ABSTRACT
The traditional village is on the retreat, not simply as an economic unit but in other respects too. Where it once created order, it is now confronted with the prospect of upheaval. The situation is ripe with dangers as well as with opportunities. A choice has to be made between those traditions worth preserving and practices better abandoned. But there is little hope that the right decisions will be made. Small-scale farming now only makes a minimal contribution to the West German economy. The village no longer functions as a social and economic sphere that can satisfy most of the needs of its inhabitants.1 As the world has grown bigger, time for the village has retreated, proximity to nature has become attenuated, and the community which once necessarily gave the villagers their social cohesiveness is less compelling. The village as a way of life and experience has not only changed its external appearance in the last 30 years; within its boundaries, the ordering of society and the structure of its mental outlook have changed too. Yet during the course of many centuries the village created traditions which have not simply disappeared with the new conditions of life. Certain ways of experiencing the world can continue in a social sub-culture far longer than a simple stimulus-and-response theory can comprehend. Education and socialisation are not merely oriented towards direct social needs, but also respond to the abilities of parents and grandparents. The possibility of experiencing happiness, of surviving partings, of feeling secure, of trusting, the whole spectrum of ways of feeling and the richness of the emotional qualities that form the basis of mental outlook, all evolve in a long and crisisridden developmental process, in which the bearers of older traditions feed in their attitudes and views of the world even before the
child has learned how to speak, and so become deeply embedded in the unconscious and subconscious aspects of human existence in the community.2 It is possible — as my friend Albert Ilien once put it — that villagers today still suffer from the hunger and undernourishment of their ancestors.3 He meant by this, that it is not only possible, but to a certain extent it is actually inevitable, that collective experiences continue to influence the individual even when these experiences no longer seem necessary for the material existence of the group. With changing conditions some attitudes do change, but not all, and it is possible that the continuation of old world-views in new conditions is sometimes painful to experience.
