Download - Mrázek. Concentration Camps

1 Social Text 122 s Vol. 33, No. 1 s March 2015

DOI 10.1215/01642472- 2831844 2015 Duke University Press

Shouldnt truth itself, as transitivity and incessant transition of a continual coming and going, be listened to rather than seen? But isnt it also in the way that it stops being itself and identifiable? Jean- Luc Nancy

Boven Digoel was an isolation camp, built in the deepest of the jungles of the Dutch East Indies. Indonesians who attempted to overthrow the colo-nial government in the fall of 1926 and the spring of 1927 were interned in the camp. The internment, for the rebels and their families, was for an undetermined period of time, and few were released before the camp was evacuated in 1943 when Dutch rule appeared to be over and the Japanese armies were approaching.

Terezn (Theresienstadt), a Czech town sixty kilometers from Prague, was emptied of its original population in 1942 and made into a ghetto for the Jews who did not manage to escape from Europe in time. Initially designed as a camp for elderly and privileged Jews, the ghetto remained moderate by Nazi standards. Nevertheless, most of the Jews were gradu-ally transported from Terezn to Auschwitz and the other camps of death.

The two camps could not differ more one from the other. Boven Digoel was in the East, in the wilderness; the other was built in the heart of Europe. Political radicals were kept in Boven Digoel; Jews were locked in Terezn because of their grandmother. Terezn belonged to the Holo-caust; Boven Digoel belonged to colonialism.

1. Camps as Cans

Red brick eighteenth- century walls with bastions surrounded the Jews in Terezn. The town was built as a Habsburg fortress against Prussia.

Thick Whisper and Thin VictoryConcentration Camps Contribution to Modern Acoustics

Rudolf Mrzek

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Published by Duke University Press

2 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern Acoustics

Josef II, the father of the homeland . . . on October 10, 1780, laid the cor-nerstone of this eternal edifice, according to a Latin inscription on one of the fortress walls.1

Inside the walls,

all the Barracks of Terezn were built with the same design. The quadrangu-lar courtyards with archways and wide encircling loggias are pleasantly rem-iniscent of the architecture of Southern monasteries. There is also a practical reason for this plan an alarm signal sounded from the center of the court-yard must be equally audible in all surrounding dwellings.2

No walls surrounded Boven Digoel no bastions, and not even a wire. There was a forest instead, huge with no roads. There was perma-nent twilight in a forest filled with marshes, mosquitoes, snakes, rivers with crocodiles, and the people of the forest, the most primitive men on the surface of the earth, as the Dutch authorities in the camp liked to point out, head- cutters and cannibals.

But neither of the two camps was an oubliette. Neither the walls nor the forest completely deadened the noise and voices from the outside. It was not about these two camps that these words were written in the Book of Job: Down there bad men bustle no more, / there the very rest. / Prisoners, all left in peace, / hear no more the shouts there of the gaoler.3

The Jews in Terezn heard the bells from a nearby village church. A motorway from Prague to Berlin cut through the ghetto. It was separated from the barracks and houses where the Jews lived by a six- foot wooden fence on both sides. But the people in the ghetto heard cars, trucks, buses, and bicycles, even pedestrians as they passed through. They could only hear them. Sometimes, Aryan relatives came to the wooden fence that separated the ghetto from the main road, once the time and place of meet-ing had been determined through a go- between, in order to exchange a few words with relatives, even if they could not see their faces.4 Planes of both the Nazis and the Allies flew over the ghetto on their missions to Prague, Dresden, or Berlin. And when the siren woke us at night, first we were scared. . . . The fast fighters cut the skies with their lightning speed; one could hardly follow them with eyes.5

In Boven Digoel, with no nearby village or town that modern people of the camp would call village or town, the internees listened for sounds around the camp with no less eagerness than the Jews in Terezn. The survivors of Boven Digoel vividly recall hearing the forest: We felt our-selves in the middle of the primeval forest nobodies and helpless. . . . It was all indescribable! A forest without monkeys, elephants and tigers, but with wild swine, cassowaries, birds and especially reptiles. All completely

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other than the fauna of Sumatra!6 All but very few internees came from either Java or Sumatra, the big islands in the west of the huge Indies archipelago. Boven Digoel was on the very eastern edge of it. The famous Wallace divide between Asia and Melanesia lay between the camp and home. Monkeys did not screech around Boven Digoel, and the birds, some internees recalled, could not sing.7

Planes flew over Boven Digoel, too. As the war in the Pacific broke out, Japanese planes appeared over the camp. As in Terezn, the planes were eagerly awaited listened for. As soon as the roar of the motors could be heard, the guards pushed the internees inside. Many internees disre-garded the orders. They waved to the planes with whatever they could put their hands on at the moment the Japanese were the enemies of the Dutch and so the friends of many in the camp. Like in Terezn, in Boven Digoel the planes roared like freedom.8 The internees in either camp might cry out with Wagners Tristan: What, am I hearing light?9

Every six weeks a Dutch government steamer came up the Digul River to the camp with a load of guards, internees, supplies, and letters. Like the sound of planes, the ships whistle was eagerly listened for and could be heard days before the ship became visible at the turn of the river bend.

s s sThe camps face me like a painting on canvas now, like the Warhol paint-ing of the Campbells soup cans. Warhol must just provoke me. The cans cannot be as depthless as he makes them look. Are they full? If so, how does their fullness sound? Is this what a scholar should be provoked to to put an ear to the cans, to put an ear to the camps?

can, noun: 1. A cylindrical metal container; 2. Informal, prison; 3. Informal, the toilet. Verb: . . . 1. Preserve (food) in a can; 2. Informal, dismiss (some-one) from their job . . . reject (something) as inadequate. . . . Phrases: a can of worms, a complicated matter likely to prove awkward or embarrassing.10

When I was about seven, I helped my mother make preserves. I pushed the lids down. Each can was a vessel to keep inside what naturally was of the outside. If fresh air got in, the preserves would be spoiled. When I put my ear to the can, and when I could hear a bubbling sound from the inside, it was a sign of disaster. The can might even explode. Of course, this is a metaphor.

At Belzec . . . a German visitor, Professor Pfannenstiel, wanted to know what was going on inside [of a gas chamber]. He is said to have put his ear to the wall and, listening, to have remarked: Just like in a synagogue.11

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The camps were like cans, and like vessels, but not of the Heideggerian sense, the manifold of the world: of clay formed into a shape by human hand, dried in the sun to hold water or wine, blessed by gods, the source of life. The essence of the camps as cans was fully in their function to shut and to open, to compress to concentrate.

2. Calling from the Outside

The walls around Terezn and the forest around Boven Digoel did not deaden the sound from the outside. They reverberated with it. The sound from the outside reached the camps, but its fullness was produced by the enclosures. What the camps heard of the world beyond the camps was the enclosure sounding.

