Folklorists in Public: Reflections on Cultural Brokerage in the United States and Germany

Abstract

Having attended the first German-American folklore conference in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1988, where public folklore was nowhere to be seen, I am particularly struck by the divide that this topic has opened up at the Bad Homburg Symposium ten years later. That divide looks something like this. While Volkskunde has a long institutional history and bad conscience about how the discipline was instrumentalized in the past, American folklore has a short institutional history and optimism in the potential for a critical public folklore practice to serve progressive ends. Public folklore in the United States is flourishing, for the time being. It has never existed in this form in German-speaking countries, nor is it likely to emerge in the foreseeable future. To read the Bad Homburg symposium proceedings is to see a faultline between the Volkskundler and folklorists gradually emerge and coalesce.1 The struggle to find a common language and common ground reveals just how incommensurable the two situations are. They cannot be mapped onto one another. The terms do not translate. Different historical experiences have produced different dispositions to the issues at hand. It is the aim of this afterword to reflect on the divide.

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