What We Are Trying to Return Is Stories’
Alia Mossallam and Britta Lange in Conversation with Olga Schubert
Olga Schubert (OS): Thank you so much for being here today. You have both done extensive research on two sound archives: the Berlin Sound Archive at Humboldt University Berlin (Lautarchiv) and the Berlin Phonogram Archive at the Ethnological Museum Berlin, which is now part of the Humboldt Forum. Both of these archives hold recordings of prisoners of war who were held captive by the Germans during the First World War. Britta, can you say a bit more about how these recordings came into being?
Britta Lange (BL): The prisoner-of-war recordings were made during the First World War in prisoner-of-war camps that were located in the German Kaiserreich, where a lot of prisoners from the so-called enemy armies were interned. This term refers to the armies of the Triple Entente but also of the other allies. So what was most interesting to the German public, and especially to German academic networks at the time, was the fact that the so-called colonial soldiers of the British and French Armies and the dependent peoples of Tsarist Russia were also in these camps. Owing to the public’s interest, which was an exoticizing interest, an academic commission was installed in Berlin: the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, founded at the end of 1915 by the Prussian Ministry of Culture. The idea was to record audio samples of the spoken languages, dialects, and musical traditions of as many different ethnic and linguistic groups as possible in the prisoner-of-war camps.
This task was carried out from late 1915 to late 1918 by the commission, made up of academics led by Carl Stumpf and organized by Wilhelm Doegen. It must be emphasized that their interest was exoticizing also. Nearly one third of the recordings were made in Wünsdorf near Zossen, in the prisoner-of-war camps south of Berlin. One of them was called Crescent Camp (Halbmondlager) because of its predominantly Muslim prisoners, and they were of interest to many commission members as colonial soldiers were interned there for political purposes. The idea was to make the colonial soldiers surrender to the German Army. There was a lot of political propaganda in these camps, which was manifested, for example, in lectures or the camp newspaper promoting jihad (El-Dschihad). There were people from India, Asia, and Africa, so that’s what obviously was most ‘attractive’ for linguists and musicologists for their ethnographic research.

OS: We learn a lot about this German ethnographic history of science behind the motivation to do these recordings in your research, Britta, but also in Annette Hoffmann’s book Knowing by Ear, which she published in 2024.[1] Alia, in your research, I think you are focusing a lot more on the communities where the captives came from. Can you say a bit more about your research focus?
Alia Mossallam (AM): My research is mainly on the North African prisoners of war, because I have been working on the experience of the Egyptian workers who were taken to war under the British military for some time. And I know that there was a lot of solidarity between North African soldiers on the front in terms of how to deal with the French.
Up to 2,000,000 North African workers and soldiers were conscripted for the First World War. The exact number is unknown, but they did not go gently. We know of executions that took place in Tunis’s harbours as forced conscripts refused to board the ships, of the hundreds of Algerian soldiers who were executed on the front, and of the Egyptians that went on strike when their comrades were executed. Execution orders were given by phone, so they are difficult to trace in the archive, but those who survived and returned to Egypt tell of tactics that they learnt from each other on the front. Tactics they employed to resist being used as they were on the front or to negotiate bad conditions, and that they used afterwards, upon their return. Many of the soldiers and workers who did make it back returned to instigate insurrections against both the colonial powers that took them to war and the nationalist elite who facilitated their arrests and deployment, for example, in Algeria in the Aurès or Upper Egypt in 1917‑18, all the way to the Upper Volta. But this process of standing together in the most impossible conditions and the development of their political ideas has always intrigued me.
This is how I came to be interested in the Lautarchiv. I was actually introduced to it through Britta, because songs, memoirs, and oral histories have been my entry point to research the experiences of the Egyptian workers on the front. So I was excited to learn there was a way I could ‘hear’ North African soldiers talk about their experiences as well. Although I started listening to the archive in 2017, I could never allow myself to write about them until their families could somehow hear their stories.
Lately, I started working on the Towards Sonic Resocialization project, conceptualized by Annette Hoffmann and Christopher Li. My job has been to find a way to make digital copies of these archives accessible in the communities and countries where these soldiers were from: Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. For me, the question then became, what possible meaningful return can be imagined for these stories, when no return at all is possible for the soldiers? For the communities, it is important to find out about their stories, how they were taken, what happened on the front, and where they ended up. So I started by organizing communal listening sessions with researchers, artists, and academics from the prisoners’ regions where we listen and talk about what we hear. We structured the project accordingly, based on the different experiences and possibilities of encounter and accessibility, and how we need to restructure and rearrange the archive so it is oriented to the stories of these people, and not the German knowledge-production project.
