she married Alfonso—to his intended bride Berengaria of Navarre, thereby also outraging the French since Richard was supposedly betrothed to Alice of France", p. 396.

14. SUNDERLAND, art. cit., pp. 32-33.

15. In addition to the works already cited in this article, see ASPERTI Stefano, "L'eredità lirica di Bertran de Born", *Cultura neolatina*, vol. 64, 2004, pp. 475-525.

16. Bertran's song has the form 8a 8b 8b 8a 7'c 8a 8a 7'c (classified by FRANK István, *Répertoire métrique de la poésie des troubadours*, Paris, Champion, 1957, as schema 539.2). Frank cites no immediate equivalents, but this rhyme scheme is closely related to his schema 624, abbacddc, which found with the same line lengths in both in La Comtessa de Dia, "Estat ai en greu consirier" (46.4), and in another, anonymous song whose incipit is lost (461.252), on which see RIEGER Angelica, *Trobairitz: Der Beitrag der Frau in der altokzitanischen höfischen Lyrik. Edition des Gesamtkorpus, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie* 233, Tübingen, M. Niemeyer, 1991, pp. 94-98. The same versifications is also found in Pons de Capduel, "Ma domna.m ditz qu'eu fatz orgoil" (375.15).

17. "D'un sirventes nom cal far loignor ganda" (GOUIRAN, ed. cit., song 11) is said to be set to the tune of the debate between Giraut de Borneil and Lady Alamanda, "S'ie·us quier conseill, bel' amig' Alamanda" (242.69).

18. My thanks to one of the anonymous readers of this article for suggesting these references.

19. In FRANK, op. cit., the *miei-sirventes* is classed as schema 325.01. This schema is closely related to Frank 382.5 – 382.53 (all of which have the same line length as the *miei-sirventes*, but with the rhyme scheme ababccdd and the feminine rhymes differently distributed); or to Frank 407.1 – 407.8 (also in decasyllables, but with rhymes ababcdcd, and again the feminine rhymes placed differently). Among the songs that share Frank's schema's 382 and 407 are several others by Bertran de Born, who clearly favored 8-line decasyllabic stanzas: see GOUIRAN, ed. cit., I, cxliv-clxv, for an exhaustive overview of the troubadour's versification.

20. GOUIRAN, ed. cit., song 21 (80.34), Frank 382.7; cf. Guillem de Sant Leidier, "Aissi com es bela cil de cui chan" (234.3), Frank 382.11; see GOUIRAN, ed. cit., I, cvl, for details. Note that both these two songs are catalogued by Frank under 382, mentioned in the previous footnote.

21. See https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b6000427q/f489.image.

22. Compare the passage from *Le Séminaire livre* XII quoted on note 3.

23. GOUIRAN, ed. cit., I, 475ff.; translation mine but drawing extensively on the one provided by PADEN et al., 274ff.

24. GOUIRAN, ed. cit., II, p. 652. Translation mine, but drawing extensively on the one provided by PADEN et al, ed. cit., 398f.

## ABSTRACTS

The *sirventes* or political songs composed by the troubadour Bertran de Born in the second half of the twelfth century in order to foment strife among the political leaders of his day provide the springboard for an enquiry into the relationship between “music” and “noise” undertaken in the light of psychoanalytic theory. Jacque Lacan’s concept of “voice” situates both “noise” and “music” in relation to the traumatic scream and silence of a newborn baby. Bertran’s explicit themes of love and war may seem more responsive to the notion of “intimate revolt” put forward by Julia Kristeva, which would locate them at some distance from this originary trauma, and yet
the sonic dimension of the troubadour's songs mediates between noise and music in such a way as to threaten the opposition with collapse, while the superimposition of love and war and the threat of death make it possible to envisage performances of these songs in which the singing voice might also evoke the primary, traumatic experiences of silence and the scream

Les *sirventes* ou chansons politiques composés par le troubadour Bertran de Born dans la seconde moitié du 12e siècle pour fomenter la guerre entre les grands de son époque, servent ici de tremplin à une enquête sur le rapport entre « musique » et « bruit » menée à la lumière de théories psychanalytiques. Le concept de la voix formulé par Jacques Lacan situe « bruit » et « musique » en rapport avec le cri et le silence traumatiques de l'enfant naissant. Si les motifs de l'amour et la guerre chez Bertran répondent plutôt à la notion de « révolte intime » proposée par Julia Kristeva, ce qui les situerait dans un contexte symbolique bien loin de ce trauma original, il n'en reste pas moins que la dimension sonore des chansons de ce troubadour révèle une médiation entre bruit et musique capable de confondre les deux termes, alors que la superposition de l'amour et de la mort, et la menace d'anéantissement, permettent d'en envisager des réalisations où la voix chantante évoquerait aussi le cri et le silence traumatiques primaires.

## INDEX

**Mots-clés:** voix, cris, silence, Lacan, troubadours, guerre, performance

**Keywords:** voice, scream, silence, Lacan, troubadours, war, performance

## AUTHOR

**SARAH KAY**

Sarah Kay teaches French and Medieval Studies at New York University. She has written widely on medieval literature across languages, genres, and periods; her work combines the study of medieval texts with philosophical and theoretical inquiry, especially psychoanalysis. Her most recent books are *Parrots and Nightingales. Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry* (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), *Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries* (Chicago, University Press of Chicago, 2017) and *Philology's Vomit. An Essay on the Immortality and Corporeality of Texts* (Zürich, Chronos, 2017). She is currently working on a book on medieval song.
# Making Home, Making Sense: Aural Experiences of Warsaw and East Galician Jews in Subterranean Shelters during the Holocaust

*Créer un chez-soi, créer du sens : expériences d'écoute de Juifs de Varsovie et de Galicie orientale dans des abris souterrains pendant l'Holocauste*

Nikita Hock

## Introduction and state of research

### Introduction

Following the dissolution of most ghettos in 1942, many Jews of Central and Eastern Europe—those who had managed to evade deportation and death—went into hiding. Carving out temporary and long-term spaces in the existing topography of towns, villages and their surroundings, they created precarious life-worlds beyond German control. In these last-ditch attempts to survive by eluding surveillance regimes of both Germans and locals, some Jews literally went underground. From wooden boxes buried in a Ukrainian farmer's barn to bunkers connected to tunnel systems under the rubble of the destroyed Warsaw ghetto, these parallel spaces became settings for a reconfigured daily life. Experiencing the often harsh conditions underground for weeks, months and even years gave the inhabitants time to document and reflect on their situation. This essay examines diaries written at the time in those underground hideouts. In doing so, it contrasts the depictions and interpretation of sounds in diaries written in rural and urban environments, mainly focusing on journals kept underground in and around Warsaw and in the rural region of East Galicia, which nowadays spans the Southeast of Poland and Western Ukraine.
## Aural history of the Holocaust

This study is an examination of the historical realities of this experience of Jews by means of sound. It is thus situated within the broader realm of what has been variously termed aural history, or sound history.¹ Engaging a wide range of textual, graphical, architectural and other sources, this relatively recent area of inquiry approaches the varieties of sound, sound production and listening in the past. Whether taking as their starting point village bells in rural France or the noise of early-20th-century New York, studies of this genre are informed by the notion that examining sound can yield fundamental insights into wider structures of sensation, emotion, knowledge and social attitudes.²

The aural history of the Holocaust, as a field, is at its very beginnings. The use of public sound in the Third Reich and its ideological context are the subject of Carolyn Birdsall's *Nazi Soundscapes*.³ Presenting case studies for German cities, she examines how radio, loudspeakers and rally cries functioned to engage the German populace and shaped the experience of public urban spaces in the Third Reich. Several recent studies touch on the transformation of the aural environment in selected European cities during and in the immediate aftermath of German occupation.⁴ However, with the notable exception of studies on music,⁵ such examinations have yet to tackle in-depth the experience, production and making-sense of sound by Jews facing persecution during World War II.⁶ As a first foray, Christian Gerlach has recently provided an examination of sound recollections in early postwar statements by Holocaust survivors.⁷

## History of Jewish hiding practices

In choosing Jewish hiding places as the setting to which to apply this approach, this essay contributes to what Gunnar S. Paulsson in 2001 diagnosed as the “unexplored continent of Holocaust historiography”.⁸ Invoking what influential Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg has proposed as categories of responses by victims—resistance, alleviation, evasion, paralysis and compliance—Paulsson pointed to the lack of scholarship on the phenomenon of evasion, namely Jewish escape and survival in hiding. While several subsequent publications, including in part Paulsson's own work,⁹ have begun to fill this gap, for the area of what before the war was Polish territory, this diagnosis can be said to still largely hold true.

Of the hiding places of Jews in the General Government, those in Warsaw have been addressed the most. Already during the war, Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum in his writings touched on hiding places that provided shelter from murderous violence and deportations, both in the ghetto and those on the so-called “Aryan side” beyond the ghetto wall.¹⁰ Subsequent historical scholarship concentrated on the building of ‘bunkers’, at times elaborate hiding places in which groups of people would hide during the Warsaw ghetto uprising and after its failure.¹¹ The hiding practices of Jews outside the Warsaw ghetto are partly addressed in studies on their survival in the city.¹² Daily life in hiding in the countryside, small towns and rural areas of the German zone of occupation remains less analysed.¹³ A growing amount of literature on the Holocaust in rural Poland deals with Jewish survival and hiding as a phenomenon of social history, mostly from the vantage point of Jewish-Polish relations, on which it relied and which it affected.¹⁴
# Sources and approach

## Sources

This essay brings these two strands together, introducing the subject of Jewish hiding practices to the field of sound history. As its source base, it takes nineteen published and archival diaries written by Jews in underground bunkers, earthen dugouts and cellars under urban centres and rural areas of Central and Eastern Europe during World War II. A majority of the archival documents have not yet been accessed in Holocaust scholarship. Six of these diaries were written by Jews in various subterranean hiding places in Warsaw, both within and outside the ghetto walls. The other diaries come to us from rural and small-town areas: two from towns near Warsaw and Kraków, and eleven from a cluster of underground hiding places in towns of the predominantly rural region of Eastern Galicia, nowadays western Ukraine. Due to markedly more complex conditions, this short examination excludes diaries from well-constructed, semi-submerged shelters (ziemianki), often by partisans, in forests.¹⁵ Written in notebooks and on loose scraps of paper, these manuscripts range in length from several to four hundred pages. The gender distribution of the authors skews towards female, with twelve of the diaries written by women. Most were adults at the beginning of their diaries, and through their use of references and self-descriptions can be said to have come from an educated background. The diaries are composed in Polish, Yiddish and German. Quotes from archival material in Polish and German are provided in our own translation, with the original sound representation in the text provided where necessary.¹⁶

## Approach

Examining these accounts with an ear to sound is a rich area of research. This is not least due to the fact that the aural dimension, by necessity, crucially influences important facets of life in hiding: the need to control one's own sound production so as not to be discovered, as well as the almost constant emotional and mental engagement with the sounds outside. As a preliminary examination, this essay takes up two aspects of this still under-researched area of study.

Firstly, it highlights how the varying ability of sound to travel between the inside and the outside of the shelters impacted the daily life of Jews hiding underground. If, in the converted basements of a besieged Warsaw or a town in East Galicia, the relatively open architecture forced silence and immobility, the conditions in more insulated bunkers and rural dugouts permitted activities such as singing, talking, cooking and tending to basic hygiene. Most underground shelters fell somewhere in between these two extremes, with different areas of the shelter exposed in various ways. Here, the concepts of “aural architecture” from cultural acoustics and “perforation” from musicology are employed to describe how the built environment of underground hideouts affected the sounds that entered or exited them, limiting or allowing certain day-to-day practices.

Secondly, this essay argues that the specifics of aural experiences in underground shelters contributed to how those in hiding related to the events unfolding outside, and
how they framed their own state of being hidden. For the authors, aural experiences
served as triggers and clues for imaginary constructions of the war-time daily life
outside of the shelter. Relating their own hiding to this inferred everyday, they use
imagery that stresses the protective function or the socially excluding effects of the
underground shelter. The experiences of sound that engendered such framings were
shaped by the specific acoustic conditions in the architecturally varying subterranean
hideouts. Attention to these conditions helps explain the diarists' highlighting the
protective function or the socially excluding effects of their surroundings. The
affordances of sound that play a role here are a topic into which human geographers
and sound-studies scholars have provided some insight. The essay draws on their work
describing the interrelationships between place, sound and notions of presence.

If this survey is a first examination of Jewish hiding practices by way of sound, the approach taken in doing so contributes to filling a gap in the aural history of war and violence. Reflecting on recent studies in this field, Jim Sykes has called for examining sonic life-worlds beyond immediately violent situations and combatant actors.¹⁷ The aural conditions in Jewish underground shelters here serve as an entry point to the wartime practices of a broad range of non-combatants, including women and children. Examining how they experienced and interpreted their aural conditions additionally shifts the focus beyond reactions to acute violence, to attitudes and meanings regarding daily life—both experienced in hiding on the inside and constructed, by way of sonic experience, about the war- and even peace-time outside. The approach taken in this essay thus permits a more complete understanding of the “experience of enduring the entire war”.¹⁸

Inhabiting perforated space

In Warsaw, the mass construction of hideouts began after the German *Grossaktion* or “great action”, the partial liquidation of the ghetto that began in July 1942. In several deportation waves over a period of two months, 250,000–300,000, or approximately half of the ghetto’s Jews, were sent to the extermination camp in Treblinka.¹⁹ The architecture of Warsaw tenements had made this task easy for the Germans: they were able to block the exits from the house, check the floors and remove resisting people from the apartments.²⁰ Following this experience, ghetto inhabitants turned to the construction of longer-term hiding places. In the main ghetto area, underground constructions made use of the debris of buildings destroyed in the 1939 fighting.²¹ In the so-called “small ghetto”, hideouts were also built under apartments occupied by non-Jewish Poles after the deportations, masked as renovations.²² These hideouts ended up providing shelter during the time of the second large deportation action and the armed fighting in the ghetto that followed in January 1943.²³

Those going into hiding underground modified already existing infrastructure. Hiding
places below ground—the largest built for several hundred people—were created by
adapting the cellars, basements and sewers of the densely-built brick tenement
buildings, and camouflaging the entries. By April 1943, the ghetto already had an entire
system of several hundred underground hideouts, located beneath about 450 buildings.
²⁴ They were most prominently used by fighting groups during the Jewish uprising in
the Warsaw ghetto in April–May 1943.²⁵ The construction of civilian hideouts continued
after the ghetto uprising, and underground hiding places made from rubble or
converted basements with additional walls provided shelter for surviving Jews.²⁶

While underground hiding relied on already existing structures in the Warsaw
tenement cityscape, it did so to varying degrees. Little-modified architectural features
created significant acoustic exposure for the diarists. This is especially notable in a rare
surviving diary written in hiding during the first days of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.²⁷
In it, an anonymous woman, writing in a barricaded cellar on Miła street under the
burning ghetto, describes the existential importance of silence and control over
movement in such a hideout. In a refrain that repeats three times over the ten
surviving pages, she notes that when the enemy is outside their shelter, "Our defence is
the greatest possible stillness".²⁸ To leverage this defence, the bunker inhabitants adopt
an upside-down routine common for exposed underground hiding: they sleep by day
and are active by night, so that the noise does not reveal the existence of the bunker to
the German search parties.²⁹ This is a pattern found among several of the more exposed
hideouts.³⁰

In the towns and villages of Eastern Galicia, the widespread building or finding of hideouts emerged after a major wave of gathering, deportation and murder in the fall of 1942. Only a small number of Jews, predominantly young and without family ties, had managed to spontaneously escape the German military advance to the Soviet Union.³¹ Similarly, only a minority of Jews in the region were able to survive by posing as “Aryans” in cities.³²

The majority of Jews in these rural areas survived in hiding places.³³ Several factors
determined the choice of going into hiding. In the generally little-urbanized Poland of
the time, cities stood out in a landscape dominated by fields and forests.³⁴ While such a
proximity to dense woods encouraged organised Jewish fighting groups to prioritize
moving there,³⁵ this was not the case for individual Jews or families. For many, the
forests—unfamiliar, exposed in the cold seasons to harsh weather conditions, and with
precarious supply possibilities—were a last resort.³⁶ Some of those who managed to
evade or escape deportation even opted to go back to the urban environment, as was
the case with several Jews who returned to the Warsaw ghetto.³⁷ To do otherwise
required extreme caution: having escaped during a deportation to the death camp in
Treblinka, diarist Herschel Wulkier headed on foot to his former family town of Łosice
to the East of Warsaw, and joined a group of Jews, writing in his diary, "We avoided the
villages and crossed fields and forests all through that night. [...] I feel secure when it is
dark".³⁸

In such conditions, being able to secure the goodwill of helpers, or possessing enough
money to pay for food and assistance, became paramount.³⁹ Thus, for example, Galician
diarist Marceli Najder attributes his delayed escape to a hiding place to the great risks
of being betrayed or caught and delivered to German authorities, as well as a lack of
resources: "I did not know anyone I could trust, with whom I could hide... I [also] did
not have any money to count on being able to pay for a hiding place, food, or being
smuggled into Romania."⁴⁰ Jews who decided to go into hiding tried approaching their
Polish and Ukrainian acquaintances for shelters in attics, barns and cellars. At times,
what began as an improvised disappearance for the duration of the German Aktionen
turned into long-term shelter for weeks and even months. "I entered my [acquainted]
peasant's house, my heart pounding. He greeted me most pleasantly and told me that
he wasn't sure about 'forever', but for the meantime I could remain with him," notes
Wulkier. He would end up staying for four weeks.⁴¹ Several of the examined rural or small-town diaries document stays lasting close to a year, while twelve-year-old Molly Applebaum endured staying in and out of several improvised wooden boxes under a barn for almost two years.⁴²

## Exposed spaces

For those Jews who did not have the skills, opportunity, money or available goodwill of helpers to build elaborate constructions, underground refuges were limited to basements and cellars as they found them. Such was the case for diarist Dina Rathauserowa, who hid in a cellar in the Eastern Galician village of Peczeniżyn. In the very first entry, her diary is interrupted mid-thought. It resumes with an entry dated the next day: “I stopped writing yesterday, because soldiers were marching on the road”.⁴³ Similarly, as Christmas approaches and villagers begin their holiday preparations, the countryside bustles with activity and traffic, well audible from the cellar.⁴⁴ After fifteen-year-old Leo Silberman loses his family in one of the bunkers in Przemyśl, he hides in a cellar behind a heap of tin trash and a kitchen stove. From here, he can clearly hear the conversations of the local inhabitants—and finds out that they can hear him: “Stasiu, give me a flashlight, someone is snoring under the stairs.”⁴⁵ What saves Leo is the lack of a working battery.

Such depictions illustrate the vulnerability and exposure of Jews resorting to pre-existing structures in improvised subterranean spaces. The acoustic transparency of non-fortified basements put the diarists in direct contact with the outside world, thereby necessitating certain bodily practices to avoid detection by Germans or neighbours. Rathauserowa can only speak to her 14-year- old cohabitant in a hushed voice, a difficult prospect in their emotionally tolling conditions: “Igo is so scared that he barely knows to talk in a whisper”.⁴⁶ The open architecture of the cellar forces her and Igo to stay on their straw mattresses for most of the day.⁴⁷ Similarly, in his basement in Przemyśl, where local people come to shelter from air raids, Leo has to walk “barefoot so that nobody can hear me”.⁴⁸

## At the perforations

Diaries that were kept in such little-adapted bunkers and cellars, and which have survived to today, are comparatively rare. Less camouflaged and soundproof hideouts were not as suited for long-term hiding, and did not provide uninterrupted time favourable for keeping a diary.⁴⁹ Most surviving diaries come from more insulated constructions. In Warsaw, these are the fortified underground “bunkers” that could house entire families and fighting groups. Building such solid shelters even included the systematic construction of communication lines, piercing walls between cellars, and sometimes creating underground routes utilising canalisation.⁵⁰ In rural Galicia, we find dugouts in the ground, located in or behind barns, or behind side walls of cellars. These dugouts were engineered to varying degrees, and could range from primitive earthen dugouts to entire subterranean rooms supported with pit props and equipped with kitchens and latrines.

For the needs of daily life and survival inside them, even these hiding places could not be entirely insulated and impermeable. In the bunkers inhabited by Jews for the ghetto uprising and during and after the Warsaw Uprising, which at times housed and
sustained dozens of people, we find partitions leading to nearby bunkers. On the “Aryan side”, Stella Fidelseid informs us of a hiding place made of two chambers connected by a narrow corridor.⁵¹ Writing in a converted basement under the ghetto, female diarist Maryłka is terrified when a directly adjacent basement hideout falls silent and does not respond to knocks.⁵² Leading to the outside, there could be several camouflaged entries, as well as slits for light.⁵³ In the case of the well-fortified bunker that housed a diarist under Miła street, the diary includes a sketch marking a dedicated spying hole called *judasz*.⁵⁴ Well-equipped bunkers with kitchens also had to manage smoke, and diaries mention constructed chimneys.⁵⁵

The hiding conditions in rural Galicia presented a different set of problems. While inhabitants of bunkers in the Warsaw ghetto or the “Aryan side” could utilise the chaos and destruction of the ghetto and Warsaw uprisings to venture out for provisions,⁵⁶ people hiding in less dense, rural areas would be more easily detected if they left their hideout. They were therefore almost entirely dependent on the help of outside caretakers for food, hygienic needs and information, and the hideouts relied on doorways and entries connecting them to the barns and houses of their hosts.⁵⁷ Thus, diarist Marceli Najder’s Galician hideout connected to a cellar contiguous to the house of their helpers, the Śliwiaks. Clara Kramer, hiding with her family north of Lwów, was able to exit through the floorboards directly to a room in the house of the ethnic German Beck family hiding her. Molly Applebaum’s and Grete Holländer’s underground hideouts exited to barns located apart from the houses of their helpers. Additionally, the more insulated the subterranean hiding places, the more of a problem air circulation became. When the soil around Grete Holländer’s cramped hiding place under a barn near Czortków is wet, the air around the three inhabitants becomes so deprived of oxygen that the candle has trouble burning.⁵⁸ Diaries feature complaints about the air underground becoming so stuffy that severe headaches and nausea ensue and sleep is impossible.⁵⁹ Those in hiding therefore had to arrange air ventilation shafts, either to a nearby cellar or to the surface.

