Soul Sound Memory

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LESLIE MORRISUniversity of Minnesota

The Sound of Memory

Not my languagebut a voicechanting n patternssurvives on earth

not history's bonesbut vocal tones.Allen Ginsberg

Elegies for Neal Cassady

The critical vocabulary that has emergedand evolved to describe and analyze thespaces of Jewish absence and memory inGermany has been, for the most part, vi-sual. In this essay, I shift the emphasis from

the visual to the aural, to the echo of theShoah in poetic texts and the echo of theelegiac that constitutes representation ofthe Shoah. I maintain that the circulationand proliferation of visual images-the im-print of the Shoah as Liss and Hirsch de-fine postmemory-contain as well the echoof the sound of memory. By thus shiftingthe focus from the visual to the aural andby exploring several key iconic sounds that

generateGerman and Jewish

memory,I

hope to add a new layer to the explorationof the sites ofJewish and German memory.

The primacy of the visual draws on con-cepts of authenticity, illusion, and specta-torship that stretch back to Aristotle andPlato and inform contemporary critical dis-cussion about documentary, archival, andvideo testimonies.1 While critical work byHirsch, Zelizer, and others has provided in-valuable reflection on the elusiveness of thevisuality of memory, there has been rela-tively little attention paid to what I will becalling the sound of memory. The sound ofmemory can be a tangible recording of

how an event is remembered acoustically,while the memory of sound presupposes amelancholic relationship to the sound thatonce was and is now lost. The sound of

memory is more elusive and perhaps morefragile and transient than the visual sitesof memory; significantly, of the five senses,sound is the only one that requires a me-dium for its transmission (Taylor 34). Inthe medium of film, as Michel Chion hasobserved, if sounds are easily projected bythe spectator onto the film image, it is be-cause the image is circumscribed by a framethat can be located in space, whereas sound

lacks a frame (Chion 204). This lack of aframe for the aural, in contrast to the vi-sual, demands that an inquiry into the re-lationship between sound and memory willbe, perhaps, more speculative and open-ended than one that examines the visualsphere.

The following questions thus serve asspeculative points of departure for an in-quiry into the relationship between mem-

oryand sound: Can we

speakof iconic

sounds as we do of iconic images? Can anexploration of sound help demarcate thelines that shape and define German andJewish memory? Can we speak of a site ofmemory as the sound of memory? If thevisual sites of memory-memorials, photo-graphs, installations-in Germany todaysuggest the enormous difficulties inherentin the project of remembrance, as JamesYoung and others have demonstrated, intowhat terrain does an exploration of thesound of memory lead us? Finally, how cana turn to the aural help us rethink the tropeof the unspeakability of the Holocaust?

The German Quarterly 74.4 (Fall 2001) 368

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MORRIS: The Sound of Memory 369

To begin answering these questions, Ipropose that the visual imprint of memoryand the acoustic echo of prior sounds createsites of memory in Germany that can bereached through what Umberto Eco has de-scribed as a travel in hyperreality, wherein order to attain the real thing, one mustfabricate the absolute fake (8). The hy-perreal blurs the distinction between pres-ence and absence, between photographicimage and death, between sound and si-lence, crafting sites of authenticity thatare no longer historical, but instead visual,

where, as Eco suggests, everything looksreal, and therefore it is real; in any case thefact that it seems real is real, and the thingis real even if, like Alice in Wonderland, itnever existed (16). Yet contained withinthe hyperreal and the circulation of mem-ory as postmemory are sound and the au-ral, not just the visual. Eco, of course, isspeaking here of American culture's needto recreate history in the form of wax

museums and reconstructed historical sites,but his point is also well taken for the shapeand form of Jewish commemoration in Ger-many in the past decade.2 For the sites ofJewish memory in Germany evoke the ab-sent as if it were present, creating from ab-sence a presence that is, however, an ab-solute fake as Eco defines it, where the'completely real' becomes identified with the'completely fake ' (7).

Emblematic of this is the 1992 touristmap Jildische Stiitten in Berlin, wherethe former sites of Jewish life are markedon a map of contemporary Germany, com-plete with a subway guide on the back toenable the tourist to reach those sites thatare no longer there. Eco's insistence thatthe sign -the fake, the reconstructed

real -aims to abolish the distinction ofthe reference might be too harsh an in-dictment of the project of recapturing mem-ory-either acoustic or visual-in Germanytoday. Yet it is, at the same time, an apt de-scription of the ideal tourist who might,with map in hand (and Klezmer music in

the background) attempt to navigate spacesof absence and presence in Germany today.The there of Jewish presence in Germanythat is at the same time not there, the la-cuna that marks a place of mourning, mem-ory, postmemory, and nostalgia, is the im-print of the Shoah in contemporary Ger-many.3 Is this imprint -by definition, vi-sual-analogous to an echo of the past andof memory? It is not solely the memory ofthe Shoah, but the memory of the layers ofrepresentation that have accrued, in thepublic imagination, over the past decades.

