Klangbild and Interwar German Media THEODORE F. RIPPEY BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY In the technical and critical discourse on sound cinema and broadcasting in the interwar era, Klangbild described a purely sonic form that both enveloped the audience and presented itself as an object of perception, placing the listener in a processing scenario radically different than that of the viewer. In what follows, I reconstruct the concept of Klangbild and trace how the sound-images of new media generated a heightened awareness of hearing as both general sensory experience and specific aesthetic event. As a mediagenerated sonic form that raised attentiveness to aural attention itself, the Klangbild had something in common with the Hörbild that became a frequent component of radio offerings in the 1920s. But the two were not identical: a Hörbild was a sonic image and a fully formed text, meant to be interpreted as a narrative or episode, contemplated as an «acoustic portrait» (Birdsall, «Sonic Artefacts» 136). A Klangbild was a concentrated dose of sonic information as well as the actual patterns of disruption of the air that the amplified playback of a sound recording created: it was a more narrowly defined component of a radio Hörbild, a sound film, or an experiment in sound art. Klangbild was discussed primarily in technical and critical circles, and that discussion frequently focused on the sheer sensory dimension. The advent of this medial sound image catalyzed shifts in the modern relationship between perception, space, and time, thus refiguring the reach, bounds and even nature of the perceiving human being. The texts that I examine here represent both technical and conceptual grappling with these shifts. My readings thus integrate reconstructed episodes of acoustic practice and sketches of the interwar acoustical imagination. Klangbild was not thinkable without wires, magnets, and tube amplifiers, but it also broke free of headphones, loudspeakers, and purpose-built auditoriums. The more common the experience of sound media became in the 1920s, the more listeners started to perceive the urban spaces through which they moved as auditory fields filled with a mix of exciting and overwhelming sound images. To structure such fields and lend contours to the aural experiences within them was to shape life at a sensory level - it was not simply the airwaves but the air itself that became a matrix of creative opportunity and a field of social struggle. The first and last texts that I analyze in this article are a 1925 feuilleton and a 1938 critical essay by Joseph Roth. These texts do not explicitly name the concept of Klangbild. Rather, they offer two renderings of it, and these renderings illustrate a sound-cultural shift that takes place in the interwar period. In the mid-1920s, Roth frames the Klangbilder that erupt from a spectacular sporting event as both a cultural shock and an aesthetic opportunity. In the late1930s, he argues that fascism’s acoustic disturbance has catastrophically damaged the unruly yet fertile sound culture of the Weimar years and threatened the most fundamental vocal elements of civilization. Between the analyses of these two pieces by Roth, I consider texts from the cinema and radio trade press, each of which provides an instructive impression of how artists, technicians, and critics exploited (or hoped to exploit) technology to create new forms of sound and new modes of sound experience for their respective media audiences. With the aesthetic emphasis of the first Roth text and the political emphasis of the second in mind, I consider the aesthetic and political dimensions of the technical discussion of Klangbild, even when those dimensions are not specifically treated by the authors themselves. In his seminal artwork essay, Walter Benjamin posits that a principal task of avant-garde art is to generate perceptual needs that emergent media will eventually fulfill: the audiovisual shocks of Dadaism, he suggests as an example, were an attempt to create effects that the public would come to seek in sound film (Benjamin, «Das Kunstwerk» 500—02). Extending this line of thought, I argue that the convergence of aural-representational practices and technologies in broadcasting and sound cinema triggered needs on the creative-productive side as well as the receptive side of interwar aesthetic exchange. Today, people who want to represent their aural experience can simply make a podcast. In the 1920s and 1930s, no such personalized technology existed, but the need to capture, shape, and share sound, born of the ubiquity of gramophone, radio, and film sound-images, is written all over the hearing-based feuilleton of the interwar years. Solving that recording problem involved hacking the medium of print. A paradigmatic example is «Das XIII. Berliner Sechstagerennen,» a Roth feuilleton from January 1925. The six-day races were velodrome cycling events, in which teams of two riders raced alternating legs for 144 hours. They drew massive crowds in Weimar-era Berlin and other major cities. Roth’s text is fascinating in this regard because of its frequent synesthetic fusion of sound and vision, which is characteristic of his ongoing attempt to 390 Theodore F. Rippey leverage the medium of print to produce new textual images of sensory experience. A first instance comes near the beginning of the text: Es sind nur noch hundert Stunden bis zum Ende. Wenn ich dabliebe, ich bekäme die Physiognomie jenes Megaphons, durch das dem Publikum in diesem Irrenhaus diverse Mitteilungen gemacht werden. Eigentlich wunder, dass diese Menschen immerhin noch wie Menschen aussehen. Sie müssten aussehen wie Megaphone, wie Schreie, wie brutale Lüste, wie Bier-Ekstasen, wie Fahrräder, wie blinde Begierden, wie dekadente Barbarei. (331) Roth moves here from the fantastical image of a person as a megaphone (a mechanical technology of amplification) to a synesthetic image of a person as a scream - a grammatically unreal, textually rendered sound-image. These images pair with actual screams, which Roth, using signal-processing mechanisms of memory, edits together into a complex sound-form: Dort, wo der Lichtkegel mit messerscharfem Rand den Schatten schneidet, wirken Millionen Stäubchen. Wenn der Schrei der Menge ertönt, geraten sie in Unordnung, und es kommen Tumult, Schrecken, Chaos in das gesetzmäßige Kreisen, Tänzeln, Fliegen der Stäubchen. So gewaltig ist die Erschütterung der Atmosphäre. (333) Here principal sound and ambient sound become coextensive, and the dust particles, thrust by the collective scream into chaotic trajectories, become visible evidence of sound’s physical force. They also become co-constituting elements of an aural-visual image: the spectator can actually see the dancing dust. As I will discuss below, this technique of describing sound’s invisible motion-forms in the air in visually referential language connects the chronicler of Weimar mass culture with technical discussions of sound cinema in 1929/ 1930. In addition, the pairing of textually rendered soundforms with reflection on the soundscapes of mass events links the feuilletonist to the broadcasting trade press. The radio-related article that I will treat