Such apertures played an important role in the acoustic ecology of the dugouts. In his earthen bunker, even a small ventilation opening “the size of a chicken egg” from an adjacent tunnel leads M. Landsberg to note that this improved the audibility of the outside.⁶⁰ The shaft in Grete Holländer’s dugout lets her hear the animals in the barn above.⁶¹ The acoustic properties that doors and spy-holes bring with them at times play a role in more dramatic experiences. When, during an *Aktion* in the Eastern Galician town of Mikulińce, Miriam Guensberg’s overcrowded hiding place runs out of air, the decision is made to open a partition to a second part of the dugout:

> All of us, especially the children, began to choke, so that we risked opening the small doors [*drzwiczki*] to the first shelter. Everyone greedily gasped for that bit of fresh air, but not for long, because the voices of the Germans from above reached us and we had to close the doors again. And this repeated hundreds of times, throughout whole day.⁶²

All these camouflaged slits, doors, entries and air shafts create apertures in the insulating material of the subterranean space. They form what Benjamin Piekut and Jason Stanyek, in a noted essay linking musicology and sound studies, call *perforation*:

> Blockages can interrupt flows [of sound], or flows can traverse obstacles through certain well-defined openings, which we call *perforations*. A perforation controls and focuses flows between two spaces, but maintains separation between them.⁶³
Perforations allow underground hiding places to remain semi-insulated from, but also semi-connected to, the outside environment. Whether consciously designed for that purpose or not, they regulate and channel the flow of sound between the inside and the outside. As openings in the insulating bunker space, they structure the acoustic ecology of the underground hideouts by distributing where sounds of the outside can be perceived.

Such perforations also shape the sounds in the bunker in a less direct manner, by opening the space to animals. While Holländer's three air openings let in only frogs,⁶⁴ others in hiding have to deal with rodents. Landsberg's egg-sized opening to the cellar is large enough to let in mice.⁶⁵ Leo Silberman's sleep is accompanied by the sound of cellar rats.⁶⁶ The sound of rats plagues Dawid Fogelman in his underground hiding space, writing that they “will not let me sleep at night”.⁶⁷ In rural Galicia, while less intrusive, Holländer mentions the sounds of a goat, and Marceli Najder hears pigs.⁶⁸

These openings convey outside sounds into the bunkers and dugouts, and their inhabitants, in turn, structure their activities in relation to these perforations. In the Warsaw bunker on Miła street, a daytime “watch” lays beside the camouflaged spy-hole, surveilling the outside not with the eyes but with the ears.⁶⁹ In several bunkers under embattled Warsaw, taking turns at these listening posts becomes a daily routine.⁷⁰ In the stuffy and often hot underground dugouts in East Galicia, people gather at the air shafts. They keep the listening post company, “air the lungs”, write in silence, or escape the snoring cohabitants.⁷¹ Especially in populated bunkers, these areas become places of community. People lie and talk with each other in hushed tones, leading some to question the efficiency of a guard “because in the changing [of guard], it is easy to knock against something, shuffle feet, or start talking to one’s companion”.⁷² The “well-defined openings” in the walls and ceilings thus themselves become spots of communal activity, of low talking and silent co-presence.

## Apart from perforations

In dugouts and larger bunkers with several areas, being apart from such perforations afforded the inhabitants a relative freedom of movement. When, in Galica, Marceli Najder and his companions consider moving from their earthen bunker to the attic of their peasant's house, they begin planning it by considering how to organize straw mattresses, because “in the attic we will only be able to lie motionless”, something they do not need to do in the main room of their bunker.⁷³

In elaborate underground hideouts, those in hiding are even able to wash laundry. Doing this with ease is characteristic for underground hideouts insulated by earth: Jews in rural attics mention not being able to wash, or taking hours to finish, as every sound is perfectly audible through the open, we can now say profoundly *perforated*, architecture.⁷⁴ Where present, basic hygiene procedures such as these are described as major events that are long-awaited and break up the endless tedium of being underground.⁷⁵

Not being close to perforations also allowed those in hiding to improvise rudimentary entertainment. Having retreated deeper into Warsaw's underground bunker system, Irena Grocher's hiding companions are able to sing.⁷⁶ Twelve-year-old Molly Applebaum, hidden with an older cousin under a barn in Dąbrowa Tarnowska, writes that “the most bearable time[s] of day are the evenings, when we lie under the warm
eiderdown and Kitten tells me various stories, which often make me burst out laughing”.⁷⁷ Further east, in an earthen dugout in the Eastern Galician town of Krzemeniec, M. Landsberg and his companion Rudy read German and Ukrainian newspapers for six hours every day; saving their candles, they spend the rest of their time on what the author terms “discussions after dark”.⁷⁸ Throughout the diaries, such singing and talking provide psychological relief, help kill time, and offer a certain degree of imaginary escape.⁷⁹

Reading the daily entries with an ear for sound depictions, then, reveals the underground hiding places as a very specific form of *aural architecture*: in significant measure, they were experienced aurally, and through their structure imposed a form on what can be heard.⁸⁰ This form ranged from exposed bunkers in which every movement was audible, to hideouts that permitted sound vibrations to pass more easily through certain perforations, and insulated underground hiding places almost entirely cut off by concrete and earth.

The structure of this aural architecture shaped what could be heard at which places in the bunkers. This influenced the daily life and activities of the inhabitants. Highly exposed hideouts, in which every place was acoustically transparent, forced certain behaviours on those in hiding: being immobile, talking in whispers or walking barefoot, etc. In more insulated bunkers, acoustic perforations that connected the inside to the outside became an important organizing factor for daily life. People lay at perforations to listen, or to write in silence. They become social spaces, for example when people gather at slits and air shafts, or when those on the outside plead to come in. In more insulated hideouts, the lack of perforations in turn allowed for various bodily and social practices such as freely moving about, doing laundry, and passing the time by talking and singing. Further sound-generating practices afforded by the most isolating hideouts include preparing food using fire and stoves, listening to front news over the radio, modifying the hideout itself, and even pursuing handicrafts to pass time or economically sustain oneself in hiding.

## Imagining the underground

Apart from influencing daily life in the shelters, the presence and location of such perforations also affected how those in hiding were able to relate to the events unfolding outside, and informed how they framed their own situation. Hearing the world outside was a major factor in their self-understanding, and the particular way they heard it in their instances of aural architecture helped direct the imagination of the diarists writing in these conditions.

In a broader study of hiding in Poland during the Holocaust, Marta Cobel-Tokarska collected multiple examples of Jews describing their hiding places in stark imagery: as a “grave”, a “ship”, a “besieged fortress”, an “island”, or a “prison”.⁸¹ For those in hiding, metaphors serve as a means of making sense of their current life circumstances. They variously emphasize perceived aspects of life in hiding such as feeling confined, being solitary, or point to the constant awareness of Jews of being besieged by hostile forces.⁸²

The diaries written underground also feature such metonymic conceptualization, thus interpreting their hiding under the surface. Among the metaphors prevalent in underground diaries, two will be examined more closely: the images of the underground hideout as a “ship” and a “grave”. Both express a common feeling of
being surrounded by boundaries that cannot or should not be crossed, and thus speak to a central feature of the hiding experience in general. However, what will become clear is that, in using either metaphor (ship or grave), the diarists imbue these boundaries with particular meanings: the conceptualization of the underground as a ship hints that the boundaries of the hiding place are understood as providing protection from a hostile outside world; its characterization as a grave points to the role the hideout boundary plays in existential displacement and social exclusion.

Equipped with the analysis in the first part of this study, it is possible to account for the particular meanings engaged by diarists by examining the aural architecture of their locations. A closer examination of this will show that what inspires and sustains the diarists' understanding of being protected, or of being excluded, are the affordances of sound that vary with the presence and position of semi-insulating and semi-connecting perforations.

## Ship, protection, perforation

In several diaries written underground, diarists use the metaphor of being surrounded by a stormy sea. For Sewek Okonowski, writing in an underground bunker on the “Aryan side” of Warsaw after the liquidation of the ghetto, “The unlit rectangular shelter, in which you cannot stand up straight, is becoming a precious, unique anchor for us, a calm sail, so to speak, in a stormy ocean among death-carrying waves. The artillery shells, fired relentlessly, will not reach us”.⁸³ The underground hideout becomes associated with a vessel providing often tenuous sanctuary from waves of surrounding and ongoing atrocities. The anonymous diarist writing in her basement in the midst of the Warsaw ghetto uprising likens it to a boat:

> In my fantasy, for a moment our shelter seems to me like a sinking boat. [...] The faintest noise [szum] or the distant explosions of grenades elicits reactions from the people, because everyone is on edge due to our internal relations. To put it briefly, a very small boat, with many people [aboard], with little food supplies, swims on a raging sea, and there is no rescue [in sight]. Not a happy outlook. I feel as if the water is searching for a weak spot in the boat, to bring about a quick end. Woe is us, SOS?⁸⁴

If here, the outside danger is described as a raging sea in search of a “weak spot” to enter, Marceli Najder, inhabiting an underground shelter with an upper “chamber” and an earthen dugout beneath, conveys more security through a related image:

> Entering the shaft resembles entering a submarine tower—the hatches are sealed (after all, the enemy is on the horizon) and we are left with the air that is inside. These “bunks” of ours, the lack of a “view”, and observing the chamber through a crack—as in a “periscope”, the listening [nasłuchiwanie] and full “combat readiness” [...] Many times we have compared our room to a submarine and each time we find new similarities.⁸⁵

In such descriptions, we find a first hint of a motivating role of aural conditions in the co-occurrence of the image and descriptions of sound. It is present in Okonowski’s text, in which he connects the “death-carrying waves” among which he finds himself and the “relentless firing” of the artillery shells. The female Warsaw diarist’s description features such a slippage of register most explicitly, when her description “The faintest noise of the distant thunder…” is directly followed by “to put it briefly, a very small boat”. Marceli Najder’s conceptualization is more layered. It speaks to protection and clandestinity, and implies a more goal-oriented military framing than that of a boat
awaiting rescue—but it, too, connects the image of the “submarine” to the practice of “listening out”.

The role of sound in these constructions also suggests itself once the specific aural
architecture of these underground hiding places is taken into account. This is most
obviously the case for the urban bunker of the anonymous Warsaw diarist. Her “small
boat, with many people aboard”, was constructed from a tenement cellar employing
timber and bricks at different places, and features a camouflaged trap door, an outlet
for smoke from the kitchen, and, at the time of writing, holes from German grenades.⁸⁶
The disorientation and fear brought about through this type of aural exposure leads
her to note that “the enemy looks for us everywhere. He listens, knocks, moves
everywhere”.⁸⁷ From Sewek Okonowski’s manuscript we learn that the “unlit
rectangular shelter” located “among death-carrying waves” is similarly constructed
within a basement. Marceli Najder here presents a hybrid image: a vessel that can be
“sealed”, but featuring a periscope and inhabited by listening out, corresponding to an
overground chamber and a more insulated dugout beneath. Among the examined
diaries, the metaphor of a “ship” is found mostly in urban bunkers, and here,
exclusively in those that can be characterized as highly perforated. Diarists in such
hideouts are, firstly, exposed to sounds of danger, leading them to conceive of the
outside world predominantly as relentlessly hostile; and secondly, exposed to these
sounds from many perforations, making the images of being surrounded apt.

This is an indication that the aural environment of the underground hideouts is
involved in leading the diarists to conceive of their current life conditions in specific
terms. This suspicion is borne out by the closer examination of a second image
employed by the diarists.

Grave

Remembering how she visited a bunker while it was still under construction, a Jewish diarist in Warsaw vividly remembers her apprehension. “I remember inhabiting it in my imagination, and felt shivers at the very thought that it one day would become our dwelling [*pomieszkanie*]. At that time I still constantly counted on other possibilities to survive; but the hideout, this escape to the grave during my lifetime, I left as a last resort”.⁸⁸ Trapped under the surface, one of the most frequent images that the diarists use to characterize their situation is the domain of dead bodies. In one of his diary entries, Dawid Fogelman measures “five weeks of being in this grave”.⁸⁹ Molly Applebaum, spending most of her waking hours in a box buried under a barn near Krakow, calls it a “grave that [we] are nonetheless thankful for”.⁹⁰ Throughout the texts of those writing underground, we find similar references metonymically describing their hideouts as graves and coffins.

The question can be posed as to which sensory conditions make the analogy to a
“grave” appear more apt to the authors than the “ship” metaphor discussed previously.
The idea that specific sensory environments inspire the use of particular metonymies
for authors writing during the Holocaust has been hinted at in the literature. In a study
of Jewish ego-documents from Warsaw, Jacek Leociak examines comparisons by the
authors of the sealed Jewish district to a “cemetery”.⁹¹ As a figure speaking to the fate
of Jews, this image conveys the authors’ sense of existential proximity to death. Going
further in his examination, however, Leociak provides a more immediate motivation
for the prevalent choice of this specific conceptualization of the ghetto—an almost
inescapable experience of the authors while moving through it:

The bodies of the dead lying up against the walls of houses and on the pavements,
amidst the feverish foot traffic, the carts of Pinkert's funeral parlour, loaded with
corpses, the mass graves of the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street sprinkled with
lime—all these and similar pictures noted by eyewitnesses had already become [in
1942] symbolic images of the ghetto.⁹²

The authors are daily eyewitnesses of corpses and other attributes connected with dead
bodies. They find themselves in specific surroundings that provide visual cues and
reminders of death. The choice to metonymically describe the ghetto as a cemetery
thus occurs in a sensory environment that makes such a choice highly plausible. While
not a determining factor, direct sensory experience provides a motivation for using
this over other images, such as a prison, for example.⁹³

If choosing to emphasize proximity to death and therefore opting for describing the
ghetto as a “cemetery” is suggested, at least partly, by the prevalent daily visual
experience of corpses, which specific sensory conditions inspire imagining the
underground hiding place as a “grave”? To answer this question, it will be necessary to
examine additional meanings that are connected with the use of the grave image in the
examined diaries.

Grave as belowness; insulation and directionality of sound

Faced with the increasing cold of winter in the open attic of a peasant in Łosice,
Herschel Wulkier convinces his host to dig a hole in the ground under the house. “I did
most of the digging”, he recalls in his notes, “and finally made a hole big enough, or
should I say a grave big enough for a living person”.⁹⁴ Going under the surface is
described accordingly: “The first time I went into the hole, I had the feeling that I
would be buried there while I was still alive”.⁹⁵ On the second day in her earthen
bunker, still under the impression of this relocation, Grete Holländer remarks that “it is
terrible to sit inside the earth [...] one almost believes oneself to be buried alive”.⁹⁶
What connects these characterizations is their conscious conveyance of moving *under*,
or of being *below*, the surface of the earth. Where the diarists access the cultural
resources of “grave”, they frequently do so to express a state or experience of being
submerged in the ground.

The cultural resources that are activated in these imaginations bring with them the
necessary meanings to express the state of being under the surface. In both Polish and
Jewish burial customs at the beginning of the 20th century, the dead are placed under
the earth. In the Jewish tradition, the connection of burial and “placing below” finds
additional conceptual expression in one of two terms for the netherworld, *eresh*. In its
most literal meaning, *eresh* is simply the material of the earth extending from the
surface to an incalculable below. It also stands for the particular “land” or “country” of
the dead, characterized by darkness and great depth.⁹⁷

The sensory conditions motivating the choice of the grave image, then, for such uses of
the grave metaphor, should sustain a sense of being “below”. On first consideration,
this would not point to aural experience. An oft-stated assertion in literature touching
on the phenomenology of sound states that its experience is characterized by multi-
directionality. Building on the psychology of perception and previous work done on
sound in human geography, Paul Rodaway puts this observation in absolute terms:
In sensuous experience, the auditory world not only surrounds us but we seem to be within it and participants. [...] Auditory phenomena penetrate us from all directions at all times. The auditory perspective is not linear but multidirectional—even when we are deaf in one ear.⁹⁸

As is clear by now, however, the particular character of sonic presence in the bunkers cannot be described without taking into account its concrete, material conditions which shape and channel sound. In particular, it is again the “aural architecture” of the underground hideouts, with its interplay of insulation and openings, that allows and limits how multidirectional the experience of sound can be.

Hiding in a bunker consisting of two connected underground chambers during the ghetto uprising, Warsaw diarist Stella Fidelseid is able to gauge daylight from night through a slit. This perforation allows her to hear the sound of firearms entering the hideout, and gauge their closeness in the horizontal plane. “The whole day we could hear unusually loud detonations and constant shots. It seems they were not at our place, because there was no rumbling reaching us from the backyard”.⁹⁹ In a basement on the Aryan side of an embattled Warsaw, Pinkus Blumenfeld is able to trace what he takes to be a change of guard: “At 1 o’clock we heard conversations next to us... After a while, they subsided, and we heard footsteps above us. Perhaps a change of guard has come?”¹⁰⁰ Listening both across (“next to us”) and upward (“above us”), Blumenfeld is able to trace a movement, concluding that the same people had changed location, which he imagines as a change of guard.

In these underground diaries, the relative multi-directionality of sound is provided by the “well-defined openings” of slits, shafts, windows and doors made out of more conductive material. These perforations break the acoustic insulation of dirt and cement walls. Sound, entering through sideways windows and slits, allows for a certain degree of multidirectional spatial orientation. This becomes pronounced in contrast with more insulated underground hideouts, where the awareness of being surrounded by an expanse of sound (water) yields to the awareness of being surrounded by layers of packed earth and clay. The majority of sound descriptions in such diaries are related to sounds happening on the surface: “Already we hear the steps of the Germans above us”.¹⁰¹ The more insulated the hideout, the more the diarists’ listening to the world is forced into a strict directionality. When the world makes sound, it does so from above. To listen to it, the diarists listen upward.

By pointing to the directionality of sound, we can account for the difference between framing the hideout as a ship surrounded by waves on the one hand, and as a grave located under the surface on the other. As the diarists in insulated bunkers turn to imagine their situation, they do so with a vivid and sustained awareness of being under the surface. They are thus likely to access the semiotic resources provided by the images of grave and burial.

Both metaphors, the vessel and the grave, then, function as imaginary mappings. As with the “life-saving” ship, however, the spatial logic of the image of burial is valenced and expresses personal attitudes to the “outside”. When Landsberg’s caretakers, after a visit from above, leave the dugout again, they camouflage the entry. The sounds, for the author, take on a sinister dimension. “One can hear the hollow impact of potatoes with which our board [i.e. the entry hatch] gets covered up. It seems to us that this is the thud [łoskot] of earth falling on the lid of our coffin”.¹⁰² Here, the morbid sense of being “buried” is connected to hearing oneself as located under the entry hatch—but also to hearing the departure of the hosts, and thus the end of friendly contact. A
further examination of the burial conceptualization will show that its more-than-
spatial deployments are, too, closely tied to the specific aural environment of the day-
to-day in the hideout.

Grave as exclusion; perforation and parallel experience of sound

In examining how those writing underground depict their own situation, another theme emerges. Pervading nearly all of the diaries is an acute, disempowering sense of being removed from the centre of action. Once again taking this theme as being sustained by direct sensory experience, a closer examination suggests that—as with the themes of “being surrounded” and “being below”—it is tied to a specific sound environment. The sense of being removed from activity is supported and sustained by aural experiences. These are both explicitly written about in the diaries, and implicitly inform the authors’ metaphorical descriptions of their situation through burial imagery.

Thus, writing in November 1944 under the Aryan side of Warsaw, Helena Midler notes that “on occasion (rarely, far too rarely), the silence is torn by a distant roar of artillery fire, an exploding shell, or the rhythmic knocking of a machine gun: another signal from the outside world.” The existence of these sounds, to her, is a signal, namely the long-awaited “proof that the Bolsheviks are close and the fighting is going on”.¹⁰³ Conversely, silence for these embattled diarists suggests a lack of movement and activity. Thus, the sounds of the Red Army’s advance sustains hope, and in many diaries, unexplained absence of sound is unsettling.¹⁰⁴

Though many of the examined diarists expected to inhabit their underground hiding
places for a relatively short period, their stay in most cases extended to months, and in
a few cases to years, almost always assisted by locals who go by their daily business.
Thus, Jews in rural hiding places often hear not just the immediate sounds of combat or
acute threats. Clara Kramer, who with her family went into hiding in a bunker
constructed under the house of an ethnic German family, repeatedly becomes ear-
>witness to their day-to-day in the conditions of occupation: “Today, the Becks sleep
overhead us, because they gave their room to some soldiers. It seems there are three of
them. We don’t know for sure, but we can assume it from what we hear”.¹⁰⁵ When
Marceli Najder lays on watch in the upper part of his two-storied hide-out, he can hear
the sounds of leisure of both nearby German soldiers and his Polish helpers: “On
Sunday, one can hear some commotion [gwar], the soldiers entertain themselves. The
Śliwiaks most probably also have a party, as can be concluded from the noise [odglosy]
from the direction of their windows”.¹⁰⁶ For prolonged periods of time, these authors
are exposed to the signatures of small-town and rural war-time life unfolding beyond
the boundaries of the hideout.

