Accidental Oral Histories: Working with Sound Recordings from WW1

The September 2025 meeting of the OHS Archives and Oral History Special Interest Group will feature a special public talk from Britta Lange, a lecturer at the Institute of the History and Theory of Culture at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. For more information see below:

Between 1915 and 1918, the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission produced 1.650 gramophone recordings and 1.030 wax cylinders with songs and speech samples of prisoners of war in German camps – designed for linguistic and ethnomusicological research and a language library on shellac discs. Academic and artistic research of the last 20 years has shown that the archive against expectation contains sound recordings in which the prisoners talk about their biography, their recruitment to the war, their situation in the camp and their longings. These provide accidental sources for an alternative history of WWI and a political history of feelings and power relations. The lecture will elaborate on the context, provide some examples and reflect on how to approach and to file the recordings today.

To join this online meeting, please click here

For more information about this meeting or the Special Interest Group, please contact Charlie Morgan, chair of the Archives and Oral History SIG