Karl Haiding
Photo documentation of Stiertreiber (bull drivers), Donnersbach (1957)
Karl Haiding (born Carlo Cyrill Andreas Paganini; 1906, Vienna, Austria-Hungary–1985, Graz) was a well-known figure of postwar Styria and the founding director of the Heimatmuseum Trautenfels (Museum of Local History Trautenfels), an influential institution dedicated in particular to rural life in the Upper Styrian Enns Valley. Haiding himself had only come to the region in 1945 while fleeing from the Red Army to the US and later British occupation zone north of the Enns.
Haiding was a committed Nazi who was to deny the Holocaust until the end of his life. In the Third Reich, he had played an important role in folklore studies. Even before the Anschluss, he worked in the Reich Youth Leadership in Berlin, taught folk dance to Hitler Youth functionaries, and headed a department of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für deutsche Volkskunde (Working Group for German Folklore), which reported to chief Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946). During World War II, Haiding’s “fieldwork” took him to parts of Eastern Europe occupied by the Wehrmacht. Here, he wanted to “work out the original Aryan folk tradition” and prepare for “Germanization.”
After 1945, Haiding remained true to his beliefs: hardly interested in Styria’s rich Christian heritage, he collected everyday objects, researched folk narratives, and documented “pagan” customs in particular, which, according to Rosenberg’s folklorists, should have replaced Christian traditions. In the Enns Valley and its side valleys, Haiding researched the autumn cattle drive, for example, during which a colorfully dressed “bull driver” with a sooty face—a personification of the devil or an “old pagan deity,” according to 19th-century descriptions—was supposed to scare children.
Digital prints from analog negatives
Schloss Trautenfels / Universalmuseum Joanneum