Holocaust remembrance in post-1989 Ger-many, I suggest, is a postmemory that can-not be traced back to an originary momentof the Holocaust itself, but that circulatesendlessly as representation, as melancho-lia, as the elegiac still echoing in the ruinsof the city that is in a constant state of(re)construction. Conceptualizing the cir-culation of memory that we now designateas postmemory n acoustic terms demands

a rethinking of the place of sound withincultural memory, which still remains large-ly unexplored in the key critical and liter-ary studies that explore German and Jew-ish memory, eclipsed by the primacy of thevisual.

One example of this elision of the pres-ence of sound can be found in the paradig-matic text for the recent explorations of vi-sual culture and the memory of the Holo-caust, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida.Barthes's reflections on photography anddeath are echoed in virtually every criticalstudy on visual culture and the Holocaust.Yet buried within Barthes's poetic text onphotography also lie reflections on the rela-tionship of image to sound. Significantly,Barthes evokes the sound of the cameraphotographing him-the moment of Death-and describes it as the sound to which his

desire clings:

Ultimately, what I am seeking in the pho-tograph taken of me (the intention ac-cording to which I look at it) is Death:




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370 THE GERMAN QUARTERLY Fall 2001

Death is the eidos of the Photograph.Hence, strangely, he only thing that I to-lerate, that I like, that is familiar to me,when I am photographed, s the sound ofthe camera. For me, the Photographer'sorgan is not his eyes (which terrifies me)but his finger: what is linked to the triggerof the lens, to the metallic shifting of theplates (when the camera still has suchthings). I love these mechanical sounds inan almost voluptuous way, as if, in the Pho-tograph, they were the very thing-andthe only thing-to which my desire clings,their abrupt click breaking through the

mortiferous ayer of the Pose. For me thenoise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks,watches-and I recall that at first photo-graphic mplements were related to tech-niques of cabinetmaking and the machi-nery of precision: cameras, n short, wereclocks for seeing, and perhaps n me some-one very old still hears in the photogra-phic mechanism the living sound of thewood. (Barthes 15)

Richard Howard's translation of this pas-sage veils the auditory aspects of the textthat appear in the original. For instance,by rendering the singular l'oeil with theEnglish plural eyes ( Pour moi, l'organ duphotograph ce n'est pas l'oeil ), the trans-lated text suggests the gaze of the photog-rapher not mediated through the lens ofthe camera. The gaze through the camerais, significantly, with one eye, l'oeil. What

terrifies Barthes is theeye

( il me terri-fie ) precisely as the eye behind the lens, notthe gaze of a face-to-face encounter unmedi-ated by the camera. Thus Barthes locatesas the photographer's organ not the eyebut rather the finger that is linked to theclick of the apparatus. Howard's transla-tion, linked to the trigger of the lens,fails to capture the onomatopoetic soundof the French word declic in the line, cequi est lid au declic de l'objectif. The trans-lation thus muffles the sound of the cam-era's click, the sound that immediately fol-lows Barthes' terror of the eye and thathe loves in an almost voluptuous way.

Barthes's evocation of an earlier era ofphotography, where the metallic shiftingof the plates would be audible, and hissuggestion that perhaps in me someonevery old still hears in the photographic mech-anism the living sound of the wood is per-haps nothing less than a nostalgia for atime now past or, even, a simulation of anearlier age. Yet his abrupt mention of thesound of a photograph being taken-themoment where the sign vanishes from ourworld -is linked to an awareness of thesadness or melancholia of the temporal that

Barthes, however, disavows. Thus by intro-ducing the sound of the photograph as it isbeing taken, Barthes seeks to counter themelancholic relationship to loss that de-fines the photograph. Earlier in the essay,when referring to the melancholy of Pho-tography, Barthes describes how he expe-riences melancholy when he sees in a filmactors whom he knows are dead; immedi-ately after this he adds, significantly, I ex-

perience this same emotion listening to therecorded voices of dead singers (79). Yet atthe same time, he asserts that he is terri-fied by the eye of the photographer butloves the sounds of the camera. The soundof the camera at the moment of the photo-graph being taken is the absolute momentof the present, yet a present that, as it bringsthe Death that is the photograph, is alwaysin the process of vanishing.