History mentions tapes or relays as the inevitable fixtures of the Russian czarist penal colonies.12 Through the relays, tapes, or halting stations, the exiles as well as the guards journeyed from Europe to the camps. The relays on the way made them, one relay at a time, into the camp people.13 A relay is

1. A group of people or animals engaged in a task or activity for a fixed period of time and then replaced by a similar group . . . ; 2. An electrical device, typically incorporating an electromagnet, that is activated by a cur-rent or signal in one circuit to open or close another circuit; 3. A device to receive, reinforce, and retransmit a broadcast or program; a message or program transmitted by such a device. . . . Origin: . . . based on Latin laxare slacken.

There could never be certainty in the camps about the truthfulness of the sounds heard from the outside. The walls, the forest, the enclosures around the camps, and the distance the tape, the relays let through or stopped, muffled or amplified the sounds. This incertitude about the sounds, in fact, is what the camp people describe when they say what they heard.

There were Czech gendarmes on guard duty in Terezn (the SS guards were stationed in special quarters). On a rare and happy occa-sion an internee could overhear the Czech gendarmes talking about their home, their world after work and beyond the walls. As the government steamer was being reloaded in Boven Digoel, sailors had to wait for a few days in the camp. They might get relaxed or bored or drunk and say something to or within earshot of an internee. These bits of message that got through, of course, had also passed through halting stations. Still, it was the best of the truth that the people of the camps got slivers of truth, or so it was believed.

The internees in New Guinea called the best of the truth Boven-

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Digoel folklore. The Jews in Terezn called the same things true tram conductors stories14 the message echoed through the camp like a tram car through a city: it might take some people in, it might let some people out; it passed. Another Terezn (and camp and Yiddish) term for this best of truth was Bonkes: Bonke (plural: Bonken or Bonkes) is called every-thing untrue, namely rumors favorable to Jews. In Terezn one of the most often used expressions.15

The Bonkes reaching the camps, and it is the point, were complete, full in body, rich in details, and finely nuanced, total:

Friday January 16, 1942 The bus [to Prague] did not arrive. Instantaneously there were rumors that the borders [of Germany] are closed for a revolution is coming, etc.16

Friday September 22, 1944. . . . Yesterdays news about a transport completely dies out. It was a rumor apparently.17

All the news that reached the camps because of the very eagerness of the camp people to hear was breaking news. It made no sense to be skep-tical about it lest there will be no news, like no stars and no skies: Look at the universe, the shining stars, millions and millions of them, theyre phonies dead for billions of years! evaporated.18

In 1933, big breaking news reached the Boven Digoel camp. There was a mutiny on the Dutch warship De Zeven Provincin, and Indone-sian sailors were also involved. In fact, the cruiser was bombed and the mutiny suppressed by the time the news reached the camp. But the people in Boven Digoel listened to the enclosure. For days and weeks, in fact months, after it was in fact all over phonies, dead, evaporated the people in Boven Digoel listened for a whistle of the cruiser that would come up the Digul and take them to freedom.19 (It does not belong to the story, really, but a couple of months later, one of the Indonesian sailors who took part in the mutiny was arrested and brought to the camp as a punishment. There is no record that the other internees were interested in his version of the events.)20

s s sCalls, or representations, sendings (envois), Jacques Derrida wrote, never reach their final destination or reunite with the object or idea they represent. The sendings have inevitable destinerrance. They are in a state of interminable wandering and, he added, (like that of the Jews).21 Derrida commented on communication in the modern world, and not explicitly in the camps. But the camps were modern. They were concentrated modern.

The enclosures did not deaden the calls from the outside. The calls,

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like the din of the planes overflying the camps, could for a minute or two drown out everything else in the camps. But the calls passed quickly, like the planes, first the silhouette if it happened during the daytime and the sky was clear, and then the sound. They were a sound mirage: In parting, the Now that was stays with us, but differently, above all when it has not been lived out to its end; that is, it haunts us . . . [as] halfness . . . tremolo between illusion and depth.22 It haunted the listeners in the camps, to use Ernst Blochs words, this halfness, this tremolo between illu-sion and depth.23 Neither Derrida nor Bloch wrote particularly about the camps. Sense . . . reaches me only by leaving in the same movement, wrote Jean- Luc Nancy in Listening.24 Such is the fugue of the call, and the more so when one happened to be locked in the camps.

fugue: Music, a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts. Origin: late 16th century: from French, or from Italian fuga, from Latin fuga flight, related to fugere flee. fugacious adjective poetic/literary tending to disappear; fleeting.

The calls reaching the camps and the calls sent from the camps to the outside were totally made of destinerrance. The departing of the sound was how hope in the camps sounded like hope, no other sound but this. This was what the camps, in their truth and while still in hope, sounded like. This is also the only way possible that we can hear the camps departing. Our sense of the camps sounds merely, if in tune, with this parting.25

3. Membrane: The Vibes

membrane: a pliable sheet- like structure acting as a boundary, lining, or par-tition in an organism, . . . a thin pliable sheet or skin of various kinds . . . a microscopic double layer of lipids and proteins that bounds cells and organ-elles and forms structures within cells. Origin: from Latin membrana, from membrum limb.

Few people in Boven Digoel ever attempted to escape through the forest; there was no other way. Without any exception known to me, they all got lost and perished, were caught, or, exhausted, turned around and asked to be taken back to the camp.

To run from Digoel could be translated as to kill oneself.26

Military patrol . . . came upon several items left behind in an empty Papua village: a diary belonging to (an escapee) Dachlan, a small trunk with cloth-ing and, most importantly, two charred skeletons that did not resemble those of Papuans. . . .

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Sedajak from Banten died on the run. . . .Soehodo from Jakarta died on the run. . . .Abas from Mandailing died on the run.27

A survivor recalled how he heard military and civilian authorities in the settlement laughing about runaway desperados . . . on a roasting spit. 28

Even fewer prisoners ever attempted to escape from the Terezn ghetto. If a person somehow got through the walls, there was the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, no roasting spit, but the Czechs (my aunts and uncles) fearful and as little inclined to help a Jew as were the Papuan people.29 The bells of the Czech church and the sounds of people behind the wall were the calls the ghetto listened for as the sounds of freedom sounded the true camp calls only in tune with their parting.

On January 9, 1943, eighteen young men attempted to escape from the ghetto and were caught not far away. They were all sentenced to public hanging. With the rope already around his neck, one sang Voskovec and Werichs famous song When We Will March by the Millions, All against the Wind. 30

The song was a marching song, optimistic: everybody in Bohemia, Jew or not, knew the song. They all watched the man die, and the man sang the song. In parting, the song and the voice belonged fully to the man singing and perhaps to those who listened fully, for the moment. It was the moment, of course, when both the man and the voice died in the rope died away, departed.

s s sAnybody who touches even the surface of what happened in Boven Digoel and Terezn cannot be but struck and, more, dumbfounded by the music in the camps.