later on shows how, like Roth, radio critic Gustav Rollwage analyzed a mass event similar to Roth’s six-day race, with an ear toward how cogeneration of a sound image linked and altered the participants in the sonic event. Within the massive, collective scream of the six-day race, subforms also manifest themselves. Here the textual visualization of sound by Roth, one of the most consequential figures of twentieth-century German and Austrian- Jewish letters, structurally anticipates that of Rollwage, a now-forgotten champion of a new radio for the Volksgemeinschaft: Manchmal wirft der Wirbelsturm der Ekstase auch die festgefügten Menschenreihen durcheinander, schrille Frauenschreie, das Sprichwort vom schwachen Geschlecht desavouierend, fahren sägend durch die festgestampfte Tonmasse 391 Klangbild and Interwar German Media männlicher Bässe, und man bekommt eine zwingende Vorstellung von der Existenz mythologischer Furien. (333) In the arena, Roth hears and virtually sees the women’s screams sawing through the dense sound/ clay-mass (Ton) of male voices. The furies raise significant questions about the relationship between the physical properties of high-frequency vocal sounds and the cultural construction of gender. Those questions lie beyond my present scope, which is limited to how Roth breaks down the component sensations of the six-day race’s multisensory onslaught and sets them in relation to one another in print. His literary method evokes hybrid aural-visual images that are not perceivable in the everyday environs of sensory experience. But these images work in familiar enough registers that the actually reading and virtually seeing-hearing audience does not become untethered from the recognizable sensory and social reality of the event. Already in the mid-1920s, there was an extensive theoretical and practical discussion of the Hörerlebnis of radio, and broadcasting’s acoustic offerings were increasingly present in the public spaces of everyday life. Mechanical sound recording (first on cylinders, then on discs) had been a part of popular culture for over two decades, and major phonograph labels began switching to recording with electrical microphones in 1925. The advent of these new technologies gave rise to an interwar sound-media climate that was strikingly new. The unremarkable quality of audio capture in our times is a function of its ubiquity and its ease. In the 1920s, the products of recording were all around, but new recording technology was difficult if not impossible to possess by audio consumers. In this context, I read Roth’s sound-centered feuilletons as a solution to a technical problem. Without access to an electronic mobile recording system, he used a much older medium in an innovative way. Roth’s task, simply put, was to render noise meaningfully in print. Driven by a need to impose a degree of comprehensibility upon an overabundance of sensory stimuli and a desire to remain sensitive to the experiential opportunities of that environment, Roth recorded, mixed, edited, and played back via the feuilleton. His text presents an assemblage of Klangbilder that roars through the reader’s head, even as each soundimage remains perfectly silent on the page. In his writing of sound, he demonstrated an intellectual, discerning ear, and he depicted the physical, vibrating ear. Both these modes of listening were foci of the technical and critical discourse in the media trade press, to which I now turn. In October 1929, only months after the German premiere of The Singing Fool spurred the Germany film industry into the transition to sound, Richard 392 Theodore F. Rippey Ruhnau published an article in Die Kinotechnik with the intriguing title «Die plastische Tonwiedergabe.» He wrote with confidence that the problem of temporal synchronization of sound and image was already completely solved, as were critical matters of signal quality. If we follow Ruhnau, under state of the art conditions that autumn, audience ears enjoyed sounds that registered in perfect time with moving visual images, free of the distortions that had nagged the first forays into sound film, and uncluttered by unwanted background noise. Despite these achievements, however, the sound-image suffered from a critical flaw: it lacked directionality. This absence triggered a sense of perceptual unease in audiences, according to Ruhnau: «Irgendein Empfinden in uns wehrt sich, trotz präzisester Synchronisierung den Ton hinzunehmen als absolut bedingt durch die optisch wahrnehmbaren Geschehnisse auf dem Lichtschirm» (521). Ruhnau explained that under natural listening conditions - those in which there is no involvement of recording technology - «Richtung und Intensität des Schalles bringen sich ohne einen besonderen Willensakt mit der optisch zu erwartenden Erscheinung in Einklang» (521). A person stands on a street. A streetcar approaches from the left margin of spatial perception, and both and eye and ear capture and convey sensory data that confirms as much. In the cinema auditorium of autumn 1929, things were different: Hier sind wir [. . .] akustisch dauernd falsch orientiert, denn der Schall ist nicht gerichtet, er entströmt irgendeiner mehr oder weniger breiten Basis, er kann nicht ohne einen besonders notwendig werdenden Willensakt mit den optischen Vorgängen auf dem Lichtschirm in Einklang gebracht werden. (521) Writing from this period of media history offers glimpses of an audience whose medium-specific auditory habits were not yet naturalized, whose eyes and ears were still actively sorting out the sensory incongruities of, in this case, the audiovisual film. In these observations, Ruhnau draws our attention to this perceptual management, which becomes unusually self-reflective during the emergence of a new medium: accepting and processing the temporally synchronous audio and visual data streams without the directionality that shapes aurality outside the cinema requires a conscious act to maintain attention despite disorientation. Citing the fatigue symptoms (Ermüdungserscheinungen) that frequently manifested themselves in sound film audiences as evidence for his position, Ruhnau proposed a simple solution to the problem: use dual microphone rigs during film shooting, and have audiences wear headphones. Those ideas were not practically feasible, as Ruhnau recognized, and the compromise that he sketches out is fascinating to contemplate. Most cinemas in major cities had large enough stage areas to accommodate graded 393 Klangbild and Interwar German Media arrangements of speaker clusters. For example, he suggested, one array could be placed directly behind the screen and others to the left and right. But Ruhnau added a further layer. These clusters, he theorized, could be linked to a circuit switching console, by which an operator could shift the number and location of speakers from which the film sound would emanate in any given shot or sequence, in accordance with the optically conditioned anticipation of sound’s spatial behavior. In fact, Ruhnau argued, one could easily produce a keyboard controller for the switching mechanism that would allow an accomplished technician to convey even more striking and subtle variations in sound direction and intensity. The