Barthes'ssuggestion

that thepunctum-the point of effect of the photograph-

can only be revealed when the photographis no longer present is also interesting tocontemplate with regard to Holocaust ico-nography which is, often, not present to usas concrete photograph, but instead cir-culating endlessly in image (and sound).Barthes does not propose substitutingsound for sight, he creates rather an aes-thetics of synesthesia in which the photo-graph must be silent, and in which in or-der to see a photograph well, it is best tolook away or close your eyes (53). In otherwords, the viewer must withdraw from the




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usual blah-blah: Technique, Reality, Re-portage, Art, etc and instead say noth-ing and shut [his] eyes (Barthes 55). Ifthe best way to grasp the punctum of aphotograph for Barthes is to close one'seyes, then it is because the sight of thephotograph has been stored in memory--arealm of memory hat is first opened by thesound of the photograph being taken.

Notably, this significance of sound formemory, memorial sites, and the trope ofunspeakability has been explored provoca-tively in Friedrich Kittler's tudy of the gra-mophone. Kittler claims, with some ironybut even more seriousness, that Edison'ssimple idea leads to Derrida's concept ofthe trace of language: Die Spur von jederSchrift, diese Spur der reinen Differenz,noch offen zwischen Schreiben und Lesen,ist einfach eine Grammophonnadel 55).The reproduction of sound and the vast ac-cumulation of sound then mediated (notonly through the gramophone) form the

echoes of texts that are, I maintain, theelegiac sites of memory. Citing Nietzsche'schampioning of the utility of poetic textbecause its rhythmic ick-tock ncreasesthe Speicherkapazitit von Gedichtnis-sen, Kittler then focuses on the greatertechnological Klangspeicherung reatedby the invention of the phonograph (125).The sound of the recorded voice created bythe phonograph is, according to Kittler,

ein einfaches Echo der ersten[...],

aufeinem bereits gebahnten Weg (25). Kitt-ler's evocation of the voice's echo that isproduced by the invention of the phono-graph as nothing less than Derrida's idea ofthe trace of language is relevant for think-ing about the echo of the charge of un-speakability hat suffuses much Holocaustdiscourse.

Rather thanjoining in the repeated com-pulsive chorus of the trope of unspeakabil-ity (and incommensurability or incompre-hensibility) of the Holocaust, I place thefocus instead on sites of indeterminacy,where meaning and reference are, as Libes-

kind famously insists, voids. For whathas provoked such intense discussion anddebate about Libeskind's museum is, Ithink, that it is emblematic of the indeter-minacy of referential meaning and the in-determinacy of art. Aesthetic and linguis-tic indeterminacy pen up rather han closespaces for contemplating the vicissitudesof memory-visual and aural-after the Sho-ah. The turn to indeterminacy s not equiv-alent to the near-constant trope of un-speakability that is evoked repeatedly; n-stead, the projects of commemoration and

witnessing that lie at the heart of discourseabout the Holocaust demonstrate, overand over, how the linguistic and the visualrealms of memory are excavated from themass grave of historical reference.

In many respects, the charge of unspeak-ability is the sound heard within criticalstudies on the Holocaust; t is not, however,the sound of the evocation of Jewish mem-ory in Germany. t is a sound that has been

repeated compulsively, a paradoxical in-guistic formulation hat the Holocaust iesbeyond language and the speakable. Notonly is there a surfeit ofvisual images of theHolocaust, here is as well a surfeit of signi-fication (and sound) about the Holocaust,what Barbie Zelizer has termed verbalcues of atrocity (204-06). Addressing thesurfeit of signification ttached o key termsthat signal atrocity (Holocaust, genocide,

massacre,ethnic

cleansing),Zelizer

pointsto the problems nherent in the naming ofthis event, whether it is the overused noun

Holocaust or the historically unspecificgenocide. 4 Similarly, he argues, the sur-

feit of Holocaust images circulating in thepublic sphere has led to a dulling of the re-sponse to atrocity by the public (Zelizer206). The repetition and echo of the word

Holocaust in public discourse in Germanyand the repetition of the unspeakability ofthe event creates a similar effect of a dull-ing and numbing, ultimately taking the lis-tener from these sites (and sounds) of re-membrance. Kittler's formulation of the




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gramophone ecasts the sound of unspeakabil-ity as it places the trope of unspeakability notbeyond language and representation, but aspart of the stuttering, iterative (Derrida)motion of the gramophone needle as it moves,again and again, in the grooves from whichsound emerges (erupts). Thus Kittler's met-aphor of the gramophone enables us to turnnot to silence and the all too familiar tropeof unspeakability, nor to the moral blan-dishments of not speaking and not writing

the Disaster. Instead, we are perhapsenjoined to listen more closely to the verytones that constitute the unspeakabilitythat is uttered, again and again, a litanyabout the impossibility of speech that closesback on itself as sound that articulates theimpossibility of sound, or language, afterthe Shoah.

