Tirailleurs: Trials and Tribulations– Reader (en)
From Cannon Fodder to Avant-Garde—The Forgotten Soldiers Who Freed Europe
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How can we deal with vulnerability in the archive? What does it mean to return something as ephemeral as a sound recording—and what significance do these voices hold for the descendants of the Tirailleurs? ‘What we are trying to return is stories’, writes Alia Mossallam in the Tirailleurs Reader about her work with recordings from the Berlin Lautarchiv (Sound Archive) at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. In Captured Voices (2022), Britta Lange examines how Tirailleurs serving in the French and British armies during the First World War were recorded in German prisoner-of-war camps for ethnological purposes and as part of colonial knowledge production. Today, Mossallam returns these recordings to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in an act of remembrance, where they reconnect many descendants of the Tirailleurs with stories long absent from familial and local memory. Salah Yousif, himself the grandson of a Tirailleur, reflects on this legacy in his poem The Grandchildren.