Voices in Ruins: West German Radio Across the 1945 Divide

Voices in Ruins

West German Radio Across the 1945 Divide

Alexander Badenoch Voices in Ruins

9th June 2008 6:40 MAC/VIR Page-i 9780230_009035_01_prexii This page intentionally left blank Voices in Ruins West German Radio Across the 1945 Divide

Alexander Badenoch

9th June 2008 6:40 MAC/VIR Page-iii 9780230_009035_01_prexii © Alexander Badenoch 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00903–5 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–00903–4 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10987654321 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

9th June 2008 6:40 MAC/VIR Page-iv 9780230_009035_01_prexii for Kathy, und für Antje

9th June 2008 6:40 MAC/VIR Page-v 9780230_009035_01_prexii This page intentionally left blank Contents

List of Figures viii Acknowledgements ix

1 Introduction and Contexts 1 2 Echoes of Days: Finding Everyday Between Exception and Routine 34 3 Familiar Voices: Representations of Personalities and Pasts 79 4 Time Consuming: Addressing a Nation of Women 123 5 Re-placing the Nation: Between Home Service and Heimat 162 6 Conclusion: Voices in Ruins? Radio and Normalization After 1945 219

Notes 234 Bibliography 267 Index 281

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1.1 Main and secondary stations in Germany ca. 1927 13 1.2 ‘The radio broadcast game’, 1940 17 1.3 ‘The four zones and their stations’ 22 2.1 NWDR morning gymnastics with Hildegund Bobsien 57 2.2 20:00 as the highlight of the day: NWDR schedule 63 2.3 Listener postcards to Radio Munich’s Die 10 der Woche 74 3.1 ‘Voices in Pictures’ Radiowelt introduces popular announcers, 1947 87 3.2 Team of speakers during the show Kreuz und quer durch Deutschland (‘All Around in Germany’) 101 3.3 Echo des Tages (‘Echo of the Day’) daily news and reportage programme, begun at the NWDR in 1947 102 3.4 Peter von Zahn, from the first issue of Hör Zu, 1946 105 4.1 ‘Grete Schmidt remains unknown!’ Der Deutsche Rundfunk, 1940 134 4.2 Jutta Telge-Wangemann, one of the first female announcers at the Südwestfunk, 1947 138 4.3 ‘ “You take.’’ Frauenfunk helps cook!’ Recipes are tested ‘scientifically’ for women’s use 142 5.1 Reporter Horst Scharfenberg of the Südwestfunk central studio in Baden-Baden, interviews farmers from the border region 187 5.2 ‘The refugee problem, a question of politics, economics and – the heart.’ An article in Radiowelt discusses the Eastern refugees in 1946 205 5.3 ‘Song from Silesia.’ An article in Radiowelt from 1949 presents memories of the lost Heimat 206

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9th June 2008 6:40 MAC/VIR Page-viii 9780230_009035_01_prexii Acknowledgements

Any nomad, even a relatively privileged one like me, gets used to hearing the questions ‘where did you come from?’ and ‘what are you doing here?’ As an American working on Germany, living in Britain and now the Netherlands, I have heard many variations on these themes over the years, but the one I hear most often is, ‘What does an American care about German radio?’ A thorough answer to that question would be a volume, the size of the one you now hold, and would contain plenty on the subjects of dislocation, home, national identity and memory, but far less useful information about radio in Germany 60 years ago. The volume at hand has only come about because people and institutions in four countries have asked not ‘what do you care?’ but ‘what do you need?’ and ‘how can I help?’ They have said welcome; it is worthwhile and you can do it. Doing justice to such kindness and support has become a motivation in itself, and I am pleased to be able to acknowledge it here. The PhD research on which this book is based was supported by an Overseas Research Studentship provided by Universities UK and a sup- plemental studentship funded by the Arts Faculty at the University of Southampton. A DAAD grant for young academics provided four valuable months research in Germany in the summer of 2002, and my employers at the British Council kindly provided a leave of absence to take it up. The book was produced with the leave and support of the Transnational Infrastructures in Europe (TIE) project at the Eindhoven University of Technology under the supervision of Johan Schot and funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) (Dossier number 277–53–001). Parts of Chapters 1 and 5 appeared as ‘Making Sunday what it actually should be: Sunday programming and the re-invention of tradition in occupied Germany 1945–1949’ in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 25:4 (2005) © 2005 Taylor and Francis. Parts of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Time-consuming: Radio and reconstruction of national narratives in Western Germany 1945–1948’ in German History 25:1 (2007) © 2007 The German History Society. I am grateful to both for their permission to republish this work. I am further grateful to the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv (Frankfurt/Wiesbaden), the SWR Baden-Baden, NDR, Axel Springer AG and the Bayrischer Rundfunk for permission to use the images in this book.

