Lincoln Snyder

Lincoln Snyder

December 17, 2025

The Archivist’s Ear: Sound as Propaganda and the Construction of a National Voice in Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde

The Third Reich is often remembered for the visual spectacle of fascism: the Nuremberg rallies, the swastika flags, the equipment, the uniforms, and a color palette dominated by hues of black, brown, red, and grey. The National Socialist regime was, however, just as obsessed with the acoustic domination of space, relying on the amplification of the voice, and above all the Führer’s voice, to lay the foundation of a Volksgemeinschaft. In his novel Flughunde (1995), Marcel Beyer thematises this “acoustic unconscious” of the Nazi era through the figure of Hermann Karnau, a sound engineer obsessed with mapping the human voice. Rather than focus directly on moral judgment or victim narratives, Beyer adopts a Täterperspektive to explore the seductive power of technology and the fallacy of “scientific” objectivity. Through Karnau, Beyer presents the production of sound not merely as a technical act, but as a central driver of National Socialist propaganda. In this essay, I argue that Karnau’s obsession with isolating the “pure” human voice serves as an acoustic metaphor for the regime’s pursuit of racial purity, an attempt to filter out the “noise” of the unwanted subject to construct a sanitized, homogeneous national identity. Ultimately, the novel exposes the hypothesis of the “neutral listener” as a fallacy; Karnau’s attempt to create an objective archive of the era results not in the preservation of the Volksgemeinschaft, but rather in his own active participation in its downfall.

Karnau

The novel’s protagonist, Hermann Karnau, is a sound engineer whose backstage technical role serves as a cover for his obsession with acoustic control. Karnau presents himself as a man without a personal history or identity, describing himself as “ein Mensch, über den es nichts zu berichten gibt” and comparing his soul to “ein Stück Blindband” or an “ungravierte Wachsmatrize” (Beyer, 2016, 10-11).¹ His motivation to pursue a life in sound stems from a traumatic childhood alienation from his own voice; recalling a birthday party where the children recorded their voices on a wax cylinder, Karnau describes his horror upon playback: “Dann merkte ich, daß zu einer fremden, unnatürlichen Stimme, die aus dem Schalltrichter erklang, keiner der Freunde in unserer Runde paßte… Es dauerte einen Moment, bis ich begriff, daß dies nur ich selber sein konnte” (Beyer, 2016, 32). This dissonance between his internal perception and his recorded voice drives him to seek mastery over the “Geheimnis der Stimme,” as he resolves: “Die Stimme muß doch formbar sein… Es muß doch in den Griff zu bekommen sein, dieses Organ” (Beyer, 2016, 32). To achieve this mastery, he attempts to create a complete map of human vocalizations, and thereby shows himself to be a cold, clinical observer willing to dehumanize his subjects to extract “pure” acoustic data. As he notes during his experiments, the subject must be for him “nur genau dies eine… Schallquelle, nicht etwa ein Mensch mit Schmerzen, dem es zur Hilfe zu eilen gilt” (Beyer, 2016, 17). Karnau is motivated by a desire for “acoustic hygiene,” a need to filter out the chaotic “noise” of reality, leading him to the homicidal conclusion that with certain people, “man müßte die Laute solcher Kreaturen löschen können” (Beyer, 2016, 11).

Karnau thus has the makings of an ideal Nazi, and the novel opens with a scene that shows him applying his talents in sound production to help construct the Führer’s mythos. Karnau is preparing the Sportpalast for a major rally, meticulously arranging the sound system to ensure total acoustic dominance. Beyer offers a precise description: “Allein hier vorn am Rednerpult braucht es sechs Mikrophone: Vier für die Lautsprecherblöcke… Eins dient zum Auffangen von Sonderfrequenzen. Während der Ansprache wird es fortwährend austariert, um bestimmte Effekte der Stimmführung hervorzuheben” (Beyer, 2016, 6). To understand the mechanics of this performance, Cornelia Epping-Jäger’s theory of the “Rednerpartei” is essential. In her essay “Stimmgewalt: Die NSDAP als Rednerpartei,” she argues that the Nazi party distinguished itself from other political movements by organizing itself almost entirely around the “akustischen Wirkungsraum” of the spoken voice (Epping-Jäger 149). Epping-Jäger contends that the Nazis used the technology of sound (a “Dispositiv Laut/Sprecher”) to manufacture a sense of ubiquity and intimacy simultaneously, with the goal of organizing “the internalization of power as an acoustic form of experience of a national community” (150).

