Language, the Voice and Esperantism in Early German Sound Film: The Case of Niemandsland NANCY P. NENNO C OLLEGE OF C HARLESTON The difference of languages is one of the most fruitful sources of the dissensions and differences among nations, for, of all things that impress a stranger in a foreign land, the language is at once the first and the greatest mark of distinction between him and them; not being able to understand or be understood, we naturally shun the contact of aliens. Dr. Esperanto (Zamenhof, Birth 6) Sight is the sense of definition and the definite, sound is the sense of the personal and individual, it lets experiencers feel that they have agency. (Sinclair 20) As early critics of the new medium of sound film recognized, the introduction of the speaking voice into cinema leads to an experience of both loss and plenitude. On the one hand, the reunion of voice and body promises an experience of wholeness. On the other, the speaking body is indelibly marked by language, and thus with difference, otherness, foreignness. And yet, in 1932, Ufa producer Erich Pommer was announcing: «Tonfilm und Internationalität? So paradox es klingt, ist es Tatsache geworden» (13). In a text that appeared in both German and English, Pommer addressed the problems that sound film, and specifically the speaking voice, had created for cinema’s continued international viability. Die Internationalität der Stummheit konnte doch nicht durch die nationale Begrenztheit der Sprache ausgeglichen werden. Das Wort schien unüberwindliche Grenzen aufzurichten. Das wäre also das Ende des internationalen Films gewesen und damit das Ende des unvergleichlichen Kultur- und Propagandainstrumentes ‹Film› überhaupt. (13) Pommer’s proposed solution to the problem of language: the creation of films with narrative content capable of speaking to all audiences. From the perspective that, ultimately, the basic problems of humanity remained the same and that only the circumstances and the treatment of a topic created variation, Pommer argued that the international potential of cinema lay in the emotional attractiveness of the narrative rather than in identification with the appa- 284 Nancy P. Nenno ratus. 1 That is, the audience should identify with the story being told rather than with the technical apparatus of the sound film (13). Through the creation of foreign language versions (Mehrsprachenversionen) that cast stars familiar to each target audience and were sensitive to cultural differences, the international attraction of silent film had been, according to Pommer, reattained. The multiple language version (MLV), which liberated the speaking cinema from the limits of language, was, he declared, the «Esperanto» of sound film (13-14). Ironically, in the same year as Pommer’s announcement, the multiple language version was clearly on its way out (Vincendeau 33). Even when studios were able to take advantage of multilingual actors such as Lilian Harvey and Marlene Dietrich, shooting two or more language versions of the same film text was an expensive proposition. Where polyglot actors were not available, or when it was deemed advisable to use national stars, the costs rose accordingly. While Hollywood favored shooting foreign language versions after the completion of the English original, in Germany all versions tended to be shot simultaneously (Krützen 134). Even after Paramount established a studio at Joinville outside Paris for the express purpose of cutting costs by using local talent, eventually sharing the expenses with other Hollywood studios, the cost of the MLVs proved prohibitive, ultimately giving way to the process of synchronization, or dubbing (Gomery 83-4). The impetus behind the MLV and the creation of the artificial language Esperanto are similar insofar as both imagine a common humanity that exists despite language differences. However, their strategies are diametrically opposite. In contrast to the MLV, which further consolidated linguistic and cultural boundaries, the artificial language of Esperanto was created to transcend such borders. First published under the name Dr. Esperanto in 1887, Dr. Ludwik L. Zamenhof’s non-national universal language, based primarily on Germanic and Romance languages, was designed to mobilize the commonalities among different communities and languages in the service of mutual understanding. In a letter to Nikolai Borovko from around 1895, Zamenhof credited his experiences growing up Jewish in a multi-ethnic and multilingual community in Czarist Russia with serving as the impetus for his creation of Esperanto: In Bielostok [sic! ] the population consisted of four diverse elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews. Each of these elements speaks a different language and is not on friendly relations with the other elements. In such a city, more than anywhere else, a sensitive soul feels the heavy woe of polyglottism [sic! ] and becomes convinced at each step that the multiplicity of languages is the sole or at least the chief cause which divides human beings and makes of them unfriendly units. I was Language, the Voice and Esperantism 285 educated to be an idealist; I was taught that all men are brothers, and yet on the street and in the market place everything caused me to feel that people did not exist; that there were only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, etc. (Zamenhof, Birth 6) Zamenhof’s declared desire was to craft «an international Language, one that could be adopted by all nations and be the common property of the whole world, without belonging in any way to any existing nationality» in the hopes that then «the whole world would be as one family» (Zamenhof, Attempt 5). In his second film, Niemandsland (1931), Russian-Jewish director Victor d Trivas approached sound film with a similar agenda. 