Radio Benjamin

CHAPTER 40. Reflections on Radio

It is the critical error of this institution to perpetuate the fundamental separation between performer and audience, a separation that is undermined by its technological basis. Every child recognizes that it is in the interest of radio to bring anyone before the microphone at any opportunity, making the public witness to interviews and conversations in which anyone might have a say. While people in Russia are drawing these inevitable conclusions from the apparatus, here the dull term “presentation” rules, under whose auspices the practitioner confronts the audience almost unchallenged. This absurdity has led to the fact that still today, after many long years of experience, the audience, thoroughly abandoned, remains inexpert and more or less reliant on sabotage in its critical reactions (switching off). Never has there been a genuine cultural institution that was not legitimized by the expertise it inculcated in the audience through its forms and technology. This was as much the case in Greek theater as with the Meistersingers, on the French stage as with pulpit orators. Only this most recent age, with its relentless fomenting of a consumer mentality among operagoers, novel-readers, leisure travelers, and the rest, has created dull, inarticulate masses — an audience in the narrow sense of the word, one with no standards for its judgment, no language for its sentiments. Via the masses’ attitude toward radio programs, this barbarism has reached its peak and now appears ready to recede. It would take just one move: for the listener to focus his reflections on his real reactions, in order to sharpen and justify them. But the task would be insuperable if this behavior were, as the programming directors and particularly the presenters like to believe, largely incalculable, or else solely dependent on the content of the programming. The slightest consideration demonstrates the contrary. Never has a reader snapped shut a book he has just begun as willfully as listeners switch off the radio after the first minute of some lectures. It is not the remoteness of the subject matter; this would often be a reason to listen for a while, uncommitted. It is the voice, the diction, the language — in short, too frequently the technological and formal aspect makes the most interesting shows unbearable, just as in a few cases it can captivate the listener with the most remote material. (There are speakers one listens to even for the weather report.) Only this technological and formal aspect can ever develop the expertise of the listener and stem the barbarism. The matter is self-evident. One need only consider what it means that the radio listener, as opposed to every other kind of audience, receives the programming in his home, where the voice is like a guest; upon arrival, it is usually assessed just as quickly and as sharply. And why is it that no one tells the voice what is expected of it, what will be appreciated, what will not be forgiven, etc.? The answer lies solely in the indolence of the masses and the narrow-mindedness of those in control. Of course, it would not be easy to adapt the behavior of the voice to the language, for both are involved. But if radio were to rely only on the arsenal of impossibilities that grow more plentiful each day, drawing, for example, only on negative attributes to create something like a humorous typology of speakers, it would not only improve the standard of its programming, it would also have the audience on its side, as experts. And nothing is more important than that.

“Reflexionen zum Rundfunk,” GS, 2.3, 1506–7. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Written in 1930 or 1931, no later than November 1931. Unpublished during Benjamin’s lifetime.

CHAPTER 41. Theater and Radio

On the Mutual Supervision of Their Educational Roles

“Theater and Radio”: an unbiased consideration of these two institutions does not necessarily evoke a sense of harmony. The competitive relationship here is not quite as fierce as between radio and the concert hall. Yet one knows too much of the ever-expanding activities of radio and the ever-deepening crisis in the theater to even begin to imagine a collaboration between the two. Such a collaboration nevertheless exists, and has existed for quite some time. To the extent that it has occurred, it has only been of a pedagogic nature. Southwest German Radio recently initiated such a collaboration, and with considerable enthusiasm. The station’s artistic director, Ernst Schoen, was one of the first to turn his attention to the works recently put forward for discussion by Bert Brecht and his literary and musical colleagues. It is no accident that while these works—Der Lindberghflug, Das Badener Lehrstück, Der Jasager, Der Neinsager, etc. — are unequivocally pedagogical, they also constitute a bridge between theater and radio in a wholly original way.¹ The basis for these programs soon proved viable. Similarly structured serial programs, such as Elisabeth Hauptmann’s “Ford,” were soon broadcast on school radio, while issues confronted in daily life — the upbringing and education of children, techniques for professional success, marriage difficulties — were casuistically addressed through examples and counterexamples.² The Frankfurt radio station (together with that in Berlin) provided the impetus for such “listening models,” written by Walter Benjamin and Wolf Zucker.³ The breadth of these activities allows for a closer look at the principles of this work, while simultaneously preventing it from being misunderstood.

