Abschied von der Nachkriegsethnologie

Der Fall der DGV-Tagung von 1969

Abstract

The history of anthropology in postwar Germany has been documented and interpreted, but in most cases with a narrow focus on the discipline. In this article, I try to widen this perspective with some reminiscences and reflections on the political atmosphere of the postwar era and the protest movement that brought it to its end, not only in anthropology. Under the collective amnesia of the Adenauer era, some of the most influential German anthropologists who had served the Nazi regime were still in office, having repressed their former ideological positions by covering them with a new, seemingly neutral terminology, and refraining from participating in international theoretical debates. This strategy of camouflage became a topic of discussion at the meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde in 1969, when it came to a clash over the question of indigenous people facing genocide in Brazil. In Germany this turning point marked the beginning of a critique of anthropology and of a new ethnography based on Gadamer's hermeneutics and on Wittgenstein's ideal of 'übersichtliche Beschreibung' (clear description).