2 His treatment of the First World War locates the central cause of international conflict in language difference. Unlike other antiwar films of the period, however, Trivas was less interested in a realistic depiction of the Great War and more in uncovering the commonalities among the warring factions as a solution to war. In dem Film Niemandsland wollte ich nicht die Greuel des Krieges, sondern seine d grausame Absurdität aufdecken. Daher wollte ich, daß sich dem kollektiven Wahnsinn entrissene Feinde auf einem Fleckchen Erde zwischen den Schützengraben, im Niemandsland (Die Todeszone) von Angesicht zu Angesicht begegnen. So konnte d ich ihre gemeinsame Sprache finden, jene Sprache der einfachen menschlichen Gefühle, die, so glaube ich, die beredteste Anklage gegen den Krieg ist. (Trivas, «No Man’s Land») It is this idea of a «common language of simple human feelings» that transforms enemies into friends, adversaries into allies, which forms the heart of the film’s narrative, echoing the sentiments of the creator of Esperanto in its insistence that language is an artificial barrier to interpersonal, and thus international, understanding. At the same time, much like Pommer, Trivas acknowledged that the storyline itself must also be one that invites identification by a broad range of audiences. This is a point that Trivas underscored in a 1933 interview with Julien J. London, declaring that «[e]in wirklich humanes Thema hätte alle Chancen, einem Film einen internationalen Charakter zu geben» (qtd. in Bock und Jacobsen 6). The goal of this essay is to illuminate the ways in which the extra-cinematic discourse on the complex relationship between language difference, national identification, and international conflict echoes self-reflexively in this early German sound film. I will argue that, in Niemandsland, Trivas employs strategies that explore how sound film can regain the international promise of silent cinema through a calculated use of the linguistically marked voice. The film engages multiple languages - in fact, the same language groups upon which Zamenhof’s artificial language was based - to stage the transcendence of difference and thus reveal the common humanity that is obscured by linguistic difference. The voice is central to the film’s diegesis as the narrative 286 Nancy P. Nenno itself mimics the move from muteness to speech, from dominant monolingualism to pluralistic multilingualism. The role of language in this film - first those of individual nations, then of specific figures, and finally the «common language of simple human feelings» - is ultimately to redraw the battle lines from those between nations to those between the voice of power and the voice of the individual. In the linguistically marked voice, Trivas invokes the plenitude of the body-voice union in sound film, even as he stages a cinematic internationalism reminiscent of silent film. In what might be called an esperantist approach to sound cinema, interpersonal human drama supersedes any external or superficial divisions, including those posed by language difference. In Niemandsland’s esperantist vision of sound film, it is incumbent upon the language of cinema - mise-en-scène, acting, editing, cinematography, and, yes, sound - to illuminate the common humanity of the warring factions. The role accorded the voice in Niemandsland is not, however, exclusively d diegetic; it also operates on a meta-discursive level, thematizing the transition from silent to sound cinema by employing strategies specific to each medium. On the one hand, Trivas draws on his experience working with Russian directors trained in the tradition of Soviet silent film. On the other, he incorporates speech into the fabric of his film as both a narrative device and a cinematic strategy. In contrast to Pommer’s Esperanto for the sound film, Trivas’s esperantist vision includes language diversity and difference as an integral part of its discovery of a common human language. Concerned about the divisiveness of language and its implication for the viability of sound film on the international market, film studios began early on to experiment with a variety of ways to appeal to national audiences, albeit for economic reasons. As Pommer’s statement documents, one solution was the MLV, which gave studios the opportunity to re-internationalize their products by simultaneously, or serially, producing the same film multiple times in different languages (Vincendeau 25-26). Adapted to the needs of different audiences, these multiple versions often required the replacement of monolingual cast members with native speakers, the casting of bior trilingual stars (as in the case of Die Drei f von der Tankstelle, Thiele 1930), or significant alterations to the storyline of a film in order to account for a bilingual actor’s accent (as in the English-language version of Der blaue Engel, von Sternberg 1930) (Gellen in this issue; Krützen 138-42; Wahl, «Babel» 238-42). A less costly alternative to the MLV was the polyglot film (Mehrsprachenfilm) that incorporates two or more languages - either with or without subtitles. 3 Such films of this period employed actors speaking their native tongues, Language, the Voice and Esperantism 287 most commonly French and German, to enhance the authenticity of stories of human relationships in which national borders represent interpersonal rather than international boundaries. As Ginette Vincendeau points out, the most successful of these films «integrate diegetically the inter-lingual apparatus which is their industrial raison d’être» (27) by hinging the story on the narrative necessity of more than one language, while portraying a situation that is easily comprehensible to all audiences. Not surprisingly, then, it was romance - a trope dramatizing the emotional attraction between two individuals - featuring lovers from different nations that seemed to promise a satisfying resolution to the language problem as it staged the power of love to overcome these hurdles. Thus, for example, in the subtitled romantic comedy, Allô Berlin? Ici Paris/ Hallo? Hallo? Hier spricht Berlin, two male telephone operators in Berlin fall in love with two French receptionists over the phone, resulting in a film that Jean Lenauer in Close Up claimed «show[s] once more how a film can be made which can be perfectly understood both by French and German people» (59). A Hollywood version of the Franco-German love affair also appears towards the beginning of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front/ Im Westen nichts Neues (1930). This romance between a German soldier and a French girl received high praise from the film critic at the Sozialistische Monatshefte: In dem Film Im Westen nichts Neues zeigt eine besonders schöne Szene die Liebe eines deutschen Soldaten mit einer Französin. Man sieht eine hübsche Zimmerecke, den Schatten eines Bettes, das Bettende selbst, einen Tisch mit einer brennenden Petroleumlampe und einer halb abgebrochenen Mahlzeit. Man sieht keine Menschen, aber man hört die glückliche und kriegsmüde Stimme des Deutschen, der der Frau deutsche Worte sagt, die sie nicht versteht und französisch mit Worten