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Nortorf’s record museum preserves 250,000 discs and the machines that played them
Volunteers keep a century of recorded sound in a former pressing-plant building.
Around 250,000 records are being preserved at the German Record Museum in Nortorf, Schleswig-Holstein, where a former industrial site has become a home for the history of recorded sound. Forty volunteers care for the discs and an extensive collection of playback technology.
The holdings include the NDR archive reaching back to 1924, as well as private collections. Museum association chairman Lutz Bertram and his colleagues present the objects as parts of a working musical culture, with guided tours adding stories to the technical information on display.
The collection ranges beyond vinyl. Gramophones, wax-cylinder equipment, jukeboxes, cassette players and tape machines trace successive ways of storing and hearing music. Short-lived formats such as the Tefifon sit alongside more familiar technologies, showing that recording history contains abandoned experiments as well as enduring successes.
The museum occupies the old boiler house on the former Teldec pressing-plant site. Telefunken began producing shellac records in Nortorf in 1948; Teldec emerged from the Telefunken and Decca partnership at the end of 1950. Over roughly fifty years, the site produced about 850 million records.
The present museum opened in autumn 2022, expanding on a predecessor established in 1999. It attracts approximately 10,000 visitors annually, including audiences for events. The municipality owns the building, while a support association raises donations and museum activities generate additional income.
Preservation involves more than keeping shelves full. Cataloguing a large archive and maintaining the equipment needed to demonstrate historical formats are continuing tasks. The collection’s scale requires patient work that is less visible than an exhibition opening.
Nortorf’s setting gives that effort a particular resonance: records are being cared for on ground once devoted to their manufacture. Industrial history, listening habits and musical repertoire meet in the same place, allowing visitors to consider recorded music as both sound and a physical object.