The wilderness of that other, fading century is stamped all over by the footsteps of prodigals torn from their homes. Some traces are still with us as sound and light, bottled by the technologies that defined the era. How strange to have to explain there were no phones or cameras to film modernity’s starting gun in Sarajevo, after which a few hundred men from quiet villages the world over found themselves assembled just south of the Kaiser’s Hauptstadt, in a camp where Pacific Islanders met with Mongolians across the prison yard, and Bengalis and Algerians fought, sang, and discussed in secret their wives and children, means of escape, and plans for peacetime.
When I moved to Berlin on an Fulbright research grant, the most important discovery I made was also the first: that no person from the U.S. Department of State, nor my institution of origin, nor the German government, nor any other representative of the coalition of institutional bureaucracies that enabled my fellowship was planning to check on me or my progress in any way. This epiphany occasioned a flowering of lassitude, like the moment a hallucinogen kicks in, in this case, several months after I ingested it. I could relax. I knew that if I waited long enough, while simply paying attention to whichever direction my curiosity pointed me toward, I would find an appropriate topic of study. I even convinced myself that I had already completed the work for which I was now being paid, i.e. the grant application itself, which had dominated the entire previous summer. So instead of working on my research project—the proposal described in my statement of purpose no longer interested me—or indeed any research project, I read novels, watched old movies, explored the strange and alluring German capital, and played the electric keyboard my partner bought me as a birthday gift. It wasn’t until November that I stumbled upon the man whose life and work, curiously forgotten today (at least in the English-language world), would engross me for weeks and months. I even thought I would write a book about him. The man was Wilhelm Doegen and his abandoned work was the Museum of the Voices of the People, one of the strangest aural collections in the world.
Doegen was a high-school English teacher and technophile born the same year Edison invented the phonograph. When the First World War broke out, he was the head of the sound department at Berlin’s state library. The job bored him and, in his boredom, he’d developed a grand utopian idea: to found a “Museum of the Voices of the People” that would combine the latest recording technologies with his Oxford training in linguistics and a quaint pre-war spirit of international brotherhood. Doegen’s ideas found unlikely allies among the German emperor’s military propagandists, which included the famous Orientalist Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, and he was encouraged to found the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission. The commission, it was agreed, would be financed by the state and kept classified.
It might have come to little more than a collection of Prussian nursery rhymes had there not also been another institution just a few miles south of the state library headquarters where that unprecedented collection of men—a collection we would now call “diverse” and was then simply cosmopolitan—waited behind barbed wire.
//
The Half-Moon Camp
Ali Swahili was a 22-year-old Comoran from an islet of Mayotte too small for most maps. One September morning in 1914 he left his adopted home of Madagascar for the North African front. The newspapers predicted a short war. Ali had no doubt read about the archduke’s assassination; he was a poor baker, with little schooling, but he’d learned to speak and write in at least five languages, including Arabic, French, Swahili, and Hua, a Malagasy dialect. The Germans who captured him in northern Africa shipped Ali first to Berlin, then to Wünsdorf, a few miles south of the city, where he was housed for the remainder of the fighting at a POW camp known for its heterogenous collection of Muslims and other so-called “orientals.” He must have left the Halbmondlager at least once, since we know that a little after nine o’clock on October 25, 1918—a few days before the Ottomans signed the armistice at Mudros—Ali walked into a crowded room on Berlin’s Friedrichstraße and sang an old Kingazija song into a funny-looking mouth. He sang beautifully and nobody spoke.
The Lady living above
has slaughtered a cow
In the big cups
is blood of human beings
which is unlike cow's blood
…
Take things slowly
by Allah's name, I swear
Finish so that you may pray
The youth of Baghani
are all clean 1
When he finished, one of the Germans asked Ali to direct his life story into the little hole, then to talk about whatever he wanted. Ali accommodated this request, too, now speaking in a dialect of the Bantu language known to its speakers as Shikomori, the language of islands. The story took less than three minutes, after which Ali disappeared from the room, our story, and recorded history.
There were thousands like him. I liked in particular the story of Mal Singh, a Sikh landowner from Punjab who left home that same September, in 1914, on a ship bound for Marseilles. In the brief oral autobiography of his life, recorded two years before Ali’s but on the same Odeon machine, and in the same room on Friedrichstraße, he recited what could have been the story of any number of his cellmates in the Half-Moon Camp. His voice was—still is—a woodwind, strong and light:
There was once a man. He ate two ser of butter and drank two ser of milk in India. He joined the British Army. This man went into the European war. Germany captured this man. He wishes to go to India. He wants to go to India. He will get the same food he had in former times. Three long years have passed. Nobody knows when there will be peace. In case the man is forced to stay here two more years, he will die. If God has mercy, he will make peace soon, and this man will go away from here.
It was the largest conscription the world had ever seen, not just in size but in geographic ambition, and it happened without any forethought. Within two days of Britain’s declaration of war, the war cabinet began dispatching divisions of Raj troops to the Middle East, with the generals’ intentions already on Europe. The French soon followed. Among the first soldiers to suffocate on Germany’s “yellow low walls” of chlorine gas were the Algerians and Moroccans of France’s 45th and 78th, at Ypres.
The hundreds of thousands of colonial soldiers fighting for the Entente powers were the most visible signs of what a strange new war this was, one where ethnic identities and national taxonomies were both paramount and open to certain revisions. Global colonialism, having eaten up most of the world’s desirable real estate, had arrived at its logical endgame in Belgium, France, Palestine, and Gallipoli, where, like starving caged rats, the great empires began to gnaw at each other.
