Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann (1918–1993)

Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann was born in Berlin, Germany. Although her parents were anti-Nazi, she joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls' wing of the Nazi Party youth movement, as a child.
After completing her doctoral degree at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (today known as the Humboldt University of Berlin) in 1940, she worked near the end of World War II as a Red Cross nurse in Prague.There she met Jews liberated from the Theresienstadt concentration camp, an experience that shaped her later views and her work. From 1946 to 1959. she was a research assistant and then deputy director at the Institute for German Folklore of the German Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, while living in and commuting from West Berlin. In 1960, she moved to the Institute for Central European Folk Research at the University of Marburg, where she was professor of European Ethnology until 1985. Her main research interests were childhood and the family. During her career, Weber-Kellermann criticized the orientation of folklore, which at the time was strongly influenced by the "blood and soil" ideology. She contrasted this with her concept of inter-ethnics, which focused on acculturation and intercultural takeover processes. In 1985 she was awarded the Wilhelm Leuschner Medal, given for outstanding contributions to democratic society and its institutions.
Weber-Kellermann was married and divorced before 1968. Her son Heinz worked as a cameraman for his mother's film productions in the 1970s. Her 18 books included the popular Buch der Weihnachtslieder (1982), which traced the history and development of the Christmas carol, and Landleben im 19. Jahrhundert (Rural Life in the 19th Century, 1987) on farm workers and the work of children, which offered ab very different perspective from the idyllic German vision of life on the country.