If it had not been for the fierce resistance of the Germany Army authorities, the camps that housed colonial prisoners might easily have become major wartime tourist attractions, and there is evidence that civilian day-trippers did venture down from Berlin by train to get a closer look at the strange mix of peoples held in Wünsdorf. The photographs and cartoons depicting the camps and their inmates, in official propaganda and the general press, went some way to making up for the fact that the real thing was off-limits. Many of these publications used the folk memory of the Völkerschau to make sense of the huge array of men now in German internment and the thousands more still fighting at the front. Leo Frobenius, an anthropologist and African explorer, on returning to Germany in 1915 (after a failed expedition to foment Jihad along the Red Sea) turned his attention to the colonial troops in the PoW camps. He visited them and presented a series of lectures that condemned the Allies for having dispatched their colonial armies to the war in Europe. In 1916 he published Der Völkerzirkus unserer Feinde – ‘The People Circus of Our Enemies’. This short tract was a racial satire on the Allies’ use of colonial soldiers, denouncing Britain as the manipulative ringmaster in a vile racial circus. The book was illustrated with photographs captured from the enemy and portraits of men held in the PoW camps, and it made specific reference to the idea of the Völkerschau. In 1915 a Berlin newspaper described the colonial PoWs in German camps as ‘a Hagenbeck Show’, a reference to Carl Hagenbeck, the great impresario, who procured rare wild animals for nineteenth-century zoos as well as coloured people as exhibits for the various Völkerschauen;10 and the Austrian anthropologist Rudolph Pöch saw obvious similarities between the pre-war human zoos and the wartime camps, describing the latter as an ‘unparalleled Völkerschau’.
As a leading member of the one group of civilians who were getting extensive access to PoW camps, Pöch’s interest was purely professional. Even before the final camp barracks had been constructed and the barbed-wire fences put up, German and Austrian scholars – anthropologists, ethnographers, musicologists and linguists – had all come to appreciate that the huge racial and cultural diversity among Allied PoWs represented a unique opportunity for study. The camps they were dispatched to, especially those at Wünsdorf, had the potential to revolutionize whole disciplines, make careers, inspire doctorial theses and build academic reputations. For decades, German anthropologists had been forced to make long journeys to the colonies in order to locate the exotic peoples whose cultures or bodies they sought to measure and classify. On occasion, their research had been thwarted or undermined by local peoples who had proved unwilling, or at least reluctant, to submit themselves to examination or to answer questions about their cultures and languages. Physical anthropologists in particular had encountered firm resistance. Some of the measurements their studies depended upon were physically uncomfortable and even painful. The calibration of the shape of the human skull, for example, involved the use of metal callipers, which caused painful bruises; while the process of making facial plaster-casts could, by all accounts, be an extremely alarming and unpleasant experience for the subject. Within weeks of the outbreak of war, German scholars were cut off from these difficult fields of study as Germany’s colonies, one by one, fell into the hands of the Allies. With Germany’s ports blockaded by the ships of the Royal Navy, the pursuit of science risked grinding to a complete halt.
Then, in 1915, when the first of the camps for colonial prisoners was opened, German science was presented with literally thousands of diverse peoples – on home soil. This great throng of humanity had little choice but to submit and cooperate with scientific enquiry. But the camps were not just more convenient than field study in the colonies; they offered a wider range of people than had ever previously been assembled in one place – in the words of one leading German anthropologist, ‘an almost incalculable quantity of the most different races’ who could suddenly ‘be better and more comfortably studied here than in their homeland’.11 Men whose nations were separated by thousands of miles were now housed in barracks only metres from one another. This made it possible for the scientists to carry out comparative studies of the various races of mankind – as they defined them – in ways that were inconceivable in any other setting. Research projects that would once have been considered laughably impractical almost overnight became straightforward and easily affordable. Not only were the prisoners from a highly diverse range of ethnic backgrounds, there was also a reasonable mix of ages, with the older career soldiers mixed in with younger, recent recruits. Women, of course, were missing; but the anthropologists blithely dismissed them as unnecessary for their studies. And thus the camps at Wünsdorf became a vast field laboratory, just twenty-five miles from Berlin and the German capital’s many universities, institutes and learned societies.
Anthropology in the early twentieth century was still a relatively new science, and German Anthropologie differed from the variants studied elsewhere in that it focused not primarily on culture but on the physical and racial differences between peoples across the world. Its practitioners sought to define and categorize the races. Among the leaders in the field was Felix von Luschan, Professor of Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Berlin. He had studied the human exhibits at the 1896 Berlin Colonial Show and now regarded the PoW camps as potentially the greatest professional opportunity his science had ever been presented with. Working with the authorities, he coordinated scientific access to the prisoners at Wünsdorf and elsewhere. The study of PoWs became not simply an academic sideline but the dominant activity of German anthropology during the war.
German studies looked at the colour and shape of a prisoner’s eyes, measured his height and weight, and classified the shape of his mouth and nose. Prisoners were interviewed to determine their place of origin, and a series of standardized anthropological photographs was taken to allow comparisons to be made between men of different races. As definitions of what constituted a ‘race’ and what constituted a ‘nationality’ were fluid in this period, the scope of the study increased, with men from enemy nations within Europe being examined and compared to non-whites from the colonial sphere. East-European Jews from the Russian Army were examined and set alongside Africans, and while no English prisoners were examined, Scots and Irish were.
Photography was central to anthropology; but the images taken of prisoners were published not just in academic articles and papers but in popular books and in newspapers too, often with official backing. Luschan published the book Prisoners of War in 1917, but many of the books that emerged using the anthropological photographs (or approximations of them) were not the work of the anthropologists. In 1915 Alexander Backhaus, with all the authority of a professor of agriculture, published a collection of photographs under the title The PoWs in Germany. A year later Otto Stiehl, a historian of German architecture (though he could also claim to be a member of the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory and an officer at the Halbmondlager itself) brought out Unsere Feinde (‘Our Enemies’), a compilation of ninety-six of his own photographs of PoWs from the Wünsdorf camps. Ironically, as an amateur, unschooled in the craft of anthropological photography, Stiehl proved himself a far better photographer than a propagandist. His photographs failed utterly to reduce his subjects to racial types. By accident rather than design, he produced some of the most powerful photo-portraits of the First World War, capturing the individuality of each of the prisoners studied.
While the professional anthropologists tended to reject the idea that character – individual or racial – could be read from faces, that idea was widely held by the public and it informed many popular publications such as those by Stiehl and Backhaus. To make the photographs of the prisoners more menacing, and assist the viewer to reach a judgement about each prisoner and the race he represented, some publications added descriptions, explaining how primitive or uncivilized each of the enemy races was and pointing out tell-tale signs of inner savagery that could be discerned in
the shape of faces or skulls. Portraying the Allied imperial armies as a flood of savage and backward races offered to German propaganda – both amateur and professional – a means to undermine the Allied arguments that they were defending civilization from German militarism.
The expertise marshalled by Luschan and others was increasingly put to work in the name of patriotism rather than science, as anthropology began to fuse with propaganda. The war on two fronts created, within Germany, a powerful sense of national encirclement by numerous enemies, which accentuated a mood of both hyper-nationalism and condemnation of ‘alien’ cultures. It was a mood expressed in public meetings, in the press and in books. It was in such an atmosphere that German and Austrian science became an instrument of war.
Scientists received grants and access to the PoW camps from a government increasingly aware of the propaganda potential of the conjunction of the huge array of races and nationalities held prisoner with the young science of anthropology. But, as historian Andrew D. Evans has shown, the driving force behind the ever-closer bond was the anthropologists and not the government (or the army).12 German anthropologists willingly weaponized their science, making it available to the war effort. Through this process, a discipline that in Germany was known before the war for its internationalism and relative liberalism knowingly transformed itself into little more than a propaganda tool.*2
Within Germany, the multiplicity of races behind the fences of PoW camps became one of the defining images of the conflict. Photographs taken and published by the anthropologists were transformed by the pens of German graphic artists into a vision of a world arrayed against Germany. In one cartoon, a German soldier appears in front of a multiracial group of PoWs huddled behind the barbed wire of a camp; every enemy race is represented, and every face is a racial stereotype. The contrast between the purity of the German soldier, fighting for his own nation, and the multi-ethnic horde set against him was intended to be stark and emotive. In 1918 one newspaper article claimed that ‘every single race is represented in the support troops of the Entente… There is no race on the planet that would not stand against us in the service of England.’13 Such a view of the Weltkrieg’s internationalism is a long way from the early German satisfaction that colonial forces were a demonstration of the Entente’s weakness; now it was a global conspiracy. The PoW camps became the place where Germany could demonstrate this theory and prove to its public the mendacity of her enemies.
THE HALBMONDLAGER, WÜNSDORF, 4PM ON 11 DECEMBER 1916. Mall Singh, aged twenty-four and from the village of Ranasukhi in the Punjab, is ordered to stand in front of the funnel of a microphone. He has little choice, having arrived on the Western Front as part of the Indian Corps only to subsequently find himself a German prisoner of war. But at least he can choose his words. He recites a poem, which he has composed himself, into a machine that etches his voice directly onto a wax disc. Clearly the poem is autobiographical; but it is phrased in the third-person, as if Mall Singh is already disembodied.
There once was a man. He ate butter in India. He drank milk.
This man came into the European war. Germany captured this man.
He wishes to go to India. He wants to go to India.
He will get the same food as in former times.
Three years have passed. One does not know when there will be peace.
If this man goes back to India, he will get the same food as in former times.
If this man has to stay here for another two years – he will die. If God has mercy, he will make peace soon.
We will go away from here.
In the last days of December 1915, while the anthropologists at the Wünsdorf camps continued their measurements of bodies and facial features, and as Max von Oppenheim’s Jihad propagandists maintained their busy schedule of lectures and observations, another programme got under way. Earlier that year, Professor Carl Stumpf of the Berlin Phonogram Archive, along with the well-connected language expert and teacher Wilhelm Doegen, had come together to form, in a round-about way, the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission. Gathering around them a group of ethnographers, linguistics experts and musicologists, they garnered official backing for a full-scale study of the various languages and musical traditions of the Wünsdorf prisoners. The project was personally approved by the Kaiser, who even helped find the money to fund it.14 The aim of the Phonographic Commission was to record and then preserve the diverse range of languages in the camps. Doegen dreamed of a collection that would constitute a museum ‘of the voices of all the peoples’.15 The recordings were also to be used to advance ethnography and language teaching.*3
From the end of 1915, and continuing past the end of hostilities into late December 1918, the commission meticulously made 2,677 separate recordings of prisoners, recording around 250 different languages or dialects. Their activities took them far beyond Wünsdorf, too. In total they made forty-nine field trips to thirty-one different camps.16 The expedition teams recorded not just speech samples, but also poems, local folk-tales and music, along with the personal words of the prisoners, poems of the prisoners’ own composition – and tragic, plaintive pleas made by disorientated, dislocated men, as if their appeals might be answered, rather than merely studied. The researchers on occasion even had X-rays produced of the larynxes of prisoners, in an effort to determine how certain language-sounds were physically formed. Before each recording was made, a form was filled out noting the language of the speaker, his level of education, his social class, his place of origin and military rank. Then, a transcription of the agreed text was made, and only then were the PoWs allowed to speak.
All the activities of the commission were kept secret for the duration of the war. Today, the voices of the colonial prisoners are held on thousands of heavy shellac discs, stored in a line of green, steel cabinets in the Lautarchiv (Sound Archive) of Humboldt University in Berlin. The final fate of many of the men whose voices are preserved is unknown.
The recordings are unedited and raw. The voices – thin and compressed by the simple recording technology of the day – have to fight their way through the heavy bass static. But once audible they are haunting and tragic. These voices of the war are unmistakably those of young men, speaking not as veterans repeating familiar war stories, worn smooth by over-telling, but as men still trapped at the moment of recording in the unfolding conflict, still in its grip, with uncertain futures. Many speak with a sing-song intonation, delivering appeals and poems as if their words are folk-songs or oral epics. Their mistakes, false starts and hesitations are all held in magical preservation alongside their words. Men clear their throats and fight back the revealing waver of nervousness in their voices. Even if all that had been recorded by the linguists had been merely these voices, repeating standard texts as was sometimes the case, the recordings would still be remarkable and moving. But that the prisoners were permitted and encouraged to write their own texts and deliver their own messages to the world beyond the barbed wire and the Prussian forests that surrounded them, and ultimately to future generations, gives them a far greater power and significance.
One prisoner, recorded as Bela Singh from Amritsar, delivered his poem in Punjabi, a poignant lament on his own experiences of war:
When we arrived in the city of Marseilles we ate well. Thus, all were happy. We were placed in cars and the major gave the order: ‘Go now, oh Lions, in the trenches, go! Fight the Germans, why do you walk backwards?’ For two months we sat in the trenches. A few lions had had enough of fighting. The German cannons hurled their artillery with great force. All ran off as they noticed the force. I was a hindrance as I could not run away. When the Germans saw me, they needed their entire strength against me. They took me with force. Where – they did not tell me….
Another PoW, a Punjabi Sikh called Sib Singh, spoke of his own political awakening:
The German Emperor is very wise. He wages war against all kings. When the war is over, many stories will be printed. In India, the Englishman rules. W
e had no knowledge of any other king. When the war began, we heard of several kings. In India this is a problem: The people know nothing.
The voices that pour forth from the shellac discs are those of men who are almost never recorded by history – the poor, the powerless, the cannon fodder of empire. They are the voices of men who almost always went to their graves silently, leaving no other record of who they were or the lives they lived. The recordings in the Lautarchiv are more even than this, though. They preserve the thoughts and words of men who were born in the last years of the nineteenth century, when empires were being built rather than sliding into decline. Their voices are not just those of colonial soldiers of the First World War – though that in itself is miraculous enough – they are also the unheard voices of the poor of rural Africa and rural India in the early twentieth century. It is ironic that in this respect, German science, so often suborned to the military, political and propagandist imperatives of the war effort, should have almost inadvertently left such a moving and unique repository. These words and the haunting voices that speak them are among the most beautiful artefacts left behind by any soldiers of the First World War.
The World's War Page 30