<i>Von Haus zu Haus</i> : Kurt Reinhard, Erich Stockmann, and the Berlin Phonogram Archive in the Shadow of the Berlin Wall

Abstract The erection of the Berlin Wall in November 1961 gave the separation between the West and the Eastern Bloc, and particularly between the two Germanies, an enduring symbol. It also concretized the division of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, which had been separated by the Second World War, in a seemingly unsurmountable way. But while the wall made cross-border academic collaborations considerably more difficult, it did not prevent them entirely. This article relies on previously unexplored primary sources to relate and contextualize the extraordinary story of how two ethnomusicologists were able to bring together a large part of the cylinder collections of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, even as the geopolitical situation surrounding them grew ever more tense. From 1966 to 1967, Kurt Reinhard, then head of the Berlin Phonogram Archive and the Ethnomusicology Department of the Ethnological Museum in West Berlin, and Erich Stockmann, an academic employee of the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin and caretaker of the archival recordings returned by the Soviets, succeeded in exchanging and copying over 5,000 cylinder recordings and their documentation despite a litany of political and financial difficulties. Their collaboration illuminates a little-known aspect of the history of this foundational archive, while raising important questions about ethnomusicology’s political history and the roles the Cold War and Second World War played in the discipline’s formation.