The Karnau Tapes

by Marcel Beyer

  The headlights grope their way along the verges, and every truck that squeezes past illuminates an expanse of ditch. There among the debris and horses' carcasses, right beside the shattered remains of an armoured car, I see something moving on the ground. The passing headlights continually illuminate the same spot, so recognition soon dawns: some very young puppies, probably still blind, are scrabbling around in the mire. Now the mother appears out of the darkness, bent on keeping her litter together. Calmly but firmly, she grips her young by the neck, one by one, and drags them back into the lee of the armoured car, whence they emerge once more and totter over to the dead horses. Little wet balls of fur, they sit there whimpering until their mother comes to round them up again. An unexpected picture so close to the front line. An indication, perhaps, that this very spot marks the war's frontier: a last symbol of peace before we enter disputed territory, the forward extremity of the rear echelon, the last stretch before the bomb and shell craters begin. Some messenger dog must have paused in the thick of the fighting to mate with a stray bitch.

  What kind of war is this? They shoot down pigeons here — blow them out of the sky. My neighbour in the dug-out insists that the birds carry cameras strapped to their bodies. 'They aren't just any old birds, Karnau, they're enemy artillery spotters, get that into your thick head. They're reconnoitring our positions. If they make it back to the Russian lines, it won't be long before the shells come raining down.'

  The soldier turns away with a shake of the head. He's frying himself something to eat amid the mud and excrement. The others make hard-boiled jokes: 'Nothing like puppy meat to supplement our rations.' They crouch in their trenches, war written on their faces, night glasses trained on the darkness beyond the parapet. Me, I sit beside the radio operator on my boxes of equipment, deep in the quaking ground. The steel helmet they've issued me is far too big. I have to keep pushing it back or I can't see a thing beneath the rim. 'Tighten the strap, you clot.' The radio operator addresses me without removing his headset. Cigarettes glow in the darkness. I'm recording enemy radio messages and conducting regular monitoring tests: yes, faint though it is, the enemy radio traffic can be heard on tape with relative clarity. Divisional headquarters sends a runner to collect the tapes three times a day. Such are my present duties as a civilian supernumerary.

  I haven't left the dug-out since I got here. I don't dare go outside, I'm so scared of the gunfire and the crowded trenches when an attack is in progress and the air billows sideways because a shell has landed near by — scared above all of the earsplitting, never-ending din. I've done my utmost to conceal this fear from the others, but my face, my set mouth and my silence, not to mention the way I screw up my eyes at every detonation, betray my state of mind to the others, many of whom are much younger than I.

  The enemy transmitter has been inaudible for quite a while. I sneak outside, determined to overcome this intolerable fear, determined not to let it dissuade me from proceeding with my own work as planned. At my own risk, I intend to take advantage of a lull in the bombardment to make some recordings of a kind that has never been heard before: I propose to capture the sounds made by soldiers in battle.

  A crosswind, rain. I conceal my microphones behind banks of spoil, in craters and along the trench, embed their bases in damp earth, run out cables, cower and curl up whenever a shell lands in my vicinity. Then back to the dug-out caked with mud. I plug in the microphone leads, don my headset and check reception, discover a loose connection in the left-hand ear-piece, adjust separate access to individual microphones located in the field, and listen: a rumble of gunfire, the groans of the wounded mingled with the hiss of the evening wind and rain. I test the tape-recorder, listen to a trial recording, wait impatiently for the blank section to end, and suddenly I hear it: the first voice, faint, distorted, scarred by its own violence. The tape goes taut and snaps, the voice breaks off in mid-utterance, the spool starts to race, the severed residue of tape slaps the recording head and controls, flutters with rhythmical, electronic ferocity. A surveyor of the human landscape, as it were, I resolve to wait until the fighting abates and nocturnal peace descends.

  Before long, the complete absence of background noise enables me to monitor and record sound sources destined to dry up in the very near future. The whole of the nocturnal landscape comes alive with these dying soldiers' swan songs, the battlefield resounds to the cries of the wounded. Feverishly eager as a child, I keep switching from one sound source to another, reaching into the box of blank tapes from where I sit and reloading the machine. Mine is a map of vowels. It will immortalise young soldiers with mangled faces long after their last postcards reach home, long after heroic words are murmured over their shattered corpses, but only, to be on the safe side, when the latter are defenceless and can no longer drown them with a spine-chilling death rattle.

  I switch to the trench: heavy footsteps and a downpour. Suddenly, members of the unit come crowding into the dugout. Left ear: the voices of those around me, muffled by the headset. Right ear: cries and a patter of hailstones from the scene of the most recent fighting. I save the remains of a soldier's exhausted voice, capture the ultimate extremity of that voice and preserve it for the bereaved. Over to the position nearest the enemy: a whistling, roaring sound. It draws nearer, swells within fractions of a second to a splintering crash. Then, just as it reaches maximal volume, transmission ceases: the microphone has been buried or blown to bits.

  The night song slowly fades, but the magnetised particles on the tape flicker on, steadfastly adjusting themselves to the sonic situation of the moment. Faint though they are, the noises in the headset rend my ears. I must go on listening, stay with those noises to the end. Unplug and switch over: each of the men left out there can now be clearly distinguished, chins as stubbly and voices as ravaged as the ground on which they lie dying — the ground across which I myself so recently stumbled. They're here in my ears, the men who will remain out there. Their bodies are lying beyond redemption in the lethal danger zone, but their sighs are safe in here on tape. And my tape will relinquish those sighs to no one, no enemy however strong, even if he slowly dismembers and sieves the bodies overnight, so that in the morning, when the assault is renewed, sodden corpses will scarcely be distinguishable from churned-up ground: all will have been reduced to grey slush, nothing more.

  Impressive though they are, these phenomena, their meaning is unfathomable; they relapse into darkness. Just before the end, voices regain their naturalness and abandon all their long-acquired self-control. Out they come once more, those crude, unschooled, amorphous sounds that issue from the very marrow. Setting up a parallel connection, I hear deep sighs in a wide variety of intonations, groans, gurgles, sounds of vomiting in the mire and murk, nuances of sound in which several layers of darkness have become deposited, and which spring from the darkness of their surroundings. The moribund are returning to their origins, no longer able to restrain their voices and suppress the cries that burst forth. Animal sounds pure and simple, these are neither fashioned by the larynx nor muted by the throat; they fill the entire oral cavity. Lips, tongue and teeth are incapable of holding these involuntary sounds in check and silencing them before they leave the mouth. What an experience! What a vocal panorama!

  IV

  'WHAT A VIEW! WHAT A VAST, ECHOING PANORAMA — RIGHT here, in front of us! Breath-taking, isn't it, this rugged scenery? Look at those rocky gorges on the other side of the valley, look at the snow-capped peaks of that mountain range. They hurt your eyes, don't they? See how the sunlight bounces off the glaciers, the patches of snow running down to the tree-line, and the avalanche that has cut a swath through the woods. The fir trees are so dense, they seem to swallow up the light. How high are those mountains, I wonder, and how did anyone ever manage to survey them? They're so dazzling, even at this distance, they hurt your eyes. Imagine having to cross those sunlit stretches — you'd be lucky not to go snow-blind! The eye instinctively avoids them and concentrates on the level, shady ex
panses — there, where sunlight gives way to shadow on that alpine meadow sandwiched between the thickly wooded area on the projecting dome of rock and the peaks in the background. And what a sky! Like the clouds in a battle painting come to life. Do look, Helga.'

  'Yes, they're very nice, the mountains.'

  Mama likes this view, that's why she chose it as a background for our family photograph. I'm trying to look at it but I can't, not properly. I force myself to look at every rock, very hard, but I can't breathe properly either. Is it the mountain air? Do you have to breathe faster up here because it's so thin, or is it this tight collar and the necklace and my new frock? It's awfully uncomfortable, the frock, not to mention these stockings and my smart new patent leather shoes. The photographer has only come here because he says there are so few opportunities to photograph all of us children together with our mother. Mama also thinks it's time we had another nice picture taken for the newspapers. We line up in a row with Mama holding Heide in her arms. 'Children in front,' says the photographer, 'mother behind and in the middle.'

  We always have to stand still for so long, smiling at the camera in a friendly kind of way. It's nice to have our picture in the paper, of course. My classmates always envy me, but they don't know what a bore it is, waiting for pictures to be taken, or how good we have to be at table, sitting there quiet as mice when Papa or Mama takes us out for meals at other people's houses. My friend Conni is a lot better off from that point of view. She doesn't go to as many big parties with her parents, but in the afternoons she can always play outside till supper-time with the other girls in our class. That's why she's got so many friends. Lots more than me.

  Conni lives at Nikolassee, which is too far away for me to walk or even cycle. Her parents' house is quite different from ours. It's much smaller, for a start, but Conni doesn't have any brothers or sisters to pester her and expect her to share everything with them. The photographer tells me to put my arm around Helmut's shoulder. Is he going to be much longer? 'Something's the matter with Helmut's trousers,' he says. 'There's a crease on the left at the top, it casts a nasty shadow. Could someone smooth it out?'

  The nursemaid comes forward and tugs at Helmut's trousers, but it makes no difference. 'Your pocket's bulging.

  Have you got something in it?' Helmut glances at Mama, looking guilty. He reaches in his pocket and brings out what he's hidden there: a toy soldier. 'No tears, if you please,' Mama says sternly. 'You don't want to be photographed with your eyes all red, do you?'

  The photographer snaps us at last.

  These mountains remind me of Helmut's model Berghof, with miniature politicians standing on the balcony looking out at the view. Inside, the Berghof is like a doll's house for boys. It's where the little figures live and hold their conferences. Helmut's awfully proud of his Berghof, which is why he was so angry when someone broke a piece off the balcony railings. That boy did it, the one Helmut had to play with. He didn't want to play with him at all, but Mama insisted. 'If our hosts are kind enough to make us welcome in their guest-house,' she said, 'we must be equally nice to their children.' It isn't as if the boy is nice to us. He acts the Führer in his Hitler Youth uniform and orders us around the whole time, and he can't even speak properly. You can't understand his Bavarian dialect, anyway, or only the odd swear-word, like shit or bastard, or when he yells at us suddenly, to scare us. He's just like his fat, red-faced father, the Reichsmarschall. It's disgusting, the way he belches and grunts and snorts.

  Mama's leaving tonight, she's off to Dresden for a rest cure. We thought she was going to spend the holidays with us, but she only came here to drop us. We're sad when Mama packs her bags. She says she'll telephone us. So will Papa, definitely, every evening. 'Can't we come to Dresden with you?' No, it's a sanatorium. Grown-ups only.

  *

  I scan the terrain, run my finger over individual areas on the map, a straightforward army-issue map with markings of the usual kind. Pencilled crosses indicate tank traps. My finger roams on, tapping as it goes. These wavy lines represent corduroy roads, most of them already severed by shellfire. My forefinger traces the course of a dotted line. This area is particularly important. At this point on its outer extremity I entered the danger zone after dark, worked my way forward from an unknown position on the periphery, and then, having first consulted an expert on the terrain, a shadow specialist, set off into the blue. Searchlights were the problem, I had to avoid their roving, probing beams. Now I open my hand and spread my fingers, covering most of the map, first with shadow, then with flesh: I've sown this entire area with concealed microphones and, thus, mapped it acoustically.

  That is how the unfamiliar markings on the map, the clusters of triangles and widely scattered circles, should be interpreted. Not all my recordings lend themselves to precise classification, for instance under the heading of gasps or moans, because their quality has sometimes been badly impaired by feedback resulting from their incredible, unforeseeable volume. When evaluating them, however, I have clearly detected certain invariable features in the distribution of sounds. Consonants, for example, are very seldom uttered on the battlefield at night, and then only at longish intervals, so my primary focus of attention is vowel research. This area spanned by my thumb and third finger, whose tendons briefly twitch as I spread them, contains a concentration of the vowel A. As for this hatching here, it denotes that certain rare sounds are uttered mainly in the immediate vicinity of the enemy line, where few words mingle with the moans and groans of the wounded, be they calling for help or scraping together the last available fragments of a prayer. Here, far out across the trenches, is where men can no longer find the words, where they hammer on the doors of their vocabulary because the enemy is launching a surprise attack on the flank; where their husks of words disintegrate, vaporised by pain and excessive exposure to the din of the enemy bombardment. Then, shortly before a sound source is finally extinguished, there are no words at all, anywhere in the monitored area, though this may also stem from loss of hearing and diminished self-control: those unable to hear their own voices refrain from speaking.

  I have become a voice thief, I have left the men at the front voiceless. From now on, I can do as I please with their final utterances. By recording, I appropriate a part of any voice I choose and can play it back without its owner's knowledge, even after his death. A voice thief can play recordings of the dead and pretend, to those who know no better, that they're the voices of living persons. My tapes are vocal excerpts. I can reach into any man's depths without his knowledge. I can extract anything from those depths and take possession of it, anything and everything down to the last, intimate breath exhaled by a dying man.

  How the map paper crackles under my palm, how it curls as it absorbs my sweat, producing entirely new constellations of sounds in one corner: here, where open vowels impinge on gutturals, and there, beside the mark that indicates where a youngster in his death throes lost all vocal control. I must listen to that recording again, right away. It's an unimaginable screech such as no one ever before heard issuing from a human mouth. Mouth, did I say? It wasn't really an oral process at all. The whole throat was brought into play, outside as well as in. Windpipe and larynx played their part, but the epidermis resonated too — indeed, one could believe that every bristle on his chin contributed to the sound.

  Where is the tape? This one is a chorus of death rattles, and this one, the label almost indecipherable because I wrote it in the field during a hailstorm, is of silence, a whole tapeful of silence recorded afterwards, when nothing — vocally speaking — was stirring. Damn, the card index has fallen off the table. Here, this must be the young man responsible for those exceptionally strident cries, if cries they can be called.

  Not long now. Thread the tape in carefully, throw the heavy switch, fingers trembling with expectancy, and listen. Almost there, not another word, just listen.

  That voice is all I want to hear. I play and replay it. A little further on comes a very special sound: just tha
t youthful stranger's voice overlaid with my breathing, nothing but my own hurried breathing, because there's no one else in the room to listen, no one with me to look at the map and listen to my explanations.

  *

  We're back in Berlin at last. Papa meets our train, he's taken some time off specially for us. Hilde almost bursts into tears when Papa gives her a hug. He really did telephone us every evening on the Obersalzburg, and we wrote to him in Berlin. Once, when he'd read one of our letters, he sent us a great big telegram complete with a picture, and he called us just after it arrived. He was far too impatient to know how we liked the telegram to wait till we spoke that evening. He even sent some presents by courier plane for Hilde's birthday.

  Mama's still in Dresden. Our nursemaid and the little ones have driven straight from the station to Schwanenwerder, but Papa takes me and Hilde to Lanke to spend a few days on our own with him. We've a lot to tell him: how we were presented with bunches of flowers, and how we could only drive very slowly, so many people were lining the village street to welcome us and Mama. By the time we got to the house the open car was full of flowers.

  Hilde's grouchy. 'We spent the whole day sitting in the train,' she says. 'It was boring.'

  Better than flying, though. I always feel sick when I fly.

  At Lanke we have the whole house to ourselves and no little ones to bother us. They're a nuisance most of the time, always making fusses, never leaving us to play in peace. Papa lets us rummage around in his bookshelves and pick out a book for him to read aloud to us.

  Hilde chooses Grimm's fairy-tales. We sit on the veranda, the three of us. It'll be dark soon. Mosquitoes come swarming up from the lake when it's dark. They're bound to bite us, we'll be itching all night.

  'Papa, what does Germanisation mean?'

  'Germanisation? Where did you pick that up?'