Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (6 May 1823 – 16 November 1897) was a German

journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalis ...

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others asp ...

and folklorist. Riehl was born in Biebrich in the

Duchy of Nassau The Duchy of Nassau (German: ''Herzogtum Nassau'') was an independent state between 1806 and 1866, located in what is now the German states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse. It was a member of the Confederation of the Rhine and later of the G ...

and died in

Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Ha ...

. Riehl was born into a settled middle-class background, was a professor at the University of Munich, and later in life a curator of Bavarian antiquities. According to

George Mosse Gerhard "George" Lachmann Mosse (September 20, 1918 – January 22, 1999) was an American historian, who emigrated from Nazi Germany first to Great Britain and then to the United States. He was professor of history at the University of Iowa, the ...

, ::"Riehl's writings became normative for a large body of Volkish thought...he constructed a more completely integrated Volkish view of man and society as they related to nature, history, and landscape....in his famous ''Land und Leute'' (Land and People), written in 1857–63," which "discussed the organic nature of a Volk which he claimed could only be attained if it fused with the native landscape....Riehl rejected all

artificiality Artificiality (the state of being artificial or manmade) is the state of being the product of intentional human manufacture, rather than occurring nature, naturally through processes not involving or requiring human activity. Connotations Artific ...

and defined modernity as a nature contrived by man and thus devoid of that genuineness to which living nature alone gives meaning...Riehl pointed to the newly developing urban centers as the cause of social unrest and the democratic upsurge of 1848 in Hessia"....for many "subsequent Volkish thinkers, only nature was genuine." ::"Riehl desired a hierarchical society that patterned after the medieval estates. In ''Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft'' (Bourgeois Society) he accused those of Capitalist interest of "disturbing ancient customs and thus destroying the historicity of the Volk." Riehl argued that the 'working class' were the most respectable Volk, since they were best attuned to nature itself. Throughout his work, Riehl displays a strong conviction that the German people and land are intrinsically connected to one another. He also is considered the founder of the "German ethnographic Volkskunde" and drew many of his conclusions in his work from his personal experiences hiking throughout Germany.Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, ''War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I'' (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 167.

References

Bibliography

George Peabody Gooch George Peabody Gooch (21 October 1873 – 31 August 1968) was a British journalist, historian and Liberal Party politician. A follower of Lord Acton who was independently wealthy, he never held an academic position, but knew the work of histo ...

''History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century'' (1913), https://archive.org/details/a583266900goocuoft * Liulevicius, Vejas G. ''War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. * Mosse, George L. ''The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich''. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964.

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Der vereinzelte Großstädter
{{DEFAULTSORT:Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich 1823 births 1897 deaths German folklorists German journalists German male journalists People from Wiesbaden People from the Duchy of Nassau Burials at the Alter Nordfriedhof (Munich) 19th-century German journalists German male novelists 19th-century German novelists 19th-century German male writers