What the Ballad Knows The Ballad Genre, Memory Culture, and German Nationalism

Adrian Daub's brilliant synthesis of the many lives of ballads in German culture breathes new and more complex meaning into Eric Hobsbawm's and Terence Ranger's concept of invented traditions. Daub calls the ballad "poetry one lived with," and his subtle, lucid analysis of its many contexts-travel, family, the schoolroom, the public sphere, the national imaginary-sketches a great arc of continuity in German life. It is erudite, graceful, and wise-a major achievement. Celia Applegate, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of History, Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology, Professor of German, Russian, and European Studies, Vanderbilt University