Javanese classical gamelans, popular Hawaiian tunes, or urban- street krontjong were played, listened to, composed, and rehearsed in Boven Digoel day and night:

Saturday, June 29, 1935 . . . Night: 7:52 . . . There is a group of people play-ing krontjong in the house of Karsowikromo. . . . 9:47 . . . The house of Ag. Soeleman is dark. Police walks to the section C. In the house of Soerjosoe-prodjo and Pontjopengrawit, the rehearsal of gamelan does not take place because few people came. Many people can be seen playing krontjong in the house of Karsowikromo. 10:00 Police breaks up this krontjong group. . . . 10:10 The breaking up of this group does not go without problems. . . . Among the internees who decline to stop are Prawirokarsiman who plays kembang, Wirjosoedarmo (guitar), and Moh. Ali no. 820 (who listens).31

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Saturday, July 22, 1936 . . . Night: . . . 8:05 . . . Police hear Pontjopangra-wito in his house playing gender [instrument]. The house of Tjitrowijono is quiet.32

The internees built a complete gamelan orchestra in the camp.

Its bonang (gong- rows) were made of milk tins.. . . Pontjopangrawito first used iron tins of powdered milk . . . as substitute for the gongs in his bonangs. He made a rebab (two- string bowed lute) from sardine tins and animal skin, as he could not obtain the buffalo intestine or bladder parchment needed for the rebab belly, nor were (half) coconut shells available for the pur-pose. For the most respected instrument of all the gong gedh kemodhong Pontjopangrawito and colleagues made a large earthenware water pitcher (normally used in the kitchen) as a resonator which was placed inside a wooden box with two knobbed iron keys cold- hammered into slightly dif-ferent pitch- levels and strung on top with cord.33

The forest or not, the cannibals or not, the Dutch or not, Boven Digoel was a concentrated- modernity camp. Naturally, there was jazz.

Every occasion was good for our unsurpassed Andoel Xarim . . . to conduct his jazz band in its cacophonic performance. We gladly forgave him.34

Because of the awful sounds that the ensemble produced, we quickly changed its name from Digoel- Concert to Digoel- con- sneert.35

(Sneert is in Dutch a kind of soup made of everything.) None of the camp jazz lovers survived to tell me. But I wish to believe that at least two Jews, like Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, might be on the Digoel Concert repertoire.

The internees of Boven Digoel built a special House of Culture and Entertainment a big edifice and in the very middle of the camp, with no walls, a palm- leaf roof, and twelve bamboo poles. Tickets were sold for chairs, benches, and standing room only. Events were packed, the whole camp was present, and as the years passed, the people of the forest also appeared. Attracted by music, the nudists, as the internees called them, with a dog or a cassowary bone in the nose, plumages of a paradise bird or a cockatoo in the hair, listened and sometimes rocked to the music in their own way.

According to the documentation from Terezn that survived, more than one thousand concerts were given in the ghetto during the less than four years of the camps existence. Chamber music, symphonies, recitals, operas, Jewish music, light Viennese, and jazz were played, composed, and listened to. People made music in barracks, attics, and courtyards, as well as in the towns former gymnasium and movie theater. A special place

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for music had been built in the ghetto, too, the music pavilion; and, as in Boven Digoel, it was also in the middle of the camp.36 Otto Brod, a friend of Franz Kafka and brother of Kafkas well- known biographer, was pres-ent at the camp performance of Verdis Requiem (he perished less than a year later in Auschwitz with his wife and a daughter, who also sang in the Requiem), and he wrote a review for a ghetto newssheet: Impressively skillful conducting by Schlchter: in the course of a year, the piece was imprinted in the heads of singers so deeply that they sang without scores. Rhythmic and dynamic clarity. Melodic diversity, energy and explicit articulation of voices. . . . Probably, the Dies Irae could have been given a greater presto. The piano was out of tune; yet the accompaniment of Frau Pollak was outstanding.37

Habit can explain much of the overwhelming presence of music in both of the camps. A disproportionate number of the Boven Digoel intern-ees were people with modern (Dutch colonial) education. They were more open than average to all things modern open enough to attempt a revo-lution! Music, and the kind of music that was later played in the camp, urban and urbane, belonged to their lives long before they were interned.

Virtually all Jews in Terezn came from the big cities and metro-polises of Central and Western Europe. Music of Prague, Vienna, Berlin, or Amsterdam still must have been ringing in their ears, ghetto or no ghetto, walls or no walls no week without a concert was a must.

Habit, however, can explain the music in Boven Digoel and Terezn only in part. The music certainly sounded like an echo of what was played before the camps and was still being played outside the camps. Yet, in the camps, it was camp music. Edmund Husserl is wrong in saying that there is no physical time in music. There was a camp physical time in the camp music. Music in the camps came nearest to what Husserl himself calls the living present.38 However high the intensity of the music might have been outside and before the camps, the intensity of the camp music was concentrated. It was the intensity of the enclosure. There they sat, lost and fragile, nodding their heads to the sound of Tales from the Vienna Woods or tunes from Carmen.39 The camp music was a camp kind of music also because it lived at its fullest in departing.

Julia Sallinger, a singer in the Prussian Royal Opera, who was born in 1873 . . . survived in Terezn practicing her singing, trilling with her voice that was grating in her old age, wearing a veil on her face and a feather boa around her neck.40 I only wish to believe that the feather boa that Miss Sallinger was wearing, in the fashion of her time, was made of a plumage of a bird of paradise from around Boven Digoel. My thesis would deserve it that the two camps were one, or at least of one constellation, by the way their music was played and their songs sung.

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4. Authenticity

The calls sent out from the camps if they reached so far were usually stopped by the enclosure, turned back, and, as an echo of the walls, the forest, and the distance, in all their vagueness and indirectness, fell back on the ears of the camp people. The heaviness with which the sound fell back was what Martin Heidegger called groundedness of sense41 groundedness of hearing in this case.

The heaviness of the call containing the sound of the enclosure made it next to impossible to distinguish the calls components and to ascertain where it was really coming from. When one really listened in the camp, one could not achieve much more than to become part of the heavi-ness. In the camps vastly more than elsewhere, the enclosure that worked as a membrane was not merely a technological device a device of the future at least. The membrane had become organic. It grew into the camp peoples bodies. It became an organ that gave the camp people capacity to hear, if the people were to hear at all, and if they wished to know if they were being heard at all.