beantwortet, die er kaum versteht. Wie viel Trauer, wie viel Schönes vermittelt der Ton dadurch, daß er dem Zuhörer das Bild und damit die Seele der Sprecher zu finden überläßt. (Stössinger 506) For Stössinger it is the very sound of the spoken language, the tone of the voice, rather than the information communicated, that carries the emotional meaning of the scene, the promise that human empathy can overcome all obstacles - even language difference. The bilingual film also serves to advance the agenda of films centered on homosocial, transnational narratives, particularly those seeking to mend the French-German rift. Pabst’s proletarian pacifist film, Kameradschaft/ La tragédie de la Mine (1931), also features two subtitled languages - again, French and German - to tell the story of a mining disaster based on a real-life incident in which German rescuers come to the aid of their French comrades. The mine itself straddles the French-German border, and part of the rescue 288 Nancy P. Nenno entails German miners literally dismantling part of the underground border from 1919 (which is then formally re-established in the film’s concluding sequence). In contrast to the bilingual romantic comedies, in Kameradschaft, it is male bonding and solidarity with one’s working-class comrades across national borders, rather than heterosexual romance, that supply the narrative rationale for the use of more than one language in the film. Pabst also exploits the trope of the transnational romance in this film as a warning about the potential dangers of interlingual conflict in a scene early in the film in which three of the German miners visit a French dance bar. One of the miners, Wilderer (Fritz Kampers), invites the beautiful Françoise (Andrée Ducret), the love interest of Émile (Georges Charlia), one of the French miners, to dance. Wilderer: Excusez - une danse? Françoise (to Émile): Qu’est-que il veut? Émile: Danser avec toi. Françoise: Je ne danse plus. Dites à lui en allemand, si tu peux. Émile: Mademoiselle, nicht tanzen. Wilderer: Was allemand? Was allemand? Ich will nur tanzen. Allemand! Ha! Nicht mit einem Allemand, hat sie gesagt. Ein Allemand tanzt eben so gut wie ein Franzose würde. 4 The scene provides an amusing interlude in an otherwise serious film, but it also stages the problem of interlingual miscommunication and dramatizes one of the primary problems of sound cinema. The misunderstanding arises from the homophonic quality of the terms for both the German language (allemand) and a German man (allemand), and although Wilderer assumes Françoise rejects him because he is German, in fact, it is simply that she is unable to communicate with him in his language, just as he does not have command of hers. This scene self-reflexively enacts the predicament of language in sound film and turns it into a narrative device. In these bilingual antiwar films, the focus on language as a source, and sign, of international discord serves the needs of both the storylines and the film industry to solve the problem of multilingualism. Indeed, such a strategy is fitting to films seeking to create a sense of commonality among enemies, to transcend national and linguistic barriers rather than solidify them. The value of maintaining the unity of the actor’s body and the linguistically marked voice is underscored by Chris Wahl, who argues that the polyglot film […] is naturalistic: languages are used in the way they would be used in reality. They define geographical or political borders, «visualise» the different social, personal or cultural levels of the characters and enrich their aura in conjunction with the voice. The complexity and variety of the character network and the intense singularity of Language, the Voice and Esperantism 289 each person which form the centre of the polyglot film render dubbing impossible without destroying the movie […]. Polyglot films must be shown with subtitles (or without any aid) because they are anti-illusionist in the sense that they do not try to hide the diversity of human life behind the mask of a universal language («Discovering» 2). In contrast to the synchronized film, or even the MLV, the polyglot film thus presumably offers the spectator the same unfettered access to the characters and their situations as it does the diegetic figures. Both All Quiet on the Western Front and Westfront 1918 (Pabst 1931) strategically employ the native tongues of their actors to just such effect. In the closing frames of Westfront 1918, a French soldier is laid next to the film’s protagonist, Karl (Gustav Diessl) in a field hospital filled with wounded and dying soldiers of both nationalities. Blindly, the Frenchman picks up the dead Karl’s hand and murmurs, «Moi, camerade. Pas ennemi, pas ennemi.» The audience recognizes the pathos of the French soldier’s tone, and perhaps the words «camarade» and «ennemi» echo as cognates in their own language. The immediacy of the physical gesture coupled with the linguistic utterance serves to invite the audience into the scene to experience the emotion of this moment first-hand. Such films adhere to what Verena Berger and Miya Komori term the central tenet of polyglot cinema, namely «the representation of language diversity as the protagonists experience it» (9). Unlike the handful of polyglot films produced during this transitional period, Victor Trivas’s Niemandsland expands the scope of the term polyglot d from two to five languages. Although Wahl argues that the term polyglot applies to any film in which more than one language plays a significant role in the narrative, in the context of early German sound cinema, the distinction is germane precisely because the majority of these films operate solely along the French-German language axis. Technically the term «polyglot» refers to the use of four or more languages, and the only film of this period to accomplish this task successfully is Niemandsland. In this film, no fewer than five languages (English, French, German, Hebrew, Russian) are heard, all without the aid of subtitles. At the same time as it conforms to many of the conventions of the antiwar film, including the narrative tropes of solidarity, comradeship, and male bonding among the common soldiers, Niemandsland also d expands its representation of the war beyond the French-German conflict to include both interand intra-continental aspects. The basic plot of Niemandsland revolves around five men of different nad tions who are first depicted as civilians