A prehistory of the archive

Changing political circumstances have affected both the reputation and the institutional and geographic locations of the Berlin Phonogram Archive over its long history. Here I provide a brief outline, emphasizing points necessary for understanding the story that follows.

Carl Stumpf began recording extra-European music in 1900 and officially named the archive in 1905, at which point Erich von Hornbostel took over its leadership. After Stumpf’s recording of Thai musicians visiting Berlin, Hornbostel, Abraham, and Ethnological Museum director Felix von Luschan began making their own recordings. The archive grew not only through their efforts, but also thanks to anthropologists (such as Franz Boas) who sent in their own recordings for processing, and to Luschan’s insistence that all German explorers take phonographs along on their travels. During the First World War, thousands of recordings from prisoner-of-war (POW) camps were added to the collection, raising ethical questions not only due to their forced nature but also because the collector, Georg Schünemann, later became the head of the music section of the Third Reich’s propaganda department.

The archive’s first institutional home was the University of Berlin’sFootnote ⁵ Psychological Institute, which Stumpf also founded, but the government placed it under the administration of the Hochschule für Musik in 1922, and finally it joined the Ethnological MuseumFootnote ⁶ in 1934. Physically, joining the Ethnological Museum entailed a move from the Berlin Palace (Berliner Schloss) on central Berlin’s Museum Island out to the southwest suburb of Dahlem, a fact that became important during the city’s post-war division. Ideologically, the move might be interpreted as linking the collection to Nazi politics and priorities with ties to so-called ‘Rassenkunde’ or ‘race science’. Administratively, it meant the archive became a part of the Staatliche Museen (National Museums), where it remains.Footnote ⁷

To protect the delicate cylinders from bombs, parts of the Phonogramm-Archiv were moved to various locations, from palaces to mine shafts. At the end of the war, no one was quite sure where they had ended up, or even if they had survived. For a while, it was thought that a good portion of them had been stored in a flak tower in Friedrichshain or by the zoo, where Schliemann’s Trojan treasures had also been kept. Museum employees believed these had been burned up and others destroyed by the Russians,Footnote ⁸ although later they learned that was not the case.Footnote ⁹

Before the Second World War, Berlin was a centre for researchers interested in the world’s music. It attained that status through the efforts of Stumpf and his protégés, many of whom were Jews such as Hornbostel, Curt Sachs, Robert Lachmann, and Mieczyslaw Kolinski.Footnote ¹⁰ All lost their jobs and were forced to leave Germany as the Nazis took power. They brought their expertise elsewhere: Hornbostel to New York’s New School and then to Cambridge; Kolinski to Toronto, from where he also helped found the Society for Ethnomusicology; Sachs to NYU, Columbia, and Harvard; Lachmann to Jerusalem, where he led the Hebrew University’s extra-European music institute and founded another phonogram archive. Several other influential scholars also got their start as students of Hornbostel or working with him at the Berlin Phonogram Archive: George Herzog, who founded the Archive of Traditional MusicFootnote ¹¹ at Indiana University; Henry Cowell, the American composer who taught an early world music course at New York’s New School; Klaus Wachsmann, a pioneer of East African ethnomusicology and UCLA professor. Jaap Kunst, the Dutch researcher who coined the term ‘ethnomusicology’ in the 1950s, counted Hornbostel as a friend and mentor.

It is doubtless due at least in part to the efforts of this international group (as well as Stumpf’s and Hornbostel’s expert pre-war networking) that the Berlin Phonogram Archive’s fame did not fade, and perhaps even grew as ethnomusicology’s centre shifted westward. In a perverse way, then, it was in some sense because of the Second World War and German persecution of Jews not only that the field of ethnomusicology grew and spread internationally, but also that the Phonogram Archive became established as its point of origin.

In Berlin itself, music research continued during the war, and the archive continued to grow; its politics grew ever murkier. German scholars have long believed Marius Schneider, director of the archive from 1933 and throughout most of the war, to be implicated in Nazi ideologies.Footnote ¹² Schneider’s supervisor Walter Krickeberg, a Mexico specialist who denounced the Ethnological Museum’s director Walter Lehman and then took over the position in 1939, edited the Nazi publication on ‘Rassenkunde’.Footnote ¹³ The State Institute for Music Research (SIM; then Staatliches Institut für deutsche Musikforschung) employed Kurt Reinhard in 1939 and was created in part from the musical instrument collection formerly run by Curt Sachs; SIM is believed to have been staffed by Nazi Party members and sympathizers throughout the period. At the end of the war, denazification was supposed to remove questionable figures from important positions, but the process often failed and many Nazi-influenced researchers kept their careers, including Krickeberg, who kept his job until retirement in 1954, and Schneider, who left to work in Franco’s Spain in 1944 but returned to Germany in 1955, where he took a professorship at the University of Cologne.

As the Cold War began, German ethnomusicology’s past was widely recognized and even celebrated abroad, in large part because of the exodus of scholars persecuted under Nazism. Within the country, however, brain drain, pariah status, and the effects of German partition left the field’s future uncertain. The Phonogram Archive itself scattered to the winds, eventually returning piece by piece to form two separate collections in West and East Berlin. Those collections were overseen in West Berlin by Kurt Reinhard (1914–79), with Dieter Christensen (1932–2017) in a supporting role, and by Erich Stockmann (1926–2003) in East Berlin.

Reinhard and Stockmann

Reinhard was born in Gießen in 1914. He studied musicology, art history, and ethnology in Cologne, Leipzig, and finally Munich, where he met and married Ursula, who was studying musicology, German, and history. Through my searches in the Stasi Archive, Bundesarchiv, and Landesarchiv,Footnote ¹⁴ I confirmed that Kurt Reinhard was a member of the Sturmabteilung since at least 1936, but most likely 1933. In 1937, he joined the Nazi Party and student organization in Munich, where he was judged an ‘exemplary’ member.Footnote ¹⁵ Ursula also joined the party in 1936. Reinhard’s biography must be the focus of a separate article; here I provide these details as they may be relevant for understanding his later obsessions. I was unable to identify any remaining traces of national socialist ideology in his later publications; readers must decide for themselves what to make of these facts.

