In Memory of Lutz Röhrich (1922 – 2006)

On December 29, 2006 we received the sad news that Lutz Röhrich, Professor emeritus of Folklore, Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, had died at the age of 84. After the death of Donald Ward, Alan Dundes and Reimund Kvideland, this is another big loss for folk narrative research and our Society. Lutz Röhrich was one of the leading figures in European folkloristics, and he will always be remembered as one of the most productive and influential scholars in his field, his publications on folktale research and paroemiology being internationally accepted as landmarks of our discipline.

Lutz Röhrich was born on October 1922 in Tübingen. He studied German language and literature, history, music history and Latin at the University of Tübingen and received his PhD in 1949 with a dissertation on demons in Svabian folk belief. Kurt Wagner, professor of German and Folklore at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz offered him a position as research assistant in 1950, and supervised his habilitation thesis on Märchen und Wirklichkeit (Folktale and Reality) published in 1954. This soon became one of the major contributions to the modern discipline of folkloristics. In Mainz, he developed a small school of folklore where his students Rolf W. Brednich, Leander Petzoldt and Hannjost Lixfeld graduated under his guidance.

In 1967, Lutz Röhrich was appointed Professor of Folklore at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg, and in 1969 he also became director of the German Folksong Archives. During his 23 years of active service for his university, he made the Folklore Institute of Freiburg University into one of the leading European centres for historical and comparative folk narratology, balladry, folksong research, and paroemiology. He belonged to the first editorial board of the Enzyklopädie des Märchens, to which he contributed an astonishing number of 50 major articles, from Adam und Eva to Sage. Under his supervision, a big number of folklore students graduated from his school and became well known scholars, among them Dietz-Rüdiger Moser, Klaus Roth, Rainer Wehse, Sabine Wienker-Piepho, and Tunde Okanlawon. Lutz Röhrich became an internationally well known and highly respected scholar who travelled widely and also taught at American universities in Kansas and Vermont.

Beginning with the first post-war meeting in Kiel and Copenhagen in 1959, Lutz Röhrich attended many, if not most, of the ISFNR conferences, always contributing significant papers of theoretical importance. He was Vice President of the Society from 1979-89, chaired the Theory Commission, for which he co-edited the volume Storytelling in Contemporary Societies (1990), and was eventually made an Honorary Member. He has been laid to rest at Günterstal cemetery near Freiburg. A detailed appreciation of his life and work will be published in Fabula 48 (2007), Nr.1/2.

Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Wellington, New Zealand