Such a scrutiny must not cause us to overlook the obvious issue at hand: technology. It would behoove us to leave all sensitivities aside and to state the matter outright: the radio, in relation to the theater, represents not only the newer, but also the more exposed technology. It cannot yet harken back to a classical epoch, as can the theater; the masses that embrace it are much larger; and finally and above all, the material elements on which its equipment is based, and the intellectual elements on which its programs are based, are closely intertwined to the benefit of the listeners. For its part, what does the theater have to offer? The use of a living medium, nothing more. Perhaps the crisis facing the theater stems from no question more important than this: What does the use of a living person contribute to the theater? In response, two starkly contrasting notions arise — one reactionary and one progressive.

The first sees itself in no way obliged to take notice of the crisis. From its perspective, the harmony of the whole is and remains unclouded, with man as its representative. It regards him as being at the peak of his powers, as the lord of creation, as a personage (even in the case of a mere wage-earner). His realm is the culture of today, over which he reigns in the name of “humanity.” This proud, self-assured theater, which takes as little heed of its own crisis as it does that of the world; this haut-bourgeois theater (whose most celebrated magnate, however, has recently stepped down) — whether now proceeding with plebeian dramas in the new style, or with Offenbachian libretti, it always perceives itself as a “symbol,” a “totality,” a “total work of art.”

We are characterizing the theater of education and of distraction — so contradictory in appearance, yet merely complementary phenomena within the saturated stratum for which all things become stimuli. But in vain does this theater seek to compete with the attraction of million-mark films, replete with complicated machinery and massive crowds of extras; in vain does its repertoire encompass all epochs and all corners of the world, while broadcasting and cinema, with a much smaller apparatus, have room in their studios for ancient Chinese drama along with new forays into Surrealism. Competing with the technology available to radio and cinema is pointless.

But the ensuing controversy is hardly pointless. Above all, this is what is expected from progressive theater. Brecht, the first to theorize it, calls this theater “epic.” Epic Theater is thoroughly sober, especially regarding technology. This is not the place to expound on the theory of Epic Theater, much less to demonstrate how the development and structure of Gestus amount to nothing but a retro-transformation of the methods of montage so critical to broadcasting and film — from a technological undertaking to a human one. Suffice it to say that the principle of Epic Theater, like that of montage, is based on interruption. Only here, interruption acts not as a stimulus, but as a pedagogical tool. It brings the action to a temporary halt, forcing the audience to take a critical position toward the proceedings and the actor to take a critical position toward his role.

Epic Theater pits drama’s laboratory against drama’s total work of art. It draws in a new way upon theater’s reliable old prospect — the exposure of those present. Its experiments revolve around man in the present crisis, man eliminated by radio and cinema, man, to put it somewhat drastically, as the fifth wheel of technology. This diminished, neutralized humanity is subjected to certain ordeals and evaluative tests. Consequently, events are alterable not at their climaxes, not through virtue and resolve, but only in their strictly habitual processes, through reason and practice. To construct from the smallest elements of behavior what Aristotelian dramatic theory refers to as “action”: that is the meaning of Epic Theater.

Epic Theater confronts conventional theater by replacing culture with training, and distraction with groupings. Concerning the latter, anyone who follows the changes in radio will be familiar with the recent efforts to more narrowly define listener blocs in terms of social class, interests, and milieu. Similarly, Epic Theater is attempting to cultivate a group of interested parties, who, independent of criticism and advertising, are keen to see their own concerns, including political ones, realized in a series of actions (in the above sense) by a consummately trained ensemble. Notably, this development has led to older dramas undergoing major transformations (Eduard II; Dreigroschenoper) while newer ones have been subjected to a kind of controversial treatment (Jasager, Neinsager);⁴ this may shed light on what is meant by replacing culture (of knowledge) with training (of judgment). Radio is particularly bound to take advantage of established cultural goods, which it does best through adaptations that not only correspond with technology, but also comply with the demands of an audience that is a contemporary of its technology. Only thus will the apparatus remain free from the halo of a “gigantic educational enterprise” (as Schoen puts it),⁵ scaled back to a format fit for humans.

“Theater und Rundfunk, Zur gegenseitigen Kontrolle ihrer Erziehungsarbeit,” GS, 2.2, 773–6. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Published in Blätter des hessischen Landestheaters in May, 1932.

¹ Brecht’s Der Lindberghflug [Lindbergh’s Flight], with music by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith, based on Brecht’s radio play Der Flug der Lindberghs [The Flight of the Lindberghs] (1930); Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis [The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent], cowritten by Brecht with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Slatan Dudow, with music by Hindemith (1929); and Der Jasager [He Who Said Yes], by Brecht with music by Weill (1930); and Brecht’s Der Neinsager [He Who Said No] (1930).