Everything that was heard in the camps and all the sounds the camps were sending out mixed, amplified, adjusted were the sounds of the camp people themselves, their fears and eagerness. In this, there was no mishearing. It was the real call. Perhaps never in history had human bodies come so closely to resemble Platos cave, and Platos cave so closely to resemble a camp: In Platos cave, there is more than just the shad-ows of the objects being moved about outside: there is also the echo of the voices of those who move them, a detail we usually forget, since it is so quickly set aside by Plato himself in favor of the visual and luminous scheme exclusively.42

There was no way to resist, any way except to naturally become a part: Its hard to despise your own substance, youd like to stop all this, give yourself time to think about it, and listen without difficulty to your heartbeat, but its too late for that. This thing can never stop. . . . You give in to noise as you give in to war.43

s s sGreedily the camp people tried to hear the world in the camp grounded-ness of hearing. They were like a person groping for a stone falling into water, to catch it before it sinks, before the circles on the water grow wide, fade, and disappear. To catch a call in the echo was impossible. The more so, then, did the camp people try to compress and to concentrate the echo as it was.

This was also the reason that music was so important in the camps. The importance given to music in the camps was a way to catch the stone, to compress, structure, and concentrate the echo. One learns to keep com-

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posure while looking at the lists of the people who perished in the camps. But it sometimes went beyond bearing in the Terezn and Boven Digoel archive, leafing through the files with sheets of music, requests for permis-sion to play, and concert tickets sold in the camps.

The camp people very often named monotony as the terror of the camps. One survivor of Boven Digoel listed the three most brutal aspects of the camp loneliness, nostalgia, and monotony.44 In the sixth year of his imprisonment, an article about him and a few photographs appeared in an Indonesian newspaper. Police reported on the article: Several pho-tographs of Digoel internees are published in the paper. Under a portrait of [one of them] A. Ch. L. Salim . . . there is a caption: . . . Days follow days and days are followed by nights. Months and years follow one after the other. 45

Against monotony, and one might believe it especially when in camp, music offered phrasing, structure, concentration, stricture of art grasping the echo. Even repetition, when music came in, might suggest a surprise, a stumbling, or a change as Gertrude Stein put it, hoppfully, like a frog hopping he cannot ever hop exactly the same distance or the same way of hopping at every hop.46 The jazzmen in the camps might have said, and believed, that in syncopation music might cut through the Platonic echo of the enclosure, in a rhythm of liberation or, at least, of crashing.

This, however, was not what happened. Whenever the monotony of a camp was disrupted, whenever the camp frogs happened not to hop exactly the same way, it proceeded in the phrasing of the camp. The tempi of the camps were changing, but in the camp way. The everyday of the camps was rhythmical, but in the ways of the camps in a serial- movie monotonous way. Rhythm is an equation, Le Corbusier wrote, and he applauded it as something very modern and avant- garde.47 In that sense, and this is just more proof of it, the camps were modern and avant- garde. With the rhythmic and syncopated order of the camps that they them-selves helped to play, the camp people performed to use Michel Fou-caults definition this time discipline monotony.48

In the Boven Digoel police report book (agents made rounds in the camp four times a day), when the internees in Boven Digoel turned to music, it was not noted as a moment of crashing but as repetitie a Dutch word for rehearsal. By a certain hour in the evening, according to the camp rules, the music, repetitie, was ordered to stop so that the camp might go to sleep. In Boven Digoel the music was the camp clock. In Terezn, the music was made one of the camp aesthetics. Dr. Hugo Friedman organized architectural tours for his fellow prisoners through the ghetto. As they walked the ghetto streets and along the ghetto walls, he always stopped at certain places and explained what he meant by the rhythmic movement of line of Terezn construction.49 The ghetto was music.

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The people of the camps, of course, thought about freedom. They possibly thought about nothing else. They tried to resist the camp acous-tics vibrating around them and through them. They strove to stay what they would have been if not for the camps. Their thinking about freedom, of course, was related to their struggle to be authentic:

authentic: . . . 1. Of undisputed origin; genuine . . . made or done in the tra-ditional or original way, or in a way that faithfully resembles an original . . . ; 2. Relating to or denoting an emotionally appropriate, significant, purposive, and responsible mode of human life.

There are, in my MacBook dictionary, two distinct definitions of authentic. And it can immediately be seen that the authenticity in the second definition relating to or denoting . . . purposive, and responsible mode of human life was something very difficult to achieve or even attempt in the camps.

The proximity into which the camp people were forced condensed, with the lid pushed down hard to close was barely a proximity that Emmanuel Levinas wrote about in connection with the responsible mode of human life: I have tried to define [proximity] otherwise than by a reduced space separating the terms that one calls close. I have tried to pass from spatial proximity to the idea of the responsibility for another . . . an incessant dis- quitude of not being open, paradoxical and contradictory responsibility for a foreign freedom.50

No one in the camp could be advised to make oneself open, disquiet, and thus responsible in Levinass sense. Levinas indeed also wrote: Only a vulnerable I can love his neighbor.51 The camp authenticity could not sustain such responsibility. The camp authenticity was almost completely defined by the first part of my dictionary entry the authentic in the camps meant predominantly, and almost exclusively, to be or to appear to be of undisputed origin; genuine . . . in the traditional or original way, or in a way that faithfully resembles an original.

After more than a month of journey to the east, in the hold of the ship or alternatively unsheltered on the deck, after being for weeks in chains, five together, the first group of the Indonesian internees arrived at Boven Digoels landing place. Thus they were, or appeared to be, to a journalist who was the only outsider permitted to travel with them: More than half is in European clothes . . . elegant city wear and soft felt hats, straw hats or little black velvet caps and European walking shoes . . . neat leather briefcases, some with umbrella and a bundle of books, oth-ers with a guitar.52 An internee described the same scene on one of the ships that followed, on which he traveled. To the things mentioned by the journalist as what the internees wore and carried, he added socks (not

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a usual thing in the tropics), a couple of typewriters, and mandolins and violins.53

These men, women, and children brought to the camp stayed cor-rectly dressed, as they would be if not at (because of) the camp, despite the heat and dirt on the ship, despite the hopelessness of it all. They were caught in this description at the moment of coming forth into being as camp people. They resisted the camp, and they were becoming of the camp at the very same moment and by the very same effort. With cour-age and in desperation they were stating their authenticity by perform-ing their undisputed origin, being genuine, faithfully resembling an original.

The internees of Boven Digoel struggled to stay what they would have been if not for the camp people with modern consciousness (reb-els in this case). They dressed, moved, spoke, and listened authentically. They made music authentically (with guitars, mandolins, and violins). Never did the camp sound so much as a camp as when the newcomers unpacked and began to play. The most famous internee of Boven Digoel, Soetan Sjahrir (in 1945 he became the first prime minister of independent Indonesia), was or appeared to be the most authentic: I often heard him sing, especially one of the European hits. I will always remember his: Das gibt nur einmal, das kommt nie wieder, das ist zo schn um wahr zu sein! 54

In Terezn also the people made music with vengeance, what Bloch might call the turmoil of musical compulsion.55 As in Boven Digoel, there was a severe respect in Terezn for the classical. In their struggle to be authentic, they played jazz jazzier and Verdi more Verdianly than any jazz or Verdi anywhere, outside the camps or before the camp, was ever played.

