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).
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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).
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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).
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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 broadcasting house typology can be witnessed in both the bbc and in Berlin. One of the main characteristics of the broadcasting house in London and Berlin is the location of the main Concert Hall or Der Grosser Sendesaal at the core of the plan layout. Bureaucratic programs, circulations, and smaller studios are arranged along the perimeter, operating as buffers to protect the central hall from outdoor noise. What Kracauer saw in Poelzig’s building, with a mysterious precision, was again the uncanny relationship between the layout of the building and the content that it produced, in other words between form and function. In functional terms the building was both a factory and a theater (a tool and a toy), but its programmatic logics, its scale, and its transmissions were designed to have a purpose, upon an audience that was not in the building but somewhere else. In its extremely fragmented plan where longer wirings are avoided at the cost of longer circulations, in its several rooms where mechanical ventilation and artificial light are used to isolate the space and create silence, and on almost every internal surface where the various different textures produced the adequate reverberation of the sound wave for it to be precisely captured by the microphones, Das Haus des Rundfunks massively and monumentally articulates the complex notion of functionality latent in the emerging artifact of the broadcasting house.
8. Adolf Behne, The Modern Functional Building, (Santa Monica: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1996). Built in 1926 and designed by architect Heinrich Straumer.
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But how does functionality operate when the subject to whom the building is suppose to act upon is not there? Without mentioning it, Kracauer suggests the presence and the fundamental relationship between the building and the transmission tower directly across the street,9 and with it the powerful potential functionality (or dysfunctionality) of the radiophonic enterprise: its capacity to modify gestures, behaviors, opinions, and discourses at a social scale.10 The radio apparatus could never be a single building, but rather is a system of relations linking specific artifacts, among which is Das Haus des Rundfunks. I will use “architecture of radio” to refer to the entangled development of those specific artifacts in relation to cultural production, electrical-engineering inventions, building technologies and techniques, sound gadgets and sound perception, radio-educational institutions, and territorial organization.
ETHEREAL WAR In 1945, 14 years after the inauguration of Das Haus des Rundfunks, the Soviet occupation forces took control of the building, then located in the British occupation sector, under the station-name Berliner Rundfunk—literally launching the ethereal war between the Eastern and the Western bloc. I would argue that the Cold War was shaped to a great extent by the ideological struggles that took place and form in large measure in air via radio waves. The political and ideological positions both the Western allies and the Soviets were not entirely defined at that time, and they were shaped and made evident throughout the process of reestablishment and formation of the new media infrastructure.11 After the war, radio was perceived as the most efficient, immediate, and important media. However, the battle for conquering the fundamental ethereal space through radio was actually performed on the ground and mostly through radio buildings. As was mentioned, the Soviet Military Administration (sma) took over Poelzig’s building, but they had no transmission tower. Thus, in the very first days after the war, they also took control of the Sendturm Tegel in the French occupation sector. The radio apparatus of the Berliner Rundfunk, operated by the sma during the first year afterwwii , included an Expressionist building located in the British sector, an 86-meter tall wooden tower (Sendturm Tegel) located in the French sector, and a couple hundred former Nazi radio technicians, all in the service of broadcasting communist political content and entertainment. Resulting in a rather complex radio-
10. To see more on the notion of function, especially as related to Georg Simmel’s understanding of its social potential, see Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings. (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 185. 11. Nichloas J. Schlosser, “The Berlin Radio War: Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin and the Shaping of Political Culture in Divided Germany, 1945- 1961” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2008).