The diarists at times explicitly connect the activity they are able to hear outside with a
more abstract notion of “life”. Whenever Landsberg’s caretaker comes by to talk and
share news, “These visits [...] bring breath from the world of the living.”¹⁰⁷ The inside,
with its oppressively monotonous existence, often appears in contrast. After Landsberg
and Rudy are able to spend time on the surface and have to return, “We sleep almost all
the time, to sleep off the feeling of ‘being above’”;¹⁰⁸ Landsberg even longs to “sleep for
a year and wake up in a free Poland”.¹⁰⁹ Accordingly, the absence of perceived sound is
often framed as “death”. It is present in frequent idiomatic connections such as “mute
as a grave [*schwieg wie ein Grab*]",¹¹⁰ or "tomb-like silence [*grobowa cisza*]".¹¹¹ It is also found in more general descriptions. When Stella emerges after hiding in bunkers among the Warsaw rubble, she notes in one conjunction that "the ghetto had died out [*wymarłe*], calm and silence [*spokój i cisza*] reigned".¹¹²

We thus find in the diaries the outside, sound-filled environment as one in which activity and “life” is happening, and its corollary of a silent environment as stillness and a sign of “death”. This particular connection of two registers, of perceived sound/silence and imagined life/death, of the experiential and the meaningful, is not accidental. It is rooted in both the properties of sound, and in the cultural connotations of the employed images around death.

On a material level, a minimal definition of sound is the “mechanical disturbance from a state of equilibrium that propagates through an elastic material medium”.¹¹³ This physical definition hinges on activity, and it has been pointed out that sound as a phenomenon of perception points to activity as well. In the words of Brandon LaBelle, sound, “by stemming from an object or body, signals that movement is occurring”.¹¹⁴ This nexus has wider implications. Following his observation, LaBelle somewhat ambiguously adds that sound signals “that life is happening”.¹¹⁵ One sense in which this is the case is that human lives are not possible without generating sonic traces. Sound studies scholar Holger Schulze reminds us that “human beings live and act—and as they do so, they actualize sound”.¹¹⁶ In a more general sense of “life”, the presence of sounds points to the temporal unfolding of activity in the world. In the words of cultural geographer Douglas Pocock, since “something is happening for sound to exist”, sound is “temporal, continually and perhaps unpredictably coming and going, but it is also powerful, for it signifies existence, generates a sense of life”.¹¹⁷ A perceived sound, whether a sign of inanimate or animate movement, can be said to evidence activity.

It is thus not surprising that the authors, listening to the sounds reaching them from the outside of their underground shelters, frame them as the outside presence of activity and life, and conversely associate their absence with death. The idioms and images they employ provide the necessary connotations. In the Polish linguistic corpus, death is lexically linked to and conceptually framed as a loss, end and rest or sleep.¹¹⁸ The Polish word cemetery, *cmentarz*, etymologically derives from the Latin word *coemeterium* and the ancient Greek *koimeterion*, literally meaning “sleeping place” or “dormitory”.¹¹⁹ In Jewish tradition, we find the netherworld of *sheol*, a famously undetermined “holding space” in which the dead are suspended until their bodily resurrection.¹²⁰ As with the state of “being below”, the cultural semantics around death and burial are suited to express the state of being “apart from activity”.

Summing up this look at how diarists in different conditions conceived of their situation, the following can be noted: In most diaries, sound reaching the hideout from outside is a reminder that movement happens “not here”. When the authors turn to imagine and describe their situation, they do so with a vivid and sustained awareness of being placed outside of unfolding events.

For several Warsaw diarists, these events are not just predominantly and relentlessly threatening, but their sonic presence in very perforated hideouts can additionally be said to phenomenologically “surround” or envelop those in hiding. This helps account for the fact that these diarists highlight the protection implicit in their apartness, for example through metaphors of a ship providing tenuous shelter from waves.
In rural hiding places, however, the social sounds of daily life enter. The sustained awareness of being removed from the outside day-to-day takes on another sense—not of being protected, but of being outside of life. The less perforated acoustic conditions remind the hiding diarists of their separation from the relative normalcy of the wartime everyday. Understanding these sounds as indices of life passing by above, the diarists here are more likely to access the semiotic resources provided by images of grave and burial.

Having observed the interconnection of the specifics of the aural architecture and the conceptualization of one's own position, we thus arrive at and are able to account for important differences in the attitudes of Jews in hiding to the aurally present "outside". Being attuned to the sounds that trigger such depictions helps unearth their connotations of protection, morbidity, exclusion or torturous ambiguity. This adds complexity and nuance to previous observations regarding the straightforward association between external sounds and feelings of risk and endurance in, for example, air raid shelters.¹²¹

Conclusion

This study outlined several points of connection between hideout acoustics, inhabitation practices of Jews, and their imaginative framing of the hideout-outside relationship.

For this, it described the cellars, bunkers and dugouts with attention to the sound conditions they created. In doing so, it understood them as instances of aural architecture ranging from exposed cellars to increasingly insulated bunkers. Within this gradation, an important role is played by perforations that channelled the flow of sound from the outside to different degrees at different places. This model brought to the fore and contextualized important aspects of how Jews in Warsaw and East Galicia inhabited their shelters. It drew attention to various sound-related bodily techniques, as well as more complex practices such as surveilling the outside and homemaking routines. It thus directed the aural war historian's ear beyond its common focus on violent moments to the wartime everyday.

The essay further highlighted the interrelationship of the acoustic conditions in the hideouts and the imaginative description of the hiding place employed by the diarists. Examining how much of which type of sound the diarists could hear announcing the outside world, and how they heard it in their shelters, helped account for marked differences in how they made sense of their current life conditions. In relating (and relating to) both the nature of the sounds that could be heard in various degrees of insulation, as well as their penetration and spatial localization underground, the diarists interpreted the confines of their hideouts by using metaphors variously underlining protection or social exclusion. Attention to the functioning of sound thus not just helped describe and understand practicalities of everyday Jewish life in conditions of underground hiding. What these practicalities can eclipse is a world of often ambivalent attitudes and meaning-making—one that became accessible through the consideration of aural experience.

While this survey thus emphasizes the influence of sound on historical actors, it also indicates its wider evidentiary potential for historians of the “unexplored continent of Holocaust historiography”. It is not just true that acoustic conditions are an important
factor for how people inhabited shelters, and that their analysis provides necessary context for understanding homemaking practices and the daily life of those hiding from persecution. Meanings inspired by, shaped through and expressed around the experience of sounds also reveal how Jews related to the events unfolding outside the confines of their hiding places, from searches and battles to social gatherings and daily routines. Taking sound seriously thus has significant potential for the history of emotions and the social history of the Holocaust.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

### Diaries (archival)

Ghetto Fighters' House, Western Galilee, Israel

GFH 6045 [NN, Warsaw]

GFH 21899 [Blumenfeld, Warsaw]

Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, Poland

ŻIH 302/25 [Fogelman, Warsaw]

ŻIH 302/39 [Maryłka, Warsaw]

ŻIH 302/103 [Grocher, Warsaw]

ŻIH 302/161 [Midler, Warsaw]

ŻIH 302/180 [Stella, Warsaw]

ŻIH 302/228 [NN, Warsaw]

ŻIH 302/229 [Maryłka, Warsaw]

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel

YVA 0.33/633 [Rathauserowa, Peczeniżnie]

YVA 0.33/774 [Holländer, Czortków]

YVA 0.33/1092 [Okonowski, Warsaw]

YVA 0.33/1099 [Landsberg, Krzemieniec]

YVA 0.33/2535 [Guensberg, Mikulińce]

YVA 0.33/9399 [Wulkier, Łosice]

Private archives

Silberman, Leo (Lejzer), transl. by Kristine Belfour, in possession of the author.

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GRZEMSKA Aleksandra, “Odmierzanie pamięci [Measuring memory]”, *Autobiografia. Literatura. Kultura. Media*, vol. 2, no. 3, 2014, pp. 151-164.

GUTMAN Israel, *Fighters Among the Ruins: The Story of Jewish Heroism During World War II*, Tel Aviv; Washington, D.C, Bnai Brith Books, 1988.

JACOBS Annelies, “The Silence of Amsterdam before and during World War II: Ecology, Semiotics and Politics of Urban Sound”, Morat Daniel, *Sounds of Modern History. Auditory Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe*, New York, Berghahn Books, 2014, pp. 305-325.

JACOBS Annelies; BIJSTERVELD Karin, “Der Klang der Besatzungszeit: Amsterdam 1940 bis 1945”, PAUL Gerhard; SCHOCK Ralf, *Sound des Jahrhunderts: Geräusche, Töne, Stimmen – 1889 bis heute*, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2014, pp. 254-261.

KAGEN Melissa, “Controlling Sound: Musical Torture from the Shoah to Guantánamo”, *The Appendix*, vol. 3, no. 1, 2013 (http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/7/controlling-sound-musical-torture-from-the-shoah-to-guantanamo, consulted on 01 August 2019)

KOPROWSKA Karolina, *Postronni?: Zagłada w relacjach chłopskich świadków* [Bystanders?: The Holocaust in peasant witness accounts], Kraków, TAiWPN Universitas Kraków, 2018.

KÖVECSES Zoltán, *Metaphor: A Practical Introduction*, New York, NY, Oxford Univ. Press, 2010.
KUCZOK Marcin, “Metaphorical conceptualizations of death and dying in American English and Polish: a corpus-based contrastive study”, *Linguistica Silesiana*, no. 37, 2016, pp. 125-142.

LABELLE Brandon, “Other Acoustics”, *Immersed Sound and Architecture*, no. 78, 2009, pp. 14-18.

LAQUEUR Thomas W, *The Work of the Dead. A Cultural History of Mortal Remains*, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015.

LEOCIAK Jacek, *Ratowanie: Opowiesci Polakow i Żydow* [Rescue: Accounts by Poles and Jews], Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010.

LEOCIAK Jacek, “Wizerunek Polaków w zapisach Żydów z dystryktu warszawskiego [The image of Poles in the writings of Jews from the Warsaw district]”, Prowincja noc: życie i zagłada Żydów w dystrykcie warszawskim [Province Night: Life and extermination of the Polish Jews in the Warsaw district], Warszawa, IFiS PAN, 2007, pp. 321-372.

LEOCIAK Jacek, *Texts in the Face of Destruction: Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto Reconsidered*, Warszawa, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2004.

MELCHIOR Małgorzata, “Uciekinierzy z gett po „stronie aryjskiej” na prowincji dystryktu warszawskiego – sposoby przetrwania [fugitives from the ghettos on the ‘Aryan side’ in the provincial part of the Warsaw district – ways of survival]”, *Prowincja noc: życie i zagłada Żydów w dystrykcie warszawskim* [Province Night: Life and extermination of the Polish Jews in the Warsaw district], Warszawa, Wydawn. IFiS PAN, 2007, pp. 344-372.

MERIN Yehuda; PORTER Jack Nusan, “Three Jewish Family-Camps in the Forests of Volyn, Ukraine during the Holocaust”, *Jewish Social Studies*, vol. 46, no. 1, 1984, pp. 83-92.

MILLS Steve, *Auditory Archaeology: Understanding Sound and Hearing in the Past*, London; New York, Routledge, 2016.

MISSFELDER Jan-Friedrich, “Period Ear: Perspektiven einer Klanggeschichte der Neuzeit”, *Geschichte und Gesellschaft*, vol. 38, no. 1, 2012, pp. 21-47.

MISSFELDER Jan-Friedrich, “Der Klang der Geschichte: Begriffe, Traditionen und Methoden der Sound History”, *Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht*, vol. 66, no. 11/12, 2015, pp. 633-649.

MÜLLER Jürgen, “The Sound of History and Acoustic Memory: Where Psychology and History Converge”, *Culture & Psychology*, vol. 18, no. 4, 2012, pp. 443-464.

NAJDER Marceli, *Rewanż* [Revenge], Warszawa, Ośrodek Karta, 2013.

NALEWAJKO-KULIKOV Joanna, *Strategie przetrwania: żydzi po aryjskiej stronie Warszawy* [Strategies of survival: Jews on the Aryan side of Warsaw], Warszawa, Neriton, 2004.

PAULSSON Gunnar S., “Evading the Holocaust: The Unexplored Continent of Holocaust Historiography”, *Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide*, New York, Palgrave, 2001. pp. 302-318.

PAULSSON Gunnar S., *Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945*, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002.

POCOCK Douglas, “Sound and the Geographer”, *Geography*, vol. 74, no. 3, 1989, pp. 193-200.

POHL Dieter, *Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944: Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens*, München, Walter de Gruyter, 1997.

REICHELT Katrin, *Rettung kennt keine Konventionen: Hilfe für verfolgte Juden im deutsch besetzten Lettland 1941-1945*, Lukas Verlag, 2016.
RINGELBLUM Emanuel, *Pisma Emanuela Ringelbluma z getta* [Emanuel Ringelblum's writing from the ghetto], Warszawa, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2018.

RINGELBLUM Emanuel, *Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto*, New York; Enfield, Ibooks, 2006.

RINGELBLUM Emanuel, *Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War*, Evanston, Ill, Northwestern University Press, 1992.

RODAWAY Paul, *Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place*, London, Routledge, 1994.

SCHULZE Holger, “The Sonic Persona: An Anthropology of Sound”, *Exploring the Senses: South Asian and European Perspectives on Rituals and Performativity*, Milton, Taylor and Francis 2015, pp. 164-175.

SMITH Bruce R., *The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor*, Chicago, London, University of Chicago Press, 1994.

SMITH Mark M., *Listening to Nineteenth-century America*, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

SMITH Mark M., *Sensory History*, Oxford, New York, Berg, 2007.

SMITH Mark M., “Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History”, *Journal of Social History*, vol. 40, no. 4, 2007, pp. 841-858.

SNYDER Saskia Coenen, “An Urban Semiotics of War: Signs and Sounds in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam”, *Place in Modern Jewish Culture and Society*, Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 56-77.

STANYEK Jason; PIEKUT Benjamin, “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane”, *TDR/The Drama Review*, vol. 54, no. 1, 2010, pp. 14-38.

STERNE Jonathan, *The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction*, Durham; London, Duke University Press, 2003.

ŚWIERZOWSKA Agata; KLIMCZYK Wojciech, *Music and Genocide*, Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Bern; Bruxelles; New York; Oxford; Wien, Peter Lang, 2015.

SYKES Jim, “Ontologies of acoustic endurance: rethinking wartime sound and listening”, *Sound Studies*, vol. 4, no. 1, 2018, pp. 35-60.

TAŃCZUK Renata; WIECZOREK Sławomir, *Sounds of War and Peace: Soundscapes of European Cities in 1945*, Berlin; Bern; Bruxelles; New York; Oxford; Warszawa; Wien, Peter Lang, 2018.

TAYLOR Richard P., “Eresh”, *Death and the Afterlife: A Cultural Encyclopedia*, Santa Barbara, Calif., ABC-CLIO, 2000, p. 97.

TAYLOR Richard P., “Sheol”, *Death and the Afterlife: A Cultural Encyclopedia*, Santa Barbara, Calif., ABC-CLIO, 2000, p. 322.

THOMPSON Emily Ann, *The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933*, Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 2004.

USHMM, “Bibliographies: Music”, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2018 (https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/music, consulted on 04 August 2019).

WEINER WEBER Suzanne, *Life and Death in the Forest: Landscape Agency During the Holocaust*, Miami, Florida, Florida International University, 2007.

WEINER WEBER Suzanne, “The Forest as a Liminal Space: A Transformation of Culture and Norms during the Holocaust”, *Holocaust Studies*, vol. 14, no. 1, 2008, pp. 35-60.
WEINER WEBER Suzanne, “Shedding City Life: Survival Mechanisms of Forest Fugitives during the Holocaust”, *Holocaust Studies*, vol. 18, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-28.

ZOHAR Eran, "Jewish Subterranean Operations in Major East European Ghettos", *Holocaust Studies*, 2018, pp. 1-37.

NOTES

1. Landmark studies include Alain Corbin's work on the role of bells in 19th-century France (CORBIN Alain, *Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-century French Countryside*, London, Papermac, 1999); Bruce R. Smith's reconstruction of the sound-worlds and their meanings for Shakespeare's contemporaries in England (SMITH Bruce R., *The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor*, Chicago, London, University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Mark M. Smith's study on politicized sound environments in antebellum America (SMITH Mark M., *Listening to Nineteenth-century America*, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2001); as well as the important works by Jonathan Sterne (STERNE Jonathan, *The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction*, Durham; London, Duke University Press, 2003) and Emily Thompson (THOMPSON Emily Ann, *The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933*, Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 2004) on the impact of sound technology in the 20th century. For synopsis see SMITH Mark M., *Sensory History*, Oxford, New York, Berg, 2007, pp. 41-58; MILLS Steve, *Auditory Archaeology: Understanding Sound and Hearing in the Past*, London; New York, Routledge, 2016, pp. 48-51.

2. On the limitations and promises of this approach, see e.g. SMITH Mark M., "Producing Sense, Consuming Sense, Making Sense: Perils and Prospects for Sensory History", *Journal of Social History*, vol. 40, no. 4, 2007, pp. 841-858; MÜLLER Jürgen, "The Sound of History and Acoustic Memory: Where Psychology and History Converge", *Culture & Psychology*, vol. 18, no. 4, 2012, pp. 443-464; as well as MISSFELDER Jan-Friedrich, "Period Ear: Perspektiven einer Klanggeschichte der Neuzeit", *Geschichte und Gesellschaft*, vol. 38, no. 1, 2012, pp. 21-47 and MISSFELDER Jan-Friedrich, "Der Klang der Geschichte: Begriffe, Traditionen und Methoden der Sound History", *Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht*, vol. 66, no. 11/12, 2015, pp. 633-649.

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

4. JACOBS Annelies, "The Silence of Amsterdam before and during World War II: Ecology, Semiotics and Politics of Urban Sound"; MORAT Daniel, *Sounds of Modern History. Auditory Cultures in 19th and 20th Century Europe*, New York, Berghahn Books, 2014, pp. 305-325; JACOBS Annelies; BIJSTERVELD Karin, "Der Klang der Besatzungszeit: Amsterdam 1940 bis 1945", PAUL Gerhard; SCHOCK Ralf, *Sound des Jahrhunderts: Geräusche, Töne, Stimmen – 1889 bis heute*, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2014, pp. 254-261; SNYDER Saskia Coenen, "An Urban Semiotics of War: Signs and Sounds in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam", *Place in Modern Jewish Culture and Society*, Oxford; New York, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. 56-77; TAŃCZUK, Renata; WIECZOREK, Sławomir, *Sounds of War and Peace: Soundscapes of European Cities in 1945*, Berlin; Bern; Bruxelles; New York; Oxford; Warszawa; Wien, Peter Lang, 2018.

5. USHMM, "Bibliographies: Music", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2018 (https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/music, consulted on 04 August 2019). Further important studies include: KAGEN Melissa, "Controlling Sound: Musical Torture from the Shoah to Guantánamo", *The Appendix*, vol. 3, no. 1, 2013 (http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/7/controlling-sound-musical-torture-from-the-shoah-to-guantanamo, consulted on 01 August 2019); ŚWIERZOWSKA Agata; KLIMCZYK Wojciech, *Music and Genocide*, Frankfurt am Main; Berlin; Bern;
Bruxelles; New York; Oxford; Wien, Peter Lang, 2015; BRAUER Juliane, "How Can Music Be Torturous?: Music in Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps", *Music and Politics*, vol. 10, no. 1, 2016 (DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0010.103).

6. Carolyn Birdsall provides a sophisticated analysis of themes occurring in narrative interviews of air raids, albeit for German civilians: Birdsall Carolyn, "Sound Memory: A Critical Concept for Researching Memories of Conflict and War", *Memory, place and identity: commemoration and remembrance of war and conflict*, London, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016, pp. 111-129.

7. GERLACH Christian, "Echoes of Persecution: Sounds in Early Post-Liberation Jewish Memories", *Holocaust Studies*, vol. 24, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1-25.

8. PAULSSON Gunnar S., "Evading the Holocaust: The Unexplored Continent of Holocaust Historiography", *Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide*, New York, Palgrave, 2001. pp. 302-318.

9. PAULSSON Gunnar S., *Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw*, 1940-1945, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002.

10. RINGELBLUM Emanuel, *Pisma Emanuela Ringelbluma z getta* [Emanuel Ringelblum's writing from the ghetto], Warszawa, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2018. Part. Engl. transl.: RINGELBLUM Emanuel, *Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto*, New York; Enfield, Ibooks, 2006.

11. GRYNBERG Michał, "Bunkry i schrony w warszawskim getcie [Bunkers and hideouts in the Warsaw ghetto]", *Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego w Polsce*, vol. 3, no. 149, 1989, pp. 53-64; ENGELKING Barbara; Leociak Jacek, *The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City*, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009; ZOHAR Eran, "Jewish Subterranean Operations in Major East European Ghettos", *Holocaust Studies*, 2018, pp. 1-37.