As a graduate student at the University of Munich, Reinhard wrote a dissertation analysing Burmese music in the Phonogram Archive. In 1939, the year the work was published, he also married , moved to Berlin, and worked briefly at SIM. Soon he was drafted into the military, where he worked in the Nachrichtenabteilung or Signal Corps (the division responsible for sending, receiving, intercepting, and decoding messages) while stationed in France and Russia. Reinhard remained a Russian prisoner of war in Morschansk until 31 August 1946.Footnote ¹⁶ Upon returning to Berlin, he was subject to the denazification process led by the American occupying forces. After an investigation and appeals hearing, he was declared a ‘nominal Nazi’,Footnote ¹⁷ clearing him for work in West Germany. At no point in Reinhard’s post-war career did his Nazi past ever come to light, nor, apparently, did any colleagues suspect it. However, according to a source close to him,Footnote ¹⁸ Reinhard’s professional choices were one way of coming to terms with the past he would refer to only as the ‘terrible times’:

In 1948, Reinhard began teaching comparative musicology in West Berlin at the Free University (FU), which the Americans had just founded in Dahlem. Soon he took on the archive’s leadership, guiding it through its re-opening (Figure 3), a move to temporary quarters in the Lichterfelde neighbourhood of West Berlin,Footnote ²⁰ and re-organization as centre of a new ‘Ethnomusicology Department’ in 1963.Footnote ²¹ By 1955, Reinhard shifted his research focus to Turkish music, for which he became a noted specialist, conducting frequent fieldwork there for two decades. A source close to him suggested he chose Turkey because it was the furthest East he could get without setting foot in the Communist bloc, which he greatly feared. Reinhard retained leadership of the archive through its move back to Dahlem in 1967.

Figure 3.

Newspaper photo of Kurt Reinhard examining cylinders, Telegraf, 6 April 1952. The caption reads, ‘The sounding museum of Berlin back in Berlin. The Phonogram Archive of the Ethnological Museum now received its wax cylinders back, on which speech and songs of exotic peoples are preserved. The cylinders were stored in Celle during the war.’ Collection of Ethnological Museum, Media Department.

In 1968, the position passed to Dieter Christensen. Christensen would later move to the United States and direct the Ethnomusicology Institute at Columbia University from 1972 to 2002; he was also general secretary of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) from 1981 to 2001. At the time of the exchange, however, he was Reinhard’s assistant, having in 1957 completed a doctorate at FU partly under his tutelage. Christensen followed his advisor in specializing in music of Turkey, though with an emphasis on Kurds; his wife, Nerthus, was an archaeologist and museum librarian who accompanied him on many research trips.

On the East Berlin side, Erich Stockmann was a specialist in organology who also briefly conducted fieldwork in Albania. He was born in Stendal in 1926 and his father was a metalworker. Younger than Reinhard, he was still in school during the war and did not join the Nazi Party.Footnote ²² In 1944, he was drafted into the Marines, and at war’s end he spent three months as a POW in the American camp at Wilhelmshaven.Footnote ²³

Stockmann completed his doctorate in systematic musicology at Humboldt University (HU), East Berlin, in 1953 – there was as yet no ethnomusicology programme in which to study – and soon married fellow HU musicology student Doris. He was soon employed as an assistant at the Institute for German Ethnology (Institut für deutsche Volkskunde) at the (East) German Academy of Sciences (DAW, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften) by invitation of Prof Dr Wolfgang Steinitz, the noted linguist and folksong scholar who headed the institute. Never a party member, the Stasi found that ‘in his professional activity [Stockmann] was without any Marxist foundation, or deliberately renounces it’,Footnote ²⁴ yet because his positions were inoffensive and because he was internationally recognized as ‘absolutely top class’ in his field, no actions were ever taken against him. He was always granted permission to travel – as long as his wife stayed homeFootnote ²⁵ – and eventually attained the elite ‘Reisekader’ rank. Only about 40,000 East Germans held this status, which allowed relative freedom of travel abroad. Later, Stockmann would lead the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) through the transitional period of 1982–97.Footnote ²⁶

Reinhard and Stockmann had very different personalities, the former reserved and quiet, the latter outgoing and gregarious. But they also had traits in common. Both had spouses who worked in ethnomusicology in various capacities. Doris Stockmann (1929–2006), assistant to Steinitz, taught at HU until receiving a ‘negative judgment’ in 1956 (Stasi files), thereafter joining her husband at the Academy of Sciences. She published extensively on topics from multipart singing to computer-aided folksong analysis and ethnomusicological theory and methods, her publication list far surpassing her husband’s. Ursula Reinhard (1915–2005) was originally a schoolteacher, but she studied Turkish and assisted Kurt during his fieldwork; after his death, she took classes in comparative musicology at FU under Kuckertz, continued Kurt’s work by conducting her own field research, and published on folksong from Turkey and the Balkans. Reinhard and Stockmann were both organologists, each publishing new works on instrument classification; both conducted fieldwork on the fringes of Europe (though Stockmann’s was short term). While, at least later in life, neither was very political, when young they did what they had to do to get degrees and jobs – Reinhard by joining the Nazi Party, Stockmann as a member of FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend, the youth organization tied to East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED)) and FDGB (Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, the SED’s official trade union). Whatever their motivations, both scholars deeply felt the importance of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, not only to their discipline, but also to world history.Footnote ²⁷

Prologue (1946–1965)

Very soon after his release from Soviet prison, Reinhard turned his attention to the archive’s whereabouts. Already in 1948, he helped bring its remains – then about 250 cylinder recordings, some playback devices, and books and papers of Hornbostel – to FU’s Musicology Department, where he was assistant to Prof Dr W. Gerstenberg.Footnote ²⁸ In 1950, he moved them back into the Ethnological Museum,Footnote ²⁹ where he was already working without pay under Krickeberg.Footnote ³⁰ In 1951, around 1,600 cylinders and galvanos (copper negativesFootnote ³¹) rejoined the collection (Figure 3), newly returned by the British from wartime storage in Celle.