OS: Since we’re talking about actual voice recordings, the question of whose voice is present in these archives seems to be even more pressing and tangible than when we usually look at archival material. Alia, in your research, you talk about ‘possibly intended audiences’ of these recordings, where there seems to be a call to someone who might be listening. How do you each deal with these ‘multiple inscriptions’ in your work?
AM: I think it’s very important from the outset to always acknowledge that we cannot assign intention. There is no way to tell what they intended to say through the recordings, or if they even had the choice to intend to say anything. But what is really incredible about the recordings is that it’s sound. When you listen, there is almost a personal connection, as if someone is speaking or singing to you directly. When I work with the archive in a teaching setting—I always use it with students—I try to get them to stay with the sound, the prisoner’s voice, with the listening for some time before they actually start to do the research. Because it has an effect on you that’s not just a logical understanding of the material. There is a very sensory experience of it. And there is knowledge there; there is something that they are saying that has to be heard and experienced before it is analysed.
Speaking Arabic, I understand what’s being said a lot of the time in the North African recordings. So for me, the experience of hearing someone so clearly, even though he was speaking 100 years ago, is always very powerful and moving. At least in the Arab and Amazigh context, clearly, they chose prisoners who were good storytellers or poets for the recordings. They took form of poetry that was well known in their home regions, but they improvised the content. So they told their stories through a familiar format of storytelling. It becomes familiar and new at once and gives the story many layers. It could be a story about treachery, for instance, or estrangement or bravery, but the content was changed for the prisoner to tell his own story, and you sense what he was trying to imply—through both structure and content. A story within a story.
And your listening experience completely differs depending on where you are listening. So if you’re listening in Berlin, for instance, and it says it’s a love song in the Personalbogen [the personal record sheet the Prussian commission created], you are confused that what you hear is actually lament. But when you hear it in the very specific regions that the people were from, in Marrakesh for instance, then you know how they changed a well- known plot of a folktale and its characters. Or how they used the structure of a wedding song, but sang the technique of lament, to lament themselves. This often makes me feel like there might have been this far-sightedness or hope—Britta calls it ‘a message in a bottle’[2]—that someone will listen to it and understand how they’ve changed it to tell their own story. I think this is the thing that I can say for sure, that many prisoners are telling their own story.
BL: I absolutely agree that we cannot know the intentions, but we know the recording situation: people were aware of talking or singing while their own people were listening—their comrades who were also in the recording room.
AM: It is likely that they shared stories and songs together the evenings before they were recorded, when they were in the barracks. Maybe they were even agreeing on what they would say. They could have also been influenced by the time they spent together on the front.
OS: What are the storylines that emerge from this material? What do people pick up on when you create encounters with the recordings, be it with students or with the communities the prisoners came from?
AM: There are songs about incarceration and resistance. One clear example is this poem by the tenth-century poet Abu Firas al-Hamdani that one of the Tunisian prisoners of war, Mohammed bin Mohammed Salah, sings. It’s a very eloquent, classical poem about colonial incarceration and resisting it. And there are other less-clear ones. For example, there’s this one song by a Moroccan prisoner named Gilali. It’s a very short song, and I love it because people who listen to it have a very strong sense that they know exactly what he’s singing. And it is always something extremely different (laughter) I mean, even here in Marrakesh, where he’s from, people have very different reactions to it.
He keeps singing ‘I took him, Gilali, I took him’, and he sings about the beauty of Gilali, who was ‘taken’. So he sings about someone with his own name. When I heard it, it sounded like he was lamenting being taken, because these songs of being taken for forced labour, for war, have a long tradition in colonized North African countries. And then when I listened to it in a workshop in Marrakesh last year, someone said, ‘But he’s clearly singing to Abdul Qadir Gilani’, who is the main Sufi wali, or saint, of Marrakesh who people sing to or pray to in times of real trouble, when all the gates are closed. And in Algeria, he is the wali of the incarcerated. He is the main wali that people sang to under French incarceration. And some people feel strongly that he’s singing madad, a kind of singing/chanting when you summon a wali for help. Some people feel that this was his way of putting himself into the recording. When we listen to the recordings here in Marrakesh, the first feeling most people have is that their families have to know what happened to them. Because the number of North Africans who were taken to the war front is unknown. It ranges between 300,000 and 1,500,000, which was a considerable percentage of the male population at the time.
