-
1 Social Text 122 s Vol. 33, No. 1 s March 2015
DOI 10.1215/01642472- 2831844 2015 Duke University Press
Shouldnt truth itself, as transitivity and incessant transition
of a continual coming and going, be listened to rather than seen?
But isnt it also in the way that it stops being itself and
identifiable? Jean- Luc Nancy
Boven Digoel was an isolation camp, built in the deepest of the
jungles of the Dutch East Indies. Indonesians who attempted to
overthrow the colo-nial government in the fall of 1926 and the
spring of 1927 were interned in the camp. The internment, for the
rebels and their families, was for an undetermined period of time,
and few were released before the camp was evacuated in 1943 when
Dutch rule appeared to be over and the Japanese armies were
approaching.
Terezn (Theresienstadt), a Czech town sixty kilometers from
Prague, was emptied of its original population in 1942 and made
into a ghetto for the Jews who did not manage to escape from Europe
in time. Initially designed as a camp for elderly and privileged
Jews, the ghetto remained moderate by Nazi standards. Nevertheless,
most of the Jews were gradu-ally transported from Terezn to
Auschwitz and the other camps of death.
The two camps could not differ more one from the other. Boven
Digoel was in the East, in the wilderness; the other was built in
the heart of Europe. Political radicals were kept in Boven Digoel;
Jews were locked in Terezn because of their grandmother. Terezn
belonged to the Holo-caust; Boven Digoel belonged to
colonialism.
1. Camps as Cans
Red brick eighteenth- century walls with bastions surrounded the
Jews in Terezn. The town was built as a Habsburg fortress against
Prussia.
Thick Whisper and Thin VictoryConcentration Camps Contribution
to Modern Acoustics
Rudolf Mrzek
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
2 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern Acoustics
Josef II, the father of the homeland . . . on October 10, 1780,
laid the cor-nerstone of this eternal edifice, according to a Latin
inscription on one of the fortress walls.1
Inside the walls,
all the Barracks of Terezn were built with the same design. The
quadrangu-lar courtyards with archways and wide encircling loggias
are pleasantly rem-iniscent of the architecture of Southern
monasteries. There is also a practical reason for this plan an
alarm signal sounded from the center of the court-yard must be
equally audible in all surrounding dwellings.2
No walls surrounded Boven Digoel no bastions, and not even a
wire. There was a forest instead, huge with no roads. There was
perma-nent twilight in a forest filled with marshes, mosquitoes,
snakes, rivers with crocodiles, and the people of the forest, the
most primitive men on the surface of the earth, as the Dutch
authorities in the camp liked to point out, head- cutters and
cannibals.
But neither of the two camps was an oubliette. Neither the walls
nor the forest completely deadened the noise and voices from the
outside. It was not about these two camps that these words were
written in the Book of Job: Down there bad men bustle no more, /
there the very rest. / Prisoners, all left in peace, / hear no more
the shouts there of the gaoler.3
The Jews in Terezn heard the bells from a nearby village church.
A motorway from Prague to Berlin cut through the ghetto. It was
separated from the barracks and houses where the Jews lived by a
six- foot wooden fence on both sides. But the people in the ghetto
heard cars, trucks, buses, and bicycles, even pedestrians as they
passed through. They could only hear them. Sometimes, Aryan
relatives came to the wooden fence that separated the ghetto from
the main road, once the time and place of meet-ing had been
determined through a go- between, in order to exchange a few words
with relatives, even if they could not see their faces.4 Planes of
both the Nazis and the Allies flew over the ghetto on their
missions to Prague, Dresden, or Berlin. And when the siren woke us
at night, first we were scared. . . . The fast fighters cut the
skies with their lightning speed; one could hardly follow them with
eyes.5
In Boven Digoel, with no nearby village or town that modern
people of the camp would call village or town, the internees
listened for sounds around the camp with no less eagerness than the
Jews in Terezn. The survivors of Boven Digoel vividly recall
hearing the forest: We felt our-selves in the middle of the
primeval forest nobodies and helpless. . . . It was all
indescribable! A forest without monkeys, elephants and tigers, but
with wild swine, cassowaries, birds and especially reptiles. All
completely
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
3 Social Text 122 s March 2015
other than the fauna of Sumatra!6 All but very few internees
came from either Java or Sumatra, the big islands in the west of
the huge Indies archipelago. Boven Digoel was on the very eastern
edge of it. The famous Wallace divide between Asia and Melanesia
lay between the camp and home. Monkeys did not screech around Boven
Digoel, and the birds, some internees recalled, could not
sing.7
Planes flew over Boven Digoel, too. As the war in the Pacific
broke out, Japanese planes appeared over the camp. As in Terezn,
the planes were eagerly awaited listened for. As soon as the roar
of the motors could be heard, the guards pushed the internees
inside. Many internees disre-garded the orders. They waved to the
planes with whatever they could put their hands on at the moment
the Japanese were the enemies of the Dutch and so the friends of
many in the camp. Like in Terezn, in Boven Digoel the planes roared
like freedom.8 The internees in either camp might cry out with
Wagners Tristan: What, am I hearing light?9
Every six weeks a Dutch government steamer came up the Digul
River to the camp with a load of guards, internees, supplies, and
letters. Like the sound of planes, the ships whistle was eagerly
listened for and could be heard days before the ship became visible
at the turn of the river bend.
s s sThe camps face me like a painting on canvas now, like the
Warhol paint-ing of the Campbells soup cans. Warhol must just
provoke me. The cans cannot be as depthless as he makes them look.
Are they full? If so, how does their fullness sound? Is this what a
scholar should be provoked to to put an ear to the cans, to put an
ear to the camps?
can, noun: 1. A cylindrical metal container; 2. Informal,
prison; 3. Informal, the toilet. Verb: . . . 1. Preserve (food) in
a can; 2. Informal, dismiss (some-one) from their job . . . reject
(something) as inadequate. . . . Phrases: a can of worms, a
complicated matter likely to prove awkward or embarrassing.10
When I was about seven, I helped my mother make preserves. I
pushed the lids down. Each can was a vessel to keep inside what
naturally was of the outside. If fresh air got in, the preserves
would be spoiled. When I put my ear to the can, and when I could
hear a bubbling sound from the inside, it was a sign of disaster.
The can might even explode. Of course, this is a metaphor.
At Belzec . . . a German visitor, Professor Pfannenstiel, wanted
to know what was going on inside [of a gas chamber]. He is said to
have put his ear to the wall and, listening, to have remarked: Just
like in a synagogue.11
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
4 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern Acoustics
The camps were like cans, and like vessels, but not of the
Heideggerian sense, the manifold of the world: of clay formed into
a shape by human hand, dried in the sun to hold water or wine,
blessed by gods, the source of life. The essence of the camps as
cans was fully in their function to shut and to open, to compress
to concentrate.
2. Calling from the Outside
The walls around Terezn and the forest around Boven Digoel did
not deaden the sound from the outside. They reverberated with it.
The sound from the outside reached the camps, but its fullness was
produced by the enclosures. What the camps heard of the world
beyond the camps was the enclosure sounding.
History mentions tapes or relays as the inevitable fixtures of
the Russian czarist penal colonies.12 Through the relays, tapes, or
halting stations, the exiles as well as the guards journeyed from
Europe to the camps. The relays on the way made them, one relay at
a time, into the camp people.13 A relay is
1. A group of people or animals engaged in a task or activity
for a fixed period of time and then replaced by a similar group . .
