Category Archives: Object of the Month

Object of the month: An Indian Tablā (dāyāṃ) in the Berlin Lautarchiv

4. April 2023 HZK

Object of the Month 04/2023

In addition to its core holdings of audio recordings of prisoners of war from the First World War and the collection of German dialects from the 1920s and 1930s, the Lautarchiv (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) also preserves other interesting sub-collections that have so far remained rather in the background and initially seem to have no obvious connection to the collection. Take, for example, three Indian drums.

No historical written documentation exists for these instruments. There is no entry in any inventory book that would indicate how, why and from where they came into the collection of the Lautarchiv. In terms of organology, the three drums do not form a coherent ensemble. One of these drums—an Indian tablā (dāyāṃ)—will be the focus of attention here.

About the instrument

Tablā is the name for a pair of drums played with the hands, consisting of two small kettle drums. The smaller of the two drums played with the right hand is also called dāyāṃ (literally: right), which is referred to as the “real” tablā in some publications. The larger drum played with the left hand is called bāyāṃ (literally: left). There is only a dāyāṃ in the Lautarchiv; the pair of drums is incomplete. The tablā is more than a mere “object”; it demands the respect of musicians to be treated as individuals: instrument and musician become one. The drums are placed on the floor and played cross-legged. However, it is not allowed to simply step over a tablā standing on the floor; this is considered disrespectful.

Provenance: a few tentative & speculative thoughts

Some speculative lines of thought on the provenance are outlined here due to the lack of documentation:

Non-returned loan?
First of all, the speculative thought suggests itself whether it could possibly be a historical loan from the Museum of Musical Instruments SIMPK or the Ethnological Museum. This can be ruled out for the MIM due to a missing catalogue number on the instrument. The same applies to the Ethnological Museum.
Guest gift?
According to Dieter Mehnert, who was responsible for the collection in the 1990s, the drums had been “brought” from India before the 1960s. Further circumstances were not known. So whether it was a guest gift to the university deposited in the Lautarchiv must remain open.
Age of the instrument?
Even though the instrument probably came to the Lautarchiv before 1960, this does not allow us to draw any conclusions about the age of the instrument. It could be considerably older. The age could only be reliably determined by a dendrochronological examination (a dating by means of a tree ring examination of the wood used), not by mere visual inspection.

Within the non-material context of the collection

Although no direct connection of the tablā to the other holdings of the Lautarchiv can be reconstructed, the tablā in the Lautarchiv by no means stands in a culturally isolated space. Interesting cross-references exist within the collection that lend a non-material context to the fact that there is a tablā in the Lautarchiv. Consider that the Nobel laureate Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur (রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর,1861–1941) gave a speech and sang a song at Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität in June 1921. This audio recording is now in the collection of the Lautarchiv (shelf mark AUT 48). Whether it might even have been a gift from Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur cannot yet be determined on the basis of current knowledge. A song sung in the Tamiḻ language (தமிழ்) by Rājamāṇikkam (born around 1902) on 28 September 1926, accompanied by tablā (shelf mark LA 733), is unfortunately among the losses of the Lautarchiv.

Symbolic power of a Tablā in the Berlin Lautarchiv

Last but not least, the tablā also stands symbolically “in the midst” of the POW recordings of Indian colonial soldiers sent by the United Kingdom against Germany in the First World War. One of the most famous cyclically repeated rhythmic structures in North Indian classical music is the so-called Teental (तीन ताल). Its rhythmically balanced structure in 16 drum syllables (bol), which in turn are subdivided into 4×4 syllables, was considered a symbolic force for peace by none other than Ravi Shankar (1920–2012). It is up to everyone to decide whether the existence of a tablā in the collection of the Lautarchiv, “in the midst” of the audio recordings of prisoners of the First World War, can also assume and unfold such a symbolic power of peace today.

Text and photos: Christopher Li, Head of Collection of Sound Archive

News, Object of the Month

Object of the month: Historical drawing of a new horse stable building

23. March 2023 HZK

Object of the Month 03/2023

House 9 on the North Campus once served as the equine clinic of the former Prussian Royal Veterinary School, which was one of the leading training and research centres for veterinary medicine in the young German Empire. The northern part of the building was built in 1836 by Ludwig Ferdinand Hesse, the southern part in 1874 by Julius Emmerich as an extension. A drawing from the plan archive of the Technical Department provides information on the construction of the extension.

The drawing by the architect Julius Emmerich shows the front of an elongated single-storey stable building with a high roof, framed by stair towers and transoms on a scale of 1:100. The centre is emphasised by a risalit with a wood-decorated roof gable, and three window axes each on the left and right. On the ground floor, double-wing windows form a line with the skylights and thus vertically divide the cube. In the gable of the risalite, at the level of the attic, a double-leaf slatted door through which straw and hay could be stored in the attic. The towers served as access to the work and living rooms of the animal keepers in the transverse bays. The shape of the roof, the profiled beam heads and brackets, the accentuation of the cornices by moulded stones as well as the alternating coloured brick bands are depicted in great detail in the drawing. Emmerich’s design borrows from Schinkel’s designs for Prussian country house buildings. Trees and bushes frame the planned building and refer to the park character of the site.

