Broken records from Berlin: the place of listening in People on Sunday (dir. Curt and Robert Siodmak/Edgar G. Ulmer, 1929)

ABSTRACT

People on Sunday, a 1929 low-budget production starring amateur actors, depicts the ordinary leisure practices of a group of four young Berliners as they elope to the Nikolassee lake at the weekend. The film's most vibrant and dynamic scenes centre around the act of playing records on a small portable gramophone. Here, I take the suitcase gramophone as my main entry point to explore the sites, issue and representation of listening in the Weimar Republic. Accordingly, this article maps out the ways in which recorded sound is represented and mediated through the paradoxically mute medium of film. It particularly interrogates the function of the gramophone and recorded songs as agents of narration and communication. The song-playing device is posited as that which temporarily plays and speaks on behalf of the actors, in a quasi-prophetic manner. Several gramophone records are broken in the course of the narration; a symbolic – and irremediable – shattering of collective entente and happiness. For the spectators, the broken records symbolise a further degree of silence – or withdrawal from the film. From a historical perspective, People on Sunday can retrospectively be seen as a larger farewell to the fragile security of the Weimar Republic.

KEYWORDS:

• Phonography
• silent film
• materiality
• intermediality
• Weimar Republic

Notes

1. This book was to serve as a blueprint for a successful series of reportages undertook by Ms. Hamilton, notably Modern Russia as Seen by an Englishwoman (1934), Modern Austria as Seen by an Englishwoman (1935) and Modern Ireland as Seen by an Englishwoman (1936).

2. Contrary to insiders such as the novelists Erich Kästner or Hans Fallada, or the reportage work of Joseph Roth or Siegfried Kracauer, Cicely Hamilton was so enthused by the myriad discrete events and routines of everyday life that she failed to grasp the dramatic threat to democracy posed by early National-Socialist events.

3. People on Sunday was produced by the state-run UFA (Universum Film-Aktiengessellschaft). Due to the enforced economic and cultural isolation of Germany in the aftermath of WW1, and despite the relative reopening of the frontiers after the signature of the Locarno Treaty in 1925 and Germany’s admission to the League of Nations in 1926, the film was typically produced for, and circulated within, the domestic market.

4. This genre was exemplified by silent features such as Leopold Jessner’s and Paul Leni’s Back Stairs (1921), Karl Grune’s The Street (1923), G. W. Pabst’s The Cheerless Alley (1925), Gerhard Lamprecht’s The Condemned Streets of Berlin (1925) and People Living Together (1926), Joe May’s Asphalt (1928) and, arguably the most famous of all, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927). See Finler (1997, 73), Schrader and Schebera (1988, 91) and, for a detailed analysis of Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, Hake (1994). According to de Jonge, the German film industry was responsible for “introduc[ing] the documentary film as a serious art form” (1978, 147). It must be noted, though, that very early cinema was already keen to record new urban environments.

5. Hermand places the film industry, alongside radio, the press and the record industry, as having “a virtually unlimited cultural monopoly” (1994, 67). Cinema-going was a popular entertainment of the Weimar Republic and Germany counted 3500 cinema by 1930, “with a million tickets sold daily” (Schrader and Schebera 1988, 89).

6. The new electric gramophones were first commercialised in 1925, the year “when the gramophone became a true mass medium and record sales ran into six figures” (Schrader and Schebera 1988, 117).

7. We should also recall here the technological affinities and frequent family resemblances which existed between the realms of early phonography and cinematography (Feaster and Smith 2009); the silent era witnessed the birth of many (short-lived) hybrid inventions such as the Cameraphone, the Chronophone, the Bio-Phonographe and the Cinephone which all attempted to synchronise the scopic and the sonic (Altman 1996, 671; Chion 1999, 10). Mostly, however, these machines remained novelties.

8. We must also insist that early film-going remained a defiantly multi-sensory, immersive experience. In a semi-autobiographical piece, Christopher Isherwood writes about the “flicks” of the early 1920s in Oxford, recalling “the films which were, even in those days, not silent, because the audience supplied the popping of champagne corks, the puffing of trains, the sound of horses’ hooves and the kisses” ([1938] 1968, 40). The audience was spontaneously improvising a matching soundtrack. And music was “there in live form from the beginning” (Armes 1988, 19).

