ESIMESE MAAILMASÕJA AEGSETEST EESTI SALVESTUSTEST BERLIINI ARHIIVIDES
Estonian Recordings in Berlin Archives From the Time Of the First World War

Summary/Abstract: During the First World War, representatives of many different nationalities were detained in German war prisoner camps. A campaign was initiated by Wilhelm Doegen in 1914, to record speech and music from those detainees and this way to create a sound archive containing examples of the world’s different languages and music cultures. By the end of the war, more than 1.5 thousand recordings on phonograph rolls and more than a thousand recordings on shellac disks had been made. Among those, 6 rolls and 2 disks containing speech and songs in Estonian have been recently discovered. This paper describes those songs. Their total number is 14 but, since one song has been recorded twice, the number of individual songs is 13. Out of those 13, 8 belong to the so-called newer Estonian folksongs and 5 are popular songs from the early 20th century. More or less equivalent variants of 6 out of the 8 folksongs can be found in the Estonian Folklore Archives, either as transcriptions of their text, melody or both, or in the form of a audio recording. Those recordings, however, have been made only after the Second World War, i.e. considerably later than the recordings kept in Berlin.

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