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architecture apparatus. As previously stated, the political and ideological differences between Western allies and Soviets were rendered visible through the battle for conquering radio space, and therefore, radio architecture. The first hostile signal from the East to the West was the Soviet rejection to the American Military Government’s solicitude to obtain an hour a day of radio air-space. That rejection resulted in the formation of rias Berlin (Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor). In 1946 rias started broadcasting operations from a building, almost as monumental as Poelzig’s. The building was the former Fernmeldeamt (telephone exchange) built by the Deutsche Reichspost in Winterfeldtstraße, and designed by Berlin architect Otto Spalding. As the Americans had lost the early battle for the ether sovereignty and given the lack of a working transmitter, they had to rely on the old “wired broadcast” mechanism (Drahtfunk)12 utilizing Berlin’s telephone lines to broadcast information.13 The reason for selecting Otto Spalding’s building as rias’ first headquarters was not so much the shared Backsteinexpressionismus (brick expressionism) style of Poelzig’s building, but more importantly the fact that the Fernmeldeamt was actually the former building for telephone exchange: it was physically wired to a great number of Berlin houses. Even though during its first year of existence therias only reached approximately 1 percent of the population, it was important for the American Military Government in Berlin to establish a different style of broadcasting. Through wire, rias Berlin found in alternative radio architectures a way around its early loss in the ethereal battlefield. (Fig. 2) In 1948, after the establishment of the Berlin-Britz long-range transmitter in 1947, rias started to occupy the former ig Farben Industrie (Fig. 3) building as its definitive broadcasting house. The shift in broadcasting technology from wire to radio consequently produced a shift in a new broadcasting architecture, and, in turn, a change in the broadcast content. In the same year of the building’s transformation the rias-Symphonieorchester was founded. In only two years rias moved from wire to radio and from pre-recorded Jazz songs to a Symphonic Orchestra, making evident the complex relationship between architecture, technology, media content, and politics in the age of radio. A reorganization of both existing and new buildings and infrastructures occurred in Berlin in the early years of the Cold War under the logics of radio. What matters here is that precisely the architecture of radio played a fundamental and yet overlooked role in shaping the political context between Soviets and Western allies.
12. During the first year of existence RIAS, Berlin was actually called DIAS (Drahtfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor). 13. Schlosser, “The Berlin Radio War: Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin and the Shaping of Political Culture in Divided Germany, 1945-1961.”
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I am not only referring to the strategic and bureaucratic control over previously existing buildings and infrastructures, but mostly about how buildings themselves performed, through their typological, technical, and symbolic qualities. On the one hand, the Soviets were quickly able to transmit through the ether not only news and journalistic content, but also music and radio programs, because they had the architecture to do it. On the other hand, the Americans were forced to use wire and not air to broadcast their content, because they had a different architecture. The content they broadcast, even after the construction of the proper wireless technology, was defined by its very architecture. It is worth noting how typology matters here. It is clear that the typology of the transmission tower was visited and revisited in the various iterations of demolition, construction, and reconstructionin these very early years of the Cold War. But the more invisible yet monumental broadcasting house also performed a crucial role. In Fig. 4)one can see how the apparently invisible presence of Soviet military administration within Poelzig’s monumental building is not only perceived but also advertised as an uncomfortable foreign threat. It is also interesting to see how the former ig Farben Industrie building, occupied in 1948 by rias Berlin as their broadcasting house, shares the curvilinear morphological qualities and the fenestration patterns of the original broadcasting houses of 1930s Berlin and London, confirming that form matters at both performance/programmatic and symbolic levels.