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The research for this book was greatly aided by a number of institutions and individuals: Dr Ansgar Diller and the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, then in Frankfurt (‘das beste Archiv der Welt’!), hosted my research in 2002, where Karin Langer, Jörg Wyrschowy and Michael Friebel provided day-to-day help, good company and the occasional glass of Sekt. Overall, primary research was greatly assisted by the archives of the Germany’s public service broadcasters: Jana Behrendt at the SWR in Baden-Baden, who came to the rescue countless times; Petra Witting-Nöthen at WDR, Cologne; Edgar Lersch and Jörg Hucklenbroich at the SWR in Stuttgart; Bettina Hasselbring, Sabine Dittler and Sabine Rittner at BR in Munich; Michael Crone at the HR. Thanks also to Regina Zölßmann (DRA), Bettina Reiss (SWF), Adriana Bednarek and Ralf Plessmann (NDR), and Rainer Laabs (Axel Springer) for their kind assistance in identifying and assembling the images here. Finally, thanks to the old and new friends who shared their homes during my archive visits: Tom Hüning, Daniel Barolsky, Ruth Knaup and Nico Meyer, Sandra Tange and die Familie Kollhuber. Much of this took shape in the intellectually fruitful environment of the School of Modern Languages at the University of Southampton. In addition to being a constant source of stimulating ideas and helpful advice, Alan Bance went repeatedly above and beyond the call of a PhD supervisor, smoothing my path at every turn. Tim Bergfelder pushed me on the details, helped bring nuance to my textual readings and offered healthy scepticism towards some of my more flowery prose. Karen Randell gave up well-deserved hours of rest and family to help hammer the whole thing into shape. Erica Carter and Neil Gregor provided insightful and helpful critiques for shaping this into a book. In general, this book owes much to the discussions, support and distractions of the Arts postgraduate community in Southampton: Carina Buckley, Niamh Doheny, Chris Duke, Joe Flatman, Naomi Hetherington, Doortje van Hove, Jason Lucas, Marcy Rockman, Marsha Robbins, Damian Sutton and our guardian angel, Mary Stubbington. Hans-Ulrich Wagner shared sources and ideas and has remained an enthusiastic interlocutor, supporter and helpful intermediary throughout. Karin Falkenberg offered concrete sources as well as moral support and friendship from the start. Andreas Fickers offered stimulating discussion on a number of related topics; Carolyn Birdsall provided a late-stage infusion of good ideas. Jason Lucas and Vincent Lagendijk provided technical support at various crucial junctures (read: the last minute). Thanks generally to my TIE-project and AW colleagues in Eindhoven for the open and friendly intellectual environment in which this book

9th June 2008 6:40 MAC/VIR Page-x 9780230_009035_01_prexii Acknowledgements xi took shape: Irene Anastasiadou, Vincent Lagendijk, Suzanne Lommers, Donna Mehos, Frank Schipper, Judith Schueler, Erik van der Vleuten and especially Johan Schot for his kind support in producing this book. Ruth Ireland and Michael Strang and the reviewers at Palgrave showed confidence, kind assistance and patience to this first-time author, for which I am fortunate, and very grateful. I also owe a large debt of gratitude to those who have supported and sustained me personally in numerous ways while writing this. To my family: Brian and Sarah-Ann Badenoch, Mary Jane Riley and the Badenoch clan at large for beaming constant encouragement across the seas, and to my new family on this side, Margaret, Norman and Helen MacDonald; the friends who have accompanied me in all stages and states: David Dault, Charlotte and Tom Wegryznowski, Masha Raskolnikov, Tom Hüning; the teachers and friends who helped, inspired and badgered me to come back into academia after a substantial hiatus: Reinhard Zachau, Pat Heck, James Fernandez, M. Katherine MacKinnon, Josh Harrell, Todd Childers and Anne Katherine Jones. A special thanks to those who have shared their memories with me over the years, Kurt and Elsa Reimers, Elke and Christian Klietmann, and especially those who have passed into living memory: Otto, Lotte and Miete. Finally, this book is dedicated to the two people who are most bound up in it with me. To Katharine MacDonald, who has suffered with this project’s many crises and celebrated its joys – once as a thesis, once as book – has listened with patience to countless odd things in foreign tongues (and to me rattling on about them), has taken me to far-off places and has become so much of how I define home. And to Antje Giering, who introduced me to German radio past and present, has supported, inspired, encouraged, informed and sometimes fruitfully contradicted this book and its author over the course of the last 20 years, and has always welcomed me back to the place I call with due nostalgia, irony and love ‘die alte Heimat’. I don’t have words in either language to express the gratitude that is owed. But here is a whole book with plenty of words (finished, finally) in their place.

9th June 2008 6:40 MAC/VIR Page-xi 9780230_009035_01_prexii This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction and Contexts

Approaching May 1945 – imagining an ‘unimaginable’ community

This book departs from a single historical observation: in the years immediately following the unconditional surrender of Germany in May 1945, the radio was the best-preserved and most popular medium of mass communication. Almost without interruption from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, the radio was not only the primary source of information, but also one of the cheapest sources of entertainment and one of the wealth- iest supporters of culture. During the Allied occupation of Germany after 1945, this dominance was particularly pronounced. Most radio stations only fell silent for a matter of weeks or even just days before restarting under the authority of the Allied occupiers. By contrast, newspapers were locally bound and plagued by paper shortages, and cinemas were showing mostly older and foreign films while the German film industry slowly began production.1 Indeed, an argument can be made that if ‘Germany’ was to be found anywhere in 1945, it was more in the airwaves than amidst the rubble landscapes, mass migrations and fragmented populations that characterized Europe at the end of the Second World War. Particularly during a period of time when the boundaries of nation and region, as well as ‘public’ and ‘private’, were being rebuilt and reconfigured, the dominance of a medium that both transgresses and helps to define such boundaries had profound implications for the way Germans came to imagine themselves and the nation(s) that would emerge. This book explores those implications by charting numerous ways that radio broadcasting addressed and maintained practices of everyday life in the western occupation zones that became the Federal Republic in 1949.

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Ironically, perhaps, given that images of Germany’s post-war destruction are iconic in narratives of German and European history, one of the most common terms used in describing Germany in 1945 is ‘unimaginable’.2 Indeed, such well-known images stand in for a scale of destruction that is difficult to fathom. Nearly two and a half million homes had been destroyed and just over the same number more were damaged, leaving behind 400 million cubic metres of rubble. Over seven million German soldiers and civilians had been killed, and an equal number of German soldiers remained in captivity. Malnutrition, cold and disease claimed further lives; three million people were home- less.3 With varying degrees of complicity from the population, the regime had systematically murdered nearly nine million people, some horrify- ing images of which were publicized shortly after the war as of ‘shock of reality’, and further challenge to the imagination of what ‘Germany’ was and meant.4 It is therefore not surprising that the phrase, ‘whoever did not experience the time simply can’t imagine it’, has become an entrenched part of German memory culture, at once heartfelt, clichéd and problematic.5 It is heartfelt because it speaks of real and painful experiences of uncertainty, violence, deprivation and grief that for most had no precedent or later equivalent. It has become clichéd, not least as a recurring strategy or weapon in the intergenerational conflicts about the meaning of the Nazi past that have played out on a number of scales. It can serve as a means of capturing personal experience back from grander narratives of history, but also as plank in exculpatory narratives about involvement in, or engagement with, the Nazi past, and as part of the enduring myth that Germans had been silent about their own wartime and post-war suffering.6 It is also one of the underlying impulses of recent attempts on television to try to ‘imagine’ the experience of the Allied air war or the expulsion from the East with a combination of documentary footage and eyewitness narratives.7 It is this embedding in generational politics that makes the claim of unimaginability problematic for historians, because as Elizabeth Heineman has pointed out, while the immediate claim seems to be about whether personal experience can be conveyed to those who were not ‘there’, it is actually made on behalf of ‘everybody’ who was.8 The problem is that notions of life as ‘unimaginable’ fix attention on a scale of inquiry localized around immediate personal experience, whilst raising questions at a different level: Who was ‘everybody’? Where was ‘there’? These are questions not of personal, cross-generational imagination, but of horizontal imagination between contemporaries; at issue are not immediate, but mediated experiences and spaces. They demand

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-2 9780230_009035_02_cha01 Introduction and Contexts 3 closer inspection of the mediated interaction between the localized and broader spheres of the social, and, as such, exploration of the media that made that possible. In taking up these questions, the goal is not somehow to explode ‘the myth of unimaginability’ but explore it and take seriously the questions it raises.9 The radio, as the dominant medium of the time, provides an important venue for doing so. Germany in 1945 did in fact pose considerable challenges to the imagination in Benedict Anderson’s (itself almost clichéd) definition of nations as ‘imagined communities’.10 Importantly, Anderson points out that the sense of national belonging rests on individuals ‘imagining’ their fellow country folk as living with them in a (roughly) bounded space, stepping forward together with them in time. The Nazi state had worked hard to amplify such images by creating mass events, especially on the radio, that sought to portray a uniform and racially based ‘national community’ which bridged regional and class divisions. To the extent that they had ever been effective, these nationally imagined spaces grew thin and fragmented with the centralized structures of the state that had propped them up. The state of ‘Germany’ had more or less ceased to exist by the middle of 1945 and virtually all of its boundaries, both internal and external, were tentative, and Germans themselves were scattered across and beyond all of them. Oral history has astutely captured the problems in ‘imagining’ Germany via the experiences around the end of the war than the war’s official end in May of 1945. Although it was arguably the most significant historical caesura of the twentieth century, it made little or no impression on the bulk of the German population. Attempts at compiling the experiences of the war’s end reveal not a grand ‘flashbulb’ event but a scattering of different experiences and personal events. Some remember the first arrival of Allied troops, others their expulsion and flight from lands in the East; the arrival home of loved ones, or news of their death.11 Political events such as the founding of the two German states in 1949 often do not stand out in memory half so much as things experienced more personally such as the currency reform, the first real coffee or butter or any one of a number of individual experiences that marked an even tentative return to ‘normality’. But this raises, rather than answers, questions about the way the boundaries around the realm of personal experience were drawn, and how ‘normality’ was defined, which exploring the role of the radio in relation to daily life, as opposed to major events, can help to explain. In spite of its central position in daily lives, and dominant role in the mass media ensemble at the time, the radio has been largely invisible in private and public memories. On the level of personal memory,

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-3 9780230_009035_02_cha01 4 Voices in Ruins when asked, individual listeners normally forget the content of regular radio programmes and remember instead their regular listening habits and the domestic contexts in which they listened.12 Public memories of radio in the 1940s are also quite fragmented and obscure, rather than illuminate, the role radio played in everyday life. After 1945, images of Volksempfänger (‘people’s receivers’) with Hitler’s voice barking through them quickly became standard cinematic code for a distant and domin- ating Nazi regime intruding upon private space. At the same time, many popular performers and programme genres from the 1930s and 1940s continued on almost seamlessly after the war’s end and are remembered fondly and publicly to this day, mostly divorced from their connection to Nazi institutions.13 Images of radio in the years after the war, to the extent that they appear at all in public memory, normally emphasize radically new elements, such as RIAS in Berlin and its propaganda war with the East, or jazz from the newly established American Forces Network, far out of proportion to the listenership they actually had at the time.14 As in memory, the presence of radio also has been invisible or fragmented in history. Particularly in Anglophone scholarship, the dominance of the radio has remained inversely proportional to the attention it has received in the cultural history of post-war Germany compared with work on literature or cinema.15 For many years, historical study of the radio in Germany did not deal with the programme, and was confined almost exclusively to history of institutions, an emphasis that stemmed not least from the contemporaneous and ongoing struggles between public service broadcasters and the state(s), and in particular the debates over privatization.16 A separate line of inquiry, coming out of German literary studies, produced a number of studies focussed around literary radio drama, which, much like studies of post-war cinema in Germany, until recently had been concentrated mostly on a few specific ‘high’ quality authors.17 At the start of the 1990s, debates among media historians in Germany on how to conduct history of the programme saw fruition in a number of detailed studies that began to incorporate more thorough analyses of programme production and output, as well as available audience research, within the framework of institutional histories.18 The occupation period has continued to be a focus of attention for many of these studies, certainly not least because it was the period of time when the current public service broadcasting institutions, which have often commissioned or supported such historical work, were founded.19 Konrad Dussel’s studies have had the broadest temporal range among studies of this kind. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, Dussel traces long-term patterns in the development of the programme as a whole,