. ; 2. An electrical device, typically incorporating an
electromagnet, that is activated by a cur-rent or signal in one
circuit to open or close another circuit; 3. A device to receive,
reinforce, and retransmit a broadcast or program; a message or
program transmitted by such a device. . . . Origin: . . . based on
Latin laxare slacken.
There could never be certainty in the camps about the
truthfulness of the sounds heard from the outside. The walls, the
forest, the enclosures around the camps, and the distance the tape,
the relays let through or stopped, muffled or amplified the sounds.
This incertitude about the sounds, in fact, is what the camp people
describe when they say what they heard.
There were Czech gendarmes on guard duty in Terezn (the SS
guards were stationed in special quarters). On a rare and happy
occa-sion an internee could overhear the Czech gendarmes talking
about their home, their world after work and beyond the walls. As
the government steamer was being reloaded in Boven Digoel, sailors
had to wait for a few days in the camp. They might get relaxed or
bored or drunk and say something to or within earshot of an
internee. These bits of message that got through, of course, had
also passed through halting stations. Still, it was the best of the
truth that the people of the camps got slivers of truth, or so it
was believed.
The internees in New Guinea called the best of the truth
Boven-
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
5 Social Text 122 s March 2015
Digoel folklore. The Jews in Terezn called the same things true
tram conductors stories14 the message echoed through the camp like
a tram car through a city: it might take some people in, it might
let some people out; it passed. Another Terezn (and camp and
Yiddish) term for this best of truth was Bonkes: Bonke (plural:
Bonken or Bonkes) is called every-thing untrue, namely rumors
favorable to Jews. In Terezn one of the most often used
expressions.15
The Bonkes reaching the camps, and it is the point, were
complete, full in body, rich in details, and finely nuanced,
total:
Friday January 16, 1942 The bus [to Prague] did not arrive.
Instantaneously there were rumors that the borders [of Germany] are
closed for a revolution is coming, etc.16
Friday September 22, 1944. . . . Yesterdays news about a
transport completely dies out. It was a rumor apparently.17
All the news that reached the camps because of the very
eagerness of the camp people to hear was breaking news. It made no
sense to be skep-tical about it lest there will be no news, like no
stars and no skies: Look at the universe, the shining stars,
millions and millions of them, theyre phonies dead for billions of
years! evaporated.18
In 1933, big breaking news reached the Boven Digoel camp. There
was a mutiny on the Dutch warship De Zeven Provincin, and
Indone-sian sailors were also involved. In fact, the cruiser was
bombed and the mutiny suppressed by the time the news reached the
camp. But the people in Boven Digoel listened to the enclosure. For
days and weeks, in fact months, after it was in fact all over
phonies, dead, evaporated the people in Boven Digoel listened for a
whistle of the cruiser that would come up the Digul and take them
to freedom.19 (It does not belong to the story, really, but a
couple of months later, one of the Indonesian sailors who took part
in the mutiny was arrested and brought to the camp as a punishment.
There is no record that the other internees were interested in his
version of the events.)20
s s sCalls, or representations, sendings (envois), Jacques
Derrida wrote, never reach their final destination or reunite with
the object or idea they represent. The sendings have inevitable
destinerrance. They are in a state of interminable wandering and,
he added, (like that of the Jews).21 Derrida commented on
communication in the modern world, and not explicitly in the camps.
But the camps were modern. They were concentrated modern.
The enclosures did not deaden the calls from the outside. The
calls,
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
6 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern Acoustics
like the din of the planes overflying the camps, could for a
minute or two drown out everything else in the camps. But the calls
passed quickly, like the planes, first the silhouette if it
happened during the daytime and the sky was clear, and then the
sound. They were a sound mirage: In parting, the Now that was stays
with us, but differently, above all when it has not been lived out
to its end; that is, it haunts us . . . [as] halfness . . . tremolo
between illusion and depth.22 It haunted the listeners in the
camps, to use Ernst Blochs words, this halfness, this tremolo
between illu-sion and depth.23 Neither Derrida nor Bloch wrote
particularly about the camps. Sense . . . reaches me only by
leaving in the same movement, wrote Jean- Luc Nancy in Listening.24
Such is the fugue of the call, and the more so when one happened to
be locked in the camps.
fugue: Music, a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody
or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively
taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts. Origin:
late 16th century: from French, or from Italian fuga, from Latin
fuga flight, related to fugere flee. fugacious adjective
poetic/literary tending to disappear; fleeting.
The calls reaching the camps and the calls sent from the camps
to the outside were totally made of destinerrance. The departing of
the sound was how hope in the camps sounded like hope, no other
sound but this. This was what the camps, in their truth and while
still in hope, sounded like. This is also the only way possible
that we can hear the camps departing. Our sense of the camps sounds
merely, if in tune, with this parting.25
3. Membrane: The Vibes
membrane: a pliable sheet- like structure acting as a boundary,
lining, or par-tition in an organism, . . . a thin pliable sheet or
skin of various kinds . . . a microscopic double layer of lipids
and proteins that bounds cells and organ-elles and forms structures
within cells. Origin: from Latin membrana, from membrum limb.
Few people in Boven Digoel ever attempted to escape through the
forest; there was no other way. Without any exception known to me,
they all got lost and perished, were caught, or, exhausted, turned
around and asked to be taken back to the camp.
To run from Digoel could be translated as to kill oneself.26
Military patrol . . . came upon several items left behind in an
empty Papua village: a diary belonging to (an escapee) Dachlan, a
small trunk with cloth-ing and, most importantly, two charred
skeletons that did not resemble those of Papuans. . . .
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
7 Social Text 122 s March 2015
Sedajak from Banten died on the run. . . .Soehodo from Jakarta
died on the run. . . .Abas from Mandailing died on the run.27
A survivor recalled how he heard military and civilian
authorities in the settlement laughing about runaway desperados . .
. on a roasting spit. 28
Even fewer prisoners ever attempted to escape from the Terezn
ghetto. If a person somehow got through the walls, there was the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, no roasting spit, but the
Czechs (my aunts and uncles) fearful and as little inclined to help
a Jew as were the Papuan people.29 The bells of the Czech church
and the sounds of people behind the wall were the calls the ghetto
listened for as the sounds of freedom sounded the true camp calls
only in tune with their parting.
On January 9, 1943, eighteen young men attempted to escape from
the ghetto and were caught not far away. They were all sentenced to
public hanging. With the rope already around his neck, one sang
Voskovec and Werichs famous song When We Will March by the
Millions, All against the Wind. 30
The song was a marching song, optimistic: everybody in Bohemia,
Jew or not, knew the song. They all watched the man die, and the
man sang the song. In parting, the song and the voice belonged
fully to the man singing and perhaps to those who listened fully,
for the moment. It was the moment, of course, when both the man and
the voice died in the rope died away, departed.
s s sAnybody who touches even the surface of what happened in
Boven Digoel and Terezn cannot be but struck and, more, dumbfounded
by the music in the camps.
Javanese classical gamelans, popular Hawaiian tunes, or urban-
street krontjong were played, listened to, composed, and rehearsed
in Boven Digoel day and night:
Saturday, June 29, 1935 . . . Night: 7:52 . . . There is a group
of people play-ing krontjong in the house of Karsowikromo. . . .
