José Gálvez
The years between 1930 and 1950 still represent an obscure episode in the history of the German recording industry. While historical accounts from music business research have dealt with this period cursorily, recent accounts from popular music studies, contemporary history and sound studies have hardly tackled in depth the German record industry during the Nazi regime. There are historical and methodological reasons for this lack of attention: The German recording industry was hit especially hard by the Depression and shrank considerably in the 1930s. From this perspective, its relevance within the popular music culture of the 1930s and 1940s could be relativized. Moreover, due to confiscations, prohibitions and forced restructuring, there is hardly any reliable data on the production conditions and sales of popular music records during the Nazi dictatorship.
However diminished and difficult to reconstruct the recording industry remained nevertheless interlocked with the music publishing, film and broadcast industry that remained stable or even expanded in the advent of the Nazi dictatorship. Moreover, if one considers that in contrast to broadcasting or film, records were more difficult to control by the Nazi dictatorship, dealing with record production may open up avenues to gain a more comprehensive understanding of practices, industrial processes and transnational networks responsible for a considerable part of the production of popular music in the 1930s and 1940s. Focusing on three examples at specific intersections of the music publishing, film and record industries this chapter aims to outline a source-based approach to records and the recording industry as integral components of the transnational media networks of popular music production in fascist Germany and Austria.