In this paper, I aim to contribute to the debate about hegemonic relations between the West European “core” and southeast European “margins,” by showing the links between mutually challenged and engendered quasi-anthropological traditions in the totalitarian projects of nation-building and empire-building. New aspects of a continuous resonance will be addressed between a politically instrumentalized Albanian tradition of “folk” or people's culture studies (kultura popullore) and a German-speaking tradition of Volks- and Völkerkunde grounded in Herderean Romanticism and the imperial ambitions of the nineteenth century. In the course of discussion the successive German traditions of National-Socialist Volkskunde and Communist East German Ethnographie, until the revised tradition of Europäische Ethnologie in the 1990s, are shown to operate from a historicist tradition rather than from a critical tradition as a reflexive successor to former Volkskunde. In the course of this discussion, I will pay particular attention to contextualizing the historical and current production of knowledge by the German and Austrian “West” on a Balkan and Albanian culture, which is reduced to its archaic or pre-modern “traditions” and its specific or antiquated “mentalities.”