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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 February 2024
I. Introduction
Around 1930, Austrian Opera and operetta singer Joseph Schmidt (born in 1904) possessed one of the best-known voices in Germany. Having moved to Berlin in 1925, he performed in more than thirty-eight radio operas and helped popularize the medium between 1929 and 1933. His internationally successful musical film Ein Lied geht um die Welt (A Song Goes Round the World) was the peak of his career, but soon after its release in May 1933, Schmidt had to flee from Nazi persecution in Germany and ended up dying in a Swiss internment camp in 1942. The title song of the movie can today be listened to in the exhibition BERLIN GLOBAL at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, of which I was one of the curators and which opened to the public in July 2021. The Humboldt Forum is housed in the partly reconstructed Stadtschloss (City Palace) of the Hohenzollern dynasty, which was erected on the site of the demol-ished GDR Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), thus becoming a highly controversial site of post-reunification Germany's interrogation of its tumultuous history and its place in a globalized present and future.
The recording of the song is part of an installation dedicated to the Berlin-based record company Lindström, which was one of the largest European record companies in the first decades of the twentieth century and became part of the EMI group in 1931. You can select Schmidt's Ein Lied geht um die Welt as one of sixteen Lindström recordings on an old gramophone from the 1920s, which has been converted into an interac-tive museum exhibit. The gramophone sits in an open spherical booth with many Lindström labels on the walls, and when you select one of the songs, it is played through loudspeakers into the booth while you can read information on the song and look at its record label on a screen in the open lid of the gramophone. The exhibition is concerned with the ways in which Berlin was and still is interconnected with the world. The music recorded and distributed by Lindström therefore stands as an example of global cultural transfers and the role Berlin played in it. All of the songs in this exhibit really went around the world in one way or the other.
The Lindström installation is not the only one in BERLIN GLOBAL offering a multisensory experience.
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