The Sound of Memory

Abstract

Not my language but a voice chanting in patterns survives on earth not history's bones but vocal tones. Allen Ginsberg Elegies for Neal Cassady The critical vocabulary that has emerged and evolved to describe and analyze spaces of Jewish absence and memory in Germany has been, for most part, visual. In this essay, I shift emphasis from visual to aural, to of in poetic texts and echo of elegiac that constitutes representation of Shoah. I maintain that circulation and proliferation of visual images-the of Shoah as Liss and Hirsch define postmemory-contain as well echo of sound of memory. By thus shifting focus from visual to aural and by exploring several key iconic sounds that generate German and Jewish memory, I hope to add a new layer to exploration ofthe sites of Jewish and German memory. The primacy of visual draws on concepts of authenticity, illusion, and spectatorship that stretch back to Aristotle and Plato and inform contemporary critical discussion about documentary, archival, and video testimonies.1 While critical work by Hirsch, Zelizer, and others has provided invaluable reflection on elusiveness of visuality of memory, there has been relatively little attention paid to what I will be calling sound of memory. The sound of memory can be a tangible recording of how an event is remembered acoustically, while memory of sound presupposes a melancholic relationship to sound that once was and is now lost. The sound of memory is more elusive and perhaps more fragile and transient than visual sites of memory; significantly, of five senses, sound is only one that requires a medium for its transmission (Taylor 34). In medium of film, as Michel Chion has observed, if sounds are easily projected by spectator onto film image, it is because image is circumscribed by a that can be located in space, whereas sound lacks a frame (Chion 204). This lack of a for aural, in contrast to visual, demands that an inquiry into relationship between sound and memory will be, perhaps, more speculative and openended than one that examines visual sphere. The following questions thus serve as speculative points of departure for an inquiry into relationship between memory and sound: Can we speak of iconic sounds as we do of iconic images? Can an exploration of sound help demarcate lines that shape and define German and Jewish memory? Can we speak of a site of memory as sound of memory? If visual sites of memory-memorials, photographs, installations-in Germany today suggest enormous difficulties inherent in project of remembrance, as James Young and others have demonstrated, into what terrain does an exploration of sound of memory lead us? Finally, how can a turn to aural help us rethink trope of unspeakability of Holocaust? To begin answering these questions, I propose that visual imprint of memory and acoustic echo of prior sounds create sites of memory in Germany that can be reached through what Umberto Eco has described as a travel in hyperreality, where in order to attain the real thing, one must fabricate the absolute fake (8). The hyperreal blurs distinction between presence and absence, between photographic image and death, between sound and silence, crafting sites of authenticity that are no longer historical, but instead visual, where, as Eco suggests, everything looks real, and therefore it is real; in any case fact that it seems real is real, and thing is real even if, like Alice in Wonderland, it never existed (16). Yet contained within hyperreal and circulation of memory as postmemory are sound and aural, not just visual. Eco, of course, is speaking here of American culture's need to recreate history in form of wax museums and reconstructed historical sites, but his point is also well taken for shape and form of Jewish commemoration in Germany in past decade. …