ABSTRACT
As early as 1900, popular music in Germany was tightly interwoven with transnational networks, linking European capital cities like Paris, Vienna and London. Through focusing on transnational connections, this chapter shows German (and especially Berlin) culture of the Weimar period as a transcultural phenomenon, presenting the beginning of a German popular music framework beyond national ideologies. It focuses on the beginning of the twentieth century and trace the way of one popular song, Victor Hollaenders “Schaukellied” (Swing song), from a Berlin revue through different places to the Ziegfeld follies in New York. The chapter looks at transnational and intermedial aspects of the popular music group Comedian Harmonists, reaching out to the 1930s and the end of the Weimar period. In the era after the Great War, while the record industry was reestablishing itself and the market demand for Western, particularly American, popular music was rising significantly, the gramophone record became the most important medium for popular song.
