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COLLOQUIA GERMANICA BAND 46 Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik Herausgegeben von Harald Höbusch und Linda K. Worley in Verbindung mit Jane K. Brown (Seattle), Katharina Gerstenberger (Salt Lake City), Todd C. Kontje (San Diego), John Pizer (Baton Rouge), Maria Tatar (Cambridge), Anthony Tatlow (Dublin), Robert von Dassanowsky (Colorado Springs) und den Mitgliedern der Division of German Studies (University of Kentucky) Band 46 · 2013 Published for the UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY by A. FRANCKE VERLAG TÜBINGEN © 2016 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten / All Rights Strictly Reserved Satz: typoscript GmbH, Walddorfhäslach Druck und Bindung: Laupp & Göbel, Nehren ISSN 0010-1338 INHALT Heft 1 Themenheft: Masculinity in Contemporary German Culture Muriel Cormican and Gary Schmidt: Introduction: Masculinity in Contemporary German Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Mary L. Knight: (L)earned Monsters: Psychopathic Masculinities in Contemporary German Film and Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Muriel Cormican: Masculinity and Transnational Paradigms: The Cinema of Fatih Akin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 John Blair: Masculinity, Topos, and Ideology in Philipp Stölzl’s Nordwand (2007) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Kyle Frackman: The Reality of the Body: Transgender, Transsexuality, and Truth in Romeos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Gary Schmidt: Queer Masculinity in Stephan Lacant’s Freier Fall . . . . . . 88 Heft 2 Themenheft: German-Language Crime Fiction Anita McChesney, Joseph W. Moser: Introduction: Revolutionizing German-Language Crime Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Thomas W. Kniesche: Weimar and Nazi Germany in Contemporary German Historical Crime Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Dagmar C. G. Lorenz: Transnational Post-Shoah and Postwar Family Stories as Detective Fiction. Descendants as Detectives in Irene Dische, Jurek Becker, Clemens Eich, and Tanja Dückers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Anita McChesney: The Second History of National Socialism in Contemporary Austrian Crime Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Joseph W. Moser: Detectives in a Criminal Regime: Krimis in Nazi Comedy Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 Helga Schreckenberger: To Know or Not to Know: Oedipal Patterns in Wolf Haas’s Detective Novel Das ewige Leben (2004) . . . . . . . . . . 162 Sascha A. Gerhards: Krimi und Klamauk: Trivializing Murder in the Eberhofer and Kluftinger Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 Olivia Albiero: Knotty Plot and Dense Text: Crime, Detection, and Epigraphs in Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Heft 3 Themenheft: Reiseliteratur Karin Baumgartner: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Madhuvanti Karyekar: Comparative Anthropology in Travel Literature: Georg Forster’s «O-Taheiti» (1779) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Daniela Richter: Inside the Oriental Spectacle: Hermann von Pückler-Muskau’s Egyptian Travelogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Kirsten Belgum: Popularizing the World: Karl Andree’s Globus . . . . . . . 245 Matthew Unangst: Changes in German Travel Writing about East Africa, 1884—1891 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Harry T. Craver: The Abominable Art of Running Away: Alfons Paquet and Concepts of Travel Writing in Germany, 1900—1933 . . . . . . . . . . . 284 Melissa Johnson: Italy zerwühlt: Hannah Höch’s Dadaist Italienreise . . . . 303 Heft 4 Themenheft: Sound Studies in German Contexts David Imhoof / Joy H. Calico: Introduction: Sampling Sound Studies in German Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Daniel Morat: Sounding Out Urban Space: Berlin Street Music Around 1900 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Tyler Whitney: Listening to the Law: Acoustical Embodiment and Industrial Space in Der Proceß . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 VI Inhalt Jonathan Wipplinger: Eccentric Modernism, Or: George Grosz’s Gramophone Goes Meschugge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366 Theodore F. Rippey: Klangbild and Interwar German Media . . . . . . . . . 389 Florence Feiereisen: They Tried to Divide the Sky: Listening to Cold War Berlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 410 Alison Furlong: Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues . . . . . . . . . 433 VII Inhalt Introduction: Sampling Sound Studies in German Studies DAVID IMHOOF / JOY H. CALICO SUSQUEHANNA UNIVERSITY / VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY The development of Sound Studies has been rather quiet. Under this heading scholars across the western world have, especially over the last fifteen years or so, created institutes, founded journals, begun university programs, and written numerous books and articles, although that may be news to many people who work in the humanities and social sciences. Sound Studies, as the present issue demonstrates, brings together voices from various disciplines, expanding what is really more of a field with some common interests than a distinct discipline. The goal of this collection is not to define Sound Studies, much less give a complete rendering of its scope. Instead, we offer a sample of the breadth and development of this growing interdisciplinary field, as it relates to (chiefly modern) German Studies. Some of the scholars writing here might not have started their work believing they were working in Sound Studies but have found that analyzing phenomena through sound helps them draw valuable conclusions about the people, ideas, and events they study. Scholars have tried to define Sound Studies almost inevitably in the subjunctive, recognizing that definitions often limit more than they illuminate. Jonathan Sterne in 2003 laid out one broad perspective: «Sound studies is a name for the interdisciplinary ferment in the human sciences that takes sound as its analytical point of departure or arrival. By analyzing both sonic practices and the discourses and institutions that describe them, it redescribes what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world.» He trumpeted cross-disciplinary pollination, arguing that most scholars in this field «are also something else: historians, philosophers, musicologists, anthropologists, literary critics, art historians, geographers, or residents of one of the many other postwar ‹studies› fields - long list here.» (Audible Past 2 - 3). This description fits our contributors too. The strength of Sound Studies, and indeed the «studies» model of scholarship generally (e. g., Film, German, Gender, American Studies, etc.), is that it draws on all of these other established traditions. That approach seems to work best when we recognize and share the assumptions in our disciplinary backgrounds. If anything holds the present group of collected essays together (and perhaps Sound Studies generally), it is the dual belief that (a) studying sound can tell us much about human behavior and (b) we can do that best by learning from other disciplines to ask different questions. Sound Studies grows from scholars’ increasing attention to the role of the senses generally. Already by the end of the twentieth century, we could speak of a «visual turn» in many humanistic and social science areas of inquiry (Boehm; Mitchell 1986, 1994). Scholars have also begun to investigate smell and touch, and even the relationship between senses (Classen 1994, 2012; M. Smith 2008; Howes; Toner). 1 Others have concomitantly pointed out the importance of mapping and spatial relations (Feld and Basso; Cresswell; Presner). While a number of writers have defined Sound Studies partly as a corrective to the modern privileging of visual perception (Schaffer; Sterne 2003), Mark Smith, one of the pioneers of sound and sensory history, encourages us to take a broader view. He locates sound studies within a larger enterprise, stretching back to Annales social scientists, that ultimately seeks to explain how people experience and give meaning to everyday life (M. Smith 2007, 2014). Such motives, rather than demarcation of fields or disciplines, animate this collection. Multidisciplinary work - scholars’ recognition that unique disciplinary perspectives collectively improve our ability to learn from acoustic experience - define Sound Studies, as the examples assembled here demonstrate. Sound Studies has also helped us understand the different ways both natural and recorded sound have functioned in the modern world. Early works by scholars of music, literature, history, and philosophy examined both kinds of sound (Feld; Chion; Corbin; Altman; B. Smith; Thompson 2002, 2004). What follows continues to attend to all manner of sound - natural, amplified, and recorded, sounds real and imagined, sound heard with others and alone in one’s head. The essays here all address the issue of human reaction to sound. While some sound studies focus exclusively on sound itself, the present essays’ focus missing a preposition: «human interaction with and response to» reflect the authors’ humanistic and social science orientations. The editors of this collection believe that sound, and thus Sound Studies, includes all sonic phenomena: noise, music, and everything in between. The German Studies Association Network for Music and Sound Studies, whose panels first brought together the authors featured in this volume, works under the assumption that music and sound people, who have not always worked together, have plenty to learn from each other. Both music and noise have played important roles in modern Germany (Applegate; Feiereisen and Hill). For instance, Nora Alter and Lutz Koepnick’s 2004 collection, Sound Matters, an early expression of Sound Studies in German Studies, offers 326 David Imhoof / Joy H. Calico scholars of the German-speaking world a rich vehicle for considering the implications of modern sound, something they argue «allowed embodied subjects to inhabit highly incongruent realties at once» and even forge a modern community (14). And though Sound Studies includes work from and about many places in the world, we can identify important intellectual antecedents in the Germanspeaking world. Benjamin Steege, an historian of music theory and another Sound Studies fellow traveler, identifies already in the work of nineteenthcentury physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz a modern, multivalent understanding of sound. In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin argued forcefully that modern reproducible culture could likewise disorient people, either reinforcing conservative politics or suggesting radical, progressive ideas. More recently literary scholar and media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s post-hermeneutical focus on technology’s autonomy and discourse has made his work a particularly valuable touchstone for sound studies. Just as Helmholtz identified sound as an object to be studied, Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme 1800/ 1900 (1985) helped develop the concept of language as writing, something created as much by technology as by individual authors. Kittler’s media determinism, further expanded in his 1986 Grammophon Film Typewriter, may have its limits, but his emphasis on analogue, electro-magnetic, and digital sound storage especially inspires scholars who use recorded sound as their object or vehicle for study. 2 The essays assembled here share some common themes. First, the fact that their authors come from history, literature, film studies, and ethnomusicology reflects the multidisciplinary nature of Sound Studies. Perhaps more importantly, they often use one discipline to interrogate another. A Germanist writes about acoustics; an historian analyzes musical performance; a literature specialist studies political history. In each case the unique experience of sound serves as the medium to facilitate this cross-disciplinary work. Next, all of the essays show how sound has defined Germans’ experience and understanding of space, what Steven Feld calls acoustemology (Feld 1996). Daniel Morat’s «Sounding Out Urban Space: Berlin Street Music Around 1900» explains the way conflicts about street performances delineated private vs. public space and notions of class. In «Listening to the Law: Auditory Disruptions in Der Process,» Tyler Whitney details characters’ experience of sound in their heads and in various spaces to reveal the modern, dystopian elements of Kafka’s novel. Jonathan Wipplinger expands the space and even memory of pre-World War I Berlin cafes by studying the performances and recordings of band leaders in «Eccentric Modernism: Or, George Grocz’s Gramophone Goes Meschugge.» Ted Rippey in 327 Introduction: Sampling Sound Studies in German Studies «Klangbild and Interwar Media» introduces us to a forgotten concept in order to explain a range of ways that interwar writers placed themselves in multi-media-defined spaces. Florence Feiereisen’s «They Tried to Divide the Sky: Listening to Cold War Berlin» uses sounds - sonic propaganda, rumbling trains, rock concerts - to show how Berliners experienced Cold War division. And Alison Furlong argues in «Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues» that «blues masses» in East German churches created a new and powerful community. Some of the authors, especially Morat, Wippinger, and Rippey, make clear that sound often mattered when it was consumed as modern mass culture. Almost all the essays grapple with the particularly modern concern about non-natural sound - electronic, amplified, or recorded. The subjects studied here see sound as a problem, solution, or opportunity, but above all as a hallmark of modern life. The analyses here all happen to be historical. Certainly many sound studies address today’s sounds and experiences. But the fact that these six scholars use a variety of sources, from actual recordings to descriptions to literary imaginings, in order to explicate Germans’ sonic experiences in the past indicates that the ephemeral nature of sound need not prevent our studying it. Indeed the fleeting nature and limited number of sound sources (especially from the past) encourages these scholars to connect listening directly to other experiences or practices. Feiereisen’s analysis of the aural Cold War, for example, depends upon the political reality of a militarily divided space, while simultaneously helping to explain Berliners’ understanding of that space. Rippey too links his argument about the development of the Klangbild to political changes in interwar Germany. Morat’s piece pairs analyses of sound and class. And Wipplinger draws from aesthetic assumptions about modernism, even as he uses sound to posit a new understanding of that very concept. Together these essays thus explore a number of issues that have animated Sound Studies since its inception. In an ambitious summation of sound studies in his 2012 The Sound Studies Reader, Jonathan Sterne maintains that «the current generation of sound studies work is defined by its conjecture.» (10) Especially by considering the fluid boundaries between sound, music, and noise in German contexts, the six essays that follow offer some riffs on how the field of sound studies continues to develop. 328 David Imhoof / Joy H. Calico Notes 1 On the impact of the «sensory turn» in art history specifically, see https: / / arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/ 2012/ 12/ lauwrens.pdf (accessed 13 August 2015). Current neuroscience has also focused lately on sound and sensory reception; see for example a recent symposium at the Vanderbilt Brain Institute on the brain and music at https: / / medschool.vanderbilt.edu/ brain-institute/ news-events/ music-mind-symposium (accessed 13 August 2015). A 2014 forum in German History (32.2) on the senses featured four scholars, including Daniel Morat, whose work appears in this issue. 2 See also the German Studies Review forum on Kittler’s legacy in the February 2015 issue (38.1). Works Cited Alter, Nora, and Lutz Koepnick, eds. Sound Matters. New York: Berghahn, 2004. Applegate, Celia. «What Is German Music? Reflections on the Role of Art in the Creation of the Nation.» German Studies Review 15 (1992): 21 - 32. Altman, Rick, ed. Sound Theory, Sound Practice. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Benjamin, Walter. «The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.» Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217 - 52. Boehm, Gottfried, ed. Was ist ein Bild? Munich: Fink, 1994. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Classen, Constance. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Champagne: U of Illinois P, 2012. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synott. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. London: Routledge, 1994. Corbin, Alain. Sound and Meaning in the Village Bells. Trans. Martin Thom. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Feiereisen, Florence, and Alexendra Merley Hill, eds. Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century: An Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Feld, Steven. Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982. Feld, Steven, and Keith H. Basso, eds. Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research P, 1996. Howes, David, ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Cultural Reader. New York: Berg, 2005. Kittler, Friedrich. Aufschreibesysteme 1800/ 1900. Munich: Fink, 1985. —. Grammophon Film Typewriter. Berlin: Brinkman & Bose, 1986. Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 329 Introduction: Sampling Sound Studies in German Studies —. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Presner, Todd, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano. HyperCities: Thick Mapping of the Digital Humanities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014. Schaffer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994. Smith, Bruce. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending the O-Factor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Smith, Mark M. Sensory History. Oxford: Berg, 2007. —. «Futures of Hearing Pasts.» Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19thand 20th-Century Europe. Ed. Daniel Morat. New York: Berghahn, 2014. 13 - 22. Smith, Mark M., ed. Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008. Steege, Benjamin. Helmhotz and the Modern Listener. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 2012. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. —. The Sound Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 2012. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900 - 1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. —. «Wiring the World: Acoustical Engineers and the Empire of Sound in the Motion Picture Industry, 1927 - 1930.» Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity. Ed. Viet Erlmann. New York: Berg, 2004. 191 - 209. Toner, Jerry, et. al., eds. A Cultural History of the Senses. 6 vols. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. 330 David Imhoof / Joy H. Calico Sounding Out Urban Space: Berlin Street Music Around 1900 DANIEL MORAT FREE UNIVERSITY BERLIN In June 1886, the Berliner Gerichtszeitung reported on a quarrel between the street organ grinder Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Demant and B. G. Hoffmann, a lawyer as well as the caretaker of the premises Landsbergerstraße 32 and Landwehrstraße 40 a. Demant had played his street organ in the courtyard of the two houses in the working class district of Friedrichshain, much to the pleasure of the carpenters who had their workshop there and listened to the organ tunes during work. Unlike the carpenters, though, the caretaker Hoffmann did not approve of Demant’s organ grinding and asked him to leave. While Demant was shouldering his organ they got into a dispute, a policeman was called, and Demant ended up in court. There he was found guilty of domestic disturbance and had to pay a fine of 20 Marks. The Berliner Gerichtszeitung introduced this story with a general observation: Die Drehorgel, die seit langem in Berlin das Bürgerrecht erworben hat, regt die Gemüter zu sehr entgegengesetzten Empfindungen an. Die einen, darunter vornehmlich die Dienstmädchen und die Straßenjungen, verehren mit schwärmerischer Begeisterung den Leierkastenmann, während wieder andere demselben mit lauten Zornesäußerungen oder auch mit innerlichem Knirschen alles erdenklich Böse an den Hals wünschen. (n. pag.) One can translate these opposite reactions into more general terms: the caretaker’s aversion to the street organ stands for the more general problem of modern city noise; the carpenters’ pleasure stands for the modern urban amusement culture, of which popular music was a very important part. Street music can be located at the intersection of these two urban phenomena. The incident between Demant and Hoffmann, therefore, provides a good starting point for investigating the role of street music in urban life around 1900. As a first step, the place of street music within the anti-noise campaigns of the time will be analyzed. We will see that complaints about street music were not only part of the class distinction between the middle and the working classes, they also contributed to negotiating the boundaries between the private and the public in the city more generally. Secondly, the relationship between street music and the expanding popular music industry will be scrutinized. In this section, I will argue that the Berliner «Gassenhauer,» popular songs sung on the streets, were not only a product of the music industry, but also a product of the active appropriation of popular music by the people who used it to form an urban identity as Berliners. Performing, regulating, and debating street music, therefore, was part of negotiating the soundscape of public (and private) urban space and of appropriating the city. From a methodological point of view, this essay hopes to show that introducing sound studies into history, that lending an ear to the sounds of the past, can help us to understand better larger historical developments such as urbanization and the transformation of big city life. Vice versa, it is a plea for historical contextualization in sound studies. Sounds are not necessarily interesting in themselves, but become relevant in their connection to larger historical, social, political and cultural phenomena. As a result of the rapid growth and the industrialization of Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century, the soundscape of the German metropolis changed in crucial respects. Noise took on a new quality, thanks to the rapid development of the city and the juxtaposition of residential buildings, factories, and craftsmen’s establishments in numerous city quarters (as in the courtyard of Landsbergerstraße 32 and Landwehrstraße 40 a): the growth of transportation, the use of new construction materials that conducted sound extremely well, the proliferation of buildings with multiple tenants (from workers with their tenement houses to the well-off with their flats), the introduction of technology into the bourgeois household, and the spread of the entertainment industry (Saul). This is true for all big cities and industrial conurbations in the western world, but Berlin might be considered an especially good case in point because of the intensity of this development within just a few years. The Greater Berlin Act of 1920 absorbed seven surrounding towns and dozens of communities, expanding the city’s area to thirteen times its former size and increasing its population from 800,000 inhabitants in 1870 to almost 4 million in 1920. It thus became the thirdlargest city in the world, trailing only London and New York. One consequence of this rapid urban growth was that, from the end of the nineteenth century onward, noise was increasingly thematized as a problem of the big city, and citizens initiated campaigns to fight it. The New York philanthropist and publisher’s wife Julia Barnett Rice was a trailblazer of the anti-noise movement. She founded the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise in New York in 1906, and carried out relatively successful lobbying for anti-noise ordinances and quiet zones, particularly around hospitals and schools (Bijsterveld; Thompson 120 - 30). Rice’s organization became the model for the foundation of similar organizations in other countries and big cities. The German philosopher and cultural critic 332 Daniel Morat Theodor Lessing also referred to the New York model when he brought the Deutscher Antilärmverein into being in 1908 (Baron; Goodyear; Lentz). 1 The foundation of the German Anti-Noise League was directly preceded by the publication of Lessing’s book-length polemical Der Lärm: Eine Kampfschrift gegen die Geräusche unseres Lebens. In it Lessing made his lament first and foremost from the position of the intellectual worker whose concentration and productivity were painfully disturbed by what he called the «preponderance of noise in contemporary life» (2). For Lessing, the tormenting noise came above all from two sources: the affairs and business of other people (neighbours and traders) and the traffic of the big city. Consequently, Lessing’s Anti-Noise League took up arms against both in its publications and campaigns, but it focused primarily on the noise made by other people as an infringement upon one’s right to private solitude. For Lessing and his allies, this problem was attributable to a lack of civility and the boorishness of fellow citizens. Accordingly, the league’s journal, first published in autumn 1908, was called Der Anti-Rüpel («Antirowdy» «Das Recht auf Stille»): Monatsblätter zum Kampf gegen Lärm, Roheit und Unkultur im deutschen Wirtschafts-, Handels- und Verkehrsleben. Harsh critiques levelled at Lessing by his opponents suggest that the elitism and cultural arrogance expressed in the title hindered the success of the League. After early increases, the number of members stagnated at little more than a thousand after 1910. Almost a quarter of them came from Berlin, while the rest were from other big cities in the German Empire. In June 1911, a disillusioned Lessing gave up the League presidency and the organization’s headquarters were moved to Berlin. There it survived until 1914, albeit without an organ like the Antirüpel, whose publication stopped with Lessing’s departure. While the impact of the Anti-Noise League was ultimately limited, it is clear that city officials and residents alike considered noise to be a crucial problem of modern cities at the turn of the century. The role street organs played in that debate provides a good example of the tensions surrounding music making, in public and in private, as part of the unwanted noise generated by one’s fellow citizens. In the pamphlets written by noise opponents, music features as one kind of nuisance among many. Hermann Hasse, for instance, listed in his 1914 report on the international anti-noise movement the following noise categories: «Tierlärm; Kinderlärm; Wirtschaftslärm; Musik- und Vergnügungslärm; Verkehrs- und Baulärm; Gewerblicher und Reklame-Lärm» (3). In his chapter on music and entertainment noise, Hasse called for the prohibition of street organs, among other things (17). In its charter, Lessing’s Anti-Noise League had also called 333 Sounding Out Urban Space for the abatement of street music. In the pages of the Anti-Rüpel, one finds complaints about all sorts of music. To most of the members and supporters of the Anti-Noise League, the piano played by the neighbors was much more annoying than the barrel organ played on the street. 2 This was mainly due to the fact that most supporters and members of the Anti-Noise League lived in bourgeois neighborhoods, where there were more pianos than street organs, the latter being operated primarily out in the open air in working class districts. Regardless of neighborhood, however, noise opponents still considered street music to be a problem. What helped them in their quest for quietude was the fact that «Ruhe» was also a major concern for the authorities. Street music was highly regulated during the German Empire. The 1869 police ordinance for Berlin remained in effect until the end of the Empire, and included a paragraph on the «Erhaltung der Ruhe auf öffentlichen Straßen, Wegen und Plätzen.» It stated that «Musik-Aufführungen auf öffentlicher Straße dürfen nur mit Genehmigung der Polizeibehörde stattfinden» (Sammlung 75). Organ grinders like Friedrich Demant therefore had to obtain a permit from the police in order to ply their trade. This permit did not allow them to play music on private property, though, if the landlord or caretaker objected, as B. G. Hoffmann did. Therefore street music played in private backyards was often a matter of dispute, and the law usually sided with the proprietors, as in the case of the quarrel between Hoffmann and Demant, which ended with Demant having to pay a fine of 20 Marks for domestic disturbance. Taken together, the dispute over house music on the one hand and street music on the other hand - with the border case of backyard or courtyard music in the middle - shows that what was ultimately at stake in the noise debates were the boundaries between the private and the public. In the first instance, anti-noise activists claimed their right to silence and peacefulness within their own private realms, yet they complained that this right was violated by all sorts of noises penetrating their homes from outside. But in the second instance, anti-noise activists also campaigned for less noise in public spaces. In this public space, they not only opposed organ grinders, but more generally the surge of popular music played in beer gardens and public squares by military bands and coffee house orchestras. In his pamphlet Der Lärm Lessing summed it up under the notion of «Musikwut»: Eine grauenhafte Unsitte grassiert in ganz Deutschland: das allgemeine Restaurant- und Kaffeehauskonzert. Wer auf das Wohlwollen seiner Mitmenschen angewiesen ist, musikalische Ohren besitzt und sich nicht ‹aus dem Erwerbsleben zurückziehen› kann, der wird durch Musik, in der alle Welt ihre Nöte und Sorgen 334 Daniel Morat übertäubt, fast zu Tode gemetzgert. Jede Arbeit in Fabrikhöllen und Schwitzschachten wird von rhythmisiertem Lärme begleitet. Aber auch alle Erholungsstätten sind von schlechter Musik überfüllt. Der jeweilige Gassenhauer, heute das ‹Lied von der Holzauktion›, morgen die Matschiche, verfolgt uns bis in die Träume der Nacht. Die allgemeine Musikwut übt auf die Kultur des Ohres die selbe Wirkung, die das illustrierte Journal, das ‹Witzblatt› und die kitschige Reproduktion auf die Kultur des Auges übt. (69) In turn-of-the-century Berlin, one could indeed speak of a «music frenzy.» 3 This music frenzy went back to what Derek Scott has called the «popular music revolution» of the nineteenth century. According to Scott and others, the development of musical life in nineteenth-century Europe and North America was characterized by two important features: the divide between art music and popular music, and the «incorporation of music into a system of capitalist enterprise» (4). Music became a business, and it became a means of social distinction. Popular music was part of the growing entertainment industry that supplied the solvent populace of big cities in particular with ever new amusements and leisure opportunities. This commercialization can also be understood as a kind of democratization of music, as Sabine Giesbrecht-Schutte has emphasized, since larger parts of the populace now gained access to music. As in so many other respects, Berlin was a latecomer in this regard, influenced by developments especially in Paris, Vienna, and London. Of course there had been opportunities to listen to popular music in Berlin throughout the nineteenth century. But the «große Schlagerzeit in Berlin,» as Walter Kiaulehn has termed it (238), came in the 1890s with popular operetta composers like Paul Lincke, Walter Kollo, and Jean Gilbert. Berlin then became the center of German operetta and musical comedy, and also of the music publishing industry. Through sheet music and the emerging recording industry popular songs composed for operettas and musical comedies found their way off the stages and into public space as well as private homes (Becker). Much lamented by anti-noise activists, the «piano pestilence» or growth of middle-class domestic music making was therefore also a part of this commercialization and democratization of music. But the popular songs were not only played in private homes (be it on the piano or the gramophone); they were also performed in beer gardens and promenade concerts, by military bands and coffee house orchestras, and, last but not least, by organ grinders, for the popular songs were also put onto the barrels or music rolls of the street organs. Barrel organs were invented in the eighteenth century and were popular in marketplaces and fairgrounds throughout the nineteenth century. They 335 Sounding Out Urban Space became the typical backyard instrument in Berlin after they began to be manufactured on an industrial scale in the late nineteenth century (Hopf et al.). According to one source, there were as many as 3,000 organ grinders in Berlin in 1893 (Lindenberg 114). Those who did not own an organ themselves could rent one for a fee from the manufacturer or at a bourse, where they also traded the barrels and music rolls. Thus, the popular hit songs were also played in the backyards and streets of the working class districts, where they were eventually sung and whistled by the housemaids and the guttersnipes mentioned in the quotation from the Berliner Gerichtszeitung above. There are many accounts of the speed and breadth of the circulation of these songs. Felix Philippi, for instance, writes in his memories of Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century as follows: Von der schnellen Popularität eines solchen Couplets der damaligen Zeit macht man sich keinen Begriff; es wurde Gemeingut, weil es volkstümlich gedacht und weil es volkstümlich empfunden war. Ein paar Tage nach seiner bejubelten Feuertaufe im Wallnertheater flatterte es durch Berlin, zog es ein in die Beletagen, in die Küchen und Gemüsekeller; es tönte von den Lippen der Schuljungen und der Dienstmädchen, die Schusterjungen pfiffen’s, die Marktweiber gröhlten’s, die Droschkenkutscher und Eckensteher brummten’s, und die Leierkasten wimmerten es. (117) Lukas Richter describes the ubiquity of «Im Grunewald ist Holzauktion,» a song that referred to the deforestation of the Grunewald in the years around 1890 when a villa colony was built in this area west of Berlin (193). Theodor Lessing also mentioned this song in his philippic against the «music frenzy» quoted above. Richter quotes this report from the Tägliche Rundschau from January 1892: Noch vor vierzehn Tagen war dieser Singsang in den weitesten Kreisen unbekannt und heute ertönt er von der Bühne des ‹Adolph-Ernst-Theaters›, aus Küchenfenstern und Schusterkellern, aus Schneiderstuben und Baugerüsten. Und aus den breitesten Volksschichten ist dieser Gassenhauer bereits in Familien und Gesellschaften gelangt. Man spielt ihn bei Bällen, Tanzkränzchen, großen und kleinen Festlichkeiten und singt und tanzt dazu. On the one hand, this circulation of popular songs can be described as a topdown-process. Of course the operetta industry had a business interest in the dissemination of its products. The Antirüpel even reported that people were hired to whistle the latest hit songs on the street as a marketing tool for the operetta industry. 4 On the other hand, it is important to note that there was also an appropriation from below at play in this process. When people sang the popular songs on the street, they did not always sing them the way they were supposed to be sung. In fact, it is constitutive of the so-called 336 Daniel Morat «Gassenhauer» (popular melodies) that they circulated in different versions. The people who picked up the songs changed the lyrics or wrote them completely anew, adapting them to local circumstances. One prominent example is the song that the organ grinder Demant played in the courtyard of Landsbergerstraße 32 and Landwehrstraße 40 a before he was kicked out by the caretaker Hoffmann. According to the Berliner Gerichtszeitung, it was «Mutter, der Mann mit dem Koks ist da.» The melody of this popular «Gassenhauer» was taken from the operetta «Gasparone» by Karl Millöcker from 1884, but the lyrics were made up by the people who sang the song in the streets and addressed the poor living conditions in the Berlin tenement houses: Mutter, der Mann mit dem Koks ist da! Stille doch, Junge, ick weeß et ja! Haste denn Jeld? Ick hab’ keen Jeld. Wer hat denn den Mann mit dem Koks bestellt? (qtd. in Richter 389) These new lyrics were so popular that they found their way back onto the stage. In April 1886 - shortly after the incident between Demant and Hoffmann took place - a new musical burlesque called «Der Mann mit dem Coaks oder Das weinende Berlin» was staged in the Luisenstädtische Theater under the directorship of Adolf Ernst, a successful theater entrepreneur and stage director (Richter 390). 5 The song stayed so popular, even in the twentieth century, that the Austrian pop musician Falco borrowed its title for one of his own songs in 1995. This example shows that street music and the new popular music industry were closely intertwined, and that the «Gassenhauer» were not simply a product of the new cultural industry, but were simultaneously a product of the active appropriation and transformation of popular music by the citizenry. The German cultural anthropologist Kaspar Maase has argued that the rise of popular mass culture since the mid-nineteenth century led to an aestheticization of everyday life in the sense that it made aesthetic experience an element of the quotidian lives of so-called «regular» people (30). By providing them with a medium for self-reflection, the popular arts helped people to cope with their lives and to make sense of them. This seems to be especially true for the «Gassenhauer,» popular songs which thematized the changing living conditions in the big city as well as social and political experiences, mostly in a humorous or satirical way. In this manner, they contributed to the process of mental adaptation to the urban living conditions, which Gottfried Korff has called «inner urbanization.» Hundreds of «Gassenhauer» dealt with Berlin and its changing living conditions during the nineteenth and early twentieth century (Richter; 337 Sounding Out Urban Space Koepp and Cleff; Hoffmann). Often, these songs were written and sung in the Berlin dialect and thereby contributed to the construction of the so-called «Berliner Schnauze,» the typical attitude of the Berliner, conveyed in the colloquial language. These songs thus served as a medium for the construction of a type of urban identity that was specifically Berlin. This was especially important for a city with such a high immigration rate and an increasingly non-native population. The influx of migrants to Berlin in the nineteenth century and especially after the founding of the German Empire in 1871 caused rapid population growth and thus changed the character of the city (Jelavich; Stahrenberg). By providing an image of the typical Berliner, these songs helped migrants to assimilate both socially and psychologically. One of the artists especially prolific in providing ever new Berlin songs was Otto Reutter, star of the Wintergarten variety theatre. Throughout his career, which lasted roughly from 1890 to his death in 1931, he wrote a considerable number of songs thematizing the peculiarities of life in Berlin (Reutter). Among the topics of big city life treated in his songs was also the problem of city noise. As early as 1908, which was of course the year of the formation of the Deutscher Antilärmverein, Reutter made fun of urban noise in one of his songs, entitled «Nicht so laut! »: Auf den Straßen heutzutage das Getös macht nervös. Darum ruft empört der Antilärmverein: «’s darf nicht sein! » Dies Geratter, dies Geknatter, dies Geknall überall, Namentlich die Aut’mobile machen einen Mordskrawall. Wie das tönt - tut tut, wie das dröhnt - (tut tut), fährt so’n Parvenu an mir vorbei, da ruf’ ich voller Wut: «Du fährst auch noch vierter Klasse, hör’ doch auf mit dem Getut! » Nicht so laut, nicht so laut, nicht so laut mußte sein, Dein Benzin macht dich bemerkbar, also brauchste nicht zu schrei’n! Nicht so laut, nicht so laut, ein Trost bleibt dir immer noch: Wenn die Leut’ dich auch nicht hören - riechen tun sie dich ja doch! 6 Reutter’s songs rarely became «Gassenhauer» themselves, as their lyrics were too elaborate to be picked up easily by the crowd. But Reutter, nevertheless, picked up the wit of the «Gassenhauer» to fuel his couplet art. His songs thereby show one way in which popular music reflected on the conditions of urban life. Other forms of popular music did so in more mediated ways. Listening to a street organ played in the courtyard of a working class district could also help the listener adapt to the urban soundscape, which was characterized by the simultaneity of different sounds - even if the lyrics of the 338 Daniel Morat song did not address this urban soundscape as directly as Reutter’s couplet from 1908 did, and even if people like Lessing or the caretaker Hoffmann opposed the simultaneity of sounds as noise and wished to regulate it. As the disputes over and the practices of street music have shown, the sounds of the modern city were one level on which the social coexistence of different people and different classes, the boundaries between the private and the public, and questions of urban identity were negotiated. Lending an ear to the backyard organ grinders can therefore offer us new insights into the fabric of modern city life. Notes 1 Another predecessor of Lessing was Charles Babbage, who already in 1864 campaigned against street performers in London (Assael). Babbage never founded an antinoise league similar to Rice’s or Lessing’s, though. 2 For the third issue of the league’s journal, it conducted an «anti-noise enquiry» among the «intellectual elite» of Germany. The poet Ludwig Fulda wrote from Berlin: «Nach meiner persönlichen Erfahrung ist der Lärm innerhalb des Hauses weit schwerer zu ertragen als der Lärm außerhalb. Hier müßte daher meines Erachtens Ihre Agitation am kräftigsten einsetzen; daß jeder Hausbewohner das unumschränkte Recht besitzt, durch laute Geräusche zu jeder beliebigen Zeit, besonders durch Musik, alle übrigen Bewohner zu stören, ist eine Barbarei, die zu unserer sonst so fortgeschrittenen Kultur in ‹schreiendem› Widerspruch steht» (35). The essayist Oskar A. H. Schmitz wrote, also from Berlin: «Von allen Störungen, die in der Anarchie unseres Verkehrslebens ihre Ursache haben, erscheint mir die private Musik als die bei weitem lästigste und zugleich häufigste.» (36). The economist Walther Borgius, again in Berlin, was the only one to list the street organ among his most hated sources of noise, along with the piano: «Ich und meine Frau und viele meiner Bekannten leiden schmerzhaft unter dem Lärm aller Art, trotzdem wir in einem sogenannten Villenvorort wohnen, und zwar besonders unter: Klavierpaukerei, Leierkasten, Teppichklopfen, nächtlichem Hundeheulen und -bellen, Wagenrasseln auf schlechtem Pflaster» (38). For the context of the «piano pestilence», see Widmaier. 3 For more detail on this subject, see Morat. 4 «Ein neuer Beruf hat sich in Berlin ausgebildet. Die Operettenhochflut der letzten Jahre hat die Fabrikanten der zugkräftigeren Marsch- und Walzerschlager einigermaßen ins Gedränge gebracht. Der Absatz der Komposition hat mit der zunehmenden Zahl solcher Schlager stark nachgelassen. In einer Zeit, wo ein Walzer den anderen ablöst, geraten Melodien sehr bald in Vergessenheit, wenn nicht für ihre Volkstümlichkeit in möglichst nachhaltiger Weise gesorgt wird. Deshalb haben die ingeniösen Operettenkomponisten und ihre Verleger zu dem originellen Mittel gegriffen, Leute anzuwerben, die imstande sind, die neuesten Couplets bei jeder passenden und unpassenden Gelegenheit dem Publikum vorzupfeifen. In erster Linie dienen dazu die Claqueure der Berliner Spezialitäten- und Operettentheater. Darüber hinaus aber bezahlt man heut schon einen großen Teil Lindenbummler und andere Elemente dafür, 339 Sounding Out Urban Space daß sie die betreffende Melodie auf Straßen und Plätzen zum Vortrage bringen. Wenn die Stadtpfeifer von Berlin bei diesem Geschäft auch nicht gerade Seide spinnen können, so ist das Honorar als Beitrag zum Lebensunterhalt doch sehr willkommen» (Peregrin 15). 