FUNKHAUS BERLIN-NALEPASTRASSE In 1949 Germany was officially divided into the German Democratic Republic (gdr) and the Federal Republic of Germany (frg). The radio panorama would become increasingly complex in the following years. The fact that the gdr's broadcasting headquarters were still located in the British sector produced significant tension between thegdr and West Berlin. In 1948 the radio transmitter located in Tegel was dismantled, and the Berliner Rundfunk was forced to build a new one in Königs Wusterhausen (the former site of the one demolished in 1945 that the Deutschlandsender III utilized by the Third Reich). By then the tensions on the radio airwaves between Berliner Rundfunk and rias Berlin were more than evident. The popular reception of the 1948 “blockade” through radio broadcasting rendered audible the ideological and political divergences between East and West. However, in 1952 a number of important factors changed for both East and West Germany. By that time rias Berlin was by far the most popular radio station on both sides, evolving from the rather precarious wire broadcasting service into the most popular and professional station. Music selection and entertainment played an important role. That same year, gdr’s Berliner
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Rundfunk was forced to leave its former headquarters. Although at the time the gdr already had the Funkhaus in Grünau,14 a former sports facility converted by the Soviet administration in 1947 in the East, but they had no infrastructure as significant as Das Haus des Rundfunk. In other words, the ethereal war was already established, Germany was divided, but the physical boundaries of the Iron Curtain were blurred and constantly being redefined by the apparently invisible nature of radio. gdr radio faced a significant crisis in1952 , continuously losing popularity against rias’ entertainment campaign. Also critical was the fact that they were losing their main infrastructure, and because of the very nature of radio, the possibility of monopolizing control over the media simply did not exist. The manipulative power of capitalist media seemed almost impossible to overcome only through political speech propaganda, and in 1952 the gdr decided to centralize all their broadcasting stations, creating the Staatliche Rundfunkkomitee (State Radio Committee). Through this process of centralization they made two important decisions aiming to overcome their secondary position in the ethereal war. The first decision was to design an anti-rias media campaign and the second was to redesign all their broadcasting media content and institutions in an attempt to regain popularity both in the East and West. Both strategies were widely carried out through architecture. In relation to the anti-rias campaign, the most important and aggressive movement was the act of jamming the undesirable capitalist frequencies emitted by rias in the west. With great secrecy, an array of lightweight movable transmitters began to grid the German territory. Since jamming was illegal, these movable stations needed to perform camouflage of sorts by regularly emitting transmitters, and they needed to be easily relocated under desirable circumstances (Fig. 5). In this map developed by the Stasi, one can see deployed a very powerful transformation of what a wall might be in under the logics of radio. The diagonal lines show, almost as a river stream, the radio waves coming from the west. Where those lines are intersected by perpendicular ones, were the zones of effective jamming, as if jamming transmitters could act literally as walls protecting ethereal sovereignty.15 At a different level, the establishment of the Staatliche Rundfunkkomitee had a significant impact on the creation and dissolution of radio station institutions within the gdr. Following the complex diagram of bureaucratic transformations, architecture
14. A former rowing club, it was later converted into a Rundfunkschule (radio broadcasting school) for training young East Germans to perform professionally in the world of radio. For more information see: Schlosser, “The Berlin Radio War: Broadcasting in Cold War Berlin and the Shaping of Political Culture in Divided Germany, 1945- 1961.”
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manifested in one building the whole range of institutional and media reorganizations. In the same important year, 1952, Franz Ehrlich was commissioned to design the new headquarters for the radio in the gdr, the Funkhaus Berlin-Nalepastrasse (Fig. 6). Completed in 1956, the Funkhaus is the most complex, massive, and monumental iteration of the typology of the broadcasting house, designed and shaped by the internal forces of the broadcasting program and external political forces, executed in the context of the Cold Ethereal War. Finished five years before the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Funkhaus Berlin-Nalepastrasse and its expanded constellation of artifacts, could be understood as an undetectable early version of the Berlin Wall. While the massive broadcasting complex was built out of actual concrete walls, slabs, columns, and