experiencing the build-up to war and who ultimately find themselves trapped together in an underground ruin between the fronts. There they discover that, despite their different languages 290 Nancy P. Nenno and national affiliations, they share similar hopes, experiences, feelings. As the critic for Vorwärts wrote: Warum stehen sie sich feindlich gegenüber? Sie sind Arbeiter, Handwerker, Angestellte. Der Krieg hat sie entzweit, wahnsinnig gemacht. Also Krieg dem Kriege! Am Schluß marschieren sie wie ein Symbol für den Kampf um den Frieden vereinigt dem gemeinsamen Feinde Krieg entgegen. (Sch[erret]) Scherret’s use of the verb «entzweien» (to sunder) is significant as it implies a prewar unity or commonality that can be re-established. This theme of unity and division - here a narrative element - is of course also a key aspect of the debates surrounding the introduction of the voice in film. In Niemandsland, Trivas approaches the «talking film» («sprechender Film») in a way that undermines the assumption that sound cinema must necessarily be a national cinema. Unlike films such as Westfront 1918 that exploit the verisimilitude of the medium to engage spectators in the war experience, in Niemandsland the voice - and specifically the voice of a speaking figure - is employed to explore the various roles that sound might play, on both diegetic and cinematic levels. The film opens with five short vignettes that introduce each soldier in his pre-war life. The first character is the Englishman Charlie Brown (Hugh Stephens Douglas), who is awaiting the birth of his child in the next room. He is first presented at the window, gazing out onto central London. He lifts the pane and settles into its frame, half in and half out, poised between the public and the private realms. The next vignette, which focuses on the flirtation between the Frenchman Charles Durant (Georges Péclet) and his soon-to-be girlfriend, also explicitly situates this figure within a national context. The two first meet on a streetcar and then appear at dusk as diminutive silhouettes dominated by the massive form of the Eiffel Tower. With the introduction of the German Emil Köhler (Ernst Busch), the film becomes even more pointed about the intertwining of national identity within the contexts of both private and work spheres. As his young son, his wife, and an apprentice watch, he removes a toy cannon from a drawer and answers his son’s question, «Kann sie schiessen? » by aiming the mouth of the toy directly into the camera’s lens. The playfulness of this gesture acquires a terrifying reality as it introduces the build-up to war that follows. A hard cut from the mouth of the toy cannon introduces a montage first of real cannons, then of bombs, and finally of medals, as a voice-over narrator intones, «Cannons, cannons, cannons, all over the world. / Kanonen, Kanonen, Kanonen, Granaten, Granaten, Granten, Orden, Orden, Orden.» This sequence, in which a voice-over commentator dominates the soundtrack, is one of two sections of the film produced as an MLV, altered to accommodate different target audiences (English, French and German). As such, the sequence Language, the Voice and Esperantism 291 sets the stage for Trivas’s exploration of the voice by beginning with an allknowing, interpretive commentary. The commanding male voice-over narration here strongly resembles the disembodied voice of the documentary with its distinctly pedagogical tone and didactic content. As Mary Anne Doane explains about voice-over commentary: It is its radical otherness with respect to the diegesis which endows this voice with a certain authority. As a form of direct address, it speaks without mediation to the audience, by-passing the «characters» and establishing a complicity between itself and the spectator - together they understand thus place the image. It is precisely because the voice is not localizable, because it cannot be yoked to a body, that it is capable of interpreting the image, producing its truth. (42, emphasis in original) Doane’s point about the total power that the voice-over commentary exercises over the image is highlighted in this sequence that depicts the preparations for war. In its invisible, extra-diegetic state, this voice is a phantasm that invokes the pre-sound film traditions of the lecturer at the magic lantern show or perhaps even the omniscient benshi of Japanese cinema (Nornes 110-19). i Significantly, it is only once the voice of this commentator falls silent that the last two figures, those who are not linked to a specific nation, are introduced to the story. The next sequence depicts the wedding of Lewin (Vladimir Sokoloff), a Jewish tailor in one of the multi-ethnic Eastern European nations (most likely the Hapsburg Empire), who comes to be known only as Irgendwo in der Welt. In contrast to the overtly national contexts of the previous figures, this is a purely private, domestic world. The Hebrew prayers and the exclamations of «Mazel tov» from his guests firmly establish this space as extra-national, even foreign. Although he has not yet been rendered mute by shell shock, Lewin never speaks even in this sequence, as if presaging his voicelessness in the space of no-man’s land and his function as a representative of (international) silent cinema. The last figure, Joe Smile (Louis Douglas), a multilingual African cabaret artist, is the most overtly cosmopolitan as well as the least developed of all the figures. 5 In no-man’s land, he will introduce himself to his companions as an «artiste international» and «un vrai professeur de langue,» but his subjectivity and his history remain elusive. Set in a Parisian cabaret, this expository scene presents the African as a performer with the ability to inhabit multiple identities. Following a quick change of clothes, he emerges on stage to perform a step routine before a transatlantic backdrop depicting representative emblems of the US, France, and Germany. His resistance to - even rejection of - national identification is evident in the text that precedes his step dance. In the English version, he is heard to say that he wants «to get off this boat,» while in the German version he declares, «Ich will den Dampfer verlassen. 