5. Long- Distance Whisper

The journalist who was allowed to go on the first ship with the Indone-sian internees also described the last three days of the journey, upstream on the Digul. The river narrowed; the forest became ever more compact on both sides and ever closer to the ship. Only a few times during the three days, a figure or a group of the people of the forest appeared. More often than that, nothing was visible and merely screams were heard as the ship passed. That is to say, it has sounded like screams, because nobody on the ship understood the language. The communists on the foredeck screamed back in the same manner.56

An internee was traveling on one of the next ships. He described his experience also as an almost purely acoustic moment and in a way almost identical to that of the journalist: I will never forget the ship

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journey. . . . We were stuck in the immense silence. . . . The first reaction was remarkably enough that we began to speak softer. We stopped with our singing!57

As the people of the forest screamed, the internees screamed back. As the forest and the world got silent, the internees stopped singing. By listening and making sound or getting silent shrieking, holding breath the internees became one with the nature they inhabited. They became part of the world. They became social in a camp way by becoming their surroundings sounding board and what in all things makes the sounding- board is this theres naught beneath.58

Noise and voices, perhaps calls and perhaps languages, but not really understood, remained around the internees throughout the years of captivity the shrieks of unfamiliar people, cries of unfamiliar animals, sounds of unfamiliar trees swaying, of the river, of the rains that one could hear in Boven Digoel long before the drops fell. The urge to make music was also an attempt to bear these sounds. There was no way to escape them, but music could make perhaps some sense of them:

As the hours of day change so do the sounds. . . . With the first rays of the sun on the eastern skies, you hear the first bird, . . . a kingfisher . . . then comes a shout of a parrot . . . a white cockatoo . . . a water bird . . . a bird of paradise. . . . Then a pause, and the cicadas break in, sharp on a second. First, a thin and sharp tone by a single cicada gives a sign that is sent over the water. A multiple- voice chord falls in just for a moment and, then, as response from the distance, the trilling and swishing song of the cicadas second choir begins.59

This was pathetic, of course, but desperation and courage of the camp people were reflected in nothing as much as this. Equally pathetic and equally epic were the quartets, the symphonies, the operas, and the jazz in Terezn, or the listening to the bells of the Christian church behind the ghetto walls and believing one was hearing a life- saving authenticity- saving music in them. As Kafka wrote about another Jewish place: Whoever can cry should come here on Sunday.60

The camp turmoil of musical compulsion grew from the effort to organize the noise. In that sense, the most charged and the most pathetic moment of the struggle, and the most sublime form of the camp music, were roll calls. More than anything, roll calls made the Terezn ghetto, as well as the Boven Digoel camp, what they had been and how they sounded. The roll calls were the calls of the camps. It was a Jericho moment: The day when there shall be a blast on the trumpet, and ye shall come in crowds.61 The trumpets sounded and they came in crowds, but the walls remained standing. They only got stronger by the blast.

The sound of the roll call pressed down upon, condensed humans

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into the camp better than anything else, including the walls, forest, or watchtowers. By the sound of the roll call, the camp people were sum-moned to being in naming, that is, in calling.62

The roll call to take quinine pills . . . Uncle Patty called out the names in the alphabet order, from A to Z. / At last we hear Sardjono called then the name of Soetaslekan and after this Soemiradjo, the name of my father. / Quickly our whole family stepped forward to receive the quinine pills, the adults three pieces of pills and children two pieces, made in Bandung (pill BK Bandoengse Kinine Fabrik). We had to swallow the pills watched by Uncle Patty we could not just take them and go.63

The medical call (a method, in fact, to check whether any internee has escaped) was probably the most vividly remembered event in Boven Digoel. The most vividly remembered event in Terezn (more often recalled than the public execution of 1943) was the big roll call of November 1944. An error was found in the ghetto records, and the SS commander ordered recounting. All the inhabitants, including children, the sick, and the old, were forced to stand in a closed formation for eigh-teen hours. People were fainting; children were crying. Some young men attempted to encourage the others as a protest or even a resistance to sing. According to some eyewitnesses (ear witnesses), the young people even began to sing according to different memories Internationale, Hatikva, or some folk songs, Czech or Jewish.64 They had barely even begun, however, when they were hushed down. The people listened for the call as the camp people. As the camp people, they were poised:

poise: noun: 1. Graceful and elegant bearing in a person . . . , composure and dignity of manner . . . ; 2. Archaic, balance, equilibrium. be poised (of a person or organization): be ready to do something.

Louis Althusser argued that in modern society it was policemen and clergymen who gave the voice to the absolute.65 The camps, however, it seems, rose to a higher stage than that. There were still policemen and clergymen (sort of) in the camps. But now it was the voicing and listen-ing by themselves that did the job, a super- high organized voicing and listening that is coding:

code: a system of words, letters, figures, or other symbols substituted for other words, letters, etc. . . . a system of signals, such as sounds, light flashes, or flags, used to send messages.

In the camps sooner than out of the camps and with much greater assertiveness coding gave voice to the absolute. The internees listened with a particular acuteness to a code. Their voices, also, sounded more

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meaningful and profound when in code. The ghetto police Captain Meisl, some children of the ghetto wrote into their stenciled paper dis-tributed in Terezn, told us quite in confidence that five short blows on a whistle meant that a ghetto policeman was calling for help.66 The SS guards restricted themselves . . . to spoken word, and to the spoken word everybody had to listen.67 The people were on the streets when an announcement came that the first Dutch transport was coming into the ghetto, and that everybody had to be locked inside. . . . An SS officer screamed he would begin shooting if there was not an absolute silence immediately.68

Even the softest and kindest of voices and calls were heard best in the camps absolutely when in codes. A few minutes before the cur-few, the people were outside and the streets buzzed with talking. Then came Good night. 69 Everybody trying to assert some authenticity had to speak in and listen to the codes, or at least close to code, concisely:

concisely: Origin: Latin concisus, past participle of concidere cut up, cut down, from con- completely + caedere to cut.

Joseph Roth, a Jew who escaped the camps only because he decided to run away soon enough and fast enough (and because he drank himself to death, in Paris, before the Nazis could get him), had already written in 1936 to his friend, a fellow writer and fellow Jew: Havent you got that yet? The word has died, men bark like dogs.70

Roth, however, was not exactly right this time. The voicing- as- coding in the camps, as outside of the camps at the time, was not exactly barking. It only sounded animalish, meaning not developed enough on the scale of voicing evolution. Coding was human, and it was not a baby talk either a kind of deflation, which transforms the so- called wild sound, of the babbling period into entities of linguistic value.71 The cod-ing was not aphasia either, a degenerated way of speaking typical of senile people.72 The least of all the coding was a sign of madness as Paul Celan wrote about Friedrich Hlderlin: If he spoke of this time, he could only babble and babble.73

The coding that gave the voice to the absolute was an engineered, highly developed form of language, efficient, easy, tweeting before tweet-ing had been invented. (My MacBook dictionary still defines tweet merely as the chirp of a small or young bird; make a chirping noise. But it is already less happy- go- lucky: Origin: mid 19th century: imitative.)

