The Beautiful Blue Danube and the Accursed Black Mountain Wreath: German and Austrian Kulturpolitik of Knowledge on Southeast Europe and Albania

Abstract

In this paper I aim to contribute to the debate about hegemonic relations between the West European “core” and Southeast European “margins”, by showing the links between mutually challenged and engendered quasi-anthropological traditions in the totalitarian projects of nation-building and empire-building. New aspects of a continuous resonance will be addressed regarding a politically instrumentalized German-writing tradition of Volks- and Volkerkunde grounded in Herderian Romanticism and the imperial ambitions of the nineteenth century. In the course of discussion, the successive German traditions of National-Socialist Volkskunde and Communist East German Ethnographie, until the revised tradition of Europaische Ethnologie in the 1990s, are shown to operate from a historicist tradition rather than from a critical tradition as a reflexive successor to former Volkskunde. In this discussion particular attention is given to contextualizing the historical and current production of knowledge by the German and Austrian “West” on a Southeast European and Albanian culture, which is reduced to its archaic or pre-modern “traditions” and its specific or antiquated “mentalities”.