Klang—Bild—Sprache. Musikalisch-akustische Konfigurationen in der Literatur und im Film der Gegenwart by Ulrich Schönherr (review)

The study of the reciprocal effectivity between word, sound, and image has taken a prominent place in the field of German Studies over the past two decades, and Ulrich Schönherr’s new book makes a valuable interdisciplinary contribution to this ongoing discussion. In six sophisticated chapters, he explores how “diverse Funktionen und Repräsentationsmodi von Musik, Klang und Geräusch” (7) critique the production of meaning in a number of critically acclaimed works of late twentieth-century film, literature, and radio. These works include Gert Jonke’s trilogy of novels about the composer Burgmüller (1977–1982), Peter Handke’s book-length essay Versuch über die Jukebox (1990), Edgar Reitz’s film series Die Zweite Heimat (1992), Georges Perec’s experimental radio play Die Maschine (1972), Wim Wenders’s film Lisbon Story (1994), and Marcel Beyer’s novel Flughunde (1995).

Schönherr’s careful analysis reveals how sonoric discourses and phenomena function to produce, reproduce, or subvert instances of power and knowledge in society. Each essay is an interrelated study that can be read independently of the others, and that asks different hermeneutical questions from the theoretical perspectives of cultural history, linguistics, literary analysis, musicology, philosophy, or psychoanalysis. Big questions include: How does the qualification of music as “feminine” pathologize gender? How might technology potentiate the discursive contours of music? What is the intermedial relationship between literature and music? And how might sound transvaluate history as a method of Vergangenheitsbewältigung?

These issues have preoccupied many researchers working in the (broadly construed) field of Sound Studies, but Schönherr succeeds in teasing out new readings by focusing on both the materiality and historical contextualization of signification. They also nicely dovetail with his own project—as a self-identified literary scholar—to better understand the cultural-revolutionary power of sound by way of other textual media. His investigations are marked by a keen interest in early romanticism with its valorization of music’s hermeneutic inexhaustibility and the radical work of New Music with its ability to highlight society’s contradictions and tensions. In addition to the usual prefatory work of the book’s introduction, the most insightful and persuasive chapters are those on Handke, Perec, and Wenders.

In his wide-ranging introduction, Schönherr traces key moments in the cultural construction of music’s mythic power from the Ancient Greeks to the early romantics and New Media theorists. He shows how music is not only a gendered mechanism of social control, but also a signifying system that opens up new horizons of meaning beyond the confines of human language. The second chapter on Handke’s Versuch über die Jukebox explores how the apparatus’s technical reproducibility provides the essay’s protagonist with an archive of reauratized musical fragments, which can be integrated into his imaginary as moments of “kultureller Vielfalt und subjektiven Lebensentwürfen” (77). The fourth chapter on Perec’s Die Maschine argues how the use of machine language rules deconstructs Goethe’s famous poem “Wandrers Nachtlied II” along rhetorical models of speech and music. This “Musikalisierung eines literarischen Modells” (124) initiates a process of ever-changing semanticiziation that places our minds into a state of free play (Spiel). Finally, the fifth chapter on Wenders’s Lisbon Story shows how the use of (asynchronous) sound and speech—as well as the techniques of sound recording and playback—allows not only the film’s protagonist, a sound engineer, to create a highly personalized fantasy of the Portuguese capital, but also allows the work’s spectators to actively participate in the “Sinnkonstitution des Films” (139).

Except for the lengthy essay on Perec, the majority of the book’s chapters have been previously published in a number of well-known journals—such as Germanic Review, Monatshefte, and New German Critique—and have attracted scholarly recognition. Although these essays were “neu durchgesehen und teilweise erheblich überarbeitet” (193), the...