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MeIn his lifetime, the German sound artist Ludwig Koch was as famous to the British public as David Attenborough is today. His relentless passion for capturing bird songs and bringing them to German and, after being expelled from Nazi Germany, British homes through audio books and BBC radio, made him a household name from the late 1930s onwards.
Celebrated beyond his lifetime, photographed by Peter Sellers (playing Koch exploring life in a Glasgow traffic lane) and immortalized in Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1980 book Human Voices, about the wartime BBC, which shows Koch’s proactive approach to recording natural sounds and indirectly shows how the agency benefited from new voices like his.
Yet to his granddaughter, filmmaker Anthea Kennedy, Koch was arrogant. Kennedy said: “I don’t remember talking to him. Instead, he used to sing to him, vividly dreaming about his brief career as a tenor opera singer that he had to leave in Germany because of World War I. “He would squeeze my hand, which I didn’t hate, and sing old operas, then ask me what he was singing.
Because of their relationship, it’s amazing what Kennedy has Fellow filmmaker and friend, Ian Wiblinhas created a loving tribute to Koch. their film, Alarm Notesinterlaces images and sounds in modern Berlin and other places he went as nature and many recorded Koch himself, from the warm whistle of the golden oriole in Spandau, to the sneezing seals on Skomer island, and his performances of Schubert’s lieder in old age. It’s a haunting mix of past and present, and acts like a never-before-seen conversation between grandchild and grandparent.
“I wanted to find out what happened to him in Berlin,” says Kennedy. “Neither he nor my grandfather have ever spoken to a spirit about anything before.”
Before the Nazi takeover, Mr. Koch had a successful career as head of the culture department at one of Germany’s leading companies (Carl Lindström), producing comprehensive books on birds and nature, as well as urban landscapes. As part of this, he turned the idea of field trips – sometimes trailing miles of cables through dead forests at night to hear sounds – into professionals. His 1889 drawing of his shama bird, which he made in his stuffed childhood home in Frankfurt when he was only eight years old, is believed to be the first bird drawing.
Kennedy recounts how Koch and his wife, Nelly, became involved in the Gestapo’s investigation of Reichstag fire of 1933, which the Nazis used as an excuse to turn Germany into a totalitarian regime.
The Kochs had – unknowingly – rented a room in their Berlin apartment to one of the accused arsonists. Known to them as Dr Steiner, was Georgi Dimitrov, a communist reformer who became Bulgaria’s first communist leader.
After Dimitrov’s arrest, the secret police took him back for questioning. Thinking she was going to be arrested again, she wrote a suicide note, took alcohol and turned on the gas taps in their kitchen, before being pulled out by a maid and revived. A suicide attempt was reported at Dimitrov’s trial at Germany’s highest court in Leipzig, prompting the Bulgarians to apologize.
Kennedy compiled the story from archives and Dimitrov’s writings. As far as he knows, his grandfather has never mentioned a suicide attempt, and has said little about his time under the Nazis.
When his “non-Aryan” identity removed Koch from the Reich Association for the Protection of A birdThe Nazis initially chose to ignore his Jewish heritage because they valued his musical talent. In August 1933, he proposed the creation of a good manual for the military on propaganda purposes. Topic Im Gleichen Schritt und Tritt (Walking and Walking Together), is a haunting yet haunting account of everything from gunfire to the heat of battle that took place at night for soldiers.
However, on a trip to Switzerland in January 1936, after the Nazis had accompanied Koch to watch over him, he was warned by a Swiss official that his life was in danger. “The air in Switzerland is better than in Germany,” he was told.
Escaping to Britain, he found refuge among ecologists and conservationists and became a regular on the radio, particularly as a regular on the BBC Children’s Hour.
Koch, who died at the age of 92 in 1974, He didn’t take Kennedy with him on any of his photo shoots. The only brush he can remember with his grandfather as a “bird”, was a “scary” trip to London zoo when he was seven. Behind the scenes were shown myna birds, which can mimic human speech and were banned from public display because of their profanity for swear words. He is happy when he explains that he went into the bird cage alone, with other children watching, as the toucan “rolled a grape from under my mouth into my mouth, then took it out again, and put it back in his mouth, my grandfather was watching”.
However, making Alarm Notes has changed the way he sees his grandmother. Reading his letters in the broadcaster’s archive, he realized his long struggle to be taken seriously by his British friends and to earn a living. He said: “I can’t help but think that he made a picture of him, but he thought, well, I have to do that, if that’s the case,” he says.
“It made me understand his suffering, and how difficult his life was.