9:47 . . . The house of Ag. Soeleman is dark. Police walks to the
section C. In the house of Soerjosoe-prodjo and Pontjopengrawit,
the rehearsal of gamelan does not take place because few people
came. Many people can be seen playing krontjong in the house of
Karsowikromo. 10:00 Police breaks up this krontjong group. . . .
10:10 The breaking up of this group does not go without problems. .
. . Among the internees who decline to stop are Prawirokarsiman who
plays kembang, Wirjosoedarmo (guitar), and Moh. Ali no. 820 (who
listens).31
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
8 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern Acoustics
Saturday, July 22, 1936 . . . Night: . . . 8:05 . . . Police
hear Pontjopangra-wito in his house playing gender [instrument].
The house of Tjitrowijono is quiet.32
The internees built a complete gamelan orchestra in the
camp.
Its bonang (gong- rows) were made of milk tins.. . .
Pontjopangrawito first used iron tins of powdered milk . . . as
substitute for the gongs in his bonangs. He made a rebab (two-
string bowed lute) from sardine tins and animal skin, as he could
not obtain the buffalo intestine or bladder parchment needed for
the rebab belly, nor were (half) coconut shells available for the
pur-pose. For the most respected instrument of all the gong gedh
kemodhong Pontjopangrawito and colleagues made a large earthenware
water pitcher (normally used in the kitchen) as a resonator which
was placed inside a wooden box with two knobbed iron keys cold-
hammered into slightly dif-ferent pitch- levels and strung on top
with cord.33
The forest or not, the cannibals or not, the Dutch or not, Boven
Digoel was a concentrated- modernity camp. Naturally, there was
jazz.
Every occasion was good for our unsurpassed Andoel Xarim . . .
to conduct his jazz band in its cacophonic performance. We gladly
forgave him.34
Because of the awful sounds that the ensemble produced, we
quickly changed its name from Digoel- Concert to Digoel- con-
sneert.35
(Sneert is in Dutch a kind of soup made of everything.) None of
the camp jazz lovers survived to tell me. But I wish to believe
that at least two Jews, like Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, might be
on the Digoel Concert repertoire.
The internees of Boven Digoel built a special House of Culture
and Entertainment a big edifice and in the very middle of the camp,
with no walls, a palm- leaf roof, and twelve bamboo poles. Tickets
were sold for chairs, benches, and standing room only. Events were
packed, the whole camp was present, and as the years passed, the
people of the forest also appeared. Attracted by music, the
nudists, as the internees called them, with a dog or a cassowary
bone in the nose, plumages of a paradise bird or a cockatoo in the
hair, listened and sometimes rocked to the music in their own
way.
According to the documentation from Terezn that survived, more
than one thousand concerts were given in the ghetto during the less
than four years of the camps existence. Chamber music, symphonies,
recitals, operas, Jewish music, light Viennese, and jazz were
played, composed, and listened to. People made music in barracks,
attics, and courtyards, as well as in the towns former gymnasium
and movie theater. A special place
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
9 Social Text 122 s March 2015
for music had been built in the ghetto, too, the music pavilion;
and, as in Boven Digoel, it was also in the middle of the camp.36
Otto Brod, a friend of Franz Kafka and brother of Kafkas well-
known biographer, was pres-ent at the camp performance of Verdis
Requiem (he perished less than a year later in Auschwitz with his
wife and a daughter, who also sang in the Requiem), and he wrote a
review for a ghetto newssheet: Impressively skillful conducting by
Schlchter: in the course of a year, the piece was imprinted in the
heads of singers so deeply that they sang without scores. Rhythmic
and dynamic clarity. Melodic diversity, energy and explicit
articulation of voices. . . . Probably, the Dies Irae could have
been given a greater presto. The piano was out of tune; yet the
accompaniment of Frau Pollak was outstanding.37
Habit can explain much of the overwhelming presence of music in
both of the camps. A disproportionate number of the Boven Digoel
intern-ees were people with modern (Dutch colonial) education. They
were more open than average to all things modern open enough to
attempt a revo-lution! Music, and the kind of music that was later
played in the camp, urban and urbane, belonged to their lives long
before they were interned.
Virtually all Jews in Terezn came from the big cities and
metro-polises of Central and Western Europe. Music of Prague,
Vienna, Berlin, or Amsterdam still must have been ringing in their
ears, ghetto or no ghetto, walls or no walls no week without a
concert was a must.
Habit, however, can explain the music in Boven Digoel and Terezn
only in part. The music certainly sounded like an echo of what was
played before the camps and was still being played outside the
camps. Yet, in the camps, it was camp music. Edmund Husserl is
wrong in saying that there is no physical time in music. There was
a camp physical time in the camp music. Music in the camps came
nearest to what Husserl himself calls the living present.38 However
high the intensity of the music might have been outside and before
the camps, the intensity of the camp music was concentrated. It was
the intensity of the enclosure. There they sat, lost and fragile,
nodding their heads to the sound of Tales from the Vienna Woods or
tunes from Carmen.39 The camp music was a camp kind of music also
because it lived at its fullest in departing.
Julia Sallinger, a singer in the Prussian Royal Opera, who was
born in 1873 . . . survived in Terezn practicing her singing,
trilling with her voice that was grating in her old age, wearing a
veil on her face and a feather boa around her neck.40 I only wish
to believe that the feather boa that Miss Sallinger was wearing, in
the fashion of her time, was made of a plumage of a bird of
paradise from around Boven Digoel. My thesis would deserve it that
the two camps were one, or at least of one constellation, by the
way their music was played and their songs sung.
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
10 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern
Acoustics
4. Authenticity
The calls sent out from the camps if they reached so far were
usually stopped by the enclosure, turned back, and, as an echo of
the walls, the forest, and the distance, in all their vagueness and
indirectness, fell back on the ears of the camp people. The
heaviness with which the sound fell back was what Martin Heidegger
called groundedness of sense41 groundedness of hearing in this
case.
The heaviness of the call containing the sound of the enclosure
made it next to impossible to distinguish the calls components and
to ascertain where it was really coming from. When one really
listened in the camp, one could not achieve much more than to
become part of the heavi-ness. In the camps vastly more than
elsewhere, the enclosure that worked as a membrane was not merely a
technological device a device of the future at least. The membrane
had become organic. It grew into the camp peoples bodies. It became
an organ that gave the camp people capacity to hear, if the people
were to hear at all, and if they wished to know if they were being
heard at all.
Everything that was heard in the camps and all the sounds the
camps were sending out mixed, amplified, adjusted were the sounds
of the camp people themselves, their fears and eagerness. In this,
there was no mishearing. It was the real call. Perhaps never in
history had human bodies come so closely to resemble Platos cave,
and Platos cave so closely to resemble a camp: In Platos cave,
there is more than just the shad-ows of the objects being moved
about outside: there is also the echo of the voices of those who
move them, a detail we usually forget, since it is so quickly set
aside by Plato himself in favor of the visual and luminous scheme
exclusively.42
There was no way to resist, any way except to naturally become a
part: Its hard to despise your own substance, youd like to stop all
this, give yourself time to think about it, and listen without
difficulty to your heartbeat, but its too late for that. This thing
can never stop. . . . You give in to noise as you give in to
war.43
s s sGreedily the camp people tried to hear the world in the
camp grounded-ness of hearing. They were like a person groping for
a stone falling into water, to catch it before it sinks, before the
circles on the water grow wide, fade, and disappear. To catch a
call in the echo was impossible. The more so, then, did the camp
people try to compress and to concentrate the echo as it was.
