What led to Braun’s exploring of connections between anti-Semitism and scare stories for children from the standpoint of empirical social science? It has to do with memories from his childhood. He grew up amid windmills in the green Zaanstreek region of the Netherlands, spending a lot of care-free time outdoors. “My parents always worried that I would not get back in time for dinner or that I'd get completely lost,” he relates. “So to discourage me from straying too far from home, they often warned me about 'the man with the bow tie.'”
This imaginary figure was supposed to live inside a nearby mill. So if the boy were to wander past a certain boundary, “the man with the bow tie” would catch him and throw him in a well, his parents warned. “That certainly made we compliant with my parents’ wishes,” says Braun, who claims this fairy tale influenced his cognitive development in a surprisingly lasting way. “Whenever I’m walking around campus or on an escalator at a conference and pass somebody wearing a bow tie, for one split second my most primitive defense mechanisms get activated.”
Widely prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries
While today his parents' storytelling tactic may seem pedagogically irresponsible, it was in widespread use in northern Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, according to the researcher. Referred to by linguists as scare stories, these tales are part of an oral storytelling tradition which parents leveraged to guide their children's behavior, through fear-based motivation. Children's scare stories are short and simply structured, consisting of only two elements: a spatial location and something scary. “Parents told their children to stay away from a certain place—a lake, a park or a street, for example—or else some bogeyman like 'the man in the bow tie' would come and get them,” Braun explains.
Children's scare tales often feature rather innocent fantasy characters or animals. But in some villages, the bogeymen were described in terms of ethnic stereotypes that reflected the various imagined enemies supposedly threatening the local communities. “In particular these include anti-Semitic bogeymen stories about ‘the forest Jew’, ‘the blood Jew’ and ‘the wandering Jew’,” the sociologist elaborates, “thus the primary aim behind this research project is to find out where and when specific bogeymen appeared in such stories and how this shaped attitudes to ultimately influence the social order.”
Ethnic notions of “the enemy”
Professor Braun says he will never be rid of the man with the bow tie for as long as he lives, observing how “It is just the same with ethnic notions of “the enemy” which German people were inundated with in the 19th and 20th centuries.” By pointing out where “bogeyman” enemy ideas emerged in the 19th century, Braun hopes to shed light on how such ideas continue to have currency today. The researcher’s work explores how many instances of xenophobic “othering” in society today by right-wing extremist groups leverage bogeyman-enemy notions deriving from earlier times.
Studying the archives
Professor Braun works primarily with material archived in Bonn which was compiled by folklore scholars between 1930 and 1980: “I utilize in particular accounts from the Atlas of German Folklore (ADV), compiled in the 1930s.” To compile the Atlas, a mammoth data collection project was carried out in the form of a survey in an effort to document orally transmitted traditional lore; the questionnaire went out to some 20,000 villages throughout the German Empire and adjacent regions. The 243 questions asked concerned peasant work and personal life, beliefs, social and cultural norms, gender roles, festivals and popular narrative motifs in orally transmitted lore. The questionnaire was to be answered by so-called “authoritative persons” – people who mostly represented rural elite, such as clergy, teachers and civil officials. The archive holds nearly four million survey reply cards. “This Atlas, known as the AdV, holds one of the largest ethnographic datasets in Europe from the period around 1900, and as such is without parallel,” comments Professor Ove Sutter. “The Atlas project played a major role in folklore studies developing from a proto-form of empirical cultural studies into an academic field in its own right, and contributed substantially to the internationalization of the field starting in the 1950s.”
While employing large-scale statistical analysis, Professor Braun’s work also involves in-depth study of the many different folklore tales. “I utilize the Atlas of German Folklore to find out where and when stories cropped up,” he explains. As a next step he links this origin data with historical voting and polling data to flesh out the historical context. “In-depth analysis of specific stories reveals how certain local actors altered the way stories are told.” Professor Braun’s research findings are to be published two years from now, according to current planning.
