| Contents |
Part 1. Sound nation? Hegemony through harmony: German identity, music, and enlightenment around 1800 / Nicholas Vazsonyi -- Mahler contra Wagner: the Third Symphony and the political legacy of romanticism / Carl Niekerk -- Conducting music, conducting war: Nazi Germany as an acoustic experience / Frank Trommler -- Part II. Dissonant visions. The politics and sounds of everyday life in Kuhle Wampe / Nora M. Alter -- Sound money: aural strategies in Rolf Thiele's The Girl Rosemarie / Hester Baer -- The castrato's voices: word and flesh in Fassbinder's In a Year of Thirteen Moons / Brigitte Peucker -- Part III. Sounds of silence. Benjamin's silence / Lutz Koepnick -- Deafening sound and troubling silence in Volker Schlondorff's Die Blechtrommel / Elizabeth C. Hamilton -- Silence is golden? The short fiction of Pieke Biermann / Christopher Jones -- Part IV. Translating sound. Broadcasting Wagner: transmission, dissemination, translation / Thomas F. Cohen -- Sounds familiar? Nina Simone's performances of Brecht/Weill songs / Russell A. Berman -- Roll over Beethoven! Chuck Berry! Mick Jagger! 1960s rock, the myth of progress, and the burden of national identity in West Germany / Richard Langston -- The music that Lola ran to / Caryl Flinn -- Part V. Memory, music, and the postmodern. "Heiner Muller vertonen": Heiner Goebbels and the music of postmodern memory / David Barnett -- The technological subject: music, media, and memory in Stockhausen's Hymnen / Larson Powell. |
| Abstract |
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, these essays 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. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| LCCN | 2003063625 |
| ISBN | 1571814361 (alk. paper) |
