Unsound: Auditory Erasure in Marcel Beyer's Literary Archive of the Third Reich

Marcel Beyer's 1995 novel The Karnau Tapes has been praised for its unique reconstruction of the Third Reich as a war of mediated sound. I argue that its greatest, and most neglected, contribution to media history lay in its account of the Nazi invention of high-fidelity tape recording. In order to conceptualize tape's unique technical affordances and their narrative function in The Karnau Tapes, I draw on notions of "unsound" formulated across various theoretical texts in sound and media studies, showing how the novel appropriates the tape recorder's integration of inaudibility and erasure to address issues of writing the Nazi past from a mediated, third-generation perspective.