Abstract
This paper presents findings from archive research recently undertaken in Berlin and Wiesbaden into the scoring of early German sound films from the period 1928-1933. Among other things, the research has uncovered neglected film repertoires, and scoring practices which seem to suggest that, at least in this cultural milieu, the familiar, later-coined diegetic/non-diegetic theoretical polarity was, from the time of the very birth of sound film, rarely a straightforward practical reality. But the discussion will principally focus on music's role in delineating the feminine persona in four remarkable films: Abschied (1930), Das blaue Licht (1932), Anna und Elisabeth (1933), and Elisabeth und der Narr (1933). These films’ complex musical characterizations and cultural representations suggest many tensions between contemporary literature on the ‘New Woman’ and the workplace (Siegfried Kracauer, Max Brod, Elsa Herrmann), women’s movements in the Weimar Republic, and the historical reality of women’s societal conditions in post-First-World-War Germany, over which hung the spectre of Paragraph 218.