vaults, with mechanical ventilations and precise sound absorptions and insulations, it attempted to build an invisible wall, not only around Eastern Germany but expanding its limits further beyond. Therefore, the Berlin Wall (concrete) performed alongside other walls and artifacts of the architectural-radio- apparatus. The combination of ethereal and non-ethereal walls—walls of radio waves and physical walls—aimed to protect and conquer not only the geographic borders imposed by the Iron Curtain, but also the equally important blurry, and highly politically charged sound-thresholds between the East and the West. It is not accidental that the building shares certain morphological and stylistic characteristics with Poelzig’s building. While studying at the Bauhaus during the late 1920s, under Moholy-Nagy (who was at the time working on the Radio Tower photographs), Franz Ehrlich worked as an intern in Hans Poelzig’s office on the design process of Das Haus des Rundfunks. Ehrlich himself embodies the shift and development of the broadcasting house typology during a twenty-five-year period, after being forced to work during most of wwii as a concentration camp designer.16 In the Funkhaus, one can still perceive echoes of the Backsteinexpressionismus (brick expressionism) style and the long frontal façade remind us of its western predecessor. Even the characteristic curvilinear corridor with studios attached to one side remains in Ehrlich design, but no longer in a symmetrical order. (Fig. 1 and 7) Der Grosser Sendesaal, or the Grand Concert Hall, is no longer located at the core of the plan. It is now placed at one extreme of the volumetric arrangement, connected to the larger block through an
15. Christopher Classen. “Jamming the RIAS. Technical Measures Against Western Broadcasting in East Germany” in Alexander Badenoch, Airy Curtains in the European Ether (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2013). 16. The exact role performed by Ehrlich during WWII remains unclear, but according to the available sources his work was mostly dedicated to interior design and fences. See: Franz Ehrlich: Ein Bauhäusler in Widerstand und Konzentrationslager, Eine Ausstellung der Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora in Zusammenarbeit mit der Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau; Neues Museum Weimar, 2. August 2009-11. Oktober 2009.
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Figure 5. Berlin Map of Radio Jamming. Source: BStU, MfS, BV Berlin, Abt. III, Nr. 691, BI. 77.
elevated circulation and to another set of studios through the curved corridor. (Fig. 8) The industrial character identified by Sigfried Kracauer in Poelzig’s building is now even more evident. One can almost trace how sound as a raw material travels through the building/factory, that is its process of transformation from sound impulse to broadcast media content; from a bus terminal (Fig. 10) to rehearsal rooms, then to the Grand Concert Hall, followed by the mixing and mastering studios. But what is most relevant in Der Grosser Sendesaal is the absence of the audience; it is no longer there. In previous versions we saw a plan basically structured around a normal concert hall, with a stage and an audience in front and surrounded by the rest of the required program. What we have here is a highly refined concert hall but with no place for the audience. This is reinforced by Gerhard Steinke: “A concert hall has
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to direct the reflection in one direction: from the stage to the audience. But not a broadcasting room, for heaven’s sake! Here the sound has to spread out evenly in all directions. In the studio, sound is absolutely undirected. This is why the listeners and experts are all so encaptured —but not the musicians. They would prefer to be cloaked in walls to hear themselves and rely on each other.”17 But I would argue that the room actually had an intentional directionality: first to the newly engineered Neumann cmv 551 condenser microphones18 capable of perceiving the sonic wave with an outstanding quality, then wired to the control and listening rooms, and finally through the transmission tower—in the form of radio—waves towards the houses and ears of East and West German inhabitants and sometimes to the entire planet, using the whole spectrum of the architecture of radio19 (Fig. 9). The Funkhaus embodied the necessary presence of a physical and material infrastructure to produce, in a centralized way, a variety of high-quality ephemeral media content. The radical and almost utopian intention to re-conquer the lost audiences through different media content manifests itself in the reverberation of sounds in delicately designed walls and surfaces. As one of the gdr radio commentators once argued after being asked by two friends if they should listen to Beethoven from rias: “I appreciate a good glass of wine. Maybe you do too. Ask your girlfriend if she would drink from a dirty glass. A real wine-lover would cringe at the thought. The same applies to music and a dirty station.”20 In other words, the Funkhaus is the built response to the increasing demand for entertainment especially manifested by younger audiences in the gdr. By looking carefully at how the Funkhaus was conceived as a “clean station” brings back the discussion over the status of the wall under the conditions of radio, specifically in relation to the dialectic opposition discussed thirty years before by Kracauer and Behne21 between creation and commodity in the former, and tool and toy in the latter. All the highly ornate interior surfaces of the walls, with geometrical patterns and references to natural motifs that one can associate with the toy aspect of the building, were what actually made it a proper tool. (Fig. 10) As a clean station where the sound warmly bounced in the geometrical patterns producing—through its form and
