Four volumes in library binding with stamps and stickers present.

From Bonn University

The Atlas of German Folklore (ADV) is the largest long-term humanities project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG; formerly the Emergency Association of German Science) in the 20th century. Between 1928 and 1984, the respective project leaders and their staff documented statements about "folk culture" using a total of eight questionnaires, analyzed these statements, and mapped their geographical distribution. The aim of this folklore project was to define cultural areas and boundaries, specifically—at least during the interwar period—within the entire German Reich as it existed in 1920, including Austria, as well as the German-speaking territories of what was then Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland).

Towards the end of the 19th century, linguistic projects emerged in Western Europe that attempted to define a static relationship between "people," space, and language through cartographic studies of dialect distribution. Subsequently, at the beginning of the 20th century, the demand for a "comprehensive German folklore" (Peßler 1931: 3) gained traction. Based on the impetus of dialect research and the emerging theory of cultural movements, the Bonn School for Cultural Area Research was founded. This followed the establishment in the early 1920s of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Historical Regional Studies of the Rhineland at the University of Bonn. Strongly influenced by these developments, the Emergency Association (Notgemeinschaft) established the central office of the ADV (Association of German Folklore Societies) in the Berlin Palace in 1928, based on planned research projects of the Association of German Folklore Societies. This office was conceived as a "large-scale, spatially oriented data collection project on [German] folk culture" (Wiegelmann & Cotter 1968: 189). In addition, 35 regional offices were established in the survey regions, from where the questionnaires for the first five surveys between 1929 and 1935 were sent to a total of 20,000 schools. These questionnaires consisted of 243 sets of questions with numerous sub-questions. With the support of informants in the schools, the staff of the central office collected data on topics including daily life, agricultural work, customs and traditions, festivals and rituals, diet, and religious beliefs. The original responses were sent to Berlin, while copies were sent to the respective regional offices. These offices managed the decentralized distribution of the questionnaires and the return of the reply cards, as well as maintaining contact with informants.

From the 1930s onward, the responses were analyzed cartographically , and the first results were published between 1937 and 1939. The transition from a national to a nationalist scientific movement appears relatively short under the following circumstances: Following the Gleichschaltung (coordination) of the project between 1933 and 1934 due to the Nazi dictatorship—evident in certain sets of questions—the SS Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage) took over the project in 1938. Due to the developments of the Second World War, the central office was relocated to Frankfurt am Main in 1939. After the war, starting in 1954, the DFG (German Research Foundation) proposed its re-establishment at the University of Bonn under the direction of Matthias Zender, which resulted in the transfer of all archival material (including more than four million reply cards) from Frankfurt to Bonn. Between 1965 and 1970, Zender had three further questionnaires "on rural life around 1900" sent out and analyzed. He published the results himself, including maps, as well as new installments containing analyses of surveys from the interwar period. In 1984, the German Research Foundation (DFG) discontinued funding for the ADV project, citing the fact that some of the collected data remained unprocessed. Certainly, the taboo surrounding the topic of "space" within the "reform of folklore studies into a science of modern contemporary culture, accompanied by ideological debates" (Schmoll 2009: 235), also played a role.