The ultimate code is a digit, a finger pointed or a number a num-ber (code) of age, ethnicity, political orientation, race, manners, color of eyes the camps, as with so many other things, were ahead of their time and exemplary. In Boven Digoel, numbers preceded and often substituted

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for the internees names and soon their qualities, building up a close- to- perfect universe of digital concision. Internee Roesman no 350 . . . stays with Tjitrowasono no 1181 . . . collects rations for Djojodoelkadir no 152 and takes his meals with Kromowidjojo no 285.74 In the same file 264 of the Boven Digoel archive, there is a list of the mentally ill in the camp: they are recognized as nos. 139, 350, 421, 630, 795, 994, 1198, 1241, 1260, and 1264.

In Boven Digoel one had to listen for ones number. In Terezn, each inmate had to listen, too, and in addition was made to carry the code of identity on itself. The generic code, of course, was the yellow star with the letter J. In Terezn the stars were not tattooed on the skin but sewed on the clothes in Terezn people still wore their civilian clothes. During the transports, however, as people were brought to the ghetto or deported to the east to the death camps, at the crucial moment of the camp when a (Jewish) individual might get confused his identity questioned numbers and letters, such as A- 3468, were written on a piece of cardboard and hung around the persons neck. Numbers dangle from their necks; numbers go with them every step of the way.75

Again, one might wrongly think of animals, of human beings degraded to the lower stages of civilization: Your brains are just so many little bells for camels and crocodiles, the sound of your sentences hangs from you like those bells cattle wear around their necks and which ring when they come down from the mountains of suggestions.76 Again, one should rather think of hearing humans poised and individualized, mov-ing in measured steps to the music of the camp. And there was still at least one next stage.

I often heard about it from the survivors of both camps. A heavy and gradually overwhelming part of their despair in the camp (as long as they still were able to feel any) was a fear of losing the number and, with it, the camp identity in the camp, a fear of becoming a cipher not even a number, not even the bells cattle wear around their necks, just a cipher:

cipher: 1. A secret or disguised way of writing; a code . . . ; 2. Dated, a zero, a figure; 0 . . . ; 3. A monogram . . . ; 4. A continuous sounding of an organ pipe, caused by a mechanical defect.

s s sEven in the camps, people might be given a moment when they might begin to talk to each other as if there were no camp. Trees might sound like trees, rivers like rivers, birds like birds, bells like bells, nearnesses like nearnesses, distances like distances, and people like people. There might arise the reserve of the invisible.77 A sound might make a listener a part of the world as it is. The listener might say something responding to the

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sound and become a singular echo within which I hear myself addressing myself.78 His voice might melt with the sound of the world and in this way of melting become human, social, and natural.

This is what some describe as radical listening, or as sharing voices.79 I like to call it thick whisper. The living present resounds,80 and it resounds in a sonorous body.81 At those moments the camp peo-ple might became proximate even in Levinass definition quoted above authentic by being responsible, responsible by being vulnerable and open. However, these were moments extremely difficult to achieve even when one really wanted to. It was again a matter of coding. As a Dadaist poet put it, it is most difficult to learn how to whistle in English.82

The thick whisper, this way of listening and melting voice, lacked assertiveness. Rarely did it reach even the enclosure of the camp. It got lost in the camp. If it made it that far, it spent most of its force on the way. It did not bounce against the enclosure, and it did not bounce back (this would at least make some defiant sound). The thick whisper lacked the power of penetration. Even if ever reached the enclosure, it melted against the enclosure, as if into plush (perfect receptor of the bourgeois modernity, as we know).83 It would disappear into the world as it was. Full and rich, human and worldly as it might be, it would trail away, its quality diffused, because there is no quality without an extension underlying it.84

As there was no penetration and not even bouncing against the enclosure, there was no answer. One had to put lips to the ear of a neigh-bor in a camp. The thick whisper made the camp people intimate with each other, but in the same way it locked them even more into the camps acoustic universe into speaking and listening ultimately to the camp, of the camp, and by the camp.

The membrane of the enclosure permeated the camp peoples senses and bodies. The internees mouths, tongues, teeth, lips, and ears became gadgets of the amazing sound apparatus of the camp a war machine.85 The machine was the people, and it was made to hear and speak only when tuned to a certain frequency.

This was why the people of the camps, when they listened and spoke, even whispered, lips to ear, eventually learned to listen, speak, and whisper long distance. It is as if they did not wish for their calls to disap-pear in plush. In the camps even the heavy breathing of the people mak-ing love became thin. This is why also the call of the camps as it reaches us is cold and metallic, silicon hard, defaulted in its volume, sharp in its pitch, ebb, and flow.

The thick whisper was truly like a heartbeat, but it was merely from wall to wall. It was rich and full, but it had short legs.86 Only thinness could make a call of the camps reach beyond the camps. The thin call

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of the camps, the one sent by the camps to the outside world, and the response that they received from beyond the enclosure was to be metallic, not inviting an adhesion, immune to bugs, touching, and other kinds of disturbances on the way. It was to be immune to the statics of the world. Fascism is nothing but the abolition of the intractable distance of the real.87 No dilution.

s s sThe acoustic space of the camps could best perform as sound apparatuses. Whisper and breathing, distance and nearness, voice and hearing made the best of sense in the camps when set (as if) on a radio dial. Sound apparatuses, indeed, were at the very center of the camps calling and camps being.

There were several gramophones in Terezn and in Boven Digoel. Guards and even some internees brought gramophones to the camps with them. Gramophone records were played in both camps with only slight variations, the same music, fox- trots, krontjong, cabaret songs, and opera arias. Canned sounds were brought to the camps. Preserved sounds of the outside were listened to. They arrived at the camps through the enclosure with the enclosure remaining standing.

In 1935 I was nine and for the first time I heard the song Indonesia Raya [Great Indonesia], from a gramophone record. Uncle Abdul Hamid Lubis who had been exiled to Digoel from West Sumatra worked the gramophone. We the Digoel children, who had never seen a gramophone, gathered in the house of Uncle Kadirun in section B. . . . My younger brother and I sat on the bench in the front row, next to the children of Uncle Kadirun, Sumono, and Karno. I watched how Uncle Abdul Hamid Latif picked up a gramophone needle and fixed the gramophone head at that time I did not know that the head was called loudspeaker. . . . He lowered the needle to the record, plat [record in Dutch] . . . and there was the song . . . Indonesia my blood . . . Indonesia the sublime . . . Indonesia the pure.88

Radio had an even greater presence in both camps. A small military telegraph and wireless station was set up in the Boven Digoel camp at the very outset. It was for official use only, but the news trickled down and among the internees. Two brigades of infantry needed comma . . . hos-pital second class under a captain comma . . . military radio station under a lieutenant comma.89

In Terezn, the death penalty was established for listening to the radio. Nobody, as far as it is known, was ever caught. However, and the more so, the space of the ghetto was saturated with radio radio rumors, that is. The radio rumors, an especially powerful form of the true tram conduc-tor stories, traveled in the ghetto from mouth to mouth von Mund

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2 0 Mrzek Concentration Camps Contribution to Modern Acoustics

zu Mund. People called it Mundfunk,90 from Rundfunk (radio broadcast in German) rund meaning around and Funk meaning a sparkle.

