Karl Ruprecht

Karl Theodorich Arnulf Ruprecht (19 June 1910  – 3 November 1986) was an Austrian folklorist and insurance specialist.

Biography

Karl Ruprecht was born and grew up in Kirchenviertel, near Graz, Styria. He began studying German, English, and folklore at the University of Graz, moved to the University of Vienna, and finally in 1934 to the University of Königsberg, where he received his doctorate in 1936 with a thesis on Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl under Walther Ziesemer. He then became an employee of Hans Hagemeyer in the Amt Schrifttumspflege, which was part of the Rosenberg Office.

Ruprecht worked in Hans Strobel's Office of Folklore and Celebration Design, evaluating the writings of Adolf Bach, accusing him of paying too little attention to the racial factor. For the Institute for German Folklore, which was established within the framework of the Advanced School of the NSDAP, Ruprecht was entrusted with the establishment and management of the Research Center for Rural Life Forms. This research center was founded in Salzburg in 1938. The fact that the Spiel und Spruch research center was established in the Cistercian Rein Abbey near Graz was probably due to a suggestion by Karl Ruprecht.

In a radio broadcast in April 1939, Ruprecht announced that Easter and Christmas should be freed from artificial Christian interpretation in order to return to their Nordic essence, since the Church had adopted the earlier Germanic customs.

During the war, Karl Ruprecht came into conflict with the SS's Ahnenerbe. Richard Wolfram, the head of the SS "Teaching and Research Center for Germanic-Germanic Folklore," urged Wolfram Sievers to exercise "extreme caution" regarding Ruprecht.

Ruprecht collaborated with the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte and in the journals Deutsche Volkskunde and Idee und Tat, among others.

Karl Ruprecht lived in Salzburg and was general manager of Bundesländerversicherung. He died from burn injuries sustained in a swimming accident.

Works

• Wilhelm Heinrich Riehls „Kulturgeschichtliche Novellen“ mit Berücksichtigung ihres Verhältnisses zur Quelle (1936)
• "Nationalsozialistische oder liberale Volkskunde?" In: Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 8 (1937), pp. 632–34.
• "Deutsches Volkstum und Konfessionelle Volkskunde". In: Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 8' (1937), pp. 962–79.
• "Bolschewismus und Volkskultur". In: Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 14 (1943), pp. 370–76.

References

• Hannjost Lixfeld, Folklore and Fascism. The Reich Institute for German Volkskunde. Indiana University Press, Bloomington (1994)
• Christiaan Janssen, Abgrenzung und Anpassung. Deutsche Kultur zwischen 1930 und 1945 im Spiegel der Referatenorgane Het Duitsche Boek und De Weegschaal. Waxmann: Münster (2003)
• James Dow, Hannjost Lixfeld, The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich. Indiana University Press (1994)
• James Dow, Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, "Austrian Volkskunde and National Socialism". In: The Folkore Historian. Journal of the Folklore and History Section of the American Folklore Society 22 (2005)
• James R. Dow, Olaf Bockhorn, The Study of European Ethnology in Austria. Ashgate Publishing Company (2004)
• Mitchell Ash, Wolfram Nieß, Ramon Pils, eds., Geisteswissenschaften im Nationalsozialismus. Das Beispiel der Universität Wien. Vienna University Press, Göttingen (2010)