The success of National Socialism was therefore not only due to the content of Hitler’s speeches, but rather the technical ability to create a synchronous ubiquity where the leader’s voice could be everywhere at once, penetrating the listener’s body. Karnau embodies this function perfectly; by manipulating the frequencies, he makes the propaganda physically inescapable, illustrating the point that the “magic” of the Führer was actually a closed feedback loop managed by technicians. Karnau treats the speech as a technical problem of cause and effect, acting as the stage manager for a political performance that relies on technical precision. He does not listen to the content of the ideology; he manages the frequencies. Crucially, this feedback loop is not just for the audience, but also for the speaker himself. Karnau notes the installation of a specific microphone, the “sechste Mikrophon,” which is connected to a small loudspeaker under the lectern, “der dem Redner zur Eigenkontrolle dient” (Beyer, 2016, 6). The Führer does not entrance thanks only to natural charisma; he speaks into a machine that feeds his own voice back to him, allowing him to adjust his pitch and intensity in real-time to match the Raumklang. As Epping-Jäger argues, the “Stimmgewalt” is not a biological trait of the leader, but a product of the apparatus (149). By controlling this apparatus, Karnau does not merely amplify the message; he constitutes the physical reality of the leader’s presence. Without this technical “Eigenkontrolle,” the hypnotic circuit between leader and mass would break, dissolving the collective trance of the Volksgemeinschaft into mere shouting in a large room.

Symbiosis with Goebbels

The novel further thematizes this capacity for control in the symbiotic relationship between the technician and the propagandist. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, is often viewed as the mastermind of the Nazi message, but Beyer suggests he is powerless without Karnau’s “scaffolding.” Karnau names this power dynamic in the text: “Ob er sich wohl jemals Gedanken darüber gemacht hat, daß er, der große Redner vor den Massen, von solch unbedeutend wirkenden Helfern wie mir in höchstem Maße abhängig ist? … Daß ohne Mikrophone, ohne die riesigen Lautsprecher ihm niemals sein Erfolg beschieden worden wäre?” (Beyer, 2016, 76). In his essay “Soundscapes of the Third Reich – Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde,” Helmut Schmitz notes that in this moment, Beyer “topicalizes the essential connection between Hitler’s rise to power and the technological development of sound recording” (“Soundscapes” 123). The “German Voice” is not a manifestation of a distinct German soul, but rather an amplified construct; Karnau is the invisible technician who makes the illusion of the omnipresent leader possible.

Birdsall: Nazi Soundscapes, Affirmative Resonances, and Heimat

The goal of this acoustic engineering, then, is to build community via sound that enforces conformity. Carolyn Birdsall, in her comprehensive study Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933-1945, explores how the regime colonized the urban environment with sound, arguing that through radio broadcasts and public loudspeakers, the Nazis created “affirmative resonances,” moments where sound “links a power center to its subjects” (“Nazi Soundscapes” 6). For Birdsall, the constant intrusion of political sound into daily life was designed to make individual resistance impossible. The listener was wrapped in a shared pleasure of belonging, but this pleasure was predicated on the violent exclusion of those who did not fit the “German” sound profile.

Flughunde reveals the dark side of this “affirmative resonance” in a chilling scene where Karnau tests the sound system on a group of deaf-mutes (Taubstummen). Because they cannot hear the words, Karnau decides to attack their bodies directly: “Wenn sie nicht den Sinn der Töne auffassen können, so wollen wir ihnen die Eingeweide durchwühlen… Tief in die Dunkelheit des Bauches sollen die Geräusche reichen” (Beyer, 2016, 8-9). This scene demonstrates that the Nazi soundscape was designed to dominate the biological reality of the subject; propaganda ceases to be about persuasion and becomes a weapon. Inclusion in the Volksgemeinschaft is enforced through vibration; those who cannot hear the words are made to feel the power of the state viscerally.