Ursula Reinhard later recalled,

While her testimony engages in a bit of hero-building, it was doubtless a personal triumph for Reinhard when in 1952 the Phonogram Archive formally re-opened to the public (Figure 4). While this Altbestand, or old stock, included only about 10 per cent of the pre-war recordings,Footnote ³³ Dahlem possessed all of the archive’s documentation (aside from some items then in the personal possession of Marius Schneider).

Figure 4.

Invitation to the re-opening of the Berlin Phonogram Archive in 1952, featuring a talk by Reinhard, a ‘demonstration of exotic music’, and a small exhibit on the archive’s history. The ‘exotic music’ was ‘Malaysian music (Gamelan)’ (Krickeberg, 25.3.1952). Collection of Ethnological Museum, Media Department.

In 1959, the Soviets returned the recordings they had taken to Leningrad to East Berlin; this Ostbestand or Eastern stock was estimated at 90 per cent of the pre-war recordings.Footnote ³⁴ Yet without documentation, they were practically useless for Eastern researchers. The first twenty-six boxes from Leningrad first went to the National Library, but in 1960, Erich Stockmann signed the paperwork to bring them to the Academy of Sciences. In 1962, he received another thirty-seven Soviet crates (Figure 5). Already in 1957 Reinhard had heard rumours from colleagues regarding the Leningrad phonograms.Footnote ³⁵ After running into Stockmann, he knew for sure that the recordings had survived the war comparatively unscathed and were now just across town from his office.

Figure 5.

A chest full of cylinder recordings sent by the Soviets back to East Berlin’s Museum Island. Collection of Ethnological Museum, Media Department.

A plan and a few obstacles

There were just two small problems facing Reinhard. First, East Berlin had most of the recordings, but no machinery for playing them back or copying them. West Berlin had machinery and documentation but few recordings. And no one knew how to make playable positives from the galvanos negatives any longer – not anywhere. Second, the Berlin Wall had gone up on 13 August 1961, shortly before the final Soviet shipment arrived in East Berlin. To put it mildly, this may not have been a great time to propose cooperation between institutions in East and West Berlin. In addition, Reinhard personally was terribly afraid of the Eastern powers, constantly worried about a new world war or Soviet takeover of West Berlin.Footnote ³⁶ But he was determined to find some way to reunite the Phonogram Archive. While Stockmann initially considered carrying out a covert exchange,Footnote ³⁷ he later rejected the idea. Instead, the two agreed to ask for formal endorsement.

In a letter to his museum’s administration,Footnote ³⁸ Reinhard outlined both the difficulty of what he was proposing and its importance. He explained how he heard ‘confidentially from East German colleagues’ of the 1959 return of the Russian phonograms to East Berlin, after which he and Stockmann ‘agreed to make an exchange’ but were prevented from doing so by ‘the events of 13 August 1961’. Reinhard noted the great interest in the phonograms among foreign colleagues, some of whom had ‘received a promise of copies from the Academy of Sciences’ (he was probably thinking of the Archives of Traditional Music in Indiana). Reinhard also felt his museum still possessed the rights to the recordings:

The museum administration decided in favour, enabling Reinhard to make a formal proposal to Stockmann’s superiors in East Berlin two months later:

Reinhard’s letter was politically expedient, if not entirely above board. He already knew from Stockmann that the East had no Edison phonograph but numerous galvanos, though admitting so could make trouble for Stockmann. And his offer to cast positives from galvanos was wishful thinking, since he also knew that such attempts had thus far been unsuccessful. As Reinhard himself wrote that same year, Hans Quadfasel, who had made cylinder copies back in 1933, ‘was the last available expert in his field, and a great deal of the existing technical knowledge went to the grave with him’ in 1953. Although the archive had purchased Quadfasel’s machinery, staff could not yet figure out what to do with it.Footnote ⁴¹

Ten days later, Stockmann replied:

He signed off in a neighbourly way that belied the sizable obstacle between the two ethnomusicologists: ‘Mit herzlichen Grüßen von Haus zu Haus’ – with warm regards from door to door.

Three days later, Dieter Christensen entered the conversation and wrote to George List, head of the archive at Indiana University. Earlier that same year, List and Reinhard had collaborated on Folkways Records’s publication of selections from Hornbostel’s Demonstration Collection.Footnote ⁴³ List and Stockmann had also met and hit it off at the meeting of the International Folk Music Council (today’s International Council for Traditional Music and Dance, ICTMD) in Israel during July of 1963. List must have mentioned his wish to bring at least copies of the Berlin cylinder collection to Indiana – he had been making discreet inquiries about it since at least 1961.Footnote ⁴⁴ Stockmann did not discourage him, though he must also have noted the probable complications. List mentioned needing to contact Stockmann in his note to Christensen, but Christensen only understood why after Reinhard officially raised the issue of a possible exchange. He then responded with a typically West German view of divided Berlin:

Christensen also admitted, ‘Up to now, I have no idea of technical problems involved in the Stockmann trade.’