292 Nancy P. Nenno Ich geh zu Fuß.» Frantically moving from one side of the stage to the other, caught between the national symbols, he finally reaches for a life preserver, as if seeking shelter and rescue from the coming storm. As Tobias Nagl observes, «Die maritime Symbolwelt selbst, die das Bühnenbild abruft, lässt sich bereits als Ausdruck schwarzer Mobilität lesen: Nach Paul Gilroy stellt das Bild des Schiffs den zentralen Chronotopos des schwarzen Atlantiks dar» (739). The sequencing of Lewin’s and Smile’s stories thus creates the initial link between the diasporic and stateless figures who will carry the supranational vision of the film. Critics at the time noted the strong resemblance to Soviet silent cinema exhibited by this first half of the film, in particular the strategic use of montage and Hanns Eisler’s contrapuntal musical score (Sch[erret]; Krautz 6). Trivas’s debt to the Soviets is evident in the manifesto on sound film that he co-authored with Russian director Fedor Ozep and screenwriter Natan Abramowitsch Sarchi, which appeared in the New Year’s issue of the Film-Kurier in 1930. r As in Eisenstein’s manifesto of 1928, «Statement on Sound Film,» the three demand a non-naturalistic approach to the use of sound in film. However, «Zum neuen Jahr: Protest! » distinguishes itself from its predecessor in its call for «die Auswertung des Tons und der Sprache als Montagematerial, als Material für poetische Gestaltung und Offenbarung der visionellen [sic! ] Welt» (Ozep, Sarchi, Triwas, emphasis added). 6 In demanding that speech, as well as images, be used as building blocks of montage, Trivas calls attention to his understanding of language’s potential to serve as a critical and specifically cinematic element of film, perhaps purely as raw sonic material or even as a sign in itself. This conviction that language may also serve ideological ends is realized in the first part of Niemandsland during the montage depicting the build-up to war. Combined with the images of each nation’s symbol - the crowned, twoheaded eagles of the Russian and the Hapsburg Empires, the German eagle, the French lictor’s fasces - and the text of the statement, each declaration of war is read aloud by a different voice, in its original language. No translation, no voice-over is needed to understand the juxtaposition of images, voices and languages as each echoes and mirrors the others. Similarly, the following montage of soldiers of different nationalities, wearing distinctive uniforms, drilling underscores the sameness of each nation’s actions, highlighting their commonality despite national and linguistic differences. Replacing the omniscient narrator of the voice-over commentary that opens the film are the linguistically marked voices of the nations that, although now part of the diegesis, are still not identified with a visible body. Language, the Voice and Esperantism 293 The linguistically marked, national voice here is literally «acousmatic,» to use Michel Chion’s term, insofar as this is a voice that «has not yet been visualized» and in its invisibility conjures «a special kind of being, a kind of talking and acting shadow to which we attach the name acousmêtre» (21). Describing the powers attributed to the acousmêtre, Chion continues: Everything hangs on whether or not the acousmêtre has been seen. In the case where it remains not-yet-seen, even an insignificant acousmatic voice becomes invested with magical powers as soon as it is involved, however slightly, in the image. The powers are usually malevolent, occasionally tutelary. Being involved in the image means that the voice doesn’t merely speak as an observer (as commentary), but that it bears with the image a relationship of possible inclusion, a relationship of power and possession capable of functioning in both directions; the image may contain the voice, or the voice may contain the image. (23) If talking cinema promised to reunite the body and the voice, in effect endowing the silent body with subjectivity and presence, thus distinguishing the human subject from the silent world of objects, then the acousmatic national voices of the film’s first half only underscore the continued object status of these men. The linguistically marked acousmatic voices that declare war and command the soldiers are indeed magical in their authority for they possess the ultimate power of life and death over the men and families whom they hold in thrall. Significantly, it is the African cabaret artist, that stateless, diasporic figure, who is able to break this spell. His basic grasp of each of the languages spoken in no-man’s land not only empowers him to call the men’s attention to the absurdity of their nationalistic rhetoric but also to bring them to realize and ultimately take control of their own voices over and against the voices of their respective nations. It is the politics of the voice that dominate the film’s second half, which stages the opposition to, and dissolution of, the power accorded these acousmatic national voices. Here, in the space of no-man’s land, the acousmatic national voice gains a body in the figure of each nationally identified soldier. This marks the climax of Trivas’s exploration of the power of the voice, as it moves from a single, dominant, commanding power in the opening sequences to a multitude of competing acousmatic voices, finally ending up situated in the bodies of the men of different nationalities. The locus and the strength of the linguistically marked voice thus follows a meta-narrative progression that ultimately enfranchises the soldiers of different nations and different languages to reject their position as mouthpieces and to assume the status of subjects, rather than objects, of the voice. While there was plenty of praise for the film’s pacifist message on both sides of the Atlantic, it is among the film’s critics that we find reasons to ex- 294 Nancy P. Nenno amine the language politics of the film more closely. On the Left, critics deplored the way in which the film appeared to ignore the origins of the First World War, the political, economic, and imperialist aims that led to the global conflict. Even as the critic for the Rote Fahne extolled Niemandsland for its d revolutionary solution to war, he rebuked the film: «[M]an erfährt nichts über die Ursachen des imperialistischen Krieges» (Lüdeke). And yet, although the film does not specifically examine the role that imperial interests play in the outbreak of the war, there are references to the imperialist nature of the various nations if one examines the film closely. Thus, the declaration of war by the Czarist regime explicitly points to the imperial nature of its identity by naming Nicholas II not only as «emperor and sole ruler of Russia» but also as «Polish Czar,» among other titles. 