How is a nation's identity built? What are the characteristics of a particular country? What reasons do most people have for choosing their holiday destination? Usually the answers to such questions – somehow related to the abstract field of cultural representations – provoke associations with the field of the visual. However – apart from national anthems – what does sound have to do with cultural representations? From the perspective of cultural studies the field of sound is still under-represented as a research topic and an indicator of social phenomena. This is one of the points of departure of the essay collection Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century, edited by Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill. The editors view the discovery of sound as a serious research topic for cultural studies and thus offer a new kind of social approach to what sound studies calls sound ecology.
The book is introduced as a kind of case study of German sound, giving the impression or taking it as a presumption that there is something special which can be called ‘German Sound’. Through the use of an anecdote – the well-known incident in Germany of Sarah Connor forgetting the text of the national anthem – it is explained that there are extreme differences between German and US-American sound culture. Identifying singing as an important function of the expression of national identity, in their introduction the editors make the so-called ‘Hymnen-Streit’ a much bigger topic than it ever was in the German media. The question of the national anthem can be considered as being another part of the field of sound as cultural representation. Referring later to R. Murray Schafer and his idea that ‘the general acoustic environment of a society’ can ‘be read as an indicator of the social conditions which produce it and may tell us much about the trending and evolution of the society’ (2), the editors attempt to use the perspective of cultural studies to examine an important sphere of the social world – the consciously as well as the unconsciously existing sphere of the aural – looking for approaches which are not at first glance psychoacoustic or musicological.
Under the primary perspective of German and cultural studies, some already established theories in the discipline of sound studies appear in new interpretations – in particular, McLuhan's idea of the social role of an acoustic space is given new importance. Thus, the editors propose that their work should be seen primarily as a plea for the establishment of transdisciplinary soundscape studies.
Although the phenomena presented in the book are quite diverse and not homogeneous, there is an attempt here to establish a kind of chronology to unify two articles dealing with different but somehow relative phenomena under the title of one section. Five such sections each open up a field in which sound appears as an interesting research object within the sphere of cultural studies. These fields include sound art, sound and politics, the role of sound in the divided Germany, the sound character of certain spaces, and the new forms of sound and noise appearance in the early twentieth century and social reactions to them.
The first section of the book takes it as a presumption that there was a new awakening of sound and noise at the beginning of the twentieth century due to factors such as industrialisation and a new kind of urbanisation. From there, also presuming that every soundscape consists of distinct sound events which had to be considered in a larger context, including the conditions of their reception, the question arises of how this world of ‘increasing noise’ and loudness was viewed. The phenomena of anti-noise movements and inventions are discussed, particularly that of Theodor Lessing's ‘Antilärmverein’ (‘anti-noise association’, under-represented until recently in serious research) in an article by John Goodyear. Goodyear also develops a summary of the long history of the earplug, illuminating in a certain way the philosophical concept of the antipodes silence and noise. The important role of the radio as a sound source determining the lives of Germans from the 1920s onwards is only touched on by Robert Ryder's analysis of Günter Eich's radio play Dreams from 1951, attributing a specific new role to the piece. The author employs the theories of Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin in a surprising manner in order to develop his concept of unconscious listening.
That a sound can help to define a certain space may appear at first glance to be a commonplace, but two very different perspectives on sound as characteristic of a certain space bring important aspects to the discussion. The interpenetration of sound and space is developed here as an interesting social component – namely the proposition of Yaron Jean to analyse the role of the auditory in the battlefields of World War One. Jean thus develops the interesting category of ‘sonic mindedness’. Sabine von Fischer brings an inner sense to the acoustic perspective, dealing with the field of perception in concert halls. Her central question is how the experiences of physical acoustics were brought back to the arts and thus to society.
The title of section three ‘East and West: Sounds in the Shadow of the Wall’ immediately gives an idea of there being a central problem of the German soundscape of the twentieth century. The division into East and West Germany made the experience of being different and same a guiding issue. Thus, the question of whether this central point had its reflection in the sphere of sound is an important consideration. Of course there is not really an answer to the question ‘Did East and West Germany sound different?’, at least because there would not be just one answer. But asking this question is revolutionary from an anthropological external perspective, because everybody seems to know that the two Germanys looked and smelt different. The investigations of East and West German soundscapes proposed here use different methodological means – both journalistic and literary. Thus, this is first of all the sources of the analysis, which differ and which lead to quite different results. Both authors – Curtis Swope, who examines Wolfgang Hilbig's novel Das Provisorium, and Nicole Dietrich, who uses interviews with contemporary witnesses on the sound of the East and the West – deal with representations of the soundscapes rather than with the soundscapes themselves (in the form of recordings or something comparable), using transcriptions of the soundscapes into words; and both authors search for the relationship between soundscape and identity. The somehow intriguing results of this section can be discussed further in the context of other fields of identity studies.
The book also deals with aspects of the interaction of politics and sound. David Tompkins investigates the political use of sound in the early GDR years as a political medium in the Cold War era, with particular reference to the Stalinist understanding of the role and function of music, as well as the control of the use of sound within this political system. The author makes various observations on some typical music festivals of the late 1950s and gives an impression of the existence of a very controlled sound sphere, which was nevertheless characterised by the existence of the ‘other’ German state. The effect of this knowledge on East German culture is not much taken into account, although the politics of so called Estradenkonzerte and rural festivals (which are both described in detail in this article) can be seen as reactions to this knowledge.
Christiane Lenk deals with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's award-winning film The Lives of Others in a very intriguing way. She takes as a departure point the idea that the history of surveillance was at least as much a history of sound as it was of vision. Of course, this may be disputed as a way to analyse the different spheres of the appearance of sound in the surveillance network, represented in art work as being relevant to its historic content, but nevertheless this analysis of an art work dealing with the sound of the GDR says a lot about our perspective today on the GDR, its use of sound and the role of sound in society generally. This article deals with an abstract and sensitive research topic in a very intense and detailed manner, which has been hitherto neglected in research into GDR issues.
Only at the end – in the fifth section of the book – is a perspective on sound art in the proper sense introduced, with an examination of the very special example of ‘The Sound of German Space in Rap and Hip-Hop’. This is conducted by Maria Stehle and includes a very wide overview of an impressive selection of movements within German sound art in the twentieth century. Brett M. van Hoesen and Jean-Paul Perrotte present their perspective on the development of sound from Dada to Christina Kubisch as being an ambivalent, multi-layered sphere of interpretations, connotations and concrete phenomena in a field which is still growing.
Nevertheless, hardly any of the approaches presented in this book (apart from one of the observations on the GDR) takes account of the fact that German culture never became homogeneous, and that it was always very much influenced and dominated by federalist policy and regional cultures, which also included its influence on soundscapes.
Although it is possible that this approach does not provide a much greater understanding of sound or music studies, this kind of study of sound can offer a great deal to cultural studies and even to sociology. Perhaps it could then bring interesting approaches back to the sound studies field in a wider sense. Thus, the subtitle ‘An Introduction’ may appear to make sense, although the book presents first of all a series of case studies – which are more or less of interest depending on the main focus of the reader's approach to the field of soundscape.
