Georg Dannenberg and the ’Usable Past’: Archiving and Re-Use of National Socialist Recordings in East German Radio Features

For broadcasters in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the National Socialist period represented two kinds of “usable past.” Firstly, the inherited radio infra-structure - including extensive sound archives - provided them with physical remnants of the past usable for broadcasting. Secondly, the Nazi period and its recordings provided ideological material for GDR propagandists condemning West Germany by association with the Nazi regime. However, as this article shows, administrative and logistical problems within GDR Radio archives forced program-makers like Georg Dannenberg to act as archivists themselves, creating their own collections of clips to use in their propaganda war against the West.