Folksong Research and Ethnic Trauma in the Czech Lands

Scientizing National Difference: Czech Folksong Research at the Turn of the Century

Folksong collection in the Czech lands began as a nineteenth-century nationalist project, as it did elsewhere, but shifted to reflect ethnonationalist thinking by the turn of the twentieth century; that is, more than celebrating Czechness, folksong collection became part of a larger mission to teach an imagined Czech “people”—usually rural and lower-income communities—how to be Czech. (Nationalist thought was, of course, driven by the middle and upper classes.) This conflation of ethnonationalism and scholarship met with complementary shifts in period legislature so that, more than celebrating a Czech nation, the Ethnological Institute upon its founding was charged with scientifically proving its existence.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, rural communities in the Czech lands would have expected members to be bilingual; children were sent on summer- or year-long student exchanges (Kindertauschhandl) between Czech- and German-speaking families to facilitate fluency.⁷ Marriages were often “mixed”; individuals deliberately avoided ethnic alignment; and still others—labeled “amphibians” by Czech nationalists and, later, Nazi administrators—moved easily between the Czech and German languages.⁸ But from as early as the 1880s, nationalist policy-makers and researchers moved to draw supposedly clear boundaries between Czech and German ethnicities, an impulse eventually codified in the 1905 Moravian Compromise.⁹ Under this legislation, Moravia’s 2.5 million inhabitants were required to register exclusively with either Czech or German political parties, rather than moving freely within an open political landscape. A particular clause within this legislature also granted school boards the right to “reclaim” Czech students from German schools, should students’ German language skills be deemed insufficient; bilingual children and children of mixed parents were “claimed” and “reclaimed” by Czech and German school boards through the beginning of the twentieth century as a consequence. A 1910 update further determined that students might attend German schools regardless of their language proficiency, as long as they were, in fact, German—at least according to supposedly objective third parties. Rather than proficiency exams or parents’ self-identification, nationality in these instances would be determined through investigations of parents’ social lives, political affiliations, language use, reading habits, and ancestry—modes of investigation aligned with then-emerging ethnological research like folksong collection.

That folksong research at the turn of the century was deeply political will not come as a surprise. Scholars including Pamela Potter, Ronald Radano, Philip Bohlman, Celia Applegate, Klára Móricz, and Julie Brown have all thoughtfully surveyed these developments in their own studies, exposing their interrelationships with German nationalism, specimen culture, and Darwinian assumptions.¹⁰ A 2006 article by Albrecht Schneider is particularly helpful here for its focus on comparative musicology (later, ethnomusicology) and systematic musicology—the modes of research that most prominently shaped nineteenth-century studies in Czech music and later characterized the work of Ethnological Institute members.¹¹ Schneider explains that comparative musicology’s focus on discovering and mapping “ethnographic parallels,” or musical traces, across nations and through time combined with systematic musicology’s attention to the physical measurement of subjective listening experience had the potential to be (and did sometimes become) dangerous.¹² If the morphology of ethnographic parallels made it possible to identify “progressive” communities, for example, then it was also possible to identify “primitive” ones. And if measurable listening experience is a part of an individual’s psychology, then those of limited hearing (among other possibilities) might be rendered less psychologically able, or, at its most extreme, less human. In either case, music research was not necessarily a study unto itself during much of the nineteenth century, but one of several interdisciplinary methods towards classifying humans—their ethnicity, biology, and possibly even worthiness.

Prague’s Charles University (then Charles-Ferdinand University) was exceptionally well positioned to facilitate ethnonationalist and separatist research, especially in music. The university had become the first institution in Central Europe to establish a department for musicology, in 1869 (the neighboring cities of Vienna and Berlin followed in 1870 and 1875, respectively), and in 1882 the university divided into separate German and Czech institutions, the Deutsche Karl-Ferdinands-Universität and the Česká univerzita Karlo-Ferdinandova. The German university named Guido Adler head of the musicology department in 1885—the same year of his landmark “Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology” (“Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft”)—and the Czech university named important music critic, researcher, and one-time student of Adler Otakar Hostinský as head of their own musicology department.