7 Similarly, the montage of images depicting the pre-war excitement includes symbols associated with many of the empires that dominated the globe at the time: the Ottoman Turk’s mustache, the Japanese umbrella, the American flag, as well as the African uniform of the French Army worn by Joe Smile as he bids his Parisian audience farewell to the strains of the Marseillaise. Essential to staging the men’s recognition of their common humanity is a scene that foregrounds their mutual suspicion, mistrust, and anger. Debating the origins of the war, each nationally identified soldier ventriloquizes the bellicose tones and defensive rhetoric of the acousmatic voices that initiate this more realistic, narrative part of the film. In a scene that recalls Ludwik Zamenhof’s description of multi-ethnic, multilingual Bialystok as a place without individuals, only nationalities, Joe Smile poses the question, «Warum Krieg? Pourquoi? Willst du? Do you want war? Veux-tu la guerre? Oder du? Alors, warum la guerre? » In response, the Frenchman declares that France never wanted war, pointing a finger at the Germans. The German denies the claim that he wanted war, but steadfastly maintains that Germany had been forced to protect itself. At this point, the Englishman joins in, blaming «the German Kaiser who attacked defenseless Belgium.» Smile begins to grin and finally to shake with laughter as the conversation then turns from the European arena to the topic of global domination. Frenchman: Vous voulez les colonies. (directed at the German) German: Kolonien? Natürlich, Kolonien, habt ihr gehört, Neger? Der Franzose will unsere Kolonien! Frenchman: La France n’est pas une colonie. German: Habt ihr nicht schon genug Kolonien? Den ganzen Äquator habt ihr gepachtet und noch ein Stück China dazu. Englishman: You wanted the whole world for your colony. Language, the Voice and Esperantism 295 As the voices grow louder, and the gestures more threatening, Smile jumps up and waves his arms, exclaiming, Hoorah! Already enemies. You make a noise like the shells. And why? You all say the same thing, but in a different language. That’s why you don’t understand each other. How stupid. You have different uniforms, different languages. I understand, but the dumb man, he has no uniform. He can’t speak. We’re all friends to him. Although the men are not actually saying the same thing, each is blaming another for having started the war. The theme of the sameness of the nations - and the men themselves - visualized in the film’s first half is made explicit by a diegetic figure that gives voice to what Trivas identifies as the source of international conflict, namely language difference. The fact that it is the African subaltern who must first translate and finally resolve the political dispute among the men is significant in this context. This particular sequence, in which he berates the men for their narrowness of vision, is exclusively monolingual; he speaks the language of the given MLV. In both its tone and its pedagogical function, this monolingual speech aligns the figure of the African with the documentary-like voice that opens the film, further rendering him a conduit for Trivas’s message. It is important, however, that those debating imperial systems and colonial aims are not those who bear their brunt, as do the African subaltern and the Eastern European Jew. At the end of the sequence, Joe Smile seats himself next to Irgendwo in der Welt and puts an arm around him as he explains that, to the deaf-mute, they are all friends. «Ich auch ausziehe meine Uniform,» he says, and divests himself of any association with a national entity. As an invocation of the «muteness» of silent film, Irgendwo in der Welt becomes endowed with an internationality that eludes the overtly linguistically-circumscribed figures of the Englishman, the Frenchman, and the German. This two-shot visually binds the two stateless (and foreign) bodies, distinguishing them from those who are still uniformed and belligerent. A cutaway scene depicting the displacement of Lewin’s wife from their home serves to remind the spectator that both Jews and Africans have been shaped by their diasporic histories. Moreover, considering the ways in which Trivas is clearly experimenting with the possibility of counteracting the national aspect of sound film, this coupling of Jewish and African bodies might also be read as invoking the very origins of the talking film revolution, namely The Jazz Singer (Crosland, 1927). Irgendwo in der Welt’s diegetic voicelessness is accompanied by the broader gestures and expository close-ups common in silent film that provide access to his emotional world and contrast starkly with the less dramatic and more realistic acting styles of the Englishman, Frenchman and German. Joe Smile, on the other hand, is neither voiceless nor naturalistic, 296 Nancy P. Nenno straddling the two traditions of film performance. As Tobias Nagl points out, contemporary critics celebrated the way in which Douglas was able to «speak» with his body, his dance essentially telling the story of «Lebensläufe, Abenteuer und Schicksale» (Alfred Polgar qtd. in Nagl 734). With his minstrel-like costume in the cabaret, the sweeping gestures, and exaggerated facial expressions, Joe Smile seems to function as a transitional figure between silent and sound cinema, even as he invokes Jackie Robinson/ Rabinowitz of The Jazz Singer - a liminal, transitional figure between Old and New Worlds, r silent and sound film (Rogin 440-42). As innovative as Trivas’s inclusion of positively-valued racial Others may be, the twinning of the figures of the Jew and the African is not unproblematic, for even as they are the heroes of this utopian, esperantist vision of sound cinema, they cannot escape the widespread threatening associations with the foreign, or non-national, body. In particular, the figure of the black African in the film came under heavy fire from the conservative press. A review in the Deutsche Tageszeitung from 11 December 1931 excoriated the film in which «[e]in Jazz-Nigger aus Paris lehrt die Soldaten der weißen Völker den Frieden! » (qtd. in Bock and Jacobsen 27, emphasis in original) With the epithet of «Jazz-Nigger,» the reviewer explicitly recognizes the American identity of the actor Louis Douglas hidden behind the figure of the African subaltern. Moreover, in the early 1930s, the rhetoric of German nationalism still linked the figure of the Jew with