The Traces of a Media War: Archives of Dutch Broadcasts from London during the Second World War

Abstract

The project ‘ Mediaoorlog ’ (media war) pioneers a digital humanities approach to analyse propaganda discourses in Dutch-language media during the Second World War. The core database at our disposal is the CLARIAH Media Suite, which brings together relevant collections of digitised sources, including the audio archive of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. This contribution reflects on our first efforts to study Radio Oranje, the daily broadcast of the Dutch government-in-exile from London to the occupied Netherlands. It is argued that the current online radio archive from the Second World War has its limits and that it therefore is necessary to employ a hybrid methodology, drawing on material from various collections, both digital audio fragments and paper transcripts. The following pages will provide an analysis of how these two source materials relate to each other by showing how they came into being and how they were transferred from Great Britain to the Netherlands. The first part of this contribution contains a historic overview of Radio Oranje and the trajectory of its archival records. The second part of this paper explores how these sources have been used in the late twentieth century to shape Dutch public memory of wartime radio broadcasting from London.