In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

GRAMOPHONES 109
gramophone makes present those who are absent or dead. [see Immanence
= Transcendence (Death)] This is why it fits well in the landscape
of death, and this is why the narrator, by destroying and thus silencing
the gramophone, conjures the fear that the enemy will return-as revenants.
Since long before the days of the Great War's trenches, gramophones
have served an important function for the international secret service.
[see Reporters] In Egon Erwin Kisch's Die Hetz;agd (The Hunt), the
director of Austro-Hungarian intelligence, Colonel Umanitzky, proudly
explains this state-of-the-art instrument to Archduke Viktor Salvator,
who is inspecting the troops: "This device is a gramophone, which will
be wound up before important conversations. Here is the mouthpiece
... Whatever is said will be transmitted by a needle to the gramophone
disk, and will be recorded" (Kisch, 48). To Colonel Umanitzky's
disappointment, His Imperial Highness isn't the slightest bit impressed
by the gramophone's practical advantages. Rather, Salva tor sees it as an
instrument for fulfilling his status-conscious desire to immortalize himself
as a patron of the arts and sciences: "I will have such a machine
installed at home and will record what I say in the course of the day.
Every evening I will send this recording to the philosophy class at the
Academy of Sciences. As you know ... , I'm a patron of the Academy of
Sciences" (48). Before reacting to Umanitzky's explanations with this
proposal, the archduke indulges in an obsessive stream of erotic fantasies,
and surmises that the closet in which the gramophone is hidden
contains bottles of champagne. The association of recorded music with
champagne, and with women invited in for the officers' pleasure, is both
more absurd and more appropriate within the plot of Kisch's tragicomedy
than the prince's idea of using the gramophone to address the Academy
of Sciences. For the unspeakable scandal lurking behind these scenes
is the private life of Colonel Redl, who was responsible for introducing
contemporary technology-including the gramophone-to the imperial
intelligence service, and who, as a homosexual, is now being blackmailed
by foreign agents to sell top secrets of the Austrian army. [see Male =
Female (Gender Trouble)] The play will end with Redl's suicide.
Eight years after the end of the war that Kisch takes as his setting, an
important technical innovation strengthens the gramophone's link to sex
and death. Microphones and loudspeakers are replacing the huge hornshaped
amplifiers that the early recording industry has been using to