The plan served as an appendix to the cost estimate for the building of 17 August 1873 and was submitted by Emmerich and countersigned by master builder F. Schulze on 12 September of the same year.
At that time, Emmerich was in the Prussian civil service and was in charge of the planning. On the basis of the other autographs, the remarks on the plan and the accompanying signatures, it is possible to trace the usual approval procedure for new buildings that was customary for the city of Berlin in the young Empire. Government building officer Ludwig Giersberg, an employee of the Ministry of Construction, Military, Trade and Finance, Department of Construction, confirmed the accuracy of the plan document. From 1866 onwards, Giersberg was entrusted in the Ministry with the preparation of expert opinions and the examination of building projects of outstanding importance in public construction. His signature under the plan, dated 27 April 1875, confirmed the planning for the new stables for the veterinary school. The text “Neuer Stall der Medizin. Klinik” using a blue pen probably goes back to the planning for necessary new buildings for the veterinary school at the beginning of 1908. At that time, 10,000 horses per year were already being treated in the existing buildings.

After the equine clinic was completed in 1839, the building was used as an animal stable and warehouse until the veterinarians moved to Dahlem in 1991. In 2014, extensive renovation and conversion work took place. Today, there are laboratory and seminar rooms on the ground floor and offices of the Institute of Biology on the upper floor.

Author: Kerstin Hinrichs, Technical Department

Further links (only in German):

Bauakten- und Planarchiv der Technischen Abteilung

News, Object of the Month

Object of the Month: Lise Meitner Monument by Anna Franziska Schwarzbach

23. January 2023 HZK

Object of the Month 01/2023

Since 2014, Lise Meitner faces Unter den Linden; on the other side of the cour d'honneur of the main building, Theodor Mommsen and Max Planck face her. The monument to Hermann von Helmholtz completes the historical series, which is broken up and continued both in terms of contemporary history and aesthetics by Lise Meitner's representation - no longer larger than life and in a space-consuming pose, but set back and asymmetrically on the plinth. The bronze monument to Lise Meitner (1878-1968) is the youngest in the university's cour d'honneur and the only one to date to honour a female scientist. Lise Meitner (1878-1968) combines many special features in her scientific biography: she was the second woman to receive a doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna in 1906; in 1913 she was the first woman to become a scientific member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society; she was the first woman to work as an assistant to Max Planck; in 1922 she became the first female physicist in Prussia to habilitate at the University of Berlin; and finally, in 1926, she was appointed as the first associate professor for experimental nuclear physics. In retrospect, she herself describes the fact that she took her work with the students very seriously as "a great human responsibility for our young colleagues, with whom we are together all day and for whose overall human development everything we do and say can have an influence".

Lise Meitner Monument

Nuclear power for peaceful use

Even before her theoretical interpretation of nuclear fission in 1939, she received the first of a total of four nominations for the Nobel Prize in 1919 – but she did not receive the Nobel Prize itself. This honour was bestowed on Otto Hahn in 1945, with whom Lise Meitner worked and researched together for decades – and whom she sometimes referred to, self-confidently teasingly, as “chicken”. She became known to the scientific community early on and met Marie Curie and Albert Einstein personally. As a Jew, she was forced to give up her scientific work by the Nazi Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which was passed in 1933. In 1938, she was able to emigrate to Sweden. There, from 1947 to 1960, she held a research professorship and was head of the nuclear physics department at the Stockholm Institute of Technology. From then on, she devoted herself not to the construction of the atomic bomb, but to the peaceful use of nuclear energy. After her retirement in 1960, she moved to Cambridge, where she died eight years later, having received many international honours and awards.

Monument with signature, nuclear reaction and calculation

The Berlin sculptor Anna Franziska Schwarzbach won the European art competition with her design for the Lise Meitner Monument. The site also almost occupies the place where the monument to Heinrich von Treitschke once stood – the historian who triggered the Berlin anti-Semitism controversy with his sentence “The Jews are our misfortune” and whose monument was finally removed after being moved by the National Socialists in 1951.

Schwarzbach contrasts the relationship between the figure and the plinth: on the base plate lies a plinth with various cuts and cracks that are associatively linked to the fractures in Meitner’s biography. The portrait-like figure itself stands somewhat apart, at once delicate and small and prominent, representing marginalisation as much as merit. On the front of the plinth is Lise Meitner’s signature, on the smooth left side surface a drawing of the nuclear reaction and fragments of a calculation. Thus the attributes have also migrated to the plinth and are not attached to the figure. Criticised as decorative, following female stereotypes and lacking the potential for irritation as an impulse to reflection, the monument is subordinate to the coherent appearance of the Court of Honour. On the everyday walk into the main building of the university, the Lise Meitner Monument nevertheless evokes German history, university and scientific history as well as questions of equal rights – whether it is an anachronism should be decided by each:r.

Author: Christina Kuhli, Custodian of the HU
Art Collection / Custody of the Humboldt University

Photos: Matthias Heyde

Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik

Zentralinstitut der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin