On 18 August 1933, just six months after the landslide electoral victory of the NSDAP that would confirm the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, Josef Goebbels, newly appointed as head of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, opened the 10th German Radio Exhibition with an address entitled Radio as the Eighth Great Power. He said, ‘It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio.’ After introducing Otto Griessing's Volksempfänger (People's Receiver) to the assembly, Goebbels described the role of the radio industry in the newly secured state ‘to clearly centralize all radio activities, to place spiritual tasks ahead of technical ones, [and] to provide a clear worldview’.Footnote ¹

For the next 12 years, a carefully contrived and articulated soundscape echoed throughout the German nation, issuing from radios and loudspeakers, from atop loudspeaker vans and installations to echo in the ears of its citizens, at home, at work, in city streets and village ways, in festivals and solemn gatherings in order ‘to provide a clear worldview’. At his trial in the Nuremburg Proceedings, following the ‘inconceivable catastrophe’ visited upon the ‘German people [and] the world’, Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production, delivered a long closing speech. He described with great acuity and authority the ways and means of the National Socialist Project. It was the knowing architect and not the Reich Minister who spoke of radio and sound technology during the Third Reich. ‘Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history’, he said. ‘It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development … which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loudspeaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought.’Footnote ²

Carolyn Birdsall's excellent Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany is the textual outcome of a careful study of the soundscape of daily life during the 13 years that bridged the two speeches of Goebbels and Speer, a study of means and impact of the Nazi propaganda machine, closely attentive to the favoured instruments of these two architects of the Reich, the radio and the loudspeaker, and to the physical spaces of their reception. In an initial small-scale 2004 survey composed of oral history interviews with Germans who were children and young adults during the National Socialist regime, Birdsall detected an important theme among the participants, a sense of being earwitnesses to the period. The present study grew out of this initial recognition and was broadened to include historical archival work, descriptions and analyses of radio and public audio programming, theoretical investigations of earwitnessing, of listening in the twentieth century, and critical engagement with attempts at the production and stabilization of meaning by government and complicit private sector agents.

With the exception of the final chapter, the project is centred on Dusseldorf, a middle-sized industrial city set on the Rhine River. The wisdom of Birdsall's choice to locate the bulk of her work in Dusseldorf and not Berlin, or more broadly, the state, is manifest throughout the text, as broad psychologisms, grand ideas and sweeping media tropes are challenged repeatedly by local events, priorities and interests. Beginning with the institutionalizing of Schlageter as a national icon and the initial project of nation building, through to the final convulsions of the Reich in which the sonic chaos of bombs and sirens and general disorder drowned out the Nazi efforts to ‘sound out the city’, the author traces an outline of the urban soundscape of Germany, especially Dusseldorf, from 1933 to 1945, connecting festival, the day to day, cinema, songs, radio and urban spaces over four chapters: ‘Affirmative resonances in urban space’, ‘The festivalization of the everyday’, ‘Mobilizing sound for the nation at war’, ‘Cinema as Gesamtkunstwerk’. The last of these veers into a cine-musical discussion of film under National Socialism, engaging ‘Wagnerian’ film music techniques of ‘symphony’ and ‘harmonic rhythm’. As such, it indirectly circumscribes the entirety of the grand vision of National Socialist project. While the great design of the national Gesamkunstwerk would be articulated in its massive works of Riefenstahl, Speer and of course Wagner, it would be built on repetitions of its Leitmotiven, played out in the daily lives of its citizenry. Birdsall's coda or Afterward is a discussion of the 2003 film, Hitler's Hit Parade, directed by Oliver Axer, which she argues deploys these same cine-musical methods, but foregrounds the organization of music/image relations as indexical, rather than iconic to remembering – as ‘Echoes of the Past in the present’ in order to provide its audience with opportunities for a critical reorientation – for listening and for seeing through.