This physical enforcement of the community extends beyond the rally and into the definition of Heimat itself. The novel suggests that German national identity was being constructed not just through martial music, but through a specific exclusionary soundscape. Beyer illustrates this acoustic colonization in Chapter V, where the occupation of Alsace is acoustically cemented by a marching band, forcing the local population to sing with the German occupiers: “Jetzt intonieren sie ein Heimatlied, und lautstark stimmen auch die Anwohner mit in die erste Strophe ein” (Beyer, 2016, 47). This moment reveals the regime’s ambition to use sound to impose a “German” identity even on those excluded from it; the “German sound” is weaponized to define who belongs and who is merely a subject of acoustic domination. The “affirmative resonance” is thus revealed to be a mechanism of nationalism; to be “German” is to resound at the correct frequency, while to be “Other” is to be dissonant noise that must be brought into harmony.

Karnau’s Private Obsession: Mapping Sound

For all his willingness to serve the ends of the Nazi regime, Karnau’s work for the party is driven by his own private obsession: the creation of a map of human sounds. He believes that by recording the human voice, he can capture the essence of the subject. However, this scientific quest for “purity” requires a radical dehumanization of the subject. To obtain “pure” acoustic data, Karnau must strip the human being of their humanity, reducing them to a source of sound. He states his philosophy clearly: “Die Schallquelle, welche in diesem Moment für den Hörer nur genau dies eine sein darf, Schallquelle, nicht etwa ein Mensch mit Schmerzen, dem es zur Hilfe zu eilen gilt” (Beyer, 2016, 17). This is the logic of what Jonathan Sterne calls “ensoniment”—the separation of sound from the sound-source, treating audio as an object that can be manipulated independently of the body that produced it (2). Karnau filters out the “noise” of suffering—the call for help, the moral obligation to the other—in order to capture the signal of the frequency.

Detachment and Dehumanization

This objectification is mirrored in Karnau’s own language. Throughout his reports from the front, Karnau retreats into a passive, nominalized grammar to distance himself from the horror. As Schmitz observes, Karnau’s narrative is marked by “passive constructions” and “nominalized verbs” that erase the subject (“Soundscapes” 128). Instead of saying “I recorded the dying man,” Karnau speaks of “Auskabeln, Umschalten” (Beyer, 2016, 59). Karnau’s linguistic detachment is the textual equivalent of the microphone; it places a mechanical barrier between the perceiver and the pain, and by stripping his own language of the first-person “I,” Karnau attempts to frame himself as a detached, and therefore blameless, observer. However, this very attempt to eradicate his subjectivity serves as proof of his guilt; the erasure of the “I” is necessary only because the actions of the “I” are wrong. Schmitz posits that Karnau’s “acoustic cartography functions as an act of self-protection” or Reizschutz (“Soundscapes” 125), creating a psychological shield that allows him to ignore the suffering he witnesses. Schmitz identifies Karnau not as an archivist, but as a Stimmstehler, noting that “the authenticity of the victims’ utterings of pain remains either forever silenced or filtered through its appropriation by their tormentors’ perception” (“Just Erase It” 146). Karnau claims to preserve the voice of the victim but is actually taking possession of their dying breaths. This concept is crucial for understanding the novel’s critique of the “neutral listener”; there is no neutrality in an archive built on theft. This theoretical detachment is put to the test as Karnau’s role expands along with the Reich’s borders.

Entwelschungsdienst

Much of the arc of the novel is thus the story of Karnau’s descent from a backstage technician into an active participant in the regime’s crimes, taking on a variety of roles that mirror the escalation of the war; three episodes illustrate this collapse. In Chapter V, he volunteers for the Entwelschungsdienst (De-Latinization Service) in occupied Alsace. His job is to assist in the eradication of French influence from the region, and he acts as a surveillance agent and sound archivist, using hidden microphones to record people speaking French in private spaces, including confessionals and homes. Karnau describes standing with his equipment “inmitten einer weinenden Kinderschar” while their father is arrested based on a voice recording Karnau made (Beyer, 2016, 45), marking a shift from setting up loudspeakers (amplifying the state) to using microphones as weapons of surveillance (silencing the individual). He treats the suffering of the families as a Gegenleistung for the opportunity to collect interesting voice samples for his map. This chilling calculation reveals that for Karnau, the “purity” of the archive is worth more than the lives of the subjects who produce it. This willingness to trade human existence for acoustic data foreshadows his descent into even more radical forms of silencing, where the microphone serves not merely to document the ‘foreign’ voice, but to facilitate its extermination.

