RADIO ACTIVITIES ...the labyrinth was much more complex and concrete than the apparent omnipresence of the ether. In the first scene of the filmDas Leben der Anderen, a Stasi officer exhaustively interrogates a prisoner. The scene supposedly takes place in the Stasi’s main political prison, Hohenschönhausen, but in reality the scene was staged precisely at the Funkhaus Berlin-Nalepastrasse, formerly the German Democratic Republic’s broadcasting house. With a particular eye—and ear—the director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, collapsed into one single space both the fictional space for sound torture/interrogation (Hohenschönhausen) and the former, real space of sound radio broadcasting (the Funkhaus in Nalepastrasse). In this interesting over-determination the spaces for sound and sonic media, production and reproduction are placed in the foreground of the built environment in Cold War Germany, as if the pure reverberation emitted by the surfaces of the building could translate the “atmosphere of the times” more than any character or decoration. In fact, especially in Berlin, the Cold War was not in a small portion a sound war, whose invisible battlefield took place in the radio-emitted and radio-received airwaves, and architecture played a significant, yet under-researched role in this. Soon after World War II, in May 1945, the Soviet Occupation Troops made two important moves in German territory. The first was to dismantle the tallest structure standing in Europe: the Deutschlander III radio transmission tower in Königs Wusterhausen. The second was to occupy the monumental building designed by Hans Poelzig, Das Haus des Rundfunks (Broadcasting House), in Charlottenburg, West Berlin. These two maneuvers were both symbolically and technically important and served as the prolegomenon in the forthcoming war in the ether1 between the Eastern and Western blocs. However, the supposedly immaterial or ethereal condition of the battle for conquering the domestic aural-space of individuals at both sides of the Iron Curtain rendered almost invisible the dialectically opposed and highly material face of that ethereal war. 1. By “war in the ether” or “ethereal war,” I am referring to the concept coined my media theorists and historians to define the political an ideological battle that took place over radio during the Cold War. To see more: Alexander Badenoch, Andreas Fickers, Christian Henrich-Franke, eds., Airy Curtains in the European Ether: Broadcasting and the Cold War (Nomos: Baden-Baden, 2013). 194 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00018 by guest on 30 September 2021 The technology and techniques of radio reached a point—specifically in Berlin during the Cold War—where its functional intentions were hardly differentiable between entertainment, cultural production, subjectivity formation, political agitation and propaganda, and, literally, warfare. All this climax development that has been perceived as an ethereal construction perforating walls, ceilings, and doors, going over fiscal and political boundaries, was actually built and designed in a highly material and sometimes monumental way. Architects, designers, engineers, politicians, journalists, and artists played their role in shaping the radio apparatus, and it was literally a dispositif,2 spanning from territorial organization to subjectivity determination, with all the other scales in between. This essay sheds light on the buildings, walls, transmission towers, factories and media industries, and territorial organizations that made possible the production, reproduction, and broadcasting of politically loaded media-content across the Iron Curtain. By assembling a (provisionary) conceptual vocabulary applied to specific built artifacts, this piece interrogates the role of the building— and the Wall—in the age where the historic solidity of architecture was radically challenged by the entangled development of technology, politics, and media-industry taking the form of an ethereal medium. And by doing so I project the same question onto our days, asking what the status is of the building in our increasingly hyper-connected and apparently ubiquitous and invisible existance. DAS HAUS DES RUNDFUNKS When talking about radio in Cold War Berlin, Das Haus des Rundfunks, designed by Hans Poelzig completed in 1931, (Fig. 1) is both history and pre-history of the subject matter. Das Haus des Rundfunks was the largest broadcasting facility of its period, being one among other examples of the same emerging programmatic type, including BBC’s Broadcasting House, completed only a year later. Both buildings dealt with the articulation of one of the most sophisticated, complex, and transformative of modern-emerging programs.3 In fact, radio embodied most of the aesthetic values present in modern art and architecture: it was media, industry, and transportation at the same time; it dealt with speed and movement in a radically new fashion; it had an impact on the formation of subjectivity on a massive scale through “an artistic medium”;4 and all that needed to be reduced 2. On the reading of Michel Foucault’s notion of apparatus or dispositif see Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 3. John Harwood, “Wires, Walls and Wireless: Notes Toward an Investigation of Radio Architecture,” Journal of the New Media Caucus, http://median.newmediacaucus.org/art-infrastructures-hardware/wires-walls-and-wireless-notes-toward- an-investigation-of-radio-architecture/. Harwood points out the under-researched character of the broadcasting house typology mentioning the early examples of the BBC and Das Haus des Rundfunks. 4. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1936). 195 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00018 by guest on 30 September 2021 THIERMANN into a single building/infrastructure. But none of the “modern masters” were interested at all in radio. Never did Mies, Le Corbusier, Gropius, or even Giedion express a significant interest for radio,5 yet both Alexander Rodchenko and László Moholy-Nagy famously portrayed radio transmission towers as symbols and emblems of the modern world. However, they completely overlooked the massive complexes where the broadcast content was actually produced. It is as if the ethereal nature of broadcasting in relation to the translucent and linear constructions of the transmission towers made the act and fact of media production, recording, and actually broadcasting completely invisible, even though they were sometimes literally across the street, as was the case in Berlin.6 Sigfried Kracauer refers in his column in Die Frankfurter Zeitung to the recently inaugurated Haus des Rundfunks in Charlottenburg: “But Poelzig’s building manifests not only indirectly the opacity contained in the idea of radio: beyond that it reveals an essential feature of the radiophonic enterprise. It is not as rigorous by whim, nor is it by chance that the headquarters evokes some central industrial authority. Through the style it defines—as precisely as possible—the commoditized nature of the spiritual activities that take place here. They are produced in the three rooms as any commodity, enveloped, and delivered to the consumers in their homes, through chord-or-wireless paths. Precisely this double meaning of creation and commodity is what builds that uncanny (unheimlich) character, which is at the same time the most outstanding feature of the new building. Perhaps unintentionally, it unveils the very quality of radio: that of being a great enterprise which transforms the production of scholars, writers, and artists into products ready to be used.”7 As a genuine modern program, the broadcasting house had to deal with functionality. Functionality however has a very specific meaning when related to sound and the extended radiophonic agency. And is that particular functionality that Kracauer saw as unheimlich, “this double meaning of creation and commodity” that is present in radio as a potential function. A few years earlier, the duality between “creation” and “commodity” was expressed in other words by Adolf Behne in his book The Modern Functional Building conceptualizing function as the balance between the building being a “tool” and a “toy.”8 Those 5. Mark Wigley, Buckminster Fuller, Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio (Berlin: Lars Muller, 2014). Wigley depicts Fuller as the real modern architect, portraying him in relation to the invention of radio. According to the book, Fuller was more interested in the transformative power of radio and in the possibility that it provides to liberate architecture from fixed urban and ground conditions. Yet Fuller never referred to the fabrication and production of media content as part of radio’s potential. 6. Moholy-Nagy’s photographs of the Berlin Funkturm were taken a year before the construction of Das Haus des Rundfunks began in 1929. 7. Sigfried Kracauer, “Sendestation: Das Haus,” Die Frankfurter Zeitung, 23 January 1931. Trans. by the author. Also published in German in: Hilker-Siebenhaar, Carolin & Krüger, Hanspeter, Hans Poelzig, (Berlin: Sender Freies Berlin, 1994). 196 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/THLD_a_00018 by guest on 30 September 2021 RADIO ACTIVITIES Figure 1. Floor Plan Haus des Rundfunks. Source: Hans Poelzig Archiv. Z. B. Architeckturmuseum der Technischen Universität Berlin, Inv. No. 4627. terms defining the early versions of the