12. NALEWAJKO-KULIKOV Joanna, *Strategie przetrwania: żydzi po aryjskiej stronie Warszawy* [Strategies of survival: Jews on the Aryan side of Warsaw], Warszawa, Neriton, 2004; PAULSSON, *Secret City*.

13. MELCHIOR Małgorzata, "Uciekinierzy z gett po „stronie aryjskiej” na prowincji dystryktu warszawskiego – sposoby przetrwania [fugitives from the ghettos on the ‘Aryan side’ in the provincial part of the Warsaw district – ways of survival]", *Prowincja noc: życie i zagłada Żydów w dystrykcie warszawskim* [Province Night: Life and extermination of the Polish Jews in the Warsaw district], Warszawa, Wydawn. IFIS PAN, 2007, pp. 344-372; ALEKSIUN Natalia, "Gender and the Daily Lives of Jews in Hiding in Eastern Galicia", *Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues*, no. 27, 2014, pp. 38-61; ALEKSIUN Natalia, "Daily Survival. Social History of Jews in Family Bunkers in Eastern Galicia", *Lessons & Legacies*, no. 12, 2017, pp. 304-331; COBEL-TOKARSKA Marta, *Desert Island, Burrow, Grave: Wartime Hiding Places of Jews in Occupied Poland*, Berlin; Bern; Bruxelles; New York; Oxford; Warszawa; Wien, Peter Lang, 2018.

14. LEOCIAK Jacek, *Ratowanie: Opowiesci Polakow i Żydow* [Rescue: Accounts by Poles and Jews], Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010; ENGELKING, Barbara; GRABOWSKI, Jan; PERSAK, Krzysztof, *Zarys krajobrazu: wieś polska wobec zagłady Żydów 1942-1945* [An outline of the landscape: The Polish countryside in the face of the extermination of Jews 1942-1945], Warszawa, Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2011; GRABOWSKI Jan, *Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland*, Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 2013; ENGELKING, Barbara; GRABOWSKI, Jan, *Dalej jest noc: Losy Żydów w wybranych powiatach okupowanej Polski* [Beyond there is night: The fate of Jews in selected districts of occupied Poland], Warszawa, Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2018; KOPROWSKA Karolina, *Postronni?: Zagłada w relacjach chłopskich świadków* [Bystanders?: The Holocaust in peasant witness accounts], Kraków, TAiWPN Universitas Kraków, 2018.

15. For more on this mode of survival, see: ARAD Yitzhak, "Jewish Family Camps in the Forests: An Original Means of Rescue", *Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference*, 1977, pp. 333-353; MERIN Yehuda; PORTER Jack Nusan, "Three Jewish Family-Camps in the Forests of Volyn, Ukraine during the Holocaust", *Jewish Social Studies*, vol. 46, no. 1, 1984, pp. 83-92;
BAŃKOWSKA Aleksandra, *Las jako miejsce przetrwania Zagłady. Zjawisko ukrywania siĘ Żydów w lasach w okresie okupacji niemieckiej w latach 1941-1945 na terenie II Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej* [The forest as a place of Holocaust survival. The phenomenon of Jews hiding in forests during the German occupation in the years 1941-1945 on the territory of the Second Republic of Poland], M.A. Thesis, Warsaw, University of Warsaw, 2006; WEINER WEBER Suzanne, *Life and Death in the Forest: Landscape Agency During the Holocaust*, Miami, Florida, Florida International University, 2007; WEINER WEBER Suzanne, "The Forest as a Liminal Space: A Transformation of Culture and Norms during the Holocaust", *Holocaust Studies*, vol. 14, no. 1, 2008, pp. 35-60; WEINER WEBER Suzanne, "Shedding City Life: Survival Mechanisms of Forest Fugitives during the Holocaust", *Holocaust Studies*, vol. 18, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-28.

16. Representations of sounds can vary significantly between languages: CHION Michel, *Sound: An Acoustological Treatise*, Durham, Duke University Press Books, 2016.

17. SYKES Jim, "Ontologies of acoustic endurance: rethinking wartime sound and listening", *Sound Studies*, vol. 4, no. 1, 2018, pp. 35-60, here 37-38.

18. SYKES, "Ontologies of acoustic endurance", p. 40.

19. ENGELKING Barbara; LEOCIAK Jacek, *The Warsaw Ghetto*, pp. 698-748.

20. COBEL-TOKARSKA, *Desert Island, Burrow, Grave*, p. 55.

21. ENGELKING Barbara; LEOCIAK Jacek, *The Warsaw Ghetto*, pp. 796-799.

22. RINGELBLUM Emanuel, *Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War*, Evanston, Ill, Northwestern University Press, 1992.

23. ZOHAR, "Jewish Subterranean Operations", pp. 6; 19 ff.

24. ENGELKING Barbara; LEOCIAK Jacek, *The Warsaw Ghetto*, p. 782; for more on the network: GRYNBERG, "Bunkry i schrony"; PAULSSON, *Secret City*.

25. ZOHAR, "Jewish Subterranean Operations", p. 19 ff.

26. NALEWAJKO-KULIKOV, *Strategie przetrwania*, pp. 36-39; see also ENGELKING Barbara; LIBIONKA Dariusz, *Żydzi w powstańczej Warszawie* [Jews in the Warsaw Uprising], Warszawa, Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2009.

27. GFH 6045 [NN, Warsaw]. Havi Ben-Sasson describes it as the only known diary written under the ghetto during the uprising: DREIFUSS (BEN-SASSON) Havi, ""Hell Has Risen to the Surface of the Earth": An Anonymous Woman's Diary from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising", Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 2008, pp. 13-43, here 7. We can add to this another diary written underground by a woman who worked at the Többens textile factory. It ends after the start of the fighting with an entry dated April 27, 1943: ŻIH 302/229 [Maryłka, Warsaw] and ŻIH 302/39 [Maryłka, Warsaw]. With less reliable self-dating, another diary fragment written in a bunker under Zamenhof street appears to report on the ghetto uprising while it is happening: ŻIH 302/228 [NN, Warsaw].

28. GFH 6045 [NN, Warsaw], p. 3 (dated Apr 27, 1943); p. 4 (dated Apr 30, 1943); p. 9 (dated May 10, 1943).

29. GFH 6045 [NN, Warsaw], p. 1 (dated Apr 24, 1943); p. 8 (dated May 10, 1943).

30. ŻIH 302/180 [Stella, Warsaw]; ZISMAN Asher, "The Diary of a Survivor of the Brisk Ghetto, R. Asher Zisman of Antwerp", *The Life and Times of Maran Hagaon HaRav Yitzchok Ze'ev Halevi Soloveitchik*, Jerusalem; New York, Feldheim Publishers, 2007, pp. 551-516, here 559 (dated October 15, 1942); see ALEKSIUN, "Daily Survival", p. 307.

31. POHL Dieter, *Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung in Ostgalizien 1941-1944: Organisation und Durchführung eines staatlichen Massenverbrechens*, München, Walter de Gruyter, 1997, p. 44.

32. POHL, *Nationalsozialistische Judenverfolgung*, p. 363; see ALEKSIUN, "Daily Survival", p. 306 f.

33. POHL, *Ibid*.

34. COBEL-TOKARSKA, *Desert Island, Burrow, Grave*, p. 86. A concise description is given by Jacek Leociak, who writes of the countryside east of Warsaw: "The topography of the village lacks the elements of the urban scenery. Cobblestones, pavements, tenement houses locking in the
perspective of the street, all this changes into the open space of fields and forests, crossed by bands of roads.” LEOCIAK Jacek, "Wizerunek Polaków w zapisach Żydów z dystryktu warszawskiego [The image of Poles in the writings of Jews from the Warsaw district]", Prowincja noc: życie i zagłada Żydów w dystrykcie warszawskim [Province Night: Life and extermination of the Polish Jews in the Warsaw district], Warszawa, IFIS PAN, 2007, pp. 321-372, here 395.

35. ZOHAR, “Jewish Subterranean Operations”, p. 7.

36. COLE Tim, *Holocaust Landscapes*, London; Oxford; New York; New Delhi; Sydney, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016, p. 51.

37. ENGELKING; LEOCIAK, *The Warsaw Ghetto*, pp. 737-739. While the boundaries of urban centers thus presented a definite psychological and organizational barrier for many Jews, the impact and danger of unfamiliar surroundings can be seen also in instances where Jews returned to the ghetto after seeking shelter within the city: ŻIH 302/229 [Maryłka, Warsaw], pp. 2-3 (dated April 1, 1943).

38. YVA O.33/9399 [Wulkier, Łosice], p. 14 (dated May 1, 1943).

39. BAUER Yehuda, *The Death of the Shtetl*, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2010, pp. 79; 155.

40. NAJDER Marceli, *Rewanż* [Revenge], Warszawa, Ośrodek Karta, 2013 (no exact date).

41. YVA O.33/9399 [Wulkier, Łosice], p. 14 (dated May 1, 1943).

42. APPLEBAUM Molly, *Buried Words: The Diary of Molly Applebaum*, Azrieli Foundation, 2017.

43. YVA O.33/633 [Rathauserowa, Peczeniżynie], p. 16 (undated, approx. early November 1942).

44. YVA O.33/633 [Rathauserowa, Peczeniżynie], p. 16 (undated, approx. early November 1942), p. 18 (dated December 10, 1942).

45. Silberman, undated. Manuscript courtesy of Alexandra Zapruder.

46. YVA O.33/633 [Rathauserowa, Peczeniżynie], p. 16 (undated, approx. early November 1942).

47. Ibid.

48. Silberman, undated.

49. COBEL-TOKARSKA, *Desert Island, Burrow, Grave*, pp. 58; 67.

50. ENGELKING Barbara; LEOCIAK Jacek, *The Warsaw Ghetto*, pp. 788, 796-799; GUTMAN Israel, *Fighters Among the Ruins: The Story of Jewish Heroism During World War II*, Tel Aviv; Washington, D.C, Bnai Brith Books, 1988, pp. 53-57, 91-113.

51. ŻIH 302/39 [Maryłka, Warsaw], pp. 327; 332.

52. ŻIH 302/39 [Maryłka, Warsaw].

53. ŻIH 302/180 [Stella, Warsaw], p. 9 (undated); ŻIH 302/161 [Midler, Warsaw], pp. 5-6; ŻIH 302/103 [Grocher, Warsaw], passim; GFH 21899 [Blumenfeld, Warsaw], passim.

54. GFH 6045 [NN, Warsaw], p. 5 (dated May 2, 1943).

55. Thus, Warsaw diarist Dawid Fogelman adapts a canalization pipe: ŻIH 302/25 [Fogelman, Warsaw], pp. 44-45 (undated); see ŻIH 302/228 [NN, Warsaw], p. 4 (dated May [real date poss. April] 18, 1943); GFH 6045 [NN, Warsaw], p. 5 (dated May 2, 1943).

56. ŻIH 302/25 [Fogelman, Warsaw], pp: 45; 46 (undated); ŻIH 302/161 [Midler, Warsaw], p. 5 (dated December 2, 1944). The shelters in the Warsaw ghetto also possessed something akin to a mutual welfare system for food, see DREIFUSS (BEN-SASSON), “Hell Has Risen”, p. 28 fn. 62.

57. For a typology of assisted hiding places as “under the same roof” and “at a distance”, see COBEL-TOKARSKA, *Desert Island, Burrow, Grave*, pp. 75-84.

58. YVA O.33/774 [Holländer, Czortków], p. 18 (dated August 5, 1943).

59. NAJDER, *Rewanż* (dated April 21, 1943); YVA O.33/774 [Holländer, Czortków], p. 18 (dated August 5, 1943). Depending on the number of people, air availability also became a problem in Warsaw, see ŻIH 302/39 [Maryłka, Warsaw], p. 23 (dated April 20, 1943).

60. First name unknown. YVA O.33/1099 [Landsberg, Krzemieniec], p. 72 (amb. dating, 1942).

61. YVA O.33/774 [Holländer, Czortków], pp. 84-85 (dated July 14, 1943).

62. YVA O.33/2535 [Guensberg, Mikulińce], p. 15 (dated June 3, 1943).
63. STANYEK Jason; PIEKUT Benjamin, "Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane", *TDR/The Drama Review*, vol. 54, no. 1, 2010, pp. 14-38, here 19-20. This application to war-time audition is indebted to: DAUGHTRY J. Martin, *Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq*, New York, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 203 ff.

64. YVA O.33/774 [Holländer, Czortków], p. 43 (dated September 22, 1943).

65. YVA O.33/1099 [Landsberg, Krzemieniec], p. 77 (dated "June 22 to July 3 [1942]").

66. Silberman, undated.

67. ŻIH 302/25 [Fogelman, Warsaw], undated.

68. YVA O.33/774 [Holländer, Czortków], p. 43 (dated July 14, 1943); NAJDER, *Rewanż* (dated August 5, 1943); for more on Najder's situation, see GRZEMSKA Aleksandra, "Odmierzanie pamięci [Measuring memory]", *Autobiografia. Literatura. Kultura. Media*, vol. 2, no. 3, 2014, pp. 151-164.

69. GFH 6045 [NN, Warsaw], p. 7 (dated May 10, 1943).

70. NAJDER, *Rewanż* (dated August 3, 1943); see also YVA O.33/1099 [Landsberg, Krzemieniec], p. 73 (amb. dating, 1942); see ŻIH 302/180 [Stella, Warsaw], p. 34 (but with unclear location).

71. NAJDER, *Rewanż* (dated April 20-21, 1943); YVA O.33/1099 [Landsberg, Krzemieniec], p. 73 (amb. dating, 1942).

72. NAJDER, *Rewanż* (dated August 3, 1943).

73. NAJDER, *Rewanż* (dated April 23, 1943).

74. See e.g. the diary of Sosia Zimmerman, who hid in various attics: ZIMMERMAN Sosia Gottesfeld, *A Mother's Diary: Surviving the Holocaust in Ukraine 1941-1944*, Morgan Hill, CA, Bookstand Publishing, 2015.

75. e.g. NAJDER, *Rewanż* (dated August 18, 1943).

76. ŻIH 302/103 [Grocher, Warsaw], p. 7 (dated 19 October, 1944); p. 14 (dated 17 November, 1944).

77. APPLEBAUM Molly, *Buried Words: The Diary of Molly Applebaum*, Azrieli Foundation, 2017 (dated November 1943).

78. YVA O.33/1099 [Landsberg, Krzemieniec], p. 10 (undated). For more on "newspaper reading" as a practice in hiding, see GARBARINI Alexandra, *Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust*, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 58-94. For similar "discussion culture", see KESSLER Edmund, *The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler: Lwow, Poland, 1942-1944*, Boston, Academic Studies Press, 2010.

79. COBEL-TOKARSKA, *Desert Island, Burrow, Grave*, pp. 119; 186.

80. BLESSER Barry, "Aural architecture: The missing link.", *The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America*, vol. 124, no. 4, 2008, pp. 124; 252.

81. COBEL-TOKARSKA, *Desert Island, Burrow, Grave*, pp. 151-203.

82. Ibid.

83. YVA O.33/1092 [Okonowski, Warsaw], undated.

84. GFH 6045 [NN, Warsaw], pp. 8-9 (dated May 10, 1943).

85. NAJDER, *Rewanż* (dated August 12, 1943).

86. GFH 6045 [NN, Warsaw], pp. 5-6 (dated May 2, 1943).

87. GFH 6045 [NN, Warsaw], p. 4 (dated April 30, 1943).

88. ŻIH 302/229 [Maryłka, Warsaw], pp. 318-319 (dated April 20, 1943).

89. ŻIH 302/25 [Fogelman, Warsaw], p. 47 (undated).

90. APPLEBAUM, *Buried Words*, p. 20 (dated April 7, 1943).

91. LEOCIAK Jacek, *Texts in the Face of Destruction: Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto Reconsidered*, Warszawa, Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2004, p. 179.

92. Ibid.

93. KÖVECSES Zoltán, *Metaphor: A Practical Introduction*, New York, NY, Oxford Univ. Press, 2010, pp. 82-88.
94. YVA O.33/9399 [Wulkier, Łosice], p. 14 (dated May 1, 1943).

95. *Ibid*.

96. YVA O.33/774 [Holländer, Czortków], p. 14 (dated August 2, 1943).

97. TAYLOR Richard P., "Eresh", *Death and the Afterlife: A Cultural Encyclopedia*, Santa Barbara, Calif., ABC-CLIO, 2000, p. 97.

98. RODAWAY Paul, *Sensuous Geographies: Body, Sense, and Place*, London, Routledge, 1994, pp. 91–92.

99. ŻIH 302/180 [Stella, Warsaw], p. 11 (undated); see p. 13 (undated): “We hear the steps of the thugs walking right here above our heads. [...] Suddenly, from the direction of the backyard...”.

100. GFH 21899 [Blumenfeld, Warsaw], p. 5 (dated August 10, 1944).

101. e.g. YVA O.33/2535 [Guensberg, Mikulińce], pp. 15; 17 (dated June 3, 1943).

102. YVA O.33/1099 [Landsberg, Krzemieniec], p. 104 (undated).

103. ŻIH 302/161 [Midler, Warsaw], p. 1 (dated November 16, 1944).

104. YVA O.33/1099 [Landsberg, Krzemieniec], p. 92 (undated); ŻIH 302/25 [Fogelman, Warsaw], p. 52 (amb. dating, before December 15, 1944); see nervous waiting for it, YVA O.33/2535 [Guensberg, Mikulińce], p. 41 (dated November 15, 1943).

105. KRAMER Clara, *Tyleśmy już przeszli: dziennik pisany w bunkrze (Żółkiew 1942-1944)* [We have gone through so much: A diary written in the bunker (Żółkiew 1942-1944)], Warszawa, Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2017, p. 99 (dated March 27, 1944).

106. NAJDER, *Rewanz* (dated August 5, 1943).

107. YVA O.33/1099 [Landsberg, Krzemieniec], p. 116 (dated November 21, 1943).

108. *Ibid.*, p. 120 (dated November 25, 1943).

109. *Ibid.*, p. 118 (dated November 21, 1943).

110. YVA O.33/774 [Holländer, Czortków], p. 91 (undated).

111. KRAMER, *Tyleśmy już przeszli*, p. 79 (dated February 27, 1944).

112. ŻIH 302/180 [Stella, Warsaw], p. 35 (undated).

113. BERG Richard E., "Sound", *Encyclopedia Britannica* (https://www.britannica.com/science/sound-physics, consulted on 01 August 2019).

114. LABELLE Brandon, "Other Acoustics", *Immersed Sound and Architecture*, no. 78, 2009, pp. 14-18, here 16.

115. *Ibid*.

116. SCHULZE Holger, "The Sonic Persona: An Anthropology of Sound", *Exploring the Senses: South Asian and European Perspectives on Rituals and Performativity*, Milton, Taylor and Francis 2015, pp. 164-175, here 165.

117. POCOCK Douglas, "Sound and the Geographer", *Geography*, vol. 74, no. 3, 1989, pp. 193-200, 196.

118. KUCZOK Marcin, "Metaphorical conceptualizations of death and dying in American English and Polish: a corpus-based contrastive study", *Linguistica Silesiana*, no. 37, 2016, p. 125-142.

119. LAQUEUR Thomas W, *The Work of the Dead. A Cultural History of Mortal Remains*, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 140.

120. TAYLOR Richard P., "Sheol", *Death and the Afterlife: A Cultural Encyclopedia*, Santa Barbara, Calif., ABC-CLIO, 2000, p. 322.

121. Thus, for instance, Carolyn Birdsall, examining interviews with German civilians in World War II, outlined themes of risk and endurance, as well as the connection the interviewees made between the intensity and regularity of the sounds and the perception of one's “enduring” self, see BIRDSALL, “Sound Memory”, p. 122 ff.
ABSTRACTS

This essay examines the depictions and interpretation of auditory experiences in a sample of Jewish diaries that were written in underground bunkers, earthen dugouts and cellars beneath urban centres in and around Warsaw and in the rural region of East Galicia in World War II. Concepts from musicology and sound studies are applied to model the subterranean dugouts as instances of “aural architecture” set through with perforations channelling the flow of sound from the outside. This highlights and contextualizes important aspects of how Jews in East Galicia inhabited their shelters. In particular, it draws attention to various sound-related bodily techniques and to more complex practices, such as surveilling “the outside” and the adapted routines of homemaking that shaped daily life in these hiding places. The essay further posits an interrelationship between the acoustic conditions in the hideouts and the imaginative descriptions employed by the authors to describe their hideouts. Examining what the diarists could hear of the outside world, and how it sounded to them in their shelters, helps account for marked differences in how they made sense of their current life conditions. Depending on both the nature of the sounds that could be heard, and their penetration and spatial localization underground, the diarists interpret the confines of their hideouts by using metaphors variously underlining protection and social exclusion.

