In the last few months, we have been delighted to welcome six new members to the EMHIS network:
Hermann Breitenborn (Hamburg University, Germany)
Natasha Kitcher (Loughborough University, UK)
Mari Pajala (University of Turku, Finland)
John Walsh (National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland)
Eskil Vesterlund (Lund University, Sweden)
Emil Stjernholm (Lund University, Sweden)
We are really happy to have you joining us and look forward to hear more about your research areas which range from film and television to pirate radio and the history of the electrophone. Welcome!
“Electrophone 1901”, George R. Sims, Wikimedia Commons/US public domain.
We are excited to present the new spring Lunch Webinar Series, which will run from February until June 2021. In line with the general ambition of EMHIS to support PhD students and early career researchers in media history, but also considering these trying times with the Covid-19 pandemic and the difficulties to travel and present your work, we have provided space for this group in particular. The lunch seminars will be one-hour long with a 30 mins presentation followed by a discussion. If you are interested to join in, please send a mail to one of the organisers: Marie Cronqvist or Jamie Medhurst (addresses below).
A new partnership between the Section for Media History and the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK) to promote digital history receives 3.3 million SEK from the Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology at Lund University. Named DigitalHistory@Lund, the new platform will support digital history research and digitization projects at Lund University.
Launching in January 2021, DigitalHistory@Lund aims to integrate existing digital history research, support the development of new projects, promote digital history skills, and build closer ties with partners outside academia.
The initiative is headed by Marie Cronqvist and Sune Bechmann Pedersen (Media History) and Kajsa Weber (History), together with a full-time research engineer dedicated to assisting faculty members with digital history projects. The ambition for the 2-year initiative is to develop new successful projects that will ensure a sustained focus on the challenges and opportunities of digital history in Sweden.
The Lund team is looking forward to collaborate with other EMHIS colleagues and together strengthen our competence in the field of digital history!
All members of the Section for Media History at Lund University are delighted to welcome EMHIS member Dr Betto van Waarden from Leuven University, Belgium, as one of our colleagues for two years within the Horizon 2020 programme Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions for Post Doc Researchers.
During his time in Lund, Betto will be working with his interesting project entitled ‘Presenting Parliament: Parliamentarians’ visions of the communication and role of parliament within the mediated democracies of Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands, 1844-1995’. Supervisor in Lund is Marie Cronqvist and co-supervisor is Ulrika Holgersson. Read more about Betto’s research on the Lund University research portal.
Another wonderful outcome of the EMHIS network collaboration! Congratulations, Betto!
Featured image: House of Commons, UK, Wikimedia Commons
Tuesday 8 May 1945, is widely known as Victory in Europe (VE) Day. Although the Second World War officially came to an end, not all Europeans celebrated the date. 8 May was experienced differently by people all over Europe. Most of them coped with everyday problems depending on the various situations they lived in: as a soldier of the German Wehrmacht or the Allied troops, as a housewife preparing a meal or living in an emergency shelter, as a survivor of the Holocaust in one of the liberated concentration camps or as a perpetrator who stood accused. Without personal documents we can only imagine what might have shaped people’s experiences of this day. But as far media coverage has been preserved, we can at least analyse what these people were told by the media of the time: reports by newspapers and the radio, news by broadsheets and loudspeakers that marked the end of the war. Of course, facts about the acceptance of the unconditional surrender of Germany’s armed forces by the Allies were inextricably interwoven with interpretations of what this event should mean for the contemporary readers, listeners and bystanders.
This is the third of three blog entries about the sonic traces of May 1945 in Britain, Germany and Sweden (authors Hugh Chignell, Hans-Ulrich Wagner and Marie Cronqvist) and the messages given by radio to the people who got in contact with them. They are radio sources from a victor, a loser, and a neutral. We consider such documents as relics of communicative processes in the past. This means that we consider them sources of past speaking and writing while looking for traces of past listening and reading historians lack so often.
These days, people in Germany can watch and listen to a long array of documentaries that all deal with the end of the Second World War 75 years ago. Since 1985 which then marked the 40th anniversary of unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht, the end of the Nazi government and the occupation by Allied troops, Germans have been discussing what VE Day means for them. For quite a long time, the understanding of being liberated was predominant. But right-wing voices are more and more challenging this interpretation by emphasising defeat, losses, and all the suffering in the rubble years.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signing the final surrender terms on 8 May 1945 in Berlin (source: Wikimedia, public domain)
Against this background, I would like to draw the attention to two radio documents of May 1945 – clips that reveal the clash of various interpretations given to the contemporary audience of May 1945.