5 Luisenstadt was the city district south of Jannowitzbrücke and around Oranienplatz and Görlitzer Bahnhof that was divided between Berlin-Mitte and Berlin-Kreuzberg in 1920 with the formation of Greater Berlin. It was characterized by the mixture of uses typical for Berlin: small industry, trade, lower middle class and working class residential buildings. 6 Lyrics according to http: / / www.otto-reutter.de/ index.php/ couplets/ texte/ 197-nichtso-laut.html (accessed September 15, 2014). To listen to a recording of the song go to: http: / / www.otto-reutter.de/ media/ audio/ 22_1901_1908.mp3. Works Cited «Antilärm-Enquete.» Der Anti-Rüpel («Antirowdy» «Das Recht auf Stille»). Monatsblätter zum Kampf gegen Lärm, Roheit und Unkultur im deutschen Wirtschafts-, Handels- und Verkehrsleben 1.3 (1909): 34 - 38. Assael, Brenda. «Music in the Air. Noise, Performers and the Contest over the Streets of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Metropolis.» The Streets of London. From the Great Fire to the Great Stink. Ed. Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore. London: Rivers Oram Press, 2003. 183 - 214. Baron, Lawrence. «Noise and Degeneration. Theodor Lessing’s Crusade for Quiet.» Journal of Contemporary History 17.1 (1982): 165 - 78. Becker, Tobias. «Die Anfänge der Schlagerindustrie. Intermedialität und Wirtschaftliche Verflechtung vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg.» Lied und populäre Kultur/ Song and Popular Culture 58 (2013): 11 - 39. Berliner Gerichtszeitung 19 June 1886: n. pag. Bijsterveld, Karin. «The Diabolical Symphony of the Mechanical Age. Technology and Symbolism of Sound in European and North American Noise Abatement Campaigns 1900 - 1940.» Social Studies of Science 31.1 (2001): 37 - 70. Giesbrecht-Schutte, Sabine. «Zum Stand der Unterhaltungsmusik um 1900.» Schund und Schönheit. Populäre Kultur um 1900. Ed. Kaspar Maase and Wolfgang Kaschuba. Köln/ Weimar/ Wien: Böhlau, 2001. 114 - 60. Goodyear, John. «Escaping the Urban Din. A Comparative Study of Theodor Lessing’s Antilärmverein (1908) and Maximilian Negwer’s Ohropax (1908).» Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century. An Introduction. Ed. Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 19 - 34. Hasse, Hermann. Die Internationale Lärmschutzbewegung. Gautzsch bei Leipzig: Felix Dietrich, 1914. Hoffmann, Niels Frédéric. Berliner Liederbuch. Lieder und Geschichten aus 200 Jahren. Berlin: Elsengold Verlag, 2014. Hopf, Manuela, Klaus Krug, and Helmut Wiemann, eds. Der Leierkasten. Ein Wahrzeichen Berlins. Berlin: Wort- & Bild-Specials, 1991. 340 Daniel Morat Jelavich, Peter. «Modernity, Civic Identity, and Metropolitan Entertaiment. Vaudeville, Cabaret, and Revue in Berlin, 1900 - 1933.» Berlin. Culture and Metropolis. Ed. Charles Werner Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990. 95 - 110. Kiaulehn, Walther. Berlin. Schicksal einer Weltstadt. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1997. Koepp, Johannes, and Wilhelm Cleff. Lieber Leierkastenmann. Berliner Lieder. Bad Godesberg: Voggenreiter Verlag, 1959. Korff, Gottfried. «Mentalität und Kommunikation in der Großstadt. Berliner Notizen zur ‹inneren› Urbanisierung.» Großstadt. Aspekte empirischer Kulturforschung. Ed. Hermann Bausinger and Theodor Kohlmann. Berlin: Staatl. Museen Preuß. Kulturbesitz, 1985. 343 - 61. Lessing, Theodor. Der Lärm. Eine Kampfschrift gegen die Geräusche unseres Lebens. Grenzfragen des Nerven- und Seelenlebens. Wiesbaden: Bergmann, 1908. Lentz, Matthias. «‹Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht›. Lärm, Großstadt und Nervosität im Spiegel von Theodor Lessings ‹Antilärmverein›.» Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte 13 (1994): 81 - 105. Lindenberg, Paul. «Straßenexistenzen.» Berliner Pflaster. Illustrierte Schilderungen aus dem Berliner Leben. Ed. M. Reumund and L. Manzel. Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 1893. 97 - 120. Maase, Kaspar. Grenzenloses Vergnügen. Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur 1850 - 1970. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997. Morat, Daniel. «Music in the Air - Listening in the Streets. Popular Music and Urban Listening Habits in Berlin around 1900.» Oxford Handbook for the History of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Ed. Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017 (forthcoming). Peregrin. «Kultur.» Der Anti-Rüpel («Antirowdy» «Das Recht auf Stille»). Monatsblätter zum Kampf gegen Lärm, Roheit und Unkultur im deutschen Wirtschafts-, Handels- und Verkehrsleben 2.3 (1910): 15 - 16. Philippi, Felix. Alt-Berlin. Erinnerungen aus der Jugendzeit. 10 th ed. Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1918. Reutter, Otto. Habn Sie ’ne Ahnung von Berlin! Heitere Lieder und Couplets. Ed. Helga Bemmann. Berlin: Parthas, 2002. Richter, Lukas. Der Berliner Gassenhauer. Darstellung. Dokumente. Sammlung. Mit einem Register neu herausgegeben vom Deutschen Volksliedarchiv. Münster and New York: Waxmann, 2004. «Sammlung der Polizei-Verordnungen für Berlin.» Berlin: A. W. Hahn’s Erben, 1878. Saul, Klaus. «Wider die ‹Lärmpest›. Lärmkritik und Lärmbekämpfung im Deutschen Kaiserreich.» Macht Stadt krank? Vom Umgang mit Gesundheit und Krankheit. Ed. Dittmar Machule, Olaf Mischer and Arnold Sywottek. Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1996. 151 - 92. Scott, Derek B. Sounds of the Metropolis. The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Stahrenberg, Carolin. «Donnerwetter! Tadellos! ! Stadtidentitäten Berlins im Klang von Couplets und Schlagern 1907/ 1908.» Musik in Leipzig, Wien und anderen Städten im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Verlage, Konservatorien, Salons, Vereine, 341 Sounding Out Urban Space Konzerte. Ed. Stefan Keym and Katrin Stöck. Leipzig: Gudrun Schröder, 2011. 335 - 47. Storck, Karl. Musik-Politik. Beiträge zur Reform unseres Musiklebens. Stuttgart: Greiner & Pfeiffer, 1911. Thompson, Emily. The Soundscape of Modernity. Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America 1900 - 1933. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Widmaier, Tobias. «In Pianopolis. Der Kampf gegen die ‹Clavierseuche› im Kaiserreich.» Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 151.6 (1990): 16 - 20. 342 Daniel Morat Listening to the Law: Acoustical Embodiment and Industrial Space in Der Proceß TYLER WHITNEY UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR Die elend dünnen Wände, die den ehrlich tätigen Mann verraten, den Unehrlichen aber decken. Franz Kafka, «Der Nachbar» In a short text composed around the fall of 1922, Franz Kafka drew a striking comparison between the legal court and a disorienting auditory experience. As the text’s protagonist enters what he takes to be an official court building in search of legal representation, he notes the court’s structural similarity to an unlocalizable noise: Über alle Einzelheiten hinweg erinnerte mich am meisten an ein Gericht ein Dröhnen, das unaufhörlich aus der Ferne zu hören war, man konnte nicht sagen aus welcher Richtung es kam, es erfüllte so sehr alle Räume, daß man annehmen konnte, es komme von überall oder, was noch richtiger schien, gerade der Ort, wo man zufällig stand, sei der eigentliche Ort dieses Dröhnens, aber gewiß war das eine Täuschung, denn es kam aus der Ferne. (Die Erzählungen 389) 1 In a single dizzying sentence, the posthumously titled «Fürspecher» illuminates key characteristics of the law, which pervade Kafka’s writings on the topic. 2 According to the acoustic analogy posited in the text, the court is defined by its omnipresence, obscurity, and capacity to obliterate conventional spatial boundaries. The reach of the court passes easily through walls and doorways, filling «alle Räume,» while simultaneously preventing the localization of its source at any single point in space. It remains unlocalizable, oscillating between a diffuse periphery and the exact location «wo man zufällig stand.» It is everywhere and nowhere, unavoidable and inaccessible, or, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari observe in concrete architectural terms, «always in the office next door, or behind the door» (45). Other critics have noted that, for Kafka, the law relies on «die Unsichtbarkeit und gleichzeitige Omnipräsenz der Macht» and «das Fehlen einer verantwortlichen Schaltstelle» (Lubkoll 285, 280). Despite critical recognition of the court’s continuous spatial propagation and, in turn, its rendering of the law as both omnipresent and inaccessible, scholars have overlooked the continuities between Kafka’s account of the law and experiences of sound and space. In his most extensive and perhaps bestknown treatment of the law, the unfinished novel Der Proceß (1914/ 15), Kafka utilizes sound as both a central metaphorical figure and literal channel for legal power in ways that resonate with the acoustical analogy put forth in «Fürsprecher.» Indeed, Der Proceß offers a conception of the law that adheres to what I will be describing as an audio-spatial logic. With this formulation, I seek to denote a particular configuration of sound and space, which insists on the unlocalizability of sound sources and the inherent permeability of spatial boundaries. According to this schema, the legal defendant and protagonist of Der Proceß, Josef K., can be regarded as occupying the figurative position of a lone listener on one side of a wall. From some undefined location on the other side of this wall, «in the office next door, or behind the door,» the court makes itself manifest as ambient noise, which cannot be deciphered in any meaningful way. Crucially, the borders separating the court and the legal subject dictate asymmetrical acoustical relations. If the court disseminates noise through all spaces, by contrast the legal subject is rendered silent and prevented from communicating across the same spatial boundaries. The membrane mediating the subject’s encounter with the court is permeable, but only in one direction. The legal subject of Der Proceß is positioned so as to provoke endless speculation about the contents of the law and its precise origins but left silent and defenseless against the court’s physical and perceptual effects, which are unilaterally communicated through the porous walls by means of noise. My notion of an audio-spatial logic bears resemblance to what Michel Chion, in his classic study of sound in cinema, terms the «acousmêtre,» a sound whose cause or source remains unseen. 3 Similar to the sound of the law in Kafka’s unfinished novel, Chion’s acousmêtre «is everywhere, its voice comes from an immaterial and non-localized body, and it seems that no obstacle can stop it» (24). In addition, the acousmatic voice is invested with the power to command and guide the actions of others. However, several crucial differences should be noted. First, while Chion’s analysis focuses on the voice and enunciation, my interest lies instead in noises devoid of semantic value. Second, although Chion defines the acousmêtre as incapable of being contained spatially, the audio-spatial logic of Kafka’s novel is defined by the perpetual oscillation between omnipresence and localized, subjective experience: in one moment «überall» and the next «gerade der Ort, wo man zufällig stand.» Finally, what I am calling an audio-spatial logic diverges from Chion’s acousmêtre by encompassing the transfer of acoustic properties of permeability to non-auditory domains and the dissolution of conceptual distinctions between subject and object, embodiment and disembodiment. 344 Tyler Whitney This essay analyzes the propagation of noise through permeable acoustic spaces as both a crucial precondition for the legal system’s functionality and an ongoing strategy of control and coercion in Der Proceß. Despite the novel’s numerous allusions to sound and listening, as well as the glaring etymological links between listening and the law, 4 the sonic dimension of Der Proceß has gone virtually unnoticed. 5 My contention is not simply that, because sound plays a crucial role in structuring the novel’s representations of juridical processes, visualist paradigms fail to account for the narrative’s underlying audio-spatial logic. 6 I am interested in how encounters with noise both illuminate the functioning of the legal system by means of analogy and function as sites for the actualization of legal power. For it is not only on a metaphorical level that legal power converges with the ear. Sound and hearing are not only ways for Kafka to talk about the law, providing something like a repository of metaphors for his literary works. Scenes of focused attention to the nuances of sonic experience and the imposition of noise from without are also depictions of the actualization of legal power. The ear becomes both the target and the conduit of legal power, in addition to serving as a symbol of how this power operates. The transformation of the ear into a site of the court’s coercive operations finds its most powerful articulation in a scene in which K. visits the court chambers in the attic of a worker tenement. There, he experiences a bout of vertigo and hallucinates the sound of a siren with no localizable source. During the same period in which Kafka was writing Der Proceß, medical scientists studying the health effects of the factory frequently cited vertigo and subjective noises as related symptoms of overexposure to the cacophony of the workplace, postulating that the cause of such disorders was related to physical damage inside the ear. The industrial soundscape’s capacity to inflict physical and perceptual damage on the ear would have been apparent to Kafka during his frequent visits to factories, a part of his professional duties as an insurance lawyer and advocate for worker safety (Koch and Wagenbach; Rhine), as well as from experiences in the asbestos factory he founded with his brother-in-law in 1911. «Gestern in der Fabrik,» he wrote in a diary entry dated February 1912, «Die Mädchen in ihren an und für sich unerträglich schmutzigen und gelösten Kleidern, mit den wie beim Erwachen zerworfenen Frisuren, mit dem vom unaufhörlichen Lärm der Transmissionen und von der einzelnen zwar automatischen aber unberechenbar stockenden Maschine festgehaltenen Gesichtsausdruck» (Tagebücher 1909 - 1912 32; my emphasis). In another entry recorded two years later as he began work on Der Proceß, Kafka compared the disruptive «Lärm» outside his hotel room to that heard in «einer Maschinenfabrik» (Tagebücher 1914 - 1923 24). In his 345 Listening to the Law professional capacities as an insurance lawyer, Kafka was responsible for helping to introduce a safer and quieter wood-planing machine, which, as he put it, eliminated «jenes Heulen der alten Vierkantwellen [. . .], welches förmlich ihre Gefahr anzeigte» (Amtliche Schriften 201). He additionally warned of the safety risks posed by workers suffering from «Schwindel, Schwerhörigkeit» (489), «Störungen der Sprache, des Gehörs und des Gesichtes» (494), especially after a loosening of safety standards due to the war and the return of traumatized and physically tattered soldiers to the factories. According to his diaries, the period Kafka spent writing the novel between the end of July and December 1914 was filled with regular visits to the factory he owned with his brother-in-law in addition to his office work at the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt. 7 The novel therefore emerges at a time in which Kafka’s everyday life was characterized by an even more intensified intermingling of white-collar bureaucracy and working-class environments than his position as an insurance lawyer would have ordinarily required. Set explicitly in the milieu of a working class tenement building and against the backdrop of a piercing siren, the scene in the court chambers in Der Proceß suggests a superimposition of elements from the industrial soundscape onto the already heterogeneous spaces of the legal court. In addition to the immediately identifiable spaces of white-collar bureaucracy, the novel draws on acoustic experiences characteristic of the factory to portray the trial’s physical effects and growing encroachment upon the body. Subtle allusions to physical trauma internal to the ear are followed by broader concerns about the court’s influence on the defendant’s body: Only moments after hearing the subjective noise of the siren, K. suspects that his body has «revolutionized (revolutionieren)» and is «preparing a new trial for him (ihm einen neuen Proceß bereiten» (Der Proceß 85). Experiences of vertigo and subjective noises give rise to anxieties regarding the increasingly embodied nature of the trial. If the scene in the court chambers begins by intimating an expansion of the court’s power into the spaces of the ear, it concludes by introducing the possibility of a body fully coopted by the court and directed from without. As we will see, the second half of the novel lends credibility to K.’s suspicion of a second embodied trial. In contrast to earlier chapters, those following the episode in the court chambers highlight the trial’s somatic effects, which range from intense fatigue and distraction to further auditory hallucinations and new modes of listening detached from the surrounding environment. The propagation of sound through space provides productive figures of transgression and permeability that underlie the court’s methods of control, 346 Tyler Whitney as Kafka engages experiences of sound as a tool to conceptualize the relations between legal subjects and the court. At the same time, the text’s allusion to otological disorders common among factory workers draws our attention to sound’s materiality and capacity to produce physical effects in listeners. The eruption of subjective noises in K.’s ears exposes a corporeal, physiological foundation that underlines the court’s omnipresence and inaccessibility. The subjective noise consumes K. but remains inaudible to those around him. Similar to the court itself in «Fürsprecher,» the sound cannot be located at any one point in space. It is nowhere and everywhere, remaining inaccessible but capable of affecting the body. The audio-spatial logic that informs Kafka’s depiction of the law and serves as the focus of this essay draws on both the figurative and material dimensions of sound. Der Proceß recounts the story of the bank employee, Josef K., who on the morning of his thirtieth birthday is informed by two agents of the court that he has been charged with an unspecified crime. He is permitted to continue working and to live in his apartment, but his ordinary routines are now regularly interrupted by mandatory visits to court offices housed in unlikely spaces throughout the city. The narrative consists largely of K.’s interactions with various legal officials, lawyers, relatives, and acquaintances, and his efforts to learn more about the law in order to better navigate a seemingly inscrutable legal system. Most relevant to the current discussion is the way in which K.’s attitude toward the trial shifts over the course of the novel. In the first half, he views his case with critical detachment and considers it «nicht sehr wichtig» (52). However, following the episode in the court chambers where he hears the subjective noise of the siren and begins to fear the onset of a second trial, K. comes to realize that «er hatte kaum mehr die Wahl den Proceß anzunehmen oder abzulehnen, er stand mitten darin und mußte sich wehren» (132; my emphasis), as the trial «immer näher an den Leib rückt» (197). The defendant becomes more and more immersed in the details of his case and, in turn, more and more physically exhausted and distracted from his professional duties. Despite the intensity of his efforts, there are no breakthroughs or major insights regarding his case and by the end K. recognizes that his chances of exoneration are nil. In the final chapter, two agents of the court again appear at K.’s door, now on the eve of his thirty-first birthday, and escort him to his execution, which he accepts with little resistance. He is led to a quarry where one man restrains him while the other stabs him in the heart with a knife. In response, K. utters the words, «wie ein Hund,» and the novel comes to a close. 347 Listening to the Law From the novel’s opening pages, K.’s interactions with agents of the court are structured according to an inherent asymmetry, which manifests itself on the level of sound. Already in the first chapter, the aggressive noise produced by agents of the court is contrasted with prohibitions on K.’s audibility. During the initial interrogation in his apartment, the protagonist registers the commands issued by court officials as violent noise that causes pain and involuntary physical responses. As he attempts to process his arrest alone in his room, the silence in the apartment is broken by a guard’s abrasive command, which emanates from an adjacent room: «Da erschreckte ihn ein Zuruf aus dem Nebenzimmer derartig, daß er mit den Zähnen ans Glas schlug. ‹Der Aufseher ruft Sie,› hieß es. Es war nur das Schreien, das ihn erschreckte, dieses kurze abgehackte militärische Schreien, das er dem Wächter Franz gar nicht zugetraut hätte» (17). In accordance with the audio-spatial logic patterning the court’s actions and organization, the guard’s command reaches the protagonist from the next room, passing through the wall while its source remains hidden from view. Moreover, it is the purely sonic dimension of the command and not its content that the protagonist finds jarring, «dieses kurze abgehackte militärische Schreien.» The court directs the subject not with semantically meaningful utterances, but rather alinguistically, merely with the tone of a militarized voice. Thus, already in the opening scene of the novel we are confronted with correspondences between experiences of sound and the court’s defining characteristics of omnipresence, inaccessibility, and disciplinary intent. Not only do sounds issue from unexpected and concealed locations, permeating the whole of a given architecture, but content also becomes unintelligible, i. e., inaccessible, behind the purely acoustic qualities of the voice. Most importantly, sounds inscribe themselves on the physical body, initially changing sensorial structures and functions from without. By contrast, K. is warned not to utter a sound. «Und machen Sie keinen solchen Lärm mit dem Gefühl Ihrer Unschuld,» one of the men cautions him, «es stört den nicht gerade schlechten Eindruck, den Sie im übrigen machen» (20). K.’s desperate plea of innocence is portrayed as an incoherent sound that must be silenced, a disruptive and unwelcome noise that is out of place. According to the court official, K.’s success depends on his ability to remain silent. The audible asymmetries between K. and the court are underscored in the following chapter as the protagonist attempts to reproduce theatrically the morning’s events for his neighbor and romantic interest, Fräulein Bürstner. In the performance, K. draws attention to the volume and aggressive nature of the guard’s voice, which had caused him to hit his teeth against the glass in a moment of violent shock. However, K.’s restaging 348 Tyler Whitney of events, which is intended to expose the absurdity of his arrest, leads only to a reconfirmation of the dangers of his audibility. The performance is interrupted by a sudden knock on the door by another inhabitant of the building who is annoyed by the noise. The sound of the knocking frightens K. «besonders stark» (37) and causes Fräulein Bürstner to turn pale in fear. Rather than providing a cathartic moment of satire, the performance results in a succession of acoustic shocks, which simply reproduce the physical effects of the guard’s voice that the protagonist was attempting to imitate. Moreover, Fräulein Bürstner cautions K. to lower his voice and move to another part of the room so that their conversation will not be overheard by their neighbor, whom she believes to be standing on the other side of the door eavesdropping on their every word. The surrounding environment, K. discovers, is populated by eavesdroppers who regularly exploit the porous walls of offices and apartment buildings in order to monitor his activities and gather incriminating evidence against him. Readers are repeatedly confronted with the possibility that the court is listening in on the defendant’s conversations. «Du sprichst aber zu laut,» K. warns his uncle after arriving at the office, «der Diener steht wahrscheinlich an der Tür und horcht» (98). Later, out on the street in front of the office, K. urgently leads his uncle away from the building towards the din of the traffic, «da der Portier zu horchen schien» (100). Finally, in a meeting with the painter, Titorelli, the two figures are forced to whisper in order to hide the content of their conversation from a group of curious children, who listen in from behind the closed door. Ultimately they too are revealed to be members of the court: «[K.] machte auch jetzt kaum eine Bewegung, als sich der Maler zu ihm niederbeugte und ihm, um draußen nicht gehört zu werden ins Ohr flüsterte: ‹Auch diese Mädchen gehören zum Gericht›» (158). It is important to note that the threat of the eavesdropper remains largely an unfounded anxiety, one that the novel repeatedly encourages only to deny or obfuscate. In a particularly striking performance of this ambiguity, K.’s uncle suddenly leaps to the door during a meeting at his lawyer’s office, expecting to find someone listening from outside (107). Upon opening the door, however, he finds no one there. The ease with which rumors about K.’s trial circulate in the novel certainly lends credibility to suspicions of auditory surveillance. But, as the scene in the lawyer’s office demonstrates, the court exerts its influence by evoking such suspicions and then refusing to corroborate them. This narrative strategy underscores the asymmetry at the center of K.’s relationship with his acoustical surroundings. The court is invested with unprecedented powers to hear everything, while the presence of eavesdroppers on the other side of the wall or door ultimately remains 349 Listening to the Law unsubstantiated but encourages belief in the notion that K.’s success relies on his silence, the self-imposed divestment of his own agency that constitutes his participation in and acceptance of the court’s discipline. Underlying these anxieties of covert listening is the recognition that all spatial borders have been dissolved, rendered acoustically permeable, and that as a result, there is nowhere for K. to hide. Kafka’s novel subverts the etymological roots of legal terms such as «das Verhör» and «das rechtliche Gehör» by depicting a legal system intent on disrupting the chains of communication between the court and its legal subjects. On the one hand, court officials discipline K. into silence and caution him against arguing his innocence to them, describing such attempts as irritating noise (Lärm). Later, when given the opportunity to state his case before a group of judges, K.’s testimony is repeatedly interrupted by members of the audience, who, rather than listening to what he has to say, respond to his remarks with the sounds of «Zischen,» «Sausen» (56), and «Kreischen» (57). Far from facilitating a «hearing» in any meaningful sense of the term, the court either encourages silence on the part of the defendant or, when eventually given the opportunity to argue his case, disrupts his speech with interjections of meaningless noise. On the other hand, court officials are assumed to listen covertly to K.’s every word. In both cases, dialogue is thwarted and replaced by unilateral relations or a volley of noise with no semantic content. In Der Proceß, the court listens, but only secretly from the next room. Contact between the defendant and court officials leads not to the exchange of arguments, testimony, or formal examinations of evidence, but instead provides an occasion for the proliferation of noise. K.’s visit to the court chambers testifies to the centrality of this proliferation in structuring the trial’s unfolding and its effects on the defendant. Here, the experience of noise once again demonstrates the simultaneously omnipresent and inaccessible nature of the court. The sound K. hears «erfüllte [alles]» but its source cannot be located (85). More radically, the noise becomes implicated in the onset of a possible second trial, which, as the protagonist speculates, has been prepared by his own body. In this way, the sound does not simply mirror or solidify a set of preexisting characteristics already operative in the trial. It comprises a shift in the trial’s very nature that «revolutionizes (revolutionieren)» the body and invests that transformed, institutionally coopted body with the power to dictate the terms under which the new trial will occur. Before analyzing K.’s experience of the sound, it is important to note the particular social environment in which Kafka sets the crucial episode of the 350 Tyler Whitney trial’s embodiment. Critics have understandably tended to focus on elements of bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie in their readings of Kafka’s novel. 7 What has been overlooked is the way in which these bourgeois spaces of administration and management are overlaid with images and sounds from a distinctly working-class milieu. When he visits the painter Titorelli to discuss his case, K. describes the immediate environment there as dark, filthy, and poor. On the way up the stairs he encounters a child crying on its stomach, but the grim scene is drowned out «infolge des alles übertönenden Lärms, der aus einer Klempfnerwerkstätte auf der andern Seite des Torganges kam» (147). Similarly, the neighborhood in which the court chambers is located is made up of «hohe graue von armen Leuten bewohnte Miethäuser» (44). Outside, a barefoot man sits on a crate and reads a newspaper, while children play with a handcart or fetch water. Inside, K. catches glimpses of women clutching babies as they cook in their one-window apartments, with other family members sick in bed or merely asleep (46). Although the class identity of the inhabitants is never explicitly discussed, one can assume from the description that we are in a worker tenement, a point that is underscored through K.’s decision to invent a story involving a certain «Tischler Lanz» in order to blend in (46). Thus, the rooms and offices officially designated for court are characterized by the proximity of heterogeneous domestic and juridical spaces, as well as their contiguity with dwellings presumably occupied by members of the working classes. Kafka emphasizes the superimposition of industrial and juridical spaces through allusions to the filth and debris that permeates the spaces housing the trial. Both the courtroom where K. hears the «Sausen,» as well as the attic in which he later hears the siren, are portrayed as filthy, filled with clouds of dust and dirt, which obscure the protagonist’s field of vision. «Der nebelige Dunst im Zimmer war äußerst lästig, er verhinderte sogar eine genauere Beobachtung der Fernerstehenden» (55), while the air in the court chambers is later described as «kaum mehr atembar» (80). During the same period in which Kafka composed Der Proceß, he, along with his colleagues and contemporaries in related fields, identified the fumes, debris, and poor air quality inside factories as a pervasive health concern for workers (Amtliche Schriften 483). Only sentences before commenting on «das starke Geräusch» of the factory, for example, one factory researcher condemned the air quality of a spinning mill contaminated by dust and debris, explaining that prolonged exposure to the air would result in irritations to «die oberen Luftwege der in den Spinnereien beschäftigten Arbeiter» (92). Air quality was a problem for numerous factory professions, ranging from steel and textile workers to flax spinners. Viewed alongside contemporaneous accounts of factory conditions 351 Listening to the Law with which the author was intimately familiar in his work at the AUVA, the dust and dirt that fill the courtrooms of Kafka’s novel can be read as traces of these industrial environments. Upon entering the spaces of the court chambers, K. experiences symptoms of nervous sensitivity. While nervousness, especially as it related to sound, had traditionally been associated with figures of the decadent aristocrat or the bourgeois intellectual (Lessing), Kafka’s unique perspective as an insurance lawyer enabled him to see the proliferation of nervous disorders across the seemingly disparate spheres of the office, the factory, and the modern battlefield. Soon after the outbreak of World War I, which coincided with a period of intensive work on the novel, Kafka noted the presence of traumatized and physically wounded bodies filling the streets. The experience of war, he observed, resulted in the loss of control over one’s own body. Returning soldiers «wurde[n] geführt,» pulled to and fro «in diesen qualvollen Bewegungen» (Amtliche Schriften 494). Crucially, however, Kafka regarded the physical and psychological trauma of the war as continuous with experiences in the factory: «So wie im Frieden der letzten Jahrzehnte der intensive Maschinenbetrieb die Nerven der in ihm Beschäftigten unvergleichlich mehr als jemals früher gefährdete, störte und erkranken ließ, hat auch der ungeheuerlich gesteigerte maschinelle Teil der heutigen Kriegshandlungen schwerste Gefahren und Leiden für die Nerven der Kämpfenden verursacht» (498). Kafka’s emphasis on permeability and the superimposition of conflicting spatial registers and class identities in Der Proceß gives voice to this historical propagation of nervous sensitivity beyond the traditional domains of the bourgeois intellectual, artist, or office worker, and into working-class segments of the population including factory workers and soldiers. In the novel, K.’s sensitivity takes the more specific form of vertigo, a type of spatial disorientation (Der Proceß 81). Importantly, medical scientists regarded vertigo as tied to disturbances to the balancing function of the semicircular canals inside the ear. Physical damage to the ear, scientists realized in the early nineteenth century, was often the main cause for feelings of dizziness and spatial disorientation in patients (Erlmann 165 - 74). As a result, complaints about vertigo were treated as otological problems. Seen in this light, K.’s experience of vertigo signals an expansion of the novel’s audiospatial logic. Even the interior spaces of the body and, in this case, the ear, appear vulnerable to modification and manipulation. No longer limited to architectural structures, the permeability of boundaries that pervades the text extends to the surfaces of the body. 352 Tyler Whitney The atmosphere in the court chambers reduces K. to a state of physical weakness and perceptual disorientation to the point that, «er [konnte] sich nicht aufrechthalten» (Der Proceß 81). However, court employees actively prevent him from pausing to rest and regain his strength because, as they explain, it would interfere with the flow of traffic through the office. «Hier können Sie nicht bleiben,» an official explains to the seated protagonist, «hier stören wir den Verkehr» (80). What is registered as a disruption to the legal system is a kind of spatial blockage that threatens to limit or partially contain the court’s otherwise omnipotent reach. The rooms and hallways of the court are marked by their heterogeneity and dizzying juxtaposition of disparate spatial registers. But they are further distinguished by the perpetual movement they demand from defendants. The scene highlights the court’s insistence on perpetuating the flow of bodies and information through space, epitomizing what Cornelia Vismann describes as «die Verschaltung und Verwaltung des Rechts» (36). K.’s temporary stasis represents an impermissible obstacle to the system of endless circulation, an impervious barrier that temporarily disrupts the spatial propagation on which the court depends. The scene in the court chambers shows the protagonist caught between a paralyzing sense of spatial disorientation and forced movement. With the two officials now supporting and directing him through the chamber, K.’s experience of vertigo merges with images of a rough sea, which are accompanied by the subjective sound of a siren with no identifiable source. In attempting to stand on his own, Er war wie seekrank. Er glaubte auf einem Schiff zu sein, das sich in schwerem Seegang befand. Es war ihm als stürze das Wasser gegen die Holzwände, als komme aus der Tiefe des Ganges ein Brausen her, wie von überschlagendem Wasser, als schaukle der Gang in der Quere und als würden die wartenden Parteien zu beiden Seiten gesenkt und gehoben. Desto unbegreiflicher war die Ruhe des Mädchens und des Mannes, die ihn führten. Er war ihnen ausgeliefert, ließen sie ihn los, so mußte er hinfallen wie ein Brett. Aus ihren kleinen Augen giengen scharfe Blicke hin und her; ihre gleichmäßigen Schritte fühlte K. ohne sie mitzumachen, denn er wurde fast von Schritt zu Schritt getragen. Endlich merkte er, daß sie zu ihm sprachen, aber er verstand sie nicht, er hörte nur den Lärm der alles erfüllte und durch den hindurch ein unveränderlicher hoher Ton wie von einer Sirene zu klingen schien. ‹Lauter,› flüsterte er mit gesenktem Kopf und schämte sich, denn er wußte, daß sie laut genug, wenn auch für ihn unverständlich gesprochen hatten. Da kam endlich, als wäre die Wand vor ihm durchrissen ein frischer Luftzug ihm entgegen und er hörte neben sich sagen: ‹Zuerst will er weg, dann aber kann man ihm hundertmal sagen, daß hier der Ausgang ist und er rührt sich nicht.› (84) 353 Listening to the Law The passage portrays the protagonist as a mere object delivered over to court officials, one that is picked up, carried, and dropped «wie ein Brett.» K. is guided «Schritt zu Schritt» by the two figures, «ohne [. . .] mitzumachen.» Reduced to this state of passivity, the defendant becomes mere cargo to be fed through the court’s labyrinthine passageways and across its variegated thresholds. Central to this articulation of waning self-determination is the figure of the seasick sailor jostled to and fro against his will. While K. continues to have trouble directing his movements or standing on his own, the ground beneath his feet assumes the form of a ship deck bombarded by violent waves from all sides. Extending the metaphor of seafaring into the acoustical register, K. then perceives a sound that he describes as, «wie von einer Sirene,» thereby invoking Odysseus’s encounter with the mythological sea creatures of the same name. 8 Similar to Odysseus, K. sails the figurative sea of the court chambers in a state of disempowerment and passivity, propelled forward under the guidance of others. However, in contrast to Odysseus, who asks his men to render him immobile in order to resist the siren’s song, K.’s immobility is not a choice and in fact facilitates coercion and control from without. At the same time that it gestures towards myth, the figure of the siren carries distinctly modern connotations. During the period in which Kafka composed his novel the siren was undergoing a semantic transformation from the purely mythological to the technological, from a figure of enchantment to a signal of alarm. Around 1913, crank-operated sirens began to be introduced into fire stations and on mobile fire equipment. The aerial bombing campaigns of World War I additionally inspired the creation of air raid sirens, which were installed in numerous European and American cities following the war’s end (Rehding; Prochnik). But the device also became a fixture of the modern European factory. A 1912 novella by the now largely forgotten Swiss writer Jakob Schaffner provides detailed descriptions of the sonic dimension of factory life in the early twentieth century and repeatedly refers to the siren as punctuating the workday. «Dann kam man in die Maschinenhalle,» Schaffner writes, «Die Sirene heulte. Die Transmissionen knickten und rollten in der Höhe» (265). Elsewhere, «die Sirene schrie auf» (271), «sie posaunte und jauchzte» (276), «[signalisierte] den Arbeitsbeginn» (236). As Schaffner’s literary depiction of the factory suggests, by 1912 the siren had become a familiar feature of the industrial soundscape, audible and identifiable amidst the cacophony of machinery and commanding voices. By situating the episode in the court chambers alongside Schaffner’s contemporaneous account of the modern 354 Tyler Whitney factory, we are able to grasp the conflicting associations that the siren would have had at the time. On the one hand, the siren maintained its close connection to myth, a sign of irresistible and life-threatening allurement and spellbound desire. On the other, it denoted entry into an industrial environment pervaded by overwhelming sensory experiences. 9 Already encouraged by multiple allusions to the dust and debris pervading the air of juridical spaces, their overlap with domestic, working-class spaces, and the sound of the siren, a reading of the court chambers as a kind of industrial space finds further support in the implication that the sound is a purely subjective figment of the protagonist’s imagination. 12 No one other than K. reacts to the sound or shows signs of having heard it. The two court officials who escort him through the chambers continue to speak to him as if nothing has happened. «Lauter,» he begs of them, feeling a sense of embarrassment at his inability to understand what they are saying. As K. himself admits, his companions speak at a volume that should be audible to him. Conversely, the two court officials are struck by the defendant’s failure to find the exit despite their repeated instructions. The fact that the two court officials speak to K. as if nothing has happened intimates that the protagonist is the only one able to hear the sound, a subjective noise with no referent beyond the listener’s own body or mind. The concomitant onset of vertigo and subjective noises resonates with contemporaneous medical reports on factory accidents and worker illnesses involving the ear. Due to perpetual exposure to the din of industrial machinery, factory workers commonly experienced symptoms of vertigo and the sudden eruption of subjective noises. In his 1905 essay, «Die Unfallbegutachtung in der Ohrenheilkunde,» one medical scientist, B. Baginsky, recounted multiple cases of factory workers complaining of «Ohrgeräuschen der mannigfachsten Art, zeitweilig und kontinuierlich, Sausen, Rauschen, Klingen,» as well as «Schwindelerscheinungen beim Bücken oder beim Blick in die Höhe» (1171). Another expert asserted that, «Schwindelerscheinungen und Gleichgewichtsstörungen gehören zu den constantesten Symptomen nach Verletzungen des schallempfindenden Apparates,» later recalling a case in which a mechanic suffered from «Schwindelanfälle und persistente subjective Geräusche» due to spending extended periods of time «in einer sehr geräuschvollen Werkstatt» (Passow 165). The industrial researcher, Alfred Peyser, also observed the frequency with which factory workers suffered from subjective noises and drew connections between «langdauernden Hörstörungen» and «Schwindelgefühl und Schwindel» (150). 