Cet article s'intéresse aux expériences auditives décrites et interprétées dans des journaux intimes tenus lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale par des Juifs réfugiés dans des bunkers souterrains, abris et caves situées sous les centres urbains de Varsovie et de ses alentours, ainsi que dans la région rurale de la Galice orientale. Des concepts de la musicologie et des sound studies permettent de caractériser ces abris comme des instances d'« architecture sonore », les flux sonores de l'extérieur étant canalisés par des conduits perforés. Cette étude met donc en lumière, et contextualise, des aspects importants de la façon dont les Juifs de Galicie orientale ont habité leurs abris. Une attention particulière est conférée à la variété de techniques corporelles relatives au son ainsi qu'à des pratiques plus complexes – surveiller « l'extérieur », adapter les routines quant aux façons d'habiter – façonnant la vie quotidienne dans ces lieux de dissimulation. L'article traite ensuite de l'interaction entre les conditions acoustiques dans les cachettes et les descriptions imaginatives qui sont faites de ces cachettes. En examinant ce que les auteurs des carnets pouvaient entendre du monde extérieur et la façon dont cela sonnait à leurs oreilles, il est alors possible de rendre compte de différences prononcés s'agissant du sens donné aux conditions de vie. Tributaires non seulement de la nature des sons qui pouvaient être entendus, mais aussi de leur pénétration et localisation dans le souterrain, ces auteurs donnent aux confins de leurs cachettes une interprétation usant de métaphores qui mettent variablement en lumière la protection et l'exclusion sociale.

INDEX

Keywords: Jews in hiding, sound history, aural architecture, resilience, survival, imagination

Mots-clés: Juifs cachés, histoire sonore, architecture sonore, résilience, survie, imagination
# AUTHOR

## NIKITA HOCK

Nikita Hock studied Jewish and Religious Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, as well as Cultural Theory and History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He has measured religious sonic spaces in Namibia and curated a sound exhibit at the Märkisches Museum in Berlin. As Research Assistant, he taught seminars on Auditory Culture Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and served as chief editor of the Berlin-based Kulturwelle radio show. He is currently pursuing his PhD at the Historical Institute in Bern, examining the sonic dimension in Jewish wartime diaries.
Interview and Commentaries

Entretien et commentaires
# De la musique à la lutte armée, de 1968 à Action directe : entretien avec Jean-Marc Rouillan

*From Music to Armed Struggle, from 1968 to Action Directe: An Interview with Jean-Marc Rouillan*

Luis Velasco-Pufleau

## NOTE DE L'AUTEUR

Les propos qui suivent sont issus d'un entretien à la Maison des métallos à Paris, réalisé le 10 avril 2019. Cette rencontre fait partie des recherches que je mène depuis plusieurs années sur le rôle du son et de la musique dans des dynamiques de violence et de lutte armée. Dans ce cadre, le témoignage de Jean-Marc Rouillan m'a paru important. Le texte conserve dans la mesure du possible le ton général de la rencontre, notamment le tutoiement entre les deux parties. Je voudrais remercier Rémi Philton, Stéphanie Gernet et Thierry Discepolo pour leurs contributions à la réalisation ou à l'édition de cet entretien.

## Introduction

1

Jean-Marc Rouillan est né à Auch (France) en 1952. Il participe à la lutte antifranquiste et au mouvement autonome en Espagne et en France à la fin des années 1960 et au début des années 1970. Puis, il s'engage dans la lutte armée au sein d'Action directe (1977-1987). Qualifié de groupe terroriste d'extrême gauche par l'État français et les médias, les membres d'Action directe se considèrent comme un groupe révolutionnaire européen – au même titre que la Fraction armée rouge (Rote Armee Fraktion, RAF) en Allemagne et les Brigades Rouges (Brigate Rosse, BR) en Italie. Pour Action directe, la lutte pour l'émancipation et l'autonomie était indissociable « d'une remise en cause du
monopole de la violence détenu par l'État »¹. De ce fait, la lutte armée est constitutive de leur existence : braquages de banques, mitraillages et attentats à la bombe contre des bâtiments de l'État ou d'organisations militaires internationales (Otan, Interpol), puis des assassinats ciblés de dirigeants industriels et de responsables militaires.

2

En février 1987 Jean-Marc Rouillan est arrêté avec les autres membres du noyau historique d'Action directe et condamné à la réclusion à perpétuité. Il passe 28 ans en prison, dont une dizaine à l'isolement. Il est soumis à plusieurs régimes de liberté conditionnelle entre 2007 et 2018. Libéré depuis le 18 mai 2018, il peut dorénavant s'exprimer publiquement sur les faits pour lesquels il a été condamné. Dans cet entretien, Jean-Marc Rouillan parle des liens entre sa pratique musicale et l'expérience sensible de son engagement politique depuis 1968, du rôle de la musique et du son dans la lutte armée d'Action directe, ainsi que de la place qu'il attribue à la musique dans la mémoire des luttes politiques.

Musique et politique : de 1968 à Action directe

**LUIS VELASCO-PUFLEAU** : Dans ton livre *Je regrette*, tu racontes qu'à une époque tu jouais de la guitare et de la basse électrique². Quel rôle a eu la musique dans ton engagement politique et dans le choix de la violence armée ?

**Jean-Marc Rouillan** : Il faudrait revenir tout à fait au début de mon engagement, parce que mon engagement politique en 1968 est précédé par un engagement musical. La musique, la littérature, la poésie et la culture underground des années 1960 ont été centrales dans mon engagement. Jouer de la musique c'était faire de l'underground en prévision de quelque chose, en prévision d'un affrontement. Mais cela ne pouvait pas satisfaire l'engagement qu'allait prendre ma vie. Finalement, 1968 est arrivé et je suis passé de la musique à l'engagement politique – c'est complexe et ne peut être délié. Ensuite, l'engagement armé a pris sa source dans la même culture que le mouvement punk et le mouvement autonome. Pour moi comme pour les autres membres d'Action directe, la musique, la littérature, la poésie et la peinture ont eu une importance cruciale dans notre action armée.

**LVP** : De quelle façon ton écoute de la musique a-t-elle donné sens à l'affrontement à venir ?

**JMR** : Quand j'étais gamin, l'écoute d'une chanson a été un choc. J'écoutais devant le jukebox la chanson « Gloria » de Them, un groupe irlandais des années 1960. Après le solo de cette chanson, il y a une reprise où tu sens vraiment qu'il va se passer quelque chose, qu'il faut qu'il se passe quelque chose. Quand j'écoutais cette musique, je me suis dit : « Dans nos vies, il va se passer quelque chose ». La vague musicale anglaise a précédé 1968, elle l'a formé culturellement mais elle l'a précédé dans l'expression : « On est la génération du babyboom et on ne va pas se satisfaire d'être commandés pas les vieux, d'être toujours en gris ». Cette idée, c'est la musique qui l'a exprimée. En parlant d'une histoire d'amour, les Them ont dit : « On va faire bouger le monde ».

**LVP** : Puis 1968 a matérialisé les changements que tu attendais.

**JMR** : La musique a fait partie de cette attente de la généralisation du conflit, dans lequel j'allais prendre ma part. Avant la première manifestation que j'ai faite en 1968, on attendait dans un bar en écoutant le jukebox pour aller répéter. Il y a un copain qui est rentré dans le bar et qui nous a dit : « Comment, vous allez répéter alors qu'il y a la manif ? On va aller se bastonner avec les flics ». Et on a dit : « Ok, on va se
bastonner ». Après mai-juin 1968, l'engagement militant a fait que je ne pouvais plus
jouer de la musique. C'était un choix.

**LVP** : Tu as donc « remisé ta guitare Fender » et abandonné tes « projets d'installation dans un squat de musicos près de Piccadilly Circus »³. As-tu complètement arrêté de jouer de la musique après 1968 ?

**JMR** : Je n'ai pratiquement plus joué, sauf dans les planques en Espagne au début des années 1970, quand je participais à la lutte armée contre la dictature franquiste. La plupart des camarades espagnols catalans avaient eu une vie musicale avant d'avoir une vie dans la clandestinité. Il y avait toujours des guitares et les gens en jouaient lors des soirées. Parfois, dans la journée, on jouait ensemble quelques accords, on chantait. J'avais une culture de la chanson contestataire antifranquiste à travers Paco Ibáñez et aussi latino-américaine avec Quilapayún. À cette époque, on écoutait beaucoup de musique.

**LVP** : Quelle était la musique que tu écoutais à l'époque d'Action directe ?

**JMR** : La musique qu'on écoutait au début d'Action directe, dans nos meetings ou dans les autoradios de nos voitures en 1977-1978, était principalement du punk et un peu de rockabilly. On écoutait aussi des chanteurs, par exemple Léo Ferré, dont les paroles étaient proches de notre engagement militant. Mais surtout on écoutait du punk : The Clash, beaucoup plus que les Sex Pistols. On y retrouvait une politisation qui nous correspondait, la culture punk du « Do it yourself – DIY [Fais le toi-même] » a été décisive pour nous.

**LVP** : Alliez-vous souvent écouter des concerts ensemble ?

**JMR** : Oui, à cette époque on faisait des actions armées mais on n'était pas vraiment recherchés, donc on pouvait aller voir des concerts. Une de ces aventures musicales du noyau historique d'Action directe est quand on a été à Londres en juillet 1977 pour assister à un grand festival de rockabilly. On a vu Crazy Cavan et d'autres vieux groupes de rockabilly. Puis le soir on est allés au Marquee Club, où on a vu un concert des Pirates, l'ancien groupe de Johnny Kidd. L'année suivante, on a vu The Clash en concert à Paris⁴.

**LVP** : Quelle importance a eu ce concert pour vous ?

**JMR** : Il a été important parce que c'était à l'époque du mouvement autonome. En 1978, on avait gardé l'esprit de free music, cette revendication issue de la fin des années 1960 de ne pas payer les concerts quand c'étaient des concerts montés par des grosses sociétés qui faisaient du fric avec la musique. Quand on est allés voir les Clash, on était environ trois cents autonomes et on avait dit qu'on allait rentrer en force. C'est à ce moment que Joe Strummer est sorti et a demandé ce qu'il se passait⁵. On lui a expliqué la situation, qu'on n'allait pas payer pour entrer les voir. Il nous a dit : « D'accord, dès qu'on commence la première chanson, ils vont ouvrir les portes et vous pourrez entrer ». C'est la première fois que j'ai rencontré Joe Strummer. La deuxième fois c'était en 1981 (au début des années Mitterrand, quand Action directe était légal), il était venu à Paris faire un concert au théâtre Mogador et on s'est vus pour boire un café.

## Résister à la marchandisation de la musique
**LVP** : Cet épisode entre en résonance avec un autre épisode de ton livre *Je regrette*, quand tu racontes ta volonté de « libérer la musique des marchands », en marge du festival de l'île de Wight en 1970⁶.

**JMR** : Notre génération de militants était habituée à la naissance des groupes dans les pubs ou les petites salles de concert. On prenait une bière et on écoutait de la musique, il y avait toute une ambiance. Puis est arrivée cette mode des grands concerts, au départ gratuits mais on s'est bientôt retrouvés derrière de gros investisseurs qui faisaient du fric avec ça. Il y a eu les premières éditions du festival de l'île de Wight, mais je n'y suis pas allé, vu le prix des places et l'ambiance concentrationnaire de la musique : on faisait ça à la campagne et ils préparaient un château fort en tôle pour protéger leur business. En 1970, il y a eu un appel de militants pour aller à l'île de Wight et obliger les organisateurs à rendre le festival gratuit. On s'est présentés et pendant quinze jours on a fait tous les soirs des bagarres avec les flics, avec les Hells Angels et avec les polices privées qui gardaient le truc. Jusqu'à faire que le festival soit gratuit. La musique libre était une lutte politique, on la concevait comme telle.

**LVP** : Vous disiez non à la marchandisation de la musique tout en soutenant les musiciens.

**JMR** : Les musiciens doivent pouvoir vivre de leur musique, c'est pourquoi on payait comme tout le monde quand il s'agissait de petits concerts, quand on savait que l'argent allait aux musiciens. Mais à Wight ou à Woodstock, c'étaient des grosses boîtes qui se montaient pour faire des festivals soi-disant libres, de paix et d'amour. Mais c'était pour faire du fric. Ça n'a pas été facile de lutter contre la marchandisation, le monopole de ces grandes sociétés qui ont compris qu'elles pouvaient faire énormément de fric avec le rock. Alors que c'était notre musique, la musique des pubs, la musique des petits concerts, la musique de nos meetings. Cette lutte s'est prolongée durant les années 1970 jusqu'à l'époque punk. Là, il y a eu une divergence. D'un côté il y avait la musique qui s'écoutait dans des grandes salles, comme à la Villette. Une musique emprisonnée, protégée par la police. D'un autre côté il y avait le punk, avec l'esprit *Do it yourself*. Les gens se disaient : « Moi aussi je peux jouer du punk. Donc on va refaire notre musique. Parce que celle-là ne nous appartient plus. Elle a été récupérée ». L'esprit de la *free music*, c'était de retrouver un espace commun avec les musiciens, comme dans les pubs britanniques au début des années 1960.

**LVP** : Faire de la musique soi-même était un acte d'émancipation ?

**JMR** : Oui, d'émancipation des personnes, et aussi de la musique. Parce que parfois les groupes ont déplacé les limites de la musique. Avec leurs cris, par exemple, c'était plus l'expression d'une rage que d'une musique issue de la soul ou du blues comme on avait l'habitude d'entendre.

**LVP** : Quelle était la musique que vous n'écoutiez pas, celle que vous ne supportiez pas ?

**JMR** : On avait un terme pour la définir : la « soupe ». On ne supportait pas cette musique, qui n'est plus qu'une marchandise. Par exemple, j'écoutais les Rolling Stones jusqu'à 1972-1973. Après, ce n'est que de la soupe. Ils ont fait de la disco et d'autres choses pour faire du fric. Du moment où la musique ne sert qu'à faire du fric, il n'y a plus aucun message politique. Et pas que dans les paroles, aussi dans le son.
**LVP** : Y avait-il d'autres groupes britanniques que tu ne supportais pas ?

**JMR** : Des groupes comme Cream, où jouait Eric Clapton. Clapton est quelqu'un que je n'ai jamais supporté, même quand il était avec les Yardbirds. Clapton faisait partie des gens qui puaient le « Je veux faire du fric, je joue de la guitare pour faire du fric ». Ce n'était pas quelqu'un qui accompagnait des luttes – d'ailleurs, plus tard, il a été un sympathisant des idées du National front et toutes ces conneries fascistes. Un peu comme David Bowie, il faisait des super chansons, mais ça puait trop le fric. Ça ne correspondait pas à l'engagement militant de notre génération.

**LVP** : En rapport avec votre idéologie anti-impérialiste, associez-vous certains groupes à l'impérialisme étatsunien ?

**JMR** : Je pense que du moment où des groupes ont vendu leur musique aux grands managers, leur musique a d'une certaine façon « impérialisé » notre culture. Même des groupes comme le Velvet Underground, ça puait trop le faux underground. Les groupes que j'ai suivis sont des groupes que j'ai vus dans des pubs ou dans des petits concerts.

Musique et lutte armée

**LVP** : À l'époque d'Action directe, écoutiez-vous de la musique avant vos actions armées ?

**JMR** : Non, on n'écoutait pas de musique. Il y avait une concentration extrêmement forte, il y avait aussi la peur. La musique venait après, quand il y avait eu un coup de chaud, pour se décontracter ou pour faire descendre l'adrénaline. C'étaient les débuts du walkman. Il y avait donc des militants qui, après les actions armées, mettaient de la musique dans leur walkman. Mais ce n'était pas forcement la musique qu'on écoutait le reste de la journée. À ce moment-là, on écoutait par exemple du Pink Floyd ou d'autres choses plutôt « zen ». Parfois on écoutait aussi de la musique classique, du Mozart ou du Fauré, par exemple.

**LVP** : Cette écoute était plutôt une écoute solitaire.

**JMR** : Oui, quand quelqu'un avait besoin de la musique pour décompresser, il prenait un verre et le walkman, assis sur un fauteuil.

**LVP** : Chantiez-vous après vos actions armées ?

**JMR** : Pas vraiment, mais cela pouvait arriver. Récemment je suis allé à Rome et une camarade italienne m'a dit : « Tu te souviens quand, après une action, on chantait une chanson pop italienne ridicule, “Sarà Perché Ti Amo”... ». En effet, je me suis souvenu qu'on la chantait à tue-tête dans la voiture, pour rigoler.

**LVP** : Et le soir, y avait-il aussi des moments d'écoute collective ?

**JMR** : Oui, bien sûr, mais elle n'avait pas la même fonction. Comme les appartements étaient souvent collectifs et que la consigne pour les clandestins était de ne pas sortir après 21 heures, le soir chacun mettait son 33 tours à tour de rôle. Le répertoire était plus varié, des vieux disques des années 1960, du punk ou du rock. Comme on ne regardait pas la télévision, c'était donc la musique ou l'écriture. La musique était quotidienne.

**LVP** : Une autre caractéristique de votre lutte armée est sa dimension internationaliste, qui a pris la forme d'échanges et d'actions communes avec d'autres groupes armés européens (RAF, Brigades Rouges) ou du Moyen Orient (OLP, kurdes). Partagiez-vous de la musique
entre militants lorsque vous étiez dans un autre pays ou qu'il y avait des militants étrangers qui passaient chez vous ?

**JMR** : Généralement, on écoutait la musique qu'écoutaient les militants de l'endroit où on était. Mais même si les échanges musicaux n'étaient pas quelque chose de central dans nos activités, ils ont eu une influence sur nos sphères musicales. Au début des années 1970 en Espagne, j'ai fait découvrir aux camarades catalans de la musique anglaise, pas celle qu'ils écoutaient dans leurs radios mais de la musique plutôt *garage*, les premiers T. Rex, par exemple. À l'époque de la fin d'Action directe, les militants allemands de la RAF écoutaient beaucoup de musique *indus* (*industrial music*), bien plus que le punk. Grâce à eux, j'ai découvert cette musique que j'ai commencé à écouter. On essayait de partager ce qu'on aimait.

**LVP** : Quelles émotions associes-tu à la musique partagée à cette époque avec tes camarades ?

**JMR** : Ces premières années de la lutte armée, au début des années 1970, ont été très dures, beaucoup de camarades sont morts dans cette période-là. Mais en même temps, elles se caractérisent par une immense joie, une immense camaraderie entre les gens. Mes souvenirs avec la musique me rappellent qu'il y avait beaucoup de joie finalement dans toutes les périodes, avec les Italiens, avec les Allemands, avec tous ces gens qui étaient venus se battre à Paris.

## Son et tactique révolutionnaire

**LVP** : Dans ton dernier livre *Dix ans d'Action directe*, tu consacres plusieurs pages aux écoutes que vous réalisiez de la radio de la police et au repérage des fréquences des unités spéciales. Tu affirmes que vos « méthodes de contrevérification et le boulot d'écoute » vous ont donné souvent « une courte avance sur la répression »⁷. Pourrais-tu en dire un peu plus sur le rôle qu'a eu l'écoute dans votre lutte armée ?

**JMR** : L'information a toujours un rôle crucial dans la lutte. Surveiller l'adversaire était une nécessité pour gagner cette bataille. Ils nous surveillaient et nous les surveillions. La guérilla a donc été forcée de créer une fonction de contre-surveillance des actions de la police. Grâce à des scanners radio (souvent fabriqués aux États-Unis mais que nous achetions en Suisse), nous avons réussi à intercepter toutes les communications de l'appareil de répression, même les plus locales. Jusqu'à ce qu'ils trouvent nos cahiers de surveillance, au bout de longues années, ils ne se doutaient pas de nos compétences. De nombreuses arrestations ont ainsi été déjouées, qu'ils croyaient dues à des taupes dans leurs propres services ou à des complicités dans l'appareil d'État.

**LVP** : Finalement vous avez détourné un des moyens de surveillance les plus utilisés par l'État : l'interception des communications.

**JMR** : Totalement. Nous interceptions jusqu'aux communications du contreespionnage, la DST [Direction de surveillance du territoire] et les brigades spéciales qui étaient chargées d'intercepter nos communications.

**LVP** : Comment le son de la radio (de la police ou des radios libres) façonnait-il votre quotidien ?

**JMR** : La majeure partie du temps, les appareils d'écoute étaient en fonctionnement dans les appartements et dans les voitures des commandos. Les sons de ces communications faisaient partie de notre quotidien, ou alors l'une ou l'un d'entre
nous portait un casque. Les appareils scannaient les ondes principales de communication de la police. Avant les opérations, nous vérifiions qu'il n'y avait pas de membres des brigades spéciales dans la zone.

Du côté des radios pirates aussi, il s'agissait d'obtenir de l'information. On suivait les émissions de débat du mouvement. Les gens savaient que nous les écoutions et souvent ils s'adressaient à nous directement, pour critiquer et proposer. Tout ceci constituait un son en direct et permanent qui rythmait nos vies militantes, comme le son de Paris, de la ville frénétique – notre sierra à nous...

Musique et mémoire des luttes politiques

**LVP** : Pour toi, la musique peut-elle constituer une mémoire politique, une façon de ne pas oublier les luttes du passé ?

**JMR** : La mémoire est un combat aussi bien pour la musique que pour les actes politiques eux-mêmes. Si on laisse la mémoire de notre combat politique aux mains de ceux qui ont gagné la bataille, il n'y a plus de mémoire, il n'y a que leur version des faits. Concernant la musique, si on ne va pas chercher jusqu'au fond de la musique de ces années-là, ça se résumera toujours à de la « soupe ». Je pense que notre génération a intégré la musique qu'elle a écoutée et produite, comme un acte politique. Ce qui n'est pratiquement plus le cas aujourd'hui. Je pense qu'il faut s'accrocher : c'est important d'expliquer ça aux nouvelles générations. Il faut combattre pour retrouver la mémoire de notre musique.