List continued to investigate all possible means of obtaining copies of the cylinders. Reinhard suggested they collaborate, although ‘I do not know yet if and how our efforts will be successful … Perhaps we may let the whole matter rest until I can see clearly here.’Footnote ⁴⁶ Meanwhile, Stockmann wrote to List about his emerging plans with Reinhard,Footnote ⁴⁷ causing List to hold off on his plans so as not to ‘rock the boat’ in Berlin.Footnote ⁴⁸ While Reinhard had his doubts, Stockmann remained optimistic:

Views from the East

Meanwhile, the higher-ups in East Berlin were engaged in their own discussions. While Stockmann’s personal relationship with Reinhard created a basis of trust, no such trust existed between their administrations. Yet Steinitz, Stockman’s department head, was a powerful ally. A Jewish communist who had spent his years of Nazi-induced exile in Leningrad and Stockholm perfecting his knowledge of Finno-Ugric languages, his political and scholarly credentials were almost unassailable. He had even been a member of the Central Committee (ZK) of the SED. Perhaps most importantly, his massive Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten (‘600 Years of German Folksongs with a Democratic Character’, often simply called the ‘Big Steinitz’) had been a game-changer for German folk music research, both in the GDR and in West Germany. Few East German academics were as well known internationally. Steinitz all but assured the exchange would happen when he wrote to Prof Dr Günther Rienäcker, general secretary of the DAW:Footnote ⁵⁰

Rienäcker gave his approval – he could hardly do otherwise given that the academy’s president, Werner Hartke, had already given his own – but remained cautious. He suggested making a contract to carry out the plan in stages so that the West Berliners would not be able to decide unilaterally on how long it would take.Footnote ⁵² Three months later, StockmannFootnote ⁵³ informed Reinhard of the board’s approval of the exchange while outlining difficulties with the machinery, the inventory of Soviet crates, and the lack of labelling on many cylinders. There were also logistical problems unique to Berlin:

The ‘probably’ stands out: would the whole exchange be put in jeopardy for lack of a driver?

Funds (or the lack thereof)

Reinhard had his own issues to deal with, principally financial ones. After running the archive as a one-man-show for many years, he had finally hired an assistant and a secretary in 1961. But funds were still tight, as he explained in a request to the administration of the National Museums in West Berlin, and he needed both supplies and a technician to do the copying.Footnote ⁵⁴

Funding from the museums was not forthcoming. Instead, a curator at the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (SPK, the Foundation to which the museum belongs), Mr Wormit, assisted Reinhard in approaching the Volkswagen Foundation. Volkswagen’s initial response was unsympathetic:

Reinhard did not think much of it, and told Wormit as much:

Here again, Reinhard exaggerated his department’s technical capabilities, but added correctly that East Berlin did not even have a phonograph, much less an electrified one, as would be necessary for copying. ‘Finally’, he added, ‘it must be kept in mind that, for whatever political motives, it can be expected at any time that the Academy of Sciences withdraws its willingness to exchange. It seems, therefore, that haste is called for!’Footnote ⁵⁷

Haste was not to be had, however. Although in October 1964 Stockmann had already suggested Christensen be sent personally to East Berlin to discuss details that presumably could not be put into writing,Footnote ⁵⁸ that letter did not reach West Berlin for almost five months. When Christensen finally wrote back to Stockmann, he noted, ‘the general prospects that we will be able to carry out the copying of the cylinders are very good, and we hope to receive a definitive decision on the financing in the very near future’. He proposed to visit Stockmann before leaving for Turkey in mid-April.Footnote ⁵⁹

In his report on this meeting, Christensen expressed pleasure at the good condition of the materials and their storage, explaining that Stockmann had had to ‘rescue’ the cylinders by schlepping a good number of them from the library to the academy single-handedly. The academy’s refusal to invest further in the collection made it a burden for Stockmann, who ‘would rather give us back all the materials without any quid pro quo’. Clearly, this was not politically possible, and it also meant that the Westerners could not count on any support from the Eastern side beyond the simple transportation of materials. Stockmann emphasized that bureaucratic approvals would likely add two months to any projected start date.Footnote ⁶⁰

After securing evaluations from peer institutions, the Volkswagen Foundation finally approved the project in July 1965.Footnote ⁶¹ By November, preparations were complete and Reinhard suggested Stockmann send the first nineteen boxes, those comprising the Bake collection.Footnote ⁶² Five days later, almost exactly two years after Reinhard made his proposal, the two sides signed a formal agreement.

The exchange (1966–1967)

A rocky start

Stockmann’s estimated start date had been optimistic, and Reinhard became nervous when his technician, Erhard Kinnemann, had nothing to do after being on the job for a month.Footnote ⁶³ Stockmann reminded Reinhard of his earlier note regarding the delays of ‘border formalities’; he hoped to begin in early January. In the meantime, he suggested Reinhard send him a plan for all deliveries.Footnote ⁶⁴

Reinhard sent that list together with a collection of song texts assembled through research in TurkeyFootnote ⁶⁵ and a goodwill gesture meant to put pressure on: ‘Since “early January” is now also past, I would like to take a first step now and send you the photocopied documentation for the cylinders of the first shipment (boxes 1–19). Perhaps this will help to accelerate things a bit.’Footnote ⁶⁶ However, while Stockmann had managed to gain the formal approval of both the academy’s board and the Ministry for Foreign and Intra-German Trade by 4 February, he was still missing an essential piece of the puzzle: transportation. He wrote to DAW’s Human ResourcesFootnote ⁶⁷ director: ‘Prof Dr Steinitz asks you to allow colleague Bressem to take along this material on his service trips to West Berlin, since because of their fragility they cannot be transported in any other way.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Yet Reinhard grew more desperate as things still dragged on:

I am a little worried because I still have no definite news from you about the start of our copying action. Hopefully, you have received our first shipment by now. Perhaps it seemed to you a little sparse, but this is surely because there happen to be few comments on the cylinders of the first boxes. In other cases, things look different.

I am writing to you today primarily because the employee I hired has now almost completed his fourth month without being able to do anything else but prepare for the hoped-for copying. I cannot justify his continued employment at the moment, and I will be forced to dismiss him on March 1, unless you can give me some kind of hope by then.