The strikes that people went on and their acts of resistance from the time that they were taken from their villages to the time that they were forced to board the ships to when they were on the front are numerous, and we have traces of them in the songs and stories of people who came back. I like to use the phrase that Ariella Azoulay uses when she talks about Algerian jewellery, that these are ‘communal remains’.[3] These are communities who have been robbed of their communal lives, of their people, and of their stories. Azoulay says we should not replicate the colonial idea that it’s these objects that have the value. We have to always think that what we’re trying to return is stories—stories whose absence has changed how history flows.
BL: I think what is also at stake is this idea of authorship. The problem with possession in the sound archives is that the speakers have always been denied authorship. The juridical construction of the sound archives was that it was folklore, which is public domain in the German or European epistemological system. Hence, the speakers are not only objectified as prisoners but also robbed of their authorship. Partly also because the academics didn’t understand that every making and every reciting of a song is creating something new. It is not pure recitation, which is a completely European notion. And departing from this assumption, the German academics granted the rights to the person who recorded the song instead of to the speaker, and the recording person passed the rights to the archive. So this is a complete negation of the speakers. This also sheds light on real epistemological violence.
AM: And they say this openly. There is the example that you mention in your book, Britta, of how Wilhelm Doegen writes in his memoirs that these recordings were not violent, that the prisoners were very happy to do them. But he makes fun of how they had the Trichterfieber (funnel fever) and that their voices were trembling, or that they would stop telling the story into the gramophone because they felt this device was stealing their voices. For them, it was Wahnsinn (insanity) that they were speaking into this device and when they stopped, their voice would come back to them. So they felt the machine was stealing it. And in fact that’s exactly what was happening! There’s so much labour that needs to be done to reverse this whole process, to turn it back into a person that needs to be found and whose family needs to know where they went! It just hits so hard, especially when you listen to it here in Morocco, and people hear voice that are speaking exactly like their grandparents and telling the stories that their grandparents told them, but with a slight difference.
BL: And you know, Doegen’s anecdote about the prisoners talking into the funnel fearing that their voice could be stolen, as you say, Alia, it was true! Maybe not that the physical voice was stolen, but the stories were stolen and the intellectual property and the community and the culture. But the other thing is that Doegen makes fun of this anecdote! And this is a colonial trope of white academics making fun of the so-called natives or savages of the world for being afraid that machines are stealing their image, their face, their dignity, their knowledge. But maybe this trope tells us more about the fear or guilt of the academics than about the people they are not taking seriously.
OS: Alia, you’ve described how you’re working with re-embedding this material into communal contexts in light of these facts. And Britta, you also talk about a similar process that you call a process of ‘translating’. In the recording you published with your book Captured Voices, you not only have recordings of the original archival material but also of conversations about trying to discern what’s being said.[4] What can you say about the experience you had in translating this material?
BL: I think we need a very broad understanding of translation processes, because it is not only about language; it is also about time. We’re listening to the recordings today, but they were made more than 100 years ago. So there’s a translation or transposition in time. There’s of course also a
translation of spaces and rooms. So the argument was that we don’t only need a temporal, spatial, technological, and linguistic translation, but also many cultural translations. This is what I learnt from listening to the recordings again and again, either alone or with other people. And of course,
it changes even if the word- by- word translation doesn’t change. Every listening is a translation, because you’re listening to the song in a different situation. This was the argument for also including my own voice with the book, and conversation with others—in order to make listening and translating processes audible. And then it makes clear that I, as a German academic who does not know the languages, cannot access the cultural repertoires that were used for these recordings. And since the recordings are 100 years old and for people from their own regions, who are very aware of cultural metaphors and phrases, their listening leaves questions open, because they cannot access all the references again.
There are also very concrete things that happened, like listening again with a different translator. I did this, for example, with the recording of the ghost storyteller Bhawan Singh, who was captured from Nepal for the British Army, and who is also the second narrator in Philip Scheffner’s 2007 film The Halfmoon Files: A Ghost Story. The other translator, Ranav Adhikari, whom I worked with in 2017, discovered a sentence that wasn’t in the first translation, which really changed the whole meaning of the text and makes clear that this is a double text: Bhawan Singh recited ghost stories for the academics because he was asked to deliver ‘folklore’ stories from Nepal, but at the same time, it is a political document, as he talks of seeing his dead comrades at night as ghosts. I only then understood this dimension, as I realized that his sentence—‘When a person dies, he turns into spirit. If it is not cremated well, it turns into a ghost’[5]—might refer to the fact that the prisoners of war of all regions and religions were all buried in the same cemetery. The complicated thing is that the translation processes are multilayered; they are necessary, but they will always remain incomplete.