The Hygiene Museum

The novel takes an even darker turn when, in Chapter VI, Karnau attends a scientific conference at the Deutsche Hygiene-Museum in Dresden as a guest lecturer and researcher, presenting his findings from the front lines to a group of Nazi scientists and doctors. He plays the recordings of the dying soldiers to the audience, and argues that to truly “Germanize” the East, one must not just teach language but physically modify the “articulatory apparatus” of the subjects, even suggesting “medizinische Eingriffe” (Beyer, 2016, 71). This event cements his transition from a technician to an ideologue, revealing how Flughunde portrays German national identity not as an inherent, biological fact, but as a technologically engineered and meticulously curated soundscape. The novel suggests that the Nazis sought to construct a “German Voice” that was pure, unified, and devoid of any noise or dissent. Karnau sees his work as contributing to this goal: “Denn nicht allein die Sprache, auch die Stimme, sämtliche menschlichen Geräusche müssen, […] auf Linie gebracht werden” (Beyer, 2016, 71). This quote explicitly links the “Germanization” of conquered territories not just to language acquisition but to a fundamental alteration of the voice itself. It suggests that “German identity” is something that must be acoustically imposed, by surgical modification if necessary.

Ur-Laut

This methodology reaches its horrifying apex when Karnau travels to the front lines to record the voices of dying soldiers. Officially, he is there to test the equipment for military use, but he misappropriates the technology for his own obsession: he is searching for the “Ur-Laut“, the essential cry of the German race stripped of civilization. He ventures into the trenches during battles to record the “Ur-Laut” and describes placing microphones in shell craters to capture the “Totengesänge” (Beyer, 2016, 58) of the wounded. Yet instead of a noble, martial “German” sound, he finds only the destruction of language rooted in suffering: he listens to the “unvorstellbares Gequietsche” of a dying man, noting that “…das ist der ganze Hals, nicht mehr nur innen, Luftröhre und Kehlkopf, da tönt sogar die Außenhaut mit…” (Beyer, 2016, 62-63). Instead of the primal German sound, Karnau finds only what he calls “nur noch animalische Töne… ungeformtes, ungezüchtetes Ertönen” (Beyer, 2016, 59). The “pure” voice that Karnau seeks is revealed to be the voice of a dying animal.

Karnau’s actions at the front dismantle the myth of the neutral listener. This is the moment Karnau becomes a Stimmstehler who treats the battlefield not as a tragedy but as a landscape of acoustic data for the taking. He describes his method with predatory language: “…hole aus der Tiefe etwas hervor und ergreife davon Besitz, bis hin zum letzten intimen Atemzug, da ein Sterbender das Leben aushaucht” (Beyer 2016, p. 62). He does not just record; he takes ownership of the dying breath, turning the soldiers’ final moments into data points in his collection. There is no neutrality here; this act of archiving is a violation of human dignity.

Helga

The voices that Karnau designs are meant to be heard, and the novel’s second main narrator Helga Goebbels shows the reader what it means to listen. While Karnau acts as a distant technician filtering the world through microphones, Helga seeks to understand the truths beneath the sounds. For example, while trapped in the physical and acoustic confinement of the Führerbunker, she detects the specific breath of deceit in her father’s voice, noticing the subtle shifts in timbre that distinguish his resilient public persona from his desperate private reality. For all the trouble Karnau and her father take to control the message, Helga perceives more than just what they want her to hear: “Erwachsene meinen, ein Kind könnte nicht selber nachdenken und sich ein eigenes Bild der Lage machen… Keiner macht sich Gedanken darüber, daß ich doch nicht alles allein aus seinem Mund erfahre” (Beyer, 2016, 107). This acoustic sensitivity allows Helga to deconstruct the Volksgemeinschaft from the inside; unlike Karnau, who treats the voice as an instrument of power to be manipulated and captured, Helga hears the voice as a bearer of truth. Her unfiltered hearing exposes the “German Voice” not as a biological fact, but as a scripted performance that fails to cover up the fear behind it.

Over the course of the novel, Helga serves as a proxy witness to the physical and sonic collapse of the Nazi project. She describes the deterioration of the adults’ language into “gestutzte Äußerungen” (Beyer, 2016, 40), perceiving how their controlled rhetoric fractures under the pressure of imminent defeat. She has seen firsthand the fragility that the microphones have served to obscure, noting the physical manifestation of her father’s stress: “Sein Hals ist jetzt von dicken Adern durchzogen, als würde er bald platzen” (Beyer 2016, p. 86). While Karnau is capturing the “pure” sounds of death, Helga sees the messy reality of their extinction, the panic and the physical ugliness, that Karnau’s machines filter out. Ultimately, Helga’s narration reveals what Karnau’s recordings themselves cannot: that the last sounds of the “pure” acoustic space of the Third Reich were captured inside its tomb.