This was also the reason that music was so important in the
camps. The importance given to music in the camps was a way to
catch the stone, to compress, structure, and concentrate the echo.
One learns to keep com-
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
11 Social Text 122 s March 2015
posure while looking at the lists of the people who perished in
the camps. But it sometimes went beyond bearing in the Terezn and
Boven Digoel archive, leafing through the files with sheets of
music, requests for permis-sion to play, and concert tickets sold
in the camps.
The camp people very often named monotony as the terror of the
camps. One survivor of Boven Digoel listed the three most brutal
aspects of the camp loneliness, nostalgia, and monotony.44 In the
sixth year of his imprisonment, an article about him and a few
photographs appeared in an Indonesian newspaper. Police reported on
the article: Several pho-tographs of Digoel internees are published
in the paper. Under a portrait of [one of them] A. Ch. L. Salim . .
. there is a caption: . . . Days follow days and days are followed
by nights. Months and years follow one after the other. 45
Against monotony, and one might believe it especially when in
camp, music offered phrasing, structure, concentration, stricture
of art grasping the echo. Even repetition, when music came in,
might suggest a surprise, a stumbling, or a change as Gertrude
Stein put it, hoppfully, like a frog hopping he cannot ever hop
exactly the same distance or the same way of hopping at every
hop.46 The jazzmen in the camps might have said, and believed, that
in syncopation music might cut through the Platonic echo of the
enclosure, in a rhythm of liberation or, at least, of crashing.
This, however, was not what happened. Whenever the monotony of a
camp was disrupted, whenever the camp frogs happened not to hop
exactly the same way, it proceeded in the phrasing of the camp. The
tempi of the camps were changing, but in the camp way. The everyday
of the camps was rhythmical, but in the ways of the camps in a
serial- movie monotonous way. Rhythm is an equation, Le Corbusier
wrote, and he applauded it as something very modern and avant-
garde.47 In that sense, and this is just more proof of it, the
camps were modern and avant- garde. With the rhythmic and
syncopated order of the camps that they them-selves helped to play,
the camp people performed to use Michel Fou-caults definition this
time discipline monotony.48
In the Boven Digoel police report book (agents made rounds in
the camp four times a day), when the internees in Boven Digoel
turned to music, it was not noted as a moment of crashing but as
repetitie a Dutch word for rehearsal. By a certain hour in the
evening, according to the camp rules, the music, repetitie, was
ordered to stop so that the camp might go to sleep. In Boven Digoel
the music was the camp clock. In Terezn, the music was made one of
the camp aesthetics. Dr. Hugo Friedman organized architectural
tours for his fellow prisoners through the ghetto. As they walked
the ghetto streets and along the ghetto walls, he always stopped at
certain places and explained what he meant by the rhythmic movement
of line of Terezn construction.49 The ghetto was music.
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
12 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern
Acoustics
The people of the camps, of course, thought about freedom. They
possibly thought about nothing else. They tried to resist the camp
acous-tics vibrating around them and through them. They strove to
stay what they would have been if not for the camps. Their thinking
about freedom, of course, was related to their struggle to be
authentic:
authentic: . . . 1. Of undisputed origin; genuine . . . made or
done in the tra-ditional or original way, or in a way that
faithfully resembles an original . . . ; 2. Relating to or denoting
an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible
mode of human life.
There are, in my MacBook dictionary, two distinct definitions of
authentic. And it can immediately be seen that the authenticity in
the second definition relating to or denoting . . . purposive, and
responsible mode of human life was something very difficult to
achieve or even attempt in the camps.
The proximity into which the camp people were forced condensed,
with the lid pushed down hard to close was barely a proximity that
Emmanuel Levinas wrote about in connection with the responsible
mode of human life: I have tried to define [proximity] otherwise
than by a reduced space separating the terms that one calls close.
I have tried to pass from spatial proximity to the idea of the
responsibility for another . . . an incessant dis- quitude of not
being open, paradoxical and contradictory responsibility for a
foreign freedom.50
No one in the camp could be advised to make oneself open,
disquiet, and thus responsible in Levinass sense. Levinas indeed
also wrote: Only a vulnerable I can love his neighbor.51 The camp
authenticity could not sustain such responsibility. The camp
authenticity was almost completely defined by the first part of my
dictionary entry the authentic in the camps meant predominantly,
and almost exclusively, to be or to appear to be of undisputed
origin; genuine . . . in the traditional or original way, or in a
way that faithfully resembles an original.
After more than a month of journey to the east, in the hold of
the ship or alternatively unsheltered on the deck, after being for
weeks in chains, five together, the first group of the Indonesian
internees arrived at Boven Digoels landing place. Thus they were,
or appeared to be, to a journalist who was the only outsider
permitted to travel with them: More than half is in European
clothes . . . elegant city wear and soft felt hats, straw hats or
little black velvet caps and European walking shoes . . . neat
leather briefcases, some with umbrella and a bundle of books,
oth-ers with a guitar.52 An internee described the same scene on
one of the ships that followed, on which he traveled. To the things
mentioned by the journalist as what the internees wore and carried,
he added socks (not
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
13 Social Text 122 s March 2015
a usual thing in the tropics), a couple of typewriters, and
mandolins and violins.53
These men, women, and children brought to the camp stayed
cor-rectly dressed, as they would be if not at (because of) the
camp, despite the heat and dirt on the ship, despite the
hopelessness of it all. They were caught in this description at the
moment of coming forth into being as camp people. They resisted the
camp, and they were becoming of the camp at the very same moment
and by the very same effort. With cour-age and in desperation they
were stating their authenticity by perform-ing their undisputed
origin, being genuine, faithfully resembling an original.
The internees of Boven Digoel struggled to stay what they would
have been if not for the camp people with modern consciousness
(reb-els in this case). They dressed, moved, spoke, and listened
authentically. They made music authentically (with guitars,
mandolins, and violins). Never did the camp sound so much as a camp
as when the newcomers unpacked and began to play. The most famous
internee of Boven Digoel, Soetan Sjahrir (in 1945 he became the
first prime minister of independent Indonesia), was or appeared to
be the most authentic: I often heard him sing, especially one of
the European hits. I will always remember his: Das gibt nur einmal,
das kommt nie wieder, das ist zo schn um wahr zu sein! 54
In Terezn also the people made music with vengeance, what Bloch
might call the turmoil of musical compulsion.55 As in Boven Digoel,
there was a severe respect in Terezn for the classical. In their
struggle to be authentic, they played jazz jazzier and Verdi more
Verdianly than any jazz or Verdi anywhere, outside the camps or
before the camp, was ever played.
5. Long- Distance Whisper
The journalist who was allowed to go on the first ship with the
Indone-sian internees also described the last three days of the
journey, upstream on the Digul. The river narrowed; the forest
became ever more compact on both sides and ever closer to the ship.