OS: In western epistemology, we are mostly trained to analyse, to qualify, to categorize, to use listening as a device to basically own what we’re hearing. But are there other practices of listening and then also sounding that you have encountered in your work?
BL: I was very struck by listening processes where people took the story of the speaker and combined it with their own story of migration; for example, the story of Cristina Stan from Romania in my book.[6] And they just did not care about 100 years of difference, because that was not the point for them. They received it as a migration story and a story of distress and melded it with their own reflections and situation.
I also encountered people who worked with the music recordings. For example, Oliver Potratz went to Kabul and took the old recordings from Afghanistan; he played it to musicians, and they reappropriated the sound with their means, their tradition, and their instruments. Then they performed it onstage. This is something that is not a re-enactment but a very creative way of taking the sounds and the songs into the present, into the future. And then there’s of course this dimension of remembering, which might apply to the situation of the great-grandchild of Sadok Ben Rashid, Jasser Haj Youssef. He made a whole album for his great-grandfather called Reminiscence. This is also a different form of listening, of taking it further, combining old music and new music in one piece.
AM: I think listening has become central to my methodology. I used to always listen to the sound archives through my headphones, because you hear nuances much better. You can sometimes hear someone whispering to the prisoners to push them on or to correct them. And then one day, I was at the archive, which at the time was on Friedrichstraße in a really big room with all these windows, and I could see the S-Bahn [the city train] and all sorts of urban life. In my head, this created a sort of dissonance, because I was listening to something that has all the textures and feelings and sentiments of another place, and also of another me. And then I took off the headphones, and I played the sound aloud in the room. It was someone doing the call to prayer, which has to do with a particular open desert landscape. Because the call to prayer changes depending on what kind of landscape you’re projecting the voice in. I let it sound through the room while it was being sort of violently intersected by the sound of the S- Bahn. And I felt like this is the reality of the sound now. I can’t go back to that place, but this is the reality of the sound now, and it’s very estranging and estranged. At that moment, I promised myself that I will listen to these recordings forever, but I will not write anything about them until a family can access them as traces of their own relatives.
I was using an example recently in a talk in Tunis when we were going through the whole nomenclature of the archive. We were listening to the recordings together. In one recording, the prisoner started singing, and Manoubia Hermi, the administrator of the national archive, started singing along. Then Mounir Hentati, the former director of the archive, started drumming on the table. Then someone came in for a signature, and he started singing too. And it turned exactly into the way the song is usually sung. It became a moment where everyone was involved, and this had not been planned. This is what these songs are; they really are life! It is important to find ways and spaces where people can listen and engage deeply with these archives, to experience all the meanings and experiences, all the untold histories they hold within their folds. There are lots of artists and students from Senegal and Madagascar here in Morocco. And there is a cultural art space called LE18, where they plan to hold a residency programme to bring together people from the different countries the prisoners of war came from, to listen together and try to understand more about what was happening between them in the camp, and on the front.
Listening itself is a political act. It’s so layered. Every time you listen, it has a different effect. And the longer you listen to the recordings of the prisoners of war, the more you almost build a relationship with the person you’re listening to.
OS: This idea of the relationship between a voice and someone listening leads beautifully to my next question. I want to come back to the question of agency or power, possibly also the power of liberation, in light of powerlessness. How do you deal with this ambivalence of the
voices being in one way deprived of power but also passing on this power of resistance and liberation?
AM: I have experienced political incarceration. Mine was very short, but I have friends who have been incarcerated for many years in Egypt. I really understand what incarceration is like. Of course, I cannot even begin to understand or imagine the incarceration conditions that Sadok Ben Rashid describes, after being injured on the front lines of a war. But incarceration and prisons generally strip you of any agency, of being able to decide anything for yourself: how to spend your time, when to eat or drink, whether or not to have company. I can’t think of anything more violent.
