The Sound of a New Era: On the Transformation of Auditory and Urban Experience in the Long Fin de Siècle, 1880–1930

Abstract

In his 1930s memoir ‘Berlin Childhood around 1900’, Walter Benjamin recollects the ringing of the telephone as a sound that sharply interrupted the quiet of his middle-class family home and signalled the beginning of a new era. Following Benjamin s lead, the article retraces the decades around 1900 as an era of transformation in which fundamental changes in the urban environment, in society and technology also lead to a crucial change of auditory experience. The new sounds of this era, from telephone rings to city noises to gramophone recordings, and the ways in which contemporaries dealt with them can therefore be used as a kind of sonic probe to detect broader transformations of modern experience.