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-4 9780230_009035_02_cha01 Introduction and Contexts 5 highlighting both continuities and ruptures between the different political eras and systems during the radio’s tenure as primary medium.20 While valuable for its documentary qualities, Dussel’s work offers very little by way of theory or interpretation, however, beyond observation of general trends such as ‘Americanization’ or ‘Westernization’. Building on existing trends, current research, notably that by Hans-Ulrich Wagner, has been particularly strong in following the people in broadcasting, res- ulting in a historiography that is rich in human voices and individual agency, and has also provided important insights into the dynamics of continuity and change at occupied radio stations.21 The last decade has seen important steps towards bringing the growing body of historiography on the radio into closer contact with more theoretically oriented work on German culture and society. The growing understanding that mass media, and in particular radio, should be considered as a central focus of social and cultural history in Germany has led to fruitful scholarship that has de-centred institutional histories and adopted a number of productive new approaches.22 The group of feminist historians headed by Inge Marßolek and Adelheid von Saldern has made very valuable contributions to understanding how radio broadcasting helped to embed the structures of authoritarian control in everyday life both in the Nazi era and in the early years of the GDR.23 These works, along with the ground-breaking work by Kate Lacey on women’s radio in Weimar and Nazi radio, have drawn most explicitly on the methods of cultural studies to contextualize radio programming more thoroughly to bring contested and often contradictory meanings and readings into view.24 In particular, they have brought parts of the programme, particularly ‘target group’ or ‘service’ programmes aimed at specific audiences, notably women and rural audiences, as well as entertainment shows into view as important areas for critical scrutiny. In an important 1999 essay – embedded, appropriately, in an edited volume devoted to broader questions of German memory – Inge Marßolek sketched out a number of areas and ways in which post-war radio addressed past and present in 1945 Germany. She pointed above all to areas of continuity such as ‘high’ literature and ‘non-political’ entertainment based around nuclear families in the domestic sphere, which allowed for ongoing collective narratives of identification that bypassed the Nazi regime.25 There is still much to be done, however, in carrying these concerns forward into the post-war era and the transformation to democracy in the Federal Republic. I will approach these issues theoretically and methodologically by both stepping back and stepping closer. Stepping back involves problematizing the nation after 1945 more thoroughly with regard to the radio.

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This may sound obvious or redundant. Surely no nation has been more problematized than Germany, particularly after 1945, and scholarship within broadcasting history has been especially alert to the way that the problems of past and present facing Germany were discussed and/or ignored on the radio from the occupied stations. Recent studies such as Christoph Classen’s that examine in depth how the National Socialist past was addressed in the radio programmes in the immediate post-war era are a case in point.26 What remains to be more thoroughly explored and explained, however, is what it meant that these and other messages came through the radio, and how (and whether) occupied radio stations in a defeated and divided nation were able to speak as German stations to German audiences. Such an approach also has implications for how we are able to assess the radio’s use in constructing narratives of memory. I follow here Alon Confino’s assertion that

we should look for traces of National Socialism not only in arte- facts and practices created intentionally to represent it, but also in social practices and representations where they were not directly dis- cernible and fairly unpredictable. These kinds of sources, practices and representations may ultimately reveal more about attitudes and beliefs.27

To do this, it is necessary to view broadcasting practice over a longer period of time and to explore a broader range of programmes and structures. I do this here through an examination of broader constructions of time and space through broadcasting. Accounts of national belonging at least since Benedict Anderson have pointed to nations as peculiar spatio-temporal experiences that are generally expressions of modernity itself.28 The visions of a population in a bounded space, stepping forward together in clocked, calendrical time rest upon a series of social relations that have been ‘disembed- ded’ from face-to-face interaction through a number of mechanisms, not least of which are print and later broadcasting media.29 Such senses of community are maintained through a series of great and small rituals, some of which are coalesced around key public ‘sites of memory’ and periodic collective remembrances, others around repetitions of barely conscious, banal linguistic and visual routines in everyday life.30 As British broadcasting historian Paddy Scannell has observed, broadcasting’s simultaneous presence in public and private space gives it the ability to interweave these senses of personal and public almost seamlessly into an intelligible sense of the broader world. Scannell takes obviousness and

