Visual Music: Jazz, Synaesthesia and the History of the Senses in the Weimar Republic
Jazz’s sensational appearance in Europe during the interwar period was a major event in European sound culture. The tours and residencies of American bands and musicians—such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or Sam Wooding—fundamentally disrupted and transformed the sonic aesthetics of European popular culture. Focusing on jazz as sound culture, however, can obscure the larger character of jazz and the nature of its production and perception. This article argues that jazz, in fact, was primarily a visual and textual phenomenon in Germany during 1920s. Most Germans, it shows, did not have access to live performances of jazz or radio and gramophones. Instead, they encountered it in newspapers and visual culture. This article explores what it meant for jazz to be visual and textual in the Weimar Republic. It also uses jazz as a window onto the larger history of the senses. A number of scholars have argued that the human senses were separated within modernity. This study argues that, within a growing media society such as early twentieth century Germany, the senses did not necessarily remain singular or divided. As this history of Weimar jazz suggests, modern media culture often promoted synaesthesia and perceptual mixing.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/32/2/201?rss=1
Godfather Cities: West German Patenschaften and the Lost German East
First developed during the First World War as a means to unify the nation and aid devastated German border communities, after World War Two ‘godfather cities’ (Patenschaften) took on an additional, territorial-revisionist objective: to assert the continued existence of (and thus national right to) German towns and regions lost in the aftermath of the latest national defeat. Upon receiving official state sanction after the founding of West Germany in May 1949, Patenschaften pursued these aims by seeking to preserve awareness of the lost territories’ culture and foster a sense of unity between millions of Germans expelled from the East and their new West German neighbours. Only in this way, it was presumed, could the lost German East live on culturally in West Germany and, one day, as a physical component of a unified German nation state. By 1970, however, it was clear that Patenschaften had failed in their official aims: few West Germans knew much of anything about the former areas of German settlement in the East, and expellees themselves had lost interest in moving back to their former homes. In an unexpected twist, this article reveals that Patenschaften not only transcended but even undermined and defeated demands for physical return. In almost every Patenstadt, expellees sanctified special sites where the very soil was supposed to represent the Heimat they had left behind. Regardless of their official purpose, by promoting the creation of this ‘surrogate Heimat,’ Patenschaften furthered the integration of almost nine million refugees who could otherwise have destabilized the very foundations of West German society.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/32/2/224?rss=1
Mediating the Enemy: Prussian representations of Austria, France and Sweden during the Seven Years War
This article aims to shed light on early modern images of intra-European ‘others’ and the interface between the transnational public sphere and politics of the time through an investigation of how the periodical Berlinische Privilegirte Zeitung framed Prussia’s adversaries Austria, France and Sweden during the Seven Years War (1756–1763). The global struggle was accompanied by intense wars of words and in print, but not all representations of the enemy ‘others’ in the Berlin periodical were negative in tone—some reports on the antagonistic powers were neutral or even positive. The pro-Prussian drive of the Berlinische Privilegirte Zeitung was therefore not, it appears, a comprehensive propaganda campaign; rather, it was the sum of a multitude of biased accounts that corresponded to the preferences of King Frederick II and his government. While the analysis corroborates the claim that the Seven Years War was primarily a political conflict, it simultaneously demonstrates that religious arguments were by no means obsolete. On the contrary, religion and politics were intimately intertwined in a master narrative defined by a sequence of dichotomies between ‘self’ and ‘other’. Even so, the article overall reveals the looser, more porous quality of identities in a period when religious essentialism had been decisively weakened and the rise of nationalism had yet to occur.
Quelle: http://gh.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/32/2/181?rss=1