Only a few times during the three days, a figure or a group of the
people of the forest appeared. More often than that, nothing was
visible and merely screams were heard as the ship passed. That is
to say, it has sounded like screams, because nobody on the ship
understood the language. The communists on the foredeck screamed
back in the same manner.56
An internee was traveling on one of the next ships. He described
his experience also as an almost purely acoustic moment and in a
way almost identical to that of the journalist: I will never forget
the ship
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
14 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern
Acoustics
journey. . . . We were stuck in the immense silence. . . . The
first reaction was remarkably enough that we began to speak softer.
We stopped with our singing!57
As the people of the forest screamed, the internees screamed
back. As the forest and the world got silent, the internees stopped
singing. By listening and making sound or getting silent shrieking,
holding breath the internees became one with the nature they
inhabited. They became part of the world. They became social in a
camp way by becoming their surroundings sounding board and what in
all things makes the sounding- board is this theres naught
beneath.58
Noise and voices, perhaps calls and perhaps languages, but not
really understood, remained around the internees throughout the
years of captivity the shrieks of unfamiliar people, cries of
unfamiliar animals, sounds of unfamiliar trees swaying, of the
river, of the rains that one could hear in Boven Digoel long before
the drops fell. The urge to make music was also an attempt to bear
these sounds. There was no way to escape them, but music could make
perhaps some sense of them:
As the hours of day change so do the sounds. . . . With the
first rays of the sun on the eastern skies, you hear the first
bird, . . . a kingfisher . . . then comes a shout of a parrot . . .
a white cockatoo . . . a water bird . . . a bird of paradise. . . .
Then a pause, and the cicadas break in, sharp on a second. First, a
thin and sharp tone by a single cicada gives a sign that is sent
over the water. A multiple- voice chord falls in just for a moment
and, then, as response from the distance, the trilling and swishing
song of the cicadas second choir begins.59
This was pathetic, of course, but desperation and courage of the
camp people were reflected in nothing as much as this. Equally
pathetic and equally epic were the quartets, the symphonies, the
operas, and the jazz in Terezn, or the listening to the bells of
the Christian church behind the ghetto walls and believing one was
hearing a life- saving authenticity- saving music in them. As Kafka
wrote about another Jewish place: Whoever can cry should come here
on Sunday.60
The camp turmoil of musical compulsion grew from the effort to
organize the noise. In that sense, the most charged and the most
pathetic moment of the struggle, and the most sublime form of the
camp music, were roll calls. More than anything, roll calls made
the Terezn ghetto, as well as the Boven Digoel camp, what they had
been and how they sounded. The roll calls were the calls of the
camps. It was a Jericho moment: The day when there shall be a blast
on the trumpet, and ye shall come in crowds.61 The trumpets sounded
and they came in crowds, but the walls remained standing. They only
got stronger by the blast.
The sound of the roll call pressed down upon, condensed
humans
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
15 Social Text 122 s March 2015
into the camp better than anything else, including the walls,
forest, or watchtowers. By the sound of the roll call, the camp
people were sum-moned to being in naming, that is, in
calling.62
The roll call to take quinine pills . . . Uncle Patty called out
the names in the alphabet order, from A to Z. / At last we hear
Sardjono called then the name of Soetaslekan and after this
Soemiradjo, the name of my father. / Quickly our whole family
stepped forward to receive the quinine pills, the adults three
pieces of pills and children two pieces, made in Bandung (pill BK
Bandoengse Kinine Fabrik). We had to swallow the pills watched by
Uncle Patty we could not just take them and go.63
The medical call (a method, in fact, to check whether any
internee has escaped) was probably the most vividly remembered
event in Boven Digoel. The most vividly remembered event in Terezn
(more often recalled than the public execution of 1943) was the big
roll call of November 1944. An error was found in the ghetto
records, and the SS commander ordered recounting. All the
inhabitants, including children, the sick, and the old, were forced
to stand in a closed formation for eigh-teen hours. People were
fainting; children were crying. Some young men attempted to
encourage the others as a protest or even a resistance to sing.
According to some eyewitnesses (ear witnesses), the young people
even began to sing according to different memories Internationale,
Hatikva, or some folk songs, Czech or Jewish.64 They had barely
even begun, however, when they were hushed down. The people
listened for the call as the camp people. As the camp people, they
were poised:
poise: noun: 1. Graceful and elegant bearing in a person . . . ,
composure and dignity of manner . . . ; 2. Archaic, balance,
equilibrium. be poised (of a person or organization): be ready to
do something.
Louis Althusser argued that in modern society it was policemen
and clergymen who gave the voice to the absolute.65 The camps,
however, it seems, rose to a higher stage than that. There were
still policemen and clergymen (sort of) in the camps. But now it
was the voicing and listen-ing by themselves that did the job, a
super- high organized voicing and listening that is coding:
code: a system of words, letters, figures, or other symbols
substituted for other words, letters, etc. . . . a system of
signals, such as sounds, light flashes, or flags, used to send
messages.
In the camps sooner than out of the camps and with much greater
assertiveness coding gave voice to the absolute. The internees
listened with a particular acuteness to a code. Their voices, also,
sounded more
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
16 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern
Acoustics
meaningful and profound when in code. The ghetto police Captain
Meisl, some children of the ghetto wrote into their stenciled paper
dis-tributed in Terezn, told us quite in confidence that five short
blows on a whistle meant that a ghetto policeman was calling for
help.66 The SS guards restricted themselves . . . to spoken word,
and to the spoken word everybody had to listen.67 The people were
on the streets when an announcement came that the first Dutch
transport was coming into the ghetto, and that everybody had to be
locked inside. . . . An SS officer screamed he would begin shooting
if there was not an absolute silence immediately.68
Even the softest and kindest of voices and calls were heard best
in the camps absolutely when in codes. A few minutes before the
cur-few, the people were outside and the streets buzzed with
talking. Then came Good night. 69 Everybody trying to assert some
authenticity had to speak in and listen to the codes, or at least
close to code, concisely:
concisely: Origin: Latin concisus, past participle of concidere
cut up, cut down, from con- completely + caedere to cut.
Joseph Roth, a Jew who escaped the camps only because he decided
to run away soon enough and fast enough (and because he drank
himself to death, in Paris, before the Nazis could get him), had
already written in 1936 to his friend, a fellow writer and fellow
Jew: Havent you got that yet? The word has died, men bark like
dogs.70
Roth, however, was not exactly right this time. The voicing- as-
coding in the camps, as outside of the camps at the time, was not
exactly barking. It only sounded animalish, meaning not developed
enough on the scale of voicing evolution. Coding was human, and it
was not a baby talk either a kind of deflation, which transforms
the so- called wild sound, of the babbling period into entities of
linguistic value.71 The cod-ing was not aphasia either, a
degenerated way of speaking typical of senile people.72 The least
of all the coding was a sign of madness as Paul Celan wrote about
Friedrich Hlderlin: If he spoke of this time, he could only babble
and babble.73
The coding that gave the voice to the absolute was an
engineered, highly developed form of language, efficient, easy,
tweeting before tweet-ing had been invented. (My MacBook dictionary
still defines tweet merely as the chirp of a small or young bird;
make a chirping noise. But it is already less happy- go- lucky:
Origin: mid 19th century: imitative.)
