Nationality Austrian, Italian Occupation Folklorist | Name Karl Wolff Role Journalist | |
 | ||
Born 21 May 1879 ( 1879-05-21 ) Karlstadt (now Karlovac), Croatia Died November 25, 1966, Bolzano, Italy Books The Dolomites and Their Legends, The Pale Mountains: Folk Tales from the Dolomites | ||
[IT]
Karl Felix Wolff (Italian: Carlo Felice Wolff; 21 May 1879 – 25 November 1966) was a journalist, poet, author and self-taught folklorist of the South Tyrol who collected and published Ladinian legends.
Contents
Life
Karl Felix Wolff' was born in Karlstadt (now Karlovac), Croatia on 21 May 1879. His father was an Austrian officer and his mother was Lucilla von Busetti, from the Non Valley. When he was a child his family moved to Bolzano, South Tyrol, where he heard local Ladinian legends from his nanny during a lengthy illness.
Wolff became a journalist and author, but spent much time travelling through the Dolomites asking the people he met, especially the old, if they could recall the local legends, which he recorded in his notebook, and later published. He proposed that the Ladinian population of the Dolomite valleys had once had a matriarchal society. He discovered the saga of the Kingdom of Fanes by piecing together the fragments of legend that he had collected with his friend Hugo von Rossi. Since he had not received a university education, for a long time his stories were attacked as his own inventions. He was only recognized towards the end of his long life.
Wolff was a pan-German nationalist, and thought that Germans were the original Indo-German people. During World War I (1914–18) he published articles in the Alldeutsche Blätter in which he called the Italians and French representatives of the African and Asiatic races, who had the audacity to attack the European Germans. In 1918 he wrote, "The next bimillenium will be the age of the Germans, for German history is just repeating Indo-German history, and the world is about to become German in the same way it once became Indo-German. Some of the articles were so extreme that they were translated and published by the French propagandists.
Karl Felix Wolff' died on 25 November 1966 in Bolzano.
Selected works
Wolff published a number of books in German, including collections of legends and descriptions of places, and also published magazine articles, booklets and leaflets. His interest was that of a poet and author rather than an anthropologist, so the legends are probably not entirely authentic.
Translations into Italian
The Italian translations, published by Cappelli Editore, hold selected legends originally published in various books.