Die Wiener Forschungen an Kriegsgefangenen 1915-1918

During World War I, German and Austrian anthropologists, orientalists, linguists and musicologists conducted wide-ranging research on prisoners of war. Between 1915 and 1918 they interviewed and (physically) measured POWs from Belgium, France, England, Russia and their dependent territories in Eastern Europe, in Asia, Africa and the Southern Pacific. Scholars investigating these prisoners used mainly visual media: data sheets, photos, plaster casts and film. Furthermore, they produced vast collections of sound recordings on wax cylinders and wax discs to record examples of the music, songs and languages of all the "foreign peoples" present in the camps. In my book I concentrate on the historical research carried out by Viennese scholars since their main interest was based on anthropological and ethnographical questions - depending largely on anthropologist Rudolf Pöch. This focus allows me to trace the characteristics of the sound recordings of prisoners of war, which were then commissioned and are owned today by the Phonogram Archive of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, in more detailed and complex manner than has been done so far. Within the manifold research activities of Viennese scholars in the camps of the Habsburg Empire no essentially new scientific methods were used. But especially Rudolf Pöch made sure to constantly standardize and optimize his scientific practices while examining thousands of internees according to the methods of physical anthropology. The massive amounts of collected data and records served as a corpus of source materials for his professorship of anthropology and ethnology at the Vienna University that was installed in 1913. The data also formed the basis on which the academic careers of his students were founded. Similarly, musicologist Robert Lach who wrote down "Songs of Russian Prisoners" in the camps, following the guidelines of the Phonogram Archive, compiled a huge collection of notations during the war and was appointed a professor of comparative musicology in 1920 at the Vienna University. The sound documents recorded as examples of diverse spoken languages were produced to a certain extent based on ethnographical questions, but fell into a methodological and disciplinary gap and were not analysed after the end of the war. Like the different forms of visualization used in physical anthropology, the recordings conformed to the academic claim of "objectivity". Much like anthropological photographs and film sequences shot in the camps by Pöch in 1915, the speech recordings do not only document the scientific practices as such but also resistances against it. But beyond this, the sound recordings as "auralisations" can and do speak to the conditions of their recording - the war, the camp and the scientifically "objective" recording apparatus. Showcasing selected examples, my work demonstrates that the historical sound recordings cannot merely be questioned from a social anthropological perspective, but also provide the potential to be an element of a counter-history on the one hand of the First World War, and on the other hand of the scientific practices of physical anthropology.