355 Listening to the Law In depicting K.’s journey through the court chambers as a series of disruptions to the perception of sound and space, Kafka’s novel documents the growing physical impact of the trial, a literalized procedure of discipline, upon the defendant’s body. By situating an experience of vertigo in close proximity to auditory hallucinations, the text invokes a network of effects borrowed from the factory as a crucial context for the corporeal turn that the trial takes, presenting a group of symptoms that were commonly analyzed alongside one another and regarded as commonly rooted in the ear. As if ripped from the pages of a medical study detailing the health risks of the industrial workplace, K. experiences the coercive power of the court as a cluster of corporeal effects elicited by the modern factory. Immediately after regaining his composure, K. expresses anxieties regarding the trial’s infiltration of the body, which he fears is no longer under his control. «Wollte etwa sein Körper revolutionieren und ihm einen neuen Proceß bereiten, da er den alten so mühelos ertrug? » (85). K.’s question is striking in that it attributes agency to the body alone. Not only does the body allegedly possess the ability to «revolutionize,» suggesting a sense of insubordination in the face of the subject’s competing will. It is, in the turn, the body that «prepares» a new trial for the subject. The passage posits a fundamental divide between the subject’s will and that of his body, with the latter guiding the former in violation of the will. 9 In the process of assuming control over the subject, the body itself becomes implicated in the form and direction that this process takes. It is not only that K. loses control over his body, but, more perniciously, that the body operates in concert with the court. The court simultaneously infiltrates and coopts the body. If a closer look at historical medical reports links K.’s symptoms to an infiltration of the ear, the question with which the passage concludes implies an expansion of this corporeal intrusion. The appearance of vertigo, subjective noises, and other forms of acoustical embodiment associated with the factory coincide with growing fears concerning the body’s cooperation with the court. Suspicions of a newly embodied trial are accompanied by an array of somatic effects. If the noise of the siren in the court chambers had been presented as subjective, the second half of the novel portrays the defendant in a state of constant physical exhaustion and distraction, and prone to perceptual misdirection. On the most basic level, the second half of the novel contains instances of mishearing, tied to the protagonist’s growing paranoia and recognition of the severity of his situation. For example, while contemplating whether he should dispense with his lawyer and represent himself before the court, K.’s solitary reflections in his office are disrupted by sounds with no 356 Tyler Whitney identifiable source. «Lange saß er so, ohne zu wissen, was ihm eigentlich Sorgen machte, nur von Zeit zu Zeit blickte er ein wenig erschreckt über die Schulter hinweg zur Vorzimmertür, wo er irrtümlicher Weise ein Geräusch zu hören geglaubt hatte» (Der Prozeß 138). In the scene, the protagonist is repeatedly drawn out of solitary contemplation by distractions in the surrounding environment, which in the end are nothing more than figments of his imagination. Similar to the mysterious audibility of the siren, K. hears things that simply are not there. Further immersion in the trial coincides with casual instances of perceptual error. More radically, the second half of the novel portrays the defendant’s ear as plagued by distraction, seemingly unhinged from any and all aspects of the external auditory environment. This threat is not merely to confuse the ear but, in a sense, to nullify the very possibility of listening to sounds emanating from the external world. While discussing his case with the painter Titorelli, K. struggles to listen despite the fact the man offers him valuable information pertaining to the inner workings of the court and potential strategies for steering the case in his favor. K. must put forth so much effort to keep his ear fixed on his interlocutor’s words that he experiences physical pain. «‹Oja,› sagte K., dem von der Anstrengung mit der er sich zum Zuhören gezwungen hatte der Kopf schmerzte» (170). But it is during K.’s meeting with an industrialist as part of his professional responsibilities that this tendency toward a suspended and unhinged mode of listening finds its clearest expression. The passage begins by highlighting K.’s difficulties in removing himself from the murmurs of an internal monologue and focusing his attention on the sights and sounds of his immediate environment. In the end, both self-reflective immersion and attention to the world around him give way to second-order observation, which takes as its object the functioning and very possibility of listening. K. hatte auch tatsächlich im Anfang die Rede des Fabrikanten gut verfolgt, der Gedanke an das wichtige Geschäft hatte dann auch ihn ergriffen, nur leider nicht für die Dauer, er war bald vom Zuhören abgekommen, hatte dann noch ein Weilchen zu den lauteren Ausrufen des Fabrikanten mit dem Kopf genickt, hatte aber schließlich auch das unterlassen und sich darauf eingeschränkt, den kahlen auf die Papiere hinabgebeugten Kopf anzusehn und sich zu fragen, wann der Fabrikant endlich erkenne werde, daß seine ganze Rede nutzlos sei. Als er nun verstummte, glaubte K. zuerst wirklich, es geschehe dies deshalb, um ihm Gelegenheit zu dem Eingeständnis zu geben, daß er nicht fähig sei zuzuhören. (135; my emphasis) Over the course of the conversation, K.’s attention does not simply drift away from the industrialist’s words in order to dwell on his own internal reflections. The sole object of his reflection becomes his inability to listen. 357 Listening to the Law The passage presents a mode of listening so distracted and disconnected from the temporal and spatial orders of the present that it can take only itself as an object of reflection. The protagonist’s thoughts come to rest in an intermediary space where both perceptions of external phenomena and internal reflection are no longer possible. In their place emerges a mode of listening preoccupied with its own functionality, pursuing questions of how one hears rather than what one hears. K.’s incapacity to focus on the words of his interlocutor illuminates the perceptual endgame of a trial that takes the ear of the defendant as a target and tool of coercion. Both subjective noises from within and auditory interruptions from without are exorcised from the perceptual field and replaced by reflections on the possibility or impossibility of listening. If the grounding of a new trial had depended on an audio-spatial logic that rendered bodies and spaces permeable and open to infiltration by the court, by the end there are few meaningful distinctions left to target or uphold. The threshold between inside and outside, which the trial undermines throughout the novel, loses all relevance. Uncoupled from the perceptual field, the ear is folded back onto itself, immersed in its own operations, limits, and necessary malfunction. Despite their critical neglect, issues of sound and hearing pervade Kafka’s novel and pattern its representations of the court according to what I have called an audio-spatial logic. The asymmetrical permeability of spatial boundaries and the exploitation of that porousness by covert listeners occur against the backdrop of a proliferation of noise. With the eruption of subjective noises in the court chambers, the permeability of spatial structures that allows for the surveillance and discipline of the protagonist extends to the surfaces of the body. Positioned alongside contemporaneous medical studies of factory workers, the spatial disorientation and perceptual confusion K. experiences indicate a common origin inside the ear, which, in turn, implies the body’s increasing vulnerability to penetration by the court’s growing sphere of influence. The expansive noise, «der alles erfüllte,» reinforces conceptions of the court as omnipresent and omnipotent, but it also marks the transfer of permeability from doors and walls to the body. On a perceptual level, the subjective noise of the siren serves to dissolve further traditional binaries between inside and outside by providing a sensory experience that is both deafening to K. and impossible to locate in the outside world. The subjective nature of the sound, the possibility that the sound’s source may be the listener himself, motivates broader concerns regarding a second trial «prepared» by the body in cooperation with the court. K.’s constant state of fatigue and distraction in the second half of the 358 Tyler Whitney novel lends credibility to these suspicions, presenting physical and perceptual effects of the trial absent in the novel prior to his visit to the court chambers. Although no longer bombarded by noise, the ear comes to exist in a state of distraction so severe that the mere task of listening to the words of an interlocutor causes K. physical pain. The integration of the body into the trial produces a listening subject severed from the sounds of the external world and plagued by his own perceptual limitations. Any doubts regarding the trial’s corporeal turn are dissipated in the novel’s final chapter, where agents of the court arrive to escort K. to his execution. Recalling the episode in the court chambers where K. had had to be held up and directed by two court employees due to his spatial and perceptual disorientation, the two men wrap their arms around the defendant’s own, take hold of his hands, stretch him upright between them, and direct him forward. In doing so, the defendant’s body merges with those of his executioners, forming a single entity: «Sie bildeten jetzt alle drei eine solche Einheit, daß wenn man einen von ihnen zerschlagen hätte, alle zerschlagen gewesen wären. Es war eine Einheit, wie sie fast nur Lebloses bilden kann» (237). The second suspected trial prepared by the body both comes to a close and is corroborated as that individual body disappears and is replaced by a seamless amalgamation of the court and the accused. With the distinctions between them dissolved, the union renders the three figures lifeless. An embodied trial ironically concludes with the conversion and fusion of individual living bodies into an inanimate whole. The law and the bodies it interpellates form a machine whose necessary conditions are the bodily subjugation of the accused and the liquidation of subjective perceptual agency. In reading Kafka’s literary treatment of embodiment and the law alongside contemporaneous medical and juridical texts, this essay has pursued questions of how sound studies might be brought to bear on literary history and vice versa. Expanding on recent work by Karin Bijsterveld and Carolyn Birdsall, which highlights the value of literary fiction and the resources of textual analysis in excavating historical soundscapes, I have advocated an approach to sound studies that interrogates literature as a particularly rich and heterogeneous archive of historically specific sonic experiences, but that takes as its primary object of inquiry the continuities and regularities that exist between literary imaginings of sound and its representation within other domains of knowledge such as law and medicine. It is no doubt an imperative that we expand sound studies beyond textual sources and the analytic tools we are accustomed to using in making sense of them. A closer 359 Listening to the Law look at early phonograph recordings would likely yield productive correctives to accounts based largely on textual sources. But this does not imply that the resources of textual archives and literary analysis can be easily abandoned without incurring additional historical and theoretical blind spots. Early phonograph recordings often require recourse to paratexts to decipher and many borrow their forms and motifs from literary sources (Feaster). Moreover, as we know from K.’s episode in the court chambers, not all sounds can be recorded by the phonograph. Hallucinations and subjective noises, for example, are recalcitrant to phonographic inscription but find structural analogies with, and are easily adapted to, the silent page of the text. K.’s hallucination brings into focus the representational capabilities distinct to the literary, invoking longstanding tropes of an originary orality or a text that ‹speaks› directly to readers. At the same time, the hallucinatory noise of the siren subverts hermeneutic fantasies of meaning-making (Kittler; Franzel) by rendering audible not some narrative voice but rather an unlocalizable noise devoid of semantic value and occupying an ambiguous epistemological status between the somatically perceptible and the imaginary. Kafka’s literary account of embodied listening therefore provides us with privileged insights into an elusive and seemingly contradictory class of sounds, which, during the same period, presented seemingly insurmountable challenges to medical scientists. They lamented their ongoing reliance on patient testimony and textual representation as well as the generally obscure nature of subjective noises (Brunner; Lucae), whose origins, one researcher commented, «noch völlig im Dunkeln liegen» (Grünberg 890). As I have argued over the course of this essay, such sounds should not be regarded as somehow less constitutive of the modern soundscape or less worthy of retrospective scholarly attention. Subjective noises are not reducible to mere solipsistic impressions or figments of the literary imagination. The hallucinated sound of the siren in Kafka’s novel illuminates key elements of modern legal subjectivity at the same time that it makes legible historical realities beyond the text; embodied histories of labor and the law, the effects of technological change, scientific management, and an emerging risk society. In addition to offering a medium capable of recording hallucination and narrating embodied experience, I have indicated how the richness of connotative language, metaphor, intertextuality, and superimposition enables works of literary fiction to expose unlikely discursive and institutional couplings that might otherwise go undetected. My reading demonstrates how, on the one hand, a distinct set of questions, concerns, and conceptual resources that has grown up around sound studies might be productively transferred to literary studies in order to motivate new readings of canonical 360 Tyler Whitney literary works. Literary scholars’ inattentiveness to issues of sound and hearing has resulted in critical neglect of Kafka’s imbrication of industrial and juridical spaces and the relevance of auditory space, surveillance, and embodiment for understanding the court’s strategies of coercion and their perceptual and somatic effects. On the other hand, the novel’s foregrounding of sound in its treatment of the law might be mobilized to raise new questions and propel new lines of inquiry within sound studies, which has up to this point remained surprisingly indifferent to the intersection of sound and legal history, otology and insurance, labor and various perceptual disorders related to the ear. A turn to the literary ultimately helps to uncover the layered experience of embodied listening. This, in turn, enables us to write the body back into preexisting narratives of acoustical modernity, which tend to foreground the disembodied voices of acoustic media such as the telephone, phonograph, and radio, and corresponding medical understandings of the ear based on atomization, dissection, and isolation from the living body. Jonathan Sterne, for example, asserts that around 1900, «knowledge of the ear was intimately connected with the physical and analytic abstraction of the human ear from the body» (57). While there is no doubt that medical practices of dissection and abstraction went hand in hand with conceptions of the ear as a mere object, mechanism, or machine, Kafka’s novel and its historical contexts remind us that the same period also produced new objects of inquiry and representational figures that were predicated on embodied experiences of sound. In Kafka’s novel, knowledge about the trial results because the ear remains attached to the defendant’s body, which registers and anticipates his physical incorporation into the court. The ear functions as both an instrument of coercion and the site of knowledge about that coercion. The hallucination of the siren, we know, signals real danger. But that knowledge is ultimately rendered unstable as it is based on a purely subjective, embodied perception of sound. In Der Proceß, an epistemology of the ear arises from embodied, subjective experience that confuses distinctions between objective knowledge and the subjective experience of hallucination. In listening to the law, K. confronts the court’s omnipotence, specifically its capacity to incorporate the body as a site of discipline via perceptual manipulation. Registered as noise, the court is revealed to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, expansive and localized, immaterial and embodied, or, as Kafka would write in «Fürsprecher» almost a decade later, «Es komme von überall oder, was noch richtiger schien, gerade der Ort, wo man zufällig stand, sei der eigentliche Ort dieses Dröhnens, aber gewiß war das eine Täuschung, denn es kam aus der Ferne» (389). 361 Listening to the Law Notes 1 Throughout this essay I retain the spelling and punctuation of Kafka’s original text. 2 The scholarly literature on Kafka and the law is too vast and diverse to summarize here. For an overview of key interpretive approaches to the issue, see Gasché, Lubkoll, Abraham, and Liska. 3 On acousmatic sound see Kane. 4 Here I am thinking of terms such as verhören, Vernehmung, and das rechtliche Gehör, in addition to broader notions of Gehorsam. 5 One exception is Uwe C. Steiner’s overview of tinnitus in modern literature, in which he briefly mentions the appearance of subjective noises in Der Proceß. 6 For ocularcentric approaches to Kafka and the law, which foreground figures of panopticism, theatrical spectatorship, optical inversion, myth and visual mimesis, see Corngold, Sokel, Campe, Corngold, and Wagner. 7 «Nachmittags werde ich in der Fabrik sein müssen» (Tagebücher 543). 8 This connection between myth and the conditions of modern industrial labor brings to mind Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic reading of the Odysseus myth in their essay, «Begriff der Aufklärung.» According to their interpretation, the oarsmen of the myth anticipate the modern factory worker, who «frisch und konzentriert [. . .] nach vorwärts blicken und liegenlassen, was zur Seite liegt,» and «den Trieb, der zur Ablenkung drängt, [. . .] verbissen in zusätzliche Anstrengung sublimieren [müssen].» Odysseus, on the other hand, resembles the bourgeois landowner. «Er hört, aber ohnmächtig an den Mast gebunden, und je größer die Lockung wird, um so stärker läßt er sich fesseln, so wie nachmals die Bürger auch sich selber das Glück um so hartnäckiger verweigerten, je näher es ihnen mit dem Anwachsen der eigenen Macht rückte» (40). However, by pointing out the ways in which Josef K. simultaneously occupies the position of Odysseus and the modern factory worker, I am arguing for a superimposition of identities in Kafka’s novel that is ultimately incompatible with Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading. See also Kafka’s short text, «Das Schweigen der Sirenen,» composed around the same time, most likely October 1917. 9 For an interpretation of the passage in terms of contemporaneous anxieties surrounding corporate personhood see Andriopoulos 147 - 55. Works Cited Abraham, Ulf. «Kafka und Recht/ Justiz.» Kafka-Handbuch. Ed. Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahraus. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. 212 - 23. —. «Rechtsspruch und Machtwort: Zum Verhältnis von Rechtsordnung und Ordnungsmacht bei Kafka.» Franz Kafka: Schriftverkehr. Ed. Wolf Kittler and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1990. 248 - 78. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialektik der Aufklärung. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1988 (1947). Andriopoulos, Stefan. Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema. Trans. Stefan Andriopoulos and Peter Jansen. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. 362 Tyler Whitney Baginsky, B. «Die Unfallbegutachtung in der Ohrenheilkunde.» Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift 37 (1905): 1169 - 73. Bijsterveld, Karin. «Introduction.» Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage. Ed. Karin Bijsterveld. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. 11 - 28. Birdsall, Carolyn. Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933-1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2012. Brunner, Gustav. «Zur Lehre von den subjectiven Ohrgeräuschen.» Zeitschrift für Ohrenheilkunde VIII (1879): 185 - 207. Campe, Rüdiger. «Kafkas Fürsprache.» Kafkas Institutionen. Ed. Arne Höcker and Oliver Simons. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007. 189 - 212. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia UP, 1999 (1982). Corngold, Stanley. «Medial Allusions at the Outset of Der Proceß; or, res in media.» A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka. Ed. James Rolleston. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002. 149 - 70. Corngold, Stanley, and Benno Wagner. Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2011. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986 (1975). Erlmann, Veit. Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Feaster, Patrick. «‹A Compass of Extraordinary Range›: The Forgotten Origins of Phonomanipulation.» ARSC Journal XLII/ ii (2011): 163 - 204. Feaster, Patrick, and Jacob Smith. «Reconfiguring the History of Early Cinema through the Phonograph, 1877 - 1908.» Film History 21.4 (2009): 311 - 25. Franzel, Sean. Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2013. Gasché, Rodolphe. «Kafka’s Law: In the Field of Forces between Judaism and Hellenism.» Modern Language Notes 117 (2002): 971 - 1002. Grünberg, Karl. «Die subjektiven Gehörsempfindungen.» Handbuch der Hals- Nasen- Ohrenheilkunde. Vol. 6. Ed. A. Denker and O. Kahler. Berlin: Julius Springer, 1926. 888 - 95. Kafka, Franz. Amtliche Schriften. Ed. Klaus Hermsdorf and Benno Wagner. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2004. —. Briefe 1902 - 1924. Ed. Max Brod. New York: Schocken Books, 1958. —. Briefe an Felice und andere Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit. Ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2003. —. Der Proceß. Ed. Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1994. —. «Fürsprecher.» Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa. Ed. Roger Hermes. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2006. 389 - 91. —. Tagebücher. Ed. Hans-Gerd Koch, Michael Müller and Malcolm Pasley. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1990. —. Tagebücher 1909 - 1912. Ed. Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer TB, 2008. —. Tagebücher 1914 - 1923. Ed. Hans-Gerd Koch. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer TB, 2008. 363 Listening to the Law Kane, Brian. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/ 1900. Trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Koch, Hans-Gerd, and Klaus Wagenbach, eds. Kafkas Fabriken. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2002. Lessing, Theodor. Der Lärm: Eine Kampschrift gegen die Geräusche unseres Lebens. Wiesbaden: Verlag von J. F. Bergmann, 1908. Liska, Vivian. «‹Before the Law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper comes a man. . .›: Kafka, Narrative, and the Law.» Naharaim 6.2 (2012): 175 - 94. Lubkoll, Christine. «‹Man muß nicht alles für wahr halten, man muß es nur für notwendig halten›: Die Theorie der Macht in Franz Kafkas Roman Der Proceß.» Franz Kafka: Schriftverkehr. Ed. Wolf Kittler and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1990. 279 - 94. Lucae, August. Zur Entstehung und Behandlung der subjectiven Gehörsempfindungen. Berlin: Otto Enslin, 1884. Passow, A. Die Verletzungen des Gehörorganes. Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1905. Peyser, Alfred. «Die gewerblichen Erkrankungen und Verletzungen des Gehörs bei den Industriearbeitern, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Schädigungen durch Betriebslärm.» Archiv für Soziale Hygiene mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Gewerbehygiene und Medizinalstatistik 6.2 (1911): 143 - 64. Prochnik, George. «The Orchestra.» Cabinet 41 (Spring 2011): n. pag. Web. 4 Feb. 2015. Rehding, Alexander. «Of Sirens Old and New.» The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. 77 - 108. Rhine, Marjorie E. «Manufacturing Discontent: Mapping Traces of Industrial Space in Kafka’s Haptic Narrative Landscapes.» Journal of the Kafka Society of America 29 (2005): 65 - 70. Röpke, Friedrich. Die Berufskrankheiten des Ohres und der oberen Luftwege. Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1902. Schaffner, Jakob. «Der eiserne Götze.» Die goldene Fratze: Novellen. Berlin: Fischer, 1912. 229 - 81. Sokel, Walter H. «The Three Endings of Josef K. and the Role of Art in The Trial.» The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2002. 247 - 67. Steiner, Uwe C. «Signalverarbeitung und letzte Dinge: Tinnitus als Epochenkrankheit in der Literatur von Kafka bis zur Gegenwart.» Epochen/ Krankheiten: Konstellationen von Literatur und Pathologie. Ed. Frank Degler and Christian Kohlroß. St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 2006. 213 - 31. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Vismann, Cornelia. Akten: Medientechnik und Recht. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2000. Weissberg, Liliane. «Singing of Tales: Kafka’s Sirens.» Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings. Ed. Alan Udoff. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 165 - 77. 364 Tyler Whitney Wellbery, David E. Seiltänzer des Paradoxalen: Aufsätze zur ästhetischen Wissenschaft. Munich: Hanser, 2006. Werber, Niels. «Bürokratische Kommunikation: Franz Kafkas Roman Der Proceß.» The Germanic Review 73.4 (1998): 309 - 26. 365 Listening to the Law Eccentric Modernism, Or: George Grosz’s Gramophone Goes Meschugge 1 JONATHAN WIPPLINGER UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MILWAUKEE A curious, if enigmatic figure referred to as «Mister Meschugge» lies at the center of Dadaist George Grosz’s account of Berlin’s entertainment district on the eve of the First World War. One of the most important and recognized visual artists of the German avant-garde, Grosz returned to Berlin around 1912, the city of his birth, after studying in Dresden. Unable to afford more elegant dance halls, ultimately it was Berlin’s cafés and their promise to deliver everything he wanted «for the price of a cup of coffee» that served as his entree into the world of popular dance music and modern entertainment culture (Grosz, An Autobiography 90). 2 «It was at the Café Oranienburg Gate,» Grosz would recall years later in his autobiography, that I first heard something like a jazz band. People called it a noise band [Radaukapelle]. It was not a jazz band in the contemporary sense, but more of a café orchestra gone crazy. Two or three musicians with saws and cowbells would parody the general melody with rhythmic interruptions. The conductor called himself Mister Meschugge and acted like a madman. He would pretend that he had lost control, would break his baton to pieces and smash his violin over the head of a musician. At the end he would grab the bass and use it as a weapon in the ensuing battle, finally throwing the splinters into the audience that screamed with delight and threw them back (90; translation slightly altered by author). Grosz’s intent, at least in part, in offering this anecdote was to relate this experience from his youth to the rise of National Socialism in Germany, when, as Grosz writes, a «different conductor Meschugge would direct a dance of death, beat his musicians with their own instruments until they were senseless, and reap thundering applause» (91). Nonetheless, Grosz’s depiction of Mister Meschugge has largely been put to other ends. Most notably, it has found resonance within scholarship treating music’s position within Dada as well as within considerations of jazz during the Weimar Republic (Goergen, «Dada» and «Apachentänze»; Robinson 120; Partsch 39; Anglet 61—62). Little attention, however, has thus far been paid to the actual performer named by Grosz, Mr. Meschugge, let alone to his significance for popular culture in pre-World War I Berlin. One major thrust of my work here is to correct this oversight. For while at present it remains the best-known version, Grosz’s eyeand earwitness account is but one example of many representations (visual, textual, and aural) of Mr. Meschugge, the most famous of Berlin’s eccentric Kapellmeister or bandleaders. In the following, I want to contextualize and historicize the case of Mr. Meschugge and the phenomenon of the eccentric bandleader within the auditory culture of early twentiethcentury Berlin (Morat; Alter and Koepenick; Feiereisen and Merley Hill). This will involve, on the one hand, an exploration of popular musical production and consumption during the period roughly around 1910, specifically in Berlin’s music cafés, and the reproduction of popular music on gramophone records. On the other hand, I will examine Mr. Meschugge’s performances at places like the Café Stern as significant moments in the creation of what I am calling «eccentric modernism,» an early twentiethcentury fascination and experimentation with the ideas and embodiment of the «eccentric» that one finds not only in Berlin, but on both sides of the Atlantic in this period. In focusing on the eccentric modernist qualities of Mr. Meschugge, I’m further seeking to highlight alternative modes and actors within German modernism, musical and otherwise, that have, for various reasons, remained on the margins of standard accounts of twentieth-century German cultural history. While my focus here is on Berlin and the eccentric bandleader, this specific case study has implications for much broader issues, including the position of popular music in German modernism between 1900 and 1945. In view of the increasingly interwoven sphere of popular cultural production uniting American, African-American, and European performers, scholarly exploration of long-forgotten musicians like Mr. Meschugge reveal them to be more than mere background details to the lives of those better-known (visual) artists like Grosz, who, for better and worse, have long determined our knowledge of their, in many ways, alien performance environment. Through greater attention to documents and descriptions of popular musical performance in the first quarter of the twentieth century, I hope to outline the modernist and eccentric, but hardly isolated, path taken by German popular musical culture in this period. I will therefore begin by reconstructing the use of the term «eccentric» within popular cultural discourse, tracing its development across German and American sources. Here I will highlight not only the theoretical weight given the eccentric performer by European writers like Moeller van den Bruck and Theodor Adorno, but also the role that race, and Blackness in particular, played within reception of the eccentric. Next, I will turn to the sites of Mr. Meschugge’s performances, Berlin’s music cafés, in order to contextualize eccentric performers and their popularity within the devel- 367 Eccentric Modernism opment of urban, modern, and popular culture in Berlin. Third, I will examine textual and visual strategies for representing eccentric bandleaders, focusing on how they became linked not only to the modernity of the city and the masses, but to European modernists like Grosz as well. Finally, addressing the question of the mechanical reproduction of such music, I will return to Grosz and Mr. Meschugge and offer a speculative reconstruction of Grosz’s gramophone collection and its potential relationship to a 1913 recording by the eccentric bandleader. Originally a term used to describe the orbits of celestial objects whose center was something other than the earth, the word «eccentric» has retained its connection to the nonstandard and atypical, as something that has lost or lacks a center, or as something that exists on the margins. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it also found use within the transatlantic network of European and American popular culture as a performance style. While clowns were closely associated with the term, as were similar performance categories of the «grotesque,» «freak,» or «comedic,» the appellation is best understood as a broad term for performers and performance styles marked by exaggerated, nonstandard styles. In this way, in both the American and European context, we find not only eccentric dancers and comedians but also eccentric bicycle riders, jugglers, and of course musicians. Summarizing the use of the term within American Vaudeville, music historian Brian Harker writes: «Bearing in mind that the original ‹unorthodox› or ‹idiosyncratic› meaning has never lapsed, we may add, as defining characteristics, a penchant for acrobatics, pantomime, a ‹rubberlegs› fluidity, and often an element of comedy» (71—72). Harker’s definition, as will become clear below, could just as easily have been drawn from German discussions of eccentric bandleaders, suggesting a significant degree of overlap in the interpretation of performance styles between North America and Europe. Also true for both the American and German contexts is Harker’s contention that the music and dance styles associated with the eccentric have for the most part been ignored. «Long regarded as vaudevillian corruptions of ‹real› jazz,» he writes, «eccentric music and dance mark out a forgotten world, recoverable only by turning a fresh gaze upon the photos and accounts overlooked by critics and historians, one sympathetic to the artistry of the vaudeville stage and the cultural richness it bequeathed to music» (70). The world of eccentric performance has been forgotten in the histories of both American jazz and German popular music, though for slightly different reasons. While deriving from a similar and overlapping popular theatrical milieu, it is important to recognize that Berlin’s eccentric 368 Jonathan Wipplinger bandleaders were not jazz musicians avant la lettre. Instead, the multiple intersections between the history of eccentric bandleaders and jazz are indicative rather of a shared transatlantic heritage and system of popular cultural exchange during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. An important part of this heritage is the long history of African American and Black diasporic performers (musicians, singers, dancers) in Germany and Europe (Lotz et al.; Campt; Aitken and Rosenhaft; Greene and Ortlepp). As the work of Astrid Kusser suggests, the period around 1900 specifically was one in which Black vernacular dance and musical idioms like the cake walk and ragtime circulated between Europe, Africa, as well as the Americas to engender multipositional and multivalent moments of encounter, transfer, and translation. This broader context of conflict and exchange bore directly on the emerging critical discourse of the eccentric performer in Wilhelmine Germany. One of the most significant examples of this intersection can be found in the writings of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a conservative cultural critic today perhaps best known for his early use of the term «Third Reich» in the 1923 book of the same name. Prior to this, however, Moeller van den Bruck had already produced a large body of work, one in which the variety theater acted as one focal point, most notably resulting in the publication of his 1902 monograph Das Varieté. There he subsumed discussion of the eccentric under a larger consideration of comedy and comedic styles, but in a later essay written from Paris in 1905, Moeller van den Bruck set about to determine the cultural significance of the eccentric performer for the contemporary moment. A key question in his 1905 essay «Der Excentrik [sic]. Eine Studie über die komische Figur unserer Zeit» is whether the eccentric performer signals cultural growth or decline - more specifically, whether eccentric acts should be understood as culturally productive and creative or as imitative and parasitical. Interestingly, he denies that the eccentric is imitative and instead defends its imaginative and «healthy» qualities. For Moeller van den Bruck, the eccentric’s originality lies not in the content of the act, but in its form. He suggests that rather than modeling the performance on the behavior of an individual person or even a specific class, the eccentric seeks to recreate experiences from the modern, urban landscape. He states that «instead of being modeled after fanciful people,» the eccentric came into being «archetypally out of fanciful times» («Der Excentrik» 57). 3 Such creativity is of an atypical nature, however. Moeller van den Bruck suggests, in a manner reminiscent of modernist montage practices, that «because the eccentric is not bound to a specific pattern, the details can be drawn from disparate areas and he can use them to the most contradictory ends» (57). His concrete 369 Eccentric Modernism example here is the performer Little Tich, a diminutive British entertainer famous across Europe for his «Big Boot Dance,» during which he performed seeming feats of contortion by wearing elongated shoes. For Moeller van den Bruck, Tich’s act is less about parodying fashionable footwear (its «content») than playfully and imaginatively improvising on everyday modern life (its «form»). Such playfulness contains a utopian element for him, specifically in its ability to question what is self-evident about modern custom, here how one walks down the street. He contends that the eccentric’s performance can serve to reorient the audience’s relationship to custom: [T]he insight we gain [is that] the most outlandish thing someone is capable of thinking still has an other side, one that is directed towards the realizable. The transformation of the irrational into something seemingly rational, yes, even extremely practical, or at least to the most simple and most mundane - this act constitutes the humor of the eccentric, who in some way is always answering the question: why should one not do something another way. (63) In sum, the eccentric enacts a form of cultural criticism, which serves, albeit implicitly, to promote change through atypical execution of everyday activities and erratic use of everyday objects and signs. While some of this interpretation is anticipated in his earlier work on the variety theater from 1902, a noteworthy addition to Moeller van den Bruck’s later analysis is the essay’s extended treatment of the role played by American and in particular African-American culture in the development of eccentric performance. For Moeller van den Bruck as well as other commentators on the variety theater such as Oskar Panizza, African Americans served as precursors not only to European popular culture, but modern culture more generally. Specifically, their state of subjugation vis-à-vis white Americans promoted parody and critique of the flaws of white culture. According to Moeller van den Bruck, the African American «exaggerated, twisted, bent these weaknesses [of white culture], only to show that there’s nothing special to the European or American when one has figured him out» (60). Still, any critical agency on the part of African-American culture and performers remains severely circumscribed. In a move typical of the period, Moeller van den Bruck binds the modernism and modernity of African Americans to their corporeality, writing: «To a certain degree, one can say that he [the African American] became the modern man par excellence - but only with his muscles» (59). While Moeller van den Bruck’s discussion of the eccentric does not treat music specifically, his understanding of the eccentric performer as quintessentially modern with origins in African-American culture reveals an important and long-lasting framework for the reception of the eccentric bandleader. Though it is beyond the scope of my argument to develop this 370 Jonathan Wipplinger line of thought more fully, much of this general framework can also be found in the later writings of philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who, yet again highlighting the overlap between the eccentric and jazz, made the former a centerpiece of his reading of jazz subjectivity in the 1930s (Adorno 96—99). The migration of eccentric practices into cultural production as described by Moeller van den Bruck, Panizza, Grosz, and Adorno can be related to more general tendencies in German popular culture in the early twentieth-century Berlin. One of these was the rise of large-scale entertainment venues. So while eccentric bandleaders depended for their existence on a number of specific conditions, such as the increasing internationalization of music production and circulation, any discussion of their popularity must additionally take account of the space of their performances, namely the music cafés. Even more so than the Café Stern referenced by Grosz, the popularity of the eccentric bandleader can be linked to another site: the Kerkau-Palast, which opened its doors in March 1910 («Kerkau Palast» March 20, 1910). Named after its initial owner and world champion billiard player, Hugo Kerkau, the location was a grandiose three-level establishment located at Behrenstraße 48. This site featured 60 billiard tables, a separate reading room for newspapers, a room for chess and card playing, nine-pin bowling, and dining facilities; its initial capacity of 4000 guests was then increased to 5000 through an expansion in 1911(«Kerkau-Palast» April 3, 1910 and April 1, 1911; «Der neuerbaute Kerkau-Palast»; «Der ‹Kerkaupalast›» Berliner Volkszeitung; «Der ‹Kerkaupalast›» Berliner Tageblatt). In terms of music, there were two large halls that featured three to four orchestras playing daily from 11 a. m. through the early morning hours («Kerkau-Palast» August 20, 1911 and November 1, 1912; Schmidl August 24, 1913). It was here that another famous eccentric bandleader of the day plied his trade, Mr. Glasneck, the so-called «Original-Kanone» - «canon» being one of two short-hand terms, the other being «bomb» (Bombe), routinely applied to these performers («Kerkau-Palast» March 7, 1913). 4 There he could be found alongside more familiar, if equally modern and international bandleaders like the Rumanian Giorgi Vintilescu («Kerkau-Palast» November 1, 1912) or the Italian Gabriel Formiggini («Kerkau-Palast» March 7, 1913). Audiences at the Kerkau-Palast and other similar establishments experienced a mélange of musical styles and presentation modes ranging from light operetta tunes to Viennese Schrammel music to cabaret songs and recitations, as well as new international styles of popular music (two-steps, ragtime, and tango) and novel modes of presentation, such as the use of unique electrical lighting (Schmidl February 4, 1912). 371 Eccentric Modernism There are two further points to be made regarding the sounds of the music cafés and their impact on auditory culture in Berlin more generally. The first concerns the sheer quantity of music: the number of pieces played and the number of concerts given across the city is difficult to imagine. The repertoire of individual groups could include more than 2000 pieces and was said to consist of classical and modern art music as well as German and international popular music («Internationales Salon-Orchester»; «Internationale Tonkünstler-Vereinigung»; «Künstler-Quartett»). Although, as I will discuss below, musicians moved regularly between music cafés, individual bandleaders could also perform so often at one venue that their 500 th , and, in extreme cases, 3000 th concert was celebrated (Schmidl April 20, 1913). If Berlin’s musicians suffused the city’s entertainment district with their sounds, their reach also extended far beyond. The relative concentration of Germany’s recording industry in Berlin meant that this city’s popular bandleaders had an amplified influence on German recordings writ large. This was due both to their proximity to major recording companies like Lindström as well as in some cases to their greater experience with the rigors of the recording process (Gauss, Nadel 53—69 and 180—81). More generally, the opening of the Kerkau-Palast belongs to the proliferation of entertainment establishments, including cafés, bars, Weinstuben, dance halls, and cabarets, during the first decade of the twentieth century (Edel). Typified by the latest amenities, technologies, and pleasures, wellknown establishments like the Josty, Piccadilly, Equitable, or Kerkau-Palast catered to a young, urban, and modern clientele. Many of these establishments marketed themselves not as German or even Berlin institutions but as international and global ones. A Welt-Café like the Kerkau-Palast saw itself as part of a Euro-American culture of artists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, and affluent tourists of major metropolises like Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna and New York (Becker; Becker et al.). Though clearly exaggerated, there was some truth to these claims and this internationalization of entertainment resulted in a number of first-hand encounters between Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders and foreign visitors. Of course such exchange also involved cultural translation, as historians Len Platt and Tobias Becker have shown for the theatrical crossings between Berlin and London. So if contemporaries regularly framed such exchange in terms of the fluidity of cultural boundaries, this was, according to Platt, «a problematic position not only because so much adaptation and transfer responded to economic contexts rather than aesthetics, but also because the cosmopolitanism of musical theatre coexisted with a powerful instinct for the local» (35). Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders became caught up in this international exchange and its seemingly inevitable localization. For 372 Jonathan Wipplinger example, when the American trade publication Variety reported on potential international tours to America by Mr. Meschugge and Mr. Glasneck («‹Crazy Orchestra› Coming»; «Mr. Meschugge as Director»), the reporter translated Glasneck’s act for an American readership with reference to Giuseppe Creatore, an Italian conductor made famous through his sensational conducting style in the US. 5 More concretely, the owner of the Kerkau-Palast, Josef König, traveled to Great Britain and returned with a new eccentric bandleader. The performer in question, Frank Groundsell, was an untrained variety theater musician from Southampton. In Berlin, however, he would become the American eccentric bandleader «Mr. Maseltop aus Chicago» (Groundsell 54—56; «Kerkau-Palast» October 1, 1913; «Im Kerkau Palast»). Mr. Meschugge, Mr. Glasneck, and Mr. Maseltop as well as other eccentric bandleaders enjoyed a high public profile with Berlin’s pre-war public. In this period, «Mr. Meschugge» was a recognizable brand within Wilhelmine popular culture, known through his appearances in a variety of cafés as much as through the use of his name in the newspapers as well as on litfass-columns, postcards, stamps, and film. 6 Part of the reason for the eccentric’s and Mr. Meschugge’s ubiquity can be linked to broader developments in mass cultural advertising. Eccentric performers like Mr. Meschugge emerged during an age of advertising and commercial imagery, an age defined, according to David Ciarlo, by ubiquity and imitation rather than variability (20). These performers both profited and suffered from their visual and textual duplication. Although substantial evidence exists to suggest that «Mr. Meschugge» was in fact the German-Jewish composer and bandleader Robert Krüger, 7 his marketing as «Mr. Meschugge» led not only to this name’s proliferation, and thus recognizability, but also to numerous imitators as well. They ranged from those who presented themselves as acts «à la Meschugge» such as Mister Carri and Albertio to those who modeled their names after his, in particular through the choice of a name associated with Jewishness such as Mr. Maseltop or Mr. Schlemihl («Mister Carri»; «Albertio»; Schmidl September 7, 1913). In a report from the Berliner Börsen- Zeitung, an anonymous author notes that his name «attracted so many imitators that the title ‹Mr. Meschugge› developed into a type of moniker for the profession. It did not help ‹Mr. Meschugge› No. 1 at all that in his advertisements he called himself the original and real ‹Mr. Meschugge›» («Mr. Meschugge»). Indeed, into the early Weimar Republic performers and commentators continued using the name «Mr. Meschugge» as shorthand for wild, eccentric musical performance (Schmidl March 30, 1919). A second reason for the high public visibility of such performers has to do with the economics of live performance in the period. Competition was fierce 373 Eccentric Modernism amongst café proprietors for customers, and sought-after bandleaders, eccentric and otherwise, regularly moved between different cafés, as one can follow from March 1911 onwards in the bi-weekly reports on Berlin’s music formations by author Leopold «Poldi» Schmidl in Der Artist, a trade publication for musicians and variety and circus performers. In response, eccentric performers themselves advertised their attractiveness both in terms of their musicianship and their ability to draw in customers («Der exzentrische Kapellmeister»). Of course, for this they also demanded (and received) higher fees, something traditional musicians and bandleaders resented («Berlin» 352). For these latter groups, the popularity of eccentric bandleaders threatened to degrade German musicians to the level of «clowns,» thereby destroying the current favorable public reputation of musicians («Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikerverband»; Schaub). Already in 1910, an anonymous article in Der Artist warned musicians of the danger the eccentric bandleader represented for their profession. «Musicality, thank God,» the author begins ironically, «is a quality no bandleader needs anymore as long as he is a good gymnast. [. . .] What fortune that something as boring as music is being anaesthetized through the flexible arts of so many bandleaders» («Zukunftsmusik»). Continuing on, the author foretells of rubber nightsticks replacing batons, of conductors jumping into pianos, of violent acts against musicians, and of the show’s enormous success with the audience. This will continue, we are told, until someone questions «whether music is even needed for these performances. Perhaps it can all be done perfectly well without the inconvenient noises» (Ibid.). In other words, eccentric bandleaders threatened to eradicate not only the profession, but music itself. Given their medial presence and economic success, eccentric bandleaders thus quickly came to be viewed as part of the encroachment of modern culture and media, particularly film and cabaret, on traditional German music and musicians. Yet contrary to such hyperbole, music did remain important to the success of eccentric bandleaders, and it is important not to fall prey to the easy rhetoric of the eccentric bandleaders’ detractors. To be sure, owing to the acrobatics involved in their stage performances, music often received short shrift within contemporary accounts. Here, however, some perspective is required. Though Groundsell (Mr. Maseltop) lacked formal academic training, he was a devotee of the popular American conductor John Philip Sousa and, based upon recordings of his work, was familiar with the latest developments in American popular music. Mr. Glasneck and Mr. Meschugge, on the other hand, appear to have been classically trained musicians, with Krüger (Mr. Meschugge) receiving praise for his musicianship from the otherwise skeptical 374 Jonathan Wipplinger «Poldi» Schmidl on atleast two occasions. In his first report on Mr. Meschugge from July 1913, Schmidl says that he enjoyed the performer tremendously. Despite rejecting eccentric performance as music in the strict sense, he also suggests that it is not for a lack of ability, noting that «Mr. M[eschugge] is actually a very good musician» (Schmidl July 7, 1919 and April 6, 1919). In other words, while their showmanship was no doubt a major contributing factor to their success, their musical abilities and innovations, especially in the field of popular music, should not be underestimated. Indeed, all three major representatives of the genre, Mr. Meschugge, Mr. Glasneck, and Mr. Maseltop made recordings in Berlin, though none of them can be said to have been an especially prolific recording artist (Kelly 697, 704, 710; Lotz, German Ragtime 230—31). Of the three, Groundsell (Mr. Maseltop) is not known to have recorded in the pre-war era. Still, his post-war recordings as the «American» bandleader of «The Eccentric Band» reveal a performance style more or less in the manner of popular European ragtime orchestras of the period, German or otherwise. Yet ultimately, it is not how, but what he recorded that is perhaps most significant here. Groundsell is responsible for one of the earliest non-American recordings of «Tiger Rag» (Original Excentric Band), one of the best-known and earliest documents of recorded jazz as released by the «Original Dixieland Jazz Band» in 1917. 8 More germane to the present context are the pre-war recordings of Mr. Meschugge and Mr. Glasneck. Indeed, as based on their recordings and songs referenced in contemporary reports, the musical repertoire of Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders was more typical than atypical. It included hits from operettas (Jean Gilbert’s omnipresent «Puppchen» or «Carlotta» from Millöcker’s Gasparone), Berlin-specific songs («Der fidele Rixdorfer») as well as international popular music («Dixieland» and «Cowboy Liebe»). Drawing on a somewhat older repertoire, Mr. Glasneck also recorded marches («Deutsche Eichen»), fitting for this performer whose centerpiece was the bellicose Schlachtenpotpourri (Kelley 704, 710; Schmidl August 24, 1913). If the significance of music to the success of the eccentric bandleader is clearly more complicated than their traditionalist critics would have one believe, before discussing the question of their musicality in further detail, it is first necessary to look at how the eccentric bandleader, Mr. Meschugge in particular, was represented within Wilhelmine culture and to what ends this image was put. While localized in Berlin’s music cafés, the eccentric bandleader’s presence was one solidified by Wilhelmine Germany’s mass cultural matrix of mediated duplication via newspapers, postcards, advertisements, films, 375 Eccentric Modernism and of course recordings. Within Berlin’s «word city» and its «industries of sensationalism» (Fritzsche 10) as well as within non-German discussions, we see elements both from Grosz’s later account as well as from Harker’s definition of the eccentric. While Mr. Maseltop and Mr. Glasneck are only rarely mentioned by name, the novelty of Mr. Meschugge’s name elicited translations of this Yiddish term: «crazy» for English readers («Mr. Meschugge as Director»; W. O.), and «gek,» «zot,» «krankzinnig» in Dutch («Mr. Meschugge» Niewe Rotterdamsche Courant). Though German-language explanations tended to assume knowledge of the term, they often invoked associated words like «verrückt» and «Blödsinn» in their descriptions («Mr. Meschugge» Berliner Börsen-Zeitung; Heuer). Somewhat unexpectedly, given that it is extremely likely to have contributed to the relationship of eccentric bandleaders and the modern and modernism, the word’s association with Jewishness does not figure explicitly in most reports. Instead, it was Mr. Meschugge’s visual appearance that demanded more lengthy remarks. Or at least this was the case for an American visitor, who reported on Mr. Meschugge in the Baltimore Sun in 1911, writing: «Picture yourself a man of small stature with a pale face, adorned with a mustache, goatee and short side whiskers about an inch long, a pair of gold spectacles fitted on the nose, and black hair about 18 inches long, descending over the shoulders, and in cases of extreme paroxysms of excitement covering the entire face, and the great and only Meschugg [sic] stands revealed» (W. O.). Regarding the aural experience, both foreign and local journalists routinely refer to the use of non-standard instrumentation in these bands and highlight the presence of pistols, toy trumpets, and megaphones (Grosz, An Autobiography 90; Edel 52—53). Vienna socialist Max Winter wrote of a performance by Mr. Maseltop: «You sometimes believe you’ve stumbled into a madhouse, the action on the small, open stage is so noisy and strange» («Mister Maseltop»). Noise, as might be surmised, is also a term deployed to describe their music and the general ambience of the scene, aided, of course, by the textual and often visual acoustics of the «bombs» and «canons» used to advertise for their appearances («Kerkau-Palast» April 8, 1916). Put differently, their musical performances and reception by critics are closely connected with the broader discussion of noise and modernity at the outset of the twentieth century (Goodyear). If the noise embraced by these groups represents an important element in descriptions from the period, writers paid equal attention to the physicality of their performances. Commentators tended to highlight the acrobatics of the bandleaders and generally describe them with the vocabulary of the contortion artist rather than the musician. To be sure, there may have been 376 Jonathan Wipplinger good reason for this. In what appears to have been a standard feature of his act, Mr. Meschugge conducted his orchestra with his head between his legs, allowing his long hair to hang down toward the ground (Grossmann; «Berlin»; Rumpelstilzchen 128). Eccentric bandleaders are further said to have jumped into their orchestras, on top of pianos, into drums, into the crowd, as well as to douse instruments with beer, tear flags, deploy sabers, etc. Though more extreme, these elements were by no means completely alien to representations of high-cultural performers and conductors in the nineteenth and early twentieth century like Franz Liszt, Hans von Bülow, and Gustav Mahler. Like Mr. Meschugge, their popularity was translated into caricatures of wild hair and wild gesticulations (Leppert 159). If the connection to these now canonical figures remains opaque within contemporary discussions, it is very likely that the imagery associated with Liszt, von Bülow, and Mahler was an important prism through which commentators (and in all likelihood Krüger himself) created the public image of Mr. Meschugge. At the same time, to reduce the eccentric bandleader into pop-cultural redux of European high culture would be a mistake. For commentators focused not primarily on the eccentric bandleaders’ wildness, but on their flexibility, their «rubberlegs» in Harker’s definition of the eccentric. Their bodies were said to undergo incessant movements and contortions, which led one writer to call Mr. Meschugge a «rubber ball conductor,» while another wrote of the eccentric bandleader as a «rubber man» (Edel 53; «Zukunftsmusik»). One might say then that these were performers who did not enact the precision of modernity or the relationship to the machine, but the individual’s ability to adapt and conform to their surroundings in novel ways. In this they can be called forerunners of Grosz’s 1917 call for the general adoption of a «rubber» subjectivity in response to modernity («Man muß Kautschukmann sein! »). Author Erich K. Schmidt offered an extended reading of the eccentric bandleader along these lines in a 1913 article «Maestro Kautschuk» that highlights the multifaceted effect of the eccentric bandleader on audience members. Entering an unnamed café, Schmidt and his wife are met first by an empty stage that is then filled with dark figures, from which a bandleader emerges dancing, shaking, moving to the sounds of Jean Gilbert’s «Puppchen.» Schmidt remarks: «Since we’d last been to a metropolitan café, the genus of the bandleader had increased by one specimen: by that of the rubber-clown, the rubber conductor, who not only conducts the melody, but performs it as a three-dimensional film» (Schmidt). Though the relationship to the variety theater is evident here, Schmidt’s remark regarding film should not be overlooked, in particular given Mr. Meschugge’s own appearances in films of the period as well as the 377 Eccentric Modernism treatment Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders receive in Ernst Lubitsch’s Austernprinzessin (1919). In the scene depicting a «foxtrot epidemic,» a young Curt Bois embodies the trope of the eccentric bandleader through wild gesticulations, gun shots, saws, slaps, and general disregard for musicianship. Much as Grosz would later do to connect Mr. Meschugge to jazz, Lubitsch here fuses this established, by 1918 somewhat outdated performance type with the new and American, here the foxtrot. As Astrid Kusser argues, the use of terms like «epidemic» served to foreignize dances like the foxtrot and cake walk through a forgetting of prior and current transnational connections and histories. As she writes, «This amnesia was an important factor in making it possible for the cake walk to appear as an ephemeral fashion in the European metropole, as a revenant caught between past and present» (51). Rather than reflecting anachronism within Germany’s post-war reception of American popular music, the foxtrot scene from Austernprinzessin enacts a similar form of forgetting in that it aligns the pre-war Berlin eccentric with the supposedly foreign and new American foxtrot. Beginning around 1910 and continuing through the war and into the early period of the Weimar Republic, eccentric bandleaders, Mr. Meschugge in particular, were routinely associated with the contemporary moment and modernist aesthetics, Grosz and Dada notwithstanding. For one, at the same time as Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders were recording hit songs from operettas, the city’s popular theaters and composers were themselves incorporating the eccentric bandleader into their own works. The Thalia-Theater’s 1912 production of Autoliebchen (Music: Jean Gilberg; Text: Jean Kren and Albert Schönfeld) featured a female singer pleading: «To the café concert. I want to see Monsieur Meschugge. Oh, he conducts so fine! » («Das haben die Mädchen so gerne»). The Metropol-Theater’s yearly revue for 1913, Chauffeur - Ins Metropol! (Music: Rudolf Nelson; Text: Julius Freund) went one step further, featuring the character «Mr. Meschugge» as one of the «typical figures from the most modern Berlin»(i.). Even before the war, their modernism, the modernism of Berlin was already American. As one pre-war commentator claimed of the Kerkau-Palast’s billiard room: «That isn’t even Berlin. That is one of the aspects of Americanism that has enthralled the Berliner» (Winter). In a critical article appearing in the socialdemocratic Volkswacht in late 1918 we read of «Mr. Meschugge»: «He is the idol of certain Berliners because he makes madness his method. His motto is: sensation. Sensation at any price. No day is allowed to pass on which the name Meschugge is not printed on the litfass-columns» (Raudi). Such hyperbole can also be found in fleeting uses of the name, where «Mr. Meschugge» appears as part of a litany of things wrong with modernism and 378 Jonathan Wipplinger modern artists. For example, one author sought to discredit a 1911 Max Reinhardt production of Jacques Offenbach’s La belle Hélène by arguing that a production constituted in this manner panders to the tastes of the plebs in the lowest way. In it, they have all sorts of useless things, great parades, variety, fat, noise, low comedy, eccentricities and, not least, the satisfaction [. . .] to receive the same enjoyment from Reinhardt, Fried, and Offenbach that is otherwise delivered by Richard Schultz, Monsieur Meschugge, and Victor Hollaender («Die schöne Helene» 168). Another author uses a similar tactic, writing: «It is the same contemporary tendency that Mr. Meschugge conducts and Frank Wedekind acts» (Schlaikjer 422). Equally telling in this regard is a false report in the Prager Tagblatt from 1916. There it is claimed that Mr. Meschugge had left Berlin to become a music critic for the Dutch periodical De Telegraaf, where he took up the new name Matthijs Vermeulen («Mister Meschugge als Kritiker»). Vermeulen, of course, was no new Mr. Meschugge, but a very real modernist composer and critic whose anti-German (and pro-French) stance made him a controversial figure at the time and thus an easy target of nativist critique during the war (Samama 77—78). Such ideological use of Mr. Meschugge could also be found with a diametrically opposed intent, namely by modernists who used Meschugge’s name to valorize their work by association. For example, in a 1920 advertisement for works by author Alfred Richard Meyer, better known as Munkepunke, a review of the work proclaims: «Munkepunke is the cubist of the neo-Berlin poets. He is the Mister Meschugge, the poet, and the mbret of the Café des Westens» («Munkepunke»). Taken together, these references suggest that by 1914 at the latest, the eccentric bandleader’s connection to modernism and mass culture was well established. In this sense, though first appearing after the Second World War, Grosz’s account of Mr. Meschugge cited at the outset ought to be read less as a reminiscence of a specific experience than as the deployment of a well-worn interpretation from the 1910s. If music and sound were more than the mere ancillary components to the success of the eccentric bandleaders, closer inspection of gramophone recordings produced by these performers offer potentially new forms of evidence and information about Mr. Meschugge and eccentric bandleaders more generally. One difficulty here is that during the First World War, eccentric bandleaders receded into the background as did the modern popular music that had accompanied them during their heyday. Yet the popular music they performed could still be heard during wartime in the 379 Eccentric Modernism form of recordings, in part explaining the longevity of their popularity in Germany. It is at this point then that I want to turn to a new set of writings by Grosz, this time poetic and epistolic, from 1917 to 1918. While Grosz’s later autobiography would focus on the visual, physical performance of Mr. Meschugge at the Café Stern, his letters and poems written during the First World War drew instead on such music’s existence as phonographic document. Beginning in the spring of 1917, Grosz’s letters to his friend and fellow artist Otto Schmalhausen repeatedly allude to gramophone records. In an almost telegraphic style, Grosz notes of listening to records late into the early morning: «Quarter to five and the gramophone moans plaintively, (Affenliebe by Theo F. Morse) No. 2 rises - Albert’s - Chorus - Oz - (Waiting for Rob. E. Lee - Medley Ragtime-Twostep by Abraham and C. L. Meir). Oh! You yellow sounds - full of banjo music! » (Briefe 68). In this and other letters, Grosz remains silent on the names of the performers of these pieces, instead confining himself to referencing tremendously popular pre-war titles such as «Alexander’s Ragtime Band» or «Rum Tum Tiddle» (Goergen, «Dada» and «Apachentänze»). Or, as he does in poetic works such as his «Gesang an die Welt,» he elaborates on these references by naming not the performers but their composers and songwriters. Although Grosz spatters his letters with Anglicisms, English-language titles and names, in all probability he possessed recordings produced in Germany, i. e., in Berlin. More specifically, Grosz’s gramophone collection during this period likely contained works recorded by Giorgi Vintilescu, a performer previously encountered at the Kerkau-Palast. In addition to «Alexander’s Ragtime Band,» Vintilescu recorded two further songs alluded to by Grosz in his letters, «Mariette» and «Laughing Waters,» the latter referenced by Grosz in its translated title, «Quellengeister,» the same title as can be found on a contemporaneous recording by Vintilescu (Grosz, Briefe 65—66; Zwarg; Lotz, German Ragtime 237—38). 9 All this suggests that while Grosz no doubt consumed and experienced American popular music in the form of gramophone records, he did so through the mediation of German and international musicians and recording artists active in Berlin’s entertainment district between 1910 and 1914. As discussed above, the three best-known eccentric bandleaders, Mr. Meschugge, Mr. Glasneck, and Mr. Maseltop, all produced recordings in Berlin. Taken as a whole, however, their production was rather limited, especially when compared to the broad popularity and recognizability of artists like Vintilescu. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that Grosz does not reference any recording by an eccentric bandleader in his letters. At the same 380 Jonathan Wipplinger time, the question of why they recorded so few titles remains. One possible explanation for this is that their predominantly visual and corporeal performance style could not be successfully translated into the realm of the sound recording. Indeed, the ideal situation for recording at this time would seem to represent the very antithesis to their eccentric performance style. As cultural historian Stefan Gauss explains: «For the artists, sound recording meant, first of all, acquiring and practicing discipline and control of their emotions. Since a recording could neither be ‹edited› nor reworked, the participants could not let any mistakes slip through during the entire recording period» (Gauss, «Listening» 81). Yet while this was the ideal of the recording process, as Gauss notes elsewhere, bandleaders of the period could in part break with such controls (Gauss, Nadel 179). One example of the violation of the ideal sterility and perfection of the recording session, I would like to suggest, can be found in the 1913 recording of «Dixieland. March and Two-Step» by Krüger’s Kapelle Meschugge. 10 This 1902 composition by the American composer Chauncey Haines was recorded at least two times by American groups, once in 1903 by the Columbia Orchestra, then again in 1913 by Conway’s Band. It was in this same year that Krüger recorded it with his band from the Rheinische Winzerstuben, another Berlin establishment where he performed. Haines’s work is a good example of the type of American popular songs performed by eccentric bandleaders throughout the period and, of course, of the recordings favored by Grosz in his ragtime letters. It is up-tempo, syncopated, and indebted to African-American musical idioms and their commercialization within (white) American and European popular culture. Haines draws in this piece not only generally on the imagery and associated acoustics of «Dixie,» but also specifically from Stephen Foster’s «Old Black Joe» from 1853. Indeed, Haines’s composition undergoes a strong and sustained shift, in instrumentation and melody, roughly midway through in its transition to the melody of «Old Black Joe.» As noted, two American recordings of the song were issued and each contrasts sharply with Mr. Meschugge’s eccentric version from Berlin. Krüger’s recording is overall much slower in tempo, though the reason for this remains unclear. More significantly, this recording displays a number of eccentric elements or «effects,» as they were labeled at the time. Though more often used by recording technicians to increase sales, artists themselves were also known to use such «effects» to their own ends and often against the wishes of the technician (Gauss, Nadel 179—80). According to a discussion in the Phonographische Zeitschrift from 1908, some such effects included the use of percussion instruments, in particular the drums and the glockenspiel, 381 Eccentric Modernism but also bird chirps. Another example of these effects is the use of nonprofessional singers (because it was said to lead to poor comprehensibility) (Kongert). The Berlin recording of «Dixieland» contains elements of all these «effects.» It prominently features a variety of atypical instruments, including percussion, musical chimes and what is possibly a kazoo (or a comb). While from today’s perspective such elements are relatively unremarkable, their presence lends the recording an unconventional sound. The most important, unique, and eccentric attribute of this recording, however, is Mr. Meschugge’s own voice. Haines’s original score contains no lyrics and American recordings follow suit in offering up strictly instrumental versions. The recording from Berlin, by contrast, features Mr. Meschugge’s voice throughout, as he issues a mixture of grunts, growls, shouts, and a loose approximation of English, one no doubt influenced by African-American performers then present in Germany. The language spoken here is neither German, nor English, but something in-between, or rather outside of these, a Berlin, stereotyped translation of the African-American voice. It is a voice that is imperfectly articulated, a halting, though vigorous declaration of the overlapping, intersecting, and conflicting elements of American, African American, German, European, and, of course, Berlin popular culture. Despite being set in the controlled environment of the recording studio, Krüger as Mr. Meschugge was able to translate his eccentric modernism into a shellac representation of his sound and style as a performer. Though there is little question that this recording of «Dixieland» is atypical and further testament to the uniqueness of Krüger, it nonetheless stands as an important artifact of this particular musical style. If in the end the recording begs more questions than it answers, it nonetheless underscores the need for a multidisciplinary and transnational approach to historical accounts of German popular music and culture. Doing so not only opens up to us the multifaceted, if still strange world of Berlin’s eccentric artists, it grants us the opportunity to recast our ideas about the development of German musical culture in this period and its place within the wider context of European and American popular music and culture. If there is thus much to be gained through such analysis, any insights achieved through examination of sound documents remain, on their own, insufficient, or better imprecise. In the case of Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders at least, the sights and sounds of their world were forgotten not only on account of the ephemerality of sound or of their «translation» into textual and visual representations. While one could potentially make this case for Krüger as Mr. Meschugge, Frank Groundsell as Mr. Maseltop was heretofore known exclusively via recorded sound documents. Well-known amongst 382 Jonathan Wipplinger discographers (Lotz, German Ragtime 230—31) and German jazz historians (Lange 20), as well as historians of popular music (Wicke 150), Groundsell’s eccentric recording of «Tiger Rag» has long been held out as a poor, yet chronologically early example of American jazz’s presence within Germany. What was missing in terms of contextualizing Groundsell’s work was therefore not only attention to sound documents itself, but a deeper appreciation of the historicity of auditory cultures like that of Berlin’s eccentric music culture circa 1910. Further testament to the cultural and historical determination of listening practices, to the necessarily symbolic, if indexical, status of early recorded sound, the different cases and histories of Groundsell’s and Krüger’s recordings demonstrate the need to investigate auditory culture in all its variability and unpredictability and most of all to not avoid this culture’s eccentric edges. Notes 1 The author wishes to thank the following people for their indispensible help in researching this article: Ulrich Biller, Konrad Nowakowski, Martin Songhurst, and Rainer Lotz. 2 Originally published as A Little Yes and a Big No in 1946, there remain slight differences between the original version published in English and the German version in 1955 (Ein kleines Ja) upon which the translation from An Autobiography is based. As the author has not had opportunity to examine Grosz’s original German manuscript from which the initial English translation of 1946 was apparently produced, the following will quote exclusively from the English translation by Hodges from 1998. 3 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are the author’s own. 4 As opposed to the real identities behind Mr. Meschugge and Mr. Maseltop discussed below, the identity of Mr. Glasneck remains unconfirmed. It is unclear whether the name «Glasneck» is even a pseudonym, as a composer and bandleader Rudolf Glasneck can be found across a number of sources around the turn of the last century. 5 On Creatore, a potential forerunner of Berlin’s own eccentric bandleaders see, for example, Greene (39—42). Though it is beyond the scope of my argument, an even more likely forerunner to Berlin’s eccentric performers and further example of the transatlantic network is the German-American Sigmund Neuberger, who performed as «The Great Lafayette» and «Mr. Lafayette» in the US and Europe. Neuberger was an illusionist who famously impersonated conductors, including a «Hebrew conducting an orchestra» (Steinmeyer 229). Krüger aka «Mr. Meschugge» may have had opportunity to see Neuberger, when he performed as «Mr. Lafayette» in Berlin in October 1907 at the Circus Schumann. At that time, he brought along an orchestra of 50 musicians and in his act parodied both John Philip Sousa and Johann Strauss («Parodistisches im Zirkus»). Neuberger was, further, an international star and Groundsell aka «Mr. Maseltop» makes explicit reference to him and his influence in his autobiography (Groundsell 34—35). Neuberger died tragically in a fire in 1911. 383 Eccentric Modernism 6 Mr. Meschugge likely appeared in at least two films, Die zweite Tür links (1914, Dir. Henri Etiévant) and Der Golem und die Tänzerin (1917, Dir. Paul Wegener). For the former, he was featured in print advertisements as «The famous Berlin original: Mr. Meschugge» (UT Lichtspiele). An example of undated advertising materials for «Mr. Meschugge» at the Café Stern circa 1913 can be viewed at the online Veikkos-Archiv: http: / / www.veikkos-archiv.com/ index.php? title=Hauptseite (accessed 2 Sept. 2015). 7 Goergen includes an illustration that gives his name as «Mr. Meschugge alias Robert Krüger» («Dada»13). This corresponds to discographical evidence as well as references in Der Artist in which «Mr. Meschugge» is referred to as «Kapellmeister Krüger» (Lotz, German Ragtime 190). Krüger apparently served during the First World War (ek.), after which he returned to performing in Berlin, though without the same level of attention or notoriety. 8 Released in late 1919 or early 1920, Groundsell’s name had been misspelled on the label as «F. Groundzell,» making a definitive link between Groundsell/ Mr. Maseltop and this recording impossible until now. More extensive information on Groundsell’s career as well as a digitized copy of his recording of «Tiger Rag» recording is available online (Biller and Wipplinger). Though two of his recordings from this period, including «Tiger Rag,» state that they were recorded in London, it seems more likely that they were done in Berlin, as Groundsell was back at the Kerkau-Palast by August 1919 (Schmidl August 3, 1919). 9 «Quellengeister» was recorded by Vintilescu in 1911 and released as Parlophon P. 1162. A final example here is Grosz’s reference to Theodore F. Morse’s «Down in Jungle Town» under its German title «Affenliebe,» a piece recorded by Vintilescu in Berlin in 1912 (Grammophon 2 - 940703). 10 This recording has been made available on youtube by the Austrian discographer Wolfgang Hirschenberger under the username «Stompy»: www.youtube.com/ watch? v=nuAFRUBzHCE (accessed 2 Oct. 2015). Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. «Über Jazz.» Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 17. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. 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RIPPEY BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY In the technical and critical discourse on sound cinema and broadcasting in the interwar era, Klangbild described a purely sonic form that both enveloped the audience and presented itself as an object of perception, placing the listener in a processing scenario radically different than that of the viewer. In what follows, I reconstruct the concept of Klangbild and trace how the sound-images of new media generated a heightened awareness of hearing as both general sensory experience and specific aesthetic event. As a mediagenerated sonic form that raised attentiveness to aural attention itself, the Klangbild had something in common with the Hörbild that became a frequent component of radio offerings in the 1920s. But the two were not identical: a Hörbild was a sonic image and a fully formed text, meant to be interpreted as a narrative or episode, contemplated as an «acoustic portrait» (Birdsall, «Sonic Artefacts» 136). A Klangbild was a concentrated dose of sonic information as well as the actual patterns of disruption of the air that the amplified playback of a sound recording created: it was a more narrowly defined component of a radio Hörbild, a sound film, or an experiment in sound art. Klangbild was discussed primarily in technical and critical circles, and that discussion frequently focused on the sheer sensory dimension. The advent of this medial sound image catalyzed shifts in the modern relationship between perception, space, and time, thus refiguring the reach, bounds and even nature of the perceiving human being. The texts that I examine here represent both technical and conceptual grappling with these shifts. My readings thus integrate reconstructed episodes of acoustic practice and sketches of the interwar acoustical imagination. Klangbild was not thinkable without wires, magnets, and tube amplifiers, but it also broke free of headphones, loudspeakers, and purpose-built auditoriums. The more common the experience of sound media became in the 1920s, the more listeners started to perceive the urban spaces through which they moved as auditory fields filled with a mix of exciting and overwhelming sound images. To structure such fields and lend contours to the aural experiences within them was to shape life at a sensory level - it was not simply the airwaves but the air itself that became a matrix of creative opportunity and a field of social struggle. The first and last texts that I analyze in this article are a 1925 feuilleton and a 1938 critical essay by Joseph Roth. These texts do not explicitly name the concept of Klangbild. Rather, they offer two renderings of it, and these renderings illustrate a sound-cultural shift that takes place in the interwar period. In the mid-1920s, Roth frames the Klangbilder that erupt from a spectacular sporting event as both a cultural shock and an aesthetic opportunity. In the late1930s, he argues that fascism’s acoustic disturbance has catastrophically damaged the unruly yet fertile sound culture of the Weimar years and threatened the most fundamental vocal elements of civilization. Between the analyses of these two pieces by Roth, I consider texts from the cinema and radio trade press, each of which provides an instructive impression of how artists, technicians, and critics exploited (or hoped to exploit) technology to create new forms of sound and new modes of sound experience for their respective media audiences. With the aesthetic emphasis of the first Roth text and the political emphasis of the second in mind, I consider the aesthetic and political dimensions of the technical discussion of Klangbild, even when those dimensions are not specifically treated by the authors themselves. In his seminal artwork essay, Walter Benjamin posits that a principal task of avant-garde art is to generate perceptual needs that emergent media will eventually fulfill: the audiovisual shocks of Dadaism, he suggests as an example, were an attempt to create effects that the public would come to seek in sound film (Benjamin, «Das Kunstwerk» 500—02). Extending this line of thought, I argue that the convergence of aural-representational practices and technologies in broadcasting and sound cinema triggered needs on the creative-productive side as well as the receptive side of interwar aesthetic exchange. Today, people who want to represent their aural experience can simply make a podcast. In the 1920s and 1930s, no such personalized technology existed, but the need to capture, shape, and share sound, born of the ubiquity of gramophone, radio, and film sound-images, is written all over the hearing-based feuilleton of the interwar years. Solving that recording problem involved hacking the medium of print. A paradigmatic example is «Das XIII. Berliner Sechstagerennen,» a Roth feuilleton from January 1925. The six-day races were velodrome cycling events, in which teams of two riders raced alternating legs for 144 hours. They drew massive crowds in Weimar-era Berlin and other major cities. Roth’s text is fascinating in this regard because of its frequent synesthetic fusion of sound and vision, which is characteristic of his ongoing attempt to 390 Theodore F. Rippey leverage the medium of print to produce new textual images of sensory experience. A first instance comes near the beginning of the text: Es sind nur noch hundert Stunden bis zum Ende. Wenn ich dabliebe, ich bekäme die Physiognomie jenes Megaphons, durch das dem Publikum in diesem Irrenhaus diverse Mitteilungen gemacht werden. Eigentlich wunder, dass diese Menschen immerhin noch wie Menschen aussehen. Sie müssten aussehen wie Megaphone, wie Schreie, wie brutale Lüste, wie Bier-Ekstasen, wie Fahrräder, wie blinde Begierden, wie dekadente Barbarei. (331) Roth moves here from the fantastical image of a person as a megaphone (a mechanical technology of amplification) to a synesthetic image of a person as a scream - a grammatically unreal, textually rendered sound-image. These images pair with actual screams, which Roth, using signal-processing mechanisms of memory, edits together into a complex sound-form: Dort, wo der Lichtkegel mit messerscharfem Rand den Schatten schneidet, wirken Millionen Stäubchen. Wenn der Schrei der Menge ertönt, geraten sie in Unordnung, und es kommen Tumult, Schrecken, Chaos in das gesetzmäßige Kreisen, Tänzeln, Fliegen der Stäubchen. So gewaltig ist die Erschütterung der Atmosphäre. (333) Here principal sound and ambient sound become coextensive, and the dust particles, thrust by the collective scream into chaotic trajectories, become visible evidence of sound’s physical force. They also become co-constituting elements of an aural-visual image: the spectator can actually see the dancing dust. As I will discuss below, this technique of describing sound’s invisible motion-forms in the air in visually referential language connects the chronicler of Weimar mass culture with technical discussions of sound cinema in 1929/ 1930. In addition, the pairing of textually rendered soundforms with reflection on the soundscapes of mass events links the feuilletonist to the broadcasting trade press. The radio-related article that I will treat later on shows how, like Roth, radio critic Gustav Rollwage analyzed a mass event similar to Roth’s six-day race, with an ear toward how cogeneration of a sound image linked and altered the participants in the sonic event. Within the massive, collective scream of the six-day race, subforms also manifest themselves. Here the textual visualization of sound by Roth, one of the most consequential figures of twentieth-century German and Austrian- Jewish letters, structurally anticipates that of Rollwage, a now-forgotten champion of a new radio for the Volksgemeinschaft: Manchmal wirft der Wirbelsturm der Ekstase auch die festgefügten Menschenreihen durcheinander, schrille Frauenschreie, das Sprichwort vom schwachen Geschlecht desavouierend, fahren sägend durch die festgestampfte Tonmasse 391 Klangbild and Interwar German Media männlicher Bässe, und man bekommt eine zwingende Vorstellung von der Existenz mythologischer Furien. (333) In the arena, Roth hears and virtually sees the women’s screams sawing through the dense sound/ clay-mass (Ton) of male voices. The furies raise significant questions about the relationship between the physical properties of high-frequency vocal sounds and the cultural construction of gender. Those questions lie beyond my present scope, which is limited to how Roth breaks down the component sensations of the six-day race’s multisensory onslaught and sets them in relation to one another in print. His literary method evokes hybrid aural-visual images that are not perceivable in the everyday environs of sensory experience. But these images work in familiar enough registers that the actually reading and virtually seeing-hearing audience does not become untethered from the recognizable sensory and social reality of the event. Already in the mid-1920s, there was an extensive theoretical and practical discussion of the Hörerlebnis of radio, and broadcasting’s acoustic offerings were increasingly present in the public spaces of everyday life. Mechanical sound recording (first on cylinders, then on discs) had been a part of popular culture for over two decades, and major phonograph labels began switching to recording with electrical microphones in 1925. The advent of these new technologies gave rise to an interwar sound-media climate that was strikingly new. The unremarkable quality of audio capture in our times is a function of its ubiquity and its ease. In the 1920s, the products of recording were all around, but new recording technology was difficult if not impossible to possess by audio consumers. In this context, I read Roth’s sound-centered feuilletons as a solution to a technical problem. Without access to an electronic mobile recording system, he used a much older medium in an innovative way. Roth’s task, simply put, was to render noise meaningfully in print. Driven by a need to impose a degree of comprehensibility upon an overabundance of sensory stimuli and a desire to remain sensitive to the experiential opportunities of that environment, Roth recorded, mixed, edited, and played back via the feuilleton. His text presents an assemblage of Klangbilder that roars through the reader’s head, even as each soundimage remains perfectly silent on the page. In his writing of sound, he demonstrated an intellectual, discerning ear, and he depicted the physical, vibrating ear. Both these modes of listening were foci of the technical