“Have you ever visited the Humboldt Forum before?” “No, this is my first time.”
We were led into his office and exchanged greetings face-to-face. The view overlooking the Berliner Dom caught my eye. In contrast to the stark white interior, the scenery outside poured in strong colors. It was as if the outside was alive, while we and the archives inside had no breath, caught in the past and asleep.
“This view is truly magnificent.” “I don’t like this building, or this office, and I cannot agree with the reasons why it was remodeled. On top of a twentieth-century East German building, they rebuilt the Baroque-style Berlin Palace that stood here from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century. It is a return from the republic back to the empire. The Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv was founded by Carl Stumpf, a man who devoted his whole life to the empire. Whatever merits or faults he had by the standards of his time, his ideology is embedded throughout this archive. That ideology has returned with this building.”
The corridor we stepped into after our conversation looked as pale as the office. He opened the door to the storage room where the archives were kept and let me look inside. Shelves and archiving folders were neatly and cleanly arranged. The voices of the Koreans I was searching for were lined up there as well. Everything was arranged in muted tones, so much so that only shadows of different brightness seemed to give the place depth.
“Who holds the copyrights to these sounds?” “We do. Since I began working here, I have met with many people in an effort to return these voices to their home countries—legally. I believe each voice belongs not here, where its speaker was once imprisoned, but where its language and geopolitical roots lie. But I have failed time and time again.”
There was a small room where one could experience the project planned over many decades. On one side stood the wax cylinder digitization device, and on other shelves were various players through which the archives could be heard. Countless folk songs and oral traditions from many nations overflowed here, yet there was no narrative. The sounds contain no story, yet they are marked as the voices of prisoners. Only Carl Stumpf’s benevolent smile looked down on me, accompanied by the note that someone in his family had donated his portrait.
The hardest part to listen to in these archives is the silence: the time when the speaker waits before saying or singing something, or the silence after they finish. Whatever the recording conditions were, it is unclear whether they had a chivalrous motivation to proudly spread their language and folk songs. As historical evidence, the speaker seated before the recording device fulfills their inherent role in their mother tongue and sound only after imprisonment, no longer delegating. That silence is expressed in the regular noise flowing from the dust- and time-stained wax cylinder player. Breath, air, longing, domination, and subjugation are contained in that sound, which resembled the techno beats flowing out of a dark club.
He handed me a light blue CD. Surprised and flustered, my face turned red as I asked:
“Did you digitize these materials and make them into CDs? To let people access the voices of prisoners anywhere, conveniently? Whose idea was this?” “This was produced before I came here.”
In a truly creative way, the present had pushed the past further down into the abyss.
After our conversation, he kindly escorted me down to the lobby. As befits a site of history and culture, a large new exhibition was opening.
“I remember the opening exhibition here.” “Didn’t you say you had never been here before?” “Yes. Thanks to that opening exhibition, I came here today for the first time. That event, which I encountered through brochures and articles, stirred in me a patriotism I had never felt before.” “Hahaha—then perhaps a blessing in disguise.”
#1. Aerodynamics Laboratory
When you see the Trudelturm (Spin Tower) in person, the building is smaller than expected. It is not spectacular, nor does it aggressively flaunt itself. Nevertheless, it impresses because its form matches its function, both inside and out. Built after World War I and used until just before World War II, the tower was a site for aerodynamic and aircraft spin experiments. Inside, experiments were conducted by trapping vortices, and during the war the exterior was scarred by bullets.
The Trudelturm stands within the Aerodynamic Park at Humboldt University’s Adlershof campus—though in fact, the campus was built on the site of the former Johannisthal airfield, once home to the German Aerospace Research Institute (DVL). The name Adlershof itself combines Adler (eagle, the German national symbol) and Hof (yard or court), echoing its aviation past.
As mentioned, the Spin Tower inserted vertical air currents to test aircraft spins and explored ways to control or intercept them without pilots. It also contained facilities for high-speed camera recordings. Whether these studies achieved their intended aims is unclear. But it remains one of my favorite buildings, because inside seems outside and outside seems inside—as if their functions compete in a kind of benevolent rivalry. Concrete, once set, is hard to change or repurpose. The tensile strength formed by the merging of hard science and the vitality granted to the Nazis hardened into the very substance and history of the tower.