The first document is the radio speech given by Großadmiral Dönitz on 8 May 1945. The document has been preserved at the German Broadcasting Archive (Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, DRA) and can be listened to in its special online dossier. BBC Monitoring Transcripts reveal that it was broadcast at 12.30.
After Hitler’s suicide on April, 30, Karl Dönitz became Reichspräsident of the German Reich. He and some high-ranked military officers and ministers escaped from Berlin and fled to Flensburg, in the north of Germany on the Danish border. The transmitter and the relay station there became a small radio station from which the Nazi government could address the German audience – at that time already under control of the British troops. The speech doesn’t merely give the factual information of unconditional surrender. Germans listening to this broadcast were also told that the ‘the unity of State and Party no longer exists’. Dönitz represents himself as a noble statesman dedicated to serve the German people (deutsches Volk). He both commemorates German fortitude and martyrdom (Tapferkeit und Opfertat) and appeals urgently on German strength and will (Kraft und Wille) which shall become the basis of a peaceful Europe.
The second document corresponds with this last address by the Nazi leadership. It is a BBC reportage recorded on 8 May 1945 in Lüneburg, a city in Lower Saxony, 50 kilometers away from Hamburg. Unfortunately, this clip hasn’t been published yet, so it can’t be linked to the sound document itself.
The reportage is about the announcement of armistice in Lüneburg. “Hello BBC, this is D-Day in Germany. And here in the old town of Luneburg …” the reporter starts. The BBC journalist tells his audience that Lüneburg inhabitants had been requested to gather at the market place at 4 o’clock and to listen to their mayor. For quite a long time, the reportage transmits the German speech about unconditional surrender given from the balcony. But what makes this reportage an outstanding document is the notice of the reporter which follows at the end of the clip: “as the announcement is made, the Germans stand listening to it silently, not a comment, not a movement among the crowd… they pause for a moment and then without comment the crowd starts to disperse”. This observation reveals something about German people’s mood at the end of the Second World War. There are no methodological reasons to call into question what the reporter says about people’s reactions. So the reportage turns out to be a proof for historians stating that Germans in May 1945 were somehow emotionless, incapable of suffering and acting, without pity, without compassion, not interested in politics and plans for future as mentioned in the propaganda speech by Admiral Dönitz. The BBC reportage was obviously broadcast on 8 May 1945. It ends up with an address to its British audience: “We in the crowd in British uniform can imagine a different D-Day”, a D-Day in Britain with excitement and flags. “Here in the town square of Luneburg is the other side of the picture.” What a wonderful British-German entangled sound document!
Zero Hour or not? Since the 1980s a huge amount of books have been published especially in Germany. (Photo: Hans-Ulrich Wagner)
Tuesday 8 May 1945, is widely known as Victory in Europe (VE) Day. Although the Second World War officially came to an end, not all Europeans celebrated the date. 8 May was experienced differently by people all over Europe. Most of them coped with everyday problems depending on the various situations they lived in: as a soldier of the German Wehrmacht or the Allied troops, as a housewife preparing a meal or living in an emergency shelter, as a survivor of the Holocaust in one of the liberated concentration camps or as a perpetrator who stood accused. Without personal documents we can only imagine what might have shaped people’s experiences of this day. But as far media coverage has been preserved, we can at least analyse what these people were told by the media of the time: reports by newspapers and the radio, news by broadsheets and loudspeakers that marked the end of the war. Of course, facts about the acceptance of the unconditional surrender of Germany’s armed forces by the Allies were inextricably interwoven with interpretations of what this event should mean for the contemporary readers, listeners and bystanders.
This is the first of three blog entries about the sonic traces of May 1945 in Britain, Germany and Sweden (authors Hugh Chignell, Hans-Ulrich Wagner and Marie Cronqvist) and the messages given by radio to the people who got in contact with them. They are radio sources from a victor, a loser, and a neutral. We consider such documents as relics of communicative processes in the past. This means that we consider them sources of past speaking and writing while looking for traces of past listening and reading historians lack so often.