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-6 9780230_009035_02_cha01 Introduction and Contexts 7 ordinariness as ‘precisely the intended, achieved and accomplished effect of broadcast output’ and highlights the ability of radio and television to appropriate, create and maintain temporal routines, mark certain times as special or exceptional, and refer routinely to common spaces, both ‘public’ and ‘private’.31 As scholars of collective memory in the tradition of Maurice Halbwachs have pointed out, such frameworks of collective experience are important, even essential, prerequisites not only for collective memory but also for individual memory formation.32 The aspects of radio that support such collective frameworks of time and space are thus probably the most important to consider when studying its role during a time when the physical, political and symbolic spaces of Germany were being restructured. General accounts of broadcasting and modernity more or less pre- suppose gradual change following the initial embedding of new media, which make them at once problematical and promising for analyzing the extreme case of post-war Germany. But how are we to understand the meaning of the radio as a generator of ordinariness and routine supporter of times and spaces during a period when routines in both spheres are interrupted? Kate Lacey has fruitfully addressed the forceful dynamics of modernity in pre-1945 Germany by taking the notion of crisis as a key paradigm for understanding continuity and change during the first two decades of broadcasting in Germany.33 Taking these same notions on board, we may usefully approach the positioning of the radio as it crossed the 1945 divide under the paradigm of normalization. This shift in terms is not meant to project the ‘no-experiments’ conservatism of the Adenauer era back in time onto the occupation, but to acknowledge a basic shift in perception of Germany’s times and spaces after 1945. Importantly, Lacey defines a moment of crisis as containing the ‘threat or promise of radical change’, that is, as something that is impend- ing – even when that sense is ongoing.34 After 1945, the widespread and well-founded perception in Germany was that the catastrophe (however defined or indefinable) had occurred, and the material and symbolic destruction of public and private realms was either its essence or one of its main consequences. A further contrast to the period that Lacey describes is that by 1945 the radio had been embedded thoroughly into everyday life and, particularly given its dominance among the media, no longer seemed so much a potential force of radical change, but part of a ‘normal’ life. A close examination of what it meant that the radio was a ‘normal’ medium in an extraordinary time gives us the opportunity to explore historically the possibilities and limits of broadcast media to structure experience.

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The importance of the radio in helping to reconstruct ‘normal’ visions of domestic spheres in relation to public spaces is underlined by the heavy but ambiguous ideological loading of such spaces in Nazi Germany as well as in the early years of both German republics. As the medium which was able to enter both spheres, the radio had been particularly implicated in these processes.35 Building upon conservative visions from the Weimar Republic, National Socialism had increasingly mobilized images of private domesticity as ideal images of the racialized ‘national community’ and as safe maternal refuge from the modern public world. As the social mobilization and war rendered other signifiers of national normality obsolete, the regime called upon such images to do more and more work. These contradictory dynamics between public and private further called into question the traditionally (if always shakily) gendered divide between these spheres, and also made domestic realms increasingly the most available sites of resistance against the regime. Bringing these issues forward to explore more thoroughly the radio’s role in reconstructing the boundaries and meaning of public and private space in occupied Germany brings it fruitfully into contact with recent works that have explored the role of domesticity and consumption in forming personal and national narratives.36 The heavy emphasis in the Adenauer era on private prosperity as the basis for the new nation also relied heavily on images of ‘normal’ domestic spaces and traditionally gendered roles. As recent scholarship has pointed out, these images were actually shot through with ambiguities and silences that betrayed the complex and contradictory forces working through them.37 Placing the radio within these historical and theoretical contexts informs, and demands, a step closer towards the texts. The central concern with the ways the radio mediated normality brings a new set of texts, and a new set of readings, into the focus of inquiry. For one, we must look beyond the limitations of more quantitatively oriented analyses of the programme that have thus far formed the basis of much research on the radio. Such analyses, exemplified by the work of Konrad Dussel, are based around notions of genre as well as broader categories such as information, education and entertainment as more or less stable entities which offer at best a limited understanding of the issues at hand.38 Instead, drawing on existing scholarship and samples from a wide range of programmes, I will look for signifiers of time and space within and around a variety of different programmes and programme genres to gain closer insight into the ways shows were positioned with regard to their listeners’ lives and experiences. This further necessitates attention to presentational and

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-8 9780230_009035_02_cha01 Introduction and Contexts 9 performative issues such as voice, gender, accent and mode of address, which identify speakers and position them routinely within a number of cultural and social frameworks. As I will show, far from being ‘mere’ incidental aesthetic issues, especially within the context of occupation and reconstruction, such aspects of programming were important areas where notions of German identity were contested. Structurally, the book is designed both as a series of extended individual essays and as a continuing narrative that explores the embedding of the radio in West German society after 1945. Each chapter explores a different aspect of radio broadcasting, and the way in which it addressed aspects of, and contemporaneous debates about, the times and spaces of Germany after the war. Roughly speaking, each chapter works from the general to the specific, outlining broad contexts and then showing how certain media structures, programmes and/or texts operated within them. In addition, each chapter outlines one or more fruitful points of dialogue with wider discourses in German cultural history and media and cultural studies. I do not intend to map these dialogues exhaust- ively here, but to shed light on the issues immediately at hand. In a more polemic vein, however, I do hope to show how new avenues in cultural history and cultural studies may be opened up by placing the radio more thoroughly within these contexts. As a whole, the book builds towards an account of one way that various constructions of time, space, personality and gender coalesced, namely around the problematical national notion of Heimat. As this study is focused on the national construction of identity in what became the Federal Republic, an equally thorough study of broadcasting in the Soviet zone, which was to become the GDR in 1949, has not been undertaken. The analysis of broadcasting in the West has been greatly enriched by the recent appearance of a number of excellent studies that have dealt with radio programming in the East and of the propaganda wars that took place in the airwaves over Berlin.39 Because the situation in western Germany was markedly different from the listening situation in Berlin, however, I have chosen not to consider the programmes of the Western stations in Berlin as a part of this study. This, too, has polemic reasons. All too often, the very active propaganda war on Berlin radio has been taken as a reflection of the situation in Germany as a whole, without considering the very different role which the Cold War played on the stations that the bulk of Germans tuned in to. The important role of the Eastern broadcasting as interlocutor and competitor, as well as the effects of the beginning Cold War on station staff and programming in the West will of course be considered.

