Access to Waxes - The Collections from the Arab World of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv

Published: 2025
the world of music (new series)
ISBN/ISSN: 2941-3680

About

Discussions on the topic of so-called decolonization of archives and collections gained considerable momentum in recent years. The debates and activities in this field are mostly about objects and artefacts and their “repatriation”, but what about collections of intangible cultural heritage? The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv at the Ethnologisches Museum provides an example of a use case for this question. It forms one of the most important collections of early audio documents in the world, but although most of its recordings and documentation have been digitized in recent years, only very few of the resources are publicly accessible today. 

Recordings from the Arab regions make up particularly noteworthy part of the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. They include numerous subcollections from the period between the late 1890s and the mid-1930s from Algeria, various Gulf regions, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, Syria, and Tunisia, but also more than 100 recordings from German prisoner-of-war camps during World War I. But as fascinating and valuable as these collections are - some, for example, include Arabic dialects and music repertoires that no longer exist today - they need to be treated with care. The recordings were usually taken by European scholars, sometimes under very problematic conditions, as the example of the recordings made in World War I prisoner-of-war camps show. 

In several workshops held at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin in the winter of 2022 under the motto “Access to Waxes”, experts from the fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, anthropology and legal studies discussed the question of how to deal with these “sensitive collections” in the field of tension between open access, science diplomacy and “recirculation”. This volume, which consists of two themed issues of world music (new series), brings together numerous contributions and discussions from these workshops.