technician at the keyboard, commanding an electrical-mechanical system that anticipates digitally-driven 360degree audio systems of today, would form the Klangbild in real time, based on optical cues from objects and motion on the screen. In other words, the system would synthesize through technology the sense of directionality that the ear and brain would create under normal conditions outside the cinema. The crowning achievement that Ruhnau envisioned was the automation of this directional sound reproduction. Just as film copying and printing machines, cued by marks in the film strip itself, set the appropriate exposure lighting, sound markers could be set into the film strip for use in exhibition. This would shift the controller’s labor from exhibition to preparation: based on test runs, all the speaker array adjustments could be set in advance, and markers could then be placed to trigger those adjustments during playback. What we find in Ruhnau’s envisioned system -again, already in 1929 - is an engineering of aural experience on another order of magnitude, even when compared with the already revolutionary development of phonographic systems of sound recording and reproduction around the turn of the century. This three-dimensional, kinetic aural experience does three things. It takes the organs of sight and hearing as its points of departure, makes the consumption of sound and image as product its objective, and ties the quality standard for that product to the sensory impressions and responses characteristic of non-cinematic reality. The more lifelike this experience became, the easier it became to forget momentarily the difference between cinematic spaces of sensation and their non-cinematic counterparts. This shift raised the technical and aesthetic question of whether those two realms could or should become completely indistinguishable. Could the experience of cinematic and natural sound (i. e., sound free of technological mediation) become virtually one and the same? In March 1930, nine months after The Singing Fool and five months after Ruhnau’s article, the trade journal Filmtechnik published an issue dedicated to the state of the art in sound film aesthetics and technology. One of the 394 Theodore F. Rippey richer contributions to this issue, from the perspective of the history of sound, is Eduard Rhein’s article «Liegt es an den Lautsprechern? » One quandary that Rhein addressed in the piece was the placement of loudspeakers within the cinema auditorium, and he described an experimental attempt to solve that problem: Als vor kurzem ein großes Berliner Theater mit Tonfilmapparaten versehen wurde, legte man besonderen Wert darauf, die günstigste Höhe der Lautsprecher durch musikalisch besonders befähigte Fachleute zu ermitteln. Die Lautsprecher waren zunächst auf dem Boden aufgestellt. Als der Probefilm abgelaufen war, schien es allen Anwesenden unerlässlich, die Lautsprecher zunächst einmal in mittlerer Höhe angebracht zu wissen. Kettenzüge hinter der Leinwand, ein furchtbares Hantieren, Poltern, schließlich wurde wieder eingeschaltet, und siehe da, die Wiedergabe war nunmehr nach Aussage aller Anwesenden bedeutend besser als zuvor. Erst als der Techniker schnell die Leinwand hochziehen ließ, merkte man, dass die Lautsprecher nach wie vor auf dem Fußboden standen. (16) Like Ruhnau’s plan for an automatically controlled, directional sound system, this quotation provides evidence of a phenomenon that is still comparatively new in 1930, if one frames it within the long history of listening: sound as a reproducible, consumable product. This product was subject to high demand; many people wanted it. It was also subject to high demands: those people had rigorous criteria - analytically conceptualized or intuitively felt - by which they judged media-generated sound. While Ruhnau projected forward, to an auditorium in which that sound product would be subject to remarkably sophisticated control, Rhein focused more immediately on how that product behaved, and how it registered with listeners, in the cinematic space of his time. Rhein also addressed the fact that speakers of greater size, while possessing a greater physical capacity to fill a room with sound, have a strange tendency, «die hohen Töne sehr scharf nach vorn gerichtet abzustrahlen, so dass in der Mitte des Theaters ein nach oben und an den Seiten des Theaters ein nach unten verschobenes Klangbild zu hören ist» (16). In principle, sound propagates spherically, so Rhein’s description of large loudspeakers shooting high-pitched tones straight ahead is at first glance an account of the effects of an engineered space and system of sound. However, as was becoming clear at the time, this effect is perceptible in settings that one would consider natural as well. Acousticians looking at the production side of sound film were focused from the outset on how and where best to position microphones during the shoot, and they had the accumulated knowledge of three decades of modern acoustics to guide them. They knew well, for instance, that no sound source generated a pattern of sound waves that was perfectly spherical 395 Klangbild and Interwar German Media because no sound source had a point-like form. Further, they knew that any instrument (the human vocal apparatus included) that forced sound waves through a tube, then out an aperture, had a structural propensity to project sound in a conical form, and that the high-frequency tones within that sound cone would be most intense along its center axis and dissipate markedly at its margins. This general form of projection was thus something that human speakers and loudspeakers had (and have) in common. What separated the two was just as significant as what connected them, however. Two physically present human beings holding a conversation in front of a movie screen would not be heard by any audience members save those at the front rows of the auditorium; two characters conversing on screen would be heard by all. The increased intensity of the amplified sound signal as a whole enhanced the high-frequency beam at the center of the cone and made the effect of the sound image shooting past more pronounced. The smaller speakers that Rhein noted thus had the same tendency; their smallness simply made the effect less drastic. The problem was to find the optimal match of speaker power level and auditorium dimensions, accounting for all the sound-damping bodies in the space (audience members included), and then determine how to place and direct the speakers in order to guarantee good resonance while sufficiently neutralizing unnatural effects like the high-frequency beam. I have gone into detail here in order to connect but also to draw a distinction between Ruhnau and Rhein: both are concerned with the relationships between sound, space, and the listening experience, but while Ruhnau focuses on signal processing and the correspondence of aural and visual directionality, Rhein focuses on the actual physical sound forms in the auditorium space. These forms are invisible and ephemeral, but they persist long enough in the listening environment to be both heard and tracked by the audience. Imagine Rhein’s group of experts in an auditorium in 