Wilhelm Mannhardt

Wilhelm Mannhardt

Johann Wilhelm Emanuel Mannhardt (born March 26, 1831 in Friedrichstadt , † December 25, 1880 in Danzig ) was a German folklorist , mythologist and librarian .

Youth and Studies

Mannhardt was the son of a Mennonite preacher who accepted a position in Danzig in 1836. The young Mannhardt suffered from a severe curvature of the back and asthma from birth , which resulted in a lifelong heart condition. From 1842 to 1851 he attended grammar school, but often had to interrupt school due to illness and take private lessons. During his school days he was already very interested in folk traditions, in which he was encouraged by his great-grandmother and mother. The great myths ( Odyssey , Edda , Nibelungenlied and Ossian ) also inspired him. Grimm's mythology was to guide him. During his high school years he collected "pagan antiquities" - or what he thought of this - from the vernacular to enter this way into the thoughts and feelings of the rural population, because in this layer, he believed, like other mythologist of romance , nor to find the unadulterated spirit of the ancient Germans alive.

At Easter 1851 Mannhardt enrolled at the University of Berlin and studied Germanic languages, Sanskrit and history in the spirit of Jacob Grimm . Two years later he moved to Tübingen, where he in 1854 with a thesis on the old Germanic king names his doctorate . He was already in contact with colleagues such as Jacob Grimm , Karl Müllenhoff , Karl Simrock , Ernst Moritz Arndt and Johann Ludwig Uhland . Between 1853 and 1859 he was in charge of the editing of the magazine for German mythology founded by Johann Wilhelm Wolf , who died young . This magazine not only contained works on German legends and folklore, but also studies on the werewolf belief and the vampire myth . Mannhardt earned his living as a private tutor in upper-class and noble houses in Berlin and Silesia .

Mannhardt completed his habilitation in Berlin in 1857. Only the first volume of his habilitation thesis was printed in 1858. Even the professional audience was confused by the abundance and complexity of his thoughts, and this prevented the success in the book market, even though the literature on ancient Germanic myths in themselves educated middle class certainly enjoyed great popularity. His portrayal of the Nordic gods was also limited to the first volume, which appeared in 1860. In the winter semester of 1859/60, Mannhardt read free of charge about German mythology as a private lecturer at the University of Halle . Here he suffered a collapse in health. Since there was no long-term prospect of a permanent position as a full professor and his health deteriorated, he moved in with his parents in 1862 and in 1863 took a position as librarian in the Danzig City Library, which remained his main place of work until his death. In the same year he published his only publication in which he was not devoted to folklore but to a political question. In view of the impending war over Schleswig-Holstein , he demanded the right to conscientious objection for his religious community .

His first works were still very much influenced by the less critical spirit of Jacob Grimm. Due to the influence of Müllenhof, he began to systematically - especially mythical customs in agriculture - to collect and evaluate. In order to get the necessary information, he used questionnaires ("Request to all friends of popular life to inquire about the old agricultural customs and harvest customs"; Danzig 1865), interviewed teachers, pastors and, last but not least, soldiers from various regions of the empire and the adjacent areas. Mannhardt mainly traveled to the areas bordering the empire to the north and east for his studies. In spite of his physical handicap, Mannhardt was an avid collector of legends and myths, folklorist and religious researcher in one person, so to speak, and his rich collections of material are still not completely exhausted. His work on the Baltic world of gods did not appear until 1936 and was difficult to access even for experts, as the linguist Mannhardt presented all the quotations with which he supported his theses in the original, i.e. also in the Baltic languages ​​and in Old Russian.

Mannhardt was a pioneer of the comparative method, "since it must lead to erroneous results if one restricts oneself to the study of the folk traditions of a single country". Therefore, he also devoted himself to the mythology of Northern Europe and the Baltic States .

The first folklore questionnaire campaign

In his system of thought he broke through Grimm's idea of ​​a static, that is, unhistorical world of myths, which “as an immovably fixed system has extended from antiquity to the present day”, and introduced the principle of development, the constant change, refraction and superimposition of old materials taken into account throughout the Indo-European tradition. Such an approach, however, required a much broader material base than the Brothers Grimm had used. Mannhardt demanded that parallel to the Monumenta Germaniae Historica a similar compilation and T. "Monumenta Mythica Germaniae" should be published in which every single folk tradition, legend and myth " Gau bei Gau, Ort bei Ort" is written down and as far as possible in the Past should be traced. To do this, he developed a questionnaire with 35 questions. In 1865 he sent 150,000 copies of it all over Germany and the neighboring countries. Mannhardt recorded a low response rate of only 2,500 copies, but some with very detailed answers. It was the first large-scale folklore questionnaire campaign. It wasn't until the late 1920s that a similar project was conceived, the Atlas of German Folklore , but this time with an adequately endowed budget and a corresponding workforce. Mannhardt's goal was to free mythology from the suspicion that it was based only on romantic speculations, and to establish it as a serious empirical science in the age that was increasingly oriented towards the exact natural sciences .