There were rumors of an illegal radio receiver assembled in the Ter-ezn ghetto.91 Any news was most believable when spread from this (per-haps never- existing) machine. An SS officer ordered the ghetto workshop to build a conference table combining radio table and flower table.92 Radio was overheard when someone from the ghetto was let out under guard to work in the garden along the outer side of the wall:

I am assigned to pick up linden tree blossoms. . . . Right nearby is a little house belonging to some gravedigger. . . . I can hear a radio coming from inside that little house, something I havent heard for a very long time.93

We look toward the tops of distant mountains . . . from a house of the direc-tor of agriculture who works in the ghetto, when a window is open, we can hear music on a radio.94

Radio was made indeed in the camp, of the stuff that was in the ghetto, mainly of desire. On the list of performances in the ghetto are

a play by Norbert Fryd . . . On Radio Waves around the World in a Sec-ond.95

Radio Reportage from Terezn . . . an imaginary radio- event with announcer, chorus and separate voices.96

In the most significant musical production of the ghetto, in Viktor Ullman and Peter Kiens opera The Emperor of Atlantis or The Disobedi-ence of Death (the opera was ready to go on stage, but before the premiere virtually everyone, the authors and the actors, were sent to Auschwitz), radio or radio- like machines played and sang the star human roles.

The Loudspeaker before the curtain: Hallo, Hallo, we begin! . . . The Emperor of Atlantis keeps connection with his ministers through telephone and radio: . . . The latest news about Death: People cannot die. Old and sick are sentenced to eternal torments. . . . The Emperor sits at his desk and before him is a micro-phone and a switchboard. Behind the Emperor can be seen a funnel of a loud-speaker. The Emperor: What time is it? Loudspeaker: Thirty- two minutes after five. . . . Statement on the radio: Death is still undecided. . . . Finale Quartet: Loudspeaker, Girl, Pierrot, and Drummer before the curtain: Come Death, our honored guest.97

s s sThe thin call travels infinitely farther than any thick whisper ever can. No enclosure is strong enough to block it, and, when one really listens, it is as

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if there was no enclosure at all as if there were even no camps at all. The whole world becomes the amazing machine.

The thin call liberates the listening world from a thick messiness and from the threat of sharing of voice and everything that may be coming from the camps. New and thin space emerges that makes no difference camp or noncamp, place and nonplace. From wherever one may listen or call, on whichever side of any enclosure one listens or speaks, one becomes a captive of the call.

Notes

1. Ruth Bondy, Elder of the Jews Jacob Edelstein of Theresienstadt, trans. Eve-lyn Abel (New York: Grove Press, 1989), 250.

2. Elena Makarova, Sergei Makarov, and Victor Kuperman, University over the Abyss: The Story behind 520 Lecturers and 2,430 Lectures in KZ Theresienstadt 1942 1945 (Jerusalem: Verba, 2004), 24.

3. Job 3:17 19, qtd. in Philippe Nemo, Job and the Excess of Evil, trans. Michal Kigel (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 105.

4. Bondy, Elder of the Jews, 330 31.5. Philipp Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr: Tatsachenbericht Theresienstadt

1942 1944, ed. Ben Barkow and Klaus Leist (Berlin: Ullstein, 2005), 219. Unless otherwise noted, translations throughout this article are the authors.

6. I. F. M. Salim, Vijftien jaar Boven- Digoel, concentratiekamp in Nieuw- Guinea: bakermat van de Indonesische Onafhankelijkheid, 2nd ed. (1876; repr., Hen-gelo, the Netherlands: NV Uitgeverij Smit van, 1980), 111.

7. Ibid.8. Yusuf Mawengkang, Pimpinan Umum Perintis Kemerdekaan. Boven

Digoel: Sebuah Cerita Anak Bbuangan (unpublished typescript in the authors posession, Jakarta, 1996), 148.

9. Jean- Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 46.

10. This and all the following dictionary quotes are from Aa Dictionary (Apple 2005 7), on my Mac OS X.

11. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 3:1040 41.

12. Anton Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, trans. Brian Reeve (London: Oneworld Classics, 2007), 355n.

13. Relays along the Siberia road, [were] surrounded by a palisade of sharp- pointed stakes and consisted of three single- storied buildings standing in the middle of the enclosure. Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. Rosemary Edmonds (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 488.

14. Ernst Bloch, Traces, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 59.

15. Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr, 462n2.16. Gonda Redlich, The Terezin Diary of Gonda Redlich, ed. Saul S. Friedman,

trans. Laurence Kutler (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992), 9.17. Pavel Weiner, A Boy in Terezn: The Private Diary of Pavel Weiner, April

1944 April 1945, ed. Karen Weiner, trans. Paul (Pavel) Weiner, with introduc-

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tion and notes by Debrah Dwork (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 157.

18. Louis- Ferdinand Cline, Rigadoon, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 95 96.

19. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 237.20. The sailors name was Soekardjo Prawirojoedo. See Koesalah Soebagyo

Toer, Tanah Merah Yang Merah: Sebuah Catatan Sejarah (Bandung, Indonesia: Ulti-mus, 2010), 108; and Karel Steenbrink, The Spectacular Growth of a Self- Confident Minority, 1903 1942, vol. 2 of Catholics in Indonesia, 1808 1942: A Documented His-tory, with the cooperation of Paule Maas (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 251.

21. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth- Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 508.

22. Bloch, Traces, 51.23. Ibid.24. Nancy, Listening, 78 80.25. The departing into which presence actually withdraws, beating its sense

in accordance with this parting. Jean- Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale- Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 15.

26. Marco Kartodikromo, Pergaulan Orang Buangan di Boven- Digoel (Jakarta: Gramedia, 2002), 24.

27. Toer, Tanah Merah, 52, 101, 106, 133.28. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 305.29. At first it was easy to get away. . . . But it was difficult to hide in Bohemia.