1931, at floor level, sensing a sound image (Klangbild) shooting over their heads; or at balcony level, sensing the sound streaking past beneath them. Technicians make adjustments to disperse the conical sound projections, such that the aural effects seem less manufactured. The trajectories of the high-frequency beams shift - but so do expectations of listeners, who know that changes are being made and anticipate an improvement in what is heard. A Klangbild coalesces and evanesces in space, even seems to move through it. It has no palpable substance, no visible contour, but it is a thing that exists, independently of our ears. Those ears, however, and the habits of perception through which all signals that strike the ear become recognizable, alter the Klangbild at the point of audition. As sound moves through bodies, it changes. As it registers 396 Theodore F. Rippey in minds, it changes again. Technically these events occur in succession, but the duration of the entire sequence is so slight as to render these two changes indistinguishable at the level of consciousness. Klangbild is therefore tricky to pin down, not only because it cannot be seen or touched, but also because it hinges on a constantly reconfiguring interplay of technological manipulation on one hand and the expectations that frame perception on the other. Assumptions about aural environs inflect hearing, even as hearing forms our basic picture of aural environs. The ear has its own adaptive tendency to naturalize aural impressions, so any attempt to minimize the sensation of unnaturalness runs the risk of heightening attention to artifice, even if only momentarily. It was thus not only the technologies of capture, processing and playback that Ruhnau, Rhein and their peers had to optimize. It was also the invisible interaction between those technologies and the ear. As they wrestled with these issues, they shared a common goal of making sound and listening in the cinema seem as natural as possible to the audience. Robert Beyer, an avant-garde composer and sound engineer, took a very different approach to natural sound. Sound cinema, he posited, should create a new kind of sound that would set itself apart from the unfiltered sounds of everyday life. Beyer was especially attentive to technologically processed sonic configurations as distinct aesthetic objects. He has received brief note in sound-related scholarship for his role in the development of the pioneering electronic music studio in Cologne in the early 1950s. However, his 1930 essay «Raumton und Tonphotographie» indicates that he was a technological innovator and astute commentator on sound and media already by the late 1920s and early 1930s. The term Tonphotographie was used with some frequency to designate the sound-on-film (vs. sound-on-disc) systems in the early sound period in Germany, but here Beyer focused not so much on the physical medium per se. Rather, he was interested in sonic phenomena captured during shooting as compositional elements of a sound image that might in turn become a compositional element of a new sound art. «Der Sinn der Tonphotographie,» Beyer posited, «liegt nicht in der Wiederherstellung der Originalität und Naturwirklichkeit einer klingenden Situation, sondern, wie das Wort Tonphotographie schon ansagt, in ihrer bildhaften Darstellung» (10). This creative agenda necessitated a careful consideration of naturalness, but unlike Ruhnau and Rhein, Beyer sought to move cinematic sound away from, not toward the natural. If Rhein’s observations about loudspeakers introduced the problem of disturbingly unnatural sonic sensations, and Ruhnau’s plan for achieving directional sound sketched a method for crafting a dynamic sound image that 397 Klangbild and Interwar German Media would eliminate those disturbances, Beyer’s text raises the theoretical and practical ante by questioning the fundamental assumption that cinematic sound should aspire to virtual identity with non-cinematic, natural sound. In a typical film shoot, he observed, microphones captured distinctly sourced, principal sounds (voices, for example) as well as the whole, subtly textured sample of spatial (or ambient) sound. For Beyer, these were all basic materials for the construction of a cinematic sound image that was not a purely technical supplement to the visual image but an aesthetic image in itself, a counterpart. This idea of the aesthetic autonomy of film sound was not Beyer’s alone: Rudolf Arnheim, Siegfried Kracauer, Béla Balázs, Sergei Eisenstein and his comrades were all working with this notion as well, around this time. What distinguished Beyer, however, was the unusual degree of concrete detail in his theoretical presentation, as we see in the following passage: Jede bildhafte Darstellung beruht auf einer klaren Abgrenzung ihrer gegenständlichen Inhalte gegen jedes Außen. Ein Bild steht mit scharfen Grenzen in unserem Raume als ein gegen unser Blickgebiet hin abgeschlossenes Blickfeld. Die Funktion der vollkommenen äußeren Abriegelung und Umgrenzung übernimmt hier für das Akustische der Raumton. Mit anderen Worten: Erst wenn durch den tonphotographischen Prozess mit einer Stimme zugleich der Raum aus unserer Wirklichkeit geschnitten wird, gewinnt der primäre Klang jene Geschlossenheit gegen unseren Raum, die uns berechtigt, von einer Darstellung des Akustischen in der Form eines Klangbildes zu sprechen. (10) It takes a moment to unpack this: Beyer contends that the creation of a sound image hinges on the effective capture and reproduction of ambient sound (Raumton). It is this ambient sound that provides the aural frame that sets off the primary sound from the listening space (the cinema auditorium), even as it fills that space. In Beyer’s view, the audio engineer had to capture the entire, diffuse content of the sonic scene in order to have the raw material for a viable sound image: without Raumton, there could be no Klangbild. In the basic desire to pursue a mode of sound capture that successfully registers ambient along with principal sound, Beyer is connected to other practitioners of his time (and ours): ambient sound provides crucial audio color to the aural impression of the scene. As technical critic Erich Leistner described the sound engineer in a March 1931 article on sound image and microphone placement, «[E]r muss Impressionist im besten Sinne sein, um den Gehalt der Szene erfassen und zum, das Optische ergänzenden, akustischen Bilde einfangen zu können» (6). Because aural experience is a principal component of spatial orientation, the sampling of aural-spatial experience during a shoot had to achieve more than capturing a voice clearly 398 Theodore F. Rippey in order to make the scene that would become part of the exhibited talking picture seem sufficiently real to the audience. It had to capture that voice as well as the ambient sound frame. In attending closely to that frame and analytically penetrating what it contained, however, Beyer moved away from Leistner and the industry’s general standards of virtual naturalness. If the processes of production and exhibition actually produced a Klangbild, as he conceptualized it, then that image would set itself apart from the original sound form and from the space