As a starting point, Mannhardt had initially selected the harvest customs, which are rooted in the most ancient times, but which he saw "more and more disappearing in the pleasing progress of rational agriculture", as he wrote in his introductory questionnaire. During his travels to Norway , Sweden , Holland , the Baltic States and Russia , he always had the questionnaires with him. During the Wars of Unification (1864, 1866 and 1870–71) he also visited prison camps in the vicinity of Danzig to submit his questionnaires to the Danes, Bavarians , Austrians and French interned there . The Prussian Ministry of Culture financed the company with a grant, but this was not enough to cover the costs of his research work.

As the first result of the questionnaire evaluation , he published the writings Roggenwolf and Roggenhund and Die Korndämonen by 1867 . The first volume of his forest and field cults appeared in 1875, and the second volume followed in 1877. Since no one except Mannhardt had such an encyclopedic overview, this work could not be adequately reviewed by any specialist colleague .

Mannhardt's search for the connections between the living folk tradition on the one hand and early historical doctrines of gods on the other hand, despite growing dissenting voices, largely determined custom and belief research well into the 20th century. Above all, the Briton James Frazer stressed that his main work, The Golden Bough ( The Golden Bough ), without the research Mannhardt over the forest and field cults would have been unthinkable. In this respect, Mannhardt remained stuck with the " mythological school " that came from the Romantic era . On the other hand, as folklorist Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann has shown, Mannhardt's research direction was very modern in its approach, because, in contrast to other folklorists and mythologists, he committed to empirical field research and the comparative method.

Last years of life

The hoped-for recognition and the associated academic and social position did not materialize, and so in Mannhardt's late writings there are clear signs of personal bitterness, sometimes paired with outbreaks of German nationalism , for example through superstition , and sometimes hateful and bitter attacks on those of rural population so revered to him before. The Kashubians in particular , the Slavic-speaking ethnic group in the Gdansk area, were the target of his attacks.

In 1880 Mannhardt died of a heart attack.

Fonts

• (together with Johann Wilhelm Wolf) Contributions to German mythology. Dieterich, Göttingen a. Leipzig 1852 ( full text )
• De nominibus Germanorum propriis quae ad regnum referuntur, observationis specimen. Dissertation, Berlin 1857 ( full text )
• Germanic myths. Researches. Habilitation thesis, Berlin 1858 ( full text )
• About vampirism. In: Journal for German Mythology and Morals, Vol. 4 (1859), pp. 259–282. Reprinted in: Wilhelm Mannhardt, Jan Ignáz Hanuš: About vampirism. Ed. And edit. from. Detlef Weigt. Superbia, Leipzig 2004, ISBN 3-937554-01-7 .
• The practical consequences of superstition with special reference to the province of Prussia. German Time and Disputes VII.97. Berlin 1878. ( full text )
• The gods of the German and Nordic peoples. Berlin 1860. Part 1 (only this one published) ( full text )
• The freedom of defense of the old Prussian Mennonites. Memorandum. Marienburg 1863.
• Christmas blossoms in custom and legend. Duncker, Berlin 1864. Reprint: The story of the Christmas festival. Leipzig 2010
• Rye Wolf and Rye Dog. Contribution to Germanic morality. Danzig 1865; 2nd probably edition Danzig 1866,
• Klytia . Collection of commonly understood scientific lectures, No. 239.Berlin 1875.
• The grain demons. Contribution to Germanic morality. Berlin 1868. ( full text )
• Forest and field cults . 2 parts. Berlin 1875/1877 (full texts: Vol. 1 , Vol. 2 ). Reprint: Olms, Hildesheim 2002, ISBN 3-487-11479-8 , ISBN 3-487-11480-1 . 2nd edition by W. Heuschkel, Berlin 1904/1905 ( full text )
• The tree cult of the Teutons and their neighboring tribes. Berlin 1875.

After his death appeared:

• Poems. With a life sketch of the poet. Danzig 1881.
• Mythological research. From the estate ed. by Hermann Patzig (= sources and research on the linguistic and cultural history of the Germanic peoples. H. 51). Strasbourg 1884. ( full text )
• Letto-Prussian doctrine of gods (= magazine of the Latvian Literary Society. 21). Riga 1936 (reprint 1971).

literature

• Leander Petzoldt : fear of demons and trust in God. For the history and research of our folk tales . Darmstadt 1989, pp. 48-51.
• Wilhelm Scherer :  Mannhardt, Wilhelm . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1884, pp. 203-205.
• Karl Scheuermann: Wilhelm Mannhardt. Its significance for comparative research on religion. Meyer, Gießen 1933 (= dissertation, University of Bonn, 1933).
• Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann : Harvest usage in the rural working world of the 19th century. Based on the Mannhardt survey in Germany from 1865. Elwert, Marburg 1965 (= dissertation, University of Marburg, 1963).

Web links

Wikisource: Wilhelm Mannhardt  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Mannhardt in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Aldis Putelis: Latvian mythology. In: Encyclopedia Mythica Online. 1997/2002, accessed May 16, 2012.