German interest in folk culture obtained its greatest impetus from Johann Gottfried Herder, who, however, had a transnational and moral-anthropological interest in his corpus. A nationally German continuation of his Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1774-75) was given by Arnim/Brentanto’s no less canonical ballad collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The texts in this collection were as often gathered from printed sources as from oral recitation, but were nonetheless presented as the living tradition of vernacular literature, unaffected by the fashions and conventions of classical elite culture, and therefore representative of the Germans’ national character.

Des Knaben Wunderhorn was, in fact, the result of a collective interest taken by a convivial circle of like-minded friends and relatives, the Bökendorf Circle; other associates were Brentano’s sisters Bettina (married to Arnim) and Kunigunde (married to Friedrich Carl von Savigny), the Haxthausen brothers, whose Bökendorf estate was the centre of activities; their cousins Jenny and Annette von Droste-Hulshoff; and the Grimm brothers. Their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (“Wonder tales for children and the domestic circle”, commonly known as the “Fairy tales”, 1812) were in fact a prose continuation of the folk song collecting that the Bökendörfers had been pursuing; but the Grimms, though they still drew on printed material (such as Musäus’s Volksmärchen der Deutschen), placed greater emphasis on actual note-taken from oral telling, and relied heavily on an informant named Dorothea Viehmann (who, ironically, had tales in her repertoire that derived from her family’s French-Huguenot origins).

The “fairy tales” were meant less as a sentimental specimen of artless folk culture than as an ethnography of German superstitions and wonder-tales, from which the Grimms would try to reconstruct pre-Christian belief-systems and the German culture of the supernatural. The Grimms took the interest in folk culture out of the convivial, domestic sphere of the Bökendorfers; a first sign of a more associational interest was the questionnaire of the Wollzeiler Gesellschaft (an informal Stammtisch association in Vienna’s street of that name) that Jacob Grimm instigated during his stay in Vienna as member of the Hessian delegation for the Peace Conference there. While the rubrication of fields of interest may have owed something to the questionnaire which the Académie celtique had devised (and which became a template for statistical, demographical and ethnographical surveys – Grimm having been introduced to that association during his Parisian sojourn, as he was introduced to the Wollzeiler in Vienna), his circular letter was to provide all subsequent research on oral literature with a fixed systematization. Ultimately, that systematics, once applied in a positivistic spirit by Finnish folklorists to their very rich oral repertoire, would lead to the Aarne/Thompson motif index of the folktale. In 1930 the Dutch-born, but fervently German philologist Johannes Andreas Jolles (1874–1946; professor at Leipzig and later a card-carrying Nazi) classified the material by genre rather than motif as einfache Formen, in a typology still echoing the questionnaire of the Wollzeiler Gesellschaft: Mythe, Sage, Legende, Märchen, Memorabile, Kasus, Rätsel, Spruch, Witz.

Meanwhile, the underlying mentality of the Grimms had taken their folklore and oral-literature interests by way of the Deutsche Sagen to the Deutsche Mythologie, and would lead to an intimate and long-standing intertwining of mythology and folklore. Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831–1880), a Grimm adept who laboured to establish mythology as an academic discipline and who edited a Zeitschrift für deutsche Mythologie in the 1850s, developed an extensive and thorough, questionnaire-based methodology for folklore fieldwork, but wholly in the service of a mythological motivation. Generally, for the next century popular customs were invariably derived from primeval/tribal ethnographical archetypes, often under the intellectual auspices of völkisch and ethnographical notions of national identity. Those interested in the material aspects of folklore (farmhouses, implements, etc.) also saw them in Grimm-style historicist and nativist terms as the remnants of an ideal, pristine national culture. The approach was usually refined empirically through the use of geographical specifics and the cartographical representation of distribution patterns. Mannhardt’s circulation of many thousands of questionnaires heralded an enterprise which eventually culminated in the Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde project (whose 4.5 million database records have so far generated only intermediary progress reports and incidental map publications). Wilhelm Peßler conceived a Plan einer großen deutschen Ethno-Geographie in 1907; his Handbuch der deutschen Volkskunde (1935-38), breathing the racial essentialism of the times, likewise strongly relies on cartographical visualizations of distribution patterns.

An increasing academic systematization, but less tainted with ethnicist or mythological preconceptions, took place in the field of folk music. The choirmaster Ludwig Christian Erk (1807–1883) collected some 20,000 popular songs, including the melodies, from whose variants he attempted to extrapolate the original versions. A first volume of his Deutscher Liederhort appeared in 1856; after his death, the book was re-edited and completed by Franz Magnus Böhme (1827–1898), appearing in 3 vols in 1893-94. Böhme followed through with his Volksthümliche Lieder der Deutschen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (1895). The Erk-Böhme Liederhort systematized its corpus thematically, ranging across occasional topics like bridal songs or drinking songs; the most nationally-themed section was the first one, Sagenlieder, starting in Grimm-style with Nachklänge der Göttersage (Zauber- und Märchenlieder), Heldensagen and Ritter- und Räubersagen before addressing more quotidian themes.

The poetic and narrative materials that inspired the Romantics meanwhile generated a strong literary backwash: the Lied and the fairy tale as a Romantic poetic form flourished in a symbiosis between creative and popular literature – witness the Märchen written by Brentano and, later, by Hauff, or Uhland’s Alte hoch- und niederdeutsche Volkslieder (2 vols, 1844-45) – while inspiring philological enquiry from Johann Gustav Büsching’s Volksagen, Märchen und Legenden (1812) to Talvj’s Versuch einer geschichtlichen Charakteristik der Volkslieder germanischer Nationen (1840). Especially the genre of local legends became a popular literary genre, where traditional tales and freshly invented ones merged. In the case of picturesque tourist destinations like the Rhine valley, Rheinsagen also functioned as a form of poetic travelogue, narrativizing and mythologizing the landscape for the benefit of Romantic tourists. A certain type of rustic tale like Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche also played into this taste for homely, regionally- and community-set narratives, feeding eventually into the genre of the Dorfgeschichte and Heimatidylle. Folktales and Märchen remained a prominent part of German middle-class culture, with the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen changing from a scholarly publication to a family book, penetrating, with its Biedermeier illustrations, deep from the public into the private sphere, its repertoire re-oralized as domestic bedtime stories into a truly nationwide narrative reservoir. While this was more than just a German phenomenon (witness the global afterlife of these Märchen in Disney form), they did play a nation-affirming function in Germany, where they were cherished as, and in the process became, precisely the national-demotic heirlooms for which the Grimms had taken them. They were also thematized in the paintings of Moritz von Schwind and in the genre of opera, from Weber’s Freischütz to Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel.