[b]»A very old man told me this tale.«[/b]
(From »The Halfmoon Files«)

Grandfather talking about the war: »Fighting in the war or detention in a prisoner-of-war camp meant […] the first encounter with a foreign people and an unknown culture for nearly everyone who writes or talks about it.« However in his study »Muslime in der Mark« (»Muslims in the Mark Brandenburg«), the late Berlin Orientalist Gerhard Höpp does not write about his own wartime experiences. Instead he examines two camps to the south of Berlin during the First World War. But certain voices are missing in his account, the voices of the grandfathers from Indian, Algeria or Georgia conscripted by the Entente powers - France, the British Empire and the Russian Empire - and interned in Germany. These voices exist, captured on Shellac discs. Berlin filmmaker and sound artist Philip Scheffner sets them at the heart of his documentary reconstruction, »The Halfmoon Files«.
Mall Singh from British India, for example, imprisoned in the Halfmoon camp near Wünsdorf in Brandenburg, spoke into a phonograph trumpet for eighty seconds on 11th December 1916:
»There once was a man. [...]He joined the British Army. This man came into the European war. Germany captured this man. He wishes to return to India.« The sing-song melody is interrupted as he clears his throat. » He will get the same food he had in former times. Three long years have passed.« Clearing of throat again. » In case this man is forced to stay here for two more years – he will die. If God has mercy, he will make peace soon and this man will go away from here.«
Scheffner calls his digital documentation, which had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007, »A Ghost Story«. The story is a remix, a montage of narrative strands and sound material with an almost tangible physical presence. The sound is the guiding element shaping the editing of this digital video audio film; the images, disconnected from the sound track, seem to be exhibited as if spread out on a light box. The crackle of the Shellac grooves, the rustle of someone moving through the undergrowth, the sound of an office door opening and closing.
» Ever since Edison’s invention, the dead can speak«, adds the narrator adds dryly. Mall Singh, born in 1892, crops up in this story at the age of twenty-four, in a wooden barracks concealed by bushes. »Happy Birthday to you«, the radio intones in the background. However the RIAS Orchestra is actually wishing linguist Wilhelm Doegen many happy returns. He had recorded a »typical example of the northern Indian language Punjabi«. As he noted, voice PK 619 was strong and light »with a good consonance«. The camera inches over the file documenting PK 619’s recording. Skype compression noises whilst talking to someone in India during research for the film. As if filming a radio play set against a black screen, the subtitles are stamped into the surface: »Singh means lion of course. [...] Almost all male Sikhs have this surname«, the voice of an Indian woman announces on the telephone. The school indicated in the recording file has been in Pakistan since the Partition of British India in 1947. The man the director is looking for owned land there.
»Maybe Mall Singh is on this photograph.« Uniforms, traditional costumes, men in women’s clothing can be identified in archive footage. Loop after loop of these meanderings are layered one upon the other. Against the backdrop of a black screen, a narrator announces the outbreak of war in 1914, the cheers of the crowd are audible in the background. A voice rings out of the hissing, joining together with old film material. Kaiser Wilhelm II. addresses the German people: »We shall stand our ground and fight even against an entire world of enemies.« However Professor Doegen did not record the Kaiser’s voice on a wax plate until shortly before Germany’s defeat in 1918, meaning that sound and image are separated by a four-year divide.
»The entire city of Wünsdorf is an archive of German military history«, explains the narrator, » on the compound of the former prisoner-of-war camp, there is supposed to develop a sports and science centre«. Rain, concreted roads, cordon tape flapping. The first mosque on German soil built for the express purpose of religious practice was inaugurated here on 13th June 1915. And, as countless propaganda postcards show, it soon became part of everyday German life. Leading on from this, the director reports on the insurgency programme pursued by the Ottoman Empire and its ally, Germany, to drive the enemy powers out of the colonies through revolutionary »jihad«¹. Meanwhile we see footage of drummers and trumpeters marching in all their splendour in front of the striking mosque. African soldiers in troop coats snake by, Germans in uniform along the route salute the prisoners. Then high-ranking visitors parade through the camp. There are almost no shots showing the fence or the camp gate. Four long minutes of material from the German Federal Film Archive are screened with no sound.
We see a garden, the mesh of a wire fence out of focus, behind it a wooden barracks. Professor Doegen’s Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, founded in 1915, employed over thirty experts in the fields of anthropology, linguistics and musicology. Systematic recordings of the various languages and the music of many prisoners of war held in German camps laid the foundations of the Berlin Sound Archive. » A visit to some of these camps is as rewarding for a practitioner as a trip around the world.« The interjection is identified as a comment by Felix von Luschan, director of Berlin’s Ethnographic Museum. » We will triumph and we will have all these fellows on discs for eternity«, exults Kaiser Wilhelm II. Overlappings, shifts, digressions. »We were broken up in 1947«, says Amit Dasgupta, the Indian Deputy Chief of Mission to Berlin.²
» My grandparents moved here from Alsace-Lorraine in 1918 and built an idyllic home on this former prisoner camp.« The door frames in Mrs Heyers’ house, once a barracks, are adorned with inscriptions in French and English. »Then there were even addresses on them [...] I shouldn’t have burnt them.« Curtains, fence, cobwebs. Hissing, rain, a cough from the wax plate. »Well let’s listen to it then«, roars Professor Doegen. We hear wooden drums »from the African bush«. The director comments: » We are situated in the French colony Dahomey, today called Benin. Burgsdorf, a German colonialist, fell into French imprisonment during the war.« Shots of African soldiers on a torture operation under French command. The camera moves away from the photos, we see a printed double-page spread about a »sensational cultural document: ›The Prisoner of Dahomey‹«, produced by Deutscher Kolonial-Film GmbH Berlin (German Colonial Film Company). »Actually, we never left Germany«, comments the narrator. The »language of the drums of the negroes«, to cite the terminology Doegen was still using decades later, was recorded with props from the museum. »People with the right skin colour who cannot run away«, as Scheffner puts it, were turned into »negroes«. Ethnography and exotic films took the place of the failed jihad strategy. Africa was re-invented in the Wünsdorf internment camp »under controlled conditions«.
Rustling around the camera microphone, auto-focus, automatic exposure. Egon von Eickstedt’s doctoral thesis »Racial Elements of the Sikhs« is based on the body measurements of 76 internees in the Halfmoon camp. »Mall Singh is number 15.« The director reads out Singh’s chest measurements. The endeavour aimed to prove that the Sikhs are a »race« – but to no avail.
» It is most likely that he did not die in the camp.« The cemetery was a Red Army restricted area. Festive bagpipe music resounds, the Indian Deputy Chief of Mission reads out Mall Singh’s text. He was speaking in the third person, comments Amit Dasgupta: » Perhaps the war has simply distanced him from himself«. The Commonwealth War Grave Commission replaced the stone commemorating the Indian prisoners. Now the pace of events really speeds up. Researcher Rubaica Jaliwala holds up a topical article from the »Indian Tribune« to the webcam: We can just read the headline »Frozen in time, a soldier’s voice comes to life«. Mall Singh’s descendants claim his legacy – »his voice.« His grandson has contacted the newspaper – now other people are carrying on the search in the southern hemisphere.
The film ends here. It is carried forward in an exhibition, developed by Philip Scheffner in conjunction with Britta Lange, which will be showing in Kunstraum Kreuzberg from December 2007.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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