Though Adler’s research might be familiar, Hostinský’s, and especially his collaborations with Charles University’s first Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology Lubor Niederle, warrant more explanation in this discussion. Hostinský published a groundbreaking study in Czech musicology in 1892, 36 Melodies of Czech Secular Folksong from the Sixteenth Century (36 nápěvů světských písní českého lidu z XVI. století).¹³ In it, he extensively annotated each melody, tracing their supposed “ethnogenesis,” especially with the aim of protecting the Czech repertoire from possible moments of German-inspired transmission. He argued, for example, that although similarities between “Ach mlynářko, mlynářko” (“Oh Dear Mill Maiden, Dear Mill Maiden”) invited comparison with the German “Ich Weiss ein hübsche Müllerin” (“There Was a Lovely Mill Maiden”), the melody most likely came from a Latin source from 1601, rather than the German song. The author also granted, however, that this relationship was actually impossible to prove.¹⁴ Hostinský’s study became a cornerstone for all future musicological studies in Czech music, especially in comparative musicology. Niederle’s research also regularly made use of comparative musicological methods, especially towards tracing supposed “ethnographic parallels” between nations and across time.¹⁵ But he also harnessed such tools towards pioneering the field of “politically engaged ethnography” (“politicky angažované etnologie”). This field called on research in early human history to comment on the current political moment, requiring scholars to reach out to politicians and make their expertise accessible to the “people.”¹⁶ Niederle’s research significantly impacted understandings of ethnicity at the time: though others had previously identified eight or nine Slavic ethnicities, Niederle determined the existence of anywhere between eleven to fourteen Slavic ethnonations. He published his findings in his 1909 The Slavic World (Slovanský svět), which provided some of the foundational philosophies for redrawing maps in Central Europe after World War I.¹⁷

If Hostinský and Niederle already produced scholarship in dialogue with one another, their collaborations yielded important consequences for future musicological and ethnological research. In 1891, the pair founded an organization called the Czechoslavonic Ethnographic Society (Národopisná společnost Českoslovanská), which became the Ethnographic Institute’s most immediate predecessor. As part of its work, the Ethnographic Society helped host the famous 1895 Czechoslavonic Exhibition, which attracted over two million visitors and presented a culmination of trends in nineteenth-century ethnonationalist scholarship. The Exhibition followed the Völkerschauen model, which featured spectacles held in German-speaking centers that showcased members of “other” (especially African, Asian, and North American) communities performing the activities of their daily lives and included detailed props and extensive sets.¹⁸ In keeping with this model, the Czechoslavonic Exhibition included elaborately detailed reconstructions of Czech cultural artifacts including clothes, food, music, dance, arts and crafts, buildings, and even whole villages as well as exhibits that incorporated research on Czechoslavonic anthropology, statistics, geography, language, psychology, physiology, sociology, and music history, among other topics. Early folksong researcher František Bartoš and researcher and composer Leoš Janáček famously performed in its demonstration of Moravian music, and the music exhibit itself included ethnographic analysis in the forms of topographical maps. At over 600 oversized and intricately illustrated pages, the event’s tome of a program also positioned Hostinský’s scholarship on Czech folk music alongside chapters discussing skull and facial dimensions. Unlike the Völkerschauen model, however, which were one-time events, the Ethnographic Society also included 154 departments in regions across Bohemia by the time of the Exhibition, including 47 in Moravia, and 4 in Silesia. Between 1892 and 1895 these individual departments staged 175 of their own exhibitions: 118 in Bohemia, 54 in Moravia, and 2 in Silesia.¹⁹ To put this into perspective, today’s Czech Republic is comparable in area to the US state of South Carolina; the Ethnographic Society’s demonstrations effectively asserted the “otherness” of 205 ethno-localities within reasonably close geographic quarters.