The ultimate code is a digit, a finger pointed or a number a
num-ber (code) of age, ethnicity, political orientation, race,
manners, color of eyes the camps, as with so many other things,
were ahead of their time and exemplary. In Boven Digoel, numbers
preceded and often substituted
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
17 Social Text 122 s March 2015
for the internees names and soon their qualities, building up a
close- to- perfect universe of digital concision. Internee Roesman
no 350 . . . stays with Tjitrowasono no 1181 . . . collects rations
for Djojodoelkadir no 152 and takes his meals with Kromowidjojo no
285.74 In the same file 264 of the Boven Digoel archive, there is a
list of the mentally ill in the camp: they are recognized as nos.
139, 350, 421, 630, 795, 994, 1198, 1241, 1260, and 1264.
In Boven Digoel one had to listen for ones number. In Terezn,
each inmate had to listen, too, and in addition was made to carry
the code of identity on itself. The generic code, of course, was
the yellow star with the letter J. In Terezn the stars were not
tattooed on the skin but sewed on the clothes in Terezn people
still wore their civilian clothes. During the transports, however,
as people were brought to the ghetto or deported to the east to the
death camps, at the crucial moment of the camp when a (Jewish)
individual might get confused his identity questioned numbers and
letters, such as A- 3468, were written on a piece of cardboard and
hung around the persons neck. Numbers dangle from their necks;
numbers go with them every step of the way.75
Again, one might wrongly think of animals, of human beings
degraded to the lower stages of civilization: Your brains are just
so many little bells for camels and crocodiles, the sound of your
sentences hangs from you like those bells cattle wear around their
necks and which ring when they come down from the mountains of
suggestions.76 Again, one should rather think of hearing humans
poised and individualized, mov-ing in measured steps to the music
of the camp. And there was still at least one next stage.
I often heard about it from the survivors of both camps. A heavy
and gradually overwhelming part of their despair in the camp (as
long as they still were able to feel any) was a fear of losing the
number and, with it, the camp identity in the camp, a fear of
becoming a cipher not even a number, not even the bells cattle wear
around their necks, just a cipher:
cipher: 1. A secret or disguised way of writing; a code . . . ;
2. Dated, a zero, a figure; 0 . . . ; 3. A monogram . . . ; 4. A
continuous sounding of an organ pipe, caused by a mechanical
defect.
s s sEven in the camps, people might be given a moment when they
might begin to talk to each other as if there were no camp. Trees
might sound like trees, rivers like rivers, birds like birds, bells
like bells, nearnesses like nearnesses, distances like distances,
and people like people. There might arise the reserve of the
invisible.77 A sound might make a listener a part of the world as
it is. The listener might say something responding to the
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
18 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern
Acoustics
sound and become a singular echo within which I hear myself
addressing myself.78 His voice might melt with the sound of the
world and in this way of melting become human, social, and
natural.
This is what some describe as radical listening, or as sharing
voices.79 I like to call it thick whisper. The living present
resounds,80 and it resounds in a sonorous body.81 At those moments
the camp peo-ple might became proximate even in Levinass definition
quoted above authentic by being responsible, responsible by being
vulnerable and open. However, these were moments extremely
difficult to achieve even when one really wanted to. It was again a
matter of coding. As a Dadaist poet put it, it is most difficult to
learn how to whistle in English.82
The thick whisper, this way of listening and melting voice,
lacked assertiveness. Rarely did it reach even the enclosure of the
camp. It got lost in the camp. If it made it that far, it spent
most of its force on the way. It did not bounce against the
enclosure, and it did not bounce back (this would at least make
some defiant sound). The thick whisper lacked the power of
penetration. Even if ever reached the enclosure, it melted against
the enclosure, as if into plush (perfect receptor of the bourgeois
modernity, as we know).83 It would disappear into the world as it
was. Full and rich, human and worldly as it might be, it would
trail away, its quality diffused, because there is no quality
without an extension underlying it.84
As there was no penetration and not even bouncing against the
enclosure, there was no answer. One had to put lips to the ear of a
neigh-bor in a camp. The thick whisper made the camp people
intimate with each other, but in the same way it locked them even
more into the camps acoustic universe into speaking and listening
ultimately to the camp, of the camp, and by the camp.
The membrane of the enclosure permeated the camp peoples senses
and bodies. The internees mouths, tongues, teeth, lips, and ears
became gadgets of the amazing sound apparatus of the camp a war
machine.85 The machine was the people, and it was made to hear and
speak only when tuned to a certain frequency.
This was why the people of the camps, when they listened and
spoke, even whispered, lips to ear, eventually learned to listen,
speak, and whisper long distance. It is as if they did not wish for
their calls to disap-pear in plush. In the camps even the heavy
breathing of the people mak-ing love became thin. This is why also
the call of the camps as it reaches us is cold and metallic,
silicon hard, defaulted in its volume, sharp in its pitch, ebb, and
flow.
The thick whisper was truly like a heartbeat, but it was merely
from wall to wall. It was rich and full, but it had short legs.86
Only thinness could make a call of the camps reach beyond the
camps. The thin call
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
19 Social Text 122 s March 2015
of the camps, the one sent by the camps to the outside world,
and the response that they received from beyond the enclosure was
to be metallic, not inviting an adhesion, immune to bugs, touching,
and other kinds of disturbances on the way. It was to be immune to
the statics of the world. Fascism is nothing but the abolition of
the intractable distance of the real.87 No dilution.
s s sThe acoustic space of the camps could best perform as sound
apparatuses. Whisper and breathing, distance and nearness, voice
and hearing made the best of sense in the camps when set (as if) on
a radio dial. Sound apparatuses, indeed, were at the very center of
the camps calling and camps being.
There were several gramophones in Terezn and in Boven Digoel.
Guards and even some internees brought gramophones to the camps
with them. Gramophone records were played in both camps with only
slight variations, the same music, fox- trots, krontjong, cabaret
songs, and opera arias. Canned sounds were brought to the camps.
Preserved sounds of the outside were listened to. They arrived at
the camps through the enclosure with the enclosure remaining
standing.
In 1935 I was nine and for the first time I heard the song
Indonesia Raya [Great Indonesia], from a gramophone record. Uncle
Abdul Hamid Lubis who had been exiled to Digoel from West Sumatra
worked the gramophone. We the Digoel children, who had never seen a
gramophone, gathered in the house of Uncle Kadirun in section B. .
. . My younger brother and I sat on the bench in the front row,
next to the children of Uncle Kadirun, Sumono, and Karno. I watched
how Uncle Abdul Hamid Latif picked up a gramophone needle and fixed
the gramophone head at that time I did not know that the head was
called loudspeaker. . . . He lowered the needle to the record, plat
[record in Dutch] . . . and there was the song . . . Indonesia my
blood . . . Indonesia the sublime . . . Indonesia the pure.88
Radio had an even greater presence in both camps. A small
military telegraph and wireless station was set up in the Boven
Digoel camp at the very outset. It was for official use only, but
the news trickled down and among the internees. Two brigades of
infantry needed comma . . . hos-pital second class under a captain
comma . . . military radio station under a lieutenant comma.89
In Terezn, the death penalty was established for listening to
the radio. Nobody, as far as it is known, was ever caught. However,
and the more so, the space of the ghetto was saturated with radio
radio rumors, that is. The radio rumors, an especially powerful
form of the true tram conduc-tor stories, traveled in the ghetto
from mouth to mouth von Mund
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
2 0 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern
Acoustics
zu Mund. People called it Mundfunk,90 from Rundfunk (radio
broadcast in German) rund meaning around and Funk meaning a
sparkle.