and critical discourse in the media trade press, to which I now turn. In October 1929, only months after the German premiere of The Singing Fool spurred the Germany film industry into the transition to sound, Richard 392 Theodore F. Rippey Ruhnau published an article in Die Kinotechnik with the intriguing title «Die plastische Tonwiedergabe.» He wrote with confidence that the problem of temporal synchronization of sound and image was already completely solved, as were critical matters of signal quality. If we follow Ruhnau, under state of the art conditions that autumn, audience ears enjoyed sounds that registered in perfect time with moving visual images, free of the distortions that had nagged the first forays into sound film, and uncluttered by unwanted background noise. Despite these achievements, however, the sound-image suffered from a critical flaw: it lacked directionality. This absence triggered a sense of perceptual unease in audiences, according to Ruhnau: «Irgendein Empfinden in uns wehrt sich, trotz präzisester Synchronisierung den Ton hinzunehmen als absolut bedingt durch die optisch wahrnehmbaren Geschehnisse auf dem Lichtschirm» (521). Ruhnau explained that under natural listening conditions - those in which there is no involvement of recording technology - «Richtung und Intensität des Schalles bringen sich ohne einen besonderen Willensakt mit der optisch zu erwartenden Erscheinung in Einklang» (521). A person stands on a street. A streetcar approaches from the left margin of spatial perception, and both and eye and ear capture and convey sensory data that confirms as much. In the cinema auditorium of autumn 1929, things were different: Hier sind wir [. . .] akustisch dauernd falsch orientiert, denn der Schall ist nicht gerichtet, er entströmt irgendeiner mehr oder weniger breiten Basis, er kann nicht ohne einen besonders notwendig werdenden Willensakt mit den optischen Vorgängen auf dem Lichtschirm in Einklang gebracht werden. (521) Writing from this period of media history offers glimpses of an audience whose medium-specific auditory habits were not yet naturalized, whose eyes and ears were still actively sorting out the sensory incongruities of, in this case, the audiovisual film. In these observations, Ruhnau draws our attention to this perceptual management, which becomes unusually self-reflective during the emergence of a new medium: accepting and processing the temporally synchronous audio and visual data streams without the directionality that shapes aurality outside the cinema requires a conscious act to maintain attention despite disorientation. Citing the fatigue symptoms (Ermüdungserscheinungen) that frequently manifested themselves in sound film audiences as evidence for his position, Ruhnau proposed a simple solution to the problem: use dual microphone rigs during film shooting, and have audiences wear headphones. Those ideas were not practically feasible, as Ruhnau recognized, and the compromise that he sketches out is fascinating to contemplate. Most cinemas in major cities had large enough stage areas to accommodate graded 393 Klangbild and Interwar German Media arrangements of speaker clusters. For example, he suggested, one array could be placed directly behind the screen and others to the left and right. But Ruhnau added a further layer. These clusters, he theorized, could be linked to a circuit switching console, by which an operator could shift the number and location of speakers from which the film sound would emanate in any given shot or sequence, in accordance with the optically conditioned anticipation of sound’s spatial behavior. In fact, Ruhnau argued, one could easily produce a keyboard controller for the switching mechanism that would allow an accomplished technician to convey even more striking and subtle variations in sound direction and intensity. The technician at the keyboard, commanding an electrical-mechanical system that anticipates digitally-driven 360degree audio systems of today, would form the Klangbild in real time, based on optical cues from objects and motion on the screen. In other words, the system would synthesize through technology the sense of directionality that the ear and brain would create under normal conditions outside the cinema. The crowning achievement that Ruhnau envisioned was the automation of this directional sound reproduction. Just as film copying and printing machines, cued by marks in the film strip itself, set the appropriate exposure lighting, sound markers could be set into the film strip for use in exhibition. This would shift the controller’s labor from exhibition to preparation: based on test runs, all the speaker array adjustments could be set in advance, and markers could then be placed to trigger those adjustments during playback. What we find in Ruhnau’s envisioned system -again, already in 1929 - is an engineering of aural experience on another order of magnitude, even when compared with the already revolutionary development of phonographic systems of sound recording and reproduction around the turn of the century. This three-dimensional, kinetic aural experience does three things. It takes the organs of sight and hearing as its points of departure, makes the consumption of sound and image as product its objective, and ties the quality standard for that product to the sensory impressions and responses characteristic of non-cinematic reality. The more lifelike this experience became, the easier it became to forget momentarily the difference between cinematic spaces of sensation and their non-cinematic counterparts. This shift raised the technical and aesthetic question of whether those two realms could or should become completely indistinguishable. Could the experience of cinematic and natural sound (i. e., sound free of technological mediation) become virtually one and the same? In March 1930, nine months after The Singing Fool and five months after Ruhnau’s article, the trade journal Filmtechnik published an issue dedicated to the state of the art in sound film aesthetics and technology. One of the 394 Theodore F. Rippey richer contributions to this issue, from the perspective of the history of sound, is Eduard Rhein’s article «Liegt es an den Lautsprechern? » One quandary that Rhein addressed in the piece was the placement of loudspeakers within the cinema auditorium, and he described an experimental attempt to solve that problem: Als vor kurzem ein großes Berliner Theater mit Tonfilmapparaten versehen wurde, legte man besonderen Wert darauf, die günstigste Höhe der Lautsprecher durch musikalisch besonders befähigte Fachleute zu ermitteln. Die Lautsprecher waren zunächst auf dem Boden aufgestellt. Als der Probefilm abgelaufen war, schien es allen Anwesenden unerlässlich, die Lautsprecher zunächst einmal in mittlerer Höhe angebracht zu wissen. Kettenzüge hinter der Leinwand, ein furchtbares Hantieren, Poltern, schließlich wurde wieder eingeschaltet, und siehe da, die Wiedergabe war nunmehr nach Aussage aller Anwesenden bedeutend besser als zuvor. Erst als der Techniker schnell die Leinwand hochziehen ließ, merkte man, dass die Lautsprecher nach wie vor auf dem Fußboden standen. (16) Like Ruhnau’s plan for an automatically controlled, directional sound system, this quotation provides evidence of a phenomenon that is still comparatively new in 1930, if one frames it within the long history of listening: sound as a reproducible, consumable product. This product was subject to high demand; many people wanted it. It was also subject to high demands: those people had rigorous criteria - analytically conceptualized or intuitively felt - by which they judged media-generated sound. While Ruhnau projected forward, to an auditorium in which that sound product would be subject to remarkably sophisticated control, Rhein focused more immediately on how that product behaved, and how it registered with listeners, in the cinematic space of his time. Rhein also addressed the fact that speakers of greater size, while possessing a greater physical capacity to fill a room with sound, have a strange tendency, «die hohen Töne sehr scharf nach vorn gerichtet abzustrahlen, so dass in der Mitte des Theaters ein nach oben und an den Seiten des Theaters ein nach unten verschobenes Klangbild zu hören ist» (16). In principle, sound propagates spherically, so Rhein’s description of large loudspeakers shooting high-pitched tones straight ahead is at first glance an account of the effects of an engineered space and system of sound. However, as was becoming clear at the time, this effect is perceptible in settings that one would consider natural as well. Acousticians looking at the production side of sound film were focused from the outset on how and where best to position microphones during the shoot, and they had the accumulated knowledge of three decades of modern acoustics to guide them. They knew well, for instance, that no sound source generated a pattern of sound waves that was perfectly spherical 395 Klangbild and Interwar German Media because no sound source had a point-like form. Further, they knew that any instrument (the human vocal apparatus included) that forced sound waves through a tube, then out an aperture, had a structural propensity to project sound in a conical form, and that the high-frequency tones within that sound cone would be most intense along its center axis and dissipate markedly at its margins. This general form of projection was thus something that human speakers and loudspeakers had (and have) in common. What separated the two was just as significant as what connected them, however. Two physically present human beings holding a conversation in front of a movie screen would not be heard by any audience members save those at the front rows of the auditorium; two characters conversing on screen would be heard by all. The increased intensity of the amplified sound signal as a whole enhanced the high-frequency beam at the center of the cone and made the effect of the sound image shooting past more pronounced. The smaller speakers that Rhein noted thus had the same tendency; their smallness simply made the effect less drastic. The problem was to find the optimal match of speaker power level and auditorium dimensions, accounting for all the sound-damping bodies in the space (audience members included), and then determine how to place and direct the speakers in order to guarantee good resonance while sufficiently neutralizing unnatural effects like the high-frequency beam. I have gone into detail here in order to connect but also to draw a distinction between Ruhnau and Rhein: both are concerned with the relationships between sound, space, and the listening experience, but while Ruhnau focuses on signal processing and the correspondence of aural and visual directionality, Rhein focuses on the actual physical sound forms in the auditorium space. These forms are invisible and ephemeral, but they persist long enough in the listening environment to be both heard and tracked by the audience. Imagine Rhein’s group of experts in an auditorium in 1931, at floor level, sensing a sound image (Klangbild) shooting over their heads; or at balcony level, sensing the sound streaking past beneath them. Technicians make adjustments to disperse the conical sound projections, such that the aural effects seem less manufactured. The trajectories of the high-frequency beams shift - but so do expectations of listeners, who know that changes are being made and anticipate an improvement in what is heard. A Klangbild coalesces and evanesces in space, even seems to move through it. It has no palpable substance, no visible contour, but it is a thing that exists, independently of our ears. Those ears, however, and the habits of perception through which all signals that strike the ear become recognizable, alter the Klangbild at the point of audition. As sound moves through bodies, it changes. As it registers 396 Theodore F. Rippey in minds, it changes again. Technically these events occur in succession, but the duration of the entire sequence is so slight as to render these two changes indistinguishable at the level of consciousness. Klangbild is therefore tricky to pin down, not only because it cannot be seen or touched, but also because it hinges on a constantly reconfiguring interplay of technological manipulation on one hand and the expectations that frame perception on the other. Assumptions about aural environs inflect hearing, even as hearing forms our basic picture of aural environs. The ear has its own adaptive tendency to naturalize aural impressions, so any attempt to minimize the sensation of unnaturalness runs the risk of heightening attention to artifice, even if only momentarily. It was thus not only the technologies of capture, processing and playback that Ruhnau, Rhein and their peers had to optimize. It was also the invisible interaction between those technologies and the ear. As they wrestled with these issues, they shared a common goal of making sound and listening in the cinema seem as natural as possible to the audience. Robert Beyer, an avant-garde composer and sound engineer, took a very different approach to natural sound. Sound cinema, he posited, should create a new kind of sound that would set itself apart from the unfiltered sounds of everyday life. Beyer was especially attentive to technologically processed sonic configurations as distinct aesthetic objects. He has received brief note in sound-related scholarship for his role in the development of the pioneering electronic music studio in Cologne in the early 1950s. However, his 1930 essay «Raumton und Tonphotographie» indicates that he was a technological innovator and astute commentator on sound and media already by the late 1920s and early 1930s. The term Tonphotographie was used with some frequency to designate the sound-on-film (vs. sound-on-disc) systems in the early sound period in Germany, but here Beyer focused not so much on the physical medium per se. Rather, he was interested in sonic phenomena captured during shooting as compositional elements of a sound image that might in turn become a compositional element of a new sound art. «Der Sinn der Tonphotographie,» Beyer posited, «liegt nicht in der Wiederherstellung der Originalität und Naturwirklichkeit einer klingenden Situation, sondern, wie das Wort Tonphotographie schon ansagt, in ihrer bildhaften Darstellung» (10). This creative agenda necessitated a careful consideration of naturalness, but unlike Ruhnau and Rhein, Beyer sought to move cinematic sound away from, not toward the natural. If Rhein’s observations about loudspeakers introduced the problem of disturbingly unnatural sonic sensations, and Ruhnau’s plan for achieving directional sound sketched a method for crafting a dynamic sound image that 397 Klangbild and Interwar German Media would eliminate those disturbances, Beyer’s text raises the theoretical and practical ante by questioning the fundamental assumption that cinematic sound should aspire to virtual identity with non-cinematic, natural sound. In a typical film shoot, he observed, microphones captured distinctly sourced, principal sounds (voices, for example) as well as the whole, subtly textured sample of spatial (or ambient) sound. For Beyer, these were all basic materials for the construction of a cinematic sound image that was not a purely technical supplement to the visual image but an aesthetic image in itself, a counterpart. This idea of the aesthetic autonomy of film sound was not Beyer’s alone: Rudolf Arnheim, Siegfried Kracauer, Béla Balázs, Sergei Eisenstein and his comrades were all working with this notion as well, around this time. What distinguished Beyer, however, was the unusual degree of concrete detail in his theoretical presentation, as we see in the following passage: Jede bildhafte Darstellung beruht auf einer klaren Abgrenzung ihrer gegenständlichen Inhalte gegen jedes Außen. Ein Bild steht mit scharfen Grenzen in unserem Raume als ein gegen unser Blickgebiet hin abgeschlossenes Blickfeld. Die Funktion der vollkommenen äußeren Abriegelung und Umgrenzung übernimmt hier für das Akustische der Raumton. Mit anderen Worten: Erst wenn durch den tonphotographischen Prozess mit einer Stimme zugleich der Raum aus unserer Wirklichkeit geschnitten wird, gewinnt der primäre Klang jene Geschlossenheit gegen unseren Raum, die uns berechtigt, von einer Darstellung des Akustischen in der Form eines Klangbildes zu sprechen. (10) It takes a moment to unpack this: Beyer contends that the creation of a sound image hinges on the effective capture and reproduction of ambient sound (Raumton). It is this ambient sound that provides the aural frame that sets off the primary sound from the listening space (the cinema auditorium), even as it fills that space. In Beyer’s view, the audio engineer had to capture the entire, diffuse content of the sonic scene in order to have the raw material for a viable sound image: without Raumton, there could be no Klangbild. In the basic desire to pursue a mode of sound capture that successfully registers ambient along with principal sound, Beyer is connected to other practitioners of his time (and ours): ambient sound provides crucial audio color to the aural impression of the scene. As technical critic Erich Leistner described the sound engineer in a March 1931 article on sound image and microphone placement, «[E]r muss Impressionist im besten Sinne sein, um den Gehalt der Szene erfassen und zum, das Optische ergänzenden, akustischen Bilde einfangen zu können» (6). Because aural experience is a principal component of spatial orientation, the sampling of aural-spatial experience during a shoot had to achieve more than capturing a voice clearly 398 Theodore F. Rippey in order to make the scene that would become part of the exhibited talking picture seem sufficiently real to the audience. It had to capture that voice as well as the ambient sound frame. In attending closely to that frame and analytically penetrating what it contained, however, Beyer moved away from Leistner and the industry’s general standards of virtual naturalness. If the processes of production and exhibition actually produced a Klangbild, as he conceptualized it, then that image would set itself apart from the original sound form and from the space of exhibition, once the synthesized image established itself in the auditorium: Einmal, zur Zeit der Aufnahme, waren vier Wände da, zu denen Stimme und Instrument in irgendeinem perspektivischen Verhältnis standen. Was uns jetzt bei der Wiedergabe anspricht, ist eine Übersetzung der räumlichen Maße und der messbaren Beziehungen, welche die Einstellung der Stimme zu ihrem Raume bezeichnet, in klingende Wirklichkeit, in ein gegen uns hin abgegrenztes, die Stimme abgrenzendes Raumbild. (10) In other words, the microphone registers within the enclosure of the studio (or the environs of the location), but the audience hears within the enclosure of the auditorium. The Klangbild, now also a Raumbild, is technologically and spatially removed from the original sounding scene, but in Beyer’s theorization it does not blend fully with the acoustic space of the auditorium; rather, the Raumbild stands within a new Raum. As this process plays out in the exhibition setting and the audience finds itself both absorbing and cohabitating with a spatialized sound image in the auditorium, the audience’s relationship with both sound and space enters new territory: Unser Verhalten gegenüber dem Klange ist damit grundlegend geändert. Wir sind nicht mehr Teilnehmende, leibhaftig mit der Stimme Verbundene, sondern in einem Maße von ihr getrennt, wie nie zuvor. Wir können auch sagen: Die Stimme besitzt keine Entfernung mehr zu uns, den Hörenden, ausdrückbar etwa in realen Metern. Allein von einer tönend gewordenen Entfernung zu ihrem Bezugssystem, von einer Perspektive innerhalb des mitschwingenden, umgrenzenden Raumbildes lässt sich sprechen. (10) With this observation, Beyer arrived at a significant point of contact between cinema and broadcasting. Both media involve the disappearance of distance as traditionally understood and the establishment in its place of a set of relationships to and within a technological system of reference. Given this disappearance and replacement, the audience does not hear the voice, in the traditional sense. Rather, it enters into a resonant relationship with the voice’s cinematic system of reference, a relationship that comes into being within the 399 Klangbild and Interwar German Media bounds of the spatialized sound image. Nothing about this is natural, but it is unquestionably real. Beyer seized on this transformation because the altered aesthetic character of sound and the altered stance of the listener represented opportunities for the composer of a new media-generated sound art: Der Sinn der Umwandlung ist, die klingenden Gegenständlichkeiten so zu entwerten, dass es möglich wird, sie im Sinne des Klangfarbenmelos zu montieren, in Gestaltungseinheiten einer neuen Musik unterzubringen. Wir denken hier nicht an eine abstrakte, das Gegenständliche negierende Gestaltung. Wir meinen nur, dass die Technik beides ermöglicht: einen Grad der Freiheit in der Beherrschung des Materials - zugleich eine Eindringlichkeit des klingenden Materials im Gegenständlichen wie nie zuvor. (11) In its connotations of accent and forcefulness, this unprecedented Eindringlichkeit was the quality with which Beyer’s envisioned mode of Tonphotographie endowed sounding things, and on which his imagined new aesthetic character and new perception of such things hinged. In placing a spatialized sound image before and around the audience, Beyer aimed also to create a new relationship between sounding things and their sounds, drawing out the sensory richness of the latter, as raw aesthetic material, without forcing the audience to relinquish the orientation that results from basic recognition of the former. He is not talking about pure sound abstraction; rather, he is talking about leveraging the unnatural dimensions of cinematic sound to shake sounds loose from their sources without severing the tie completely, fostering a dual mode of aural experience. The technological manipulation of sound as signal makes this new sound art possible, but its manipulations do not take the audience beyond all known bounds of aural or visual experience. In conceptualizing a new kind of aural experience that would push audiences outside the bounds of the everyday listening, Beyer’s work recalled the pioneering acoustics research of Hermann von Helmholtz in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Benjamin Steege writes, Helmholtz shared with British empiricism an «emphasis on the silent operation of habit in perception, reflecting a particular sensitivity to the overlooked significance of the ‹everyday›» (74). As appropriated by Helmholtz, this line of thought regarded the everyday state of sensation and perception as the «absence of reflection, the absence of attention,» (74) and that absence would bar the very analytical listening that would mark the new relationship with sound that Beyer hoped to foster. In Helmholtz’s theory, normal listening involves not «awareness of the sounding world in all its fine detail» but a «forgetting, and abstraction from the singular elements that 400 Theodore F. Rippey make it up» (75). Helmholtz’s classic illustration is the general inability of the everyday listener to analytically isolate the upper partial tones that create the timbre (Klangfarbe) of a note played on a specific musical instrument. Beyer’s principal objective - to create a new Klangfarbenmelos from filmed sounding things - raises the question of whether the everyday listener described by Helmholtz would have the analytic perceptual capacity to discern such a new sound-photographic music. The answer, inherent in Beyer’s concept of a new Klangfarbenmelos, is that medial manipulation of sonic material and of listening conditions would catalyze a different mode of listening. The listener would not necessarily have to achieve that shift on his or her own. Helmholtz’s acoustic laboratory, with its purpose-built tone generators and tuned resonators, actually provided a classic model of this process on an individual level: its devices crafted from extant sonic material aural impressions that listening subjects had not previously encountered. Beyer’s sound art followed this basic structural model but aspired to greater magnitude. The cinema was his aesthetic laboratory, in which he sought to remake sounds and alter listening on a collective scale. The same could be said of Ruhnau and Rhein as well, with the crucial caveat that the new listening they sought to engender would be most successful when it became indistinguishable from familiar listening. The forgetting and abstracting that Helmholtz ascribed to everyday listening was (and is) born of necessity. It would be overwhelming for any listener to attend to every sonic detail of every moment. Those engaged in the German cinema’s transition to sound (whether they were theoretically minded artists, commercially minded technicians, or anything in between) conceptualized and achieved technological transformations of sonic material and altered modes of listening. But that did not constitute an attempt to change abstracting/ forgetting everyday listeners into acutely attentive, analytical listeners who would never again miss the rustle of a leaf, a whisper in the background, or a partial tone. Rather, it was an attempt to create tailored listening situations, in which optimized technology would facilitate the desired interaction of audio and audience, to a specific end. For Ruhnau and Rhein, the concern with audience listening satisfaction had a more commercial motivation, while Beyer’s aims were more artistic. Beyer’s interest in sound, space, and relationships, established within a technological system of reference, connected his analysis of the cinematic sound image with the multifaceted inquiry into the aesthetic and social potential of radio in its first decade. This inquiry intensified in the early 1930s, first as the increasingly fractious and desperate political climate fueled efforts 401 Klangbild and Interwar German Media to exploit radio’s utopian potential to connect; and later, as theoreticians, practitioners and officials sought to leverage that potential as another means of galvanizing the racialized national community. In both settings, the aesthetic qualities and the individual and collective dimensions of the listening experience were of utmost concern. I turn now to a text from this time, in order to provide an impression of the conceptualization of listening communities, first with technical and sensory emphases, then with a pronounced emphasis on the spiritual essence of the Volk. This text, from the July 1934 edition of Rufer und Hörer, is an essay by Gustav Rollwage titled «Miterleben im Hörbericht.» It takes the coincidence of the transition to Nazi rule and the conclusion of the first decade of German broadcasting as an opportunity to revisit foundational questions of the medium’s potential. Rollwage develops a model for leveraging the medium to generate a new mode of virtual aural presence, and in so doing he combines core impulses that we also find in the writing of Rhein, Ruhnau, and Beyer. Like those three contemporaries from the realm of cinema, the radio critic also pursues the complex (and sometimes paradoxical) dual agenda of suspending the division of medial and non-medial sensory experience and fostering new modes of individual and collective listening. Rollwage begins with the commonplace that radio erases the barriers of time and space between event (Ereignis) and experiencers (Erlebende) but cannot replace the experience of physical presence at and participation in the event. Radio reporting and listening thus cannot be experiencing-of (Miterleben); it can only be experiencing-after (Nacherleben) (184). Rollwage then quickly moves to attack his own position, arguing for a way to push radio practices into the realm of Miterleben. Reporters, he writes, must realize that their direct experience generates a stream of energy (Kraftstrom) that the medium instantaneously transmits: listeners experience the event at one remove, but their experience of the reporter’s experience is immediate (186). The result is a hybrid state of aural and general sensory experience that is only possible in radio. Like Beyer’s, Rollwage’s work also drew on ideas that emerged in nineteenth-century acoustic science. Here, however, the connection did not involve habits of perception; it involved circulation of energy. Once again, Helmholtz anticipated conceptual issues of interwar sound media. As Steege recounts, Helmholtz developed the concept of the material ear to designate those resonators (inorganic and organic, the human ear among them) that served as «converter[s] and transmitter[s] of elastic energy to and from air, in which that energy took the form of acoustic vibrations» (69). The relationship that Rollwage described followed a Helmholtzian line of thought, framing the 402 Theodore F. Rippey hybrid aural participation of the radio listener as an extension of the elastic energy transmission that Helmholtz had characterized. To create this hybridity, Rollwage argued, the medium needed reporters with exceptional visual and verbal capacities, «Menschen, denen sich die geschaute Wirklichkeit zu einem Erlebnis verdichtet, und die diesem Erlebten die mitreißende Wortgestaltung zu geben vermögen» (186). He also insisted on revisiting the on-site tactics of live reporting and finding a way to direct the energy streams emanating from the masses of live participants into the stream that flowed from the reporter to the listeners. When the reporter stood on a metaphorical hill over the spectacle below, then the energy flowing from the assembled mass of people was marginalized as mood or atmosphere (185). Consequently, the mass of participants, whose participation, in Rollwage’s view, was a (if not the) central component of the event itself, was lost in the technical and formal construction of the report. Rollwage’s proposed solution to this problem was to put microphones and reporters in the thick of the crowd: «Gerade unser neuer Rundfunk muss diesen Gemeinschaftswerten nachgehen, muss die ‹Stimmung,› das ‹Fluidum› einzufangen suchen, muss das in den Hörbericht hereinholen, was über der Menge liegt» (187). We can take Rollwage literally here: pulling in what lies above the mass of people at the event, capturing that communal data that the medium must pursue, involved registering the crowd’s sound from the standpoint of the crowd itself. «Wichtig ist vor allem,» he continues, «dass der Sprecher sich als unmittelbares Glied der Zuschauergemeinschaft empfindet und aus dieser Grundhaltung heraus seinen Bericht formt» (187). This reorientation and repositioning join the energy stream linking the mass and the reporter to the stream linking the reporter to the audience, creating a shared immediacy that brings the medium to the tipping point between Nacherleben and Miterleben. Radio had by the early 1930s reached that tipping point in isolated instances, Rollwage insisted, and he offered a recent radio report on the German soccer championship in Berlin’s Poststadion as proof: [A]ls nach Spielschluss die Meisterelf von der begeisterten Menge auf dem Platze jubelnd umringt und gefeiert wurde, da war das Mikrophon mitten unter ihnen. Minutenlang hörte man aus dem Lautsprecher nur diesen brausenden Jubel und hin und wieder Fetzen von durchdringenden Rufen (der Berichterstatter versuchte, den Mannschaftsführer der Schalker vor das Mikrophon zu holen). Nichts Abgezirkeltes, nichts Vorwegbestimmtes, sondern improvisiertes Einfangen dieser Stimmung, dieses Gemeinschaftserlebnisses. In der Absage wurde vorsichtshalber eine Erklärung für dieses außergewöhnliche Vorgehen abgegeben! (Rollwage 187) 403 Klangbild and Interwar German Media Rollwage wanted to see this kind of exceptional audio become the norm, and when one considers the conventions that he was up against, one recognizes how unrealistic this wish was. After all, a sequence of sound that lasts several minutes and contains nothing but the crowd’s roar pierced by an occasional shred of speech strains the concept of report to a breaking point. Rollwage called for an instantaneous transmission of sensation, a media-based, shared aural experience that could transform the actual mass assembled at the event into a virtual mass that spanned the nation. I use the term mass to emphasize the visceral dimension, but Rollwage’s stress fell on the idea of Gemeinschaft. In conceptualizing how to exploit radio to generate a community of sensation, he conceptualized how to exploit media and aural sensation to meld the national community of the Third Reich. In his account of electronic presence in American media from the age of the telegraph through the age of television, Jeffrey Sconce describes how radio, as a wireless mass medium, registered in its early days as an «unsettling phenomenon of distant yet instantaneous communication through open air. Abstract electricity in the ‹ether› made for messages and audiences that were at once vast and communal yet diffuse, isolated, and atomized» (62). In Rollwage’s conceptualization of broadcast-networked mass listening, the medium that was once unsettling to a community of listeners had become a means of galvanizing that community in an unprecedented way. He does not remain transfixed by the magical qualities of the ether. Rather, he envisions how to harness the airwaves as a means of what historian of listening Daniel Morat calls «acoustic mass mobilization» (178). In Morat’s analysis of collective cheering and singing on the eve of World War I, acoustic mass mobilization is site-based and unmediated. It creates «vibrating relationships between bodies and subjects» (182) that perforate the boundaries between the distinct members of the crowd and join them together in a collective affective state. This street-level acoustic mobilization, Morat argues, sets the stage for the medium-based mobilization of the decades to follow. Rollwage’s conceptualization of the Gemeinschaftserlebnis offers a case in point. The listeners that he constructs are not isolated recipients reached simultaneously by a signal. They are consciously collective participants in an affectively charged acoustic event. The connections between sensation, medium, and community become explicit toward the end of the article, in Rollwage’s call for a confluence of the «Gemeinschaftsgeist der Berichterstatter» and the «Gemeinschaftsgeist der Zuschauer, der Mitschaffenden am großen Gemeinschaftserlebnis.» Only the unity of these two related spirits will create the «Grundhaltung für den künftigen Hörbericht,» and only this fundamental stance will embody the «Geist unserer Weltanschauung» (187). These last remarks take Rollwage’s 404 Theodore F. Rippey line of thought even farther away from the specifics of a given event that is reported via radio. The unbounded virtual crowd of the soccer match could just as easily be the unbounded virtual crowd of the boxing match, the political rally, or the victory parade. In Rollwage’s plan for the future, radio reporting is more about aesthetic formation - both of sound images and of listeners’ aural stances - than it is about journalistic information. Geist, after all, cannot be troubled by quotidian reality, and in projecting radio as the connective tissue between the roar of the crowd and the power of the spirit, Rollwage illustrates an early fascist inflection of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and modern media. In her incisive and compelling study of soundscapes in the Third Reich, Carolyn Birdsall develops the concept of affective resonance in order to capture how the National Socialists coupled «occupation of the cityscape [with] integration of mediated sounds into public settings» (61) in the pursuit of fascist political ends. In keeping with Benjamin’s basic thesis of Nazi aestheticized politics, she argues that sound «was an intrinsic part of the desire to orchestrate sensory experiences and facilitate the consumption of national mythologies» (42). With martyr-memorial spectacles, loudspeaker vans, marching columns of brownshirts, the Nazis sought to organize communally generated soundscapes that would «reinforc[e] the legitimacy of their group and its identity patterns,» at the expense of all others (34). In addition, the Nazi regime developed new radio forms like the Sondermeldung (113—14) in order to disrupt the flow of the everyday and condition a collective listening identity in public and private spaces. Rollwage’s text is linked to varying degrees with all of these dimensions, but what he addresses most intently is something more elemental, more preconscious than consumption of mythology and affirmation of identity. He focuses on a Haltung, a basic attitude or stance that a sensing subject brings to any auditory situation, regardless of meaningful audible content. The arbitrariness of the mass event underscores this: it is the intense rush of the energy transfer that is decisive for Rollwage. Without it, the Gemeinschaftsgeist is a boring abstraction. Keeping Rollwage’s Gemeinschaftsgeist and Birdsall’s concept of affective resonance in mind, I will close by returning to Roth. In 1938, the now-exiled author conceptualized an acoustic reality in which the affective resonance that Birdsall describes and the affective collectivity that Rollwage saw realized in moments in 1932 had fused and spread, triggering a catastrophic transformation. The air, Roth found, had become so permeated with the sounds of fascism that the German cultural traditions to which he clung were 405 Klangbild and Interwar German Media no longer acoustically possible. The unease in Roth’s account of the 1925 sixday race, which I discussed to begin this piece, originated in anxiety over exactly the kind of viscerally thrilling yet potentially devastating collective sensation that Rollwage would later promote. The fascist effort to leverage new media to push that sensation well beyond its prior conceptual and physical bounds fueled Roth’s increasing desperation in exile. The crowd’s concussion of the arena atmosphere was a cultural jolt for Roth, but in 1925 he could process that jolt as an opportunity as well as a potential threat. His disquiet was tempered with acknowledgment of such mass events as central components of modern culture and an interest in the sights and sounds of the arena as raw material for literary experiment. In Roth’s estimation, the Third Reich catastrophically damaged that atmosphere of opportunity and experiment, and this catastrophe had a crucial sonic component. By 1938, as he worked on the unpublished essay «Am Ende ist das Wort,» the noise of German society under Nazi rule had become «hellish» and had taken the air away from anyone with something meaningful to say. This meant dark days for those whose life was words: [M]it Missmut setzt sich der Schriftsteller vor das leere Blatt Papier, obwohl er voll von Worten zu sein glaubt, die treffen könnten, wirken, töten und lebendig machen. Ach! Er weiß, dass des Lesers Ohr schon erfüllt ist von einem Gedränge entstellter, verkrümmelter, zerbrochener, verkrüppelter Worte, monströsen, sinnlosen Silbenkompositionen. Begriffen ohne Unterleib gleichsam, sprachähnlichen Lauten, die der Mensch vom Papagei gelernt zu haben scheint. («Am Ende ist das Wort» 837) This passage evinces a critique of language under fascism that shares elements with those of Roth’s contemporaries (Klemperer being the best known), but it stands out in its connection of concept to word to sound. That sonic dimension comes more strongly to the fore in the closing section of the essay: Was soll man noch sagen können, in diesem Höllenlärm? In diesen Weihnachtstagen? Kann ein fühlender Mensch noch rufen: Christ ist geboren! - ohne daran zu denken, dass er gekreuzigt wird? Woher den Mut nehmen, dem Nächsten etwas zu wünschen, da die Akustik sogar selbst gestört ist, in dem Maße, dass man nicht sicher ist, ob der Segen nicht wie sein Gegenteil klingt? («Am Ende ist das Wort» 837; my emphasis) Readers familiar with Roth will know that this text is from a very late point in his life, after he had reconceived his political and religious identity in a last attempt to counter the fatal combination of nationalism and mass politics that, in his estimation, had given rise to fascism in Germany and Austria. Like the questions about voice and gender, these issues reach beyond the scope of this essay. I close with this passage, though, because it conveys something 406 Theodore F. Rippey important about what Roth imagined that language could still do as signification, even in 1938, but was prevented from doing as speech because National Socialism had succeeded not just in degrading and contorting words and meaning but in altering the acoustic conditions of cultural life in Germanspeaking Europe. Without denying the social and historical implications of the religious tradition embodied by holiday well-wishing in general, I focus on this particular religious well-wishing above all as a greeting, a hail that conveys recognition and goodwill. To Roth’s eye and ear, what language could still do as signification was not much - convey holiday well-wishes - but such wishes function in his account as the most basic expressions of human kindness, thus the most critical strands in the audible fabric of a civilization grounded in the sympathetic acknowledgment rather than the annihilation of fellow human beings. The aesthetically and politically volatile mass noise that he had rendered in print in the 1920s continued to flourish into the late 1930s, but the increasing concentration of soundscape control and the increasing absence of discerning ears - the rise of affective resonance - left the air not only barren of creative opportunity but also hostile to audible humanity. So severe was the acoustic disturbance that wishing someone well ran the continuous risk of registering as wishing someone harm. What Roth heard from afar and infused into his printed words was the sound of his civilization, real or perceived, undoing itself. His two texts thus bookend a stretch of the interwar era in which artists, critics, and technicians boldly pushed the conceptual and practical limits on how sound could be wielded to occupy the most critical body of all: air. The resulting sound images and the occupations they achieved (or failed to achieve) are countless; it falls to us to achieve a subtler grasp of how they figured in the aesthetic revolutions and political catastrophe that marked the age. The texts that I have analyzed here approached the medial sound image from different angles at different times, but a range of conceptual concerns connects them. Ruhnau’s and Rhein’s articles illustrate how an industry in transition sought to leverage new technology to create a listening experience that would make the artifice of cinema sound fade from the audience’s consciousness. Beyer, on the other hand, sought to capitalize on exactly that artifice to develop a new genre of Klangbild. All three, though, pursued the basic question of how to realize a sonic environment in which audience members become joined in a new, medium-specific mode of listening. Rollwage saw radio as a means to create a new kind of simultaneous, collective aural experience as well, one that would make the Reich an auditorium by joining those physically present at a mass event with the 407 Klangbild and Interwar German Media limitless ranks of the virtually present. The community of sounding and hearing bodies that Rollwage hoped to forge with the new medium represented a Gemeinschaft that hinged on annihilation of perceived external threats and chaotic impulses within. The soundscape of the arena, which Roth wrote to make an old medium new again in the mid-1920s, was full of such chaos. In 1938, Roth’s lament implied that National Socialist sound culture had pushed that chaos (and all its creative energy) to the brink of extinction. To his ear, German fascism disturbed acoustic life on a national scale, and gestört, as he uses it in this context, evokes threatened destruction more than temporary upset. But threatened destruction is not the same thing as complete destruction. Nazi sound culture drew, conceptually and technologically, on the acoustic life of the Republic, so the rupture that Roth recognized was not possible without substantial continuity. Moreover, elements of Weimar sound culture lived on in the Third Reich, whether within a specific cultural form (jazz being perhaps the best known example) or within the more amorphous, volatile sonic dimensions of life in German streets, homes, and public gathering places. As sound studies work on Germany between the wars evolves, one of its main challenges will therefore be to maintain balanced attention to what changed catastrophically after 1933, what continued uninterrupted, and what persisted amid disturbance, in those acoustic spaces that no regime can completely control. Works Cited Arnheim, Rudolf. Film als Kunst. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002 (1932). Benjamin, Walter. «Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit» (Dritte Fassung 1936). Gesammelte Schriften. Vol I.1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. Beyer, Robert. «Raumton und Tonphotographie.» Filmtechnik (17 May 1930): 9—11. Birdsall, Carolyn. Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology, and Urban Space in Germany, 1933—1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2012. —. «Sonic Artefacts: Reality Codes of Urbanity in Early German Radio Documentary.» Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage. Ed. Karin Bijsterveld. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. Leistner, Erich. «Klangbild und Mikrophoneinstellung.» Filmtechnik (7 March 1931): 6—9. Morat, Daniel. «Cheers, Songs, and Marching Sounds: Acoustic Mobilization and Collective Affects at the Beginning of World War I.» Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe. Ed. Daniel Morat. New York: Berghahn, 2014. 177—200. 408 Theodore F. Rippey Rhein, Eduard. «Liegt es an den Lautsprechern? » Filmtechnik (8 March 1930): 14— 17. Ruhnau, Richard. «Die plastische Tonwiedergabe.» Die Kinotechnik 11.19 (1929): 521—23. Rollwage, Gustav. «Miterleben im Hörbericht.» Rufer und Hörer 4.4 (1934): 183— 88. Roth, Joseph. «Das XIII. Berliner Sechstagerennen.» Joseph Roth Werke. Das Journalistische Werk. Vol. 2. Ed. Klaus Westermann. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989. 331—35. —. «Am Ende ist das Wort.» Joseph Roth Werke. Das Journalistische Werk. Vol. 3. Ed. Klaus Westermann. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989. 837—40. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. Steege, Benjamin. Helmholtz and the Modern Listener. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 409 Klangbild and Interwar German Media They Tried to Divide the Sky: Listening to Cold War Berlin FLORENCE FEIEREISEN MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE «At least they can’t divide the sky,» Manfred states in Christa Wolf’s novel They Divided the Sky, when his lover Rita chooses socialist ideals and life in the German Democratic Republic over westbound Manfred. «The sky? ,» Rita thinks in response, «this enormous vault of hope and yearning, love, and sorrow? » «Yes they can,» she says, «the sky is what divides first of all» (191). Originally in German, Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel was written in 1963 during the aftermath of the construction of the Berlin Wall, a time of high cold war tension. The story is the tragic one of two young lovers who find their lives separated by the Wall. I am interested in the concept of a «divided sky» and seek to examine how the airspace situated along the border between East and West was experienced sonically in divided Berlin. Blesser and Salter define an acoustic arena as a «region where listeners [share] an ability to hear a sonic event» (22). In what follows, I leave Wolf’s novel behind and present three acoustic arenas that showcase how the people of East and West Berlin lived in and visually experienced separate spaces, while sharing the sonic airspaces of the Cold War: first, the highly politically charged sound war that took place in the early 1960s at the command of those in charge on both sides of barbed wire and Wall; second, traveling sound waves at a concert given by Western artists (including David Bowie and Genesis) on the west side of the Wall but intended for East Berliners to hear in 1987; and third, traveling ambient sounds in the border area of the train station Berlin-Friedrichstraße, a transfer station for West transit into Eastern territory. These sounds include engineered and accidental sounds, sounds amplified through loudspeakers, and sounds that were completely unprocessed. There is no doubt that sounds played a significant role in the everyday lives of East Berliners - acoustic control and surveillance through the Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (Stasi) and socialist mass songs are just two examples - but I argue that the Cold War as it was fought acoustically within earshot of the Berlin Wall was, above all, a loud war. Studying the sounds along the Wall sheds light on the manipulation and control of the sonic public in divided Berlin. Visually speaking, the Wall was a monumental reminder of German division; understanding the aural meaning of the traveling sound waves in the Wall’s shared, undivided airspace adds a layer to our understanding of the Cold War. The descriptions of historical eyewitnesses, or of earwitnesses, will help us reconstruct Berlin’s past as a means to understanding this visual marker of division in sonic terms. Sound is ethereal; it enters a space without appropriate papers, and it doesn’t ask for permission from the authorities to bathe the ears of listeners in its waves. All sound waves are, by definition, travelers: they are pressure waves of air molecules in motion through a medium. Physically speaking, a wave is a propagating disturbance of an equilibrium state. Like ocean waves, sound waves need a medium through which to travel, and anything made of molecules can play this role; in our context, we will look at sound waves traveling through air. These molecules carry the sound waves by bumping into each other, just as colliding billiard balls pass on their kinetic energy. They finish their journey at our eardrums (tympanic membranes), setting up vibrations inside resonance cavities within the inner ear. I examine historical situations in which sound could travel when people could not: while the Wall prevented (most) East Berliners from crossing the border, nothing was - or still is - in place to prevent sound waves from traveling over walls. In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Barry Blesser und Linda-Ruth Salter observe: «History provides an almost limitless portfolio of visual sketches of spaces, but no corresponding portfolio of aural records» (70). These days, it seems that one can find any data needed online - yet in comparison to visual data, not much sonic data pertaining to the past is readily available because the recordings disappeared, became unreadable, or simply never existed. For one, recording technology is very young: in 1857, a dozen years before Edison would introduce his Phonograph, Parisian inventor Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (1817 - 1879) received French patent #17,897/ 31,470 for his Phonautograph. A printer by trade and very interested in the field of acoustics, Scott de Martinville sought to create a device that could transcribe vocal sounds. The recording process of this, the earliest known device of its sort, started with Scott himself speaking (or singing) into a funnel-like horn; his voice set a membrane at the end of the horn in vibration, forcing a pig bristle connected to the membrane to trace lines onto smoke-blackened glass or paper. 1 His recording invention worked, but playback options did not exist at the time. According to Jonathan Sterne und Mitchell Akiyama, Phonautographs «were never supposed to be heard»; in fact «the idea of audio playback had not been conceived.» They were, rather, «intended to be seen» (545; my emphasis). Therefore Scott de Martinville’s goal was not to reconstruct the sonic past; rather, his scientific endeavor was to succeed in turning acoustic 411 They Tried to Divide the Sky waves into visual documents. But why were Scott de Martinville and his contemporaries not interested in hearing the data upon successful recording? Sterne and Akiyama offer an explanation: «[They] believed that to see sound was to better know it» (546). Scott de Martinville’s task had, in his view, been successfully completed. 2 Another, more significant, reason why we cannot listen to more sounds of the past is that nobody recorded them. Recording technology was not, and still is not, readily available for everyone; more importantly, many sounds - unless they contain music or human voices in intentional acts, such as giving speeches or reciting poetry - do not seem to the general public to be worthy of documentation. In our context, many recordings of speeches given by GDR officials, social-realist music, and even the sounds of thousands of Berliners celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 can be readily found on YouTube. In contrast, there is only a small selection of ambient sounds available: the sounds of train stations, of streets, of random conversations. It is these sounds that allow us a more robust concept of times past, replete with the full complexity and texture of the experience. «[T]he general acoustic environment of a society,» suggests R. Murray Schafer, Canadian composer and pioneer of Anglophone sound studies, «can be read as an indicator of social conditions which produce it and may tell us much about trending and evolution of that society» (7). Advocating the consideration of a community’s soundscape as a marker of identity, Kendall Wrightson adds: «Schafer’s terminology helps to express the idea that the sound of a particular locality (its keynotes, sound signals and soundmarks) can - like local architecture, customs and dress - express a community’s identity to the extent that settlements can be recognised and characterised by their soundscapes» (10). But how are scholars of sound to conduct research when sonic data do not exist? Even when sound recordings are not available, one can collect aural information and reconstruct the sonic past by auralizing (the aural analogue of visualizing) it. Blesser and Salter define the term as «converting an image of a prospective spatial design into its acoustic properties» (70). Auralizing, therefore, works as a converse to Scott de Martinville’s Phonautograph: the point is to learn to «listen» to visual data of a certain time and space in maps, photographs, written eyewitness accounts, newspaper clippings, policy documents, etc. In auralizing, the goal is not to recreate every single note of the musical composition of the world around us, but to listen to properties of sound that lie beyond mere waveforms and to investigate the relationship of sounds and their environments. In other words, the task is to «describe the meaning contemporaries attached to the sounds they heard, why they listened to actual and represented sounds in particular ways, and 412 Florence Feiereisen how listening shaped their understanding of themselves and their societies» (Smith, «Echoes» 318). Hearing is an integral part of our perception of the world, and it contributes to our daily acquisition of knowledge. This notion can - and should - be applied to academic research; indeed, several disciplines have been experiencing a «sonic turn.» In Hearing History, sensory historian Mark M. Smith writes of the increasing focus on the aural in historical research: «This intensification holds out the prospect of helping to redirect in some profoundly important ways what is often the visually oriented discipline of history, a discipline replete with emphases on the search for ‹perspective› and ‹focus› through the ‹lens› of evidence, one heavily, if often unthinkingly, indebted to the visualism of ‹Enlightenment› thinking and ways of understanding the word» (ix). In his introduction, «Onwards to Audible Pasts,» he pleads: My hope is that questions of sound, noise and aurality will not just infiltrate historical narratives but also change the very conceptualization of historical thinking and problems. Should that occur, history will regain its full texture, invite new questions, and take us beyond an unwitting commitment to seeing the past. Ideally, we will begin to contextualize the past within the larger rubric of all senses and thus free mainstream historical writing from the powerful but blinding focus of vision alone (xxi). This article focuses on the aural aspects of narrating Germany’s past, which holds one seat at the table of what Smith terms «Sensory History»: not a field within the traditional discipline of history, but rather, a certain «habit» in «thinking about the past» (Sensing 5). «What are usually considered historical ‹fields› of inquiry - diplomatic, gender, race, regional, borderlands, cultural, political, military, and so on,» argues Smith, «could all be written and researched through the habit of sensory history» (Sensing 5). In other words, the senses function not only as an avenue to philosophically experience our own world, but also as a ‹lens› through which society, both past and present, can be investigated. Applying this ‹lense› to understanding Berlin’s past reveals soundscapes as a site of power struggle. Defective relationships frequently reveal themselves through sound. A lack of mutual tolerance and deficient willingness to communicate are often reinforced by loud rhetoric. This is exactly how the media along the Wall dealt with one another in divided Berlin. The war of sound waves happened in the shared airspace. For our auralization, let us backtrack a little. The construction of the Berlin Wall appeared as its own distinct soundscape: shortly before 2 a. m. on 13 August 1961, the lights around the 413 They Tried to Divide the Sky Brandenburg Gate were switched off, and one could hear the puttering sounds of trucks approaching from the street Unter den Linden, the rattling of tanks, vehicle doors clicking open, footfalls as men exited the vehicles, and doors slamming shut. Soon thereafter, Berliners sleeping in their apartments on either side of the border rustled in their beds and awoke to the ear-splitting sounds of jackhammers drilling a swath of destruction into the streets. With a grating ring as barbed wire was rolled out and tightened, the border between East and West Berlin became physically closed off. Before concrete fortified the border and obstructed the view, Berliners on each side could communicate both visually (for example by waving handkerchiefs) and acoustically («Kannste mal ne Schachtel Zigaretten rüberwerfen? » or «Du, der Else geht’s gar nicht gut.»). As no form of communication was allowed, information could be exchanged only when the border guards were not looking. But by the crack of dawn on 18 August, the barbed wire had been replaced by bricks and, later, concrete blocks. The physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain would remain closed for the next twentyeight years. Consider its dimensions. Length of the demarcation line between West Berlin and East Berlin (inner ring): 26.8 miles; length of the demarcation line between West Berlin and GDR (outer ring): 69.5 miles; overall length: 96.3 miles; parts of house fronts and boundary walls: 0.3 miles; 302 observation towers; 259 installations with dogs on cable-runs. 3 A shootto-kill order for border guards was put in effect. With an average height of 11.8 feet, the Wall’s concrete blocks had visually sealed the border. According to Heinz Gerull, West German radio journalist and face of the Studio am Stacheldraht, the GDR installed 190 loudspeakers along the demarcation line. When West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited West Berlin nine days after the construction of the Wall, he was greeted by a popular hit blasting from the speakers at the East side of the Reichstag: «Da sprach der alte Häuptling der Indianer, wild ist der Westen, schwer ist der Beruf.» Insulted by this music, Adenauer immediately turned around and walked back West (Pragal and Stratenschulte 36). Although helpless in the face of the Wall’s physical construction, West Berlin refused to accept this loudspeaker propaganda. After the first two deaths at the Wall, Senator of the Interior of West Berlin Joachim Lipschitz decided to launch a sonic counterattack. Together with RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), he arranged for a mobile loudspeaker unit on wheels, the Studio am Stacheldraht, to broadcast information from West Berlin into the East using a Volkswagen van (Volkswagen Kombi T1 b) fitted with six loudspeakers at 150 watts each. Soon thereafter, four Volkswagen vans 414 Florence Feiereisen commenced operations for acoustic guard duty day and night. Within a few days of the erection of the Wall, the acoustic arms race was in full swing. 4 Figure 1: Photograph from the Landesarchiv Berlin showing the Studio am Stacheldraht vans in action. Western newspaper were hard to come by in the East, and in the first years after the construction of the Wall, West German radio could not be received everywhere. Lipschitz sought to fill this information vacuum in East Berlin with the mobile loudspeaker units (Stratenschulte). The broadcasts always started with the famous military tune «Taps» (known to Germans as the trumpet solo from the 1953 Hollywood movie «From Here to Eternity») followed by the slogan «Hier spricht das Studio am Stacheldraht.» Before Gerull read the news, he appealed to the members of the Volkspolizei (German People’s Police of the GDR) and the Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army) not to shoot at people who tried to escape: «Wer einen Menschen erschießt, der von Deutschland nach Deutschland gehen will, begeht einen Mord. Niemand soll glauben, er könne sich eines Tages, wenn er zur Rechenschaft gezogen wird, auf höheren Befehl berufen. Mord bleibt Mord - auch wenn er befohlen worden ist.» The reporter’s voice addressed the officers who could see him and asked why they had been standing there since 13 August («Warum eigentlich? Fragt euch einmal, warum ihr hier stehen müsst.»), then immediately offered his own explanation: Walter Ulbricht and other officials wanted to persuade them that the construction of the Wall was to protect the citizens of the GDR. But the reporter pleaded: «Ihr seid klug genug, um diese Lüge zu erkennen.» Ulbricht, he said, wants to force them to commit crimes of violence. «Fragt euch selbst, fragt eure Kameraden, wie lange dieser unglückliche Zustand noch andauern soll. Sie hörten das Studio am Stacheldraht.» After fifteen 415 They Tried to Divide the Sky minutes, the trumpet solo was played again and the van drove off to the next location. 5 Although Studio am Stacheldraht tried to reach out to the ears of all East Berliners, it specifically targeted border guards who were stationed along the demarcation line and on watchtowers. Since the guards were not allowed to leave their position, they were a captive audience; they could not escape the sounds because, unlike eyes, ears do not have lids that can be closed on command. Moreover, had the guards worn headphones, they would have been unable to do their jobs. Reactions to this tactic differed: according to earwitnesses of the time, some guards heard the information and dispersed without saying a word; it is said that other guards welcomed these sounds from West Berlin and even kept small radio receivers on the towers to secretly listen to RIAS. But other times the scene was more dramatic, as it involved tear gas, fog bombs, rocks, bricks, and trash thrown over the Wall to the West. Earwitness Rainer Steinführ remembers the battle of the loudspeakers from his childhood: Die Fahrzeuge zogen natürlich den Unmut der ‹Organe› auf sich. Tränengas, Nebelbomben, Steine, Abfall wurden gern von der anderen Mauerseite zu den Wagen geworfen. Ich habe auch gezogene und in Anschlag gebrachte Waffen gesehen. Wie dem auch sei, zumeist dauerte es nicht lange, dann tauchte auf Ostberliner Seite ebenfalls ein Lautsprecherwagen auf, der Gegenparolen oder sowjetische Marschmusik verbreitete (Steinführ). Arriving literally from above, the acoustic responses to the Studio am Stacheldraht were initially folk tunes played loudly from the East’s 190 loudspeakers to drown out the Studio’s questions. Later, the East Berlin authorities set up their own mobile units; over the next few months, up to fifteen vans with loudspeakers from the VEB Roter Zinnober mounted onto the roofs came to stand guard. The West Berlin police called these vans that dispersed political slogans Rote Hugos. West Berlin won the volume battle: the fifteen Red Hugos (95 to 105 Phon) were outperformed by the Studio’s four vans (120 Phon). 6 I am not aware of any study that discusses hearing loss as a result of the sound war along the barbed wire, but it is clear that, regardless of whether they were actively involved, people up to 2.5 miles from the border dealt with ear-splittingly loud soundscapes. Border guards, of course, were not the only citizens addressed: on 16 October, workers of an East Berlin factory stood by their building’s (open) windows to listen to the messages of the Studio from the other side of the Wall. The factory’s authorities immediately arranged for its loudspeakers to blast Soviet marches, which only caused the staff to move closer to the windows. In this case, music as a weapon did not work against the power of 416 Florence Feiereisen words. The Volkspolizisten who were called to the site then threw tear gas grenades over the border and threatened the Studio’s van with machine guns. The vans reacted again as they loudly invited the East German workers to look out of the window and memorize the faces of those Volkspolizisten who wanted to shoot at people who, as the Studio said, simply wanted to read messages aloud. In private homes, this exposure to sound waves continued in both the East and the West. In a Zeit article titled «Propaganda-Posaunen,» a West Berliner who wrote under the acronym G. R. complained in 1963 about the West’s acoustic war: Noch in zwei Kilometern Entfernung ist keine Verringerung der Tonstärke zu bemerken. Im Umkreis von 100 m zerspringen Fensterscheiben, wenn sie angepeilt werden. Letzte Woche wurden diese Lautsprecher zum ersten Mal auf eine Kaserne der Volksarmee in Groß Glienicke eingesetzt. Die Antwort ließ nicht auf sich warten. Die Vopo fuhr am nächsten Tag Lautsprecher auf, die zwar nicht die Fensterscheiben zerklirren ließen, aber doch die in der Nähe der Zonengrenze wohnenden Westberliner zwang, die Fenster zu schließen, um das eigene Wort verstehen zu können (24). It was the citizens of West Berlin, added the earwitness, who were saddled with the burden of authorities fighting this deafening war: «Wer bezahlt das? Wahrscheinlich doch die Steuerzahler, die doppelt geschädigt werden, finanziell und gesundheitlich» (24). The East’s authorities went on to install permanent speakers next to one another on the horizontal bar of former overhead masts of the tram. The speakers were directed at West Berliners as earwitness Peter Ulrich from Lichterfelde (West Berlin) recalls: So gab es Tage, an denen wir acht oder zehn Stunden hindurch - pausenlos - beschallt wurden - und an anderen Tagen war überraschend wieder völlig Ruhe; eine unberechenbare Taktik war das, die uns zermürben sollte. Doch nicht bloß Nachrichten oder Kommentare gab es, sondern auch einfach nur Tanzmusik, mit der man glaubte uns unterhalten zu müssen; mal lauter, mal leiser, wie es eben gerade kam. Und nicht nur tagsüber ging das so; es kam vor, dass es spät abends um 22 Uhr immer noch hinter der Mauer quäkte, jaulte und brabbelte [. . .]. Diese Praxis wurde fast drei Jahre lang fortgeführt; erst im Laufe des Jahres 1964 hat man uns allmählich wieder Ruhe gegönnt. (Ulrich) But before the sound war finally quieted down, it became very loud one more time. On 7 October 1965, more than four years after the acoustic war had begun, the Nationale Volksarmee celebrated the GDR’s sixteenth anniversary on the military grounds just across the border from Berlin-Gatow. The Studio drove up to the Wall and disturbed the GDR’s festivities with its 417 They Tried to Divide the Sky characteristic trumpet solo. Instead of the vans, the Studio broadcasted from a new fleet of trucks with hydraulic cranes that lifted the loudspeakers up to 42 feet into the air and rotated them to aim as needed; the mounted 5,000 watt loudspeakers could sound more than three miles into the enemy territory (Epping-Jäger 17). 7 Announcing that yet another East German soldier was shot by his own comrades because he wanted to go «from Germany to Germany,» West German reporter Gerull’s voice continued: «Ein Schuss kann befohlen werden; dass er aber auch trifft, kann kein Befehl dieser Welt erzwingen.» After a gong, news from Moscow and Los Angeles were read. Another gong and the by now familiar trumpet solo brought the very last broadcast of the Studio am Stacheldraht to an end. After this event, the East German authorities ceased with their acoustic onslaught and the Studio’s loudspeaker vans were no longer deployed. Other than the only partially effective strategy to drown out sounds with even louder ones, the East’s authorities had not been successful in preventing traveling sound waves from crossing the border and propagating through the supposedly «divided sky.» Whereas people in 1961 were bombarded by inescapable sounds ordered and executed from ‹above› on both sides of the Wall, my next soundscape, the «Concert for Berlin» that took place very close to the Wall on Western territory in June 1987, features engineered, intentional sounds around which people congregated voluntarily. Similar to the 1961 soundscape, there was still no technology available twenty-six years later to divide the shared airspace sonically. Figure 2: Ticket for the «Concert for Berlin» 418 Florence Feiereisen When the three-day concert began at 4 p. m. on 6 June 1987, a stage 250 feet wide had been erected, 50,000 tickets had been sold, and technicians from RIAS2 (the youth radio in the American sector) stood ready in West Berlin to record the festival «Concert for Berlin,» which would celebrate the city’s 750 th anniversary. World stars had been hired to entertain the masses on the Platz der Republik directly in front of West Berlin’s Reichstag: David Bowie, New Model Army, the Eurythmics, Bruce Hornsby, Paul Young, and Genesis. The stage was physically in West Berlin, but it sat well within earshot of East Berlin - a mere 700 feet as the crow flies. The Wall ran around the back of the building and then formed a small arc around the west side of the Brandenburg Gate, that sad icon of divided Berlin and Germany. Already on the first night, East German authorities were stunned to see 6,000 youth convene around the Brandenburg Gate as the wind carried the music to the East. The hard, stone-clad facade of the Soviet Embassy at Unter den Linden 63 - 65 reflected the sound into the large courtyard. Standing in front of the iron doors made for a breathtaking acoustic experience. In the 1980s, young East Berliners craved popular music, and music from the West was in particularly high demand. Those in power deemed popular music as potentially subversive, so the mainstream music scene was monitored, controlled, and limited to those musicians willing to conform to state restrictions. GDR bands such as Renft, Puhdys, and Karat reached cult status and were promoted by the East German authorities as long as they adhered to the party line. Renft was banned in 1975; the Puhdys, on the other hand, adhered more strictly to the rules and were permitted to sing in English and even to tour in the Federal Republic of Germany! But East German youth craved English-speaking rock and pop music and felt more and more excluded from the world. Every day, they would listen to West radio and watch West TV, yet they found themselves just onlookers of Western popular culture. But popular music was not just a means through which to live vicariously as musicologist Peter Wicke suggested in a review on rock music in the very same year of the «Concert for Berlin»: «Rockmusik ist in der DDR - und das macht den wesentlichen Unterschied zu ihren angloamerikanischen Ursprüngen aus -Bestandteil des politischen Diskurses innerhalb der Gesellschaft [. . .], eine Diskussion freilich, die sich eher in sprachlicher und kultureller Symbolik denn in argumentativer Unmittelbarkeit vollzieht» (35). The East German authorities were very aware of popular music’s significance in society, and in order to placate their citizens, they allowed an increasing number of recordings by West German, British, and American artists to become available in the GDR. Whereas in the first two decades of 419 They Tried to Divide the Sky the GDR, the SED had viewed popular music as a dangerous American cultural weapon designed to corrupt its young people, turning them away from socialist ideals, the state label AMIGA (VEB Deutsche Schallplatten) started in the mid-1960s to release albums by Western artists such as Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and later, Phil Collins and Michael Jackson. Yet all foreign-licensed records were pressed in small quantities, so they were usually sold out within minutes. Music lovers resorted to recording radio music (often from stations in the West) onto tapes. In the mid-eighties, as Günter Mayer observes, [i]n 97.8 percent of all households there is a radio; in many there are two or three. The technical equipment has high-fidelity standard. More than 82 percent of the people between ages 15 and 23 have their own portable radios (more and more with taping-technique). The number of «walkmen» is increasing. The real popular use of radio is evident: more than 70 percent of the people in the GDR, older than 15, listen to the radio on workdays between four and eight o’clock AM. Most of such music is popular music. It is a fact - determined by sociologists - that - like everywhere else - people between the ages of 14 and 25 listen to music for an average of 2 or 3 hours a day, and often more. (n. pag.) Well aware of their youth’s enthusiasm for music from the West, the GDR authorities became apprehensive when they learned about West Berlin’s «Concert for Berlin» in June 1987. They assumed the festival to be yet another villainous attempt by the capitalist FRG to fight an international class battle and to spoil their youth (Kloth). Because the East’s authorities could not stop the sound waves from traveling across the border, they tried to remove the GDR citizens from the sound waves instead. The masses of youth that congregated in front of the Soviet Embassy close to the Wall in order to hear the festival presented a serious security problem that could possibly result in an attack on the «Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.» Members of the Volkspolizei broke up the group, chasing people toward Alexanderplatz with truncheons in hand. The masses reacted by means of sound as thousands of GDR citizens proclaimed: «Die Mauer muss weg! ,» a famous quotation from then-mayor of West Berlin Willy Brandt’s 1961 speech in front of the Schöneberg city hall. Just a few months before the concert took place, the song «Berlin, Berlin (. . . dein Herz kennt keine Mauern)» by the West German band John F. und die Gropiuslerchen had also contained the line «Die Mauer muss weg»; it was therefore fresh in people’s memories. But soon the mood changed: West Germans recount hearing catcalls at first, then shrill cries from the other side of the Wall; by 10 p. m., rocks and empty cans were thrown over the Wall (Kloth). Soon thereafter, East authorities erected 420 Florence Feiereisen barriers and began to make arrests. All of this occurred on the first day of the three-day long festival. Overnight, both East and West German media reported on the police’s prohibition of youth from convening in front of the Soviet Embassy to participate (if only auditorily) in the music festival. On day two, thousands upon thousands flocked to the border area to find a good listening spot. Yet the East’s authorities had prepared for the event thoroughly: barrier chains had been installed far ahead of the Brandenburg Gate, and water cannons stood at the ready. Earwitnesses from the East report that it was impossible to determine whether people at this point had come to hear Phil Collins’s Genesis (who were slated to perform on that day), or whether they were simply onlookers to the upheaval. At sunset, the situation escalated again, and once more, West German festival goers reported hearing the masses chant «Die Mauer muss weg! » on the other side of the Wall (Kloth). It is important to note that all of this commotion did not come as a surprise to West Berlin - indeed, to unite both parts of Berlin through the means of music had been the explicit intention of West German festival organizer Concert Conzept Veranstaltungs-GmbH. In 1984, the same concert organizers had hired André Heller to put on a gigantic firework display that was seen by many in the East, so they knew exactly what would happen (Wagner). Heller’s Feuertheater, essentially a large-scale provocative piece of art, had illuminated the «divided sky» - its light show, accompanied by the sounds of detonating fireworks, had attracted many East Berliners to the border area. In this sense, Heller’s spectacle had been the dress rehearsal for the 1987 festival’s audacle in celebration of Berlin’s 750 th birthday. The artists themselves also knew that their audience would comprise both West and East Berliners. RIAS project manager Christoph Lanz, emcee at the festival, stated: «Nachdem [Phil Collins] erfahren hat, welche Hörerschaft RIAS2 in Ostberlin und in der DDR hat, dann hat er gesagt: Das machen wir! Damit in der DDR das gehört werden kann» (Wagner). The concert’s main act, David Bowie, went several steps further: he asked for the speakers to be turned not to face the West German concert goers, but to face the Wall. For technical reasons, it was only possible to turn a quarter of the speakers. After he sang the song «Time Will Crawl,» Bowie introduced his band and then addressed his audience in the GDR in German: «Wir schicken unsere besten Wünsche an all unsere Freunde, die auf der anderen Seite der Mauer sind.» Bowie had lived in West Berlin in the shadow of the Wall from 1976 to 1979, sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with Iggy Pop for parts of his Berlin stay. 8 421 They Tried to Divide the Sky Bowie’s stay in the divided city ten years earlier had influenced his song choice as well, as he went on to sing «Heroes,» which tells a classic story of two lovers who meet under the «divided sky.» Bowie sang: I, I can remember / standing, by the Wall and the guns shot above our heads / and we kissed as though nothing could fall and the shame was on the other side / ah, we can beat them for ever and ever then we could be Heroes just for one day. The atmosphere was electrifying; less than a week later elsewhere in West Berlin, with the monumental Brandenburg Gate as the backdrop, Ronald Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev to «Tear down this wall.» The music made the Wall tremble on contact, both literally and metaphorically. More than twenty-five years ago the «Concert for Berlin» allowed East and West Germans to listen to sound waves sent into their shared airspace by world-class music artists and participants on both sides of the Wall, through conversations, sing along, catcalls, and the sounds of thrown rocks and empty cans. It also reminded all involved quite plainly that the Wall was still up, a sonic reminder that to live in its shadow meant to live a life interfered with. Meanwhile, the GDR regime downplayed the situation, noting that everything had gone according to protocol and there was no cause for worry. When East Berlin authorities learned that West Berlin planned to host another concert series of West German and international artists including Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson, Nina Hagen, and Udo Lindenberg in the Wall’s shadow in 1988, they realized that immediate action was necessary. They complained to the West Berlin senate that «the concerts were too close to a nearby hospital [Charité] and that the noise and vibration could cause the deaths of seriously ill patients there» («Fearing»). But music promoter Peter Schwenkow had already sold 30,000 tickets, so it was too late to cancel the concert outright. Instead, he asked the bands to lower their volume; in response, Pink Floyd redirected the loudspeakers to blast their song «The Wall» eastward (Kloth). The Minsterium für Staatsicherheit also removed potential troublemakers from the Wall ahead of time. But the principal precaution taken was to schedule a competing concert with international stars at exactly the same time in a different location. In order both to avoid a protest along the Wall similar to the one a year before and to win back the support of East German youth, the Künstleragentur der DDR had begun to organize concerts with famous artists from the West, resulting in what became known as the «Music Summer of 1988»: Depeche Mode followed the invitation to play in celebration of the Free German Youth’s 42 nd birthday; The Wailers, Marillion, and Bryan Adams performed during a three-day 422 Florence Feiereisen festival in June; West German artist Rio Reiser played on two consecutive nights in October. Although the dueling concerts might appear at first to be parallel to the acoustic arms race along the barbed wire a quarter century before, the GDR’s music festivals did not take place near the Wall, but on the cycling track in Berlin-Weißensee, deep in East Berlin and therefore at a safe distance from the Wall and the class enemy. Despite the GDR’s efforts to draw music fans eastward and away from the concerts on the West side of the Wall, thousands of youth congregated behind the Brandenburg Gate to eavesdrop, again chanting «Die Mauer muss weg! » Even before the concert started, people were bullied away, and one hundred individuals were arrested. One month later, Bruce Springsteen played before the biggest audience of his life: 160,000 tickets had been sold, but many more entered the cycling track in Weißensee without one. Although censored, millions of East Germans saw the concert on TV. 9 During the concert, Springsteen told the crowd in German: «Es ist schön, in Ostberlin zu sein. Ich bin nicht für oder gegen eine Regierung. Ich bin gekommen um Rock and Roll zu spielen für Ostberliner, in der Hoffnung, dass eines Tages alle Barrieren abgerissen werden.» Note that Springsteen chose «barriers» instead of «walls» - he did not want to risk being shut down by the authorities right away. His message achieved its goal independent of its exact wording. Music obviously is not just about passively listening to pleasant sounds. Indeed, by the 1980s, music directed at and even in the GDR itself had become an important platform for promoting reform and resistance: it actively advocated for political change. Not even the mighty Wall could stop this. United in the sonic airspace of the «divided sky,» both East and West Germans, in concert with West German and international pop stars, participated in a politicized acoustic arena together and planted the seeds for more change to come. The first two examples of the Cold War’s acoustic arenas revealed the sonic characteristics of the common airspace along the border between East and West Berlin. Example one was chosen from the earliest history of the Berlin Wall, while example two presented the soundscapes of June 1987, roughly two and a half years before its fall. My third example presents the soundscapes of yet another shared (air)space, this time not above, but rather below the divided city. While the Wall epitomized the German division, standing tall for twenty-eight years for everyone to see, there were many other, invisible «walls» that divided the city into two parts. In fact, even before the Wall was built, Berlin had been a divided city: its phone network, drinking water system, light cables, and gas lines had already been separated 423 They Tried to Divide the Sky (Pragal and Stratenschulte 51). 