When the Ethnological Institute was founded in 1905, Hostinský was named head of its Czech Department and Adolf Hauffen, the German (Adler had left by then). These halves were divided into smaller departments, including subdivisions for “German Song in Bohemia” based in Prague; “German Song in Moravia and Silesia,” seated in Brno; “Czech Folksong in Bohemia” based in Prague; and “Czech Song in Moravia and Silesia,” also seated in Brno, Janáček its head. Within this framework, the Czech half of the Ethnological Institute actively worked to assert its “otherness” and independence from its parent project. In one of the organization’s first public announcements, for example, members explained that, though its organization under the “Folksong in Austria” project might imply “central—naturally German—management,” its committees were actually “completely autonomous.”²⁰ They were also dedicated to forming new research methods to suit their repertoire’s supposedly Czech (and not German) sounds. In particular, they rejected the possibility of organizing their work according to Josef Pommer’s Guidelines for Collection (Grundzüge für die Sammlung, 1905), and created their own guide, Collecting Czech National Song in Moravia and Silesia (Sbíráme českou národní píseň na Moravě a ve Slezsku). Its methods were modeled on Hostinský’s 1906 Czech Secular Folksong (Česká světská píseň lidová, an updated version of his 1892 study).²¹ Within his Moravian department, Janáček also worked to further address the nuances specific to its repertoire.²² He continued developing methods of transcription and made some of the first recordings of folksong on wax cylinders. The combination of such rigorous methods alongside the assumption that the quantity of folksongs evidenced the supposed ethnic richness of any particular region ultimately allowed the organization to boast nearly 15,000 folksongs in its catalogue for each of the Bohemian and Moravian-Silesian Departments by World War I, and 10,000 folksongs in its German Department.²³ At a time of such instability, folksong seemed to bear witness to the scientific validity and implicit independence of ethnic states within the Empire.

The work of Ethnological Institute members became increasingly radicalized after World War I, following its reorganization to reflect new understandings of the state and research methods. Most fundamentally, the organization’s refounding in 1919 as the State Institute for Folksong (Státní ústav pro lidovou píseň) included new subdivisions designed to reflect the demographics understood to exist in the then-new Czechoslovak Republic. A Slovakian Department was headed by Karol Medvecký, a German Department by Hauffen, a Moravian-Silesian Department still under Janáček, and the Czech Department under looming political figure Zdeněk Nejedlý. Nejedlý would later serve as Minister of Culture and Education under the Czechoslovak communist administration from 1948–1962, but he had trained as a musicologist with Hostinský at the beginning of his career and joined Charles University’s faculty in 1905. In keeping with the interdisciplinarity of folksong research, too, the first leader of the Institute upon its refounding in 1919 was not a professor of musicology, but Slavic folklorist and friend of Niederle, Jiří Polívka.

Within this new structure, the Institute’s projects also were increasingly and more explicitly in dialogue with German racialized projects. Most fundamentally, Niederle’s protégé Karel Chotek became a particularly visible member of the Institute. Chotek had radicalized Niederle’s politically engaged ethnography within the framework of his own “political ethnography” (“politický národopis”), which he taught and promoted in his “Seminar for General Ethnography” (“Semináře pro všeobecný národopis”) at Charles University beginning in 1932, in which he presented methods increasingly aligned with Nazi scholarship.²⁴ Additionally, Institute members from the 1920s onwards called for a compendium of source materials in folksong research to be organized under Zdeněk Nejedlý’s editorship. More than collection for collection’s sake, the proposed project was in dialogue with the Berlin-based German Folklore Union’s launch of its “Landscape Folksong” (“Landschaftliche Volkslieder”) project—also a type of compendium—in 1924. As Philip Bohlman shows, this project actually comprised research to support Germany’s philosophy of Lebensraum, anticipating its future territorial moves.²⁵ To that end, the project’s first volume concerns folksong in Silesia (then under Czechoslovakia); a 1934 volume explores folksong in Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, the region Hitler would first occupy following the 1938 Munich agreement; and a 1938 volume focuses specifically on Upper Silesia. Additionally, the collection’s forty-third volume, though not published until 1971, was collected during “Song weeks” held by its committee from 1929–39 in southern Moravia.