9. The machine also kindled writers’ imaginations even since its introduction; for instance, the French produced many plays “starring” the phonograph as its main actor. As notably evidenced by John M. Picker (2003) in his study of the encounter between the novel and phonography, one medium becomes firmly embedded within another, contributing to texturing or collapsing traditional texts from the inside (as is also the case in Joyce’s Ulysses, and its reliance on phonograph-like effects of syncopation and repetition).

10. To name only a few of these memoirs or semi-memoirs: Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Vladimir Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave, Joseph Roth’s What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933, Sebastian Haffner’s Geschichte eines Deutschen – Als Engländer maskiert.

11. The gramophone was often used in films as a visual shortcut for America. See for instance its use in the Soviet film Men and Jobs (dir. Macheret, 1932); Christie (1994, 188).

12. And which Kracauer analysed in his 1930 account of the emerging white-collar culture in Germany. See Kracauer ([1930] 1998).

13. Peukert reminds us that “By introducing the forty-hour week and the first negotiated agreements covering holidays, the Weimar Republic actually established a framework of leisure for wage-earners for the first time. Pleasures that had previously been restricted for the middle classes were now, potentially at least, available for all. Modern leisure, indeed, dates from the twenties” (Peukert [1987] 1993, 175).

14. See also Taussig: “Obsolescence is where the future meets the past in the dying body of the commodity. […] The commodity does more than yield the measure of history as time. It is also the petrified historical event where nature passed into culture, where raw material combined with human labour and technology to satisfy cultured design” (Taussig 1993, 232–233).

15. The loose constellation of Frankfurt School thinkers, from Adorno to Kracauer, actively engaged in decoding and critiquing these new forms and sites of “modern sound consciousness” (Thompson 2004, 191). Kracauer, in particular, “accurately identifie[d] the reconfiguring of space in which the power relationship between the consumer of sound and the producer remains ambiguous” (Bull 2004, 181).

16. Hundreds of pictures are held at the Berlin Museum für Fotografie Archive alone.

17. Kracauer anticipated the formidable power of the radiophonic network in the Third Reich, when it was completely annexed by the government as an instrument of coercion.

18. One may remember that the words “object” and “obstacle” share a common etymology. The gramophone becomes, literally, an obstacle.

19. Einstein saw radio as a democratising tool. In 1930, he opened the annual German radio exhibition in Berlin with the following words: “Radio […] has a unique capacity for reconciling the family of nations. Until now nations got to know once another only through the distorting mirror of the daily press. Radio acquaints them in the most immediate form and from their most attracted side” (quoted in Hailey 1994, 14).

20. In the words of Carter, “the listener is after traces of significance” (2004, 44; the emphasis is mine).

21. The term “neue Sachlichkeit” initially applied to a new style of painting, which aimed to “come to terms with the new reality of the express train, the stink of petrol and the stock-exchange wizard, and to draw up a new aesthetic that did not consist merely of cries of despair or escapist vocations of rose petals. Painting became representational once again […]” (Peukert [1987] 1993, 168).

22. Implicit here is the fact that the young were at the forefront of these “new values”. Peukert remarks for instance that “many young people were quicker than adults to adopt the new values of an urban and industrial mass culture” ([1987] 1993, 93).

23. See also Follmer (2013) on the entwined rise of modernity and individuality in Weimar Berlin.

24. For parallels, see also Erich Kästner’s 1931 novel, Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist.

25. It could have been, technically at least, a talking film, especially as “UFA was one of the first company in the world to build proper sound stages for talkies” (de Jonge 1978, 147). Several filmmakers had already made use of sound. For instance, The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, and the first German full-sound talkie Melodie des Herzens [Melody of the Heart] was released in 1929, soon followed by The Blue Angel in 1930. For an account of the rise of talkies, see Schrader and Schebera (1988, 113). German cinemas started being converted to sound in 1929 and “by mid-1933 all 3,500 of them were in possession of the new apparatus” (Schrader and Schebera 1988, 113).