The Climax: The Failure of Karnau’s Archive

The failure of Karnau’s archive is perfected in the novel’s climax, which takes place in 1992. Karnau, having survived the war, listens to the secret recordings he made of the Goebbels children in the bunker just before they were murdered by their mother. He hopes to find a memory of life, but the recording delivers only the silence of death. The children ask, “Ist das Herr Karnau, der jetzt zu uns kommt?” followed by the chilling description: “Schließlich ist gar nichts mehr zu hören. Es herrscht absolute Stille, obwohl die Nadel noch immer in der Rille liegt” (Beyer, 2016, 157). As with his tapes from the front lines, the record is not a vehicle for life, but a thief that traps sound in a dead, material form. Confronted with this recording, Karnau attempts to deny his own involvement. He claims, “Nein, diese Aufnahme habe ich nun wirklich nicht durchgeführt… Dieses Dokument muß jemand Unerfahrenes erstellt haben” (Beyer, 2016, 157). But this denial rings hollow. He was the only one who knew the microphone was there; he was the one who set the trap.

The novel strongly implies his presence and possible direct involvement. While the text points to the involvement of Magda Goebbels, Dr. Kunz, and Dr. Stumpfecker (Beyer, 2016, 152), the novel offers a disturbing alternative. The final recording ends with the children asking: “Ist das Herr Karnau, der jetzt zu uns kommt?” (Beyer, 2016, 157), suggesting Karnau was the person entering the room at the moment of their death. Karnau has already proven himself a Stimmstehler; he may also be repressing his role as the executioner, or at least an assistant who facilitated the murder. Karnau tries to hide behind the persona of the objective technician, but the “noise” on the tape—the silence of the murder—proves his complicity. He cannot be a neutral listener because he built the machinery that captured the death. The archive does not exonerate him; it indicts him.

In conclusion, Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde reveals that the “Sound of Germany” under National Socialism was a technological fabrication engineered to enforce conformity and exclude the “noise” of individual humanity. Through the character of Hermann Karnau, the novel deconstructs the myth of the apolitical scientist; his search for a “pure” sound resulted only in an archive of death. This failure is underscored by the novel’s final forensic image: not the preserved voice of the Volksgemeinschaft, but of a Soviet pathologist unbraiding the hair of a child’s corpse (Beyer, 2016, 156). The “German Voice” Karnau sought to preserve became the last words of a murdered child. The reality of the regime was not the Stimmgewalt of the leader, but the silence of the bunker; Karnau’s archive is not a repository of culture, but a tomb for the voices he stole. As the sounds of his final recording ran out, the “acoustic unconscious” of the Nazi era was revealed to be a void.

Bibliography

Beyer, Marcel. Flughunde. Suhrkamp, 1995.

Beyer, Marcel. Flughunde. Suhrkamp, 2016. E-book.

Note: I cite two editions here because I referred to both in class and in the writing of the paper. The page numbers I cite in the paper above are from the e-book edition.

Birdsall, Carolyn. Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933-1945. Amsterdam University Press, 2012.

Epping-Jäger, Cornelia. “Stimmgewalt: Die NSDAP als Rednerpartei.” Stimme: Annäherung an ein Phänomen. Edited by Doris Kolesch and Sybille Krämer, Suhrkamp, 2006, pp. 147-171.

Schmitz, Helmut. “‘Just erase it. Erase it all.’ – Perpetrators and the Legacy of National Socialism in Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde.” On Their Own Terms: The Legacy of National Socialism in Post-1990 German Fiction, edited by Helmut Schmitz, University of Birmingham Press, 2004, pp. 125-47.

Schmitz, Helmut. “Soundscapes of the Third Reich – Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde.” German Culture and the Uncomfortable Past: Representations of National Socialism in Contemporary Germanic Literature, edited by Helmut Schmitz, Ashgate, 2001, pp. 119-41.

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past. Duke University Press, 2003.

1 The page numbers I cite in the paper above are from an e-book edition published in 2016 by Suhrkamp as the book’s 11th edition. The bibliography contains citations for both the original 1995 edition and the e-book.