Ethnological Institute members never completed their compendium. They did, however, insert their work into then-emerging conversations on music and race, as modeled by Richard Eichenauer’s landmark Musik und Rasse (1932).²⁶ In particular, three of the organization’s leading members—Niederle, Chotek, and Jiří Horák, secretary of the Czech Department—contributed to a collection of essays on The Equality of European Races and Means for Their Refinement (Rovnocennost evropských plemen a cesty k jejich ušlechťování), published in 1934.²⁷ The book’s introduction explains that the loss of life during World War I had affected the “genetic foundation” of all nations involved and that it was necessary to “repair all of the damage to national health.”²⁸ These institute members’ contributions, in turn, demonstrate the ways interdisciplinary bodies of evidence could be used to describe “The Racial Composition of Slavs” (in the case of Niederle) or examine relationships between “Race and Culture” (Chotek). Horák’s contribution on “Race in Slavic Folktales” discusses the usefulness of specific ethnographic parallels. While these essays are primarily theoretical, other studies within the book demonstrate the application of their methodologies. An essay by Vladislav Růžička on “The Improvement of the State of the Nation by Racial Hygiene or Eugenics,” for example, lists forty characteristics of the “Nordic Man”—an “ideal of German, racial hygiene.” According to the author, the Nordic Man is tall, has a slender cranium, has light blue or grey eyes, has light skin, is “enterprising” and “tenacious,” has a “strong will” that borders on “callousness,” and “prioritizes metaphysics.”²⁹ Race, then, was not merely biological or political, but also philosophical and psychological.

It is within this increasingly radicalized framework that Ethnological Institute member Vladimír Helfert and musicologist Gustav Becking were killed. Bruno Nettl has situated these scholars’ deaths as resulting in part, if not primarily from their 1936 public scholarly debates, much of which concerned ethnogenesis in supposed Western Art music.³⁰ More specifically, these researchers analyzed the musical scores of Bohemian-born composers like Johann Stamitz, Heinrich Biber, František Benda, and Johann Schobert—Franz Schubert even fell into the discussion—to determine their supposedly scientific, biological races. Outside of these debates, however, Helfert’s activities had also positioned him to become an enemy of the state moving into World War II. In his professional life, he had chaired a newly founded musicology department at Komenský (now Masaryk) University in Brno since 1919. But in his political life, Helfert had also collaborated with the Maffie (a Czech resistance group) against Austria-Hungary during World War I; given increasingly political and eventually anti-Nazi lectures in his professorial work; and, just before the Nazi takeover of the university, smuggled the Brno collection of Ethnological Institute sound recordings into the care of the editorial board of Czech Radio (Český rozhlas).³¹ All recordings were returned after the war, only ten wax cylinders damaged.³² Helfert’s political background, then, at least as much as his conversations with Becking, poised him to receive extra scrutiny under the Protectorate. He was called in for gestapo questioning in November 1939 and eventually sent to the Nazi camp Terezín. He lived to see the camp’s liberation but died only a few days later of spotted fever on May 18, 1945. In contrast, Becking worked at Prague’s Charles University between 1930 and 1945. During the 1930s, he promoted Nazi ideologies even as he continued to advise the doctoral work of Jewish students, and he joined the Nazi party in 1939. He was killed on May 8, 1945, amid the violence surrounding what is sometimes referred to as the Battle for Czech Radio (May 8–9). He was reported to have been executed on the street alongside thirty other prominent Germans.³³

The careers and deaths of Helfert and Becking demonstrate that Czechs and Germans shared in the same scholarly projects through the twentieth century, worked within the same political systems, and even fell victim to mutual acts of violence. A brief overview of the research of the Ethnological Institute also reminds us that Czech and German scholars were immersed in the same radicalized political discourses through the twentieth century and that their scholarship informed, interacted with, and responded to one another. Together, these intertwined careers alongside the research activities of the Ethnological Institute during the first half of the century suggest that Czech folksong research involved more than recording sounds. Instead, it operated within shared political and intellectual systems that shaped not only its methods, but also the ways it has been subsequently interpreted and narrated. Understanding how these frameworks persist in later historiographic discourse beyond the interwar period requires turning from institutional history to later historiographic reflection.