13 August 1961, finally, saw the all-important public transportation network divided and a frequently traveled escape route to the West cut off. Some train lines serving West Berlin ran through East territory; rerouting them proved to be financially unfeasible. The Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (West) first offered 2.8 million Deutschmark, which was later raised to 6 million, for the right to use East German rails. Strapped for cash, the GDR agreed to the deal. After 1961, the subway line U6 ran from Tegel (West Berlin) to Tempelhof (after 1966, all the way to Alt-Marienfelde, West Berlin), passing through a short stretch of East German territory on its way. Figure 3: Map of the BVG (West Berlin) subway system in 1966. The five underground train stations between Reinickendorfer Straße and Kochstraße became ghost stations, allowing passengers of the West Berlin Uand S-Bahn to physically travel through East Berlin without stopping and therefore without legally entering the GDR. 10 This peculiar situation resulted from the position of the East Berlin neighborhood Mitte, which protruded into West Berlin; Mitte bordered West Berlin in the North, West, and South, thus forcing the lines U6 and U8 (and, after 1984, also the city train S2) to pass through this territory on their way from West Berlin to West Berlin. Before entering East Berlin territory, visual (signs) and auditory (recorded voice) warnings were given to the passengers that they were about to leave West Berlin. Earwitness Annette Scharnberg commuted with public transportation from her West Berlin apartment through East Berlin to her workplace in West Berlin. She remembers that the train passed slowly through the guarded ghost stations. What Scharnberg recalls as «slow» must have been fifteen miles per 424 Florence Feiereisen hour according to my own estimates. Scharnberg describes her memory in sonic terms: On my way to [Berlin-]Wedding, I went through the East and I remember that everything there sounded a bit different. The underground itself sounded different, too. [. . .] There was a specific sound to this slowness, somehow hollow, maybe because [the stations] were emptier. This hollow clack, clack, clack. A different resonance cavity. I think it is like in some films [. . .] steps approaching you across a big dark room: clack, clack, clack. This hollow sound - I think that stands for something threatening. A hollow sound in the emptiness (Dietrich 103). It is quite telling that this earwitness does not remember any other humans or human sounds - only the eerie sounds connected to the vast empty space. In most underground stations, there are waiting passengers, signs, benches, and often concession stands. Many West Berlin train stations featured musicians who entertained the masses hoping for a few Deutschmark. Yet since the Cold War’s ghost stations were underground stations void of any signs of human life with the exception of the border guards, there were no soft objects (hair, clothing, strollers, filled trash bins, newspaper kiosks, etc.) to absorb sound waves or dampen them; the hard surfaces of the stone or concrete floors, walls, and columns simply reflected the sounds of the train, causing the space to sound like an enormous hollow chamber with eerie reverberations. There were some ghost stations aboveground, but most ghost stations were underground, meaning that the train passengers passing through would not see East Berlin scenery, only the interior of abandoned train stations dimly lit by humming neon lights, just enough for train conductors and GDR guards to see. Earwitnesses also recall that once the trains passed into the ghost stations, conversations on the train would cease. The train ride was, for the passengers, a highly aural experience; this was true for the East Berliners aboveground as well. But in addition to hearing, they also smelled, and even felt, the West Berlin U6 traffic through ventilation grids and air shafts. Around the train station Friedrichstraße, not more than twelve feet separated passers-by on foot in East Berlin from those on the train heading back to West Berlin. The only train station along the U6 that did not become a ghost station was the train station Friedrichstraße, at which passengers from West Berlin could switch onto other West Berlin trains. The S3 that started in Wannsee actually ended at Friedrichstraße. This last example for the «divided sky» in Berlin remained a busy station even after the construction of the Wall. It was a unique situation in which a physical wall existed within the train station, separating East and West traffic: East and West Berlin in one building, on East German territory! This made Friedrichstraße the site of numerous attempts, a few 425 They Tried to Divide the Sky successful, many more unsuccessful, by citizens of the GDR to escape into the West. The train station was also a major border crossing between East and West Berlin: with the appropriate papers, after the Passagierscheinabkommen in 1963 and even more so after signing the Four Power Agreement in 1971, Friedrichstraße was an official entry point for visitors from the FRG and other Western countries into East Berlin and a transit station to get from West Berlin through Friedrichstraße to a destination in the FRG; selected GDR citizens with hard-to-obtain exit permits were also allowed to enter a West German train and ride it into West Berlin and/ or the FRG. It was also an Agentenschleuse, a transfer for agents - unofficially called Ho-Chi-Minh path. In «Bahnhof Friedrichstraße. Ein Museum,» East German author Jens Sparschuh calls Friedrichstraße the «absurdeste Berliner Bahnhof» (225) and explains: «Unterm Strich also, kurz und knapp: der Grenz- und Fernbahnhof Friedrichstraße ist ein Umsteigebahnhof, kombiniert aus Durchgangs- und doppeltem Kopfbeziehungsweise Sack-Bahnhof in Form eines Turm- Bahnhofs» (238). To decipher this quotation and to understand this train station as a border, long-distance, connecting, transit, terminal, and two-level train station, the reader has to think of it as two separate train stations with three platforms and on two levels. GDR citizens used platform C as a connecting or transit station to exit or board trains to other stations in East Berlin or in East Germany. Platform A was a long-distance station for international travels including Interzonenzüge, i. e., trains running nonstop from Berlin through the GDR to the FRG. In a «Geheime Verschlusssache,» Minister of the Interior of the GDR, Karl Maron, had ordered on 12 August 1961: «Züge im internationalen Reiseverkehr in Richtung Westen und zwischen Westberlin und Westdeutschland beginnen und enden auf dem Bahnsteig A des Bahnhofes Friedrichstraße» (Mugay 98). At this platform, the transit station became a terminus for trains commuting between the FRG and Berlin, a stop along the routes of longdistance trains to international destinations such as Copenhagen and Stockholm and the Paris-Moscow express. Platform B, finally, was the final destination for West Berlin’s S-Bahn to Wannsee and Staaken. Passengers from West Berlin switched to a different level, to subways or city trains located on the lower level of the train station. Platform B was also a shopping destination for visitors from the West: Intershops, a government-run chain of retail stores, offered alcohol, cigarettes, cosmetics, and other goods marketed to a West audience at comparatively low cost in order to generate a stream of outside currency into the GDR. Being situated on East German territory, all operations at the station were under GDR jurisdiction: all employees of Intershops and train station staff were 426 Florence Feiereisen from the East; only the train conductors on West Berlin subways or city trains and long distance trains from the FRG were from the West and traveled from West to East and then back to the West without leaving the platform. The platforms aboveground were separated by walls. Soon after traffic commenced again following 13 August, a wall almost three meters high constructed of opaque security glass with wire mesh was installed. East and West Berliners would pass each other unseen, but again, the sonic airspace above the glass wall was a shared resource. West Berliner earwitnesses recall hearing speaker announcements such as «Schönefeld zurückbleiben,» and the passengers waiting for their connecting train on the «Ost-Bahnsteig» (platform C) also heard announcements from the adjacent (West) platforms. An East Berliner recalls hearing the juxtaposition of directions from both sides: first instructions to step back while the long distance train to Munich passes through, and then an invitation to board that train. Delays to Hamburg were also announced (Dietrich 103). To the many participants in this soundscape who were never allowed to travel to those destinations, this was a cruel sonic teaser. In the 1980s, the glass was replaced by a higher metal wall that reached to the roof and prevented sounds from crossing over. Still, the sounds traveled around the walls: the East authorities did not build soundproof tunnels around West trains, so the trains entering the station - before they reached the platform - could be both seen and heard by people on adjacent platforms. The same held true for announcements, which needed to be sufficiently amplified to reach and be understood by all passengers on the platform. Had platform A or B been enclosed spaces, the passengers on platform C would not have been able to participate in the soundscape. Where the trains arrived and left revealed shared airspace capacious enough for sound to travel and, due to its volume, still be heard on the platforms. Underground, Bahnhof Friedrichstraße was an even more complicated maze. When the train station was restructured according to the above mentioned «Geheime Verschlusssache,» old corridors were closed, and others were built - with two-way mirrors, surveillance cameras, and interrogation rooms. There were even more walls separating East and West traffic, but with brick or concrete walls from floor to ceiling and a lack of the necessary volume described above, the airspace underground was now indeed divided. Lastly, the train station served as an official border crossing for westbound travel. Here, people were actually allowed to cross into the other world, provided they had the appropriate papers. Our last auralization, therefore, will reconstruct the soundscape of exiting the GDR while still on East Berlin territory. Western visitors to the East, GDR retirees, and others who had 427 They Tried to Divide the Sky special permission were allowed to travel from the GDR to the West using Bahnhof Friedrichstraße. Before they could leave, they had to enter through the Tränenpalast (palace of tears), a glass pavilion attached to the train station for customs, security, and foreign exchange checks. After waiting in line with many others, being interviewed, and receiving their stamps, they heard a buzzer and could now enter the train station’s hall through a metal door. In order to auralize this, we must also consider the demography: many of those traveling from the East to the West at this train station were citizens of the GDR aged sixty or older (termed «veterans of labor»), making for a rather advanced average age among the passengers at this border crossing. Exceptions were young or middle-aged uniformed officers who had the travelers and their luggage line up along a white stripe on the floor while their comrades searched the train; not until it was officially announced through loudspeakers were the travelers allowed to pick up their luggage and board the train. Needless to say, although many travelers were in their sixties, nobody would help them with their luggage. Hence, we have to add to the soundscape their heartbeats, their panting from being out of breath after schlepping heavy luggage, their fearful answers to the officials, and the barking and sniffing of police dogs (or the scratching of their claws on the concrete floor). Just to emphasize how hostile this environment was, consider one very sad fact: between 1961 and 1989, in the context of border controls at train station Friedrichstraße, at least 227 people died of natural causes; in most cases, the cause of death was a heart attack due to stress (Hertle and Nooke). As soon as the train was in motion, the soundscape became quieter. The train would roll through train station Friedrichstraße and reveal visually twice (upon entering and leaving West Berlin) that which one usually did not see: walls, fences, the death strip, dogs on cable runs. All the passengers would hear was the rattling of the train, their own body sounds, other passengers relieving built-up tension - the journey had begun. Though this last example does not represent an acoustic arena along the Wall itself, it is an important puzzle piece in understanding the sonic significance of the border area’s soundscapes. An acoustic arena is an auditory community for those who are not only producers but also recipients of sounds - by hearing what happens in the common airspace, the members of this community have unknowingly already signed their membership cards. Not even the Berlin Wall could stop the inhabitants of two different political systems who lived in the border area from being part of a single auditory community. I have presented three such acoustic arenas in which sound waves traveled from one side to the other. The battle of the loudspeakers along the barbed wire in the early 1960s was a technological arms race based 428 Florence Feiereisen on orders from above: as a result, West German reporters and East German border guards manipulated and controlled the sonic public. Each side tried to «win» by drowning out each other’s sounds or to simply win the contest in volume. Though officially declared as a news medium, the sounds the Studio am Stacheldraht dispersed were part of a politically charged sound war directed at those who could not escape: the border guards on the East side and thousands of civilians on both sides of the wall whose daily lives were affected by the loud soundscapes. When East authorities installed permanent loud speakers, citizens in the border area had to close their windows day and night in order to sleep or even to have a conversation without shouting. The second acoustic arena in the form of rock concerts also featured sound signals processed and broadcast through loudspeakers, though the sound production was less unpredictable in comparison with the 1961 - 65 soundscape. Also, these sound waves did not intrude upon everyday life, but came from performances advertised well in advance. Concerts by Western artists for East and West Berliners on West Berlin grounds were not about winning the volume war (though they were most certainly loud! ), but they showed that musical performances could be just as political as standard propaganda. These concerts were officially sanctioned and executed by a commercial company equipped with all the technological means to bring a provocative audicle to the Brandenburg Gate border area. Western artists demonstrated their solidarity and sonically included East German youth. Not sent through loudspeakers, but still an important part of the soundscape, were the sounds that evolved on the East side of the Wall (ranging from the sounds of enjoyment to subsequent sounds of danger and violence). The third acoustic arena represented a sonic wall experience a mile away from the Berlin Wall. While the first two examples had featured intentionally engineered sounds that were meant to be sent over the wall, the traveling ambient sounds at train station Berlin-Friedrichstraße - some of them amplified, others unprocessed - were produced with no intent yet were heard all the same. In fact, the authorities in the East went to great lengths to keep these sounds divided. In the end, despite their efforts to route people through an overand underground maze by erecting walls separating platforms, these authorities did not succeed completely in preventing sound waves from traveling from one side to the other. Berlin was divided, but unlike the American translation of Christa Wolf’s novel suggests, they could not divide the sky above it. All three examples show that a soundscape can be the site of power struggle for all of its participants, be they intentional producers or accidental recipients of sound. It can be a site of any combination of annoyance, fear, hope, or pleasure - whatever the mix, a 429 They Tried to Divide the Sky soundscape is a field of interaction, an arena in which people connect with each other. «Knowing the world through sound,» Bruce Smith argues, «is fundamentally different from knowing the world through vision,» (Smith, «Tuning» 129), and so it is only appropriate to investigate sound spaces in an effort to make sense of our world and lend an ear to our history. Notes 1 The earliest known recording of intelligible human speech is Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville singing the French song «Au Clair de la Lune»: http: / / www.firstsounds. org/ sounds/ 1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune-05-09.mp3. 2 Even for twentieth-century sources playback technology remains a challenge. Some sound recordings exist, yet the format is so old that the data is not easy to extract. 3 See «Der Polizeipräsident von Berlin.» Chronik der Mauer: http: / / www.chronik-dermauer.de/ index.php/ de/ Start/ Detail/ id/ 593791/ page/ 0. 4 Epping-Jäger points out that the construction of the Studio am Stacheldraht reminds her of the NSDAP’s Reichs-Auto-Züge. The Third Reich’s speech trucks had featured hydraulic stages to reach the audience via sight and sound (38). 5 For a RIAS recording of the Studio am Stacheldraht broadcast on16 October 1961 go to: http: / / www.chronik-der-mauer.de/ chronik/ #anchornid173492. 6 For the sake of comparison: the standard range for orchestral music is about 40 to 100 Phon; 120 Phon can be compared to an airplane engine only 4 meters away («Schall und Rauch» 37 f.); the threshold of physical pain is at 130 Phon. 7 For a recording of the Studio’s last broadcast go to: http: / / www.berliner-mauer.tv/ interview-gerull-heinz/ die-letzte-sendung-studio-am-stacheldraht.html? showall=&limitstart=. 8 For a video recording of David Bowie’s 1987 West Berlin rendition of «Time Will Crawl» go to: http: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=uZiKOH9NXKc. 9 For a video recording of Bruce Springsteen’s «Chimes of Freedom» in East Berlin 1988 go to: https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=WBIcfPBVxxQ. 10 Had the train stopped there, the stairways would have been metal-grilled or closed with masonry. There were entry doors for GDR border guards who would have guided West Berliners out in case of an emergency. Works Cited Besser, Barry, and Linda-Ruth Salter. Spaces Speak: Are you Listening? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Dietrich, Nicole. «Audible Cartography of a Formerly Divided City.» Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century. Ed. Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Hill. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2012. 95 - 108. 430 Florence Feiereisen Epping-Jäger, Cornelia. «LautSprecher-Passagen. Zu den Umbauten eines Dispositivs der Massenkommunikation vor und nach 1945.» Formen der Mediennutzung. Vol. 3. Ed. Irmela Schneider and Cornelia Epping-Jäger. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008. 17 - 41. «Fearing the Moonwalk Revolution.» www.spiegel.de. Spiegel Online, 31 July 2009. Web. 2 Oct. 2015. Hertle, Hans-Hermann, and Maria Nooke. «Die Todesopfer an der Berliner Mauer.» www-berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de. Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam, July 2011. Web. 21 Oct. 2015. Kloth, Hans Michael. «Mauerkonzerte. Wummerbässe für den Osten.» www.spiegel. de. Spiegel Online, 5 Nov. 2009. Web. 21 Oct. 2015. Major, Patrick. Behind the Berlin Wall. East Germany and the Frontiers of Power. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2010. Mayer, Günter. «Popular Music in the GDR.» Journal of Popular Culture 18.3 (1984): 145 - 58. Mugay, Peter. Die Friedrichstraße. Geschichte und Geschichten. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1995. Pragal, Peter, and Eckart D. Stratenschulte. Der Monolog der Lautsprecher und andere Geschichten aus dem geteilten Berlin. Munich: DTV, 1999. «Propaganda-Posaunen.» Die Zeit 17 May 1963: 24. Schafer, Murray R. The Soundscape. Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994. «Schall und Rauch.» Der Spiegel 29 Nov. 1961: 37 f. Sparschuh, Jens. «Bahnhof Friedrichstraße. Ein Museum.» Grenzübergänge. Autoren aus Ost und West erinnern sich. Ed. Julia Franck. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 2009. 225 - 44. Smith, Bruce. «Tuning Into London, c. 1600.» The Auditory Culture Reader. Ed. Michael Bull and Les Back. New York: Berg, 2003. 127 - 35. Smith, Mark M., ed. Hearing History. A Reader. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004. —. Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2007. Steinführ, Rainer. «Lautsprecherkrieg. Meine persönlichen Erfahrungen im Berliner Ost-West-Konflikt.» www.welt-der-alten-radios.de. Wumpus Welt der Radios, 26 June 2013. Web. 14 July 2016. Sterne, Jonathan, and Mitchell Akiyama. «The Recording That Never Wanted to Be Heard and Other Stories of Sonification.» The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. Ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2012. 544 - 60. Stratenschulte, Eckart. «Hier spricht das Studio am Stacheldraht.» www.berlinerzeitung.de. Berliner Zeitung, 20 July 1999. Web. 15 Oct. 2015. Ulrich, Peter. «Damals war’s: Wie ich den Bau der Berliner Mauer erlebt.» www. petrus-giesensdorf.de. Gemeindebrief der Evangelischen Gemeinde Petrus-Giesensdorf, July/ August 2011. Web. 15 Oct. 2015. Wagner, Jörg. «Die Musik überwindet die Mauer.» www.deutschlandradiokultur.de. Deutschlandradio Kultur, 6 June 2012. Web. 15 Oct. 2015. 431 They Tried to Divide the Sky Wicke, Peter. «Rockmusik in der DDR - Landeskunde im modernen Soundgewand.» GDR-Bulletin 13.1 (1987): 34 - 37. Wolf, Christa. They Divided the Sky. Trans. Luise von Flotow. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2013. Wrightson, Kendall. «Soundscape. An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology.» The Journal of Acoustic Ecology 1.1 (2000): 10 - 13. 432 Florence Feiereisen Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues ALISON FURLONG THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY Action requires sound. Action requires the audible presence of those people engaged in it. Political action is most commonly associated with a specific type of sound: that is, speech. In The Human Condition, German political theorist Hannah Arendt writes: «No other human performance requires speech to the same extent as action. In all other performances speech plays a subordinate role, as a means of communication or a mere accompaniment to something that could also be achieved in silence» (Arendt 179). This is no metaphor, and can be expanded beyond mere speech to include other sounds, including (but not limited to) music. Public political action can take the form of speeches, or of chanting at a protest march, but it can also be heard in church bells or in collective singing. Sound creates a world, and is thus never only about itself; rather, sound makes a claim on our attention, bringing us into the world it creates. Sound acts upon us. And action, by definition, makes noise. In the context of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), sound also had the power to challenge a discourse that sought to keep the religious domain wholly apart from the public sphere. Indeed, debates over sound - as distinguished from music on one hand, or noise on the other - are always entwined with concerns over political and social power. In his discussion of discord between American religious groups, the scholar of religion Isaac Weiner points out that noise is a label used to demarcate «threats to a dominant social order» (Weiner 5). Similarly, in his work on jazz funerals in post-Katrina New Orleans, Matt Sakakeeny writes that «one’s experience of a soundscape is dependent on an orientation toward sound, in terms of both physical proximity (near or far, loud or soft) and evaluative listening (music or noise, pleasurable or intrusive)» (Sakakeeny 4). Finally, in her work on Latin American popular music circulation, Ana María Ochoa Gautier argues that «the public sphere is increasingly mediated by the aural. [. . .] [It] is being redefined to include forms of participation which are not channeled by the forms of debate or participation historically recognized as such by the official polity» (Gautier 807). In the case of the late GDR, churches sought to use sound not merely to mediate a public sphere, but to create one. The growing heterogeneity of sounds in East Berlin churches at the time can be read as a signifier of the diverse new social movements that coalesced in church spaces. On 1 June 1979, Jugendpfarrer Rainer Eppelmann of East Berlin’s Samariterkirche, together with blues musician Gunther «Holly» Holwas, Pfarrer Heinz-Otto Seidenschnur, Diakon Bernd Schröder and other members of the Church, hosted the first so-called «Blues-Mass.» This new genre took advantage of increased religious freedom in East Germany by combining popular music, skits about social and political concerns, and religious content. In creating this hybrid genre, Schröder, Holwas, Eppelmann, and Seidenschnur were entering into a debate not only over how church spaces could and should be used, but also how they might be heard. Within the Blues-Mass genre, sound, broadly conceived, became a signifier of pluralism and of political action, within the protected context of a Protestant worship service. Still, the Church’s protection was constantly being renegotiated. The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) scrutinized events in churches, looking for anything that might cross the line into political advocacy, and regular churchgoers did not always approve of the nontraditional groups the Blues-Masses brought into their religious spaces. Between 1979 and 1986, twenty Blues-Masses took place at the Samariterkirche, Auferstehungskirche, and Erlöserkirche in East Berlin, and Blues- Masses became a genre unto themselves. A re-engagement with the social and sonic world of Blues-Masses creates a rich portrait of the ways in which participants in the genre engaged in political action through sound: musical or theatrical performance, religious speech, or political rhetoric. At the same time, such an investigation reveals how churches and Blues- Mass organizers balanced their spiritual missions with social engagement. To this end, I will examine the structure and generic conventions of the Blues- Mass, paying special attention to the mass on 29 February 1980. This microhistory, supported by examples from other Blue-Masses and ethnographic interviews with organizers and participants, shows that these events created a heightened sense of pluralism within the Church, in contrast to the homogeneity of the official public sphere. 1 Each of the discrete elements of a Blues-Mass - the performative frame, theatrical pieces, musical performances, and religious content - were tied together into a coherent whole that simultaneously brought multiple publics into coalition. That coalition was always being recreated and renegotiated, however: established groups sought to strengthen their claims on the social space, while fresh groups joined and made new demands. Pluralism, as pursued by Blues-Mass participants and organizers, was paradoxically both the reason for the genre’s success and the source of its ultimate demise. That pluralism can 434 Alison Furlong be traced through the increasingly heterogeneous sounds of the Blues-Mass, which at its best reflected a thrilling harmony amongst participants. In later years, that multiplicity of sounds became discordant, as myriad participating groups vied to make their voices heard. In order for the pluralistic social groups created within the Blues-Mass space to produce real social change, and to have a voice in the broader public sphere of East Germany, they needed to leave the safe, but limiting, space of the Church. The event that made the Blues-Masses possible in the first place occurred on 6 March 1978, when East German Head of State Erich Honecker met with Bishop Albrecht Schönherr to discuss Church-state relations in the GDR. This was the first formal meeting of its kind between the Church and state hierarchies. Sabrina Ramet points out the unique situation in East Germany, «the only communist system in which Protestantism was clearly the predominant religious force,» giving individual parishes and pastors relative autonomy in their ministry (Ramet 53). Officially, freedom of religion was provided by the Constitution of the German Democratic Republic, adopted 7 October 1949. Section Vof that document dealt entirely with «Religion and Religious Associations,» and stated: (1) Jeder Bürger genießt volle Glaubens- und Gewissensfreiheit. Die ungestörte Religionsausübung steht unter dem Schutz der Republik. (2) Einrichtungen von Religionsgemeinschaften, religiöse Handlungen und der Religionsunterricht dürfen nicht für verfassungswidrige oder parteipolitische Zwecke mißbraucht werden. Jedoch bleibt das Recht der Religionsgemeinschaften, zu den Lebensfragen des Volkes von ihrem Standpunkt aus Stellung zu nehmen, unbestritten. («Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik» Artikel 41) This statement engendered relatively good conditions for religious individuals during the early years of state socialism in Germany and kept active prewar relationships between East German and West German churches. During Walter Ulbricht’s presidency (1960 - 73), however, this relatively tolerant stance began to slip. The official policy of religious freedom was undermined by the consequences of actual religious practice. For instance, beginning in 1964, Christians objecting to military service were permitted to join the Baueinheiten («Anordnung des Nationalen Verteidigungsrates»). Bausoldaten, as they were called, could fulfill their required service on construction projects to benefit the national infrastructure. In practice, however, participation in this program marked an individual as «negativfeindlicher»; Bausoldaten were not allowed to attend university, and many careers were immediately foreclosed. 435 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues In the 1968 Constitution, mention of religious practices was kept to a minimum, and protection reduced considerably. That document stated: (1) Jeder Bürger der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik hat das Recht, sich zu einem religiösen Glauben zu bekennen und religiöse Handlungen auszuüben. (2) Kirchen und andere Religionsgemeinschaften ordnen ihre Angelegenheiten und üben ihre Tätigkeit aus in Übereinstimmung mit der Verfassung und den gesetzlichen Bestimmungen der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Näheres kann durch Vereinbarungen geregelt werden («Verfassung Der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik» Artikel 39). Although individual citizens were still guaranteed freedom of religious belief, religious institutions were now more heavily restricted and required to act in accordance with state dictates, with details worked out on a case-bycase basis that invariably favored the state. At the same time, the East German Church separated formally from the West German Evangelical Church (EKD), leading to increased isolation for East German Christians. 2 The 1978 Honecker-Schönherr meeting resulted in a tentative rapprochement between the Protestant Church and the state that allowed Christians to take the Abitur examination and attend university, included pastors in the state pension plan, and offered churches improved (albeit limited) access to media. Perhaps most important, this meeting marked the state’s reluctant acknowledgment of the Church’s autonomy and its value to society. In exchange for official political neutrality, people in church spaces were Figure 1: Map: Three East Berlin churches in relation to the border zone. United States. Central Intelligence Agency, «Berlin Region,» map (Washington DC, June 1989). 436 Alison Furlong allowed to express themselves freely, and religious content could not be forbidden. State officials, including employees of the Staatssekretariat für Kirchenfragen, agents of the Stasi, and «Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter» - civilians recruited by the Stasi for surveillance work - watched church spaces carefully. The Stasi’s infamous Hauptabteilung XX was tasked with investigating underground political activities, along with what it called the «abuses» of churches, but it could not prevent a Church from holding worship services. The Church’s position as a relatively safe venue made it a crucial space for the social movements of the late 1970s and 1980s, even as those movements served to challenge the new detente between Church and state. The first Blues-Mass, not yet called by that name, took place on the evening of Friday, 1 June 1979, at the Samariterkirche in East Berlin’s Friedrichshain neighborhood. Although the event had been publicized only through word of mouth, it drew between 250 and 350 visitors, a dramatic contrast to the usual turnout for Sunday services, which Pfarrer Eppelmann told me ranged between thirty and fifty people. A second event was planned almost immediately for 13 July, this time under the theme «Zwischen Haß und Hoffnung.» As Eppelmann relates the story, with each successive Blues- Mass, the crowd in the church doubled. While that is an exaggeration, it is only a slight one. The second Blues-Mass drew between 450 and 500 people, and by the fifth Blues-Mass on 25 April 1980, the Samariterkirche could no longer contain the 1,500 participants, forcing organizers to move the events (C Rep 104 Nr. 436, 25 April1980, «Betr.: Blues-Messe in der Samariter- Kirche am 25. 4. 80 von 19.30 [Uhr] bis ca. 21.30 [Uhr]»). As an interim solution, Blues-Masses were held at both the Samariterkirche and the Auferstehungskirche. Visitors who found the first church full for the 4: 30 p. m. service could either walk or take the U-Bahn to the Auferstehungskirche and arrive in time for a 7 p. m. Blues-Mass with different musicians but the same spoken text. Finally, the Blues-Masses found a home at the Erlöserkirche in the more remote neighborhood of Berlin- Lichtenberg. The Erlöserkirche, besides being substantially larger, also sat on roughly half an acre of land bordered by the S-Bahn tracks. This gave visitors a place to gather outside the church building before or after an event, while also providing a sound buffer between the often loud performances and nearby residents. Some attendees chose to camp for the weekend on church grounds. At the height of their popularity in 1982, between 3,500 and 4,000 people were attending these Blues-Masses, which were by then being held as four consecutive events on a single day. 437 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues As a purposefully popular genre performed in a church space, the Blues- Mass brought together heterogeneous groups of people to create a new public. We might here borrow Michael Warner’s definition of a public as a group that organizes itself through attention to a particular text or performance (Warner 49). Warner takes care to distinguish a public from the more concrete notion of an audience, and, critically, from the public writ large. Rather, a public is an «addressable object [. . .] conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence» (Warner 51). Each of the performance types represented in a Blues-Mass «conjured into being» a distinct public: Christian youth attended to the psalms and sermon, burgeoning grass-roots groups were drawn to political skits, and musical performances brought in fans of blues, folk, and eventually rock and punk music. Once within the church, however, these groups and their multiple desires united into a single heterogenous counterpublic, convened through their attention to the performance and bound by their conflict with both the dominant discourse in the GDR and with the social norms that reproduced that discourse. This assemblage was key to the success of the Blues-Masses; its noisy messiness was also its appeal, as it provided a contrast to the conformity demanded in official spaces. Hannah Arendt called «plurality,» or the coming together of contrasting views, essential for any kind of meaningful political engagement (Arendt 7). The Blues-Mass genre became an overt performance of plurality through sound and reflected a serious effort to address multiple constituencies as a coherent (if diverse) whole. Within this pluralistic framework, peace activists, hippies, Christians, blues fans, singersongwriters, and punks vied for space and voice, sometimes during the same event. Warner’s model stresses that «[a] public organizes itself independently of state institutions, law, formal frameworks of citizenship, or preexisting institutions such as the church» (Warner 51). Although the Blues-Mass public organized itself around discourse provided by church organizers, and presented on church grounds, they endeavored to remain independent from the Church as an institution. This separation between the Church and the Blues-Mass public, however, became ever more fraught, and harder to maintain. Some participants worried (and rightly so) that if the Church was pressured by the ruling Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), it would protect itself before it would protect them. Just as importantly, as long as the grassroots groups who made up the Blues-Mass public relied on church spaces, their reach was limited. As individual interest groups gained strength and confidence, they left the Blues-Masses to create new texts and perfor- 438 Alison Furlong mances, centered around their own specific interests. By 1986 the Blues- Masses had outlived their usefulness, lost their public, and came to an end. From the original inception of the Blues-Masses, organizers balanced political, social, and sacred concerns with musical ones. The use of popular music styles in the context of worship was not completely new; Pfarrer Walter Schilling used jazz as an important element of his Open Youth Work in the early 1970s (Tyndale 68). What was new about the Blues-Masses was its direct appeal to non-believers. As Pfarrer Eppelmann described his first meeting with Holwas, the project began as a compromise between the sacred and the secular. Holwas, a self-taught blues musician and former Bausoldat, had been denied a license to perform by the SED’s Committee for Entertainment Arts. He proposed to give blues concerts at the church, perhaps to raise money for some worthy cause. Eppelmann’s position was that, while a purely secular concert was not feasible, blues music would be permissible as part of a religious service (Eppelmann). Pfarrer Seidenschnur’s recollection of early meetings confirmed the importance of blending the sacred and the secular; Diakon Schröder concurred, citing increasing openness to social ministry within the Church hierarchy and a willingness to engage with non-Christians as prerequisites to the Blues-Mass (Seidenschnur; Schröder). Given how tightly the East German music industry was regulated, it is easy to see how appealing the idea of a church performance would have been to Holwas. All professional musicians needed to be licensed, not only to record through the state-owned Amiga record label, but also to perform at any official venue, which is to say at almost any venue at all. One man I interviewed, himself an officially licensed Liedermacher (singer-songwriter), explained that the system was in place so that musicians could live as musicians without needing to hold down other jobs. The Liedermacher, who uses the pseudonym «Malcolm,» explained the value of the state’s measures to ensure quality and «proper training» for musicians. Conspicuously absent from Malcolm’s account, however, were the restrictions placed on political speech by musicians, whether on stage or off, or the fact that licensing could be rescinded at any time («Malcolm»). In 1975 the Klaus Renft Combo, one of the most popular GDR rock bands, was banned from performance, and in 1976 the SED forcibly expatriated popular Liedermacher Wolf Biermann. These events brought into sharp focus the precarious nature of life as a working musician under state socialism, leading many musicians to seek alternative performance venues. Non-licensed musicians, including Liedermacher, rock and blues bands, and punk bands, were left with limited options. Many performed in 439 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues apartments or squats, especially in the East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, with publicity handled through word of mouth. Use of a church space, by contrast, opened a world of possibilities. Unlike an apartment, a church could hold an audience of hundreds, even thousands of people. Further, as large non-state-run spaces, churches were unique. They could allow unlicensed bands to perform in an arena that was accessible to citizens at large, but also offered some protection from official interference. As the popularity of the Blues-Mass increased, the format began to take on certain generic conventions, inspired by a traditional Evangelical worship service, but with some notable differences. Each event centered on a single theme, typically rooted in some problematic aspect of everyday life in the GDR. Themes included «Angst überwinden,» «Lustlosigkeit,» and «Hin- und Hergerissen.» A typical Blues-Mass opened with a greeting, followed by a blues or other popular song. After this, short skits would be separated by additional musical performances, often with one or two Psalm readings in the mix. Music also flanked the sermon (sometimes replaced with something more akin to a dramatic monologue). Finally, there would be intercessory prayers, a collection of money for youth ministry, announcements, a farewell to the participants, and a closing musical number. Each of these elements had a parallel in the traditional Evangelical service - skits served the function of biblical readings and gospel selections, while popular music stood in for hymnody - but at the same time they created a wholly separate type of event, aimed as much at non-believers as believers. Each element of the Blues-Mass genre - musical, dramatic, and liturgical - appealed to a different portion of its larger public, and their juxtaposition made clear the diversity of the Blues- Mass audience. As in a traditional worship service, the Blues-Mass opened with a greeting to participants. Unlike a more traditional service, however, that greeting specifically included words of welcome to visitors from other regions of the GDR. After Rainer Eppelmann called out each place name, the «Trampers» who had hitchhiked or traveled by train from Sachsen, Thüringen, or Mecklenburg would cheer and applaud. In this way the greeting made audible the broad geographical range of the Blues-Mass, as well as giving those from the provinces an opportunity to make themselves heard within the capital city. Another aspect of the greeting draws attention to the multiple subcultures who would be addressed by the individual elements of the Blues-Mass. The introduction to a 29 February 1980 Blues-Mass in the Samariterkirche, built around the theme «Frieden - Konfliktklärung ohne Gewalt,» is a particularly striking example of this appeal: 440 Alison Furlong Finde es auch dufte, wenn wir versuchen aufeinander Rücksicht zu nehmen. Das heißt: Einige kommen wegen der Musik, um zu träumen, um sich irgendwie zu fühlen, zu merken, daß da jemand bei mir ist. Und andere kommen, um auf die Texte zu hören, die dabei verlesen werden. Andere wieder kommen um zu beten, und auf das Wort der Verkündigung zu hören. Ich finde, daß alles seinen gleichen Rang heute bekommen soll. Und daß wir die Kraft haben für die paar Stunden, die wir hier zusammen sind, miteinander tolerant zu leben. («29 February 1980 Blues- Messe») This greeting calls upon participants to show respect for one another’s differences and to come together in celebration. In their reports on the event, Stasi agents took a different view of the greeting’s call for pluralism, cynically commenting that «Man wolle sich bemühen, allen gerecht zu werden» (BStU MfS BV Berlin AKG 1449, 5 March 1980, «Information über die Blues-Messe des Kreisjugendkonventes der Evangelischen Kirche Berlin Friedrichshain am 29. 2. 1980 von 19.30 Uhr bis 22.00 Uhr in der Samariter-Kirche»). Just as in a traditional Evangelical service, the greeting served as a framing device to set the Blues-Mass, and the church event more generally, apart from everyday life. It marked the Blues-Mass as what Victor Turner would have called a liminal space: a «moment in and out of time,» in which usual social restrictions no longer applied (Turner 96). As in a traditional service, the greeting was used to establish the Blues-Mass as a spiritual occasion, but it also created a zone of protection, in which religious freedom could take on the form of political and social freedom. Here participants could exercise «the powers of the weak,» as Turner calls it, and share the space in a sense of communitas. 3 An interview with photographer Harald Hauswald confirmed that the Blues-Masses served as a special social space, set apart from the mundane world. When I inquired about his photography, much of which deals with the everyday in East Berlin, and asked him to place his photographs of Blues-Masses into that context, he replied, «That was something different. The Church was different. It was the only place we could speak freely» (Hauswald). He went on to point out that, although he was an atheist, he remained «grateful» for the existence of the Blues-Masses and the opening of churches as a «freier Raum» for expression. Indeed, churches in East Germany had been steadily expanding their reach to reform-minded groups for many years at this point. Since Schönherr’s appointment as Bishop of Berlin-Brandenburg, he had made strides toward solidifying the Church’s position, spearheading the 1969 founding of the new Federation of Protestant Churches (BEK), which unified the eight regional churches of East Germany into a single umbrella organization, and establishing the «Church within socialism» policy that marked Church-state inter- 441 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues action through the 1970s. Wendy Tyndale points out the deep connection between Schönherr’s work and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology. As a twentyone-year-old student, Schönherr had befriended and studied under Bonhoeffer, embracing his vision of a «Church for others» (Tyndale 36). While the new Federation was met with some skepticism from Christians who viewed it as a capitulation - that it amounted to an admission that Germany would remain divided for the foreseeable future - it was also a savvy political maneuver. With the rise of the BEK, it became harder for the SED to divide and conquer. It could no longer effectively deal with each church individually, assisting those who where politically convenient whilst punishing those who criticized the regime (Tyndale 37). At the same time, the narrow path implied by the «Church within socialism» policy produced a stability that allowed Church hierarchy to operate within the socialist structure while still pursuing its mission to be a «Church for others.» With these two actions, Schönherr effectively set the stage for what would follow. Political and theatrical performances formed the core of the Blues-Mass, and these performances drew the most attention from state observers. These skits were designed in a manner similar to parables, often using broadly drawn character types with symbolic names. A skit from 23 April 1982 featured Diakon Ralph Syrowatka as «Herr Lustlos,» who bemoans his grey everyday life, and begs God to help him find a way to change his «broken world» (C Rep 104 Nr. 436, n. d., «Information über eine Kontrolle von sogenannten ‹Bluesmessen› in der Erlöserkirche Berlin-Lichtenberg, Noldnerstraße 43»). Another sketch, from the 4 July 1980 Blues-Mass, makes explicit reference to the constant surveillance of the Blues-Masses: using the German term for coward, Angsthase, this sketch takes place in «Angsthasen-Land,» and features performers in long ears playing the parts of four Angsthasen as a narrator describes various things they fear. 4 One segment casts the Angsthasen as secret police, ordered to find out why so many young people were gathering in churches, and using the motto «trust is good but control is better! » At the conclusion of the skit, the narrator announces: «They, the four secret police, didn’t give up, and we can therefore now observe them at work.» Whereupon, the Angsthasen left the sanctuary and sat down among the worshippers. Throughout the rest of the Blues- Mass, they kept their long ears, a visible reminder of ongoing surveillance (C Rep 104 Nr. 436, n. d., «Anlagekarte 6 - Blues-Messe am 4. 7. 