of exhibition, once the synthesized image established itself in the auditorium: Einmal, zur Zeit der Aufnahme, waren vier Wände da, zu denen Stimme und Instrument in irgendeinem perspektivischen Verhältnis standen. Was uns jetzt bei der Wiedergabe anspricht, ist eine Übersetzung der räumlichen Maße und der messbaren Beziehungen, welche die Einstellung der Stimme zu ihrem Raume bezeichnet, in klingende Wirklichkeit, in ein gegen uns hin abgegrenztes, die Stimme abgrenzendes Raumbild. (10) In other words, the microphone registers within the enclosure of the studio (or the environs of the location), but the audience hears within the enclosure of the auditorium. The Klangbild, now also a Raumbild, is technologically and spatially removed from the original sounding scene, but in Beyer’s theorization it does not blend fully with the acoustic space of the auditorium; rather, the Raumbild stands within a new Raum. As this process plays out in the exhibition setting and the audience finds itself both absorbing and cohabitating with a spatialized sound image in the auditorium, the audience’s relationship with both sound and space enters new territory: Unser Verhalten gegenüber dem Klange ist damit grundlegend geändert. Wir sind nicht mehr Teilnehmende, leibhaftig mit der Stimme Verbundene, sondern in einem Maße von ihr getrennt, wie nie zuvor. Wir können auch sagen: Die Stimme besitzt keine Entfernung mehr zu uns, den Hörenden, ausdrückbar etwa in realen Metern. Allein von einer tönend gewordenen Entfernung zu ihrem Bezugssystem, von einer Perspektive innerhalb des mitschwingenden, umgrenzenden Raumbildes lässt sich sprechen. (10) With this observation, Beyer arrived at a significant point of contact between cinema and broadcasting. Both media involve the disappearance of distance as traditionally understood and the establishment in its place of a set of relationships to and within a technological system of reference. Given this disappearance and replacement, the audience does not hear the voice, in the traditional sense. Rather, it enters into a resonant relationship with the voice’s cinematic system of reference, a relationship that comes into being within the 399 Klangbild and Interwar German Media bounds of the spatialized sound image. Nothing about this is natural, but it is unquestionably real. Beyer seized on this transformation because the altered aesthetic character of sound and the altered stance of the listener represented opportunities for the composer of a new media-generated sound art: Der Sinn der Umwandlung ist, die klingenden Gegenständlichkeiten so zu entwerten, dass es möglich wird, sie im Sinne des Klangfarbenmelos zu montieren, in Gestaltungseinheiten einer neuen Musik unterzubringen. Wir denken hier nicht an eine abstrakte, das Gegenständliche negierende Gestaltung. Wir meinen nur, dass die Technik beides ermöglicht: einen Grad der Freiheit in der Beherrschung des Materials - zugleich eine Eindringlichkeit des klingenden Materials im Gegenständlichen wie nie zuvor. (11) In its connotations of accent and forcefulness, this unprecedented Eindringlichkeit was the quality with which Beyer’s envisioned mode of Tonphotographie endowed sounding things, and on which his imagined new aesthetic character and new perception of such things hinged. In placing a spatialized sound image before and around the audience, Beyer aimed also to create a new relationship between sounding things and their sounds, drawing out the sensory richness of the latter, as raw aesthetic material, without forcing the audience to relinquish the orientation that results from basic recognition of the former. He is not talking about pure sound abstraction; rather, he is talking about leveraging the unnatural dimensions of cinematic sound to shake sounds loose from their sources without severing the tie completely, fostering a dual mode of aural experience. The technological manipulation of sound as signal makes this new sound art possible, but its manipulations do not take the audience beyond all known bounds of aural or visual experience. In conceptualizing a new kind of aural experience that would push audiences outside the bounds of the everyday listening, Beyer’s work recalled the pioneering acoustics research of Hermann von Helmholtz in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Benjamin Steege writes, Helmholtz shared with British empiricism an «emphasis on the silent operation of habit in perception, reflecting a particular sensitivity to the overlooked significance of the ‹everyday›» (74). As appropriated by Helmholtz, this line of thought regarded the everyday state of sensation and perception as the «absence of reflection, the absence of attention,» (74) and that absence would bar the very analytical listening that would mark the new relationship with sound that Beyer hoped to foster. In Helmholtz’s theory, normal listening involves not «awareness of the sounding world in all its fine detail» but a «forgetting, and abstraction from the singular elements that 400 Theodore F. Rippey make it up» (75). Helmholtz’s classic illustration is the general inability of the everyday listener to analytically isolate the upper partial tones that create the timbre (Klangfarbe) of a note played on a specific musical instrument. Beyer’s principal objective - to create a new Klangfarbenmelos from filmed sounding things - raises the question of whether the everyday listener described by Helmholtz would have the analytic perceptual capacity to discern such a new sound-photographic music. The answer, inherent in Beyer’s concept of a new Klangfarbenmelos, is that medial manipulation of sonic material and of listening conditions would catalyze a different mode of listening. The listener would not necessarily have to achieve that shift on his or her own. Helmholtz’s acoustic laboratory, with its purpose-built tone generators and tuned resonators, actually provided a classic model of this process on an individual level: its devices crafted from extant sonic material aural impressions that listening subjects had not previously encountered. Beyer’s sound art followed this basic structural model but aspired to greater magnitude. The cinema was his aesthetic laboratory, in which he sought to remake sounds and alter listening on a collective scale. The same could be said of Ruhnau and Rhein as well, with the crucial caveat that the new listening they sought to engender would be most successful when it became indistinguishable from familiar listening. The forgetting and abstracting that Helmholtz ascribed to everyday listening was (and is) born of necessity. It would be overwhelming for any listener to attend to every sonic detail of every moment. Those engaged in the German cinema’s transition to sound (whether they were theoretically minded artists, commercially minded technicians, or anything in between) conceptualized and achieved technological transformations of sonic material and altered modes of listening. But that did not constitute an attempt to change abstracting/ forgetting everyday listeners into acutely attentive, analytical listeners who would never again miss the rustle of a leaf, a whisper in the background, or a partial tone. Rather, it was an attempt to