Giorgio Agamben also seeks, throughstrict etymological inquiry, to correct omeof the terms that are used repeatedly instudies of the Holocaust. Most significant-

ly, he presents one of the most cogent argu-ments against the trope of unspeakability.Tracing the word euphemism to the Greekeuphemein which originally means to ob-serve religious silence, he suggests that tosay Auschwitz is unsayable or even in-comprehensible is equivalent to observingthis sort of religious silence, euphemein,

as one does with a God (Agamben 32-33).Instead of merely stopping here, however,

Agamben probesinto the

verylacuna that

he identifies as lying at the core of testi-mony and that also calls into question thevery nature of testimony, much as Lyotardearlier claimed the impossibility of bearingwitness (33). Agamben's focus on the la-cuna of language leads to an exploration ofwhat he calls non-language. He cites an in-teresting passage from Primo Levi's TheTruce, about a three-year old boy in thecamp who cannot speak and who has noname.

He was paralyzed from the waist down,with atrophied egs, as thin as sticks; buthis eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted

face, flashed terribly alive, full of de-mand, assertion, of the will to break oose,to shatter the tomb of his dumbness. The

speech he lacked, which no one had both-ered to teach him, the need of speechcharged his stare with explosive urgency.(Levi, qtd. in Agamben 37)

The boy, named Hurbinek by the otherprisoners, finally does say one word that is,however, hard to decipher, either mass-klo or matisklo :

During the night we listened carefully: twas true, from Hurbinek's corner thereoccasionally came a sound, a word. It wasnot, admittedly, always exactly the sameword, but it was certainly an articulatedword; or better, several slightly differentarticulated words, experimental varia-tions on a theme, on a root, perhaps on aname [...] No, it was certainly not a mes-sage, it was not a revelation; perhaps itwas his name, if it had ever fallen to his lot

to be given a name; perhaps (according toone of our hypotheses) it meant to eat,or bread ; r perhaps meat n Bohemi-an, as one of us who knew that languagemaintained. (Levi, qtd. in Agamben 38)

Agamben draws on Levi's story to suggesta new way of conceptualizing languageand unspeakability:

Perhaps every word, every writing is born,in this sense, as testimony. This is whywhat is borne witness to cannot alreadybe language or writing. t can only be some-thing to which no one has borne witness.And this is the sound that arises from thelacuna, the non-language that one speakswhen one is alone, the non-language towhich language answers, in which lan-guage is born. (38)

Agamben'sreflections on true testimo-

ny as non-language, as the sound thatarises from the lacuna expand, by turningto sound and the echo, the visual imprint ofHolocaust memory. Agamben identifies the




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linguistic indeterminacy at the heart of lan-guage testimony; this is the acoustic com-plement to Ulrich Baer's idea of the photo-graph that signifies nothing. For in hisrecounting of Levi (that is, the echo ofLevi within Agamben's text), Agamben toopoints to the void of reference and the in-determinacy of meaning, the illegibilityand untranslatability of the repeated word

massklo/matisklo, despite the fact, as Le-vi says, [...] everybody listened to him insilence, anxious to understand, and amongus there were speakers of all the languagesof Europe; but Hurbinek's word remainedsecret (Levi 198).

Agamben's retelling of Levi's tale pointsto the stuttered language that erupts in theaftermath of trauma, the non-language[...] in which language is born. Sound isremoved from referential meaning and canonly exist as a chain of signifiers that, likeHurbinek's word that is not always ex-actly the same word but instead experi-

mental variations on a theme, do not movetoward any clear or stable meaning. This isthe sound of memory that perhaps mostclosely corresponds to the site of visualmemory of the Holocaust as it has beencaptured in photography, for it is a soundthat, as Barthes claims for the photograph,is synonymous with death. Agamben, whointersperses his ideas with those of numer-ous other writers, most significantly Primo

Levi,stresses the acoustic nature of mem-

ory. His technique of citation, reminiscentof Sarah Kofman's weaving together of textsby Blanchot and Antelme in SmotheredWords, serves ultimately to bring to light thevery aporia of language that Agamben setsat the center of his study. The text that isthen choked with the texts of previoustexts becomes a meta-reflexion on the na-ture of speech and writing, where the un-speakable becomes a re-iteration of priormoments of the declaration of unspeaka-bility. The other voices in Agamben's text,notably Primo Levi's, become echoes ofprior memories and testimonies that blend

and merge with Agamben's voice. Thus heachieves his aim of writing a sort of per-petual commentary on testimony (Agam-ben 13) by simultaneously burying earliertexts and bringing them back to life. If thetext on testimony is figured as commen-tary in perpetuity, it then suggests its ana-logous status to elegiac writing, to the rep-etition, also perpetual, that defines elegiacpoetry, and which expresses Walter Ben-jamin's conception of the text as der lang-nachrollende Donner (570).