the «bastardization» of German culture, whether as putative instigators of the so-called Black Horror on the Rhine (recall that Smile is shown in fez, blousy pants, and short embroidered vest which mark him as belonging to an African unit of the French Army, possibly that of the tirailleurs sénégalais), or of the «invasion» of jazz (Hitler 908; Partsch 62). Even those who praised the film, such as Hans Siemsen, ultimately resorted to racial stereotypes. Writing in Die Welt am Montag, Siemsen gushed: Und es ist einer der schönsten und besten Gedanken dieses schönen Films, daß dieser Neger, dieser Angehörige einer verachteten, «unkultivierten», «minderwertigen» Rasse (infolge seiner Artisten-Internationalität) der Dolmetscher und Vermittler wird zwischen dem Deutschen, dem Franzosen, dem Engländer, die da im r Granattrichter zusammenhocken, keiner des anderen, aber jeder der «Gefangene» des Krieges und der Granaten. Und nicht nur weil er «internationaler» Artist ist, nicht nur weil er von jeder Sprache ein paar Worte stottern kann, ist dieser Neger der gute Geist dieser zusammengeschossenen Insel zwischen den feuerspeienden feindlichen Linien, sondern auch deshalb, weil er, der Neger, keinen Nationalehrgeiz, keinen «Patriotismus» hat, weil er kein Deutscher, kein Franzose, kein Engländer, sondern «nur» ein Neger, nur ein armer, aber vernünftiger kleiner Mensch ist (qtd. in Bock and Jacobsen 26-27, emphasis in original). Language, the Voice and Esperantism 297 The scare quotes around negative terms such as «uncultivated» and «inferior» do not ultimately mitigate the fact that Siemsen continues to identify the African figure with a racial category. Even as he praises the fact that Smile is without a nation and celebrates his simple humanity, the fact that Smile is without any identity except for his race further seems to empty this figure - already a flat character without definition or personal associations - of the agency he appears to command. Much like many of his contemporaries, Siemsen portrays the black body as always already diasporic, not belonging to any nation, always foreign and never at home - a sensibility that also emerges when Smile announces to the men that he has played the Alhambra in London and the Wintergarten in Berlin. In response, the German suggests that perhaps he had seen him there, or perhaps not, since, «Ihr seht ja egal schwarz aus.» And yet, as Nagl has convincingly demonstrated, the figure of the internationally recognized, cosmopolitan African-American performer nonetheless peers out from behind the mask of the African, ultimately undercutting the sense of the figure’s status as national tabula rasa (Nagl 735-45). Joe Smile is not the primitive savage depicted by conservative critics of the French occupation of the Rhine, nor the wild, ahistorical being of a primitivist imagination. Instead, the artistic persona of Louis Douglas, which was so intimately tied to Weimar Jazz culture, and whose accent is clearly American rather than francophone, remains recognizable both visually and aurally. The slippage between African and African American reveals itself on the margins of the film, first in the visual invocation of the United States in Smile’s cabaret routine, then in his distinctly American stage name, and finally in the persona of Douglas himself. As such, on a meta-discursive level, the looming American presence in the transition to sound film emerges in Trivas’s contemplation of the quandary of sound cinema. Although a shadow figure within the film narrative itself, through the indirect invocation of American cinema and the economic conflicts between European cinema and Hollywood (Crafton 418-39; de Grazia 57-62; Gomery 82-90), Hollywood acquires a presence in the film through the African/ American figure of Douglas. As Alice Maurice has argued, the transition to sound in the US is marked by the deployment of black bodies and voices to authenticate the new medium. «The rhetoric around the ‹black voice,›» she argues, «suggests that racial identity must be seen and heard, or more precised ly, that racial identity lies somewhere in the synchronization of sound and image» (33). Douglas’s «speaking body» delivers the motion required of silent cinema, while his voice delivers on the promise of talking cinema to «sound» authentic. Joe Smile’s imperfect command of the languages dominant in noman’s land, although certainly adequate to the diegetic task of impromptu 298 Nancy P. Nenno translator, also resonates with a minstrel tradition of «black» language, thus supporting, aurally, the difference between black and white. In contrast, the silent Eastern European Jew remains a ghostly figure, more comfortable in the dream world of silent film than the real world of the talkie. Despite the fact that both the Eastern European Jew and the African soldier are linked within the narrative as diasporic figures and thus representatives of an internationalist vision of sound cinema, each figure inflects this project in a different way. Ironically, it is the continued reliance upon the primacy of the visual register that separates these two «foreign» bodies even in this film. Although Trivas actively seeks to develop an esperantist approach to sound cinema that effectively mobilizes both its aural and visual modes of expression, the positions accorded the figures marked by the racial sciences of the day as «other» remain nonetheless divided along these two registers. On the one hand, the African soldier is marked as foreign, mobile, and yet still comprehensible in his limited ability to communicate verbally. As a representative of the transition from silent to sound film, his purpose is to appeal to, and communicate with, a variety of national audiences, without necessarily belonging to them. As a result of the associations with the black body that dominated both scientific and popular discourses of the time, the figure of the African can never be fully integrated or become invisible. On the other hand, despite the fact that Irgendwo in der Welt represents a «foreign» element within the body of the nation, his muteness or absence of linguistic marking allows him to pass in a way that remains impossible for the African. The importance of visual kinship is beautifully illustrated when the mute figure of the Eastern European Jew desperately seeks the photo of himself and his bride, without result, at which point the German hands him a picture of his own family. In a lap dissolve, the image of the German’s