Churchill waves to crowd (source: Wikimedia, public domain)
Most historical accounts of Victory in Europe Day (VE Day) focus on London and the gathering of huge crowds around Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square – the traditional meeting places for celebrations in the capital. The celebrations had been triggered by Hitler’s assassination on 30 April followed by the complete surrender of German forces at 02.14 on 7 May. The following recording tells us little but its sheer mundane authenticity; the sound of repeated car horns, whistles and cheers somehow connects us to what must have been a day of great relief and joy.
The BBC was not only central to celebrations and commemoration, it had earned that right over the last six years, and at 15:00 on 8 May it broadcast Churchill’s victory speech, ‘the evil doers now lie prostrate before us’. In Sian Nicholas’ definitive account of the BBC and the war she writes with authority of the tremendous success of VE Day broadcasts. After Churchill had been heard by 71% of the population (some listening to his words broadcast through loud speakers fixed to trees) Victory Celebrations was a programme designed to bring the London festivities to everyone in the land. Later that evening, with a certain inevitability, listeners were treated to a Tribute to the King featuring voices from around the Empire. The following week, J B Priestley, who had so brilliantly captured the public mood in the early years of the war was allowed to sound a note of caution warning that ‘the scene is grim and ruinous; and the journey must continue … Europe must be put together.’
Two girls at VE Day 1945, Battersea, London. (source: Wikimedia, public domain, IWM Non-Commercial License)
The scenes of crowds wearing paper hats, shouting and singing would have been against a grimmer back drop. London a shattered city, like so many throughout Europe, everywhere blackened by fire, rubble in huge heaps, ominous gaps in rows of houses. The crowds sang but as one 50 year old man remarked, ‘It was just like this after the last war and twelve months later we was standing in dole queues.’
Tuesday 8 May 1945, is widely known as Victory in Europe (VE) Day. Although the Second World War officially came to an end, not all Europeans celebrated the date. 8 May was experienced differently by people all over Europe. Most of them coped with everyday problems depending on the various situations they lived in: as a soldier of the German Wehrmacht or the Allied troops, as a housewife preparing a meal or living in an emergency shelter, as a survivor of the Holocaust in one of the liberated concentration camps or as a perpetrator who stood accused. Without personal documents we can only imagine what might have shaped people’s experiences of this day. But as far media coverage has been preserved, we can at least analyse what these people were told by the media of the time: reports by newspapers and the radio, news by broadsheets and loudspeakers that marked the end of the war. Of course, facts about the acceptance of the unconditional surrender of Germany’s armed forces by the Allies were inextricably interwoven with interpretations of what this event should mean for the contemporary readers, listeners and bystanders.
This is the second of three blog entries about the sonic traces of May 1945 in Britain, Germany and Sweden (authors Hugh Chignell, Hans-Ulrich Wagner and Marie Cronqvist) and the messages given by radio to the people who got in contact with them. They are radio sources from a victor, a loser, and a neutral. We consider such documents as relics of communicative processes in the past. This means that we consider them sources of past speaking and writing while looking for traces of past listening and reading historians lack so often.
In neutral Sweden, the liberation of “Norden” was an overarching theme on radio from 7 to 9 May 1945 – in broadcast speeches, radio reports and news bulletins. ”It feels like a long nightmare has finally released its grip and we can breathe again”, said prime minister Per Albin Hansson in his first radio speech shortly after the German surrender on 7 May. “Even if we Swedes have not been directly involved in the battle, we still realize what this means for our country and our people.” He emphasized the unyielding Nordic spirit and the joy that the Swedish people felt about their brothers and neighbours. That Sweden has managed to keep neutral and successfully avoid the lines of battle was not, Hansson stressed, a matter to boast about but instead a strike of good luck to be humbly grateful for.
Among the perhaps most emotional audio clips that can be found in the audio archive are a couple of recordings focusing merely on city sounds from Kungsgatan in Stockholm on the same day, 7 of May. In one of them, reporter Gunnar Helén stood on the roof of a garbage truck describing to the listener the spectacular visual scene before him: waving hands and flags, traffic jam, and confetti, office papers and paper streamers thrown from the windows. On the recording we hear people cheering, and an incessant sounding of car horns and laughter. After a while, someone takes up singing the Danish national anthem and others quickly join in. Then the singing crowd gets bigger continuing with the Norwegian and finally the Swedish anthems. Happy people on the street, both Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, are interviewed.
