Národopis a ideológia. Činnosť Ústavu pre vlastivedný výskum v Kežmarku počas druhej svetovej vojny

The paper focusses on the activity of the Institute of Homeland Research (Institut für Heimatforschung) in Kežmarok which was supposed to research the history and culture of the German minority in Slovakia. From its foundation in 1941 until its dissolution in 1944, the Institute was administered by the German Party (Deutsche Partei) in Slovakia, and it fulfilled both scholarly and political tasks. The author focussed on the work by the German ethnographer Hertha Wolf-Beranek, a member of the National Socialist Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei) and research fellow at the Kežmarok Institute in 1942–1943. The author tried to explain how the scholarly and the ideological objectives in science mixed in the peak period of non-democratic regimes during World War II in Central Europe. The empiric data, used in the paper, come from documents stored at the German Archives of the Institute of Ethnology and Social Anthropology of the SAS and at other domestic and foreign archives. The author analysed the case from the perspective of the relationship between science, ideology, and political power.