**LVP** : De quelle façon la mémoire est-elle une condition des luttes politiques ?

**JMR** : La mémoire fait partie de toute lutte révolutionnaire. Il n'y a pas une lutte révolutionnaire qui soit née spontanément (comme on le pensait de certaines maladies du XIXe siècle). La mémoire est un terreau qui t'amène à lutter : si tu connais bien la mémoire du mouvement révolutionnaire, tu y trouves de la force, tu y trouves de l'expérience et énormément d'autres choses. Il n'y a pas de lutte sans mémoire : si on perd la mémoire, on perd le sens de notre lutte.

**LVP** : De quelle façon la musique fait-elle partie de cette mémoire ?

**JMR** : La musique a une histoire politique. Il y a des jeunes qui écoutent de la musique sans savoir d'où elle vient. Ils pensent qu'elle est née au sein de mouvements récents. Mais si tu connais la musique depuis les années 1960, tu comprends que certaines musiques découlent d'autres mouvements ou qu'elles ont des filiations avec des luttes politiques plus anciennes. Par exemple, il y a une histoire politique derrière le ska. Il est né dans des boites, à Londres, où on acceptait seulement des Antillais et des Irlandais, à qui on refusait l'accès dans des boites réservées aux Anglais. Donc, ils ont fait leur musique. C'est pourquoi The Clash avait aussi un penchant pour d'autres musiques, par exemple le reggae : Joe Strummer allait souvent dans ces boites de relégués, où se trouvaient les premiers skins [mouvement skinhead]. Tout cela n'est pas nouveau et demande une articulation et une compréhension politiques. La musique, c'est un combat permanent sous l'influence des luttes politiques.

**LVP** : Tu penses que la dépolitisation de la musique va de pair avec la dépolitisation de la mémoire de ces luttes ?

**JMR** : La « soupe » qu'on produit, elle ne fait que reproduire des produits commerciaux. Il n'y a plus rien, seulement de l'émotionnel. C'est comme un peintre
qui fait seulement de la décoration pour ton salon, qui n'exprime pas quelque chose de fondamental. Il y a des groupes qui font toujours de la musique très proprette, pour ascenseur, de la musique décolorée : de la musique vide. Quand tu écoutes de la musique, il faut que tes sentiments aient une qualité de réflexion sur le monde.

**LVP** : Cette réflexion sur le monde est provoquée par les paroles ou par la façon de jouer et d'interpréter la musique ?

**JMR** : Les deux, même si parfois ça peut paraître contradictoire. Par exemple, la musique anglaise des groupes qu'on pouvait voir dans les pubs au cours des années 1960, comme les Them, les Small Faces, même The Who, parlent d'histoires d'amourettes et de petits trucs. Mais dans la musique, on sent l'affrontement, on sent la rage, on sent qu'on refuse le monde tel qu'il est. On criera au milieu du solo... L'expression de ce refus est très rageuse alors qu'on dit que ma petite amie doit arriver au rendez-vous deux heures après. C'est la musique qui parle, pas les paroles. En se réappropriant la soul, les Animals ou les Small Faces y ont rajouté une étincelle de rage. Ils y ont rajouté aussi un contenu de classe et l'espérance qu'il va se passer quelque chose.

## Repousser les limites du possible

**LVP** : Pour toi, cette musique a donc repoussé les limites de ce qui était possible.

**JMR** : Oui, absolument. On sent au cours des années 1960 qu'il y a encore un barrage. Mais il est de plus en plus petit. Enfin, ça part en live avec Jimi Hendrix. Là, on fait ce qu'on veut. Musicalement, on fait ce qu'on veut parce qu'on en est capable. De la même façon, nous, en tant que mouvement politique, on se dit que les partis et les syndicats, ça nous fait chier. On se dit : on va faire d'autres choses.

**LVP** : Comment cela s'est-il traduit dans votre expérience ?

**JMR** : Dès qu'on s'est mis dans une lutte radicale face à un système mortifère, on a eu un air frais de liberté qui était incroyable. Il nous a suffi de rentrer radicalement en conflit, pour qu'on devienne presque plus grands, même physiquement, qu'on se redresse. On se dit : « tout cela est passé, ce monde est fini. Je ne veux plus y participer en rien, parce que toute participation à ce monde est mortifère ».

**LVP** : Pour toi, Jimi Hendrix incarne cette rupture ?

**JMR** : Il y a des prédécesseurs à Jimi Hendrix. Mais avec lui, dès le début, en 1966, on a senti que la porte était ouverte. Ce qui n'était pas possible quatre ans avant. Jimi Hendrix a dit : « C'est possible. On a décidé que c'est possible ». C'était une décision. Et Jimi Hendrix disait « Je suis libre » dans un solo de sept ou huit minutes. Puis des gens sont tout de suite arrivés pour vendre cette liberté. Des majors et des organisateurs des concerts. Ils ont joué avec ce sentiment de liberté pour le vendre à toute notre génération. Ils en ont fait des produits commerciaux. On a passé deux ou trois ans à acheter ça. Et après on s'est dit : « Non, là on s'est fait baiser ».

**LVP** : Jusqu'au moment où d'autres refusent à nouveau de se soumettre au marché.

**JMR** : Les punks incarnent ce renouveau, la nouvelle étincelle dans la musique autour de 1976-1977. Ils se sont dit : « On va pas tomber dans cette musique de "soupe". On va faire la musique nous-mêmes, à la maison ». Ils ont voulu nous dire que tout le monde est capable d'être un membre des Sex Pistols. Partout allaient naître des gens,
des groupes, qui avaient envie de gratter sans être des grands musiciens. C'était une nouvelle liberté. Même si, après, cette liberté a aussi été récupérée.

**LVP** : Le combat pour éviter la récupération est permanent...

**JMR** : C'est vrai, autant pour la musique que pour ce qu'a été Action directe. Tant que certains d'entre nous peuvent parler, on est irrécupérables. On a refusé de se vendre. Et tant qu'on peut contrarier une récupération politique, il est impossible de combler le fossé qu'on a creusé entre eux et nous. Il est toujours possible de nous présenter comme des fous (ou pire), de résumer tout ce qu'on a fait à très peu de choses, de tourner en dérision notre action. Mais tant qu'on est vivants et qu'on peut fournir notre propre récit, la récupération est très difficile.

## BIBLIOGRAPHIE

ROUILLAN Jann Marc, *Je regrette*, Marseille, Agone, 2016.

https://agone.org/jeregrette/

ROUILLAN Jann Marc, *Dix ans d'Action directe : Un témoignage, 1977-1987*, Marseille, Agone, 2018.

https://agone.org/dixansdactiondirecte/

## NOTES

## RÉSUMÉS

Jean-Marc Rouillan est l'un des membres fondateurs d'Action directe (1977-1987). Dans cet entretien, il parle des liens entre sa pratique musicale et l'expérience sensible de son engagement politique depuis 1968, du rôle de la musique et du son dans la lutte armée d'Action directe, ainsi que de la place qu'il attribue à la musique dans la mémoire des luttes politiques.

<footnote n="1">1. ROUILLAN Jann Marc, *Dix ans d'Action directe : Un témoignage, 1977-1987*, Marseille, Agone, 2018, p. 36.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. ROUILLAN Jann Marc, *Je regrette*, Marseille, Agone, 2016, chap. 33 et 173.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. *Ibid.*, chap. 33.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. [ndlr] Le concert des Clash a eu lieu le 16 octobre 1978 au Stadium, 66 avenue d'Ivry à Paris.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. [ndlr] Joe Strummer (1952-2002) est le chanteur et guitariste des Clash.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. ROUILLAN, *Je regrette*, chap. 175-176.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7. ROUILLAN, *Dix ans d'Action directe*, p. 220-221.</footnote>
Jean-Marc Rouillan is one of the founding members of *Action directe* (1977–1987). In this interview, he talks about the connection between his musical practices and his political activism since the May 1968 events in France, the role of music and sound in the armed struggle of *Action directe*, and the place he attributes to music in the history of political struggles.

## INDEX

**Mots-clés** : Action directe, lutte armée, terrorisme, musique, politique, DIY, Rote Armee Fraktion, Clash, Hendrix (Jimi), punk rock

**Keywords** : Action directe, armed struggle, terrorism, music, politics, DIY, Rote Armee Fraktion, Clash, Hendrix (Jimi), punk rock

## AUTEUR

### LUIS VELASCO-PUFLEAU

Musicologue et artiste sonore, Luis Velasco-Pufleau est chercheur au Walter Benjamin Kolleg et à l'Institut de musicologie de l'Université de Berne. Son travail constitue une réflexion critique sur les liens entre musique et politique dans les sociétés contemporaines. En tant que chercheur et artiste sonore, il explore des formes d'écriture innovantes à la croisée de la création artistique et de la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales. ORCID : https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1330-974X
# From Music to Armed Struggle, from 1968 to Action Directe: An Interview with Jean-Marc Rouillan

*De la musique à la lutte armée, de 1968 à Action directe : entretien avec Jean-Marc Rouillan*

Luis Velasco-Pufleau

## AUTHOR'S NOTE

The following is from an interview at the Maison des métallos in Paris on 10 April 2019. This meeting was part of the research I have been conducting for several years on the role of sound and music in dynamics of violence and armed struggles. In this context, the testimony of Jean-Marc Rouillan seemed to me to be of undeniable importance. The text retains, as far as possible, the general tone of the meeting. I would like to thank Rémi Philton and Stéphanie Gernet for making this interview possible, and Thierry Discepolo for his contributions to the editing of this text.

## Introduction

<footnote n="1">¹ Jean-Marc Rouillan was born in Auch (France) in 1952. He participated in the anti-Franco struggle and the autonomist movements in Spain and France in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He then continued in armed struggle with *Action directe* (1977–1987). Described as an extreme left-wing terrorist group by the French State and the media, the members of *Action directe* considered themselves to be a European revolutionary group—like the Red Army Fraction (*Rote Armee Fraktion*, RAF) in Germany and the Red Brigades (*Brigate Rosse*, BR) in Italy. For *Action directe*, the struggle for emancipation and autonomy was indissociable from “challenging the monopoly of violence held by the State”.¹ Consequently, armed struggle was part of their existence, including bank</footnote>
robberies, machine-gun fire and bomb attacks against state buildings or international military organisations (NATO, Interpol), followed by targeted assassinations of industrial and military leaders.

2

In February 1987, Jean-Marc Rouillan was arrested with the other members of the historic nucleus of *Action directe*, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent 28 years in prison, including roughly ten years in solitary confinement. He was granted various parole arrangements between 2007 and 2018. Since his final release on 18 May 2018, he can now express himself publicly about the actions for which he was convicted. In this interview, Jean-Marc Rouillan talks about the connection between his musical practice and his political commitment since the May 1968 events in France, the role of music and sound in the armed struggle of *Action directe*, and the place he attributes to music in the history of political struggles.

## Music and politics: from 1968 to Action directe

**LUIS VELASCO-PUFLEAU:** In your book *Je regrette*, you say that at one time you played guitar and electric bass.² What role did music play in your political activism and in your choice to use armed violence?

**Jean-Marc Rouillan:** We should go back to the beginning of my activism, because my political commitment in 1968 was preceded by musical commitment. The music, literature, poetry and underground culture of the 1960s were central to my commitment. Playing music was like going underground in anticipation of something, in anticipation of a confrontation. But that could not satisfy the commitment that my life was going to make. Finally, the May 1968 events in France arrived and I moved from music to political activism – it is complex and cannot be untied. Then, the armed activism drew its inspiration from the same culture as the punk and autonomist movements. For me and the other members of *Action directe*, music, literature, poetry—the arts—were crucial to our armed action.

**LVP:** How did your listening to music give meaning to the upcoming confrontation?

**JMR:** When I was a kid, listening to a particular song was a shock. I was listening to the song "Gloria" by Them, an Irish band from the 1960s, on the jukebox. After the guitar solo of this song, there is a reprise where you really feel that something is going to happen, that something has to happen. When I was listening to this music, I said to myself, "Something will happen in our lives". The English musical wave preceded 1968; it shaped it culturally but preceded it in expression: "We are the baby boom generation and we won't accept to be ordered about by the old and always wear grey". This idea was expressed by the music. Speaking of a love story, Them would say, "We're going to shake up the world".

**LVP:** Then 1968 brought about the changes you were waiting for.

**JMR:** Music was part of this expectation of the spread of the conflict, in which I was going to play my part. Before the first demonstration I went to in May 1968, we were waiting to go to rehearsal in a bar, listening to the jukebox. A friend came into the bar and said, "What? You're going to rehearse when there's a demonstration? We're going to go fight the cops." And we said, "Okay, let's go fight." After May 1968, militant activism meant that I could no longer play music. It was a choice.
**LVP:** So you "put away your Fender guitar" and abandoned your "plan to move to a music squat near Piccadilly Circus".³ Did you completely stop playing music after 1968?

**JMR:** I hardly played any more, except in the hideouts in Spain in the early 1970s, when I was involved in the armed struggle against the Franco dictatorship. Most of the Catalan Spanish comrades had had a musical life before their life in hiding. There were always guitars, and people played them at night. Sometimes, during the day, we would play a few chords together; we would sing. I had a culture of protest songs: anti-Franco through Paco Ibañez and Latin American with Quilapayun. At that time, we listened to a lot of music.

**LVP:** What was the music you were listening to at the time of *Action directe*?

**JMR:** The music we were listening to at the beginning of *Action directe*, at our meetings or on our car radios in 1977-1978, was mainly punk and a little rockabilly. We also listened to singers, like Léo Ferré, whose lyrics were close to our militant commitment. But above all we listened to punk: The Clash, much more than the Sex Pistols. There was a politicization that spoke to us, the punk culture of "Do it yourself —DIY" was decisive for us.

**LVP:** Did you often go to concerts together?

**JMR:** Yes, at that time we were doing armed actions but were not really "wanted" yet, so we could go to shows. One such musical adventure of the historic nucleus of *Action directe* is when we went to London in July 1977 for a major rockabilly festival. We saw Crazy Cavan and other old rockabilly bands. Then in the evening we went to the Marquee Club, where we saw a concert of the Pirates, Johnny Kidd's former band. The following year, we saw The Clash in concert in Paris.⁴

**LVP:** How important was this show for you?

**JMR:** It was important because it was at the time of the autonomous movement. In 1978, we kept the spirit of freemusic, this late-1960s principle of not paying for concerts when they were organised by big companies that made money with music. When we went to see The Clash, there were about three hundred of us autonomous activists, and we said we were going to force our way in. That's when Joe Strummer came out and asked what was going on.⁵ We explained the situation to him, that we were not going to pay to come in and see them. He said, "Okay, as soon as we start the first song, they'll open the doors and you can come in". It was the first time I met Joe Strummer. The second time was in 1981 (at the beginning of the Mitterrand years, when *Action directe* was legal); he was in Paris doing a concert at the Mogador theatre and we met for a coffee.

## Resisting the commodification of music

**LVP:** This incident resonates with another episode in your book *Je regrette*, in which you talk about wanting to "free the music from the merchants", at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.⁶

**JMR:** Our generation of activists was used to groups being born in pubs or small concert halls. We would have a beer and listen to music; there was a whole atmosphere. Then came this trend of big concerts, initially free, but we soon found ourselves behind big investors who made money with that. There were the first editions of the Isle of Wight Festival, but I didn't go, given the price of the tickets and the concentration camp atmosphere of the music: they held the festival in the
countryside but were putting up high walls to protect their business. In 1970, there
was a call from activists to go to the Isle of Wight and force the organizers to make
the festival free. We went over and for two weeks fought every night with the cops,
with Hells Angels and with the private security agents trying to protect the thing. We
kept fighting until the festival was free. Free music was a political struggle; we
understood it as such.

**LVP:** You refused the commodification of music while supporting musicians themselves.

**JMR:** Musicians have to be able to make a living from their music, which is why we paid like everyone else when it came to small concerts, when we knew the money went to the musicians. But at Wight or Woodstock, they were big companies that were set up to make so-called free, peace and love festivals. But it was to make money. It wasn't easy to fight against commodification, the monopoly of these big companies who understood that they could make a lot of money with rock-when it was our music, the music of the pubs, the music of the small concerts, the music of our meetings. This struggle lasted from the 1970s to the punk era. There was a divergence there. On one hand there was the music listened to in big venues, like at La Villette. Music imprisoned, protected by the police. On the other hand there was punk, with the Do It Yourself spirit. People were saying, "I can play punk, too. So we are going to make our own music again, because this is no longer ours. It has been taken over". The spirit of free music was to find a common space with musicians, like in British pubs in the early 1960s.

**LVP:** Making music yourself was an act of emancipation?

**JMR:** Yes, emancipation of people, and also of music. Because sometimes bands have pushed the boundaries of music itself. With their shouting, for example, it was more an expression of rage than the music from soul or blues that we were used to hearing.

**LVP:** What was the music you didn't listen to, the music you couldn't stand?

**JMR:** We had a word for it: "soup". We couldn't stand this music, which is no more than a commodity. For example, I listened to the Rolling Stones until 1972-1973. After that, it was just "soup". They did disco and other things to make money. When music becomes only about making money, there is no longer any political message. Not only in the lyrics, but also in the sound.

**LVP:** Were there any other British bands you couldn't stand?

**JMR:** Bands like Cream, in which Eric Clapton played. Clapton is someone I've never liked, even when he was with the Yardbirds. Clapton was one of the people who stank of "I want to make money; I play guitar to make money". He was not someone who played a role in struggles; moreover, later on, he was a sympathizer of the ideas of the National Front and all that fascist bullshit. Kind of like David Bowie: he made great songs, but it smelled too much like money. It did not fit with the militant commitment of our generation.

**LVP:** In terms of your anti-imperialist ideology, did you associate certain groups with US imperialism?

**JMR:** I think that from the moment bands sold their music to big managers, their music somehow "imperialised" our culture. Even bands like The Velvet Underground; it smelled too much like fake underground. The bands I followed were bands I saw in pubs or small gigs.
Music and armed struggle

**LVP:** At the time of *Action directe*, did you listen to music before your armed actions?

**JMR:** No, didn't listen to music. We were extremely focused on the action; there was also fear. Music came after, when a highly stressful moment had passed, to relax or lower our adrenaline. It was the beginning of the Walkman. So there were activists who, after armed actions, put music in their Walkmans. But it wasn't necessarily the music we listened to the rest of the day. At that time, we listened to Pink Floyd or other things that were more "zen". Sometimes we also listened to classical music, Mozart or Fauré, for example.

**LVP:** This listening was more solitary listening.

**JMR:** Yes, when someone needed music to wind down, they would take a drink and their Walkman, sitting in an armchair.

**LVP:** Did you sing after your armed actions?

**JMR:** Not really, but it could happen. Recently I went to Rome and an Italian comrade told me, "Remember when, after an action, we sang a ridiculous Italian pop song, 'Sarà Perché Ti Amo'...". Yes, I remembered that we sung it at the top of our lungs in the car, just for fun.

**LVP:** In the evenings, were there also moments of collective listening?

**JMR:** Yes, of course, but it didn't have the same function. As the flats were often shared and the instruction for underground members was not to go out after 9 p.m., in the evening we all took turns playing our 33 vinyls. The repertoire was more varied: old records from the 1960s, punk or rock. Since we didn't watch television, we used our time for music or writing. Music was a daily presence.

**LVP:** Another characteristic of your armed struggle is its internationalist dimension, which took the form of exchanges and joint actions with other armed groups in Europe (RAF [*Rote Armee Fraktion*], Red Brigades [*Brigate Rosse*]) or the Middle East (PLO, Kurds). Did you share music among activists when you were in another country or when there were foreign activists passing through your home?

**JMR:** Generally, we listened to the music that the activists listened to wherever we were. But even if musical exchanges were not central to our activities, they had an influence on our musical spheres. In the early 1970s in Spain, I introduced Catalan comrades to English music, not what they heard on their radios, but garage music, the first albums of T. Rex, for example. Towards the end of *Action directe*, German RAF activists were listening to a lot of industrial music, much more than punk. Thanks to them, I discovered new music that I started listening to regularly. We were trying to share what we loved.

**LVP:** What emotions do you associate with the music shared at that time with your comrades?

**JMR:** Those early years of the armed struggle, in the early 1970s, were very hard. Many comrades died during that period. But at the same time, those years are characterized by immense joy, immense camaraderie between people. My memories of music remind me that there was a lot of joy during those times, with the Italians, with the Germans, with all those people who had come to fight in Paris.
## Sound and revolutionary tactics

**LVP:** In your latest book *Dix ans d'Action directe*, you devote several pages to your surveillance listening to police radio and tracking the frequencies of special units. You say that your "methods of cross-checking and the work of surveillance listening" have often given you "a slight step ahead repression."⁷ Could you say a little more about the role that surveillance listening played in your armed struggle?

**JMR:** Information has always had a crucial role to play in the struggle. Monitoring the adversary was a necessity to win the battle. They were watching us and we were watching them. *Action directe*, as a guerrilla war, was therefore forced to create a function of countersurveillance of police actions. Thanks to radio scanners (often made in the United States but purchased in Switzerland), we were able to intercept all communications—even the most local—from the repressive state apparatus. Until they found our surveillance notebooks, after many years, they had no idea of our capabilities. Many arrests were thwarted, which they thought was because of moles in their own departments or complicity in the state security services.

**LVP:** In the end, you hijacked one of the most common means used by states for surveillance purposes: the interception of communications.

**JMR:** Totally. We even intercepted the communications of counterintelligence services, the DST⁸ and the special units that were responsible for intercepting our communications.