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In the remaining sections of this chapter, I will set the stage for this inquiry by tracing two different narratives, the ways in which radio was embedded in Germany from its inception through the occupation period. The first outlines how the radio was institutionally, politically and socially embedded in Germany. This is intended in part as necessary background for readers less familiar with German broadcasting, and in part to highlight the continuities and ruptures in the structures of broadcasting vis-à-vis developments in social and political spheres. The second looks at one way that radio was culturally embedded in Germany, showing the many ways radio has been tied up intricately in the times and spaces of Heimat, one of the most enduring visions of normality in Germany. It will show how this concept helped to mediate some of the vital contradictions of states as well as broadcasting structures in Germany. In Chapter 2, I look to the temporal structures of the programme to explore how the relationship between the private world of individual experience and the public world of historical events were addressed and maintained in the radio programme. I will trace the historical development of this relationship in Germany, showing how the radio became embedded in everyday routine during the Nazi era, and how radio programmes of the post-war era addressed these routines. At the centre of this analysis is the way in which the relations between ‘ordinary’ time and ‘extraordinary’ times and events were constructed through the radio schedule, and the possibilities for radio listeners to place their individual experiences within imagined collective routines. Finally, I will explore the contemporaneous debates about ‘light’ music in the programme. I will point in particular to the dynamics of time that were expressed in these debates, from the belief on the part of many programmers that such music was largely empty ‘time filler’ to the paradoxical dynamics of nostalgia and progress expressed in the music and in discourse surrounding it. Chapter 3 turns attention to the way narratives of continuity and change were articulated through the personalities, and more specifically the voices, on the radio. It highlights the ambiguous positioning of those who spoke on the radio, sometimes as exemplary models for a new Germany and sometimes as ordinary representatives of their audiences. It explores how such issues of representation were underscored by aspects of presentation that are peculiar to the radio, namely its ability to address audiences intimately and familiarly, and shows the often conflicting way these aspects were constructed and mobilized in post-war broadcasting. In presenting unknown voices to listeners, the post-war radio stations highlighted such ‘unaffected’ traits as the hallmarks of a

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‘new person’ in the new non-militaristic Germany that was to come. At the same time, however, well-known personalities were also able to emphasize their ongoing connections with the audience, in part through their own more familiar voices and address. These ambiguities are then explored more closely through the performances of famous cinema stars on the radio to show how their familiar characteristics were reproduced and partly transformed through their performance. In Chapter 4, I will explore further the role of the radio in constructing public and private space by examining in detail programmes that addressed women by situating these programmes within post- war debates about the role of women in the German society. In light of recent work which has reconsidered this role, I will argue that the radio, and in particular women’s radio, played a seminal role in shaping the consciousness of women in post-war consumer society. I will first explore the ambiguous position that women occupied with regard to public and private space in post-war Germany, and then show how the position of women at the radio stations reflected these ambiguities. I will then show the way in which the role of women in post-war German society was negotiated in particular through its structuring of women’s time. Drawing on Erica Carter’s study of the role of the female consumer as a focus of national identity in the social market economy of the 1950s, I will argue that the radio contributed significantly to the construction of these identities in the occupation era through implicit and explicit addresses to women as rational consumers of time.40 I will further point to the fundamental tensions between such forms of address and other national narratives of femininity. In Chapter 5, I will show how the constructions of ‘normal’ private spaces and times described in the previous chapters were mapped on the markers of space in the radio programme. Building on the method- ological framework outlined below, I will show how the radio stations identified themselves with the regions they served by means of a number of symbols and habits in radio programming. Rejecting previous approaches to the study of regional identity that have focused solely on traditional genres of regional programming, I will show how markers of space functioned across a wide range of regular programmes to present listeners with a vision of a space that was at once inhabitable and memorable, albeit in complicated ways. This discussion will draw especially on the idea of Heimat as it developed in Germany over the years leading up through the end of the war, and in the reconstruction of the nation that followed, and argue that it is a key concept that underlay many of the structures of radio programming.

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States, stations and listeners 1923–1949

On 3 June 1945, in the first official broadcast from Stuttgart since Germany’s unconditional surrender, US military commander Fred G. Taylor announced, ‘From today onward Radio Stuttgart will attempt to be worthy of all who listen to its broadcasts. It will attempt to erase the memory of the past and its previous shameful role in it.’41 Apart from the highly questionable possibility, and even more questionable wisdom, of erasing a past that appeared so indelibly present in June of 1945, Taylor’s comments are interesting in that he spoke of the radio in Stuttgart as if it were something that had always been there. Even though the station had been destroyed, its staff dispersed, and the regime that controlled it defeated, he referred to ‘Radio Stuttgart’ as if the institution were continuing. Referring to ‘the radio’ in much the same way as one would refer to ‘the sky’ was of course as common 60 years ago in Germany as it is nearly everywhere now. But ‘the radio in Germany’ 60 years ago was more problematic. The first half of the twentieth century saw five different states called ‘Germany’, each with a unique set of boundaries, and the licence fee on any radio set that lasted through the first three decades of broadcasting would have been paid to between three and five different institutions, depending on location.42 Yet within this illustration of the discontinuity of broadcasting in Germany, points of continuity are also apparent, namely the location of the stations and the licence fee (and to this could be added broadcast frequencies for most of the period in question), and it is these continuities and discontinuities I will outline here. The system of broadcasting that developed in Germany during the Weimar Republic reflected many of the paradoxes and instabilities of the state. It was at once decentralized and part privately owned, and yet it was also subject to control by ministries of the national and state governments. The Ministry of Post (RPM) owned at least 51 per cent of the voting capital in all of the stations, set and collected the radio licence fees and owned all of the transmitting equipment. Local capital, often in combination with the Deutsche Stunde, a private production company, and the Dradag, a news service sponsored by the Ministry of the Interior, provided the rest. The stations and their programmes were likewise over- seen by state-government-appointed radio commissioners, committees and councils. The broadcast space of Germany was divided into nine regional monopolies owned by private companies, which began broadcasting programmes between 1923 and the end of 1924.43 The regions served by each of these monopolies were defined neither by political boundaries of states nor by the actual range of the radio waves, but

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-12 9780230_009035_02_cha01 Introduction and Contexts 13 rather by the series of postal districts that were assigned to each station.44 As such, the broadcast areas were often comprised of multiple states or provinces. In addition to the main station in each region, there were in most cases one or more smaller secondary stations (Nebensender), which served primarily to relay the signal from the main station, but in most cases also produced some of their own ‘local’ programmes (see Figure 1.1). In addition to nine regional stations, a long-wave station meant to reach all of Germany was set up to broadcast from the large transmitter at Königswüsterhausen near Berlin. Though the station was initially set up to augment the programmes of the regional stations with ‘higher’ quality offerings, its position as the central station made it more and more synonymous with both the nation and the state of Germany. The Deutschlandsender, initially just the name of the station’s 35-kW transmitter, came more and more to be used as the name of the station.45 Radio stations that crossed regional and social boundaries thus carried with them the sense of speaking for and to an audience that was defined not only by their region or state but as Germans. In light of this situation, the radio was considered subject to censorship via the

Figure 1.1 Main and secondary stations in Germany ca. 1927. The view here of an interconnected system belies the fact that stations mostly operated independently. Source: Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv.

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-13 9780230_009035_02_cha01 14 Voices in Ruins national government.46 Even before the National Socialists took over, the sense of national crisis in the latter years of the Weimar Republic led the conservative elements in government to take control of radio broadcasting. In 1932, all private interests were bought out by the states and the national radio company (Reichs-Runfunkgesellschaft, hereafter RRG), under the auspices of the Ministry of the Interior, was given broad decision-making powers over the stations. In addition, the technological connections were also put in place that would enable every station to carry the same programme simultaneously.47 Any doubt about what the stations were to represent was eliminated by the directives given to the programme-makers at the stations:

The radio participates in the life work of the German nation. The natural ordering of people in home and family, work and state is to be maintained and secured by the German radio. The radio does not therefore speak to the listener only as an individual, but also as a member of this natural national order.48

Thus, when the National Socialists came to power less than a year later, they took over a system of broadcasting that was institutionally, techno- logically and symbolically geared towards the nation – and towards the state. Shortly after the elections of 5 March 1933, which formally gave the Nazis political power in Germany, two things were uppermost on Hitler’s agenda: the start of ‘an ambitious propaganda and enlighten- ment campaign to prevent political lethargy’, as well as the political ‘co-ordination’ (Gleichschaltung) of the states not controlled by National Socialist parliaments.49 Both activities meant fundamental, and sometimes contradictory, changes for radio broadcasting. Seizing upon the radio as the medium best able to reach all of the population, the regime gave control over the radio almost entirely into the hands of the newly created Ministry for Public Information and Propaganda (Reichsminis- terium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, hereafter RMVP) under the leadership of Josef Goebbels. This process was aimed first and foremost at eliminating the influence of the individual states over the radio. The RMVP not only directly produced the central policy and programme guidelines for the stations, it controlled their finances as well. This meant that all personnel decisions at the stations went through the ministry in Berlin, as well as the collecting and distributing of money from licence fees – less and less of which was allocated to the individual stations over the years. From early 1933 on, Nazi policies were directed towards

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‘co-ordination’ of public institutions. This term, with its connotations of mechanical efficiency and process streamlining, meant nothing less than establishing Nazi party control over every public institution. At the radio stations, this meant dismissing most of the top personnel, as well as all Jewish staff. All in all, ‘co-ordination’ was carried out at most stations by June of 1933, and approximately 13 per cent of the radio staff in Germany had been dismissed.50 Over time, the ranks of Nazi party members working at the radio stations swelled, as many party members sought to use their influence to obtain work, and existing employees joined in order to further their careers.51 By 1934 over half, and by 1937 nearly two-thirds, of the employees of the radio stations were Nazi party members.52 In April 1934, all stations changed their name to Reichssender (‘station of the Reich’) and a uniform structure of organizational responsibility was imposed. In the months and years that followed, radio stations outwardly emphasized their identification with the regions they served, while internally they were brought under tighter central control from Berlin. New station identification tunes that were ‘typical’ of each region were adopted in 1935 and the radio schedules swelled with programmes that showcased the tradition of the region.53 Wherever possible, such expressions of ‘essential’ regional culture were brought together into national productions, where listeners would be able to hear the ‘typical’ voices of their own region alongside ‘typical’ voices from all over Germany. If the government of Weimar Germany had seen the radio as implying the nation by its crossing of regional boundaries, it was only after the Nazi takeover that the radio was actually able to reach something that demographically resembled the entire ‘nation’, and even then, it was far from complete. The relatively high cost of the devices, not to mention the unmistakably bourgeois content of most programming, ensured that Weimar radio was the almost exclusive domain of the middle class. Beginning in 1932, a number of factors came together to cause rapid expansion of radio listening. First was the sense of national crisis. Radio sales increased sharply starting already in 1932, due to an increased desire to be kept abreast of unfolding events, combined with moves to invest savings in durable goods should there be another monetary crisis as there had been in 1923.54 In addition to those driven to the radio by the sense of crisis, many more listeners were soon added by the concerted efforts of the Nazis to ensure that their message would be carried to as many people as possible. Strong drives among the working classes and in rural areas encouraged everyone to become radio listeners out of a sense of national duty. Germans were told that ‘whoever excludes himself from