There were rumors of an illegal radio receiver assembled in the
Ter-ezn ghetto.91 Any news was most believable when spread from
this (per-haps never- existing) machine. An SS officer ordered the
ghetto workshop to build a conference table combining radio table
and flower table.92 Radio was overheard when someone from the
ghetto was let out under guard to work in the garden along the
outer side of the wall:
I am assigned to pick up linden tree blossoms. . . . Right
nearby is a little house belonging to some gravedigger. . . . I can
hear a radio coming from inside that little house, something I
havent heard for a very long time.93
We look toward the tops of distant mountains . . . from a house
of the direc-tor of agriculture who works in the ghetto, when a
window is open, we can hear music on a radio.94
Radio was made indeed in the camp, of the stuff that was in the
ghetto, mainly of desire. On the list of performances in the ghetto
are
a play by Norbert Fryd . . . On Radio Waves around the World in
a Sec-ond.95
Radio Reportage from Terezn . . . an imaginary radio- event with
announcer, chorus and separate voices.96
In the most significant musical production of the ghetto, in
Viktor Ullman and Peter Kiens opera The Emperor of Atlantis or The
Disobedi-ence of Death (the opera was ready to go on stage, but
before the premiere virtually everyone, the authors and the actors,
were sent to Auschwitz), radio or radio- like machines played and
sang the star human roles.
The Loudspeaker before the curtain: Hallo, Hallo, we begin! . .
. The Emperor of Atlantis keeps connection with his ministers
through telephone and radio: . . . The latest news about Death:
People cannot die. Old and sick are sentenced to eternal torments.
. . . The Emperor sits at his desk and before him is a micro-phone
and a switchboard. Behind the Emperor can be seen a funnel of a
loud-speaker. The Emperor: What time is it? Loudspeaker: Thirty-
two minutes after five. . . . Statement on the radio: Death is
still undecided. . . . Finale Quartet: Loudspeaker, Girl, Pierrot,
and Drummer before the curtain: Come Death, our honored
guest.97
s s sThe thin call travels infinitely farther than any thick
whisper ever can. No enclosure is strong enough to block it, and,
when one really listens, it is as
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
21 Social Text 122 s March 2015
if there was no enclosure at all as if there were even no camps
at all. The whole world becomes the amazing machine.
The thin call liberates the listening world from a thick
messiness and from the threat of sharing of voice and everything
that may be coming from the camps. New and thin space emerges that
makes no difference camp or noncamp, place and nonplace. From
wherever one may listen or call, on whichever side of any enclosure
one listens or speaks, one becomes a captive of the call.
Notes
1. Ruth Bondy, Elder of the Jews Jacob Edelstein of
Theresienstadt, trans. Eve-lyn Abel (New York: Grove Press, 1989),
250.
2. Elena Makarova, Sergei Makarov, and Victor Kuperman,
University over the Abyss: The Story behind 520 Lecturers and 2,430
Lectures in KZ Theresienstadt 1942 1945 (Jerusalem: Verba, 2004),
24.
3. Job 3:17 19, qtd. in Philippe Nemo, Job and the Excess of
Evil, trans. Michal Kigel (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1998), 105.
4. Bondy, Elder of the Jews, 330 31.5. Philipp Manes, Als obs
ein Leben wr: Tatsachenbericht Theresienstadt
1942 1944, ed. Ben Barkow and Klaus Leist (Berlin: Ullstein,
2005), 219. Unless otherwise noted, translations throughout this
article are the authors.
6. I. F. M. Salim, Vijftien jaar Boven- Digoel, concentratiekamp
in Nieuw- Guinea: bakermat van de Indonesische Onafhankelijkheid,
2nd ed. (1876; repr., Hen-gelo, the Netherlands: NV Uitgeverij Smit
van, 1980), 111.
7. Ibid.8. Yusuf Mawengkang, Pimpinan Umum Perintis Kemerdekaan.
Boven
Digoel: Sebuah Cerita Anak Bbuangan (unpublished typescript in
the authors posession, Jakarta, 1996), 148.
9. Jean- Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 46.
10. This and all the following dictionary quotes are from Aa
Dictionary (Apple 2005 7), on my Mac OS X.
11. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed.,
3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 3:1040
41.
12. Anton Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, trans. Brian Reeve (London:
Oneworld Classics, 2007), 355n.
13. Relays along the Siberia road, [were] surrounded by a
palisade of sharp- pointed stakes and consisted of three single-
storied buildings standing in the middle of the enclosure. Leo
Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin
Books, 1966), 488.
14. Ernst Bloch, Traces, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2006), 59.
15. Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr, 462n2.16. Gonda Redlich, The
Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich, ed. Saul S. Friedman,
trans. Laurence Kutler (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press,
1992), 9.17. Pavel Weiner, A Boy in Terezn: The Private Diary of
Pavel Weiner, April
1944 April 1945, ed. Karen Weiner, trans. Paul (Pavel) Weiner,
with introduc-
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
22 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern
Acoustics
tion and notes by Debrah Dwork (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2012), 157.
18. Louis- Ferdinand Cline, Rigadoon, trans. Ralph Mannheim
(London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 95 96.
19. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 237.20. The sailors name was Soekardjo
Prawirojoedo. See Koesalah Soebagyo
Toer, Tanah Merah Yang Merah: Sebuah Catatan Sejarah (Bandung,
Indonesia: Ulti-mus, 2010), 108; and Karel Steenbrink, The
Spectacular Growth of a Self- Confident Minority, 1903 1942, vol. 2
of Catholics in Indonesia, 1808 1942: A Documented His-tory, with
the cooperation of Paule Maas (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 251.
21. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in
Twentieth- Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), 508.
22. Bloch, Traces, 51.23. Ibid.24. Nancy, Listening, 78 80.25.
The departing into which presence actually withdraws, beating its
sense
in accordance with this parting. Jean- Luc Nancy, Noli me
tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-
Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press,
2008), 15.
26. Marco Kartodikromo, Pergaulan Orang Buangan di Boven- Digoel
(Jakarta: Gramedia, 2002), 24.
27. Toer, Tanah Merah, 52, 101, 106, 133.28. Salim, Vijftien
jaar, 305.29. At first it was easy to get away. . . . But it was
difficult to hide in Bohemia.
Zdenek Lederer, Ghetto Theresienstadt (London: Edward Goldston,
1953), 61.30. Bondy, Elder of the Jews, 261 62.31. Dagboek v/d
Politie i/h Interneeringskamp. v.a 4 Mei 1935 t/m 21 Juli
1935, file 211, Boven Digoel Archives, National Archives,
Jakarta.32. 9 April 1936 t/m 25 September 1936, file 212, Boven
Digoel Archives.33. Margaret J. Kartomi, The Gamelan Digul
(Rochester, NY: University of
Rochester Press, 2002), 32. The instruments were transported to
Australia at the same time as the internees; they survived (and I
was allowed to see and even touch them at the Gamelan Room of the
Monash University in Clayton, Australia).
34. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 113.35. Ibid., 108.36. Stages emerged
in the most impossible places, especially in the lofts . . . in
empty offices and former sheds and horse stables. Alice
Bloemendahl, Theresien-stadt with a Difference, 02/452 no. 580, Yad
Vashem Archives, Jerusalem, Israel, and P.III.h. (Theresienstadt),
no. 580, 4, Wiener Library, London.