Not everyone cheered on the new pan-national war. To a few knighted journalists in the British press, conscription from the colonies was imperial suicide. After all, Britain and France had not just encouraged but ordered certain brown men to kill certain white men. This was a change in the natural order of things. If a brown man got it into his head that some white men were legitimate targets of lethal violence, what next? But the prospect of cheap bodies outweighed European notions of racial propriety, and colonial soldiers were given uniforms and guns. By 1917, the Western Front had achieved a state of cultural and ethnic exchange unprecedented in the history of the world — a feat to be compared only to the unprecedented number of the dead.
To be taken prisoner was a lucky turn. Those captured by the Ottomans were merely tortured and starved, rather than gassed on a cold field, and those captured by the Germans were sometimes treated with special scientific interest. Perhaps the luckiest of all lived at the Half-Moon Camp, which owed its existence to von Oppenheim, an eccentric half-Jewish German aristocrat. Von Oppenheim had spent decades in the Near and Far East, and had become convinced even before the breakout of war that Islam was Germany’s secret weapon against Britain, France, and Russia. Wilhelm II found him credible and in August 1914 a secret alliance was formed between the Kaiser and Sultan Mehmed V of the Ottoman Empire.
The commander of the Half-Moon Camp was an enthusiastic if amateur photographer named Otto Stiehl. Stiehl’s aims were mostly anthropological, but this didn’t matter to his superiors. The Half-Moon was Germany’s premier Islamic show camp, intended to demonstrate the possibility of revolution among its (mostly, but not entirely, Muslim) population of colonial subjects. Speeches on the evils of French, Russian, and British rule were a common entertainment for prisoners. They ate halal food which they themselves prepared, worshipped at a mosque—the first ever built in Germany—and enjoyed special provisions for Ramadan.
Thousands of Stiehl’s photographs, many of which became popular postcards in Germany, attest to the strange lives of the prisoners, who were studied like exotic animals while simultaneously enjoined to mutiny against their colonial masters. Their wardens hoped the prisoners would be radicalized and sent to fight for the Ottoman army in Constantinople. The camp newspaper for Muslim prisoners was called El Dschihad and was available in a half-dozen languages. (For Hindu prisoners the name was changed to Hindustan, and the pan-Islamic content was censored.) One imagines they must have talked, though. Here Muslims were interned alongside Sikhs, Hindus, and Christians; among the Indians, Gurkhas were imprisoned with Rajputs, Punjabis, and Pashtuns. Men from Comoros, Tunisia, Morocco, and Martinique shared their bunks and canteen benches. News of the camp aroused the excitement of Doegen, the high-school English teacher, and toward the end of the war, with von Oppenheim’s approval, his commission began to assemble a body of recordings of the cornucopia of voices forcibly gathered there.
I heard them for myself one muddy November morning in 2014 at Humboldt’s Sound Archives. I approached the old building along the banks of the river beneath a white and drizzling sky. Across the Spree, the Pergamon Museum was half-covered in scaffolding. All the buildings on the island were cratered by mortar shell. Exactly a century had passed since the Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip had stumbled upon the stalled Gräf & Stift convertible of the archduke and his wife outside a Sarajevo café.
The archives lived in a narrow room overlooking a courtyard where a few tattered and jaundiced leaves were battened to a windswept oak. A tall woman named Sarah greeted me at the door. We were alone. Along one side of the room stood twenty metal cabinets, each containing a few hundred shellac records. They smelled old and musty. Sarah didn’t speak any English so I muddled my way in German. She began to show me the hand- and typewritten records of the prisoners whose voices were recorded by Doegen. Many of them included incredibly detailed biographies. There were handwritten accounts in Hebrew and Tamil scripts. A Sikh prisoner told a fable, a “story of two cats” dutifully translated and typed up by an assistant.
Then we played a recording together. Over loud cracking, a soft voice hummed and sang. Between the notes, I felt I could hear the ghostly breathing of the singer and the otherwise silent witnesses who stood with him in the room: Doegen and his assistants. Everyone on the recording was dead.
[Continue to Part 2 here.]
//
These essay fragments were written in 2015. A recent visit from a Pakistani friend with whom I consulted on the project reminded me of their existence. Part 2 will follow soon. If you like this sort of thing, subscribe below.
xoxo,
Ben
My thanks to Abdilatif Abdalla for translating this song and to Kelly Askew for her assistance. The full translation, which I have adjusted only slightly for my own purposes, follows:
Bibi wa darini
TheLady(living)above
amechinja nombe [there's a dot over the 'n' so I'm guessing this ought to be ng'ombe]
hasslaughteredacow
ndani ya makombe
In the big cups/ big oval-shaped plates/ big shells
damu ya viumbe
is blood of human beings
si kana ya nombe [an error? should be 'kama'?] (Kelly: Katika lahaja nyingine, "kama" ni "kana.")
(which) is unlikecow's blood;
sua mambo miramira
take things slowly/ gradually
harafu ndjema = (harufu njema)
Nice smell/ Sweet scent
kana ya maungo
like the smell/ scent of the back
suwe he mambo miramira.
take things slowly/ gradually
Allahi nakuwa pia = (Wallahi nakuapia)
by Allah's name, I swear
weshe usali
Finish so that you may pray
vijana zaki baghani = (vijana wa ki-Baghani)
the youth of Baghani
wote maradadu.
are all neat/ tidy/ chic