by Marcel Beyer
At present, while their vocal cords are still supple, the children speak quite uninhibitedly. They're altogether unaware, I imagine, of the freedom with which they form words and sounds. They may even yearn to be able to speak like adults. Later on, however, their voices will inevitably lose that natural quality. It will vanish if only because they learn how to cough, to emit polite little coughs and clear their throats behind an upraised hand, grown-up fashion, instead of relieving a troublesome tickle as promptly and forcefully as possible. It will vanish if only because their voices will seldom be heard again at full strength, and because the uninhibited shouts, screams and jubilant cries of childhood will be replaced by restrained utterances delivered at room volume. Their voices will soon be subject to limitations. They will be taught to speak clearly at all times, taught not to pick up any old accent they hear, if only in passing, and temporarily substitute it for their usual mode of speech, albeit unconsciously, perhaps, when they themselves pass a remark or engage in conversation. The continual repetition of words and sentences, the persistent crying and whimpering, will disappear for ever, because every voice is monitored by the human ear.
The children may already have a secret inkling of this. Why else were they so shy when they first arrived, why else were they so reticent at first? Not a word more than necessary, and only when they couldn't avoid answering a question of mine. Slowly, one by one, they gained confidence and ventured to address me of their own accord. But they chattered with real abandon only when playing alone in their room with the door shut so the stranger couldn't hear — or so they hoped. A diffident, inhibited manner of speaking will one day come naturally to them, and they'll be wholly unaware that their voices ever sounded any different.
Their original lack of constraint will never be satisfactorily replaced by anything they learn in the way of new vocalisations, for instance the polite, affected, swiftly subsiding laughter that greets an unfunny or unseemly joke, or the vocal sweet nothings, the reallys and you-don't-says that dissuade people from tearing each other limb from limb at the slightest conversational tiff. The erstwhile vocal range narrows and the voice is steadily abraded by prescribed patterns of speech until death supervenes, by which time it has become a strangled sound located at the base of the tongue. Clipped utterances are all it can produce, and any outbursts are quickly retracted.
It will dawn on the children, sooner or later, that they no longer enjoy free use of their voices. Helmut will attain this painful realisation as soon as his voice starts to break. The larynx suddenly refuses to obey and becomes a sore point, an ever open wound in the throat. The vocal cords are strained and distorted, and the tongue, too, weakens because all it can articulate are fragmentary sounds that fluctuate in pitch. And Helmut will be alarmed to find that his voice is slipping from his grasp. Like everything else.
Growth alone is held responsible for all the unpleasantnesses associated with this phase: the adolescent's headaches, growing pains, and uncoordinated movements. But isn't it far more likely that changes in the voice are to blame for this feeling of disorientation, and that its gross failure has repercussions on the entire body? We know, after all, that phonation or vocalisation brings many more muscles into play than are directly connected with the apparatus of speech itself. May not the voice be far more important than is generally assumed, therefore, since it is echoed by dull aches throughout the body at the very stage when it sounds most discordant? If a breaking voice betokens adolescence, or incipient sexual maturity, must a man have slept with a woman before his voice attains its final form?
My own voice never broke, as far as I can recall, and my memory cannot be at fault or my voice would now be deeper, like those of other men. I have the impression that its pitch has never really changed, never slipped down the scale. Characterised by inflexibility, it produces a sound quite inappropriate to my age. Its melody is also false, as high-pitched as a child's and at odds with the body and movements of an adult, but devoid of a child's sincerity.
A medley of cries and hesitations, the speech of a child is coloured by its upbringing.
*
Papa comes panting up the stairs. Helmut is screaming the house down. Papa's on the landing now, he's calling me. 'What's going on, Helga?' he shouts. 'What have you done to your little brother this time?'
'It's his own fault, he broke my watch.'
Helmut stands there bawling with a face like a beetroot. He runs to Papa, who picks him up in his arms and glares at me. 'You're not to hit Helmut, you know that perfectly well, he's too little. He didn't mean to be naughty.'
Helmut sobs in Papa's arms, looking as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. He unscrewed the back of my watch, the one with the red leather strap, and took out all the works. He didn't see me coming because he was too busy rooting around in the case with a screwdriver. He was working away with all his might — so hard that his tongue was clamped between his teeth and the tip was all red and throbbing. He gave a start when he finally saw me, but by that time my lovely watch was completely ruined. The hands were bent, too — not a hope of mending it. I gave him a good slap. He started crying right away, lost his temper and swept all the bits off the table with his arm. Then he ran to the door and cried a bit louder so Papa would hear him down below.
'Did you hear what I said?' Papa says sternly.
'But he bust my watch.'
'Bust? What do you mean, bust? Speak properly when you're talking to your father.'
'He broke my watch.'
Hilde and Heide have appeared in the doorway, wondering what all the noise is about. 'Hold your tongue and go to your room at once,' Papa says.
'But Helmut took it to bits, he deserved to be slapped.'
'That's enough, Helga. Don't be so damned impertinent.'
And Papa gives me a slap. I start crying too, now. I run to my room, yelling, 'You're mean and unfair, the lot of you!'
Papa comes after me, but I slam the door and turn the key, twice. Papa knocks, bangs on my door. 'Open up at once, Helga. You know you're not allowed to lock yourself in.'
But he can't come in however long he goes on shouting. He can't slap me again either, not when I'm lying on my bed with the pillows over my head. The pillows are wet with tears already. Helmut doesn't shed tears as a rule because he isn't sad, just angry — angry because he isn't strong enough to hit me back. If I clamp the pillows against my ears I can hardly hear Papa banging and yelling outside.
Helmut's still so little, he doesn't realise when he's being naughty. He's far too young to know, and so are Hilde and Holde and Hedda, not to mention Heide. Mama and Papa are allowed to punish them, but not me — oh no! I'm not old enough for that, but I'm old enough to put up with those little nuisances, old enough to look after them when Mama gets one of her headaches and goes to bed, when everyone in the house has to be quiet, when Mama goes away to recuperate and Papa's not here either — when he spends the night at Lanke and doesn't come home for days on end. But I mustn't ever lose my temper with the little ones. 'Helga's very understanding for her age,' says Papa when he wants to butter me up in front of other people. 'It's sweet, the way she looks after her little brother and sisters.'
I can still hear him outside in the passage, shouting, 'No film show for you this evening. No film show, Helga, you hear?'
Then he stops banging on the door. Helmut will be playing with my watch again by now, you bet. Papa won't object, Helmut can get away with murder, being the only boy. The rest of us are just girls. Heide's lucky, she's the only one Mama really cares about. All the grown-ups rave about her blue eyes, but they'll change colour soon enough. All babies have blue eyes to begin with.
I can hear Holde and Hilde laughing in the nursery — what are they playing, mothers and babies? — and Helmut is hammering and screwing away at my watch. He can't use a screwdriver properly, he's too stupid to play with his Meccano. If Papa tells Mama about our fight he'll say Helmut was playing quietly by himself. Mama won't ask if it's really true, she
'll scowl at me and make her headache face. There's the nursemaid, she's saying something to the others. Now she's knocking on my door: 'Helga, get tidied up and comb your hair, it'll soon be supper-time.'
I'll have to unlock the door, I can't put it off any longer. I hope Papa won't be there for supper. I'll listen on the stairs first, to see if I can hear him talking.
*
Street signs are being dismantled and taken down. The men's hands are sore and calloused from unscrewing so many in quick succession. Potting and glazing are in progress. Clay is being moulded on the potter's wheel and fired. Now everyone will get new jugs. A summer wind is blowing across the green meadows. The blue pencil is scouring fields and ridding flower-beds of thistles. Walls are being repainted, hoardings whitewashed over. The blue pencil bites through weeds, rips out tufts of vegetation, strips trees of foliage and lays them flat. Incredible, the extent of this clearance: threshed grain, shady hillsides, forest glades, charred signposts, barns, farms, ploughland — the whole countryside is being burned off like a field of stubble. Tongues, too, are set ablaze and their last words cauterised as a prelude to extinction.
The operation is already in full swing. The entire region is being blue-pencilled. Readers are combing every library. The blue pencil is inflicting deep wounds, gnawing away at the foreign vocabulary. Street names, formerly French, are being replaced with German. The blue pencil underlines, corrects, makes marginal notes, suggests appropriate German replacements. Typewriters churn out words at seventy-eight per minute. Normative regulations are being imposed, indigenous civil servants re-educated, language courses administered under the auspices of a compulsory programme designed to inculcate a basic vocabulary and eliminate any pronunciation problems.
Hammers and chisels are chipping away at tombstones and excising memorial inscriptions, even the French words for BORN and DIED. Labels bearing washing instructions, too, are being ripped from the collar of every garment. The blue pencil is deleting forms of address, conventional words of farewell, verbal courtesies.
New names are being assigned to everyone and everything. The Germanising process requires that foreign words be erased from mouths and foreign names from passes and permits. Any inscriptions other than HEISS and KALT are disappearing from bath taps throughout Alsace. The blue pencil is prescribing financial penalties for the use of French words. All mottoes or graces stamped on tableware, whether of silver or some other metal, are being removed.
The linguistic purge is being implemented with the utmost rigour. The authorities raid a china factory where, in contravention of a strict ban, French inscriptions are still being scratched into the soft clay of crockery ready for firing. Paint pots are tipped over, startled workers drop their brushes and are lined up facing the wall with their wrists handcuffed behind them. While the guilty parties' personal particulars are being taken down, all the crockery in the warehouse is systematically smashed, even inscribed plates adorned with floral patterns and landscapes. Fragments bearing isolated letters in cursive could have been combined into new, German, words, but the blue pencil is implacably thorough: the fragments and the letters painted on them are vigorously trampled underfoot and ground to dust. Jugs for water, milk and wine are hurled through the shop window, and a trayful of salt cellars goes sailing into the street just as the prisoners are being marched away. The flying splinters cut their foreheads.
Every brow reflects the flames. A word of command, and torch-bearers standing in the fiery glow apply their brands like slow-matches to a cannon's touch-hole. Bonfires blaze up on all sides, conflagrations in every public square light up the night sky above the entire city. The region's linguistic heritage is being torched, a crackling, petrol-sodden agglomeration of dictionaries and novels, cookbooks and paperbacks. It comprises every book in French, translations from German included, that could be seized in and around Strasbourg, where every household has been obliged to surrender its library. Suspects were tackled from the start by reconnaissance patrols. No one escaped their scrutiny, not even the most inconspicuous, book-engrossed figure seated on a park bench. Now, beside the crackling, blazing mounds of paper, dim figures can be seen roasting potatoes on improvised skewers, mopping their sweaty foreheads, clinking glasses of wine in the firelight. The glasses glint as they raise them to their lips and drink to the success of Germanisation.
In the background, flames flicker and smoke rises into the brightly illuminated sky. Afterwards, jackbooted feet aim kicks at the ashes and dying embers. The glow fades and dies.
The reorganisation of lessons in all schools is a quite informal process. During excursions children are encouraged to rid the streets of all undesirable foreign words, to develop keener eyes and a keener linguistic awareness. In the classroom, suggestions are invited for Germanising terms used in the jewellery trade, hitherto a Gallic preserve. The pupils join in with a will. Their suggestions are arranged in categories, and the author of the one deemed most appropriate is privileged to step up to the blackboard, rub out the French designation, and replace it with the German. The children have then to copy out the whole of this newly acquired vocabulary in their exercise books.
The blue pencil is neatly noting down the particulars of those who defy the linguistic ordinances. It fills out forms: date, forename, surname, address, said person to be deported to the Reich with immediate effect, signature, rubber stamp. Sharp-eared Germanisers are scouring the countryside. They round up whole gangs of intransigent French-speakers and confine them in the detention camp that has already housed well over a thousand of their number.
Having thoroughly explored the phonetic landscape at home in Germany, I realised that, in order to pursue my cartographic project further, it would be necessary to record voices from other regions. That's why I volunteered for Germanisation duties here in Strasbourg.
Eavesdropping on people has landed me in some very awkward situations. My equipment not only attracts puzzled glances but has provoked physical assaults on my person and on the recording-machine itself. Once, in fact, a brand-new wax disc narrowly escaped destruction. I had often noticed while passing an old folks' home at night, on my way back from work, that issuing from an open ground-floor window were the peaceful, regular snores of some aged resident asleep inside. They were so audible that on one occasion, when they ceased, I feared that the sound source had just expired. One chilly night, as I crouched beneath the window to capture these sounds, I managed to make an almost perfect recording of them. The air was still and the street deserted, so there were no other noises to spoil the faint, rhythmical snores that issued from the room as the stylus engraved them on wax. Suddenly, however, I was attacked from the rear by a woman in nurse's uniform, who had crept up behind me through the shrubbery. She set about me with a walking stick and shouted for the police. It was all I could do to defend myself, I was so startled, but I succeeded in getting away with a few bruises.
Amateur recordings demonstrate that conspiratorial gatherings still take place at which French is spoken by those present. My working conditions here in Alsace are excellent. I make a note of the most interesting recordings on file, which are very numerous, and copy them for personal use in my billet after work. In return, so to speak, I'm compelled to endure some unimaginably awful sights: third-degree interrogations, sanguinary floggings. Brutal police raids, too: complete with my recording equipment, I'm obliged to stand there surrounded by a gaggle of tearful children whose father is being hauled off by the Germanisers, and all because I myself have recorded his voice. Microphones are even installed in the confessional, where people still dare to speak French with their priest. The church is then raided.
Linguistic culling: a basic concept evolved during the Napoleonic wars by Friedrich Jahn, the father of German callisthenics and originator of the physical education programme to which I was remorselessly subjected from childhood until late adolescence. Jahn held that the entire body must be toughened, including — of course — the tongue.
Like the Ge
rman Linguistic Association, he opposed verbal interbreeding and urged that our language divest itself of all foreign interlopers.
My supervisory officer plays me a tape. The voices are distorted and can barely be heard above the hiss of the low-volume recording, but the stresses, which differ from those of any known German accent, are clearly detectable. Now the hiss threatens to drown the voices altogether. The officer starts cursing: 'What's the man blathering about? Why can't he speak more clearly? Not a single recognisable name, just isolated syllables.'
There's an unusual timbre to the voice on the tape. It reminds me of my own siren voice: 'Down to the air-raid shelter,' every note of it seems to say. I find the sound so distasteful I want to clap my hands over my ears. The officer turns to me. 'My job is to detain French-speakers,' he says, 'but it's obvious that this equipment hasn't been perfected sufficiently to yield any useful information. See to it at once, Karnau. I want this tape-recorder to supply all the evidence we need in order to arrest the subversive elements in question. You're the expert, use your own initiative. Copy the tape, cut it up and splice it, do all you can to improve the quality of the recording. We're in urgent need of details: names, addresses, motives for attending these clandestine get-togethers.'
He looks at me helplessly, knitting his brow. I go over to the tape-recorder. Perhaps if we played it slower? I switch the machine to half-speed, rewind the tape and play it again, but no deep, drawling, tortured voices issue from the loudspeaker. Silence, absolute silence. We listen a moment longer. Then, after glaring at the tape, the officer abruptly flies off the handle: 'You idiot, Karnau, what have you done? That recording's a write-off. You wiped it when you wound it back and replayed it — you pressed the wrong button. How could they have sent us an ignoramus like you? Aren't you familiar with this technology?'