I can’t say they were resisting, but I can say that when we listen, we hear something! We hear something that’s not a Tanzlied (dance song) or a Liebeslied (love song), as the archival record says. I feel that my responsibility doesn’t come from a higher moral sense, but that I just feel so mobilized when I hear them! And almost everyone who listens to them feels the same. Especially in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, because they hear voices that sound like their grandparents, using words and stories that they were told. I think music and songs are an everyday language. They are not just for performance. Your grandmother sings you a lullaby to go to sleep, and there are songs that she sings when she’s cooking. Workers sing while they’re working. It’s the rhythm of life. And they use this rhythm of life simply because they knew these moulds of songs so well that they could improvise within the mould and sometimes use just ‘la la la’ to fill in the gaps when they can’t make it as rhythmic as it needs to be for this mould.
OS: Were they taking a risk when they put in creative content that was obviously not what was asked for?
BL: They raised their voices and gave something that was labelled by white academics as folkloristic, which we now know is not correct. It is not pure folklore but a manifestation of a mould filled with reality and metaphors and feelings. The fact that the prisoners did that, not knowing if it would put them at risk, is maybe not a direct sign of resistance, but it’s a sign of strength and courage.
AM: It’s a sign of resilience. To even speak in a context like that, where you’re surrounded by white academics who are dressed much better than you and who have full control over the conditions in which you live, is extremely resilient. To be in the world, to have survived that long in a war that you didn’t want to go to, to have continued to somehow live and breathe and eat in a prisoner-of-war camp, to be watched and filmed and photographed and moulded, to still speak into the gramophone—sometimes with such sadness and sometimes with such joy! There are some recordings that really lift you up, some that mobilize you, some that make you angry, some that make you sad, and it’s because of the emotion that comes across! To continue to feel in this kind of circumstance, to continue to want. It’s like wanting to write, in our case. To be in this condition and still be able to write, still be able to tell stories, of course this is resilience.
Notes
[1] Annette Hoffmann, Knowing by Ear: Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915–1918) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024).
[2] Britta Lange, ‘Poste Restante, and Messages in Bottles: Sound Recordings of Indian Prisoners in the First World War’, Social Dynamics 41/1 (2015), 84–100.
[3] Ariella Azoulay, ‘Unlearning Together at the Threshold of Museums’, lecture given
as part of the Identität und Erbe series, Technische Universität, Berlin, 2 July 2024, www.
identitaet- und- erbe.org/en/veranstaltungen/ariella- aisha- azoulay- unlearning- togetherat-
the- thresholds- of- museums- eng/. A sound recording is available here: https://www.
identitaet- und- erbe.org/en/podcast/.
[4] Britta Lange, Captured Voices: Sound Recordings with Prisoners of War, 1915–1918 (Berlin: Kadmos, 2022).
[5] Lange, Captured Voices, 339.
[6] Lange, Captured Voices, 201–2.
About the Authors
Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian, educator and writer interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell of popular struggles behind the better-known events that shape world history. For her PhD she researched a popular history of Nasserist Egypt through the stories and experiences of the popular resistance in Port Said (1956) and Suez (1967–1974) and the construction of the Aswan High Dam through the experiences of its builders and the Nubian communities displaced by it. She is now an associate researcher at the “Towards Sonic Resocialization”-project at the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik and a distinguished visiting lecturer of Modern Middle East history at the Barenboim-Said Akademie, and remains affiliated with EUME 2024–26.
Britta Lange is an art and cultural scholar. With the research project “Captured voices”, which she conducted at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin, she habilitated in 2011. Since 2014, she has been a lecturer at the Institute for Cultural Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, and 2016–2018 she was co-collection manager of the university’s sound archive. Her research focuses on cultural history from the 19th to the 21st century, the history and theory of early film and early sound documents, concepts of collecting and exhibiting, cultural techniques, and colonial and postcolonial constellations.
Olga Schubert, PhD, is an editor for artistic publications, a cultural studies researcher and art educator. She teaches at the Institute for the History and Theory of Design at University of the Arts Berlin and is an editor at the agency from now, founded by Julia Große. She has been working at HKW since 2015 and co-curated the New Alphabet School (2019–22), a travelling school for artistic and activist research. Co-edited publications include: Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations. From Cannon Fodder to Avant-Garde—The Forgotten Soldiers Who Freed Europe (2026); instituting—space-making, refusal, and organizing in the arts and beyond (2023); The New Alphabet School – Practices of Knowledge Production in Art, Activism and Collective Research (2022).
Citation: Alia Mossallam / Britta Lange / Olga Schubert, What We Are Trying to Return Is Stories, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 12.05.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/65509
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (May 12, 2026). What We Are Trying to Return Is Stories’. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved June 14, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/167g5


