College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Humanities scholar

Distinguished Humanities Scholar James Dow to speak on folklore use during World War II.
James Dow says his interest in German folklore can be directly attributed to a faculty improvement leave he took in 1977-78.

Dow, professor of foreign languages and literatures, spent that academic year at Abteilung Volkskunde, Universitåt Freiburg.

"It was a classic case where a faculty improvement leave produced five or six books that I have since published," Dow said.

It also helped establish Dow as Iowa State's Distinguished Humanities Scholar, an honor bestowed by the Council on Scholarship in the Humanities. That group is charged with stimulating scholarly growth in the humanities at Iowa State.

Dow will give his Distinguished Humanities Scholar lecture, "Austrian Nazis Reinvent the Past through Folklore," on Thursday, Feb. 28, at 7 p.m. in room 240 of the Scheman Building. A reception will be held beginning at 6 p.m.

The lecture is sponsored by the Council on Scholarship in the Humanities, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, and the Office of the Vice Provost of Research.

During his lecture, Dow will show films made by a branch of the Nazi SS in the German-speaking portion of Italy.

"These films have been available only for the past couple of years," Dow said. "This will be a rather unique opportunity to see these films."

Dow's faculty improvement leave was also directly responsible for establishing Dow as an internationally recognized scholar in German folklore. His research and academic pursuits have netted Dow a couple of recent campus honors. Last spring he was named a winner for the LAS Award for
Excellence in Research/Artistic Creativity that recognizes a faculty member who has a national or international reputation for contributions in research, and who has influenced the research activities of students.

Much of Dow's recent work has been devoted to writing the history of German and Austrian academic complicity with Nazi (National Socialist) ideology.
Dow has found that while folklore may invoke images of quaint figures among many of us, the Germans used it much differently during the Nazi regime.

He has been instrumental in discovering and revealing how National Socialist ideology appropriated folklore studies in order to help define a "pure" and “continuing” Germanic race in his books The Nazification of an Academic Discipline, Folklore and Fascism, and in the 700 page German volume Volkische Wissenschaft.

A reviewer of those two books says Dow provides "a chilling account of the role folklore and folklorists played in the development of fascist Germany." The reviewer recommends the works "to any reader interested in the interplay between politics and culture in the modern world."

In particular, Dow has researched the activities of academics during the Nazi regime. He is currently working on another book, Study of Folklore in Austria, which will deal with specific Austrian academicians. One particular individual, Dr. Karl Haiding, has caught Dow’s attention. He describes Haiding as a "200% Nazi" even years after the end of World War II.

"Much of the ideology regarding folklore is focused around Austrian writers and actors," Dow said.

Dow says there is no simple answer as to why highly educated Germans and Austrians cooperated with Hitler and his regime.

"Some academicians were opportunistic while others just went along with National Socialism a little," Dow said. "But there is no mistaking that no one, regardless of their education, escaped National Socialism totally."

Dow is also internationally recognized as a bibliographer. He has documented the activities of folklorists in Europe and the U.S. through his editorships of two major series including the International Volkskundliche Bibliographie (International Folklore Bibliography) and as co-section head of the folklore volume of the Modern Languages Association International Bibliography. He initiated computerization of the International Folklore Bibliography and created a tri-lingual index for it in German, French and English.

"There was a lot of research in the study of folklore, both in this country and in Germany," Dow said. "Unfortunately the researchers in the different countries didn't know what the other nation's researchers were doing. This bibliography helped bring those research efforts together."