Contained within the aporia of Ausch-

witz that Agamben locates as the veryaporia of historical knowledge: a non-coin-cidence between facts and truth, betweenverification and comprehension (12) isthe stuttered, compulsively repeated at-tempt to articulate this void. In one sense,as Marianne Hirsch has emphasized in herrecent article on photography, this repeti-tion is the reenactment of trauma as it isrepeated and remembered visually. Hirsch

points to the striking repetition of thesame very few images, used over and overagain iconically and emblematically to sig-nal this event. 5 Moreover, Hirsch claims,

in repeatedly exposing themselves to thesame pictures, postmemorial viewers canproduce in themselves the effects of trau-matic repetition that plague the victims oftrauma (29). Hirsch's concept of post-memory and her work on photography havebeen instrumental in

probingthe contours

of memory and pointing to the ways thaticonic images of the Holocaust circulate end-lessly as melancholic repetition.6 Explora-tions of memory within the realm of the vi-sual have opened up, for literary and cul-tural studies, aspects of textuality beyondmerely formalist and descriptive accountsof the image; significantly, recent work onvisual culture and the Holocaust challengesthe putative authority and truth claims ofthe documentary and archival image7 andexplores the photographic site of memoryas a space in which reference and referen-tiality are voided. s




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MORRIS: he Sound of Memory 374

It is vital to make a distinction between,on the one hand, documentary and archi-val photography and film, which attemptto assert truth claims about the past, andphotographs taken in the present that seekto chart the effect of the passage of time onthe places of the genocide. The truth claimsof the former have been increasingly calledinto question (the recent debates aboutthe veracity and verifiability of the Wehr-macht-Ausstellung is just one case inpoint), yet their connection to notions ofempirical truth and knowledge are still

intact.9 On the other hand, contemporaryHolocaust images create a visual echo ofnow absent spaces that are, like the ever-present Klezmer music in Berlin or the mapof Jewish sites on the Berlin map, both

real and not real, a referent to an ab-sence that becomes then referent to whatUlrich Baer has termed geographic place-lessness (744). The imprint of the past inthese photographs is one defined by elision,

absence, and elusiveness, not certainty orempirical or historical knowledge.

Baer's strategy for reading these im-ages moves visual analysis of the Holo-caust in an important direction and has abearing on an inquiry into the relationshipbetween memory and sound:

The sense of being situated in reference oan unremembered but meaningful eventor site raises a crucial question about how

we are to read Reinartz's photograph.This question is not how the reading of animage is inflected by prior knowledge orhistorical context, but rather how we canread an image that is inflected byknowledge which is not fully available.(745)

Baer's question about how to read visu-al images of unremembered events, eventsabout which we do not and cannot have full

knowledge, enables us to pose the questionabout the analogous project of readingsounds-such as Hitler's voice-that are notthemselves remembered, but rather medi-ated and filtered through a variety of

acoustic screens. In the case of the soundof Klezmer in Germany, the sounds lis-tened to are not simply Jewish sounds re-membered in the present, but rather un-remembered sound that is produced andfabricated as a simulacrum of remem-bered, elegiac sound. Thus the simulac-rum of sound in German culture today ismarked, perhaps, by a nostalgic desire forJewish sound. Or, to pose the question in asomewhat different way: Are Germans mel-ancholic because of the absence of Jews, ordoes the fabrication of Jewish sound fill the

spaces of this melancholia? If certainsounds evoke for Germans what they thinkof as Jewish spaces, do these sounds-evok-ing a fabricated presence- then automati-cally carry with them the very absence ofJewishness?

Marcel Beyer's novelFlughunde (1995)takes up these questions in its portrayal ofWWII as a war of sound. The narrator,Herr Karnau, is a sound engineer hired to

rig up a complicated public-address sys-tem for a large Nazi rally. Karnau, obsessedwith voices and acoustics, tapes the fullrange of the acoustic world: the sounds ofcombat, the voices of dying patients in mil-itary hospitals, throat-clearings, coughsand sniffs, and, ultimately, the murder ofthe six Goebbels children.10

Beyond the easy, sensationalized narra-tive pull ofFlughunde lie important reflec-tions on the nature of the voice, on soundand the acoustic, and on the technologicalunderpinnings of mass genocide. Beyeralso provides an imaginative way of con-structing subjectivity through the voice,which the narrator likens to a state oforiginary wholeness that is then disruptedthrough the use of the vocal cords:

Wir alle tragen Narben auf den Stimm-baindern. Sie bilden sich im Laufe einesLebens, und jede Au3erung hinterlaitihre Spur, vom ersten Schrei des Saiug-lings angefangen. Und jedes Husten, je-des Kreischen und heiseres Sprechen ver-unzieren die Stimmbinder ein weiteres




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Mal mit einem Einschnitt, einem H6ckeroder einer Naht. [...] Wie achtsam man ei-gentlich mit den eigenen Stimmbandernumgehen mfil3te. Man dfirfte wohl kaumsprechen. (21)

