Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture

Nora M. Alter, Lutz Peter Koepnick

Berghahn Books, 2004 - Music - 257 pages

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.

Contents

• German Identity Music: 33
• The Third Symphony and the Political: 49
• Nazi Germany as: 65
• The Politics and Sounds of Everyday Life in Kuhle Wampe: 79
• Aural Strategies in Rolf Thieles: 91
• Word and Flesh in Fassbinders: 104
• Benjamins Silence: 117
• Silence Is Golden? The Short Fiction of Pieke Biermann: 142
• Transmission Dissemination: 155
• Sounds Familiar? Nina Simones Performances: 171
• Roll Over Beethoven Chuck Berry Mick Jagger 1960s Rock: 183
• The Music That Lola Ran To: 197
• Heiner Goebbels and the Music: 217
• Music Media and Memory: 228
• Notes on Contributors: 242

About the author

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."

Bibliographic information

• Title: Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture; Berghahn Series; G - Reference,Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series
• Editors: Nora M. Alter, Lutz Peter Koepnick
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Berghahn Books, 2004
• ISBN: 1571814361, 9781571814364
• Length: 257 pages
• Subjects: Music / Genres & Styles / International; Music / Philosophy & Social Aspects; Science / Acoustics & Sound; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social; Social Science / General; Social Science / Media Studies