Introduction: Early Sound Cinema in the Late Weimar Republic JOHN E. DAVIDSON/ THEODORE F. RIPPEY T HE O HIO S TATE U NIVERSITY / B OWLING G REEN S TATE U NIVERSITY The adjective «early» generates associations with rudimentary and simple, but the articles in this special issue of Colloquia Germanica consistently reveal how refined and complex the production and reception of German sound film had already become during its first two years of existence. Building on the work of Thomas Koebner, Corinna Müller, Jörg Schweinitz, and others who have focused on the silent-to-sound transition, the volume’s contributors analyze a sample of works that ranges from light to heavy, canonical to obscure, always with an eye - and ear - toward the intricacies of the film texts themselves and their multi-layered technical, social, and cultural contexts. Their common intent is to make faded dimensions visible and audible again, dimensions of a medial world that came into being as the Republic came to an end. Beyond the insights that the contributors provide into individual films and artists, their papers are connected by three overarching concerns. First, there are the shifts in the technical and social experience of aurality that preceded, coincided with, and proceeded from sound film and that had an increasing impact throughout late Weimar culture. Rippey opens the volume with an exploration of the sophisticated nature of the early sound-film debate, using Alfred Zeisler’s locked-door whodunit Der Schuss im Tonfilmatelier (The Shot on the Soundstage, 1930) to describe a moment of transition not just in the way screenwriters worked with and against the audience’s knowledge of sound technique, but also in the role sound technology plays in situating us in time and space. The Tonfilm not only expands the spatial construction of cinema for the viewer, Rippey argues; Zeisler’s film shows that the increasing penetration of the world by recording devices changes one’s sense of placement in time as well, for moments that had been thought lost can now be heard again. Rippey concludes by exploring Siegfried Kracauer’s dismissal of Der Schuss in light of his overall attention to experience in modernity, showing why the Weimar theoretician missed the significance of this film as a document of «technically augmented aurality» at the turn of the 1930s. 234 John E. Davidson/ Theodore F. Rippey Sound film production required not only new studio designs to accommodate technical developments such as «blimped» cameras and sound booths; it also brought with it a need for new techniques in acting and voice. In her contribution, Kata Gellen analyzes how the vocal training thematized in Josef von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930) reflects specifically l modern aspects of the physical and social regimentation of the voice. Beginning with a discussion of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Gellen argues that technical developments and social realignments made possible - even demanded - a conception of voice training as part of a physiological education tied to social advancement. Der blaue Engel continues a trajectory of works l exploring modernity’s «nexus of vocal refinement, social ascendancy, and professional success in the context of theater and pedagogy.» Professor Rath and Lola-Lola illuminate the professional and personal tragedy of such vocal training that was already latent in Eliza Doolittle’s fate, and Gellen’s article uncovers the sonic registers that mark its staging in this iconic sound film. Where Gellen’s contribution shows the hidden double edge of vocal training in ordering society, Nancy Nenno’s discussion of Victor Trivas’s Niemandsland (No-Man’s Land, 1931) shows a more utopian project, an d «esperantist approach to sound cinema,» which according to Trivas seeks a «gemeinsame Sprache […], jene Sprache der einfachen menschlichen Gefühle.» This drama of forced cohabitation, involving soldiers from the enemy nations of World War I, moves through stages toward such a common language by first allowing Europeans to free themselves from the role of mediums for bellicose nationalism. The different uses of language in this film, as well as the language of film itself, become the means by which the soldiers who are able to speak each slowly develop voices of their own. When they finally learn to do without the divisions of national speech, the film’s mute character comes to share in a common, cinematically rendered language of feelings. Yet, Trivas’s cinematic esperantism faces challenges that it cannot overcome: the meld of aural and visual means he deploys to erase national divisions relies on racialized visual markers that etch non-European others more starkly. The complex balance of sound, sight, and silence (and, in this case, silencing) that Nenno maps in this film is explored in other contributions as well. The necessity of consistent attention to the interwoven nature of the aural and the visual in the early Tonfilm is the second recurring focus of this volume, because the emergence of sound in the cinema is not simply an addition to a visual medium. The contributors trace and extend the thinking of those Weimar-era observers who saw sound as returning the medium of film to a point of technical origin, and their scholarly investigation of the aural experience of a public increasingly familiar with the new medium opens