By locating the trope of speechlessness andsilence in the body, and even more literally,in the vocal cords where sound is pro-duced, Beyer recasts the concern in post-war German culture with speech and cul-pability. Karnau-whose name even sug-gests, however allusively, flesh and the

body-is, quite literally,the one who

bringsthe voice of Hitler and Goebbels to the pub-lic, through his elaborate sound system,and at the same time is, significantly, a pa-ternal stand-in for Goebbels within hisfamily. In one sense, the entire novel isoverdetermined by the murder of the chil-dren that the overt references to Goebbelsindicates will take place at some pointwithin the text. Thus the actual historicalmemory of Goebbels' murder of his chil-dren is contained within Flughunde; thenovel fixes the public memory of this mur-der in the acoustic, as Karnau, as is re-vealed at the novel's end, has taped thechildren's murder.

Beyer's novel underscores the central-ity of sound in the Nazi propaganda machi-nery-namely, the role of public speechesat mass rallies. Beyer twists the power andseduction of these speeches, locating it not

in the charismatic appeal of fascist figure-heads such as Hitler and Goebbels, butrather in the elaborate sound system-themicrophones and immense loudspeakers--Karnau devises to disseminate Goebbels'svoice. Karnau first meets Goebbels andHitler when he is hired to set up an elabo-rate sound system for a Nazi rally in whichthe blind, the disabled, and the deaf-mutewill march. The deaf-mutes present a par-

ticular conundrum for the sound engi-neers; since they will not be able to hear thespeeches, but instead can only feel the vi-brations from the public address system,the engineers must manipulate the sounds

to penetrate tief in die Dunkelheit des Bau-ches (Beyer 14). Indeed, this darkness isakin to what Karnau identifies as the blank-ness within him, as he describes himself asa

noch ungravierte, glatte Waschmatrize,wo sich andern Lingst unzihlige Spureneingeprigt haben, wo sie schon bald einKratzen oder Knacken h6ren lassen, weilsie so oft abgespielt worden sind. Keineerkennbare Vergangenheit, und nichts,was mir widerfiihrt, nichts in meiner Er-

innerungkonnte zu einer Geschichte bei-

tragen. (Beyer 18)

If a person's life is defined by this series ofassaults on the vocal cords, and in whichthe voice is the source of humanity, Kar-nau sees himself as a Stimmstehler whocan penetrate bis in die Tiefe jedes Men-schen greifen, ohne daB ihm dies bewuftist [...] (Beyer 123).

Karnau records the sounds around him,but is himself a glatte Waschmatrize un-touched by the acoustic world around him.At the end of the novel (now set in the early1990s), his sound archive is discoveredduring a routine inspection of an orphan-age in Dresden, where it is accessible to theMuseum of Hygiene from a series of under-ground passages. The archeological dis-covery of the buried sound archive revealsnot only the sounds, ultimately, of the mur-

der of the six children, but also, in a modethat is as muffled as the sounds of the mur-ders themselves, the one moment of pathosand emotion in the entire novel.

Significantly, Beyer begins his story withan account of Hitler's voice as it is heardover the public address system. By under-scoring the centrality of Hitler's voice (andother, subsequent voices) in the text, Beyerpoints to the iconic stature that record-

ings of Hitler's voice have attained.11 Morethan the actual words he is saying, Hitler'srecorded voice, with its distinctive, indeedunmistakable cadences and rhythms,serves as an acoustic marker of National




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Socialism. It is the sound of Hitler's voiceand not his language as language that issignificant.12 Thus the sound of war infil-trates the private sphere, ever present astext and as noise. The sound of Hitler'sspeeches in films underscores the functionof sound as noise that disrupts the possibil-ity for dialogue-in other words, as soundthat buries other potential sounds. Hitler'svoice, repeated again and again in film, be-comes metonymic for all of National Social-ism; the sound of fascist radio broadcastshas a vital thematic function, yet at the

same time it serves as the noise of thepublic sphere infiltrating the private sphere.

The spectrum of sound that ranges fromnoise to music contains iconic German

sounds. Yet at the same time, the veryiconic nature of these sounds as Germansounds in texts produced after the warevokes the absence ofJewish sound. Signif-icantly, the Jewish sound that is most prev-alent in Germany today-Klezmer music

-is an example of sound as memorial site,yet it is an iconically Jewish sound thathas become part of-indeed, perhaps indis-tinguishable from-the sounds of Germanmemory.13 Although different from the noise-like, iconic status of Hitler's voice from re-cordings of speeches, Klezmer becomes itsown iconic sound in contemporary Germanculture. The ever-present melancholic strainsof Klezmer in Germany are the musicalscore to the visual and film images circulat-ing everywhere that constitute Jewish lifeas simulacrum and hyperreal. The insis-tently elegiac tones of Klezmer music un-derscore the spaces and sites of Jewishmemory in Germany as elegiac sites of re-membrance. Klezmer in Germany thus fab-ricates, through sound infused with melan-cholia, a simulacrum of Jewish authentic-ity as it evokes the generalized and imagi-nary (and now lost) spaces of Jewish East-

ern Europe. These spaces are rememberedin Holocaust iconography either as the ac-tual sites of destruction (the camps) or asthe originary sites of Jewish life (the shtetl);