family briefly transforms into one of Lewin and his wife, giving explicitly cinematic expression to Trivas’s concept of the «language of simple human feelings» by optically erasing the difference between the two «Europeans.» This scene invokes the roots of Esperanto and Ludwik Zamenhof’s dream of the whole world as one family, suggesting that they belong to a particularly European Jewish experience. Both Esperanto and Niemandsland seek to escape the confines of nation d by creating a space outside of this concept, a parallel territory untouched by national identity. And yet, the languages that dominate no-man’s land remain those of European colonial powers that just so happen to also be the main competitors in the global film market as well as the primary bases for Esperanto. As Albert Guérard noted in 1941, «There is a language imperialism which is not identical but parallel with political imperialism. In both cases we establish in our minds a hierarchy of nations and cultures» (176). By focus- Language, the Voice and Esperantism 299 ing primarily on the English, French and German, the film does not, in fact, extend its scope beyond the European theater of the war, or of the transition to sound film. Despite the fact that Joe Smile is portrayed as the cosmopolitan negotiator among nations and the ultimate signifier of humanity, he remains a racialized figure inscribed with the associations of Weimar’s Jazz culture. Unlike the Eastern European Jew, with whom he shares a diasporic history and sensibility, he nevertheless remains visually separated from the white Europeans, just as his putative geographical origin - Africa - is not a country, but a continent. In its single-minded focus on illuminating the destructiveness of national identity and linguistic difference in the creation of world peace and intercultural understanding, the film’s focus on the aural register results in the creation of a blindspot that ultimately redraws the boundaries from those between nations to those between races. As a result, the esperantist vision of the film fails as a result of its deafness to color. Notes 1 «Von der Einsicht ausgehend, daß schließlich und endlich, die Grundprobleme der Menschheit immer dieselben bleiben und nur das Milieu und die Behandlung des Themas Variationen schafft […].» Pommer 13. My translation. 2 Niemandsland (Trivas, 1931). Produced by Anton Resch. Released 10 December 1931; d banned on 22 April 1933. This article relies on four versions of the film: Inkwell Image’s 2001 video release of Maurice Zouary’s restored (but shortened by 27 minutes) version under the American title, Hell on Earth; the original script and a German film version, both available at the Filmmuseum Berlin-Deutsche Kinemathek; and a German version (also shortened by 23 minutes) available through the distributor Reichskino (www.reichskino.com). 3 For example, in Leni Riefenstahl’s Das blaue Licht (1932), the German artist Vigo (Matthias Wiemann), who is obsessed with the beautiful Junta (Riefenstahl), is confronted with a population in the Dolomites whose Italian he does not understand, although he is able, through gesture and facial expression, to communicate with them. 4 The published script of the film, in which this scene is rendered solely in German, provides a rather different text than the one I transcribed from the film version. There, Françoise in fact is anti-German as she intones sotto voce: «Mit einem Deutschen schon gar nicht! » (Vajda, Otten and Lampel 59). 5 This identity, however, also coincides with the popular image of the African American artist in Weimar Germany, of whom Louis Douglas was a prominent example. Audiences in Weimar Germany could hardly have missed the fact that, in addition to his fame six years earlier in the Revue nègre, Douglas had also recently appeared in several German films, alongside, among others, Willy Fritsch, Lilian Harvey, and Heinz Rühmann in the Ufa production, Einbrecher (Hans Schwarz, 1930). (Hopkins 63; Lotz 297-389; r Nagl 737-39) 300 Nancy P. Nenno 6 While Eisenstein does not explicitly address the issue of national or ethnic identity in this text, this wrinkle was surely apparent to him. In the Soviet Union, where agitprop trains «educated» the population of a vast nation of multiple ethnicities and languages through silent film, the introduction of speech threatened to destabilize, even undercut, the power of the image. The pedagogical force of Soviet montage lay in the clashing images on screen and the concept of «inner speech» rather than the interplay of the visual and the aural. His 1928 «Statement on Sound,» co-authored with Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov, begins with the acknowledgement that «the ‹silent› [film] has found its voice.» At the same time, at no point does the text refer to specifics on how the voice - and thus language - might work in the «contrapuntal use of sound vis-à-vis the visual fragment of montage.» Nonetheless, the text concludes with the declaration that «[t]he contrapuntal method of structuring a sound film not only does not weaken d the international nature of cinema but gives to it meaning of unparalleled strength and cultural heights. With this method of construction the sound film will not be imprisoned within national markets […] but will provide an even greater opportunity than before of speeding the idea contained in a film throughout the whole globe, preserving its worldwide viability» (Eisenstein et. al., «Statement» 80-81). For further analysis of Soviet approaches to sound, see Christie and Thompson. 7 Many thanks to Meglena Miltcheva for translating this passage from the Russian. Works Cited All Quiet on the Western Front. Dir. Lewis Milestone. RKO-Pathé Studios, 1930. Allô Berlin? Ici Paris/ Hallo? Hallo? Hier spricht Berlin. Dir. Julien Duvivier. Films Sonores Tobis, 1932. Berger, Verena and Miya Komori. «Introduction: Moving Pictures from a Modern Babel.» Polyglot Cinema: Migration and Transcultural Narration in France, Italy, Portugal and Spain. 7-12. blaue Engel, Der. Dir. Josef von Sternberg. Universum Film, 1930. blaue Licht, Das. Dir. Leni Riefenstahl. Leni Riefenstahl-Produktion, 1932. Bock, H.M. and W. Jacobsen, eds. FilmMaterialien 9: Victor Trivas. Hamburg-Berlin: CineGraph, 1996. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Christie, Ian. «Soviet Cinema: Making Sense of Sound.» Screen 23.2 (1982): 34-49. Oxford Journals. 3 August 2010. 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