create tailored listening situations, in which optimized technology would facilitate the desired interaction of audio and audience, to a specific end. For Ruhnau and Rhein, the concern with audience listening satisfaction had a more commercial motivation, while Beyer’s aims were more artistic. Beyer’s interest in sound, space, and relationships, established within a technological system of reference, connected his analysis of the cinematic sound image with the multifaceted inquiry into the aesthetic and social potential of radio in its first decade. This inquiry intensified in the early 1930s, first as the increasingly fractious and desperate political climate fueled efforts 401 Klangbild and Interwar German Media to exploit radio’s utopian potential to connect; and later, as theoreticians, practitioners and officials sought to leverage that potential as another means of galvanizing the racialized national community. In both settings, the aesthetic qualities and the individual and collective dimensions of the listening experience were of utmost concern. I turn now to a text from this time, in order to provide an impression of the conceptualization of listening communities, first with technical and sensory emphases, then with a pronounced emphasis on the spiritual essence of the Volk. This text, from the July 1934 edition of Rufer und Hörer, is an essay by Gustav Rollwage titled «Miterleben im Hörbericht.» It takes the coincidence of the transition to Nazi rule and the conclusion of the first decade of German broadcasting as an opportunity to revisit foundational questions of the medium’s potential. Rollwage develops a model for leveraging the medium to generate a new mode of virtual aural presence, and in so doing he combines core impulses that we also find in the writing of Rhein, Ruhnau, and Beyer. Like those three contemporaries from the realm of cinema, the radio critic also pursues the complex (and sometimes paradoxical) dual agenda of suspending the division of medial and non-medial sensory experience and fostering new modes of individual and collective listening. Rollwage begins with the commonplace that radio erases the barriers of time and space between event (Ereignis) and experiencers (Erlebende) but cannot replace the experience of physical presence at and participation in the event. Radio reporting and listening thus cannot be experiencing-of (Miterleben); it can only be experiencing-after (Nacherleben) (184). Rollwage then quickly moves to attack his own position, arguing for a way to push radio practices into the realm of Miterleben. Reporters, he writes, must realize that their direct experience generates a stream of energy (Kraftstrom) that the medium instantaneously transmits: listeners experience the event at one remove, but their experience of the reporter’s experience is immediate (186). The result is a hybrid state of aural and general sensory experience that is only possible in radio. Like Beyer’s, Rollwage’s work also drew on ideas that emerged in nineteenth-century acoustic science. Here, however, the connection did not involve habits of perception; it involved circulation of energy. Once again, Helmholtz anticipated conceptual issues of interwar sound media. As Steege recounts, Helmholtz developed the concept of the material ear to designate those resonators (inorganic and organic, the human ear among them) that served as «converter[s] and transmitter[s] of elastic energy to and from air, in which that energy took the form of acoustic vibrations» (69). The relationship that Rollwage described followed a Helmholtzian line of thought, framing the 402 Theodore F. Rippey hybrid aural participation of the radio listener as an extension of the elastic energy transmission that Helmholtz had characterized. To create this hybridity, Rollwage argued, the medium needed reporters with exceptional visual and verbal capacities, «Menschen, denen sich die geschaute Wirklichkeit zu einem Erlebnis verdichtet, und die diesem Erlebten die mitreißende Wortgestaltung zu geben vermögen» (186). He also insisted on revisiting the on-site tactics of live reporting and finding a way to direct the energy streams emanating from the masses of live participants into the stream that flowed from the reporter to the listeners. When the reporter stood on a metaphorical hill over the spectacle below, then the energy flowing from the assembled mass of people was marginalized as mood or atmosphere (185). Consequently, the mass of participants, whose participation, in Rollwage’s view, was a (if not the) central component of the event itself, was lost in the technical and formal construction of the report. Rollwage’s proposed solution to this problem was to put microphones and reporters in the thick of the crowd: «Gerade unser neuer Rundfunk muss diesen Gemeinschaftswerten nachgehen, muss die ‹Stimmung,› das ‹Fluidum› einzufangen suchen, muss das in den Hörbericht hereinholen, was über der Menge liegt» (187). We can take Rollwage literally here: pulling in what lies above the mass of people at the event, capturing that communal data that the medium must pursue, involved registering the crowd’s sound from the standpoint of the crowd itself. «Wichtig ist vor allem,» he continues, «dass der Sprecher sich als unmittelbares Glied der Zuschauergemeinschaft empfindet und aus dieser Grundhaltung heraus seinen Bericht formt» (187). This reorientation and repositioning join the energy stream linking the mass and the reporter to the stream linking the reporter to the audience, creating a shared immediacy that brings the medium to the tipping point between Nacherleben and Miterleben. Radio had by the early 1930s reached that tipping point in isolated instances, Rollwage insisted, and he offered a recent radio report on the German soccer championship in Berlin’s Poststadion as proof: [A]ls nach Spielschluss die Meisterelf von der begeisterten Menge auf dem Platze jubelnd umringt und gefeiert wurde, da war das Mikrophon mitten unter ihnen. Minutenlang hörte man aus dem Lautsprecher nur diesen brausenden Jubel und hin und wieder Fetzen von durchdringenden Rufen (der Berichterstatter versuchte, den Mannschaftsführer der Schalker vor das Mikrophon zu holen). Nichts Abgezirkeltes, nichts Vorwegbestimmtes, sondern improvisiertes Einfangen dieser Stimmung, dieses Gemeinschaftserlebnisses. In der Absage wurde vorsichtshalber eine Erklärung für dieses außergewöhnliche Vorgehen abgegeben! (Rollwage 187) 403 Klangbild and Interwar German Media Rollwage wanted to see this kind of exceptional audio become the norm, and when one considers the conventions that he was up against, one recognizes how unrealistic this wish was. After all, a sequence of sound that lasts several minutes and contains nothing but the crowd’s roar pierced by an occasional shred of speech strains the concept of report to a breaking point. Rollwage called for an instantaneous transmission of sensation, a media-based, shared aural experience that could transform the actual mass assembled at the event into a virtual mass that spanned the nation. I use the term mass to emphasize the visceral dimension, but Rollwage’s stress fell on the idea of Gemeinschaft. In conceptualizing how to exploit radio to generate a community of sensation, he conceptualized how to exploit media and aural sensation to meld the national community of the Third Reich. In his account of electronic presence in American media from the age of the telegraph through the age of television, Jeffrey Sconce describes how radio, as a wireless mass medium, registered in its early days as an «unsettling phenomenon of distant yet instantaneous communication through open air. Abstract electricity in the ‹ether› made for messages and audiences that were at once vast and communal yet diffuse, isolated, and atomized» (62). In Rollwage’s conceptualization of broadcast-networked mass listening, the medium that was once unsettling to a community of listeners had become a means of galvanizing that community in an unprecedented way. He does not remain transfixed by the magical qualities of the ether. Rather, he envisions how to harness the airwaves as a means of what historian of listening Daniel Morat calls «acoustic mass mobilization» (178). In Morat’s analysis of collective cheering and singing on the eve of World War I, acoustic mass mobilization is site-based and unmediated. It creates «vibrating relationships between bodies and subjects» (182) that perforate the boundaries between the distinct members of the crowd and join them together in a collective affective state. This street-level acoustic mobilization, Morat argues, sets the stage for the medium-based mobilization of the decades to follow. Rollwage’s conceptualization of the Gemeinschaftserlebnis offers a case in point. The listeners that he constructs are not isolated recipients reached simultaneously by a signal. They are consciously collective participants in an affectively charged acoustic event. The connections between sensation, medium, and community become explicit toward the end of the article, in Rollwage’s call for a confluence of the «Gemeinschaftsgeist der Berichterstatter» and the «Gemeinschaftsgeist der Zuschauer, der Mitschaffenden am großen Gemeinschaftserlebnis.» Only the unity of these two related spirits will create the «Grundhaltung für den künftigen Hörbericht,» and only this fundamental stance will embody the «Geist unserer Weltanschauung» (187). These last remarks take Rollwage’s 404 Theodore F. Rippey line of thought even farther away from the specifics of a given event that is reported via radio. The unbounded virtual crowd of the soccer match could just as easily be the unbounded virtual crowd of the boxing match, the political rally, or the victory parade. In Rollwage’s plan for the future, radio reporting is more about aesthetic formation - both of sound images and of listeners’ aural stances - than it is about journalistic information. Geist, after all, cannot be troubled by quotidian reality, and in projecting radio as the connective tissue between the roar of the crowd and the power of the spirit, Rollwage illustrates an early fascist inflection of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and modern media. In her incisive and compelling study of soundscapes in the Third Reich, Carolyn Birdsall develops the concept of affective resonance in order to capture how the National Socialists coupled «occupation of the cityscape [with] integration of mediated sounds into public settings» (61) in the pursuit of fascist political ends. In keeping with Benjamin’s basic thesis of Nazi aestheticized politics, she argues that sound «was an intrinsic part of the desire to orchestrate sensory experiences and facilitate the consumption of national mythologies» (42). With martyr-memorial spectacles, loudspeaker vans, marching columns of brownshirts, the Nazis sought to organize communally generated soundscapes that would «reinforc[e] the legitimacy of their group and its identity patterns,» at the expense of all others (34). In addition, the Nazi regime developed new radio forms like the Sondermeldung (113—14) in order to disrupt the flow of the everyday and condition a collective listening identity in public and private spaces. Rollwage’s text is linked to varying degrees with all of these dimensions, but what he addresses most intently is something more elemental, more preconscious than consumption of mythology and affirmation of identity. He focuses on a Haltung, a basic attitude or stance that a sensing subject brings to any auditory situation, regardless of meaningful audible content. The arbitrariness of the mass event underscores this: it is the intense rush of the energy transfer that is decisive for Rollwage. Without it, the Gemeinschaftsgeist is a boring abstraction. Keeping Rollwage’s Gemeinschaftsgeist and Birdsall’s concept of affective resonance in mind, I will close by returning to Roth. In 1938, the now-exiled author conceptualized an acoustic reality in which the affective resonance that Birdsall describes and the affective collectivity that Rollwage saw realized in moments in 1932 had fused and spread, triggering a catastrophic transformation. The air, Roth found, had become so permeated with the sounds of fascism that the German cultural traditions to which he clung were 405 Klangbild and Interwar German Media no longer acoustically possible. The unease in Roth’s account of the 1925 sixday race, which I discussed to begin this piece, originated in anxiety over exactly the kind of viscerally thrilling yet potentially devastating collective sensation that Rollwage would later promote. The fascist effort to leverage new media to push that sensation well beyond its prior conceptual and physical bounds fueled Roth’s increasing desperation in exile. The crowd’s concussion of the arena atmosphere was a cultural jolt for Roth, but in 1925 he could process that jolt as an opportunity as well as a potential threat. His disquiet was tempered with acknowledgment of such mass events as central components of modern culture and an interest in the sights and sounds of the arena as raw material for literary experiment. In Roth’s estimation, the Third Reich catastrophically damaged that atmosphere of opportunity and experiment, and this catastrophe had a crucial sonic component. By 1938, as he worked on the unpublished essay «Am Ende ist das Wort,» the noise of German society under Nazi rule had become «hellish» and had taken the air away from anyone with something meaningful to say. This meant dark days for those whose life was words: [M]it Missmut setzt sich der Schriftsteller vor das leere Blatt Papier, obwohl er voll von Worten zu sein glaubt, die treffen könnten, wirken, töten und lebendig machen. Ach! Er weiß, dass des Lesers Ohr schon erfüllt ist von einem Gedränge entstellter, verkrümmelter, zerbrochener, verkrüppelter Worte, monströsen, sinnlosen Silbenkompositionen. Begriffen ohne Unterleib gleichsam, sprachähnlichen Lauten, die der Mensch vom Papagei gelernt zu haben scheint. («Am Ende ist das Wort» 837) This passage evinces a critique of language under fascism that shares elements with those of Roth’s contemporaries (Klemperer being the best known), but it stands out in its connection of concept to word to sound. That sonic dimension comes more strongly to the fore in the closing section of the essay: Was soll man noch sagen können, in diesem Höllenlärm? In diesen Weihnachtstagen? Kann ein