² Elisabeth Hauptmann (1897–1973) was a German writer who collaborated with Brecht on works including The Threepenny Opera (1928) and Happy End (1929).

³ On Benjamin’s collaboration with Wolf Zucker, see, in this volume, “A Pay Raise?! Whatever Gave You That Idea!” (292), and “Listening Models” (373).

⁴ Brecht’s Eduard II [Edward II] (1924); Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera) (1928); Der Jasager [He Who Said Yes], and Der Neinsager [He Who Said No].

⁵ See Benjamin, “Gespräch mit Ernst Schoen” (GS, 4.1, 548); “Conversation with Ernst Schoen” (trans. Thomas Y. Levin in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael Jennings et al. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008], 397). Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 398.

CHAPTER 42. Two Kinds of Popularity

Fundamental Principles for a Radio Play

The radio play What the Germans Were Reading While Their Classical Authors Were Writing, a few samples of which have been excerpted for readers of this issue, attempts to take into account some fundamental considerations on the popularity to which radio ought to aspire in its literary dimension.¹ For all of radio’s revolutionary aspects, it is in relation to our understanding of popularity that it is, or should be, most innovative. According to the old conception, popular representation — no matter how valuable it may be — is derivative. And that is easy enough to explain, given that before radio there were hardly any forms of publication that actually correlated to popular or educational aims. There was the book, the lecture, the newspaper, but these forms of communication in no way differed from those through which the progress of scholarly research was disseminated among circles of experts. Consequently, popular representation was undertaken in scholarly forms and had to forgo its own original methods. It found itself constrained to clothe the content of certain domains of knowledge in more or less appealing forms, in some cases relating it to shared experience and common sense; but what it produced was always secondhand. Popularization was a subordinate technique, and public estimation of it testified to this fact.

Radio — and this is one of its most notable consequences — has profoundly transformed this state of affairs. On the strength of its unprecedented technological potential to address unlimited masses simultaneously, popularization has outgrown its well-meaning, humanistic intentions and become an endeavor with its own formal laws, one that has elevated itself just as markedly from its former practice as did modern advertising technology in the previous century. In terms of experience, this implies the following: popularization in the old style took its point of departure from a sound basis of scholarship, imparted in the same way that scholarship itself had developed it, but with the omission of more difficult lines of thought. The essence of this form of popularization was omission; by and large its layout remained that of the textbook, with its main parts in large print and its excursus in small. However, the much broader, yet also much more intensive popularity sought by the radio cannot content itself with this approach. It demands a total transformation and rearrangement of the material from the standpoint of popular relevance. It does not, therefore, suffice to attract interest with some timely inducement, only to once again offer the curious listener what he can hear in any old lecture hall. To the contrary, everything depends on convincing him that his own interests possess objective value for the material itself; that his questions, even when not spoken into the microphone, call for new scholarly findings. In this way, the external relationship between scholarship and popularity that prevailed before is supplanted by an approach that scholarship itself cannot possibly forgo. For here is a case of a popularity that not only mobilizes knowledge in the direction of the public, but mobilizes the public in the direction of knowledge. In a word: true popular interest is always active; it transforms the substance of knowledge and has an impact on the pursuit of knowledge itself.

The livelier the form in which such an educational endeavor claims to proceed, the more indispensable the demand that a truly lively knowledge unfold, and not just an abstract, unverifiable, and general liveliness. This applies especially to the radio play, insofar as it has an instructive character. The literary radio play in particular is as little served by the arts-and-crafts cobbling together of so-called conversations, plucked from anthologies and from excerpts of works and letters, as by the dubious audacity of having Goethe or Kleist at the microphone, reciting the words of the script writer. And because the one is as questionable as the other, there is only one way out: to address the scholarly questions directly. And that is what I am aiming for in my experiment.² It is not the heroes of German intellectual history themselves who make an appearance, nor did it seem appropriate to make heard the greatest possible number of excerpted works. In order to gain depth, the superficial was taken as a point of departure. The aim was to present the listeners with what is in fact so prevalent and so gratuitous that it invites this typification: not the literature, but rather the literary conversation of the day. Yet this conversation, unfolding in coffeehouses and at fairs, at auctions and on strolls, was preoccupied with poetry schools and newspapers, censorship and the book trade, secondary education and lending libraries, Enlightenment and obscurantism in unforeseeably diverse ways; this conversation simultaneously maintains an intimate relationship to the questions posed by an advanced literary scholarship ever more concerned with researching the historical factors that determined literary production. To reconstruct the debates over book prices, newspaper articles, lampoons, and new publications — in themselves the most superficial debates imaginable — is anything but superficial as a scholarly undertaking, for such retroactive invention also makes considerable demands on the investigation of facts with respect to their sources. In short, the radio play in question strives for the closest possible contact with the research recently undertaken in so-called audience sociology. It would see its highest confirmation in being able to captivate the specialist no less than the layman, even if for different reasons. And with that, the concept of a new popularity appears to have found its simplest definition.

“Zweierlei Volkstümlichkeit: Grundsätzliches zu einem Hörspiel,” GS, 4.2, 671–3. Translated by Jonathan Lutes and Diana K. Reese.

Published in the radio magazine Rufer und Hörer, September 1932.

¹ Benjamin refers to his own play, What the Germans Were Reading While Their Classical Authors Were Writing, an excerpted version of which was published with “Two Kinds of Popularity” in the radio journal Rufer und Hörer in September, 1932.

² See Benjamin, What the Germans Were Reading While Their Classical Authors Were Writing.

CHAPTER 43. The Situation in Broadcasting

The chaos of programs is inefficient and confusing. To address this problem, each station’s programming will now be broadcast on several other stations. So far so good, in terms of a simplification of the work involved; however, the following is now occurring: the many large stations abroad are interfering with the reception of the smaller German stations, to such a degree that their radius is limited to only forty or fifty kilometers. Conferences have been arranged to eliminate these disturbances through a sensible allocation of wavelengths. Without waiting for the results of these conferences, it has now been decided to build nine or ten large broadcasting stations, allegedly to ensure that reception will be free of disturbances. (Of course, there will again be separate programming for these stations. What is simplified at one extreme is lost at the other. A victory for double-programming across the board.) But the real reason for building these stations lies elsewhere: in politics. Long-range propaganda instruments are desired in case of war.

“Situation im Rundfunk,” GS, 2.3, 1505. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Unpublished during Benjamin’s lifetime. Likely written between 1930 and 1932. For further context, see the exchange of letters between Benjamin and Schoen from April 1930, where they discuss Benjamin’s plan to publish, in the Frankfurter Zeitung, an essay on the current political issues in broadcasting (GS, 2.3, 1497–505). This essay was, apparently, never realized. Benjamin’s comments also register an acknowledgment or anticipation of the reorganization of radio under the Papen government, introduced in the summer of 1932, which transferred control over broadcasting to the state and prepared the way for the takeover of the airwaves by the Nazis at the end of January, 1933.

CHAPTER 44. Listening Models

The underlying purpose of these models is a didactic one. The subject matter of the instruction consists of typical situations taken from everyday life. The method of the instruction is to juxtapose example with counterexample.

The speaker appears three times in each listening model: at the beginning he announces to the listeners the topic that will be covered; he then introduces to the audience the two partners who appear in the first part of the listening model. This first part contains the counterexample: how not to do it. After the first part, the speaker returns. He indicates the mistakes that were made. He then introduces the listeners to a new figure, who will appear in the second part and show how the same situation can be handled successfully. At the end the speaker compares the wrong methods with the right ones, and frames the moral.

Thus, no listening model has more than four principal voices: 1) that of the speaker; 2) that of the model figure, who is identical in the first and second parts; 3) that of the inept partner in the first part; 4) that of the adept partner in the second part.

Radio Frankfurt presented three listening models from 1931 to 1932:

1. “A Pay Raise?! Whatever Gave You That Idea!”

2. “The Boy Tells Nothing But Lies.”

3. “Can You Help Me Out Until Thursday?”

The first listening model showed one inept and one clever employee, negotiating with their boss. The second showed a ten-year-old boy who tells a fib. In the first part his father questions him, driving him deeper and deeper into his untruth. In the second part his mother demonstrates how to make the boy aware of his naughtiness without provoking defiance. The third listening model showed the clumsy behavior of a man who asks his friend for money and gets turned down, followed by the skillful actions of someone else in the same situation.

“Hörmodelle,” GS, 4.2, 628. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Unpublished during Benjamins lifetime. “Listening Models” was possibly written in early 1931, in conjunction with the broadcast of “A Pay Raise?!” Benjamin did produce at least one additional listening model, perhaps in collaboration with Wolf Zucker: a piece entitled “Frech wird der Junge auch noch!” [The Boy Is Getting Fresh, Too!], likely a version of the above-mentioned “The Boy Tells Nothing But Lies,” was broadcast from Frankfurt on July 1, 1931, and perhaps from Berlin as well (see editors’ notes in GS, 2.3, 1442; see also Schiller-Lerg, Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 196–7, 213–16).