37. Quoted in Makarova et al., University, 216.38. There is no
physical time in music. . . . Husserl uses the paradigm of
listening to a melody. He analyses how the present of this
perception is a present formed by the overlapping, in it or on it,
of the present impression and the retention of the past impression,
opening forward onto the impression to come. It is a present,
consequently, that is not instantaneous, but differential in itself
. . . what Husserl calls the living present. Nancy, Listening, 18
19.
39. Bondy, Elder of the Jews, 345. For a photograph of a Terezn
ghetto orchestra, see photo no. 32650, Yad Vashem Archives.
40. Privileged until Further Notice, in Ruth Bondy, Trapped:
Essays on the History of the Czech Jews, 1939 1943 (Jerusalem: Yad
Vashem, 2008), 102.
41. On Heideggers groundedness of memory, see Todd Samuel
Presner,
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
23 Social Text 122 s March 2015
Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007), 19, 43 44.
42. Nancy, Listening, 75n42.43. Louis- Ferdinand Cline, Journey
to the End of the Night, trans. Ralph
Mannheim (New York: New Directions, 2006), 194.44. The mass of
us internees as a consequence of loneliness and nostalgia
crumbled to ruin. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 153.45. Moestika, 6 May
1933, in Overzicht van de Inlandsche en Maleisch- Chineesche
Pers [IPO] (Weltevreden, Batavia: Kantoor voor de Volkslectuur,
1933), n.p.46. Quoted in Joshua L. Miller, Accented America: The
Cultural Politics of Mul-
tilingual Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011),
150.47. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover,
1986), 50. 48. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 142.49. Quoted in
Makarova et al., University, 24.50. Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who
Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 80, 12 13.51.
Ibid., 91.52. Aage Krarup Nielsen, In het Land van Kannibalen en
Paradijsvogels, trans.
Claudine Bienfait (Amsterdam: Querido, 1930), 102 3.53. Salim,
Vijftien jaar, 85.54. Ibid., 248.55. Bloch, Traces, 41.56. Nielsen,
In het Land van Kannibalen, 101.57. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 111.58.
Herman Melville, Moby- Dick: or, The Whale (London: Penguin
Books,
2001), 574.59. Nielsen, In het Land van Kannibalen, 122.60.
Entry for 7 July 1912, from a visit to Halle, in a supplemental
travel diary
entitled Trip to Weimar and Jungborn, 1912, in Franz Kafka, The
Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914 1923, vol. 2, ed. Max Brod, trans.
Martin Greenberg, with the coopera-tion of Hannah Arendt (New York:
Schocken Books), 302.
61. Sura xxviii THE NEWS, The Koran, trans. J. M. Rodwell (1909;
repr. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1953), 52.
62. Jean- Luc Nancy, Dis- Enclosure: The Deconstruction of
Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malefant, and Michael
B. Smith (New York: Fordham Uni-versity Press, 2008), 86.
63. Minggu Kliwon Tanggerang, in Trikoyo: cerita digul cerita
buru (unpub-lished manuscript in the possession of the author, 28
January 2007). See also Widayasih, Masa kanak- kanak (unpublished
manuscript in the possession of the author, n.d.), 1:14 15.
64. Kamis Kliwon Tanggerang, 14 March 2008, in Trikoyo: cerita
digul cerita buru.
65. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,
in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essay, trans. Ben Brewster (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 163.
66. Anonymous, Ghetto Cops, in We Are Children Just the Same:
Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of Terezn, ed. Paul R.
Wilson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 120.
67. Hans Gnther Adler, Theresienstadt: Das Antlitz einer
Zwangsgemeinschaft, 3 vols. (Gttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 2:256.
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
24 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern
Acoustics
68. Leben in T von Mrs. Else Dormitzer, London (September 1945),
P.III.h (T) no. 560 YVA 02/392, 1, Wiener Library.
69. Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr, 317.70. Josef Roth to Stefan
Zweig, in Michael Hofmann, Joseph Roth: Going
over the Edge, New York Review of Books, 22 December 2011,
80.71. Roman Jakobson, Child Language Aphasia and Phonological
Universals
(1941; repr., The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 25.72. The same
considerations are valid mutatis mutandis for aphasic speech
disturbances. Ibid., 31.73. In 1961 after a visit to Tbingen,
where Friedrich Hlderlin endured his
mental deterioration into silence, Paul Celan wrote, He / could
/ only babble and babble, / ever- , ever- / moremore. / (Pollaksch.
Pollaksch.) / . . . pollaksch the non-sense word that Hlderlin
repeated. Luis Prez- Oramas, Len Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled
Alphabets, in Len Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets, ed.
David Frankel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 34.
74. Document signed Wakil kampong (deputy head of a section),
Boven Digoel, 28 February 1932, file 264, Boven Digoel
Archives.
75. Jir Weil, Colors, trans. Rachel Harrell (Ann Arbor: Michigan
Slavic Pub-lications, 2002), 53.
76. Jesus Christ Rastaquoure [1920], in Francis Picabia, I Am a
Beautiful Mon-ster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, trans. Marc
Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 227.
77. Maurice Blanchot, qtd. in Roland Barthes, The Neutral:
Lecture Course at the Collge de France (1977 1978), trans. Rosalind
E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press,
2005), 93.
78. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 9.79. On radical listening and
sharing voice, see Luce Irigaray, The Way of
Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephan Pluhcek (London:
Continuum, 2002), 48.80. Nancy, Listening, 18 19.81. Ibid., 6 8,
paraphrasing Charles Rosens The Frontiers of Meaning (1994).82.
Slack Days, in Picabia, Beautiful Monster, 340.83. Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 20, 121, 222.84. Gilles
Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953 1974, trans.
Michael
Taormina (Paris: Semiotext(e), 2002), 96.85. On language as a
war machine, see ibid., 254.86. For example, in the Chinese
doctrine of Wou- wei, the melting of breath
(lianqi) is superior to the control of breath (xingqui).
Barthes, Neutral, 176.87. Nancy, Dis- Enclosure, 137.88.
Tanggerang, 5 January 2006, Trikoyo: cerita digul cerita buru
(italics in
original).89. 25 November 1926 aan den Landvoogd no. 1060
referte telegram 24 deze
no 1281 Amboina, MvO Tideman Hoofdstuk XXXVII NG, National
Archives, The Hague.
90. Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr, 268, 338.91. E.g., Bondy, Elder
of the Jews, 303.92. Adler, Theresienstadt, 2:428.93. Entry for
Thursday, 20 July 1944, Paul [Pavel] Weiner, Terezn Remem-
bered (paper presented at the University of North Carolina
Humanities Program Seminar, Chapel Hill, 10 May 2005), 97.
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press
-
2 5 Social Text 122 s March 2015
94. Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr, 69.95. Eva ormov, Divadlo v
Terezne 1941/1945 (st nad Labem, Czechoslo-
vakia: Severocesk Nakladatelstv, 1973), 75.96. Makarova et al.,
University, 367.97. DER KONIG VON ATLANTIS oder DER TOD DANKT AB.
Leg-
ende in Vier Bilden. Text: Peter Kien. Musik: Viktor Ullmann,
72/70, Yad Vashem Archives.
Social Text
Published by Duke University Press