Bruno Nettl and Modern Understandings of Czech Folk Music

Bruno Nettl’s 2002 “Ethnicity and Musical Identity in the Czech Lands” is an important piece of scholarship, not only because it remains one of the most recent pieces of English-language writing on the topic, but also because the study foregrounds the complexity of relationships between Czech, German, and Jewish identities. The primary focus of Nettl’s study concerns “the musical culture of Germans—ethnic Germans whose principal language was German,” which he later adds in some ways “died with the departure of the Sudeten-Germans after 1945 and the execution of many Germans in Prague.”³⁴ I am in no way interested in challenging, implicating, and certainly not “righting” Nettl’s account, especially as the author is very forthcoming that he and his family, including his equally groundbreaking father Paul Nettl, emigrated from Prague in the fall of 1939; that is, Nettl’s narratives about Germans living in and leaving Prague are very much part of his own lived experience. What I am interested in, however, are the ways Nettl’s account, like Tyllner’s address that opened this article, carefully negotiates the horrors of the past. I am also interested in how Nettl’s folksong scholarship unwittingly uses the same paradoxical forms of argumentation and ethnic assumptions that structured the work of past Ethnological Institute members, including the possibility that ethnicity might be ascribed to language.

Nettl’s discussion focuses on a 1938 collection of 700 Folksongs of the Sudetenland (Volkslieder der Sudetendeutschen); that is, like Ethnological Institute members before him, he calls on quantity-driven research to evidence the implied richness of a culture. And like Ethnological Institute members before him, too, Nettl performs a particular mode of nationalism—in this case colonialist nationalism—in his writing. As Richard Taruskin aptly summarizes, colonialist nationalism positioned German sounds (and German culture generally) as “sophisticated, humanizing, and universal” and all those of “other” nations—including Czech—as “folk-like” and “merely national.”³⁵ Nettl summarizes, “Czech music was folk music, the music of the versatile vernacular musician,” and he reinforces this characterization by citing, without critical commentary, Karl Michael Komma’s 1959 study, in which Komma claims, “It is a fact—explained by the abiding strength of the German-Czech symbiosis—that German musicians in particular understand more clearly the character of Czech musical culture in the diaspora than before, acknowledge it, and even miss it as something once part of their neighborhood.”³⁶ Although this assertion belongs to Komma, rather than Nettl himself, Nettl’s decision to incorporate it unproblematically into his narrative grants it interpretive weight. In doing so, he reproduces a structure in which German musicians appear as especially capable interpreters of Czech musical identity—a configuration long embedded in colonialist nationalist discourse, even if that discourse is not explicitly endorsed.

Whereas Nettl presents Czech music as historically distinct from German traditions, his discussion of German-Bohemian repertoires intensifies this logic of alterity, positioning them as even more radically “other” than Czech music. He grounds this positioning in the Preface to Folksongs of the Sudetenland, in which its editors emphasize the songs’ connection with the “German fatherland.”³⁷ Rather than treating this gesture as primarily reflective of the politics of 1938 Central Europe, Nettl interprets it as evidence of what he terms “the decline of German culture and its music in Bohemia,” reading the appeal to Germanness as a compensatory claim rather than a defining origin.³⁸ He instead attributes the repertoire’s specificity to its “consistent interactions with the culture of the Slavic-speaking Czechs, with that of the large and ancient community of Bohemian Jews, and more distantly the Rom or Gypsies.”³⁹ For Nettl, then, the German-Bohemian repertoire was distinct from German traditions, but also even more uniquely local than the Czech. If Czech music was framed as exclusive—defined as “not German”—German-Bohemian music was inclusive, its uniqueness dependent upon its interactions with a (still exclusive) group of “others.” That is, German-Bohemian folksong was unique not for its straightforward universalism like German repertoires as colonial nationalism would posit, but for its cosmopolitanism—a localized universalism that nonetheless retained greater interpretive reach than the bounded specificity ascribed to Czech folksong.

