Authors

Discussion

The purpose of a sound carrier (wax cylinder, vinyl record, cassette tape, CD, etc.) is to capture, store, and make reproducible ephemeral sound waves. During the Cold War, eastern European states used these sound carriers as a tool to further socialist friendship around the world. State-run companies released recordings of international music festivals, produced records for (politically sympathetic) artists in exile from their home countries, and licensed a wide variety of foreign music for domestic listeners. However, Eastern European states also used sound carriers as a diplomatic tool even when other mediums, objects, or symbols would have sufficed.

This paper will focus on the diplomatic use of vinyl records in situations that did not require the specific technological capabilities of a sound carrier, with particular attention to the relationship between the German Democratic Republic and Latin America. Records were handed out after diplomatic meetings with foreign officials, shipped overseas as part of goodwill packages and solidarity campaigns, included in international book fairs (with no regard given to their discrete medium), and awarded as souvenirs at festivals. In all of these situations, the records in question may have been listened to, but whether or not they actually were was immaterial to their function as a diplomatic symbol of the technological prowess and cultural affluence of eastern European socialism.

Beyond their musical content, vinyl records take on new significance. As objects abstracted from their function, they represent a unique model of technological and economic development, cultural patrimony, and international socialist friendship. This paper argues that, using records, East Germany developed and then exported a new, culturally mediated understanding of socialist economics to places as far away as Cuba and Chile. The congruences and frictions between these epistemologies helps us to understand how ideology converged with international economic, diplomatic, and cultural networks, such that these networks eventually became more beholden to logistical constraints.