Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century: An Introduction ed. by Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill (review)

Does sound play second fiddle to sight as a medium that can aid us as we decipher socio-political matrices of the past and present? The materiality of scholarly evidence—monographs, articles, and this review—certainly offers mountains of evidence that sustain the supremacy of visually consumable information. Nevertheless, the register of printed matter (the right “voice”), acknowledgments in dissertations to the conversation that spurred researchers’ initial questions, or the fifteen minutes of fame at a conference testifies to the aural skeleton founding our understanding of the world.

Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century: An Introduction offers a collection of essays that answer editors Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill’s call for a more explicit engagement with the sounds of the much-celebrated visual turn of the twentieth century. Their lament in the introduction—“why hasn’t sound been studied more?”—must be understood as a trompe l’oreille, for as the varied foci that follow prove, scholars have indeed kept their ears to the ground to lay bare that “it is in combination with the other senses that the visual makes more ‘sense’” (6). Feiereisen and Hill’s introduction uses popular culture and scholarly parsing of industrial-media soundscapes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to zero in on how the sounds of a visual culture undo and redo the public sphere. That these strikingly varied chapters—from explosions of World War I to the silence of the Stasi to the boasts of Bushido and Sido—read seamlessly testifies to the thoughtful engagement of the editors to each contribution, an editorial hand that highlights both overarching themes and pinpoint relationalities.

Germany’s loud twentieth century reaches from 1908 to 2010 and details a drive for acoustic solitude or acoustic solidarity. While the antinoise fantasies of Theodor Lessing are easy to laugh about, and when John Goodyear’s chapter parallels them with the invention of the earplug brand Ohropax, echoes of the philosophical plea and commercial invention are unmistakable in the enduring belief that “children should be seen, not heard” and in contemporary use of Ohropax in lieu of Ohrstöpsel. Other chapters demonstrate how the legacy of sonic engineering is borne out in the construction of philharmonic concert halls (Sabine von Fischer) and the aural politics of water-fountain conversations—or that quintessential rattletrap marker of the German Democratic Republic, the Trabant (Nicole Dietrich). Dietrich’s interviewees make clear that things sound different in today’s Germany in part because of a new kind of sonic engineering, but as David Tompkins argues in his contribution, also due to the loss of sound’s popular instance heard in the cohabitation of GDR Festspiele and Social Realism. A topic hinted at by many chapters, yet never explicitly engaged, is the extent to which the Berlin Republic carries on what Christiane Lenk calls the GDR’s “aural panopticon” (125)—the orchestration and monitoring of sound from above—particularly in light of recently surfaced legal questions around Internet eavesdropping in the name of antiterrorism.

Further contributions make clear that angst—of collective history created by the first broadcast of Günter Eich’s Hörspiel Dreams, of post-Wende loss felt by the protagonist C. in Wolfgang Hilbig’s Das Provisorium, or of transculturation incited by Bushido and Sido—is sound’s “cultural work.” Such phenomenological and psychological effects offer unique insights into the legacy of modernist projects and the status of contemporary “sound art.” To this end, Brett M. Van Hoesen and Jean-Paul Perrotte’s inventory of German sound art and Curtis Swope’s analysis of the “gaps and disjunctures” (84) of Germany’s socio-economic transition heard by Hilbig’s protagonist highlight the tensions and enduring resonance of sound imagery that move well beyond simple dynamics of composition and reception. Sound’s durability and power depend on a lack: namely, that we cannot close...