Magazine

Privatbesitz Familie Dierks

The voice of the great-grandfather

Society Report

Descendants can help decipher the stories and origins of recordings in the sound archive – like the great-grandson of a civil servant who recorded a dialect recording in the 1930s.

Many people recognise the faces of their ancestors from photo albums. But what did their voices sound like? Friedrich Dierks is lucky enough to know how his great-grandfather spoke. The family knew that there was a sound recording in the sound archive of the Humboldt University in Berlin that Hinrich Dierks recorded in 1936. When his great-grandson asked for a digital copy, he learnt that his grandfather’s recording would also play a role in the planned exhibition at the Humboldt Laboratory.

A happy coincidence, because Friedrich Dierks knows a lot about his great-grandfather’s life and has historical photos, which he makes available.

Born in 1867, Hinrich Dierks was a busy man. He travelled the world as a clerk on a ship and later became a senior civil servant in the Imperial Navy Ministry. Despite this, he retained a close connection to the farming background from which he came.

The curators of the exhibition know quite a lot about Hinrich Dierks – partly thanks to contact with his great-grandson. The situation is different for many people who made recordings in the 1920s or 1940s. ‘That’s why we think it would be exciting to find as many descendants as possible,’ says Antonia von Trott zu Solz. The linguist is responsible for the presentation of the sound archive at the Humboldt Laboratory, which has a collection of around 7,500 shellac discs, wax cylinders and tapes. These include, for example, voice portraits of famous personalities from the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. The core of the archive collection, however, is the documentation of various languages and dialects.

© Privatbesitz Familie Dierks

Portrait of Hinrich Dierks

The last remnants of vanished dialects

‘In some cases, they are the only remaining evidence of linguistic variants that no longer exist,’ says Antonia von Trott zu Solz. One example is recordings from Gottschee in Slovenia. The linguist explains that the language island was largely dissolved by resettlement processes. For minorities that are now scattered across other countries, such recordings are important in order to learn more about their own history.

There are more than 700 recordings of the German language from the 1920s to the 1940s. The recordings were mostly recorded voluntarily in the home village or the speakers travelled to the recording location in Berlin or Marburg. Some of the German speech and song samples were produced during the Second World War in resettlement camps for so-called ‘ethnic Germans’ who were considered German but lived outside the borders of the Reich. ‘They often contributed to Nazi propaganda with Nazi-conformist statements,’ says von Trott zu Solz.

As important as the recordings are for today’s research, the history of another part of the Lautarchiv’s collection is just as problematic. When Hinrich Dierks made his recording, the Institute for Sound Research was part of an anti-Semitic university that had already been brought into line. Many of the institute’s employees were members of the NSDAP and participated in National Socialist science.

The majority of non-German language recordings were made in prisoner-of-war camps during the First and Second World Wars. In this predicament, prisoner-of-war soldiers, mainly from French and British colonial territories, spoke their languages, classified as ‘exotic’, into the gramophone.

Descendants could help to find out more about the people behind the voices

Contact with descendants of the people whose voices can be heard on the recordings could also help to clarify the circumstances and learn more about the people whose voices we can still hear today.

The Humboldt Lab takes a look at the history of the archive and discusses the connection between politics, power and the media. But the recordings are also exciting because they offer an insight into cultural techniques that are sometimes unknown today.

There will also be six recordings on the subject of agriculture, including one by Hinrich Dierks.

Someone who doesn’t speak Low German only understands bits and pieces of the three-minute text. ‘I can snicker along,’ he says at the beginning. Later, there is talk of spinning machines and cloths.

The passage in which he talks about the cultivation of flax in a Low German dialect comes from his book ‘Aus dem Tagewerk Deiner Väter’.

At the time, Dierks was worried that the knowledge of agricultural techniques and his dialect would be lost. In fact, the language and content seem strange to untrained ears today. ‘This is not only evidence of a linguistic change, but also of a cultural one,’ says Antonia von Trott.

The life of Hinrich Dierks

Hearing your own great-grandfather’s voice is a strange feeling, says Friedrich Dierks. ‘In terms of quality, it’s as if he had recorded it today.’ The vivid impression of the recording matches the image he has of his relative. ‘I think he was someone who was good at telling stories.’

But the great-grandfather became a legend for another reason. ‘He made the leap from the farming community to a position as a senior civil servant in the Reich Navy Ministry,’ reports Friedrich Dierks. He thus became the epitome of enormous social advancement.

Hinrich Dierks was born in Aschhauserfelde near Oldenburg in 1867. He grew up in a croft where people and cattle lived together. He was clever, but not very strong, according to his great-grandson. At the age of 14, Dierks was apprenticed to a lawyer as a clerk – which was apparently too boring for him in the long run. At the age of 17, he applied to the Imperial Navy as a ship’s clerk. On the SMS Leipzig, he travelled to China, Japan and South Africa, among other places. ‘He actually travelled around the world once,’ says Friedrich Dierks. He later worked in Berlin at the Imperial Navy Ministry. He was obviously interested in preserving his memories throughout his life, as he left behind three volumes of memoirs: the first written in 1916 at the age of 49 and the last after his retirement in Berlin.

I’m sure he would be delighted to know that his audio recording will soon be presented to a large audience at the Humboldt Forum. ‘He was very keen that the dialect he could still speak should be preserved,’ says Antonia von Trott.

In part, what Dierks feared at the time has materialised. Many words have since disappeared. But the prophecy that dialects would die out completely – or that the entire German language would be replaced by other languages – has not materialised. Change is part of a natural process, says the scientist. ‘Language is always changing, it has never been rigid.’

Date: 27. December 2020