**LVP:** How did the sound of radio (police or pirate radio) shape your daily life?

**JMR:** Most of the time, surveillance devices were in use in the apartments and commando cars. The sounds of these communications were part of our daily lives, or sometimes one of us used headphones. The devices were scanning the police's main communication radio waves. Before operations, we checked that there were no special unit members in the area.

For pirate radio stations, too, it was a question of obtaining information. We followed the movement's debate shows. People knew we were listening and often they would speak to us directly, to criticize and make suggestions. All of this was a live and constant sound that punctuated our militant lives, like the sound of Paris, the frenetic city—our own sierra...

## Music and the collective memory of political struggles

**LVP:** For you, can music be a political collective memory, a way of not forgetting the political struggles of the past?

**JMR:** Collective memory is a struggle for both music and political acts themselves. If we leave the collective memory of our political struggle in the hands of those who won the battle, there is no longer any collective memory, only their version of the facts. When it comes to music, if we don't go deep into the music of those years, it will always boil down to "soup". I think our generation integrated the music it has listened to and produced, as a political act. This is rarely the case today. I think we have to keep at it: it's important to explain this to the new generations. We have to fight to reclaim the collective memory of our music.
**LVP:** In what way is collective memory a condition for political struggles?

**JMR:** Collective memory is part of any revolutionary struggle. There is not one revolutionary struggle that was born spontaneously (as was thought of some 19th-century diseases). Collective memory is a breeding ground for struggles: if you know the past of the revolutionary movement, you find strength, experience and a lot of other things. There is no struggle without knowledge of the past: if we lose our collective memory, we lose the meaning of our struggle.

**LVP:** In what way is music part of this collective memory?

**JMR:** Music has a political history. There are young people who listen to music without knowing where it comes from. They think it comes from recent political movements. But if you know music history from the 1960s to the present, you understand that some music comes from other movements or has links to older political struggles. For example, there is a political history behind ska. It emerged in clubs in London, where only West Indians and Irish people were accepted, and they were denied access to clubs reserved for English people. So they created their own music. That's why The Clash also had a penchant for other kinds of music, like reggae: Joe Strummer often went to these relegated clubs, where the first skins [skinhead movement] were located. All of this is nothing new and requires political articulation and understanding. Music is a constant fight under the influence of political struggles.

**LVP:** Do you think that the depoliticisation of music goes hand in hand with the depoliticisation of the collective memory of these struggles?

**JMR:** "Soup" that is produced reproduces commercial products. There's nothing left, only emotion. It's like a painter who just decorates your living room, who doesn't express anything fundamental. There are bands that always make bland, colourless music, for elevators: empty music. When you listen to music, your feelings have to have a quality of reflection on the world.

**LVP:** Is this reflection on the world driven by the lyrics or by the way music is played and interpreted?

**JMR:** Both, even if sometimes it may seem contradictory. For example, the lyrics of the British bands you could see in pubs in the 1960s, like Them, Small Faces, even The Who, talk about love stories and small stuff. But in their music, we feel the confrontation, we feel the rage, we feel that they refuse the world as it is. They will shout in the middle of the solo... The expression of this refusal is angry even if they're singing "I've got a date with my girlfriend in two hours". It's the music that speaks, not the lyrics. In creating their own take on soul music, The Animals or Small Faces added a spark of rage. They also added class content and the hope for something to change.

## Pushing the limits of what is possible

**LVP:** For you, this music pushed the limits of what was possible.

**JMR:** Yes, absolutely. In the 1960s, we felt that there was still a barrier; but it was getting smaller and smaller. It finally exploded with Jimi Hendrix. From that point, we could do whatever we wanted. Musically, he did what he wanted because he was capable of doing it. In the same way, as a political movement, we were fed up with
political parties and unions. So we said to ourselves, “We’re going to do things differently”.

**LVP:** How did this translate in your experience?

**JMR:** As soon as we got into a radical struggle against a deadly system, we tasted the fresh air of freedom and it was incredible. All we had to do was to enter into a radical conflict to be bigger, physically taller even, to straighten up. We said to ourselves, “All this is over; this world is over. I no longer want any part in it, because any participation in this world is fatal”.

**LVP:** For you, Jimi Hendrix embodied this breakaway?

**JMR:** There are forerunners to Jimi Hendrix. But with him, from the beginning in 1966, we felt that the door was open. What was not possible four years before, Jimi Hendrix said, “It’s possible now. We have decided that it’s possible”. It was a decision. And Jimi Hendrix would say “I’m free” in a seven- or eight-minute solo. Then, right away, people showed up to sell this freedom—major labels and concert managers. They played with this feeling of freedom, in order to sell it to our entire generation. They turned it into commercial products. We spent two or three years buying it, and then we thought, “No, we’re getting fucked”.

**LVP:** Until other musicians also refused to submit to the market.

**JMR:** Punks represented this renewal, the new spark in music around 1976–1977. They said, “We’re not going to fall into this ‘soup’ music trap. We’re going to make music ourselves, at home”. They wanted to tell us that anyone could be a member of the Sex Pistols. Everywhere, people and groups emerged, who wanted to make music without being great musicians. It was a new kind of freedom—even though, later, the market usurped this freedom too.

**LVP:** It’s a constant battle to avoid being turned into something else...

**JMR:** That’s true, as much for music as for *Action directe*. As long as some of us can talk, we can’t be controlled. We refused to sell out. And as long as we can thwart a political distortion, it is impossible to cross the divide that we dug between them and us. They can always present us as fools (or worse), try to make what we did sound like very little, mock our action. But as long as we are alive and able to provide our own account, being turned into something else will be very difficult.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

ROUILLAN Jann Marc, *Je regrette*, Marseille, Agone, 2016.
https://agone.org/jeregrette/

ROUILLAN Jann Marc, *Dix ans d'Action directe : Un témoignage, 1977-1987*, Marseille, Agone, 2018.
https://agone.org/dixansdactiondirecte/
## NOTES

1. ROUILLAN Jann Marc, *Dix ans d'Action directe: Un témoignage*, 1977-1987, Marseille, Agone, 2018, p. 36.

2. ROUILLAN Jann Marc, *Je regrette*, Marseille, Agone, 2016, chaps. 33 and 173.

3. Ibid., chap. 33.

4. [Editor's note] The Clash gig took place on 16 October 1978 at the Stadium, 66 avenue d'Ivry in Paris.

5. [Editor's note] Joe Strummer (1952-2002) was the singer and guitarist of The Clash.

6. ROUILLAN, *Je regrette*, chaps. 175-176.

7. ROUILLAN, *Dix ans d'Action directe*, pp. 220-221.

8. The Direction de surveillance du territoire (DST) was responsible for counterespionage and counterterrorism—the French equivalent of the FBI in the United States and the British MI5. Created in 1944, it was merged in 2008 with the Direction centrale des renseignements généraux (often called Renseignements Généraux, RG) into the new Direction générale de la Sécurité intérieure (DGSI).

## ABSTRACTS

Jean-Marc Rouillan is one of the founding members of *Action directe* (1977-1987). In this interview, he talks about the connection between his musical practices and his political activism since the May 1968 events in France, the role of music and sound in the armed struggle of *Action directe*, and the place he attributes to music in the history of political struggles.

Jean-Marc Rouillan est l'un des membres fondateurs d'Action directe (1977-1987). Dans cet entretien, il parle des liens entre sa pratique musicale et l'expérience sensible de son engagement politique depuis 1968, du rôle de la musique et du son dans la lutte armée d'Action directe, ainsi que de la place qu'il attribue à la musique dans la mémoire des luttes politiques.

## INDEX

**Keywords:** Action directe, armed struggle, terrorism, music, politics, DIY, Rote Armee Fraktion, Clash, Hendrix (Jimi), punk rock

**Mots-clés:** Action directe, lutte armée, terrorisme, musique, politique, DIY, Rote Armee Fraktion, Clash, Hendrix (Jimi), punk rock

## AUTHOR

LUIS VELASCO-PUFLEAU

Luis Velasco-Pufleau is a musicologist and sound artist. He is currently a SNSF researcher at the University of Bern (Walter Benjamin Kolleg / Institute of Musicology). His work critically reflects on the relationship between music and politics in contemporary societies. As a researcher and sound artist, he is interested in exploring innovative forms of writing at the crossroads of artistic creation and research in the humanities and social sciences.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1330-974X
# Guitars Give Way to Guns: A Commentary on an Interview with Jean-Marc Rouillan

*Les guitares laissent place aux fusils : commentaire d'un entretien avec Jean-Marc Rouillan*

Matthew Worley

## EDITOR'S NOTE

The following is a commentary on: VELASCO-PUFLEAU Luis, “From Music to Armed Struggle, from 1968 to Action Directe: An Interview with Jean-Marc Rouillan”, *Transposition*, no. Hors-série 2, 2020, https://journals.openedition.org/transposition/3780. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.3780

1. The life of Jean-Marc Rouillan brings into sharp relief the connections and overlaps between pop music, youth culture and politics that helped define the late twentieth century. As the interview reveals, music – and rock music especially – served as a segue from teenage agitation to political provocation. Guitars gave way to guns. Shaking some action transformed into *Action directe*. Romanticism became rebellion; a revolution of the senses fed into a revolution on the streets until slang went the jail guitar doors.

2. In recounting his life's trajectory to Luis Velasco-Pufleau's probing questions, Rouillan taps into much that resonated at the time and continues to resonate for scholars and politicos today. Certainly, in the late twentieth century, a correlation between music, violence and politics became clear, as rock'n'roll's tearing of the cultural fabric allowed for flesh, frustrations and freedoms to fall free. From the 1950s, creativity begat personal liberation, confronting and overturning tired expectations and social restraints. Political commitment was preceded by musical commitment, Rouillan notes, as if the spaces occupied by youth cultural innovation required more than a temporal
response. In the hands of Rouillan, rock's rebel pose became real. In May 1968, rock
provided a soundtrack to a protest that further generated allusions to street fighting
men and set about upturning the horrors of the twentieth century. Rouillan felt it and
believed it; he did not just perform it.

3 Interestingly, the shift from music to militancy ensured Rouillan ‘could no longer play music’. For others, of course, 1968 served as inspiration to revitalise popular music. With punk, the spirit of rebellion connected the subversive thrill of rock’n’roll to the seditious thrill of 1968’s almost-revolution – or it did so for some anyway. As an aside, it may be worth pondering if the assault of Peter Brotzmann’s *Machine Gun* or Anthony Braxton’s *This Time* better captured the moment *in the moment*. Punk, after all, took time to gestate. Whatever, Rouillan recognised the feeling bound up in songs such as Them’s ‘Gloria’: primal, raw, pushing to the edge of *something*. A soundtrack to chaos. The thrill of the fight ... or the fuck.

4 Yet, even as Rouillan lay down his guitar, he continued to find a soundtrack to the revolution in pop music. The Clash, and the DIY ethos associated with punk, are mentioned. This is interesting for several reasons. First, The Clash's signing to CBS was a contentious moment, a decision to engage on the *inside* rather than without. The band's experience – including the release of 'Remote Control' (1977) as a single without the group's consent – revealed the expected tension between art, protest and commerce, with the more cynical reader perhaps left wondering how far CBS consciously sought to cash-in via marketing The Clash's rebel-image ('turning rebellion into money'). Second, the experience of The Clash on CBS reaffirmed – for bands such as Crass and others of a less overtly anarchistic bent – the need to circumnavigate the music industry to better embody punk's oppositionism. Punk died, Mark Perry once said, on the day The Clash signed to CBS, an exaggerated remark that nevertheless allowed the innovator of *Sniffin' Glue* and ATV to seek more creative avenues under – rather than over – ground. Third, and linked to this, punk's DIY was in some ways a response to The Clash (and the Sex Pistols') perceived co-option by the music industry. If the 'first wave' had been codified and commodified, then it was up to those who followed to forge a better and alternative path. Fourth, The Clash's relationship to politics was likewise contentious. In particular, the band's performance at the Anti-Nazi League carnival of 1978, whereat Joe Strummer wore a (mis-spelt) *Brigade Rosse* T-shirt brokered yet more debate. Already criticised for their trip to Belfast and the photos taken in front of the barricades, The Clash's evoking the armed struggle of Italian militants led to further condemnation, be it for fetishizing violence or dabbling in politics little understood. And yet, beyond the pose and the pretence, Rouillan's meeting with Strummer reaffirms the more general sense of The Clash as a band that mattered and meant well. They opened doors, literally, and the connection made between The Clash's smuggling fans into gigs and the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival confrontations is telling. The notion of punk being a 'year zero', a wholesale rejection of the hippie counterculture and a break from the past was always dubious, and Rouillan is surely right to recognise continuums. We may note, too, the double meaning of 'free music'; that is both costless and open to experimentation. Either way, boundaries are this way broken and crossed.

5 Indeed, the question of commodification looms large in Rouillan's interview and
loomed large in punk's broader critique of both the music industry and society more
generally. Be it Jamie Reid's artwork for the Sex Pistols or X-Ray Spex's dissection of
consumerism, Gang of Four's agit-pop musical essays on the commodification of desire or Buzzcocks' breakdown of fiction romance, Rough Trade's co-op shop and label or Crass' anarchist communiqués, the 'fight against commodification' (as Rouillan puts it) was fought on many fronts. The Sex Pistols may be seen as a kamikaze mission into the heart of pop's spectacle. Following their impact, amidst the shrapnel and the media-generated horror, spaces opened up for previously untapped voices, sounds, labels, language and attitudes to find expression. Rouillan mentions British pubs, but there followed the arts centres, squats and collectives that likewise enabled bands to push the parameters of music. And as the 'expression of rage' transformed from anger to alienation, so the post-punk period from late 1977 fused with punk's DIY ethos to enable one of the most diverse and creative periods of music ever. The money was not the motive. Expression, originality, creativity, communication, agency, autonomy: these became the watchwords. Rouillan reveals a penchant for bands in small pubs or playing small gigs. There's a search for purity here: the moment before corruption.

Or ... the moment before the action. Once engaged in the armed struggle, so the music followed rather than preceded the moment of confrontation. Pink Floyd and classical music helped lower Rouillan's adrenalin. A soundtrack of urgency gave way to sounds of fluidity and contemplation. Maybe even silence. The industrial noise that Rouillan says the German Red Army Faction plotted to in the early 1980s might seem more attuned to the violence of the struggle: maybe the volume it was played at could affect the response of the listener? The harsh tones of Throbbing Gristle become soothing when played at minimal volume, more sound-bath than aural assault.

Industrial, obsessed about the media: about control processes and systems. Of all punk's associated cultures, industrial came closest to fetishizing political aesthetics and formulating music/sound as a weapon. When Rouillan talks of surveillance, it recalls the proto-sampling of Cabaret Voltaire and the fascination with fascism that informed the paranoid instincts of Throbbing Gristle's 'total war'. Here, of course, Rouillan was surveying those doing the surveillance. Punk, more generally, may be read as a dialogue with the media, a critique of distortions and double-standards, an alternative TV. Think of all those collages of newspaper headlines set against bland adverts and cropped photos from glossy magazines. Think of all those lyrics setting television as the new religion, or the impetus to *do it* rather than consume/absorb/observe it. But when Rouillan talks of intercepting communications, it reminds more of industrial's jamming of media signals and construction of alternative narratives. Herein, now the 1970s and 1980s are very much *history*, lay trace of collective memories that tell different stories and different possibilities. Resources of hope, Raymond Williams might say.

Certainly, amidst the scrambled (fake) news casts of the twenty-first century, such resources are important. As the interview notes, musics have a history and those histories are often bound to political struggles. The playing and the production, the language and the location, the music and the movement of the bodies. And it is those histories that help make music more than the 'soup' Rouillan compares much commercially-produced pop to. Context is all. Know your history. Never disentangle or atomize. In rock'n'roll he heard anger, frustration and the desire for change: love songs sung through gritted teeth. Where rock suggested a reconstitution of music, so the politics it served to soundtrack and conceive also sought to reinvent: to do different; to demand the impossible; to kiss the sky. In many ways, Rouillan's life sought to make tangible the world rock promised; to ensure the freedoms encapsulated in sound and
feedback might shake off the chains of commerce and soiled tradition. The struggle –
against capital, reification, commodification and control – continues. There remains a
world to win.

ABSTRACTS

This short commentary reflects on Luis Velasco-Pufleau's interview with Jean-Marc Rouillan. Picking up on the connections made between musical practice and political struggle, it locates Rouillan's life and thoughts in relation to punk and the subversive charge more general to rock'n'roll. By so doing, questions of freedom, action and commodification are considered, relating how cultural revolution may feed into political insurrection.

Ce court commentaire revient sur l'entretien que Luis Velasco-Pufleau a mené auprès de Jean-Marc Rouillan. En reprenant les liens effectués entre pratique musicale et lutte politique, il contextualise la vie et la pensée de Rouillan en relation avec le punk et la charge subjective plus généralement propre au rock'n'roll. Pour ce faire, les questions de liberté, d'action et de marchandisation sont interrogées en perspective de la manière dont la révolution culturelle pourrait contribuer à l'insurrection politique.

INDEX

Mots-clés: révolution, rock'n'roll, punk, Action directe, musique, marchandisation

Keywords: revolution, rock'n'roll, punk, Action directe, music, commodification

AUTHOR

MATTHEW WORLEY

Matthew Worley is professor of modern history at the University of Reading and co-founder of the Subcultures Network. He has written widely on British labour and political history between the wars, though his more recent work has concentrated on the post-war relationship between youth culture and politics. Articles have been published in such journals as *Contemporary British History*, *History Workshop*, *Popular Music* and *Twentieth Century British History*. A monograph, *No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–84*, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. As a co-founder of the Subcultures Network, he has also been involved in events, book series and publications such as *Ripped, Torn & Cut: Pop, Politics and Punk Fanzines from 1976* (Manchester University Press, 2018).
# Going Underground: The Politics of Free Music around 1968

Going underground : politiques de la musique libre autour de 1968

Timothy Scott Brown

## EDITOR'S NOTE

The following is a commentary on: VELASCO-PUFLEAU Luis, "From Music to Armed Struggle, from 1968 to Action Directe: An Interview with Jean-Marc Rouillan", *Transposition*, no. Hors-série 2, 2020, https://journals.openedition.org/transposition/3780. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.3780

1. When Jean-Marc Rouillan observes that his “political commitment in 1968 was preceded by musical commitment”, he touches on an oft-emphasized point in the recent scholarship on the “global 1960s”. It was not just that culture and politics were intimately bound together around 1968, but that innovations in the former often precipitated developments in the latter. The point is particularly relevant where popular music is concerned. In no other area of cultural production was the social impact so explosive nor the politics of consumption so fraught. And as the scholarship of the last dozen or so years has shown and Rouillan’s recollections again confirm, popular music—above all rock’n’roll—was the sound of revolt *par excellence*. Rouillan touches on this fact directly when he remarks that “[p]laying music was like going underground...in anticipation of a confrontation”. That this statement could be uttered with reference to the moment of 1968 was in part a function of rock’n’roll’s newness, and the ease with which that newness allowed it to articulate with other cultural and political innovations emerging around the same time. In this respect, rock’n’roll gained its cultural-political import through a process of synergy in which it came to stand in for a broader rebellion.

2. Rouillan’s comment simultaneously suggests a spatial relationship—one in which the socially-valuable in music, as in politics, can take root only in the subterranean spaces
where society's demands for conformity fail fully to penetrate. Here, the "underground" as a term/concept has a double valence—as the space simultaneously in which the left-wing political desperadoes of the post-'68 moment marshaled their forces for all out war with the forces of the state, and the place where cultural militants sought to create authentic artistic expression free from the deforming pressures of mass commerce. The most culturally militant sounds, like the most politically militant agitation, were to be found not at the surface level of society, again, but underneath it, in the realm of subculture. To "go underground" was the act not just of the political militant who rejected all accommodation with bourgeois-parliamentary forms, but of the cultural militant who, similarly, rejected the forms dictated by the market.

The liberatory qualities of music, in Rouillan's account especially the music of Jimi Hendrix, foreshadowed other possibilities. With Hendrix, remembers Rouillan, "we felt that the door was open. What was not possible four years before, Jimi Hendrix said, 'It's possible now. We have decided that it's possible.'" This voluntaristic act was, as Rouillan puts it, a "decision", one that could lead to others. "From that point [the appearance on the scene of Hendrix] we could do whatever we wanted. Musically, he did what he wanted because he was capable of doing it. In the same way, as a political movement, we were fed up with political parties and unions. So we said to ourselves, 'We're going to do things differently.'"

Almost as soon as it was enunciated, however, that emancipatory decision faced the danger of being rendered meaningless. "Jimi Hendrix would say 'I'm free' in a seven- or eight-minute solo;" says Rouillan; "Then, right away, people showed up to sell this freedom—major labels and concert managers. They played with this feeling of freedom, in order to sell it to our entire generation. They turned it into commercial products. We spent two or three years buying it, and then we thought, 'No, we're getting fucked.'" The demand for free music was a response to this realization. A key threat perceived by radicals in the long 1960s was posed by what the Situationists dubbed recuperation, a term meant to invoke capitalism's ability to heal itself from challenges to its hegemony. Across the whole range of cultural production, from mainstream publishing programs calculated to cash in on the demand for the writings of Che and Mao to the commerce-safe recapitulation of countercultural values represented by the musical Hair, capitalism proved adept at placing the revolution up for sale almost as quickly as it could be created. Radicals worried about recuperation because capitalism's ability to assimilate the cultural gave it the ability to disable the political. The "underground" in which subcultures flourished was never a pure sphere of rebellion, but constantly under threat of having its content siphoned away. Capitalism was all too adept, in the words of a band that figures centrally in Rouillan's account—the Clash—of "turning rebellion into money".

