‘Amerrrika ist wunderrrbarrr’: promotion of Germany through <i>Radio Goethe</i>’s cultural export of German popular music to North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Much has been written about the cultural, social and political impact of German popular music within the country, but the role of German popular music outside of Germany has not been sufficiently examined. The research presented here is designed to investigate an example of Germany’s export of contemporary popular music as state-sponsored promotion of its national (pop) culture. San Francisco’s weekly radio programme Radio Goethe – The German Voice, which distributes popular music from German-speaking countries to English-speaking audiences, is explored. The main purposes of this programme are to portray a modern Germany to a foreign audience and to arouse interest in the country. The weekly 60-minute series began airing in 1996 and is sponsored by the German federal government. Radio Goethe is carried by over thirty college radio stations in the USA, Canada and New Zealand, and in 2004 the German creator and host of the series received a Federal Cross of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz) for his intercultural work. This article briefly documents the history of the series and critically examines the presentation, style and language of the music. The results of qualitative research on the meanings that listeners assign to the music – based on questionnaires and focus group interviews with American members of the show’s audience – are presented. This case study is framed within existing debates about the relationships between popular music, national identity, cultural representation, and state-supported music export. Data from interviews with the founder of the show and the cultural ambassador of Germany in San Francisco are analysed to clarify the goals of and assumptions behind the radio series.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".