Tracing (de)colonial options in German philology around 1900
The Berlin Lautarchiv holds a large collection of historical recordings with POWs during World War I. These recordings were produced with the prisoners in German camps by a group of German linguists, anthropologists, and musicologists in an ambitious project to ‘collect the languages of the world’. The acoustic documents were archived and are now digitally available. Most of the recordings with African prisoners and civilian internees were never translated, yet some of them surfaced in radio broadcasts and publications. By means of approaching acoustic, visual, and written traces in European archives, which relate to two of the speakers and their biographies, this chapter engages with linguistic practices, with epistemic regimes that framed the project of recording in camps, as well as its racist assumptions at specific moments of colonial knowledge production.