The Nordic theme was followed up on 8 May, when Hansson spoke again to cheering crowds in the central park Vasaparken in Stockholm. He was joined by Norwegian Labour party politician Lars Evensen, a member of the resistance movement (Hjemmefronten) and during the war in exile working at the Norwegian legation in Stockholm. “You can say that Norden has never been more alive with the Swedes,” Hansson stated, “than during these last few years. With every fibre in our body, we have felt with our brothers and sisters in Norway and Denmark.”
Among the remaining audio clips is also a travel report from 9 May by legendary radio reporter and host Sven Jerring about a brief undercover visit to Copenhagen shortly before the German surrender. Jerring tells the listener about an accidental but fortunate meeting on the street with a Danish colleague, who travelled around with his radio equipment on a trailer. The two reporters joined forces, and in Jerring’s report, the whole anecdote serves as an illustration not only of the unity and cooperation between the Nordic countries. It also forcefully reproduced what Nick Couldry has called “the myth of the mediated centre”, putting broadcast radio in the centre of world events.
Since its launch in 2012, Bournemouth, and more recently, Aberystwyth universities have participated in EMHIS. Over the years we have attended and organised forums, co-authored journal articles, presented our work and enjoyed the friendship, hospitality and scholarship of our Swedish and German colleagues. Much of was paid for by the Swedish government’s STINT fund.
But now Britain has left the EU and there is a nationalist government in power. What that will mean practically time will tell but as the EMHIS British contingent we wanted to make a statement.
We are deeply committed to our European project. We enormously value our Swedish and German friends and all of our European colleagues. We celebrate the transnational, progressive, diverse, feminist and experimental project that is Entangled Media Histories and we will remain in Europe – in Lund, in Hamburg and absolutely opposed to the petty minded nationalism of Brexit.
Thank you EMHIS for welcoming us into your entangled European home and together lets prove that British scholars are better off in Europe than outside!
We are really happy that all articles in the EMHIS special issue of Media History (Routledge, Taylor & Francis, vol 26, no 1, 2020) is now available in print. This is a joint venture that has been under way since our “Tracing entanglements in media history” conference at Lund University, Sweden, in May 2017, where most articles were once presented as papers. It has been lovely to see them all taking shape over the course of the peer review process during the last two years. Big thanks to all anonymous peer reviewers, whose comments and suggestions have made the texts better, and most of all to all authors for their wonderful input and their patience along the way!
What seems to be a matter of course within academia today, is far from being easily done. I talk about the endeavour of jointly writing a handbook chapter as a five-colleague team located in four different cities Hamburg, Lund, Bournemouth and Munich. I checked on my computer that I brought in the idea to contribute to the then planned ‘Handbook of European Communication History’ quite a long time ago, in mid-2013. As an immediate result of this initiative I was elected lead author. Along with four EMHIS colleagues, Marie Cronqvist, Kristin Skoog, Hugh Chignell, and Christoph Hilgert, we successfully applied a proposal on ‘Media after 1945: Continuities and New Beginnings’. Later on, we worked out the chapter, worked in reviewers’ occasionally contrastive recommendations and at the end proof-read what was sent to us by Wiley Blackwell several times. We did this, because up to now, we consider it a great opportunity to write about entangled media history.
How to write a 9.000 word-text on a period of transition in an entangled way? For us, it was clear that we do not only put together three case studies – one written from the perspective of a victorious country (UK), one from the perspective of a defeated state (Germany divided into four occupation zones), and one from the perspective of an officially neutral state during World War II (Sweden). In an amount of emails, Skype conferences and Google docs documents a new structure emerged. We decided on dealing with ‘the media landscape in Europe at the end of WW II’ (covering print media, radio, film and TV plans), with the question of ‘established’ and/or ‘new orders’ which means with media policy and media systems, and with – what we called – ‘key topics in the immediate post-war period’, i.e. how the media after 1945 dealt with everyday problems, the visions of the future, and the management of national identity. Whenever it was possible we also worked in information from other countries, especially from South and East Europe, supported by our media history colleagues Alec Badenoch, Gloria García González, Morten Michelsen, and Darina Volf.
