“I'm already in a sort of tomb”: A Reply to Philip Scheffner's The Halfmoon Files

This essay is an illustrated montage of some points of engagement with Philip Scheffner's 2007 film, The Halfmoon Files, about the Halfmoon prisoner of war camp in Wünsdorf, Germany. The camp was an important site for anthropometric research and propaganda during World War I. The film is a ghost story and conjures a number of connections to related stories and to questions of racism, imprisonment, and war that my essay offers in response. My title—“I'm already in a sort of tomb”—is taken from Victor Serge's fictionalized autobiography, Men in Prison, whose contemporaneous account of being in prison during World War I serves as a guide along the way.