The effort to "free the music from the merchants" was a transnational one. It is no surprise, for example, that Action Directe's West German counterparts, the Movement 2nd June, were first politicized in precisely such a refusal of the logic of the "big concert". This was in the infamous 1965 riot at the Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin, which saw militants-to-be crash the show and participate in a riot that destroyed the venue. The same group of militants later carried out a smoke bomb attack on the West Berlin debut of Hair, denouncing it as an attempt to "gratify capitalist demands" at the expense of the "real subculture". The attack against Hair took place against the backdrop of ongoing police pressure against the Zodiak Arts Lab,
a key site of subcultural experimentation in West Berlin. Such attempts to mobilize
against the twin threat of police pressure and capitalist recuperation could be
multiplied across a range of European and North American cases. Meanwhile the
conceptual basis of these attempts—the assumption of a unity between political and
cultural forms of struggle—was symbolized in an ubiquitous image of 1968 on both
sides of the Atlantic: the juxtaposition of the machine gun and the electric guitar.

The pervasiveness of the association between political and cultural militancy and the linked struggle against recuperation offers more evidence of the importance of the transnational around 1968. It was not just a matter of ideas moving across national borders, however; rather, activists everywhere were responding to the issues imbedded in industrial society in general and capitalism in particular. That militants expected a political message from their music or ascribed political significance to music whether it was openly political or not was symptomatic of the long-1960s moment. But it also suggests for us a key link between the activism of the moment around 1968 and that of the decade that followed. It is no accident that Rouillan references both Hendrix and the Clash, the former a musical avatar of the 1960s rebellion, the latter the most-explicitly political of the bands associated with the punk explosion of the late-1970s. In both cases, music held a political valence; more importantly, punk—along with the proto-punk exemplified by bands such as West Germany’s Ton Steine Scherben—directly embodied an approach to cultural production in which the act of making and distributing the music became as important as the messages embedded in the music itself.

This DIY (“Do it yourself”) approach is a key feature linking the rebellion of 1968 and the rebellion of punk, calling into question too-easy assumptions about the extent to which punk actually broke with the cultural politics of a hippie rebellion that, on the surface, it violently rejected. More important is that DIY, as both mode of cultural production and political ethos, exists at the very heart of the particular understanding of music put forward by Jean-Marc Rouillan. The demand that music be free was simultaneously an anti-capitalist act and an act of cultural rebellion that sought to protect the integrity of the musical-political gesture. “Free music was a political struggle”, as Rouillan puts it; “we understood it as such”.

6

7

ABSTRACTS

*Going Underground* situates the demand for “free music” as part of a broader contestation of the terms of cultural consumption in the radical milieu of the long 1960s. At stake in the mobilizations recounted in the reflections of Action Directe-member Jean-Marc Rouillan was not just access to popular music, but the validity of the subversive meanings ascribed to cultural production under capitalism. Struggling with the system’s ability to co-opt challenges to its hegemony by putting them up for sale, activists insisted that it was they, and not promoters or other financially-interested middle men, who had the right to determine the conditions under which liberatory cultural expression such as rock’n’roll would be consumed. The insistence that
music be “free” embodied a characteristic demand of the radical moment around 1968: that culture actually matter.

*Going underground* resitue la revendication d'une "musique libre" (*free music*) au sein d'une contestation plus large, dans le milieu radical des années 1960, des termes de la consommation culturelle. Dans les mobilisations dont Jean-Marc Rouillan, membre d'Action directe, rend compte dans ses réflexions, ce qui est en jeu n'est pas simplement l'accès à la musique populaire, mais aussi la validité de la charge subversive accordée à la production culturelle en régime capitaliste. Luttant contre la capacité qu'a le système à intégrer – en le commercialisant – ce qui défie son hégémonie, les activistes insistent : c'est bien eux, et non des promoteurs et autres intermédiaires intéressés par l'argent, qui ont le droit de déterminer les conditions de consommation d'expressions culturelles libératoires telles que le rock'n'roll. L'insistance sur le fait que la musique doit être "libre" (*free*) rejoint une revendication caractéristique du moment radical entourant 1968 : que la culture compte bel et bien.

## INDEX

**Mots-clés:** DIY, récupération, rock, subculture, underground

**Keywords:** DIY, recuperation, rock, subculture, underground

## AUTHOR

### TIMOTHY SCOTT BROWN

Timothy Scott Brown is Professor and Chair of History at Northeastern University, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a recent Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. His books include *West Germany in the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962-1978* (Cambridge 2013); *The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture, Revolt* (Palgrave 2014); and *Between the Avantgarde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe, 1957 to the Present* (Berghahn 2011). His latest book, *Sixties Europe*, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2020.
# Reflections on a Revolutionary and Music

## Réflexions sur un révolutionnaire et la musique

Jeremy Varon

### EDITOR'S NOTE

The following is a commentary on: VELASCO-PUFLEAU Luis, "From Music to Armed Struggle, from 1968 to Action Directe: An Interview with Jean-Marc Rouillan", *Transposition*, no. Hors-série 2, 2020, https://journals.openedition.org/transposition/3780. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/transposition.3780

The age of miracles.
The age of sound.
Well there's a Golden Age.
Comin' round, comin' round, comin' round!
- Phish, "Golden Age"

1. At the height of the radical Sixties, the White Panther's John Sinclair called for the creation of a "guitar army".¹ "Rock'n'roll", he extolled, was "a weapon of cultural revolution" — indeed, the "model of a revolutionary future".² Combined with acid, activism, and guns, it had the power to birth beautiful, free, high-energy people in a new, beautiful world.

2. Sinclair's vision spoke to rock'n'roll's insurgent roots. From its start, rock music has been the bearer of rebellion, borne of adolescent rage, illicit sexuality, and great dollops of Black cool so coveted within white Western culture. Building on the musical legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, folk and then rock musicians brought the protest song to thriving social movements. Some artists embraced the revolutionary "freak" culture reaching its zenith at the Woodstock festival of August 1969.

3. The music-saturated event served, in turn, as a master-metaphor for a comprehensive liberation. On the witness stand for his involvement in the Chicago 1968 protests at the
Democratic National Convention, Yippee leader Abbie Hoffman declared himself a resident not of the United States but of a Woodstock Nation. That nation, currently “held captive” by a “decaying system”, valued “cooperation” over “competition” and profit.³

4 A decade later — and with hope of revolution now in decay — Hoffman changed his tune. (He had spent much of the 1970s underground fleeing cocaine charges, while remaining active in small environmental campaigns.) “The idea that rock was revolutionary”, he told an interviewer in 1979, “was probably the greatest put-on of the Sixties”.⁴ Only Phil Ochs, the MC5, and the Fugs had dared play at the Yippie’s Festival of Life during the Chicago convention, teeming with riot police. Most musicians, Hoffman lamented, “just wanted to make a lot of money and smoke a lot of dope”.

5 Here Hoffman speaks to that other side of rock music, squarely planted in the culture industry. From its start, rock'n'roll was a mass commercial enterprise, growing more lucrative as youth culture exploded. Its leading artists appeared to relish growing fabulously wealthy — even as they maintained the persona of the incorrigible bad-ass, or earnest rocker, or pop spiritualist, or patron of noble causes. Reckless profligacy in the form of gluttonous addictions and smashed instruments, hotel rooms, and sports cars became part of the renegade profile.

6 All the while, little golden ages of pushback to commercialism — such as once captivated Sinclair and Hoffman — bubbled up and quickly vanished. The fledgling “guitar army” of the Sixties gave way to arena rock, disco, and the inward-looking singer-songwriter. Thereafter, the whole genre periodically re-energized itself in purported return to a plebian, break-even authenticity, like the early days of punk or grunge. This cycle of decline and rebirth continues on, with DIY-diehards ever posing as rock's conscience.

7 But eventually, most everyone wants to get paid. When they don't, they file lawsuits. Bitter disputes over royalty payments and estates have themselves become the unseemly stuff of rock legend, consuming the likes of George Clinton, John Fogerty, Johnny Rotten/Lydon, the Dead Kennedys, Prince, and the Clash's Paul Simonon. Involvement in good causes still exists, but mostly as philanthropy and celebrity advocacy safely within the progressive mainstream.

8 And still the singers howl, in whatever the latest rebel fashion, “Long live rock, be it dead or alive!”

***

9 The enduring genius of rock'n'roll has been to mask its social position with its subjective spirit: to signify rebellion in a deep, visceral way, while remaining tethered to common aspirations for fame and fortune, or at least a decent living. How else to explain the reflections on music and revolution of the French urban guerrilla Jean-Marc Rouillan than in terms of this cunning?

10 Rouillan repeatedly describes rock music — the real rock music of the 1960s and later of the punk era — as the people's music. He praises the bands of his own little golden age tearing up British clubs in the early and mid-1960s. He credits music for helping to push him into the streets of Paris in May 68 and a life of radical activism. And he
readily separates the damned from the saved: those who betrayed and those who stayed faithful to rock's rebel roots, defined for him by the rejection of profit.

11 Rouillan holds the “big companies” promoting rock concerts in special contempt, claiming the right to crash any show too wedded to money. Posing as a “peace and love” festival, Woodstock itself was a giant rip-off. Few artists escape his purist wrath, which verges on self-parody. Rouillan brands Eric Clapton a sell-out from the start; his remarkable achievements on the guitar were evidently driven by his single-minded goal “to make money”. David Bowie, no matter what he meant to queer and other misfit kids, suffers the similar taint of greed. Even the ultra-hip Velvet Underground “smelled too much like the fake underground”. Rouillan found redemption in the European punk/DIY scene of the 1970s and early 80s, aligned with the autonomist movement and, in his mind, the militancy of *Action directe*. The Clash, a favorite among his comrades, became for him the gods of a resurrected rock.

12 By parts idealistic, censorious, and naïve, Rouillan somehow escaped Hoffman's disillusionment. Above all, he seems guilty of taking rock's insurgent spirit for its essence, imposing expectations on it not widely shared by rockers themselves. The extraordinary times he lived in make this error, at the very least, understandable. His generation was propelled into a higher consciousness and mission of social change under the influence of music. Countless youths appealed to rock — the lyrics but also just the energy — as inspiration, oracle and omen.

13 Rouillan recalls being seized with the sense that “something will happen in our lives” after hearing a rousing section in the garage band classic “Gloria”. That something became for him a new life as a radical trying to create a new world. Rock could capture also the heaviness of the times. Jonathan Lerner, an American radical, recalls of 1967:

> my soundtrack mostly came from folk rockers, like Jesse Colin Young. His iconic "Get Together"⁵, with its admonition to "love one another right now", came out that year. So did his "Dreamer's Dream"⁶. Its chorus goes, "Now the dream has ended, the world that I intended crashing down into bitter reality". It was actually a song of broken romance. I misheard it as political commentary, because crashing into bitter reality felt like what was happening.⁷

14 Two years later, Lerner helped found the urban guerrilla group Weatherman. Suggesting inexorable change, its name was famously drawn from the Bob Dylan line "you don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows". At the time and in reflection, rock was used both to make sense of and to reshape one's individual and social world.

15 Insofar as the subjecting feelings associated with rock music inspired activism and other change energy, music became an objective, social force. In this limited sense, Roullian is not wrong to equate rock music with social transformation and even political radicalism, no matter his dubious claim of rock's elemental purity.

16 More troublesome, however, is Rouillan's conceit that art somehow owes the revolution — even when revolution is just a pipe dream of a handful of ultra-radicals at the far margins of their national politics. The Grateful Dead's early manager, Rock Scully, took as his creed that “there’s no such thing as a free show”, even when the audience paid nothing.⁸ (Scully had helped set-up numerous free Dead concerts in San Francisco’s Panhandle and other locales).⁹ *Someone* is always doing the hard work, whether compensated or not. Setting aside the issue of money, Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry
Garcia addressed the late-Sixties demand of “free music for free people” from a musician’s perspective:

> the musician's first responsibility is to play music as well as he can. . . . [A]ny responsibility to anyone else is just journalistic fiction. . . or political fiction. Because that bullshit about the people's music, man . . . what's that supposed to mean? It wasn't any people that sat with me while I learned to play guitar. . . . [And] when somebody says *the people* . . . that has to mean everybody. It means the cops, the guys who drive the limousines, the fucker who runs the elevators, everybody".¹⁰

17 Insisting that artists conform to “the militant commitment” of radicals like Rouillan — self-appointed as the arbiters of worthy art — is to ask the wrong thing from the wrong people. Of the many reasons that *Action directe* and similar Western armed struggle groups failed to instigate mass insurrections, that kind of arrogance may be one.

18 In closing, Roullian asserts that, “we have to fight to reclaim the collective memory of our music”, much as we must reclaim the memory of radical political struggles. Part of both histories is the passion of true belief and the optimism, joy, and dedication it brings. In his idealism, unbroken by years in prison, Rouillan is himself worthy of appreciation and study as part of this memory project. But it is also vital to learn from — and not merely reclaim — illusions, no matter how seductive. Otherwise, the next great reign of freedom risks being just another golden age.

## BIBLIOGRAPHY

LERNER Jonathan, “What I Saw on the Way to Revolution”, *The New York Times*, 12 September 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/opinion/what-i-saw-on-the-way-to-the-revolution.html.

RICHARDSON Peter. *No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead*. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2014.

SCULLY Rock, “40th Anniversary Summer of Love Oral Archive by Rock Scully”, Compact Disc issued by BeanBag1 Entertainment, 2007.

SINCLAIR John, *Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings*, New York, Douglas Book Corporation, 1972.

## NOTES

1. SINCLAIR John, *Guitar Army: Street Writings/Prison Writings*, New York, Douglas Book Corporation, 1972.

2. SINCLAIR, p. 113.

3. From “The Testimony of Abbie Hoffman in the Chicago 7 Conspiracy Trial”, https://www.famous-trials.com/chicago8/1326-hoffman.

4. From “Abbie Hoffman — Interview Outtakes, August 20, 1979”, posted by *Paste Magazine*, 31 October 2008, https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2008/10/abbie-hoffman-interview-outtakes.html?part=12.
5. https://youtu.be/mgo7jZzW7Jw

6. https://youtu.be/0C_4fzrLzDE

7. JONATHAN Lerner, “What I Saw on the Way to Revolution”, *The New York Times*, 12 September 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/opinion/what-i-saw-on-the-way-to-the-revolution.html.

8. Scully expounded his views in interviews for the “40th Anniversary Summer of Love Oral Archive by Rock Scully”, Compact Disc issued by BeanBag1 Entertainment, 2007.

9. A list of the Grateful Dead's free shows and benefit concerts is available at: "Grateful Dead Guide", 15 June 2015, https://deadessays.blogspot.com/2015/06/free-shows-benefits-1965-1975.html.

10. Quoted in RICHARDSON Peter, *No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead*, New York, St. Martin's Press, 2014, pp. 169-70.

## ABSTRACTS

After spending years in prison for armed actions with the French urban guerrilla group *Action directe*, Jean-Marc Rouillan shared in an interview his reflections on the role of music in his political development and on the broader politics of rock'n'roll. This essay responds to Rouillan's reflections. Noting rock'n'roll's dual identity as rebel music and a mass commercial enterprise, the essay sees hopefulness, naiveté, and arrogance in Rouillan's insistence that to stay true to its roots rock music must shun profit. The essay argues the value of recovering radical moments in popular culture while cautioning against idealizing cultural forms.

Après des années d'emprisonnement suite à son action armée au sein de l'organisation française de guérilla urbaine Action directe, Jean-Marc Rouillan a donné un entretien au gré duquel il partage ses réflexions sur le rôle de la musique dans son propre engagement politique, et plus largement sur les politiques du rock'n'roll. Cet essai répond aux réflexions de Rouillan. Relevant l'identité duale du rock'n'roll – à la fois musique rebelle et entreprise commerciale de masse –, nous notons l'optimisme, la naïveté et l'arrogance avec lesquelles Rouillan insiste sur la nécessité qu'a le rock à fuir le profit afin de rester fidèle à ses racines. Soulignant l'intérêt d'un tel retour sur des moments radicaux de la culture populaire, cet essai met en garde contre l'idéalisation de formes culturelles.

## INDEX

**Mots-clés:** Action directe, Bowie (David), Clapton (Eric), Clash, Garcia (Jerry), Grateful Dead, Hofmann (Abbie), Lerner (Jonathan), Rouillan (Jean-Marc), rock'n'roll, Sinclair (John), White Panthers, Yippies.

**Keywords:** Action directe, Bowie (David), Clapton (Eric), Clash, Garcia (Jerry), Grateful Dead, Hofmann (Abbie), Lerner (Jonathan), Rouillan (Jean-Marc), rock'n'roll, Sinclair (John), White Panthers, Yippies.
AUTHOR

JEREMY VARON

Jeremy Varon is a Professor of History at the New School in New York City. He is author of *Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies* and co-founder and editor of *The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture*.
# Essays

## Essais
# On Music and War

## À propos de la musique et la guerre

### Morag Josephine Grant

1. The musicology of war and other forms of collective violence is a relatively new field of enquiry. Its emergence can be viewed, on the one hand, as a logical development of the turn towards explicitly political concerns in music research over the past twenty to thirty years.¹ On the other, it can be regarded as a musicological *pendant* to how the study of war and violence more generally has developed over roughly the same time period, marked by a move away from the celebratory and hagiographic tendencies of old-school military history towards critical military studies and a focus on the impacts of violence on individuals, be they those inflicting the violence, or those who have violence inflicted upon them (most combatants, of course, are both).

2. My own approach to these topics starts from the same perspective I take generally as a musicologist working in what I can broadly call Kaden-school music sociology. For Christian Kaden (1946-2015), music sociology “is an inquiry into the aesthetic *and* the social potentials that are entwined in the act of making and perceiving music. It is both a historical and a systematic discipline, concerned as much with how music is socially embedded in longer-term historical processes as with the clarification of its function in different cultural systems”.² Subsequent spokespeople of the working group on sociology and social history of music which Kaden founded within the German *Gesellschaft für Musikforschung* extrapolated further in a manner very much in keeping with Kaden’s own, interdisciplinary approach:

> Music sociology investigates material and conceptual value systems, mediality and structures of social behaviour, the attribution of and expectations associated with particular roles, and in particular the functions of music in everyday life, and does so both synchronically and diachronically. In doing so, interdisciplinary impetuses—for example from the fields of sociological theory, empirical social research, but also a wider spectrum ranging from religious studies to communication theory—play an important role, without ever losing sight of those aspects of the subject “music” which are specific to it and cannot be reduced to other things.³
3 What, then, are these irreducible elements of music, and what makes them relevant in the context of war and collective violence? And how can music sociology, thus defined, help us explore these issues?

4 To begin answering these questions—or rather, to indicate in what direction these answers might lie—we need first remind ourselves what the context of these investigations is. I have talked here of the musicology of “war and collective violence”, whereby collective violence is actually the superordinate category and war, in its various forms, a special case thereof—a very special case indeed, given its enormous social, political and cultural significance. War is not simply violence, although violence—the act of killing specifically—is its very heart: war is a cultural system which, since Neolithic times, has come increasingly to define the world in fundamental ways. Almost all societies in today’s world are martial cultures: that is, cultures predicated to a greater or lesser extent on the possibility of war and on the collective memory of war. In some martial cultures, war becomes so fundamental to the political and social structures of the society in question that war is inevitably produced by these societies. Thus, systems developed originally—we can hypothesise— to enable societies to defend themselves just as most animals defend their territory and their young, become so entrenched in these societies politically, economically, and morally, that they bring about the very thing they claim to be defending against.⁴

5 Recognising the cultural rather than “natural” foundations of war is of fundamental importance for understanding the roles of music in war. Equally important is emphasising, again, the collective nature of violence in war. Collective violence—-which we could also term intergroup violence—-has specific structural and organisational features and dynamics which set it off from forms of violence not committed in the context or in the name of a group. Definitive for collective violence is not that acts of violence are necessarily carried out by a group, but that matters of group identity, and ingroup/outgroup dynamics specifically, define why the violence is carried out. Thus, what is sometimes erroneously termed “lone-wolf” terrorism is generally also a form of collective violence, since both the motivation and the socio-psychological mechanisms at play situate it within a script of attacking one group in defence of the other. Joe Stroud’s discussion of how the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik used music in preparation for the mass murder of 77 people and the injuring of several hundreds more is particularly pertinent here: Breivik’s own manifesto showed him anticipating the use of music to allay his fears during the attack itself, but also contained references to specific artists and genres that consolidated his identity as a white supremacist.⁵ Collective violence is rooted in collective practices, practices which do not necessarily lead to violence but which can provide the emotional bedrock for turning ideology into action.⁶

6 Musical practices are very often collective practices, and thus specific forms of collective experience: in the act of singing, playing or listening to and moving with music in the company of others, but also, at a distance, through the sense of sung or felt rather than purely imagined communities that particular pieces of music engender where they have become symbolically connected to, and expressive of, particular collective identities. In both these cases, but particularly in the former, to collectively experience music is to enact collectivity itself, and simultaneously to have collectivity enacted upon one, thanks to the processes known as entrainment which are arguably one of the most significant and fundamental aspects of music and musicality per se.⁷