The nationalist frameworks within which Nettl writes create a particularly complicated and revealing context for his discussion of Jewishness. In particular, Nettl extends the universalism of the German culture also to German-speaking Jews, situating them as, to his experience, German-oriented and “culturally German.”⁴⁰ But more than emphasizing the complexity of identity, Nettl also reveals his decision to include discussions of Jewishness as deeply personal. Nettl offers this introduction to his father and his work:

Paul Nettl (1889–1972), my father, born in Vrchlabí (or Hohenelbe) in the Reissengebirge or Krkonoše mountains, is among the scholars who, in publications of the 1920s and 1930s, most emphatically celebrated the German character of Prague. But his earliest works in this line concern the musical life of the Jewish community in Prague in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁴¹

More than introducing his father as a scholar and “authentic” German-Bohemian, Nettl uses this account to frame Paul Nettl’s engagement with Jewish musical life as evidence of intellectual openness and cosmopolitanism. Jewish repertoires here function as a marker of scholarly breadth, demonstrating attentiveness to cultural difference within an otherwise German-oriented framework. Nettl nevertheless stopped short of acknowledging that both he and his father at times—as part of a continually renegotiated process, both public and private—identified as Jewish.⁴² In this text, Jewishness appears as an object of scholarly attention and validation, rather than as a category of self-identification. This asymmetry—between the affirmation of openness towards Jewish culture and the absence of explicit claims to Jewish belonging—reveals the limits of how Jewishness is incorporated into Nettl’s narrative, even within a text that is unusually personal.

In total, Nettl’s study is a deeply personal statement in addition to a scholarly text; a narrative that, much like Tyllner’s address which opened this paper, omits (or rewrites) some of history’s traumas in a necessary move to negotiate its most difficult components. And as in all studies exploring folk music research including my own, the topic demands ethical maneuvering. For scholar Tara Zahra, whose articulation of this tension in her own study of “democracy” I cited at the outset of this article, research outcomes can outweigh the risks built into the historiography of Czech nationalism.⁴³ Here, the risks I take in drawing attention to nuanced readings of Nettl, as well as some of his omissions, similarly hope to embrace the ethical decisions embedded in Czech historiography as opportunities and not problems. Doing so illuminates Czech folksong research in the past as an instrument of ethnonationalism—one not merely descriptive but delineative of who belonged and who did not. It also illuminates the study of Czech folk music today as part of continually unfolding negotiations of the twentieth century’s traumas.

Conclusion

Taken together, the institutional history of Czech folksong research offered here and Bruno Nettl’s later historiographic reflections reveal that the study of folk music in the Czech lands was never merely descriptive. From its earliest moments within the Ethnological Institute, claims to scientific objectivity, classificatory authority, and methodological rigor enabled music to function as evidence of ethnonationalist distinction. Czech researchers operated within the same political landscapes, scholarly conversations, and classificatory frameworks as their German nationalist counterparts, even as they sought to assert their independence from them. In doing so, they mobilized music not only to document repertoires, but to construct arguments about national origins, racial difference, and territorial legitimacy.

As Rachel Mundy has shown, positivist methods that are foundational to musicology more broadly, particularly in the search for musical “styles,” are deeply embedded in a process of “categorizing culture as a form of essential, biologized difference.”⁴⁴ Interrogating its assumptions, she writes, therefore can illuminate “music’s power to classify human cultures” and “define human beings.”⁴⁵ The Czech case examined here demonstrates how such methods operated with particular force in folksong research. For Ethnological Institute members, the existence of a Czech nation was not simply a political aspiration, but a scientifically measurable fact. If Czechness could be measured, so too could its inverse: not-Czechness, “otherness,” or sometimes “Germanness.” That is, folksong became a means of taxonomizing humans, their ethnicity, race, and relative position within a hierarchy of cultures.

At the same time, as the discussion of Tyllner’s commemorative address and Nettl’s historiographic intervention also reveal, the narrative of these histories has required ongoing ethical negotiation. Moves to “mute the traumas of the past,” whether through institutional commemoration or personal scholarly reflection, have often been necessary for grappling with the most difficult legacies of twentieth-century violence. As Zahra cautions, confronting such histories risks granting agency where it may not have existed and shaming past victims. Avoiding these tensions entirely, however, risks limiting critical inquiry. The readings offered here accept this risk in the spirit of revealing Czech folksong research as a continuing site of historiographic reckoning. Attending to when, where, and how past traumas are muted opens space for new forms of inquiry that recognize folk music scholarship itself as part of the ongoing negotiation of twentieth-century history.