Producing, Circulating and Listening to Recorded Popular Music in Nazi Germany
José Gálvez
This subproject explores the legal, administrative, commercial and political entanglements involved in the production, circulation and consumption of popular music records under the Nazi regime. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources and materials from private collections, the subproject aims to detail the key tensions between the economic imperatives of the Nazi state, the political goals of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and the social impact of popular music in a context of dictatorship and war. Against the backdrop of the Nazi regime’s various regulatory mechanisms, popular music records are approached here as “unruly media”—media that were difficult to control due to the complex networks they both shaped and were embedded in.
The output of the subproject includes a peer-reviewed chapter in an edited volume and a peer-reviewed journal article. The chapter offers a structural analysis of the production and circulation of popular music records, focusing on legal, administrative and economic dimensions. The journal article takes a micro-level perspective, examining the social and psychological impact of recorded popular music by female artists on German soldiers at the margins of desire, delusion and death.