Daniel Morat

Public History sites often promise that visitors will be able to 'experience history'. From a historiographical perspective, this claim has repeatedly been criticized. The concept of aesthetic experience developed in popular culture research, however, can provide a more nuanced approach towards the experience of history. In light of these different perspectives, the article discusses the advantages of a cultural studies concept of aesthetic experience for the study of public history.

In the last few years, sound history has developed into a lively field of research within the science of history. Its relationship to public history, however, still seems to be undefined. On the one hand, many formats of public history – from television and radio documentaries through exhibitions up to audio walks and history apps – deliberately rely on auditory forms of representing and conveying history. On the other hand, a systematic analysis of the ways in which the auditory here works as a medium of history, however, still lacks. A particular aspect of this auditory mediation of history lies in the relationship to the past into which we are put, the moment we listen to historical voices.

In his 1930s memoir 'Berlin Childhood around 1900', Walter Benjamin recollects the ringing of the telephone as a sound that sharply interrupted the quiet of his middle-class family home and signalled the beginning of a new era. Following Benjamin's lead, the article retraces the decades around 1900 as an era of transformation in which fundamental changes in the urban environment, in society and technology also lead to a crucial change of auditory experience. The new sounds of this era, from telephone rings to city noises to gramophone recordings, and the ways in which contemporaries dealt with them can therefore be used as a kind of sonic probe to detect broader transformations of modern experience.

The history of music listening has focused mainly on art music and the cultivated listeners of the educated classes. But the nineteenth century saw not only the rise of concert music and its middle- and upper-class audiences, it also witnessed the “popular music revolution” in European and North American cities and metropolises. By drawing on the example of turn-of-the-century Berlin, this chapter explores the place of popular music within modern urban leisure culture. The chapter investigates the different venues and locations in which popular music was performed and consumed (dance halls, café terraces, amusements parks, street corners, and so on). Then it focuses on the ways in which popular music was listened to and appropriated by urbanites and how these urban-listening habits facilitated the process of mental adaptation to big-city life and the development of a metropolitan mentality.

Nachdem das Marschlied über die „Berliner Luft“ von Paul Lincke 1904 uraufgeführt wurde, entwickelte es sich rasch zu einem der populärsten Berliner Gassenhauer der Zeit. 1905 be- merkte Hans Ostwald: „In diesem Marschlied liegt wirklich etwas von dem preußischen Geist des neuen Berlin.“ Allerdings behielt das Lied auch nach dem Untergang des Wilhel- minischen Reichs seine Popularität und etablierte sich über die politischen Regimewechsel des 20. Jahrhunderts hinweg als inoffizielle „Berliner Nationalhymne“. Der Beitrag unter- sucht im ersten Teil die Entstehungsbedingungen dieses Marschlieds im Kontext der Berli- ner Unterhaltungs- und Militärmusik um 1900 und arbeitet die Bedeutung der populären Gassenhauer bei der Konstruktion einer Berliner Stadtidentität heraus. Im zweiten Teil ver- folgt er die Karriere der „Berliner Luft“ als inoffizieller Stadthymne durch das 20. Jahrhun- dert bis hin zu den Berliner Philharmonikern, die das Lied seit 1992 traditionell als Finale des Saisonabschlusskonzerts auf der Waldbühne spielen.

According to German sociologist Georg Simmel, the inhabitants of the modern metropolis are characterized by a heightened nervous sensitivity caused by constant visual and acoustic over- stimulation. This sensory overstimulation takes place primarily on the streets of the modern city centers. Around 1900, on the peek of western urbanization, the city center streets were not only crowded by an increasing number of pedestrians, but also by all sorts of vehicles and animals, street vendors and peddlers, coffeehouse and kiosk customers, newspaper sellers and beggars.
The article examines the place of street music within this cacophony of the modern city street by looking at Berlin between 1880 and 1914. During this time, street music has been the object of public debate. Whereas some considered it to be noise and wanted to ban it from the street, others defended street music as being a vital part of modern urban culture. Street music was thus located at the intersection of the problem of modern city noise on the one hand and the development of a new urban amusement culture and entertainment industry on the other hand. On a more general level, performing street music and regulating and debating it was part of negotiating public urban space and of appropriating the city.
Drawing on recent scholarship both from urban history and from sound studies, the article explores the different ways in which street music occupied and defined public urban space acous- tically and thereby contributed to forming the modern city consciousness in the sense of Georg Simmel. It does so in two steps: In the first part, it takes a closer look at the anti-noise campaigns of the time and at the role street music played within these campaigns. In the second part, it analyzes the relationship between street music and the expanding popular music industry with a special focus on the Gassenhauer and their circulation between music theater stages, dance halls and street corners.

The article analyses acoustic practices in Berlin during the First World War in two examples: the acoustic mobilization through singing and shouting on the streets at the outbreak of the war and the performance and consumption of popular music throughout the war. By investigating the acoustic dimension of the urban public sphere during the war, the article stresses the importance of sound in processes of political mobilization and of managing the home-front morale. It shows how attention to sound can add to our previous understanding of political and cultural practices and developments in wartime.

Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger rightly count among the signal examples of intellectual complicity with National Socialism. But after supporting the National Socialist movement in its early years, they both withdrew from political activism during the 1930s and considered themselves to be in “inner emigration” thereafter. How did they react to the end of National Socialism, to the Allied occupation and finally to the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949? Did they abandon their stance of seclusion and engage once more with political issues? Or did they persist in their withdrawal from the political sphere? In analyzing the intellectual relationship of Heidegger and Jünger after 1945, the article reevaluates the assumption of a “deradicalization” (Jerry Muller) of German conservatism after the Second World War by showing that Heidegger’s and Jünger’s postwar positions were no less radical than their earlier thought, although their attitude towards the political sphere changed fundamentally.