Lily Weiser-Aall

Lily Weiser-Aall, photo Norsk Folkemuseum , 1965.

Lily Weiser-Aall (born December 18, 1898 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died February 26, 1987 in Oslo ) was an Austro-Norwegian folklorist and ethnologist. She was the first woman to do her habilitation in folklore.

Life

Weiser-Aall was born as Elisabeth Augusta Jeanette Weiser, called Lily, into a Viennese upper-class family. The father was a lawyer and came from immigrants from Styria and Tyrol, the mother was a singer and pianist from Heidelberg.

After graduating from high school, she studied German and Nordic philology at the University of Vienna . In 1920 she went to Sweden to study. From the fifth semester she studied with Rudolf Much , since then she has belonged to the special circle of his students. At Much she did her doctorate in 1922 with a folklore thesis on "Yule Festival, Christmas and Christmas Presents", which was published in 1923.

After graduating, she did an internship at a museum in Hamburg, and from 1923 she worked as a teacher at a secondary school for girls in Vienna. This was followed by stays and trips to Sweden and Italy for meetings and conferences and lectures. In doing so, she made contacts with folklorists Viktor von Geramb and Eugen Fehrle, for example . It was also Fehrle who published her post-doctoral thesis “Old Germanic Young Men and Men”, which was also made by Much in 1926, in his new Heidelberg series “Building blocks for German folklore and religious science” as issue 1 in 1927. This research-historical influential and controversial work was a "contribution to German and Nordic antiquity and folklore". In 1927 she received the Venia legendi for "Germanic antiquity and folklore".

From the summer semester of 1928 readings on "German Folklore" followed, further courses were canceled by her because she took leave of absence to marry the Norwegian philosopher and psychologist Anathon Aall (1867–1943) and moved with him to Oslo in 1929, where she moved henceforth lived. She had three children with Aall.

In 1933 she was awarded the “King's Gold Medal” by the University of Oslo for her contribution “To build up religious symbolic experiences” . In the 1930s she published as a member of the Psychological Institute at the University of Oslo on subjects of experimental psychology. In 1937 she published an Introduction to General Psychological Concepts for Folklore Students and Researchers. The Norwegian Academy of Sciences in Oslo elected Weiser-Aall to its full member in 1937.

In order to be able to look after her children as a widow during the German occupation of Norway in World War II, she became an employee and confidante of the "ancestral inheritance" of the SS in 1943 . There she was assigned to the religious studies seminar of the Reich University of Strasbourg under Otto Huth and was supposed to translate relevant Scandinavian specialist literature into German, such as the writings of the Danish medievalist and folklorist Axel Olrik (1864-1917).

After the Second World War, Weiser-Aall worked as a curator at the Institute for "Norwegian Ethnological Research" until she retired at the end of the 1960s.

Fonts (selection)

• Jul. Christmas Presents and Christmas Tree: A Folklore Study of Their History . Friedrich Andreas Perthes, Stuttgart / Gotha, 1923, DNB 578280663 (dissertation).
• Old Germanic consecration of young men and men's associations: a contribution to German and Nordic antiquity and folklore . Konkordia, Bühl (Baden), 1927, DNB 363037136 (habilitation).
• Folklore and Psychology: An Introduction . de Gruyter, Berlin / Leipzig, 1937, DNB 361860536 .

literature

• Reimund Kvideland: Lily Weiser-Aall 85 years. In: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 86, 1983, pp. 256–261 (with a list of the most important works).
• Christina Niem: Liliy Weiser-Aall (1898–1987). A contribution to the history of science of folklore. In: Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 94, 1998, pp. 25–52 (with bibliography of the writings).
• Elsbeth Wallnöfer: Spiritual, mythological, psychological Lily Weiser-Aall (1898–1987). In: Elsbeth Wallnöfer (Hrsg.): Measure, measure: women in folklore. Böhlau Verlag, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2008, ISBN 978-3-205-77645-1 , pp. 63–78.
• Brigitte Fuchs: Weiser-Aall, Lily. In: Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (ed.): Scientists in and from Austria. Life - work - work. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , pp. 799–801.

Web links

• Entry about Weiser-Aall in the "Norsk Biographisk Leksikon"
• Lily Weiser-Aall , at AGSÖ, University of Graz, May 2015