In any case, I would like to ask you to send me an interim report of any kind whatsoever.Footnote ⁶⁹

The very next day, Stockmann telegrammed: ‘DELIVERY COMING 22 FEBRUARY 11 O’CLOCK’.Footnote ⁷⁰ He also posted a letter with further procedural details and a postscript congratulating Ursula on her book.Footnote ⁷¹

The day of the delivery dawned with Reinhard in a panic. No one involved had ever dealt with the technicalities of bringing delicate materials across the Berlin Wall; Reinhard had thought only of the bureaucratic hurdles his Eastern Bloc colleagues would face, and not of the fact that he himself was constrained by the same political situation. He quickly drafted a letter to the economic senator for West Berlin, explaining the situation:

Unfortunately, as people unfamiliar with these things, we did not realize that we too [in West Berlin] had to first apply for the necessary permits and shipping slips … I would therefore like to ask you to issue global procurement permits and slips for the entire operation and to inform the Hansa Customs Office or the responsible border office of this approval. As already mentioned, the copying operation is to proceed in batches, so that about 20 to 35 trips of a vehicle of the East Berlin Academy of Sciences to West Berlin and back will be necessary.Footnote ⁷²

Reinhard then telephoned the economic senator and wrote a note explaining the customs requirements to Kinnemann. Stockmann had already prepared the shipment and the necessary paperwork for Interzone Trade (Figure 6).Footnote ⁷³ Two days later, the senator authorized the exchange through 1967.Footnote ⁷⁴

Figure 6.

Official form accompanying the first shipment from East to West Berlin via Interzone Trade, signed by Stockmann, 22 February 1966. Contents are described as ‘scientific study material’, ‘no trade value’. Collection of Ethnological Museum, Media Department.

…or does it?

Yet just when everything seemed to be moving smoothly, the exchange ground to a halt. A week after the June shipment, Reinhard telegrammed Stockmann asking for the next date, and Stockmann telegrammed back, ‘CYLINDER EXCHANGE STILL EXPECTED THIS WEEK = SPECIFIC APPOINTMENT CURRENTLY IMPOSSIBLE’. Reinhard wrote to Stockmann’s superiors:

Unfortunately, our exchange has come to a standstill. After your messenger had to postpone his journey a few weeks ago and also could not keep a new appointment for the delivery of further cylinders and the collection of the phonograms stored here, I addressed a telegram to Dr Stockmann, to which he answered with a telegram and announced the resumption of the exchange initiative. Unfortunately, this date has also passed, so we are a bit perplexed. As you may know, we have hired a new employee, whom we pay from special funds, and who must work only on preparing the copies you receive.

In order to avoid further downtime, I would be very grateful if you could continue the exchange soon, or at least let us know when we can expect it.Footnote ⁷⁸

Stockmann seems to have encountered problems with his superiors, as on 20 August he sent Christensen a handwritten note explaining they needed to sign a new work agreement, and that Christensen should sign himself rather than waiting for Reinhard to return. Perhaps the work stoppage occurred because the original agreement had not been signed by the department heads, Steinitz and Reinhard, but by their underlings, Stockmann and Christensen: a bureaucratic discrepancy which might have raised red flags (Figure 7).

Figure 7.

Signature page from the ‘Arbeitsvereinbarung’ (work agreement) that started the cooperation, showing that Stockmann and Christensen signed in place of Steinitz and Reinhard. Collection of Ethnological Museum, Media Department.

In September, Stockmann sent the signed agreement to Frau Dr Völker, leader of the Institute for Social Sciences working group, reminding her that the general secretary had already agreed to the exchange in 1964, although ‘for technical reasons’ it began only in 1966.Footnote ⁷⁹ Since ‘The Ethnological Museum has completely fulfilled its obligations so far’, and it was mutually beneficial, Stockmann requested the exchange be continued. The Ethnomusicology Department returned to Dahlem from Lichterfelde, Reinhard let Kinnemann go and sent yet another urgent telegramFootnote ⁸⁰ – but the new year dawned with no further word.

Reinhard took his concerns to the next level on 3 January. He wrote to the president of the Academy of Sciences to remind him of their agreement, emphasizing the mutual benefits and his claim that only West Berlin had the ability to work with galvanos. He continued:

At the beginning of 1966, the planned exchange was underway, but unfortunately, in the summer of this year, it came to a standstill. I would be grateful if you could arrange for us to resume the exchange. At the present time there are still several boxes of cylinders and copies here with us, which have not been picked up.

When I put this request into words, I do so firstly in order to complete the collections of scientific material both on your side and on ours, and secondly because the funds made available here are earmarked for a specific purpose, and I would have to return them in due course if the exchange were to be discontinued.

Surely the director of another scientific institute could sympathize with these financial difficulties –and in fact, on 20 January, Stockmann at long last telegrammed: ‘NEXT CYLINDER DELIVERY MORNING OF 24 JANUARY’. Stockmann took advantage of the shipment to send Reinhard a copy of Doris’s latest book, Albanische Volksmusik (‘Albanian Folk Music’), and Kinnemann got his job back.

A villain, and two deaths

On 10 February, Reinhard wrote to congratulate Doris on ‘an excellent and exemplary work’ and to thank Erich ‘for bringing back our exchange’. Another delivery arrived on Valentine’s Day 1967. But again, the good times were short. One week later, the excessively titled Prof Dr Dr-Ing Robert Rompe,Footnote ⁸¹ pre-eminent physicist and acting general secretary of the academy, wrote to Steinitz withdrawing Rienäcker’s permission for the exchange.Footnote ⁸²

Rompe’s motivations are unclear, but as a member of the SED’s Central Committee (ZK), it is possible that Rompe had an inkling of a decision the party was to hand down two weeks later, which would prevent East Germans from taking part in West German scholarly societies.Footnote ⁸³ In that light, the exchange was perhaps not politically expedient. Whatever the reason, even Stockmann was not fully informed.Footnote ⁸⁴ On 7 March, Frau Dr DroysenFootnote ⁸⁵ of the National Institute for Music Research telephoned Reinhard and relayed a message from Stockmann, whom she had just visited in East Berlin, to the effect that the cylinder exchange planned for that day would have to be delayed eight days; their ‘book exchange’ must also halt.Footnote ⁸⁶ Even so, a copy of Doris Stockmann’s (Reference Stockmann1966) article ‘The problem of transcription in ethnomusicological research’ arrived in West Berlin with Erich’s compliments, but no further comment.Footnote ⁸⁷

Given Rompe’s decision, Stockmann’s eight-day delay appears overly optimistic and suggests he had not actually seen that letter. Indeed, no delivery occurred, prompting Christensen to comment, ‘Over there they have very strange methods with regards to cooperation.’Footnote ⁸⁸ While Reinhard feared the exchange ‘was now probably quite at an end’,Footnote ⁸⁹ he still wrote to the head of the Academy of Sciences, reminding him of their signed agreement and dwindling funds.Footnote ⁹⁰ It was not the president who responded, however, but Rompe, who claimed to ‘have asked the appropriate officer of the Institute of German Folklore to contact you in this matter as soon as possible’.Footnote ⁹¹ Yet the day after Reinhard penned his letter, the prospects for the exchange’s success were further reduced when Steinitz, director of Stockmann’s department, died unexpectedly at age 62 (Figure 8). A bereft Doris Stockmann wrote to Reinhard, thanking him for his compliments on her transcription article, which Erich had forwarded:

Figure 8.

Steinitz’s death notice, sent to Reinhard with an invitation to a memorial service, 1967. Collection of Ethnological Museum, Media Department.

I was doubly happy about it because the last days here have been overshadowed by the sudden death of our boss … and we feel quite abandoned. With letters like yours, perhaps our joy in our work will return little by little, even when nothing will be how it was for the last 15 years, when we could work at Steinitz’s side. One doesn’t want to think about it.Footnote ⁹²

Had Rompe really asked his colleagues to communicate with Reinhard? No one did so, although discussions in the academy continued,Footnote ⁹³ leaving Kinnemann to complain in operatic fashion, ‘I can only call out together with Field Marshall Radames: “The stone has closed again!”’Footnote ⁹⁴ (he refers to the last scene of Verdi’s Aida). Reinhard next wrote to the Stockmanns’ unit, the Academy’s Institut für Deutsche Volkskunde (German Folklore Institute), asking for answers. Again emphasizing that ‘one day this money will be used up without the intended purpose being achieved’, he requests a ‘hopefully hard-and-fast answer’ and reminds the other side of the exchange’s ‘great scientific benefit to both our institutes’.Footnote ⁹⁵ When Stockmann returned from vacation a few weeks later, in fact he had received permission to continue the exchange. However, the old problem had returned: ‘at the moment we have no possibility to transport the phonograms, since our driver, Mr Bressem, whom you also know, unfortunately passed away last week and a successor for him has not yet been named’. Footnote ⁹⁶ The West Berliners received the news ‘with shock’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Bressem’s death at age 39 remains unexplained,Footnote ⁹⁸ and it was probably not so simple to find a new driver with permission to make frequent trips over the border. The whole enterprise was again in jeopardy for lack of a driver.

Aftermath (1968–1989)

Reunification

Kurt Reinhard died in 1979 and so was never able to see his dream of a reunited Phonogram Archive fulfilled. His wartime activities and affiliations had long since been forgotten, and he was remembered simply as a careful scholar, a good fieldworker, an effective archive director, and a valued professor. He passed his dream on to Artur Simon (1938–2022), director of the Ethnological Museum’s Ethnomusicology Department following Christensen’s departure in 1972. In 1987, Simon wrote to the president of the SPK to propose a renewal of the cylinder exchange. He suggested three possibilities: either they proceed just as before; or they organize it through a third party such as the Vienna archive, if the East finds the first suggestion unpalatable; or they keep the originals and provide the East with copies: ‘According to unofficial information of which I have become aware, a certain willingness to do this can be discerned on the eastern side. The first step, however, would have to come from our side.’Footnote ¹³⁶ The most likely source for this insider knowledge was Stockmann.

Moving forward discreetly, an anonymous museum employee orally passed the suggestion onto the GDR’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and took the opportunity to slip them a written document as well. The president of the SPK reported to the director of the Ethnological Museum: ‘It is assumed that in the foreseeable future a reaction from the other side will become known through our Permanent Mission in Berlin (East). As soon as I learn anything, I will let you know’.Footnote ¹³⁷

No ‘reaction’ was forthcoming, even though the Eastern side did know about the suggestion and strongly considered it. A deputy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mier, wrote to two professors, Stephan Supranowitz and Claus Grote, that same month, referring to the Phonogram Archive as the property of the Ethnological Museum in West Berlin. While direct contact with the ‘Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation’ (SPK, which Mier indeed put inside scare quotes) must be avoided, he suggested an alternate plan that would allow them to continue the 1960s exchange with Dahlem and eventually even return the cylinders:

Nothing resulted from these suggestions, but in the long run, it hardly mattered. When the Berlin Wall fell, Simon saw his opportunity. While the two Germanys worked out the terms of their reunification, Simon also worked to reunite the two halves of the Phonogram Archive.

