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History of the Marburg Institute for European Ethnology and Studies of Culture and History

The founding of the Institute in 1960 also marked a departure of the discipline towards new methodological and theoretical orientations, towards critical distancing and finally thorough reappraisal of the burdened past. In 1959, Gerhard Heilfurth (1909-2006) was appointed to a chair of German studies and folklore in Marburg. When he founded the institute the following year, he chose the name "Institute for Central European Folk Research" in order to express the scientific claim of the subject with the research and to overcome the "German folklore" of Germanistic character with the concept of Central Europe. He was able to win Ina-Maria Greverus (1929-2017), who had already been in Marburg as a student of Gottfried Henssen's and was in charge of the narrative archive, as a collaborator for the establishment of the institute and the work on the mining saga catalog, with which he established his mining culture research. Heilfurth's orientation toward American cultural anthropology was taken up productively by Greverus after her habilitation in 1970 and her call to Frankfurt in the establishment of the Institute for Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University. Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann (1918-1993) came to the Marburg Institute from Berlin in 1960, where she habilitated in 1965 with a critical revision of the first folkloric enquiry of 1863. As the last dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, she helped to shape the university reform from 1970, which enabled the social science profile of the subject with the Department of Social Sciences: social culture of the family and childhood, custom research as an analysis of social interaction and normative behavior, interethnics as a process of cultural exchange were thematic fields in teaching and research projects, among others in Hungary and Romania. Hans-Friedrich Foltin (1937-2013) developed media research as a central focus of the study structure. In 1974, the renaming to "Institute for European Ethnology" aimed at a further opening of the subject, not in the sense of an "Ethnology of Europe", but very much at overcoming borders, including borders of perception.

Since its foundation and beyond the opening of the specialist perspectives, the institute also fulfills tasks of regional research: research on Jewish cultural history in Hesse, on regional minority and migration history, on building and housing culture, nutrition, times of need and holidays. Peter Assion (1941-1994) brought with his appointment in 1981 the name addition "cultural research", the development of a research project on the Hessian American emigration in the 19th century as well as the worker culture research. Starting in 1985, Martin Scharfe shaped the cultural studies profile of the institute, which was also anchored in the name with the renaming to "Institute for European Ethnology/Cultural Studies" in 1995, and sharpened the focus on the ruptures, misunderstandings, errors in cultural processes. Christel Köhle-Hezinger contributed perspectives on biographical transitions in 1995-1998, Harm-Peer Zimmermann cultural theoretical approaches as well as modern approaches to Grimm research in 1999-2012, Ina Merkel aspects of the production and social impact of media images as well as on culture and society in the GDR in 2000-2021, Karl Braun views on contemporary history, memorial work, on culture and history in the Czech Republic as well as on Mediterranean cultures in 2002-2020 to the research foci of the institute. The history of the institute thus demonstrates the broad, diverse possibilities offered by our subject: to deal with small, everyday things in order to be able to understand the large dimensions of cultural processes in an exemplary way.