Early Sound Cinema in the Late Weimar Republic 235 new avenues for understanding Weimar’s multifaceted cinematic world. The contributions show the truly integrated status that sound and image achieved already very soon after sound’s introduction, and their most telling interpretative turns arise from a nuanced understanding of the mutually reinforcing nature of the aural and the visual in the formal fabric of the film text. In order to give a sense of the manner in which two canonical films might have spoken differently to contemporary audiences, Katherine Roper develops the notion of «sounds of the city.» Used to describe the filmic tone given the experience of the modern metropolis, this idea refers to the blend of sounds, sights, and silences that «narrates» this world, in Roper’s term; a blend that corresponds to the multiplicity of social moods of late Weimar. But as telling as this harmony of different registers can be, the tensions between aural and visual tracks are often just as important. This productive tension is also illustrated by Christian Rogowski’s elucidation of the «politics of sound» in Ludwig Berger’s Ich bei Tag und du bei Nacht (I by Day, You by Night, 1932). Carefully placing this boy-meets-girl story in the political and economic context of the day, the former hidden and the latter foregrounded by Berger, Rogowski teases out a subtext inclined toward «enlightened liberal pragmatism» from the film’s recurrent misdirection of viewers’ habituated reactions to sounds and sights. This rests on a twofold self-reflection: the first involving the film’s narrative and the film-withinthe-film structure; the second arising from deliberately staged out-of-synch moments between the image and sonic registers at key points. In particular, he argues, the play with diegetic and non-diegetic sound elements serves an important function, for the film’s repeated «unmasking of seemingly nondiegetic music as part of the diegesis […] trains its audience to be enlightened viewers.» Again, as is highlighted by the other contributors in this volume, sound film of the period is shown to involve an inherently pedagogical element, and in this case it is no less politically engaged for not having been taken up by the audience outside the theater. The third consistently honed point in this volume is that the culture of the late Weimar era, if studied seriously on its own terms, remains fertile ground for innovative work that creates connections amongst films and between fields of life that seem at first remote from one another. Rogowski emphasizes that the political subtext of Berger’s film cannot be dismissed simply because it did not single-handedly halt the rise of Nazism. He thus maintains that our understanding of Weimar sound film must be freed from overly limiting frameworks provided by the proximity to the Nazi period, without forgetting about it. Roper avers with good cause that the same is true for the power exerted on scholars by the image of the Republic’s final years as per- 236 John E. Davidson/ Theodore F. Rippey meated by crisis: such a word gives us too seamless an image of the world, as Béla Balázs insisted at the time. Starting from Michael Wedel’s evocation of films as markers of «futures past» in a multitude of «crisis histories,» John Davidson’s contribution wrestles with the inescapable fact that crisis distributes itself unevenly across populations and time periods, as well as with the equally inescapable convergence of a proto-Volksgemeinschaft with the resolution of Wilhelm Thiele’s «Tonfilmoperette,» Die Drei von der Tankstelle (The Three from the Gas Station, 1930). Davidson finds a useful heuristic in the vertically integrated corporate structures that helped the biggest players in the oil industries to flourish during both Weimar crises that wiped so many out financially. The sublation of the related discourse of automobility into the soundscape and musical staging of Thiele’s film leads Davidson to propose a renewed symptomatic reading of cynical films, an approach that Slavoj Žižek dismisses because such films were not meant to be taken seriously in the first place. The contribution shows that it is precisely because of popular cinema’s seriously non-serious nature that such a reading lets so much ring through these early sound films as they drive us along the very different highways and byways of «the crisis years.» This volume originated with two panels organized by Christian Rogowski for the annual conference of the German Studies Association in autumn 2012. The sessions included several participants of the German Film Institute seminar «The Cinema of Crisis: German Film, 1928-1936» organized by Johannes von Moltke at the University of Michigan that spring. The GSA panels drew the attention of Harald Höbusch, who approached the participants on behalf of Colloquia Germanica about publishing a special issue. Co-editors John Davidson and Ted Rippey had invaluable assistance from Jaclyn Kurash, and the editorial team could not be happier with the growth toward cohesion in the essays presented here. We close with a word of thanks to everyone who played a part in this truly collaborative process: our colleagues just mentioned, all those who offered critique and encouragement from the conference panels through final manuscript revision, and our fellow contributors, who responded to every query, no matter how small.