The amazing life of the refugee ‘Bird Man’ who brought tweets and chirps to the BBC Documentaries

IDuring his lifetime, the voice of pioneering German recordist Ludwig Koch was as familiar to British audiences as the voice of David Attenborough is today. His tireless passion for capturing bird sounds and introducing them first into the German language and, after his exile from Nazi Germany, into British homes via audiobooks and BBC radio, made him a household name from the late 1930s onwards.

It was celebrated after his lifetime, parodied by Peter Sellers (playing Koch observing life at a Glasgow traffic junction) and immortalized in Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1980 novel Human Voices, about the wartime BBC, which depicts Koch’s diligent approach to capturing natural sounds and indirectly highlights how the organization benefited from new voices like his own.

However, to his granddaughter, the film director Anthea Kennedy, Koch was a somewhat isolated presence. “I don’t remember ever having a conversation with him,” Kennedy says. Instead, he preferred to sing it, vividly dreaming of the short career as an opera tenor singer that he had been forced to abandon in Germany due to the First World War. “He would squeeze my hand hard, which I hated, and sing classical opera, and then ask me what he was singing. It didn’t matter to him that I had no idea.”

Given their relationship, it’s surprising that Kennedy, along with fellow director and partner Ian Wiblin, have created a loving tribute to Koch. Their film, Alarms, interweaves images and sounds from modern-day Berlin and other places he visited as a naturalist with many of Koch’s own recordings, from the warm whistle of golden orioles at Spandau, to the sneezing of seals on Skomer Island, and his personal renditions of Schubert’s Lieder in old age. It is a haunting and contradictory interweaving between the past and the present, and resembles a dialogue between the granddaughter and the grandfather that never happened in life.

“I wanted to explore what really happened to him in Berlin,” Kennedy says. “Neither he nor my grandmother spoke to a soul about anything in their past.”

Before the Nazis seized power, Koch had a thriving career as head of the culture department at one of Germany’s leading record labels (Karl Lindström), making best-selling audiobooks about birds and the natural world, as well as urban landscapes. As part of this, he turned the idea of ​​going on location – sometimes dragging cables for miles through undergrowth in the dead of night to get sounds up close – into a professional craft. His 1889 recording of his pet shama, made in his animal-filled childhood home in Frankfurt when he was just eight years old, is believed to be the first recording of a bird.

Kennedy recounts how Koch and his wife Nelly became involved in the Gestapo investigation into the 1933 Reichstag fire, which the Nazis used as an excuse to turn Germany into a dictatorship.

The Kochs had unwittingly rented a room in their Berlin home to one of the accused plotters of the arson attack. He was known to them as Dr. Steiner, but he was actually Georgi Dimitrov, the communist revolutionary who later became Bulgaria’s first communist leader.

After Dimitrov’s arrest, they were also taken for interrogation by the secret police. Suspecting further arrest, they wrote suicide notes, took barbiturates and turned on gas taps in their kitchen, before they were discovered by a maid and resuscitated. Their suicide attempt was mentioned during Dimitrov’s trial in Germany’s highest court in Leipzig, prompting the Bulgarian to apologise.

Kennedy pieced together the story from archival documents and Dimitrov’s memoirs. As far as she knows, her grandparents never mentioned their attempted suicide, and spoke little about their time under the Nazi club.

While his “non-Aryan” identity excluded Koch from the Reich Society for the Protection of Birds, the Nazis initially chose to ignore his Jewish heritage because they valued his skills as a voice recorder. In August 1933, he proposed creating an audiobook for the armed forces for propaganda purposes. due Im Gleichen Schritt und Tritt (Steps and Steps Together) is an eerie but impressive sound collection of everything from machine gun shots to the flickering campfires of soldiers gathering at night.

However, during a business trip to Switzerland in January 1936, after the assassination of a Nazi whom Koch had accompanied to monitor him, a Swiss government official warned him that his life was in danger. He was told: “The air in Switzerland is better than in Germany.”

After fleeing to Britain, he found refuge among fellow naturalists and bio-audio enthusiasts, and became a darling of radio listeners, particularly when he tuned in to the BBC’s Children’s Hour programme.

Koch, who died at the age of 92 in 1974, He did not take Kennedy with him on any of his recording trips. The only brush she can remember with her grandfather in the guise of Birdman was a “very scary” trip to the London Zoo when she was seven. Behind the scenes, myna birds that can imitate human speech were on display and were banned from public display due to their tendency to pick up obscenities. She steps back as she describes how she was forced into the bird cage alone, while the other children looked on, while the toucan “rolled a grape down his beak into my mouth, then took it out again, and rolled it back up his beak, and my grandfather looked on.”

However, taking notes of caution changed her view of her grandfather. By reading his letters preserved in the radio archives, I came to understand his long struggle to be taken seriously by his British colleagues and to earn a living. “I can’t help but think they made a caricature of him, but he decided, ‘Okay, I’ll fit into that, if that’s what it takes,'” she says.

“He made me understand his suffering, and how difficult his life was. I admire his patience and desire, and it finally made me love listening to birds.”