It began with a telephone call to Stockmann, as Simon reported to Museum Director Klaus Helfrich: ‘As soon as a new government has been formed in the GDR, Prof Stockmann will submit a proposal to the responsible government agency that all phonograms belonging to my department be transferred to the Ethnological Museum. A positive decision is to be expected.’Footnote ¹³⁹ Indeed, two months later Peter Feist, head of the Institute for Aesthetics and Art Studies which held the collection, wrote that with Berlin’s reunification the duplication of materials would be ‘nonsensical’; it would make much more sense to transfer all materials back to the museum.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

A week later, Simon travelled to East Berlin. Because he described the cylinders’ location in the National Library as a ‘sealed room’, I imagine him here as Howard Carter opening King Tut’s tomb, perhaps peering through a crack to see ‘wonderful things’. Instead of Egyptian treasure, though, the room held 90 per cent of the Phonogram Archive. And instead of fame for its discoverer, Simon believed the return of the materials to Dahlem would mean glory for his city and the field of ethnomusicology: ‘Berlin will once again attain a leading position in this discipline.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ It was what Reinhard, too, had hoped. After overcoming one final roadblock,Footnote ¹⁴² over 15,000 cylinders and 1,300 shellac discs finally arrived back in Dahlem on 16 January, 1991.Footnote ¹⁴³ And in 2021, the reunited Archive returned to its original home: the Ethnological Museum moved back to Berlin’s Museum Island in 2019 as a part of the new Humboldt-Forum, whose building is in part a reconstruction of the old Berlin Palace; the Phonogram Archive joined it there soon after. Yet even as its foundational archive has been reinstalled in Berlin’s geographic centre, ethnomusicology’s place in the city’s institutions has been drastically reduced. Comparative musicology never regained its pre-war importance in Berlin, and ethnomusicology per se has disappeared from most Berlin institutions: Reinhard’s former ‘Ethnomusicology Department’ has been renamed ‘Media Department’, and there is no professorship in ethnomusicology at any of Berlin’s five universities.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ So while Reinhard’s dream finally came true, whether Simon’s prediction will also bear out remains a question.

Sound archives, heritage, and ideology

The role of sound archives has changed dramatically since Berlin’s comparative musicology heyday, partly because source communities and general populations now record and archive themselves using affordable new technologies, partly because the ethics of recording and keeping the traditions of Others are increasingly viewed with suspicion. In Anthony Seeger’s important 1986 article on the role of sound archives, he noted that their role was changing as the questions ethnomusicologists asked also changed. Thus, Seeger explained, it was clear that ‘sounds’ on their own were not enough; context was needed – and that was exactly what was missing in the sound archive.

I would add that context is not only missing in our studies of the sounds archives hold, but – often – in our studies of archives themselves. In providing missing biographical and political context for the Berlin Phonogram Archive, this article has shed light on how ethnomusicology’s history has been intertwined with world politics. Reinhard’s and Stockmann’s actions and their thoughts about archives during this episode are relevant for understanding how ethnomusicology developed, particularly because sound archives are still seen as playing a key role in the founding of the discipline, as well as how the discipline functions today in a post-colonial setting. To explain why, I now outline two lessons to be learned from this story: one about post-war Germany and another, linked to the first, about ethnomusicology, its archives, and the Cold War.

The first can best be viewed through the actions of Reinhard. Throughout this research, it was remarkable for me to see how his interest in the Phonogram Archive never wavered and lasted from 1948, soon after his return from POW camp, all the way through the 1970s until his death. He never gave up hope that the collection would one day be reunited. This extreme tenacity suggests Reinhard’s interest was not only professional, but also personal, and that it served some psychological need. My curiosity as to what fuelled his obsession is what led me to follow this rabbit hole ever deeper until it led me into the darkest part of Germany’s history – which may also be the darkest chapter of the history of ethnomusicology.

Obviously, Germany’s pre-war position as an enlightened centre of intellectual and philosophical activity had been destroyed in the war – along with the lives of approximately six million Jews, tens of thousands of Romani, communists, and homosexuals, 70 million additional civilians, and 25 million members of the various militaries. In this context, I propose that for Reinhard, the divided archive may have symbolized a divided Germany; reuniting it would have meant a symbolic German reunification. As a source close to him noted, ‘it was hard for him to accept the division of Germany’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Optimistically, to preserve sonic diversity might also have served for him as restitution for Germany’s attempted destruction of human and cultural diversity in the Holocaust. Reinhard’s archival work (and potentially his later fieldwork as well) might have been a way of dealing with his own guilt. More cynically, it would also be possible to view his obsession with the archive as a nationalistic residue, held over from his Nazi past even as he tried to erase it. In this sense, its restoration would also mean a restoration of German intellectual splendour. Without access to Reinhard’s heart, it is impossible to choose one right answer, and it is possible that both were true.

Other actors in this story participated in Reinhard’s vision to a greater or lesser degree. Simon also saw the archive as having symbolic importance, as can be seen in the preceding quote as well as his later work in gaining UNESCO world heritage status for the archive. Stockmann’s advocacy in favour of the archive is a testament to his understanding of its importance to ethnomusicology, yet it is noteworthy that he always believed it belonged in West Berlin, not the GDR.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ While the archive does not seem to have been as personal a crusade for Simon and Stockmann as it was for Reinhard, for all of them reuniting the archive seemed tied to notions of German unity and identity.

It may seem strange to refer to the archive as a repository of German heritage when it holds very little German music. The 1999 UNESCO resolution declared its recordings ‘memory of the world’; Simon’s nomination form underlined its ‘universal significance’ and ‘intercultural dimensions’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Yet while particular objects within the archive represent and preserve a global (mainly extra-European) musical heritage, the archive as a whole can also serve as a repository of European, specifically German, intellectual heritage. Regarding the inception of the Phonogram Archive as a way of studying ‘Naturvölker’ or primitive people and contrasting them with ‘civilized’ Europe, Alejandro Madrid similarly writes, ‘the scientific gathering and classification of the Other was clearly a project about self-identity’ for German collectors.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Other sound archives found elsewhere in Europe likely served and continue to serve similar European identity projects.

These observations raise questions about what the archive actually is and does. Early studies of ethnomusicology archives emphasized their role as preservers of ‘a “pure” and “disappearing” heritage’, as did Bruno Nettl in the 1950s;Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Reinhard and Stockmann would likely have at least partly identified with this mission statement. More recent studies underline the ideological nature of archiving practices, typically involving colonialist paradigms.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Colonialist ideologies clearly played a role in Phonogram Archive’s original collection practices (a problem with which the main actors in this story did not contend), but they were later superseded by other ideologies: during the Second World War, fascism; during the Cold War, those of the capitalist and socialist blocs. Each has left its trace on the archive and the discipline to which it is tied. And if archives have worked to ‘control and reduce otherness’,Footnote ¹⁵¹ in this story the otherness of the musics’ creators was less important than the otherness of those Germans on the other side of the wall. This can be observed in the East Berlin suspicions of Western motivations as well as the condescending West Berlin mentions of Easterners’ ‘strange’ ideas or unsatisfactory fulfilment of obligations.

Westerners often suspect Eastern Bloc bureaucrats and academics of acting only to further ideology. In this story, however, most acted with good will, motivated by personal ties and professional concerns. Official state ideologies were more an obstacle for Reinhard and Stockmann than a motivation, although at times each of them used ideological arguments to convince others of their plan. Reinhard used Western Bloc ideas about copyright as well as freedom of movement, thought, and opinion when applying for Volkswagen funds; Stockmann, for his part, used Eastern Bloc ideas about internationalism in arguing for the exchange. Ideologies limited what could be done with the archive, but they also made its reunification possible. Reinhard could not bring his dream to fruition alone; it could only be accomplished through the efforts of Eastern Bloc academics such as Stockmann and his many colleagues who saw the collection’s value and worked to protect it.

Ethnomusicology emerged and developed in a Cold War context: the discipline received its name from Jaap Kunst in 1950Footnote ¹⁵² and the Society for Ethnomusicology was founded in 1955. The people in this article played important roles in establishing ethnomusicology as a discipline, both in Germany and within international institutions and organizations. Their cross-Wall exchange could be seen as laying the foundation for their later contributions to the discipline. Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco writes of Christensen, her teacher, that his experiences working with Reinhard led him to begin an archive at Columbia University, while ‘his experience in war-torn Germany informed one of his priorities for the ICTM, namely to facilitate dialogue and collaboration with colleagues across the “Iron Curtain”’.Footnote ¹⁵³ Christensen’s earlier but heretofore unknown collaboration with Stockmann surely also played a role. In fact, Anthony Seeger credits the ICTM board’s counterbalancing of East German Stockmann with West German/American Christensen with the organization’s effectiveness as a scholarly organization bridging the Blocs.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Yet Reinhard’s circumstances suggest we cannot view ethnomusicology’s Cold War history without also considering the Second World War and the Nazi era, a difficult topic that will need to be explored in other publications.

Ethnomusicology in the post-socialist and post-colonial world

If the Berlin Phonogram Archive could only (re-)emerge through the interplay between East and West, we must ask whether the same is true of ethnomusicology. While there are plenty of studies of music in the Cold War,Footnote ¹⁵⁵ research on ethnomusicology’s Cold War ties is much thinner.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ However, even a brief look at the history of the International Council for Traditional Music and Dance, where (as noted) both Stockmann and Christensen held long-term leadership roles, shows broad and deep exchanges between the Blocs,Footnote ¹⁵⁷ culminating in the 1987 World Conference in East Berlin. Numerous subdisciplines were furthered through ICTM study groups that were led or mainly populated by Eastern Bloc scholars: Musical Instruments, led by E. Stockmann; Historical Sources, D. Stockmann; Maqam, co-chaired by East German Jürgen Elsner and Uzbek-Soviet Fayzulla M. Karomatov; the discontinued Radio Committee, proposed by Radio Zaghreb; and Ethnochoreology.

In ethnomusicology as in many academic disciplines, the contributions of Eastern researchers are often overlooked, even purposefully ignored. Gisa Jähnichen writes, ‘After the reunification of Germany in 1990, a number of scholars from the East became silent, discontinued their work, or withdrew from scholarly activities due to unemployment or because of their necessary refocus on other essential problems in their lives. Stockmann’s good intentions were also not always valued as he wished’, one reason, she believes, he retired as ICTM chair.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The same did not occur with those from the Western Bloc, even though they too were influenced and at times motivated by Cold War propaganda. Yet our disciplinary and archival histories have been written mainly from a Western perspective and they have favoured Western research agendas.

If assuming a unitary ‘German culture’ has meant that Eastern contributions and distinctiveness have been largely overlooked in telling German history, assuming a single ‘ethnomusicology’ (or ‘popular music studies’ or ‘historical musicology’) can have similar effects. The Berlin Phonogram Archive exists today because of a West–East reunification project, itself a repatriation effort of a different sort. Typically, post-colonial repatriations return items taken by a colonial power from a colonized culture, but in this post-socialist repatriation the roles are not as clear. In 1945, both Germanys were occupied by foreign powers; in 1990, West Germany subsumed the East. But while colonizers saw the cultures of the colonized as inferior, something to be wondered at and then replaced, most West Germans did not even believe East Germany had a culture of its own; they were meant to share a single ‘German culture’. Reinhard and Stockmann acted on this assumption of shared heritage, as fellow Germans and as fellow ethnomusicologists. Somewhat ironically, given the debates over repatriation that swirl around the objects in today’s Ethnological Museum, they saw the Phonogram Archive’s Cold War repatriation – which essentially affirmed Western ownership – as unproblematic. Their reunification project was ultimately successful, but national reunification has not been entirely so, in large part because East Germany was never seen as an equal partner; East Germans constantly felt (still feel) belittled, even ridiculed. In this sense, there are similarities between post-socialist situations and post-colonial ones. If we extend this insight to ethnomusicology as a field, we must consider whether Eastern ethnomusicology/ists (and musicologies/ists) have also been overlooked or written out of disciplinary histories in favour of Western points of view, and if Western ideologies and Cold War propaganda were (are) upheld and spread through our field. Decolonizing music studies and music archives might then also require exhumation of their Cold War histories and a re-evaluation of how Cold War politics and ideologies affected both.