Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann Explained

Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann
Birth Date:26 June 1918
Birth Place:Berlin, German Empire
Death Place:Marburg, Germany
Education:Humboldt University of Berlin
Occupation:
  • Folklorist
  • Academic teacher
Organizations:

Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann (26 June 1918 – 12 June 1993) was a German folklorist, anthropologist and ethnologist. She was an academic teacher, from 1946 at the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin in East Berlin and from 1961 at the University of Marburg.

Career

Born in Berlin, Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann studied ethnology, anthropology and prehistory, among others with . She received a doctor's degree at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1940, on the topic of the ethnography of the German village Josefsdorf (now Josipovac) in Slavonia. It was based on field trips to German settlements in Slavonia. She also studied in Hungary, Banat, Transylvania, and Turkey, focusing on the relation between different ethnic groups.

At the end of World War II, she was a Red Cross nurse in Prague, where she met Jews who had been liberated from the Theresienstadt concentration camp. From 1946 to 1959 she was a scientific assistant and then from 1960 vice director at the Institut für deutsche Volkskunde at the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin in East Berlin, while she lived in West Berlin. When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, she could no longer commute, and she accepted the offer of the University of Marburg to work at the Institut für mitteleuropäische Volksforschung, later to be called Institut für Europäische Ethnologie/Kulturwissenschaft.

Works

Her 1982 Buch der Weihnachtslieder (Book of Christmas carols) is a collection of 151 German Christmas carols presented in a "cultural-historical context", including background information on lyricists and composers, of the history of each carol, and with period illustrations. Her book Landleben im 19. Jahrhundert (Rural life in the 19th century), published in 1987, renders the reality of the situation of dependent workers on farms and of the work of children, which was different from idyllic bias about life on the country versus life in industrial production.

She died in Marburg on 12 June 1993.

Selected publications

The German National Library holds 35 of her publications, including:

Literature

External links