fühlender Mensch noch rufen: Christ ist geboren! - ohne daran zu denken, dass er gekreuzigt wird? Woher den Mut nehmen, dem Nächsten etwas zu wünschen, da die Akustik sogar selbst gestört ist, in dem Maße, dass man nicht sicher ist, ob der Segen nicht wie sein Gegenteil klingt? («Am Ende ist das Wort» 837; my emphasis) Readers familiar with Roth will know that this text is from a very late point in his life, after he had reconceived his political and religious identity in a last attempt to counter the fatal combination of nationalism and mass politics that, in his estimation, had given rise to fascism in Germany and Austria. Like the questions about voice and gender, these issues reach beyond the scope of this essay. I close with this passage, though, because it conveys something 406 Theodore F. Rippey important about what Roth imagined that language could still do as signification, even in 1938, but was prevented from doing as speech because National Socialism had succeeded not just in degrading and contorting words and meaning but in altering the acoustic conditions of cultural life in Germanspeaking Europe. Without denying the social and historical implications of the religious tradition embodied by holiday well-wishing in general, I focus on this particular religious well-wishing above all as a greeting, a hail that conveys recognition and goodwill. To Roth’s eye and ear, what language could still do as signification was not much - convey holiday well-wishes - but such wishes function in his account as the most basic expressions of human kindness, thus the most critical strands in the audible fabric of a civilization grounded in the sympathetic acknowledgment rather than the annihilation of fellow human beings. The aesthetically and politically volatile mass noise that he had rendered in print in the 1920s continued to flourish into the late 1930s, but the increasing concentration of soundscape control and the increasing absence of discerning ears - the rise of affective resonance - left the air not only barren of creative opportunity but also hostile to audible humanity. So severe was the acoustic disturbance that wishing someone well ran the continuous risk of registering as wishing someone harm. What Roth heard from afar and infused into his printed words was the sound of his civilization, real or perceived, undoing itself. His two texts thus bookend a stretch of the interwar era in which artists, critics, and technicians boldly pushed the conceptual and practical limits on how sound could be wielded to occupy the most critical body of all: air. The resulting sound images and the occupations they achieved (or failed to achieve) are countless; it falls to us to achieve a subtler grasp of how they figured in the aesthetic revolutions and political catastrophe that marked the age. The texts that I have analyzed here approached the medial sound image from different angles at different times, but a range of conceptual concerns connects them. Ruhnau’s and Rhein’s articles illustrate how an industry in transition sought to leverage new technology to create a listening experience that would make the artifice of cinema sound fade from the audience’s consciousness. Beyer, on the other hand, sought to capitalize on exactly that artifice to develop a new genre of Klangbild. All three, though, pursued the basic question of how to realize a sonic environment in which audience members become joined in a new, medium-specific mode of listening. Rollwage saw radio as a means to create a new kind of simultaneous, collective aural experience as well, one that would make the Reich an auditorium by joining those physically present at a mass event with the 407 Klangbild and Interwar German Media limitless ranks of the virtually present. The community of sounding and hearing bodies that Rollwage hoped to forge with the new medium represented a Gemeinschaft that hinged on annihilation of perceived external threats and chaotic impulses within. The soundscape of the arena, which Roth wrote to make an old medium new again in the mid-1920s, was full of such chaos. In 1938, Roth’s lament implied that National Socialist sound culture had pushed that chaos (and all its creative energy) to the brink of extinction. To his ear, German fascism disturbed acoustic life on a national scale, and gestört, as he uses it in this context, evokes threatened destruction more than temporary upset. But threatened destruction is not the same thing as complete destruction. Nazi sound culture drew, conceptually and technologically, on the acoustic life of the Republic, so the rupture that Roth recognized was not possible without substantial continuity. Moreover, elements of Weimar sound culture lived on in the Third Reich, whether within a specific cultural form (jazz being perhaps the best known example) or within the more amorphous, volatile sonic dimensions of life in German streets, homes, and public gathering places. As sound studies work on Germany between the wars evolves, one of its main challenges will therefore be to maintain balanced attention to what changed catastrophically after 1933, what continued uninterrupted, and what persisted amid disturbance, in those acoustic spaces that no regime can completely control. Works Cited Arnheim, Rudolf. Film als Kunst. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2002 (1932). Benjamin, Walter. «Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit» (Dritte Fassung 1936). Gesammelte Schriften. Vol I.1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1991. Beyer, Robert. «Raumton und Tonphotographie.» Filmtechnik (17 May 1930): 9—11. Birdsall, Carolyn. Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology, and Urban Space in Germany, 1933—1945. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2012. —. «Sonic Artefacts: Reality Codes of Urbanity in Early German Radio Documentary.» Soundscapes of the Urban Past: Staged Sound as Mediated Cultural Heritage. Ed. Karin Bijsterveld. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. Leistner, Erich. «Klangbild und Mikrophoneinstellung.» Filmtechnik (7 March 1931): 6—9. Morat, Daniel. «Cheers, Songs, and Marching Sounds: Acoustic Mobilization and Collective Affects at the Beginning of World War I.» Sounds of Modern History: Auditory Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe. Ed. Daniel Morat. New York: Berghahn, 2014. 177—200. 408 Theodore F. Rippey Rhein, Eduard. «Liegt es an den Lautsprechern? » Filmtechnik (8 March 1930): 14— 17. Ruhnau, Richard. «Die plastische Tonwiedergabe.» Die Kinotechnik 11.19 (1929): 521—23. Rollwage, Gustav. «Miterleben im Hörbericht.» Rufer und Hörer 4.4 (1934): 183— 88. Roth, Joseph. «Das XIII. Berliner Sechstagerennen.» Joseph Roth Werke. Das Journalistische Werk. Vol. 2. Ed. Klaus Westermann. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989. 331—35. —. «Am Ende ist das Wort.» Joseph Roth Werke. Das Journalistische Werk. Vol. 3. Ed. Klaus Westermann. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989. 837—40. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke UP, 2000. Steege, Benjamin. Helmholtz and the Modern Listener. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 409 Klangbild and Interwar German Media