Of course, these few blog sentences invite you to read about ‘the continuities and new beginnings’ the team found out and what we ‘entangled’ so far. Maybe you are curious to know more about Sweden’s idea of ‘folkhemmet’ which means ‘the people’s home’ and the future of a welfare society; or to read more about the transition when the nation-wide Nazi-Newspaper ‘Völkischer Beobachter’ was published until 24 April 1945 and the very first new German newspaper under control of the Military Government, the ‘Aachener Nachrichten’, which was out on 24 January 1945; or to recognise problems of the female staff at the BBC, of women in a male dominated profession. As a matter of course, all national examples like these are embedded in a transnational context.
Finally, worth mentioning might be that we decided that several developments didn’t start on 8 May 1945, the ‘Victory in Europe’ (VE) Day, but already in 1943/44. And of course, we state that transformation processes didn’t come to an end in 1947/48. On the contrary, Europe became more and more shaped by two ‘blocs’ and a so-called ‘Cold War’, also on air – but this is described by other colleagues in the following chapter of the handbook.
Hans-Ulrich Wagner, Hamburg
Hans-Ulrich Wagner, Hugh Chignell, Marie Cronqvist, Christoph Hilgert, Kristin Skoog: Media after 1945: Continuities and New Beginnings. In: Klaus Arnold, Paschal Preston, Susanne Kinnebrock (Eds.): The Handbook of European Communication History. London: Wiley 2020, 189-204.
Report from a conference at the Institute of Sound and Vision, Hilversum, Netherlands.
This was probably one of the first such events to mark the hundredth anniversary of radio. Anya Luscombe and her colleagues from the University of Utrecht had assembled a number of well known radio specialists incuding a good friend of EMHIS, Michele Hilmes.
The EMHIS representation at the event included Hans-Ulrich Wagner and Alec Badenoch. Apart from some very interesting papers we were shown some of the artefacts in the extraordinary archives. The photograph shows Michele Hilmes and some of the machines used for digitising audio tape.
I found the conference particularly useful because of my interest in radio drama (an interest I share with Hans-Ulrich of course). In Hilversum I met Philomeen Lelievedt from the University of Utrecht who proved to be an extremely useful contact for future research.
The Radio Research Section of ECREA held their 6th conference at the Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences of the University of Siena, Italy, from 19-21st September 2019. The theme was Radio as a Social/Convivial Media: community, participation, public values in the platform society.
The conference gathered together scholars and practitioners that are currently exploring the complex entanglement between radio/audio/digital media and society. The aim was to situate radio studies within the broader contemporary media ecosystem and created a dialogue with Internet Studies, Platform studies, Social Media studies, critical political economy of the media, Media History, digital media management, Cultural Studies, production studies, ethnography, sound studies, and social sciences.
Keynote by Prof David Hendy
170 delegates from 35 countries attended, hearing keynotes from Elena Razlogova, Christina Dunbar-Hester, David Hendy, David Fernández Quijada, Enrico Menduni and Caroline Mitchell. EMHIS was well represented in panels on advertising, public radio, radio communities and talk radio cultures. Hans-Ulrich Wagner reflected on the challenges of radio cultures in times of media change, Gloria Khamkar spoke about female empowerment in ethnic minority community radio and Nelson Ribeiro discussed how advertising played a significant role on the establishment of the first newsrooms in the Portuguese commercial broadcasters. Kathryn McDonald’s paper focussed on suicidal callers to live UK radio phone- in shows and she was honoured to be awarded the first Guy Starkey Prize for most original presentation. Guy was a former Chair of the section and a key figure in connecting European and global radio scholars.
Siena was a beautiful place to visit. We were lucky enough to enjoy the September sunshine and were treated to an evening tour to the hillside for our social dinner in the magnificent cloister of La Certosa di Pontignano – a Carthusian monastery and church. This was a great chance to connect from scholars and practitioners with so many different approaches – and to reconnect with our EMHIS colleagues once again.
During his time in Lund, Betto will be working with his interesting project entitled ‘Presenting Parliament: Parliamentarians’ visions of the communication and role of parliament within the mediated democracies of Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands, 1844-1995’. Supervisor in Lund is Marie Cronqvist and co-supervisor is Ulrika Holgersson. Read more about Betto’s research on the 
Iconic newsreel from Kungsgatan, Stockholm (source: Svenska filminstitutet, SVT/SMDB, retrieved from Stockholmskällan)
Comments