Rebellion, Community and Custom in Early Modern Germany

Folklore, April, 2005 by David M. Hopkin

In many ways Schindler is a folklore-friendly historian. Many historians have plundered the folklore archive for historical examples; far fewer have followed the discipline's development. Schindler is not only thoroughly versed in the recent literature, he has contributed to many folklore journals. What he objects to in folklorists is their emphasis on culture as a socially unifying force, the emanation of a holistic community. This is most obvious in his polemic with D.-R. Moser concerning carnival. For Moser, carnival was primarily a religious festival, when the Church permitted the brief enactment of the Devil's reign on earth merely to accentuate the return to divine order at Easter. The Church inspired, or at least tolerated, carnival customs because of their pedagogical value. Schindler, however, sees a Church besieged by a celebration of the material, of bodily pleasure, and of festive disorder. Whereas the folklorist Moser sees the elites and the masses unified through culture, the social historian sees only conflicts expressed in culture. Paradoxically, Moser's position is the result of a more historically sensitive approach among folklorists, pioneered by such scholars as Wolfgang Bruckner (another of Schindler's targets). Folklore should not be seen as a closed corpus, but as the product of a historical mediation between social groups. By insisting on the autonomy of popular culture, it is Schindler and not the folklorists who owes most to romanticism.

David M. Hopkin, University of Glasgow, Scotland