Klezmer fuses these conflicting sites of mem-ory, merging the nostalgia for the shtetl withthe trauma and destruction of the camps.This, I maintain, is the source of the pathos(and ultimately, kitsch) of this music, as itfabricates the illusion of an authenticity ofJewish experience and memory and car-ries the images that circulate with an emo-tionally-charged, overdetermined soundthat locates the spaces of Jewish memoryin Germany in pathos, kitsch, and moreimportantly, as a travel in hyperreality.Klezmer provides the listener easy access

to eastern European Jewish spaces that,however, no longer exist; it asserts the hy-perreal of the present as it both affirms andnegates the past.

Klezmer in Germany raises the ques-tion about the difference between Jewishmemory and German memory. Yetwhat is remembered, with the ubiquitousstrains of Klezmer in Germany, is not theexperience of German Jews (for whom Klez-

mer, as part of eastern European and Yid-dish culture, would have been entirely for-eign, if not distasteful) nor that of othercosmopolitan European Jews, but rather asimulacrum of a displaced and fetishizedJewishness. The sound of Klezmer in Ger-many creates a metonymic association be-tween the sound of this Jewish music andthe experience of Jews, thus homogenizingJewish culture and replacing absence withmusical tones that are simultaneouslycelebratory and elegiac. Significantly, it isthe iconic function of the sound of Klez-mer as sound, not the music per se, thattriggers the metonymic link between Jew-ish sound and Jewish experience, how-ever illusory, fictive, invented, or hyper-real that may turn out to be.

If 'Jewish sound (Klezmer) and Ger-man sound (Hitler's voice) in Germany are

unremembered sound whose very repro-duction (and, to draw on the language ofacoustics, reverberation) and simulationl4create a site of remembrance within sound,then these sounds are in one sense acoustic




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examples of Eco's notion of hyperreality.By insisting on authenticity that is pure-ly visual and not historical and thus ques-tioning the fakeness of a fake (such asRipley's Believe it or Not museum), Ecoalso, I maintain, opens up the possibilityfor reading texts-visual and acoustic-notas expressions of the experiential and the

real. To be sure, any move from the expe-riential will raise the question of historicalspecificity and the danger of revisionism.Yet Eco's idea of hyperreality, rather thanobscuring and obfuscating history (and

the real ), can instead open up multiplereadings of visual and aural texts-movingfrom the visuality of the poetic and thesonoric of the visual- central to the projectof understanding memory and history andnarrative. Thus my call for a turn to the au-ral is not a call for a move away from the vi-sual; rather, by exploring the repetition ofsound and the echo of memory in texts (po-etic, filmic, visual) we can find, in the inter-

stices between sight and sound, additionallayers in the production and creation ofmemory.

Notes

1See Kaja Silverman for an elaboration ofthe centrality of Plato's parable of the cave forcurrent explorations n visual culture.

2

Bydrawing on Eco's idea of

hyperrealityo

speak about the Holocaust, I do not mean to as-sert that there is not a real nd historical baseto the Holocaust, or that historical studies ofthe Holocaust are without value. Furthermore,I locate not the Holocaust per se as analogous oEco's hyperreal, but rather German sites ofmemory and German remembrance f the Ho-locaust. Since Eco's critique s of American cul-ture through which he travels in hyperreali-ty, the move away from history is perhaps lessproblematic han it would be if he were talkingabout the Holocaust.

3 For the idea of postmemory as imprint, seeAndrea Liss's definition of postmemories sconstituting the imprints that photographicimagery of the Shoah have created within the

post-Auschwitz generation (86). MarianneHirsch's work on postmemory has beengroundbreaking and is the basis for all subse-quent discussions of this topic. See MarianneHirsch, Family Frames. See also Hirsch'srecent article, Surviving Images: HolocaustPhotographs and the Work of Postmemory, nwhich she elaborates further on her originalidea of postmemory.

4Numerous critics, writers, and philoso-phers have, of course, addressed he problemsof naming the event. Blanchot, Lyotard, Derri-da, Kofman, and Agamben, o name just a few,have all explored he question of the trace of the

Shoah (the Disaster; the churban; he Destruc-tion). Berel Lang chooses to refer to it as the

Nazi genocide against the Jews because hefeels that terms such as Holocaust, Shoah etc.

have theological or at least mediating over-tones, they are confined to the viewpoint of thevictims, and they fail to suggest the specific roleof genocide as it figured in the deeds of theThird Reich. See Berel Lang, xxi. GiorgioAgamben argues against the use of the word

Holocaust as he traces the history of an in-

correct term (28-31).5 Hirsch, Surviving mages 7. Hirsch draws

on Geoffrey Hartman's The Longest Shadowand Barbie Zelizer's Remembering to Forget tomake this point.