Zdenek Lederer, Ghetto Theresienstadt (London: Edward Goldston, 1953), 61.30. Bondy, Elder of the Jews, 261 62.31. Dagboek v/d Politie i/h Interneeringskamp. v.a 4 Mei 1935 t/m 21 Juli

1935, file 211, Boven Digoel Archives, National Archives, Jakarta.32. 9 April 1936 t/m 25 September 1936, file 212, Boven Digoel Archives.33. Margaret J. Kartomi, The Gamelan Digul (Rochester, NY: University of

Rochester Press, 2002), 32. The instruments were transported to Australia at the same time as the internees; they survived (and I was allowed to see and even touch them at the Gamelan Room of the Monash University in Clayton, Australia).

34. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 113.35. Ibid., 108.36. Stages emerged in the most impossible places, especially in the lofts . . . in

empty offices and former sheds and horse stables. Alice Bloemendahl, Theresien-stadt with a Difference, 02/452 no. 580, Yad Vashem Archives, Jerusalem, Israel, and P.III.h. (Theresienstadt), no. 580, 4, Wiener Library, London.

37. Quoted in Makarova et al., University, 216.38. There is no physical time in music. . . . Husserl uses the paradigm of

listening to a melody. He analyses how the present of this perception is a present formed by the overlapping, in it or on it, of the present impression and the retention of the past impression, opening forward onto the impression to come. It is a present, consequently, that is not instantaneous, but differential in itself . . . what Husserl calls the living present. Nancy, Listening, 18 19.

39. Bondy, Elder of the Jews, 345. For a photograph of a Terezn ghetto orchestra, see photo no. 32650, Yad Vashem Archives.

40. Privileged until Further Notice, in Ruth Bondy, Trapped: Essays on the History of the Czech Jews, 1939 1943 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 102.

41. On Heideggers groundedness of memory, see Todd Samuel Presner,

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Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 19, 43 44.

42. Nancy, Listening, 75n42.43. Louis- Ferdinand Cline, Journey to the End of the Night, trans. Ralph

Mannheim (New York: New Directions, 2006), 194.44. The mass of us internees as a consequence of loneliness and nostalgia

crumbled to ruin. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 153.45. Moestika, 6 May 1933, in Overzicht van de Inlandsche en Maleisch- Chineesche

Pers [IPO] (Weltevreden, Batavia: Kantoor voor de Volkslectuur, 1933), n.p.46. Quoted in Joshua L. Miller, Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Mul-

tilingual Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 150.47. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (New York: Dover, 1986), 50. 48. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan

Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 142.49. Quoted in Makarova et al., University, 24.50. Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 80, 12 13.51. Ibid., 91.52. Aage Krarup Nielsen, In het Land van Kannibalen en Paradijsvogels, trans.

Claudine Bienfait (Amsterdam: Querido, 1930), 102 3.53. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 85.54. Ibid., 248.55. Bloch, Traces, 41.56. Nielsen, In het Land van Kannibalen, 101.57. Salim, Vijftien jaar, 111.58. Herman Melville, Moby- Dick: or, The Whale (London: Penguin Books,

2001), 574.59. Nielsen, In het Land van Kannibalen, 122.60. Entry for 7 July 1912, from a visit to Halle, in a supplemental travel diary

entitled Trip to Weimar and Jungborn, 1912, in Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914 1923, vol. 2, ed. Max Brod, trans. Martin Greenberg, with the coopera-tion of Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books), 302.

61. Sura xxviii THE NEWS, The Koran, trans. J. M. Rodwell (1909; repr. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1953), 52.

62. Jean- Luc Nancy, Dis- Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malefant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham Uni-versity Press, 2008), 86.

63. Minggu Kliwon Tanggerang, in Trikoyo: cerita digul cerita buru (unpub-lished manuscript in the possession of the author, 28 January 2007). See also Widayasih, Masa kanak- kanak (unpublished manuscript in the possession of the author, n.d.), 1:14 15.

64. Kamis Kliwon Tanggerang, 14 March 2008, in Trikoyo: cerita digul cerita buru.

65. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essay, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 163.

66. Anonymous, Ghetto Cops, in We Are Children Just the Same: Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of Terezn, ed. Paul R. Wilson (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 120.

67. Hans Gnther Adler, Theresienstadt: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft, 3 vols. (Gttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 2:256.

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68. Leben in T von Mrs. Else Dormitzer, London (September 1945), P.III.h (T) no. 560 YVA 02/392, 1, Wiener Library.

69. Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr, 317.70. Josef Roth to Stefan Zweig, in Michael Hofmann, Joseph Roth: Going

over the Edge, New York Review of Books, 22 December 2011, 80.71. Roman Jakobson, Child Language Aphasia and Phonological Universals

(1941; repr., The Hague: Mouton, 1968), 25.72. The same considerations are valid mutatis mutandis for aphasic speech

disturbances. Ibid., 31.73. In 1961 after a visit to Tbingen, where Friedrich Hlderlin endured his

mental deterioration into silence, Paul Celan wrote, He / could / only babble and babble, / ever- , ever- / moremore. / (Pollaksch. Pollaksch.) / . . . pollaksch the non-sense word that Hlderlin repeated. Luis Prez- Oramas, Len Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets, in Len Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets, ed. David Frankel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 34.

74. Document signed Wakil kampong (deputy head of a section), Boven Digoel, 28 February 1932, file 264, Boven Digoel Archives.

75. Jir Weil, Colors, trans. Rachel Harrell (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Pub-lications, 2002), 53.

76. Jesus Christ Rastaquoure [1920], in Francis Picabia, I Am a Beautiful Mon-ster: Poetry, Prose, and Provocation, trans. Marc Lowenthal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 227.

77. Maurice Blanchot, qtd. in Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collge de France (1977 1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 93.

78. Nancy, Noli me tangere, 9.79. On radical listening and sharing voice, see Luce Irigaray, The Way of

Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephan Pluhcek (London: Continuum, 2002), 48.80. Nancy, Listening, 18 19.81. Ibid., 6 8, paraphrasing Charles Rosens The Frontiers of Meaning (1994).82. Slack Days, in Picabia, Beautiful Monster, 340.83. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 20, 121, 222.84. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953 1974, trans. Michael

Taormina (Paris: Semiotext(e), 2002), 96.85. On language as a war machine, see ibid., 254.86. For example, in the Chinese doctrine of Wou- wei, the melting of breath

(lianqi) is superior to the control of breath (xingqui). Barthes, Neutral, 176.87. Nancy, Dis- Enclosure, 137.88. Tanggerang, 5 January 2006, Trikoyo: cerita digul cerita buru (italics in

original).89. 25 November 1926 aan den Landvoogd no. 1060 referte telegram 24 deze

no 1281 Amboina, MvO Tideman Hoofdstuk XXXVII NG, National Archives, The Hague.

90. Manes, Als obs ein Leben wr, 268, 338.91. E.g., Bondy, Elder of the Jews, 303.92. Adler, Theresienstadt, 2:428.93. Entry for Thursday, 20 July 1944, Paul [Pavel] Weiner, Terezn Remem-

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