1980»). The theatrical piece used in the 29 February 1980 Blues-Mass, while less incendiary than the Angsthasen skit, made direct reference to the frustrations of everyday life in East Germany. In this skit, two men (played by Syrowatka and Uwe Kulisch) held up signs - one white and one black - as they read 442 Alison Furlong conflicting «headlines» about current events (see Figure 2). During the backand-forth, Eppelmann stood between the two, finally holding up a sign with a large question mark, and pretending to faint from dizziness. Weiß Schwarz 2 - 4 Millionen Menschen durch Pol-Pot-Regime ermordet. Militärische Einmischung Vietnams in Kampuchea. Entspannungspolitik muß fortgesetzt werden. Erdölvorkommen müssen militärisch gesichert werden. In Kampuchea geht es nicht um unseren Wohlstand, nicht um das Öl, nur um Menschen. Kampucheaner dem sicheren Hungertod ausgeliefert - Hilfsgüter erreichen die Menschen nicht. NATO-Raketenbeschluß gefährdet die Menschheit. Sowjetische Mittelstreckenraketen bedrohen den Frieden. USA-Schützenhilfe für Israel spitzt Lage in Nahen-Osten zu. Mit palästinensischer Terrororganisation wird nicht verhandelt. Afghanischen Freunden wird alle Hilfe zuteil. Sowjetunion beugt in Afghanistan militärisch ein Ausweiten der islamischen Revolution (im eigenen Lande) vor. Jugendliche Rowdys stören das Geburtstagsfest der DDR auf dem Alexanderplatz. Jugendliche Opposition protestiert am 7. Oktober in Ostberlin. Beschluß des Staatsrates über eine Amnestie aus Anlaß des 30. Jahrestag. Der Jugendliche Günther D. seit Januar 1980 wieder wegen asozialem Verhalten verurteilt. FDJ-Plan - Freizeitangebote für Jugendliche müssen verbessert werden.: -) Unsere Fußballstadien nun auch Tummelplatz für mutwillige Zerstörer. Unser Soziale Menschengesellschaft wurde immer gefestigt. Opa Ela nach sein Tot ist seit 5 Monat unbemerkt in seine Wohnung. Figure 2: Table: «Weiß-Schwarz» placards from 29 February 1980 Blues-Mass. Transcribed from 29 February 1980 Blues-Messe. Berlin: Robert-Havemann- Gesellschaft, 2008. CD supplement to Moldt. 443 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues Of these contradictory pairs, the last four drew the most attention. The «headlines» dealing with the 7 October 1977 protests on the Alexanderplatz drew catcalls and loud applause. The crackdown on those protests by police and state security had resulted in three deaths and two-hundred injuries, and the response at the Blues-Mass that day reveals how fresh the psychic wounds from that incident still were more than two years later. Similarly, the contradiction between the very public amnesty program for certain prisoners (instituted in honor of the 30th anniversary of the GDR), and the ongoing detention of others, was marked by applause from the crowd. Finally, the juxtaposition of jingoistic statements about the strength of the society and the idea of someone’s poor grandfather lying dead and unnoticed in his apartment for five months elicited laughter: a damning indictment of the failures of actually-existing socialism. Blues-Mass organizers were acutely aware that they were serving several publics, including the many atheists who attended. In many respects, the Blues-Mass was a Church service that was especially designed for nonbelievers. Although structured as a worship service, Biblical content was not the focus of the event. Rather than starting with Biblical texts, and using a sermon to connect those texts to the present day, the Blues-Mass inverted the structure: scripted skits dealing with the issues of everyday life in East Germany, whether about work, the desire to travel, or fear of surveillance, formed the backbone of the service. There was no statement of belief, such as the Apostles’ Creed, nor any group prayer such as the Our Father to be recited by participants. Blessings and psalms were typically read to the assembly by one of the participating pastors and, based upon recordings I have heard, only a small handful of people joined to recite the closing «Amen.» In place of group prayer to unify the crowd, there was communal clapping to music, shared rhythm producing a sense of shared presence and communitas. 5 Religious texts were nevertheless part of the proceedings. Psalms and other sacred texts, along with a sermon, tied the (secular) theme to a broader Church ministry. In this way, organizers addressed two issues critical to the success of the Blues-Masses. First, use of sacred texts provided a justification for protecting the Blues-Masses as «religious content.» As Pfarrer Heinz- Otto Seidenschnur told historian Dirk Moldt in a 2005 interview, «Vielleicht wären wir selber gar nicht so sehr stark auf diese gottesdienstliche Schiene gekommen, wenn es nicht diese Angriffe von außen gegeben hätte» (Seidenschnur). Because the Stasi was watching, and had threatened to end the Blues-Masses on numerous occasions, organizers needed to present a clear 444 Alison Furlong religious character for these Church services. Subtlety would have been lost on those surveilling. Nonetheless, religious texts also exercised a second function: organizers used the juxtaposition of these texts with secular material to make a claim for the Church as the proper venue to address the questions of everyday life. In the 29 February 1980 Blues-Mass, which included a direct appeal to tolerance and pluralism, the psalm was explicitly connected to the secular aspects of the service, reinforcing the idea of pluralism. Immediately preceding the psalm, Liedermacher Steffen Marschall performed a song entitled «Fahne im Wind.» By way of transition to the psalm, Seidenschnur told the crowd that they had just heard from a young singer-songwriter, and that they would now hear from «ein sehr alter Liedermacher [. . .] ein alter Dichter, der hat seine Texte in der Bibel veröffentlich.» As if to underscore the status of the psalm as song, a bass guitar accompanied Seidenschnur’s spoken words, the sound of the instrument - used earlier for a performance of the blues - now inflecting the sound of the psalm text. Over this accompaniment, Seidenschnur offers a decidedly worldly interpretation of Psalm 12. Consider the differences between Psalm 12 as written in the 1962 Lutheran Bible, and the adaptation of the same psalm read at the Blues-Mass: Psalm 12: Lutheran Bible Psalm 12: February 29 Blues-Mass Hilf, HERR! die Heiligen haben abgenommen, und der Gläubigen ist wenig unter den Menschenkindern. Einer redet mit dem andern unnütze Dinge; sie heucheln und lehren aus uneinigem Herzen. Der HERR wolle ausrotten alle Heuchelei und die Zunge, die da stolz redet, die da sagen: Unsere Zunge soll Oberhand haben, uns gebührt zu reden; wer ist unser HERR? Weil denn die Elenden verstört werden und die Armen seufzen, will ich auf, spricht der HERR; ich will Hilfe schaffen dem, der sich darnach sehnt. Hilf Herr, die, die zu dir gehören, werden immer weniger, und die Gleichgültigen werden immer mehr. Eine Lüge fällt ihnen schneller aus dem Mund als die Zeitung aus der Tasche. Sie haben Köpfe mit zwei Gesichtern und machen sich gegenseitig ein X für ein U vor. Sollte da nicht Gott dazwischenfahren? Ihnen ihre Lügenblätter um die Ohren schlagen, ihre Zeitungen, die ewig Phrasen drucken, von «Unser-Kurs-ist-richtig! » Ach, wenn doch Gott ihre Radiosendungen stören würde, die Nichteinmischungspolitik verkünden und dich doch Einmischung und dies Freundschaftsdienst nennen. 445 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues Psalm 12: Lutheran Bible Psalm 12: February 29 Blues-Mass Die Rede des HERRN ist lauter wie durchläutert Silber im irdenen Tiegel, bewähret siebenmal. Du, HERR, wollest sie bewahren und uns behüten vor diesem Geschlecht ewiglich! Denn es wird allenthalben voll Gottloser, wo solche nichtswürdige Leute unter den Menschen herrschen. (Bibel, Psalms 12: 1 - 8) Aber wir glauben, Gott, daß eher eines Tages den Spieß umdrehen wird, und schon heute erfahren wir, daß wir nicht von allen guten Geistern verlassen sind, daß Gott uns hinweghilft über den Berg aus Haß, aus Gewalt, aus Lüge. Denn Gottes Wort ist verläßlicher als alle Nachrichten aus Ost und West. Diese Zeitung bringt gute Nachrichten, die Bibel, frohe Nachrichten, weil sie nicht Partei ergreift für eine Ideologie, nicht Partei ergreift für eine Partei, für die Macht weniger, nicht Partei ergreift für ein politisches Lager. Sondern die Bibel bringt gute Nachrichten, indem jeder Artikel Partei ergreift für die Menschen. Figure 3: Table: Psalm 12 as presented in the Lutheran Bible and at the Blues-Mass. Bibel: oder, Die ganze Heilige Schrift des Alten und Neuen Testaments, nach der deutschen Übersetzung Martin Luthers. Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1962. Transcribed from 29 February 1980 Blues-Messe. Berlin: Robert- Havemann-Gesellschaft, 2008. CD supplement to Moldt. Although Seidenschnur’s rendition of the psalm begins in much the same vein as its source, he quickly shifts from theological concerns to sociopolitical concerns, challenging the politics of Eastern and Western news media that was lampooned in the earlier theatrical piece. In his first stanza, he introduces the idea that not only are the numbers of believers dwindling, but that the ranks of the apathetic have swelled. He goes on to speak in the voice of those apathetic masses, asking why God himself does not intervene to stop the purveyors of falsely optimistic headlines. In the final portion of his psalm, however, Seidenschnur posits his alternative to «hatred, violence, and lies.» The word of God, he says, brings the real «good news,» in a way that neither the Eastern nor Western newspapers can equal. Shortly after this psalm adaptation, Seidenschnur reads verses 3 - 5, 14 - 16, and 20 - 22 of Psalm 69. The text of that psalm, which cries out to God for deliverance, becomes, in the 446 Alison Furlong context of the previous reading, a cry to be delivered from doubt and hopelessness, and a prayer for strength in the face of state oppression. In a similar fashion, Rainer Eppelmann begins his sermon with the statement «Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword» (Matthew 26: 52), but transforms it into a statement not only against the increasing militarization of everyday life in East Germany, but also into a call to resist other, metaphorical, types of «armament.» Specifically, he recites the litany of messages instilled in East German citizens through education, media, and work: «Setz Dich durch - denke zuerst an Dich - sei Dir selbst der Nächste - Leben ist Kampf - die anderen sind die Bösen, sie haben nur Arges im Sinn - wer Frieden will, muß bewaffnet sein - die Feinde mußt Du hassen - willst Du etwas werden, mußt Du Dich - auch brutal - durchsetzen» (29 February 1980 Blues-Messe). Several of these slogans would have been immediately recognizable. «Der Frieden muß verteidigt werden - der Frieden muß bewaffnet sein» was the name of a well-known campaign by the Free German Youth (FDJ), the youth movement of the SED; and Alles Leben ist Kampf was the title of a 1937 Nazi propaganda film. Eppelmann not only juxtaposes the Nazi-era slogan with that of the FDJ - a dangerous rhetorical move, to be sure - but he then presents the Church’s alternatives to both these messages: engaging in open discussion with those with whom you disagree, opting for alternative military service, and assisting those who are working for peace. Both of these segments were typical of the Blues-Mass genre: they served to connect religious, social, and political themes. In this case, they also became a means of expanding the theme for the evening: «Konfliktklärung ohne Gewalt.» Where Seidenschnur’s Psalm readings urge participants to reject violence and despair and rely instead on God’s help, both he and Eppelmann also make a claim for official state-socialist doctrine as a form of violence in its own right, an abuse of power that must be resisted as well. This sort of discourse was typical of resistance and reform movements within the GDR; it was common to repurpose an existing socialist image or phrase to convey a new message. One noteworthy example of such refashioning can be seen in the «Schwerter zu Pflugscharen» anti-war movement. In 1959, the Soviet Union had presented a sculpture to the United Nations, engraved with the text «We shall beat our swords into ploughshares»; starting in 1980, the East German anti-war movement used as its emblem an image of that sculpture. Like the «Schwerter zu Pflugscharen» emblem, Eppelmann’s and Seidenschnur’s discourse brought into focus the differences between the socialist ideal and the realities of socialist life in East Germany. 447 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues The use of popular music styles, including American-influenced blues music, was a crucial means of appealing to a public who might not otherwise have attended a Church event, and of creating a sense of communitas amongst participants. Believers, too, found themselves drawn to this space in part for the musical performances. One man I interviewed, «Wolf,» came from a religious family in a small town outside Magdeburg; his sister had played the organ in their local church. He told me: «It was not until I came to Berlin as a young man that I went to anything like a Blues-Mass. I could not believe that something that sounded so modern was happening in a church» («Wolf»). Most of the music for the 29 February Blues-Mass was performed by the duo «Holly & Plent» (Holly Holwas and Thomas «Plent» Reiner), accompanied by Frank Gahler, harmonica player and singer for the popular Monokel Blues-Band; two numbers were played by a young Liedermacher named Steffen Marschall. It is worth noting here that «blues music» experienced some generic slippage in the context of the Blues-Mass. Although «Holly & Plent» unquestionably worked in the blues form - much of it covers of songs by African-American artists - Marschall’s first number, «Fahne im Wind» fits more clearly into the specifically German Liedermacher tradition. Marschall sings with acoustic guitar, his voice somewhat breathy (a contrast to Holly’s growling blues), and the song is a simple verse form in triple meter, with the frequent rubato and tempo shifts commonly used by Liedermacher. Nonetheless, in the plans for the event, as well as in all Stasi reports, the song is identified as a blues number. Blues was as important an idea as it was a genre. Identifying oneself with the music of African Americans meant identifying with the oppressed. The state itself was partly responsible for this narrative about blues music: when the state softened its position on jazz music in the 1960s, stressing its proletarian origins and identifying its performers (African Americans) as victims of American imperialism, it created a similar story for blues music. Performance of blues music outside accepted state venues, however, could undermine that story. An unlicensed blues musician performing at a Blues- Mass was a link between victims of American imperialism and those who felt disenfranchised under the socialist state. In an interview with historian Dirk Moldt, Pfarrer Heinz-Otto Seidenschnur referred to the symbolic importance of blues as a type of African-American protest: «Wir verstanden auch, dass das die Sprache und Ausdrucksform des schwarzen, amerikanischen Protestes ist und dass das durchaus in unsere andere Gesellschaft hineingetragen werden und eine Form des Protestes sein kann. Es erschien uns auch jugendgemäß» (Seidenschnur). By virtue of its status as African American music, as the music of an oppressed underclass, and as music associated in 448 Alison Furlong German minds with the U. S. civil rights movement, even an instrumental blues number became politically inflected. Moreover, blues music made a claim on behalf of Churches: within the proper context, even wholly secular music could become central to spiritual practice. In fact, most of the pieces chosen for the 29 February Blues-Mass were neither explicitly political nor religious in their texts. Even the surveilling agents at the event deemed the musical content to be «politically neutral.» This comparative lack of concern by the Stasi may have been rooted in their focus on text over sound. Indeed, of the pieces performed, only three - «Fahne im Wind» and two newly composed blues numbers - had German texts at all. The remainder were instrumental, or English-language covers of African-American blues songs by B. B. King («Rock Me, Baby,» and «Every Day I Have the Blues»), Muddy Waters («Honeybee»), and Elmore James («Dust My Blues»). Clearly, these pieces were not chosen for either religious or political lyrics, and few of those in attendance would have understood the English texts in any case. 6 Rather, it was the sound of the music, the feeling of communitas produced by the sharing of this music, and the mere fact of its performance in a non-state-controlled setting, that was central to its importance. That sense of communitas was most evident during the opening instrumental piece, during which the disparate members of the audience, people who had come to the Blues-Mass for a variety of reasons, joined together and clapped in time to the music. Just as Eppelmann’s greeting to the visitors from the provinces of the GDR was an audible way to unite a broad geographical space under one roof, this instrumental blues, and the clapping that accompanied it, made audible the coalition created among the people in attendance. Among the various publics who attended the Blues-Masses - musicians, music fans, believers and non-believers, political activists - was another group whose presence was intensely felt, even when it wasn’t openly discussed. Surveillance within church spaces had been a priority for the Stasi from its inception. An entire division of the security service was tasked with investigating Churches and other aspects of the «political underground.» Pfarrer Eppelmann’s residence was bugged, and an entire operation, code named «Blues,» was dedicated to the surveillance and obstruction of Blues-Masses. Obstruction, while less common than surveillance, typically took the form of pressure to reschedule events, often at the last minute. 7 Stasi employees, meanwhile, scrutinized and documented Blues-Masses, categorizing photos of visitors as «participants with alcohol,» «participants with musical instruments,» «participants at the park entrance,» and so on. 449 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues 450 Alison Furlong Figure 4, 5, 6: «Beobachtung ‹Blues› vom 26. 06. 1981, Teilnehmer mit Musikinstrumenten». Photographs (n. d.), 56, BStU MfS BV Berlin Abt. XX Nr. 4923, Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. In addition to official surveillance there was also unofficial surveillance in the form of Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter who reported back to handlers about whom they recognized, what took place, and what sorts of «politically negative» acts or speech they might have witnessed. The Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter program is perhaps the most infamous aspect of the Stasi’s all-pervasive surveillance structure, and informants were routinely recruited from those professions with greatest access to people’s personal lives, including clergy. Between 1969 and 1989, estimates are that nearly eight percent of clergy were listed as Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, along with many more laypeople (Gieseke 112). Blues-Mass organizers and participants were aware that Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter were present, but it was not always clear who they were. In a discussion with Stefan Krawczyk, a singer who performed at one of the later Blues- Masses, I asked if he ever feared that surveillance. He replied that he only really felt fear when an individual did not come to the next event, that this was a sign that either they had been arrested or had been informing (Krawczyk). One informant, code-named «Burkhard,» seems to have been tasked primarily 451 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues with reporting on Eppelmann and the Blues-Masses. The General Superintendent of Churches for the Berlin-Brandenburg region, Günter Krusche, one of the harsher critics of the Blues-Masses within the Church, was later revealed to have been an informant for the Stasi. State agents were hardly the only source of pressure on the Blues-Masses. Many churchgoers themselves were concerned about these new groups coming into their church. Prior to their move to the Erlöserkirche, neighbors of the Samariterkirche wrote letters complaining about the noisiness and bad behavior of Blues-Mass visitors. Several put their complaints in specifically religious terms, referring to scriptural accounts of Jesus and the moneylenders, or comparing the scene at the Samariterkirche to a «Bastschuppen.» Others complained of «repulsive dress» and the presence of «hippies and bums.» In a 23 September 1980 report to the Friedrichshain district government, the following passage was highlighted by a staff member of the Staatssekretariat für Kirchenfragen: Die Bürger bringen gegenüber der Kirche und den verantwortlichen Pfarrern ihr Mißfallen zum Ausdruck. Sie anerkennen, daß Glaubensfreiheit in der Verfassung der DDR garantiert ist, aber dieses Treiben, wie es sich in und um der Samariterstr. zutrug, nichts mit gottesdienstlichen Handlungen zu tun hat. (C Rep 104 Nr. 436, 23 September 1980, «Zusammenfassung der Hingaben von Bürgern der umliegenden Wohngebiete an der Samariterkirche in Durchführung der Blues-Messe am 12. 09. 80 in der Zeit von 16.00 [Uhr] bis ca. 23.00 Uhr») Indeed, from its inception, the Blues-Mass’s status as a worship service was always in question, and debates over its status became debates over the Church’s proper role. A report from East Berlin Oberbürgermeister Günter Hoffmann summed up the stance of the SED: «kaum religiöse[r] Charakter» (C Rep 104 Nr. 436, 5 July 1980, Memo to Konrad Naumann). Those issues that Blues-Mass organizers saw as central to the Church’s mission - questions of environmental stewardship, peace, and human rights - were viewed by government officials as an abuse of the Church’s protected status. Even among those who supported the Blues-Mass project, there were concerns that some of the newcomers were insufficiently respectful ofthe church as a sacred space. Several people mentioned instances of public drunkenness, smoking in the pews, or urinating on walls. Wolf commented that he didn’t think people «from outside» felt the same connection to the church as a religious space («Wolf»). Another Blues-Mass visitor, Luise, distinguished between practices at her church (the Gethsemanekirche) and at the Blues-Masses, claiming «we always remembered it was a church first» (Wekel). Maintaining Church approval was particularly important for Blues-Mass organizers, for they relied on the Church to defend their work, and its 452 Alison Furlong centrality to the Church’s mission, to the state. Martin-Michael Passauer, Jugendpfarrer for the city of Berlin, along with Church General Superintendent Hartmut Grunbaum (and, later, Grunbaum’s successor Günther Krusche), had the unenviable task of meeting with the Deputy Mayor for Internal Affairs, Günter Hoffmann, to discuss the Blues-Masses, their perceived religious content (or lack thereof), and the extent to which they were or were not acting within the bounds of the Church’s mandate. Prior to the 29 February 1980 Blues-Mass, at a meeting of the Friedrichshain District Council, Deputy Interior Minister for Berlin-Friedrichshain Kunth demanded an end to the Blues-Masses; the events were allowed to continue only on the condition that they would use a written script, and that all participants would adhere to that script (this would be verified by agents sent specifically to check conformity with the rules) (C Rep 104 Nr. 436, 22 February 1980, «Sitzung im Rat des Stadtbezirks»). It is worth noting, however, that participants in the 29 February Blues-Mass did deviate from the script, including one of the musicians, who offered a special welcome to those who were in the audience «on official business (for the Stasi)» (BStU MfS BV Berlin AKG 1449, 5 March 1980, «Information über die Blues- Messe») Moreover, despite repeated meetings, in which Kunth and Councilman Gerd Hoffmann decried the Blues-Masses as an abuse of the Church’s status and demanded their end, these demands appear to have had no teeth. The struggle between the Church and the state became a war of inches. Licensed musicians were threatened with the loss of state approval, and Holly Holwas was forced to leave the GDR in 1981. At the same time, other musicians in a broad range of styles flocked to the events, replacing those who had left. Some licensed bands performed under assumed names, and those who were already out of favor with state officials had little to lose by appearing at a Blues-Mass. Chanteuse Regine Dobberschutz, well-known for her performance on the soundtrack to Konrad Wolf’s «Solo Sunny» (1980), appeared with her band at a 1983 event, after her request for an exit visa left her unwelcome in official venues. Liedermacher like Stefan Krawczyk and Kalle Winkler continued to perform, and punk bands (most notably the band Namenlos) became a common sight at Blues-Masses. In fact, the pressures placed on musicians by the state led to a broadening of the musical repertoire and a shift toward performances by «outsider» groups. 8 In response to the public complaints about noise and participant behavior, Church officials agreed to move the Blues-Masses to the Erlöserkirche in late 1980. Although this shift forced the events to a relatively remote locale, it also gave them a larger venue, with a plot of land on which participants could camp before and after the Blues-Masses. The events at the Erlöserkirche took 453 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues on a festival atmosphere, with sandwiches provided by Blues-Mass organizers, and individual grassroots groups displaying banners and posters about their particular concerns. Thus, the scope of the Blues-Mass expanded in both space and time, and the influence of participating groups grew stronger. As long as the events enjoyed Church protection and - more importantly - as long as participants believed themselves to be operating within a sphere of safety, the Blues-Masses flourished. Figure 7: Blues-Mass participants at the Erlöserkirche. Photograph (n. d.), 237, BStU MfS HA XX/ 4 Nr. 267, Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. As the Blues-Masses grew in popularity and in diversity, though, fissures started to appear within the events. These internal pressures proved more instrumental in their demise than those from outside. Each of the diverse groups who made up the Blues-Mass audience had its own goals and priorities, which did not necessarily match the priorities of the Church or Blues-Mass organizers. Groups like «Schwerter zu Pflugscharen» were primarily concerned with the increased militarization of everyday life in the GDR. Other groups focused on environmental issues; like the peace groups, they advocated for nuclear disarmament, but they were also concerned with the disastrous environmental impact of East Germany’s brown coal industry. 454 Alison Furlong Still other groups dealt primarily with the concerns of women, gay men, or lesbians, and many religious participants remained focused on issues of religious freedom and the right of conscientious objection. Meanwhile, as the musical makeup of the Blues-Masses grew in diversity, the musicians, too, found themselves factionalized. Although they shared anxieties over the lack of free expression in the broader culture, blues fans, goths, and punks all belonged to distinct subcultures, which were only bound together through their mutual alterity. The Blues-Masses succeeded in bringing these groups into coalition, but a coalition by its very nature is a temporary association. Erving Goffmann describes a coalition as «a joining of two or more, ordinarily opposed, parties, and their functioning, temporarily and in regards to specific aims, to promote a single interest» (Goffman 86). In the case of the Blues Mass, groups participated with the mutual agenda of creating an alternative public sphere. In time, however, groups became more focused on giving their own particular issues a voice in that sphere. Specific interests began to outweigh a singular, common one. As these groups grew in confidence and influence, their ideals came into conflict with one another and with the church that hosted them. Tensions between the political grassroots groups and the more anarchic punks seem to have run especially high. One example of this tension arose during a discussion of the 24 June 1983 Blues-Mass: Gen. Hoffmann belegte dies mit Beispielen. Am ‹Informationsstand› gab es Vermerke wie ‹Wir haben die Macht, wir müssen sie gebrauchen. Wo Mauern sind, kann keine Freiheit gedeihen. Gegen Naziregime in Ost und West.› Eine Punker-Band trat mit einem Titel auf ‹MfS MfS-SS› oder mit der Feststellung ‹Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg› und ‹Nazischweine raus aus Ostberlin.› [. . .] Aggressionen wurden insbesondere durch die anderen Teilnehmer gegen die Punker wach. [. . .] So habe es obszöne Zurufe gegeben. An der ‹Informationswand› hätte es nur zwei Anwürfe gegen den Staat, dafür aber eine Vielzahl gegen die Punker gegeben. (BStU MfS HA XX Nr. 6015, n. d., «Information über ein Gespräch des Stellvertreters des Oberbürgermeister für Inneres, Genossen Hoffmann, mit Generalsuperintendent Krusch und Stadtjugendpfarrer Passauer am 30. 6. 1983») Although Passauer defended the rights of punk groups to participate in Blues-Masses, Church officials were beginning to crack down on the sorts of behavioral offenses that most often attracted state attention. Organizers began to confiscate alcohol on church property, and inappropriate language was discouraged onstage. In 1985 organizers made a grave tactical error when they attempted to schedule a Blues-Mass with the theme «Von der Befreiung zur Befreiung» on 5 May 1985, opposite the state Liberation Day festivities. Pushback from 455 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues Hoffmann resulted in a month-and-a-half delay of the event. Significantly, one of the key pieces of evidence officials offered for the unsuitability of a Liberation Day Blues-Mass was the planned musical performance: Es wurde betont, daß der vorgesehene Zeitpunkt der Veranstaltung politisch nicht vertretbar und im besonderen Maße für das Verhältnis Staat-Kirche konfliktträchtig sei. Mit dem Hinweis darauf, daß alle Mitglieder der Gruppe «fade out», die den musikalischen Teil der Bluesmesse gestalten sollte, Anträge auf Übersiedlung in die BRD/ WB gestellt haben, wurde diese Einschätzung unterstrichen. (BStU MfS BV Berlin AKG 3962, 15 May 1985, «Information über die am 5. 5. 1985 geplante Bluesmesse in der Erlöserkirche») Visitors who had not heard about the postponement (and Western journalists who had) arrived on 5 May to find no Blues-Mass, and no indication of when it would take place. The delay of the event heightened fears that, when faced with enough pressure, the Church hierarchy was likely to submit to the wishes of SED functionaries. Visitors on that day left a «complaint board» for organizers, covered with criticisms of the decision. The most pointed called for a new Church leadership; one simply read «Staatskirche» (BStU MfS BV Berlin AKG 3962, 15 May 1985, «Information»). When the planned Blues-Mass finally did take place more than a month later, attendance was down significantly. Whereas the 17th Blues-Mass drew roughly 2,500 participants over four consecutive events, the 18th drew only 500 and was followed by a nearly yearlong hiatus. By September 1986, only 400 participants attended. Although this attendance remained considerably higher than that of pre-Blues-Mass services, it was far from the overwhelming number of participants seen in 1982 (see Appendix for a complete list of Blues-Masses with dates and attendance figures). It is critical to understand that the end of the Blues-Mass phenomenon came not as a result of a state crackdown, but rather as the result of growing fissures among the groups who had been its core audience, and between those groups and the Church hierarchy. The alliances formed at the Blues-Masses emboldened East German grassroots organizations, but at the same time balkanized them. Although the official end came in 1987, many of the grassroots groups who had been involved used the Blues-Masses’ hiatus in 1985 and 1986 to find other avenues to pursue their interests. Peace groups that began in the early 1980s drew membership and publicity from their participation in the Blues-Masses to become national organizations. The group «Schwerter zu Pflugscharen» had used the Blues-Masses as an opportunity to distribute posters and patches displaying their logo, and to publicize the «Friedenswerkstätten» that were also being held on the Erlöserkirche grounds. Other grassroots groups like «Frauen für den 456 Alison Furlong Frieden» and «Konkret für den Frieden» seem to have avoided the Blues- Mass scene entirely, but their presence in Church-owned spaces drew some of the more politically minded away from the hybrid Blues-Masses to singleissue events. Now these peace groups scattered to numerous parishes, including those in farther-flung areas of the GDR, so that their members no longer needed to make the risky trip to Berlin for sonic community. Environmentalists founded the Umweltbibliothek in the basement of the Zionskirche Gemeindehaus in 1986, where they became an important underground publishing house: rather than asking their public to come to them, they sent their texts out to an increasingly broad public. That library also became a popular venue for secular concerts and art exhibits. Meanwhile, some individuals and groups (especially the growing number of punk rock bands) found themselves as unwilling to accept the restrictions of the Church hierarchy as those of the state, and mistrustful of organizers following the Liberation Day fiasco. Several punk groups took up residence in the Erlöserkirche, which began to host purely secular concerts and festivals on its grounds. Finally, some of the strongest political voices, including the «Initiative Frieden und Menschenrechte (IFM),» several area «Peace Circles,» and the Umweltbibliothek launched the «Kirche von Unten (KvU),» the Church from Below, as a direct challenge to the Church hierarchy. The first «Kirchentag von Unten» was held 24 - 26 June 1987 opposite the official Church Day celebration of the 750th anniversary of Berlin’s founding. That event drew as many as 6,000 people by some accounts, eclipsing even the largest Blues-Masses in scope. The KvU became a way for these groups to advance their agenda without going through a hierarchy that they increasingly viewed as corrupt. In this way, each of the diverse groups that had coalesced into a single Blues-Mass public could continue to pursue its own goals, whether sacred or secular. With inclusive ideas about music, space, and community, Blues-Masses thus served as an incubator for broader social reform movements in East Germany, allowing grassroots groups to convene, develop their own agendas, and recruit new members. But the church settings could not adequately contain these groups once they had come to adulthood. We can see here a parallel to the rapid rise and fall of new East German political parties in 1989. Like the Blues-Mass audience, the varied collection of reform movements in the GDR was not a monolithic group. These movements formed an alliance under the common banner «Wir sind das Volk.» Later that battle cry became «Wir sind ein Volk,» a statement that, even as it appeared to call for German unification, simultaneously glossed over the very real differences that still existed amongst «the people.» 457 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues In the end, while state officials exerted direct pressure on Blues-Mass organizers, the effect of their efforts was indirect. Officials could not forcibly stop the events from occurring, or quash the dialog that took place within church walls; on the other hand, they were expert at sowing the seeds of discord. The more significant factor causing the splintering of the Blues- Masses was the diverse makeup of the publics it served and the uncertainty of the relationships between those groups. The pressures brought by Stasi agents and SED functionaries merely exacerbated those internal stresses. In a sense, the Blues-Masses were undone by their own success. In many respects, the Blues-Mass was a microcosm of the pluralistic society Hannah Arendt called for. With this pluralism, however, came new debates over sound, and new «threats to the social order» (Weiner 5). A single church space on a weekend was insufficient to accommodate such diversity of sound. Moreover, in order to engage with the broader society of the GDR, the actions of these grassroots groups, along with the sounds those actions produced, could not remain contained. Through sound, therefore, we may consider structures of power: what is music, what is beautiful, what is inappropriate, what is noise, and who decides. Action in public requires and produces sound, whether that be through sermons, organ music, or the ringing of church bells; the pluralistic subcultures who used churches each brought their own sounds with them, including electric guitar and harmonica, political speechifying, and rapid-fire punk drumming. Arguments over the Church’s public role are deeply intertwined with questions about how a church should sound. During the final years of the GDR in particular, the line between appropriate and inappropriate sounds grew ever blurrier as new groups laid claim to their own voice in this alternative public sphere. Notes 1 For a more complete analysis of the significance of the Blues-Masses over the seven years of their existence, please refer to my dissertation, «Resistance Rooms: Sound and Sociability in the East German Church» (Furlong). For a historical outline of the Blues-Mass phenomenon see Moldt. 2 For further analysis of the split from the West German Evangelical Church, as well as of debates over the 1968 Constitution see Goeckel. For discussion of the broader problems faced by the «Church within Socialism» as it tried to balance its religious and social missions see Tyndale. 3 Turner includes special mention of hippies, beatniks, and other members of the «optout» movements of the mid-twentieth century as emblematic of the «power of the weak.» They «‹opt out› of the status-bound social order and acquire the stigmata of the 458 Alison Furlong lowly, dressing like ‹bums,› itinerant in their habits, ‹folk› in their musical tastes [. . .].» In adopting this deliberately low status, he says, they bring the contrast between communitas - that of the eternal now - and structure - of the past and future - into relief, acting as living critiques of those structures. There are clear parallels with the hitchhikers and blues fans who frequented the Blues-Masses, and although this study concerns the bounded space of those events, there is work to be done on individuals in the GDR who adopted such a stance (Turner 112 - 13). 4 It is hard to ignore here the rhetorical similarity to «100 Points» by the Czech band Plastic People of the Universe. 5 For a discussion of music’s (and especially rhythm’s) contribution to ritual performance and communitas see Basso. 6 Although Walter Ulbricht reinstated English as an elective language in 1958, instruction seems to have been rudimentary at best, taught via a television series called «English For You» (EFY). Students were offered no opportunity to practice the language. 7 One pretext for starting Operativer Vorgang «Blues» in January 1981 was to prevent Eppelmann from scheduling a Blues-Mass in April of that year, opposite the Volkswahlen and the X. Parteitag der SED. Specific documentation of the obstruction process in this case was unavailable, but the next Blues-Mass did not occur until 26 June 1981 (BStU MfS HA XX/ 4 Nr. 267, 16 October 1981, «Sachstandsbericht zum OV ‹Blues›»). 8 For more on Namenlos and the Berlin punk scenes on both sides of the Berlin Wall see Hayton. Works Cited Archival Collections Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (BStU): BStU MfS BV Berlin AKG 1449. BStU MfS BV Berlin AKG 3962. BStU MfS HA XX/ 4 Nr. 267. BStU MfS HA XX Nr. 6015. Landesarchiv Berlin: C Rep. 104 Nr. 351, «Kirchliche Kinder- und Jugendarbeit 1955 - 1985.» C Rep. 104 Nr. 436, «Kirchliche Jugendarbeit 1979 - 1982.» Personal Interviews Eppelmann, Rainer. Personal interview. 19 Feb. 2013. Hauswald, Harald. Personal interview. 21 Feb. 2013. Krawczyk, Stephan. Personal interview. 29 Jan. 2013. «Malcolm.» Personal interview. 7 July 2012. Wekel, Luise. Personal interview. 12 July 2012. «Wolf.» Personal interview. 16 May 2012. 459 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues Secondary Literature «29 February 1980 Blues-Messe.» Berlin: Robert-Havemann-Gesellschaft, 2008. CD supplement to Moldt. «Anordnung des Nationalen Verteidigungsrates der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik über die Aufstellung von Baueinheiten im Bereich des Ministeriums für Nationale Verteidigung.» Gesetzblatt der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 16 Sept. 1964: 129. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958. Basso, Ellen B. «A ‹Musical View of the Universe: › Kalapalo Myth and Ritual as Religious Performance.» Journal of American Folklore 94 (1981): 273 - 91. Bibel: oder, Die ganze Heilige Schrift des Alten und Neuen Testaments, nach der deutschen Übersetzung Martin Luthers. Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1962. Furlong, Alison M. «Resistance Rooms: Sound and Sociability in the East German Church.» Diss. Ohio State U, 2015. Gautier, Ana María Ochoa. «Sonic Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification and the Aural Public Sphere in Latin America.» Social Identities 12.6 (2006): 803 - 25. Gieseke, Jens. The History of the Stasi: East Germany’s Secret Police, 1945 - 1990. New York: Berghahn Books, 2014. Goeckel, Robert F. The Lutheran Church and the East German State: Political Conflict and Change Under Ulbricht and Honecker. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. Goffman, Erving. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1969. Hayton, Jeff Patrick. «Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock, Authenticity and Alternative Culture in East and West Germany.» Diss. U of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign, 2013. Moldt, Dirk. Zwischen Hass und Hoffnung: Die Blues-Messen 1979 - 1986: Eine Jugendveranstaltung der Evangelischen Kirche Berlin-Brandenburg in ihrer Zeit: Eine Dokumentation. Berlin: Robert Havemann-Gesellschaft, 2008. Ramet, Sabrina P. Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics, and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998. Sakakeeny, Matt. «‹Under the Bridge›: An Orientation to Soundscapes in New Orleans.» Ethnomusicology 54.1 (2010): 1 - 27. Schröder, Bernd. Interview. 15 Sept. 2005. Transcript. CD supplement to Moldt. Seidenschnur, Heinz-Otto. Interview. 2 May 2005. Transcript. CD supplement to Moldt. Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1969. Tyndale, Wendy. Protestants in Communist East Germany: In the Storm of the World. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2010. «Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik.» Gesetzblatt der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 7 Oct. 1949: n. pag. «Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik.» Gesetzblatt der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 6 Apr. 1968: n. pag. 460 Alison Furlong Warner, Michael. «Publics and Counterpublics.» Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49 - 90. Weiner, Isaac. Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism. New York: New York UP, 2014. Appendix: Blues-Mass Dates, Themes, and Attendance Samariterkirche 1. 6. 1979: 1st Blues-Mass 13. 7. 1979: «Zwischen Haß und Hoffnung» - 400 to 500 in attendance 14. 9. 1979: «Aus Hoffnung leben» - 900 to 1,000 29. 2. 1980: «Frieden - Konfliktklärung ohne Gewalt» or «Gewalt - Gewaltverzicht! » - ca. 900 25. 4. 1980: «Zur Freiheit berufen» or «Freiheit - die wir meinen . . .» - ca. 1,500 Samariterkirche/ Auferstehungskirche 13. 6. 1980. «Leben macht Spaß» - 900 to 1,100 at two events 4. 7. 1980: «Angst überwinden» - 1,450 - 1,500 at two events 12. 9. 1980: «Nach dem Urlaub - Partnerschaft» - ca. 1,600 at two events Erlöserkirche 14. 11. 1980: «Umweltschutz (Wie gehe ich mit mir, mit Dir, mit der Erde um? )» - ca. 1,600 to 2,000 at three events 26. 6. 1981: «Hin- und Hergerissen» - ca. 2,000 27. 11. 1981: «Möglichkeiten zu leben» - 2,000 to 2,200 at three events 23. 4. 1982: «Lustlosigkeit» - ca. 2,600 at four events 2. 7. 1982: «Gewogen und als zu leicht befunden» - ca. 2,400 at four events 29. 4. 1983: «Versuchung» - ca. 2,500 at four events 24. 6. 1983: «Protestanten» - ca. 2,350 at four events 30. 9. 1983: «Wagnis um des Lebens willen» - ca. 2,850 at four events 27. 4. 1984: «Ein Tag wie jeder andere» (or «Zwischentöne») - ca. 2,500 at four events 16. 6. 1985: «Von der Befreiung zur Befreiung» - ca. 1,500 at four events 1. 6. 1986: «Rückgrat gefragt» - ca. 550 20. 9. 1986: «Betrogene Betrüger» - ca. 400 461 Politics, Faith, and the East German Blues