6 See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames.7 See Barbie Zelizer.8 See Ulrich Baer's discussion of a photograph

by Dirk Reinartz entitled Sobibor : What sshown as real is the nothingness-neither capi-talized nor italicized-that forms the basis ofour

understanding.The absence

imagedhere

becomes the referent for an event whose mon-strosity involved an effort to obliterate all tra-ces of the crime. In being drawn nto a picture ofundisclosed significance, we are positioned inreference to a voiding--or a beyond--of refer-ence (Baer 750).

9See Zelizer for an excellent discussion ofthese debates.

10Karnau is hired by Goebbels to care for hischildren while his wife recovers rom deliveringtheir sixth child; the other narrative strand inthe novel which is interspersed with Karnau'saccount is the voice of the 8-year old Helga,Goebbels's oldest daughter. While the text doesnot explicitly identify Goebbels, his wife, andtheir six children-we know only their first




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names and never hear their surname-it is im-

plicit. The allusion to Goebbels without nam-

ing him is, I maintain, also part of Beyer's nar-

rative strategy of playing with the soundswithin the text: in this case, the silencing of thename within a text devoted to sound and theacoustic can be read as an additional ironic andeven parodic narrative layer.

11 nterestingly, Hitler's recorded voice hasresurfaced in central films that explore the fas-cist past, including Roberto Rossellini's Ger-mania anno zero (1946) and Ettore Scola's A

Special Day (1977). In both of these films, thesound of the Fiihrer's voice in the background

is used diegetically-we listen not to the soundof Hitler's voice, but rather to the figures in thefilm listening to radio broadcasts of the voice.In Scola's film, the sound of the speech given onthe day of Hitler's visit to Mussolini in 1938,suffuses the interior private sphere in whichthe two main characters meet, while the rest ofthe social housing project is away at the rally.

12Another sound of the Shoah, or more accu-rately, an echo found in the sound of the Shoah,is that of shattered glass at Jewish weddings.

Althoughintended to evoke the destruction of

the Temple, the sound of glass shattering isnow variously summoned to stand in for Kris-tallnacht and the destruction of European Jew-ry in the war.

13I refer here not to particular Klezmer

groups, musicians, or performances, but insteadto the general phenomenon of Klezmer in Ger-

many, to the fact that there are currently more

performances of Klezmer in Berlin than any-where else in the world. While Klezmer is by nomeans a solely German phenomenon, I am sug-gesting that it is produced and heard differ-ently in Germany than it is in the US, France,England, etc. By focusing on the general phe-nomenon of Klezmer in Germany, I do not in-tend to deny the fact that among this multitudeof performances there is diversity and range of

style, listeners, etc.14Significantly, Syberberg's film Our Hitler

contains the real sound of Hitler's voice aswell as simulations of it that are foregroundedas simulations.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The

Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone, 1999.

Baer, Ulrich. Contemporary Holocaust Images:The Landscape of Loss and the Limits of thePhotograph. German Dis/Continuities. Spec.issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 96.4 (1997):741-53.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Trans. Rich-ard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981.

Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 1.Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1982.

Beyer, Marcel. Flughunde. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhr-kamp, 1995.

--.The Karnau Tapes. Trans. John Brown-john. London: Secker & Warburg, 1997.

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision nd Sound. Sound.Ed. Patricia Kruth and Henry Stobart. Cam-bridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Eco, Umberto. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyper-reality. London: Vintage, 1986.

Hartman, Geoffrey H. The Longest Shadow: Inthe Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington:Indiana

UP,1996.

Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames. Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1997.

*-. Surviving Images: Holocaust Photo-

graphs and the Work of Postmemory. TheYale Journal of Criticism 14.1 ( 2001): 5-37.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Grammophon, Film, Type-writer. Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986.

Kofman, Sarah. Smothered Words. Trans. Mad-eleine Dobie. Evanston: Northwestern UP1998.

Lang, Berel. Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.Levi, Primo. If This is a Man and The Truce.

Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Penguin,1979.

Liss, Andrea. Trespassing Through Shadows:Memory, Photography and the Holocaust.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998.

Silverman, Kaja. World Spectators. Stanford:Stanford UPI 2000.

Taylor, Charles. The Physics of Sound. Sound.Ed. Patricia Kruth and Henry Stobart. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge UP 2000.Zelizer, Barbie. Remembering to Forget. Chicago:

U of ChicagoP,

1998.

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