive . 37, 2018, ISSN  1027-5649 , pp. 115–150, urn : nbn: at: at-ubi: 4-5842 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pan-German sheets. Communications from the Pan-German Association. Berlin, 4.1894 - 49.1939, ZDB -ID 519208-0 .
  2. ^ Michael Wedekind: Tourism and Nation. On the politicization of travel in the late Habsburg Monarchy . In: Hannes Obermair u. a. (Ed.): Regional civil society in motion. Festschrift for Hans Heiss (=  Cittadini innanzi tutto ). Folio Verlag, Vienna-Bozen 2012, ISBN 978-3-85256-618-4 , p. 68–93, here: p. 88, note 4 .
  3. ↑ Michael Wedekind: From mythical creatures and leader races. The Tyrolean alpine researcher Karl Felix Wolff. In: Messages from the Brenner archive . 37, 2018, ISSN  1027-5649 , pp. 115–150, here p. 137, urn : nbn: at: at-ubi: 4-5842 .
  4. ↑ Bozner Tagblatt. Edition of October 7, 1944, p. 3: Article Seis and his heralds ( tessmann.it , State Library "Dr. Friedrich Teßmann" ).
  5. ↑ In Kindl's publications on Wolff there are also numerous biographical data.
personal data
SURNAME Wolff, Karl Felix
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wolff, Carlo Felice
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South Tyrolean folklorist
DATE OF BIRTH May 21, 1879
PLACE OF BIRTH Karlstadt
DATE OF DEATH November 25, 1966
Place of death Bolzano