The Trudelturm created artificial lift and thrust in the belief of perfection. Scientific calculations assume no error, yet later generations always revise them with unforeseen logics. The certainty of the era, blind to uncertainty, ended up assisting the next war. The internal force of artificially controlled nature felt like human arrogance—full of conviction yet always impatient, a stubborn listener determined to extract meaning. Day after day, it created vortices with the same but different questions. When the inner vortex stopped after the war, it continued to be delivered outward, into the world.
#2. Strength Through Joy
The eternal dominion of power finds completion in leisure resorts. A perfect life, adorned with recreation and pleasure, was to be realized as a reward for labor. The resort better known as Prora was located on Binz beach, Rügen Island. Construction began in 1936, but was halted when World War II broke out in 1939. It was part of the Nazi “Strength Through Joy” (Kraft durch Freude, KdF) program.
Today, at the entrance to the Prora Documentation Center, the phrase MACHT Urlaub is displayed. While Urlaub means “holiday” and Macht can mean “make” or “do,” the scale and history of the building make the slogan less like “Make holiday” and more like a command: “DO holiday!” It urged workers to brace themselves for leisure with the same determination demanded of labor.
Prora stretches 4.5 km, capable of housing 20,000 vacationers at once, collectively obeying the command to rest. By uniting labor and leisure, this experiment sought to control and indoctrinate through holidays. It even won the Grand Prix at the 1937 Paris Expo. Inspired by the British Butlin’s resorts, it was not grand but certainly effective propaganda.
Prora represented a higher-order leisure facility. Yet thanks to the rulers’ leisure infrastructure, sunlight, rain, air, and time were unequally distributed. Whether or not you could enter the regime’s leisure time defined your status. One person’s breath was the threshold between life and death; another’s breath was a longing for eternal sunbathing. This asymmetry was weaponized as propaganda.
In the end, Prora was never used for its intended purpose. After the war it was repurposed for various military uses, and only recently capital investment has transformed parts of it into renovated luxury accommodations atop the original framework.
#3. The Sports Center of Liberation
After long subjugation came the “world civil war.” When that war temporarily paused, countless proxy fighters disappeared, and their descendants gained the leisure to build for themselves. The fantasy of leisure that Prora never realized now abounds. Labor and leisure seem destined to converge, and leisure takes many forms. We seek to fulfill all forms of rest in one place: golf ranges, indoor pools, saunas, lazy rivers, squash courts.
Some enjoy such leisure, others cannot. For some, even entering such spaces brings alienation. That alienation resembles Prora’s—compulsory grandeur, or conversely, a liberating common resource for citizens. The material flow of time also brings decline: spaces of leisure soon turn into idle, derelict sites. The past becomes old before it has even rested, while the future is rebuilt repeatedly. When the pause in war itself becomes the past, how will we live as subjects or proxies, differently from now? “Four days later, Korea was exactly the same as four days earlier.”
#0. You May Ask Us Who We Are
Between wars, and in places where the future resurrects as past, I conducted my filming. By chance, all three sites relate to my own life: I live near the Spin Tower; my far relatives hail from Rügen, where Prora stands; and I was born near the Samik Sports Center, where I went swimming. Though from different historical times, on the same stage they resonate contemporaneously. Nations, peoples, cultures, politics—like trees, stones, fertilizers, or dust—act in parallel, replaying themselves through small errors and shifts. Sometimes they even substitute for one another.
What empowers globally displaced bodies to act in their own right is the energy of subjective resonance with their identity. Even the silence between proxy voices, recorded on the dusty cylinder player, holds a subjectivity of its own. The spirit of the Koreans who resisted Germany for Russia recalled to me the Koreans who paved Sakhalin’s roads barehanded for Japan.
I titled the work made through this research We Are Yo. For the English title, I wondered: from the perspective of those never delegated, how might they see us? Thus it became: You may ask us who we are. Please, do.
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Heaven Baek and Kaputte Katze Studio All right reserved