Boundary breaking and compliance: Will -Erich Peuckert and 20th century German Volkskunde

What is an individual\u27s role in shaping disciplinary history? How does a scholar produce knowledge, caught between personal interest, academic customs, media attention, and societal pressures? And what are the repercussions of conducting scholarship during a time of political unrest? Archival research grounds this dissertation which resides at the interface between folkloristics and Volkskunde and disciplinary history. It examines these questions by thoroughly analyzing the case-study of Will-Erich Peuckert (1895-1969), the partially marginalized German Volkskundler often credited with saving the discipline of Volkskunde in Germany after World War II. Peuckert, a controversial figure, has faded out of recent interest in disciplinary historiography, in part because his research interests in the occult and in belief studies are now considered to be stagnant and taboo. Yet his contributions are nevertheless a fascinating insight into a discipline grappling with an ideological burden which came to a head during World War II, but which has foundations that go back much further. While Peuckert is known for his in-depth scholarship on folk narratives, his major contributions include writing a book which expanded the concept of folk, actively resisting the Nazis during World War II, attempting to internationalize the discipline, and experimenting with witchcraft. These research areas were often in tension with a more stagnant discipline which, after World War II, was more focused on static analyses using collected data from the past. This dissertation, underscoring the dialectic between new research and a healing discipline, discusses the way in which Peuckert at one and the same time conformed to a set of disciplinary frameworks and rules, while at the same time breaking boundaries and making new advances for the field. The way in which one individual interacted with and ultimately shaped a discipline in crisis during a time of crisis is ultimately at stake