17. Gerhard Steinke is a sound engineer who worked between 1953 and 1990 at the Technical Centre for Radio and Television Broadcasting (RFZ) in the GDR and was the director of the “Forschungslabor für akustisch-musikalische Grenzprobleme” between 1956 and the mid-70s. See Anne Kockelkorn’s interview with Gisela Herzog and Gerhard Steinke in Anne Kockelkorn, Doris Kleilein, Gesine Pagels and Carsten Stabenow, eds. Tuned City: Between Sound and Space Speculation (City, Publisher, 2008). See also: Tanja Böhme-Mehner, “Interview with Gerhard Steinke, 12 October 2010, Steinke’s apartment, Berlin,” Contemporary Music Review, 30,1, 15-23, DOI. 18. Alexander Raschkowitsch, “Neue Musik-und Hörspielstudio,” Radio und Fernsehen, April, 1955. 19. In the 1960s, Radio Berlin International, operating from the Funkhaus Berlin-Nalepastrasse, was broadcasting over 370 hours a week to the five continents in eleven different languages, being one of the largest international broadcasting stations in the world. See James Wood, History of International Broadcasting (London: P. Peregrinus Ltd. 1992) in association with the Science Museum. 20. Letter from Birgit Sch., 10 July 1962; BArch DR 6/575. Previously quoted in Classen, Christopher. “Captive audience? GDR Radio in the Mirror of Listener’s Mail,” Cold War History, 13,2, 2013, 239-254. 21. See op. cit. Siegfried Kracauer and op. cit. Adolf Behne.
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materiality—the reverberation time exactly desired22 and where the sound is captured by the impossibly better—and specially engineered— microphones—these made ornament perform or have a function that is almost at a planetary scale. Therefore the conceptualization of the wall was not only about limits and discontinuities, but also about projecting an ideological cosmology into the ether: ornate surfaces and sound waves in an entangled performance. Within the clean station, the heterogeneity of spatial morphologies and wall surfaces is as complex as the program itself. The expressionist space of Block d, covered by 12 concrete half-vaults, hosted a bus terminal for the transportation of over 5000 employees. The monumental stair within the Hörfunkstudio in Block b is finished in raw concrete, carpet, and wood, and goes nowhere. It is just a resonating device to record footsteps under different acoustic conditions. (Fig. 11) In the studio next door, all the floors are removable giving access to a different set of materials to produce the same effect for foley recordings. In this image (Fig. 12), Franz Ehrlich is with Wilhelm Pieck (gdr’s former president) in the vaulted space, especially designed to produce high- reverberation recordings. Within the chamber both look comfortable; because of the particular acoustic morphology, they are listening to themselves:
The carpeted rooms where no footstep sounds and whose walls deaden any voice, the countless doors and corridors with their bright little light-signals, the mystifying ceremony of the actors in their shirt-sleeves who, as if attracted and repelled by the microphone, alternately approach and withdraw from the surgical charms of the metal stands; whose performance can be watched through a pane of glass, as in an aquarium, while their voices come strange and closely from the control-loudspeaker in the listening room; the serious young man at the control-board who, with black knobs turn voices and sounds off and on like a stream of water; the loneliness of the studio where you sit alone with your voice and a scrap of paper, yet before the largest audiences that a speaker has ever addressed; the tenderness that affects one for the little dead box suspended by garter-elastic from a ring, richer in treasure and mystery than Portia’s three caskets; the hazard of improvising a speech before the world; the allurement of the quit room that invites confidence and homely ease, and the stage fright that lurks behind; the joy of the writer who may create unhindered fantastic spirit-plays in the realm of thought with symbols and theories as characters; and finally the long exciting evenings at the loudspeaker where,a God or Gulliver, you make countries tumble over each other by a twist of your hand, and listen to events that sound as earthly as if you had them in your own
22. See Emily Ann Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). 23. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1936).
