Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture

Published by Berghahn Books 2004

Sound Matters

Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture

Edited by: Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781782381723

Overview
Contents

About this book

The sounds of music and the German language have played a significant role in the developing symbolism of the German nation. In light of the historical division of Germany into many disparate political entities and regional groups, German artists and intellectuals of the 19th and early 20th centuries conceived of musical and linguistic dispositions as the nation's most palpable common ground. According to this view, the peculiar sounds of German music and of the German language provided a direct conduit to national identity, to the deepest recesses of the German soul. So strong is this legacy of sound is still prevalent in modern German culture that philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in a recent essay, did not even hesitate to describe post-wall Germany as an "acoustical body."

This volume gathers the work of scholars from the US, Germany, and the United Kingdom to explore the role of sound in modern and postmodern German cultural production. Working across established disciplines and methodological divides, the essays of Sound Matters investigate the ways in which texts, artists, and performers in all kinds of media have utilized sonic materials in order to enforce or complicate dominant notions of German cultural and national identity.

Author / Editor information

Nora M. Alter is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Indiana UP, 1996) and Projecting History: German Non-Fiction Film 1967-2000, (University of Michigan Press, 2002). She has published articles in New German Critique, The Germanic Review, Cultural Critique, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, and contributed essays to Beyond 1989, Imperialism and Theatre and Triangulated Visions. She is currently working on a project on the "The Essay Film."

Lutz Koepnick is Associate Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (The University of Nebraska Press, 1999), for which he received the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2000; and of Nothungs Modernität: Wagners Ring und die Poesie der Politik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1994). His next book, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood, will be published this fall by the University of California Press. He is currently working on a project, "Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture."

Nora M. Alter is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (Indiana UP, 1996) and Projecting History: German Non-Fiction Film 1967-2000, (University of Michigan Press, 2002). She has published articles in New German Critique, The Germanic Review, Cultural Critique, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, and contributed essays to Beyond 1989, Imperialism and Theatre and Triangulated Visions. She is currently working on a project on the "The Essay Film."

Reviews

“This volume is a most welcome contribution to an area of inquiry the editors concede as been slow to flourish in German Cultures Studies…the polished and thought-provoking essays in this anthology will lead readers to begin hearing things differently in their own research and teaching.” · German Studies Review

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: Sound Matters Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I: Sound Nation?
1. Hegemony through Harmony: German Identity, Music, and Enlightenment around 1800 Nicholas Vazsonyi Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
2. Mahler contra Wagner: The Third Symphony and the Political Legacy of Romanticism Carl Niekerk Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
3. Conducting Music, Conducting War: Nazi Germany as an Acoustic Experience Frank Trommler Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
Part II: Dissonant Visions
4. The Politics and Sounds of Everyday Life in Kuhle Wampe Nora M. Alter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
5. Sound Money: Aural Strategies in Rolf Thiele’s The Girl Rosemarie Hester Baer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	91
6. The Castrato’s Voices: Word and Flesh in Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons Brigitte Peucker Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	104
Part III: Sounds of Silence
7. Benjamin’s Silence Lutz Koepnick Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
8. Deafening Sound and Troubling Silence in Volker Schlöndorff’s Die Blechtrommel Elizabeth C. Hamilton Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	130
9. Silence Is Golden? The Short Fiction of Pieke Biermann Christopher Jones Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
Part IV: Translating Sound
10. Broadcasting Wagner: Transmission, Dissemination, Translation Thomas F. Cohen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	155
11. Sounds Familiar? Nina Simone’s Performances of Brecht/Weill Songs Russell A. Berman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
12. Roll Over Beethoven! Chuck Berry! Mick Jagger! 1960s Rock, the Myth of Progress, and the Burden of National Identity in West Germany Richard Langston Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
13. The Music That Lola Ran To Caryl Flinn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Part V: Memory, Music, and the Postmodern
14. “Heiner Müller vertonen”: Heiner Goebbels and the Music of Postmodern Memory David Barnett Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
15. The Technological Subject: Music, Media, and Memory in Stockhausen’s Hymnen Larson Powell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	228
Notes on Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	242
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245

Language: English
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 266
Keywords: Cultural Studies (General); Media Studies

eBook

Published: November 1, 2004
ISBN: 9781782381723