German Politics and Society

“Mr. Radio (der Radio) is man’s greatest achievement,” a young Bavarian

named Maxl announced in the op-ed column of Der Rundfunkhörer, a journal

of the state’s listener advocacy association, in April 1954.1 His initial

enthusiasm, the letter made obvious, fizzled out fast. Elsewhere, Mr. Radio

may well have been a paragon of mobile greatness, road-ready thanks to

cars and portable following the introduction of transistors in 1953.2 Yet, his

country’s Mr. Radio, Maxl regretfully remarked, was deeply flawed, and

this circumstance had nothing to do with the advances of this “gentleman’s”

televisual competitor, which would need as many as six more years to reach

a quarter of all households.3 Rather, a slew of intrinsic shortcomings

plagued the imaginary character’s transmission, programming, and reception

in Maxl’s family residence—the home of the West German everyman.

The purposefully naïve wording of the boy’s letter, possibly penned by the

editor and association’s president Hans Gebhard, whose own frequent contributions

were nearly identical in tenor and substance, barely veiled a long

list of tongue-in-cheek complaints. The latter showed just how vulnerable

radio, this “hegemon of domestic leisure,” was during the first full decade of

the Cold War—the seminal overture to this special issue’s chronology.4

This article examines the intellectual discourse in West Germany on the role of entertainment in radio programs during the 1950s. Although accounting for most of the airtime and being an assigned mission of public broadcasters, many radio officials and experts continued to be suspicious of entertainment. Strongly adhering to the classical tradition of highbrow culture, these humanistic intellectuals had difficulties accepting entertainment as an integral component of broadcasting. The only discursive path for them to adopt entertainment as a legitimate concept was to discuss its specific contribution in the context of Bildung and Kultur. The article thus provides insight into how members of the cultural elites came-to-terms with the rise of popular culture during the 1950s.

This article delves into the relationship between cultural radio and the Cold War. After 1945, culural radio took on a central role in the intellectual self-understanding of the early Federal Republic. From the very beginning, there was much less censorship than with political editorial departments. Thus, it was possible for cultrual radio to offer an intellectual forum in which socialism was not simply dismissed due to the official anticommunist political doctrine. This article shows the ways in which the East-West conflict was present in the cultrual departments of radio broadcasters. It argues that socialism appeared less as an ideological restraint or taboo, but rather as a productive challenge, which in the end was part of the modernization of West Germany's intellectual self-understanding. Two prominent examples buttress this argument: the free space that cultrual radio conquered in a kind of leftist integration with the West, and the rapid advancement of sociological discourse.

In 1949, Jewish-German critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, a member of the group of intellectuals now known as the Frankfurt School, returned to West Germany from exile in the USA. This article examines a lesser-known aspect of Adorno's participation in the West German public sphere: namely, his radio broadcasts around the topos of “eine Erziehung zur Mündigkeit” (a pedagogy fostering political maturity/autonomy). Adorno's critique of the medium of radio as an arm of the reified “culture industry” is well documented. What, then, are we to make of his sociopolitical contribution to the German public sphere in the form of over one hundred radio broadcasts in the late 1950s and 1960s? This article broaches the question by analyzing his now-canonical 1960 broadcast on Hessischen Rundfunk titled “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?” (“What does Coming-to-Terms-with-the-Past Mean?”). Arguing for the centrality of affect for Adorno's postwar work, I demonstrate how he stages a pedagogy emphasizing the necessary relationship between reason and affect (Kant avec Freud) in achieving self-reflective thought and political autonomy. Finally, Adorno's earlier attack on music educational shows as “pseudo-democratic” (1938-1941 in Paul Lazarsfeld's Princeton Radio Research Project), complicates any straightforward elaboration of a postwar public pedagogy.

Using the example of the audio series Unforgotten Landscapes (Unvergessene Landschaften) aired on Radio Bremen in 1955, this article addresses the important role that radio played in the complex border-negotiation processes in Germany after World War II. For many years, the agency of radio as an interlocutor and discursive tool in the process of renationalization has been more or less neglected in historical research. Indeed, visual and auditory representation of the Eastern borders was a highly contaminated field in Western Germany until the 1970s. Even today, the relations between Poland and Germany are still affected by these issues. By using the German notion of Heimat as an umbrella concept, this article shows how these radio programs tried to shift the understanding of existing territorial borders, as having resulted from World War II and the atrocities of Nazi Germany to being a part of the imaginary construction of Germany as a Kulturnation. The audio series depicted the history of theses landscapes as German since medieval times, with no human beings living there in the present, but also claiming that the voices of death still can be heard. Thus, the territories could be lost, but by anchoring these landscapes in cultural memory, they would still be part of Germanness. Moreover, the programs reinforce West Germany's European mission to connect the east with the west beyond continuities with the völkisch “blood-and-soil ideology” underlying the concept of Heimat.

Until recently, broadcasting in Europe has been seen by historians and broadcasters alike as intricately related to national territory. Starting immediately after the Second World War, when West German national territory was still uncertain, this article explores how the broadcasting space of the Federal Republic (FRG) shaped and was shaped by material, institutional, and discursive developments in European broadcasting spaces from the end of World War II until the early 1960s. In particular, it examines the border regimes defined by overlapping zones of circulation via broadcasting, including radio hardware, signals and cultural products such as music. It examines these spaces in part from the view of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the federation of (then) Western public service broadcasters in Europe. By reconstructing the history of broadcasting in the Federal Republic within the frame of attempts to regulate European broadcasting spaces, it aims to show how territorial spaces were transgressed, transformed, or reinforced by the emerging global conflict.

This article examines Ulrich Horstmann's science fiction radio play Die Bunkermann-Kassette (The Bunker Man Cassette, 1979), in which the author frames fears and anxieties surrounding a potential nuclear conflict during the Cold War as apocalyptic self-annihilation of the human race. Radio, especially radio drama, had a unique role in capturing the historical imaginaries and traumatic experiences surrounding this non-event. Horstmann's radio drama and the titular cassette tape become sound artifacts that speak to the technological contexts of their time, while their acoustic content carries the past sounds into the present. In the world of the play, these artifacts are presented in a museum of the future, which uses the possibilities of science fictional imagination and speculation to create prosthetic memories of the Cold War. The article suggests that these memories are cyborg memories, because the listener is a fully integrated component of radio technology that makes these memories and recollections of imagined events possible in the first place.