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room, and yet as impossible and far as if they had never been.23 That is the space of radio! The point is that the nature of the architecture of radio had a direct influence on the content that it produced; it was a particular kind of factory that was shaped by the conditions of its immaterial broadcast products. If the outcome was specifically targeted to perform ideological interests to produce political loyalties, one could understand the architecture of radio—and not only radio as media—as one of the most important industries of political fabrication. Going back to the notion of function now using Rudolf Arnheim’s24 analogy between radio and fishing nets, when he observed that in the same town in southern Italy, fishermen used nets to catch fish, and cafés used radio to catch clients. Now understood as an apparatus and not as a single-standing building, the architecture of radio could be read as a particular kind of net designed to catch political power. In order for the net to work, to function itself as a “net-work,” to have a purpose at a social scale, a number of solid surfaces needed to be delicately designed, microphones needed to be engineered and fabricated, theories of human sound perception needed to be developed in order to persuade bureaucrats to invest funds in research laboratories that would actually be built, people needed to be educated to operate those massive artifacts and others to develop the aesthetic sensibility to become the artists and literally play the buildings, and all that reacting to what was happening across the Iron Curtain with similar intensity trying to catch the same political power. Back to “Das Leben der Anderen,” where the gdr is portrayed mostly as a sonic space. The movie depicts a relevant asymmetry between actions and sounds. What characters say and listen to matters much more to the development of the story than what they actually do. Normal and professional listeners (from common population to Stasi officials) are portrayed with sophisticated sound-hermeneutical techniques, in order to listen to what their interlocutors say and do not say. But listeners are also depicted as moldable subjects and sound itself is present as a subject-form-giver. At the same time, in the well-known environment of extreme surveillance, there is an assumption that not only subjects listen but also that space and architecture itself listen. To put it more precisely, every character in the film is conscious of the fact that every single surface is a potential listening source; walls, floors, ceilings, and doors can potentially record and then reproduce whatever sound has been emitted. In the film, architecture does both: it listens and it speaks, and sound, not only speech, is the most relevant locus of subjectivity, information, and power. At the end of the film, Sebastian
24. Ibid.
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Koch (Georg Dreyman) is informed that he has been under surveillance for years in his own apartment. When he actually realizes is that his own private space was completely wired, he begins to pull the wires compulsively out of the walls. As if pulling Ariadne’s thread, in an attempt to find the way out of the radio-sonic apparatus, he realizes that the labyrinth was much more complex and concrete than the apparent omnipresence of the ether.
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Above: Figure 7. Große Sendesaal (Saal 1 Block B) Funkhaus Berlin-Nalepastraße. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-36132-0006 / Photographer: Horst Sturm, 1956. Below: Figure 6. Funkhaus Berlin-Nalepastraße. Source: Fotoarchiv Karl Metz. Previously published in: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Rundfunksdeutscher Demokratischer Rundfunk. Opposite: Figure 9. Interior Funkhaus Berlin-Nalepastraße. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-36157-0002 / Photographer: Horst Sturm, 1956.
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Clockwise from top-left: Figure 4. Haus des Rundfunks. Sign reads: “Caution! This is not a West-Berlin Station” (translation by author). Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 145 Bild-00014221 / Photographer: Brodde, 1955. Figure 3. RIAS-Berlin Broadcasting House. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-43264-0008 / Photographer: Herman Krueger, 1956. Figure 2. Loudspeaker Truck by RIAS-Berlin. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-Z1105-504 / Photographer: Herman Krueger, 1956. Figure 10. Architect Franz Ehrlich and President Wilhelm Pieck in the “Echo Chamber” Funkhaus Berlin-Nalepastrße. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-37772-0012 / Photographer: Heilig, 1956. Figure 8. Interior Funkhaus Berlin-Nalepastraße. Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-36157-0001 / Photographer: Horst Sturm, 1956.
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