The Representation and Performance of African Music in German Popular Culture

Abstract

Africa constituted a vivid part of the popular European imagination as early as the nineteenth century. Fascinated by travel accounts and adventure novels and, towards the end of the nineteenth century, by ethnographic shows and colonial exhibitions, audiences in Europe followed with great interest the “scramble for Africa,” with its spectacular discoveries on the periphery of the expanding colonial empires, just as people marvelled at the images of the first landing on the moon a century later (Lindfors 1999; Rotberg 1970). Towards the turn of the nineteenth century, new media technologies and forms of representation emerged such as the panorama or the cinematograph, conveying ever new images of seemingly exotic worlds. Thus, at Berlin's Kolonialpanorama which opened its doors for the public in 1885, a 115-metre long cyclorama, showing scenes of Germany's colonial occupation of Africa, awaited visitors. In exhibition rooms, ethnographic objects from the colonies were on display. Palm trees, a special lighting system, and artificial fog were installed to create a “tropical atmosphere” (Zeller 2002). The holistic, three-dimensional experience panoramas so created led Erlmann to speak of the “first mass medium to set up a perfect enclosure, a proto-cyberspace that enabled the viewer to become an inhabitant of image-space, someone who enters an image rather than someone who contemplates it from the outside” (1999:5–6). Other technologies such as phonography imparted not only a sonic but, as it were, a new “psychophysical” reality to the myth of Africa as a continent persisting in a seemingly timeless past (Carl 2004:126–31; see also Kittler 1986).