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German radio runs the danger of missing out on the life of the nation’.55 In order to enable as many people as possible to be able to listen, the Nazis developed an inexpensive radio, the Volksempfänger (‘people’s receiver’). The first model, the VE301, came on the market in 1933 at a price of RM 76, about half the price of any other model on the market.56 In 1938, an even cheaper model, the small DKE38, came on the market for the price of RM 35. These cheap radios could be paid for in monthly instal- ments drawn directly by employers from a worker’s wages, with reduced or waived licence fees. As a result, the numbers of radio listeners swelled by the millions, including listeners in the lowest income brackets.57 The equation of radio listening and citizenship was defined both positively and negatively. The special deals on radios described were not available to Jews or other people whom the Nazis considered ‘un-German’.58 Later on, Jews were even banned from owning radios altogether. Thus, the mass addressed by the radio programming of the Nazi state came to resemble – demographically, if not necessarily ideologically – the ‘national community’ envisaged by the Nazis. The Volksempfänger was designed to help keep this community national by only reliably picking up stations closer to ‘home’ in the airwaves, although this, like all other ‘technical fixes’ to prevent listening to foreign stations, was not very successful.59 As Currid has pointed out, like so many other aspects of Nazi-era mass culture, the national orientation of radio listening was not total but rather revealed a number of breaks and contradictions particularly as it tried also to accommodate consumer capitalism.60 The clearest example of these contradictions was that until the start of the war, schedules of other nations were printed in programme guides and could be received by anyone with a strong enough receiver. The greatest changes both in the Nazi state as well as in the radio stations came with the outbreak of war. What had begun as the administrative and economic ‘co-ordination’ of the stations was finally completed with the centralization of the programme production. The final phasing out of ‘local’ broadcasting was only one part of a larger shift in the radio landscape created by the war. Within a week of the start of the war, listening to foreign stations became a crime, punishable by stiff fines, imprisonment, or (theoretically) death.61 The radio was to represent Germany and Germany only. The territory of this exclusive realm did not remain stable, however. Having already expanded first by the addition of Saarbrücken in 1935, and then the stations in Austria in 1938, the war saw the rapid expansion of the ‘German’ radio domain. In the initial ‘lightning’ phase of the war in 1939–1940, Warsaw, Lodz and Prague became ‘German’ stations. Furthermore, smaller stations for the troops

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Figure 1.2 ‘The radio broadcast game’, 1940. Source: Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv. could often be picked up by listeners in Germany as well. To help even the children to learn which stations could be listened to legally, a board game was invented with a map of Germany, showing the boundaries of the wartime Reich, along with those stations that had been captured (see Figure 1.2). There was enough confusion that both sides in the propaganda war, especially in its latter phases, operated ‘black’ stations, which masquer- aded as networks for the forces, but carried with them misinformation, demoralizing and/or divisive reports.62 The ‘enemy’ station best-known to listeners in Germany was the BBC’s German Service. In addition to programmes by Hugh Carleton Greene and Lindley Fraser, much of the programme was produced by German émigrés, who spoke anonymously to emphasize the fact that this was a British station.63 The largest push for the BBC German Service came from the start of the Normandy invasion through the end of the war, broadcasting a full 10 hours per day during prime time.64 As American and British troops entered Germany from the West in March of 1945, the BBC began to broadcast instructions from General Eisenhower to Germans in the areas occupied by Allied troops. A joint base was set up in 1944 at the newly recaptured Radio Luxembourg, which broadcast a combination of material from the BBC’s German Service, the London-based ‘American

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Broadcasting Station in Europe’ (ABSIE) and the New York-based ‘Voice of America’ during the day, and was a so-called ‘black station’ by night.65 As Allied bombing raids destroyed more and more of the cities, German radio once more became a local matter, if only in a limited capacity. In many cities, emergency transmitters and wire broadcasts were made available during bombing raids when the main broadcasting transmitters shut down in order to pass on emergency information.66 One by one, the German stations fell silent as both Eastern and Western fronts retreated and collapsed. Some were destroyed either as a result of Allied bombing or of ‘scorched earth’ actions by the SS.67 Some, such as Hamburg, Berlin and Munich, were taken more or less intact by the Allies. The establishment of broadcasting under Allied occupation was largely an improvised affair, dependent in large part on which stations were taken by which army. Prior agreements among the Allies had only fore- seen taking control of all media, but not what was to be done with them. Vague plans for national broadcasting under four-power control were discussed and a ‘Multipartite Radio Committee’ of the Allied Control Committee was even created but nothing ever came of it.68 The first radio station to come back under Allied control was Hamburg, which was taken mostly intact when the city surrendered peacefully to British troops on 3 May 1945. By the evening of the next day, the small team of control officers who had been specially trained for the assignment of restarting broadcasting in Germany had put the station in order and begun broadcasting.69 Work began almost immediately to restore Cologne, the other major station in the British zone. In June 1945, broadcasting, along with newspapers and other publishing in the British zone were placed under the control of the ‘Public Relations/Information Services Control’ (PR/ISC).70 The British adopted the model of the BBC for the institution, with a public service structure, and a centralized service, with Hamburg as the production centre of a ‘home service’ for the entire zone.71 This central service was dubbed the Nordwestdeutsche Rundfunk (‘North-West German Broadcasting’, hereafter NWDR) when Cologne began broadcasting in September of 1945. Although the name change implied a new service that would extend over the entire zone, the bulk of the station’s operations, as well as programme production, remained in Hamburg. The British hired Hugh Carleton Greene (later Sir Hugh Greene 1909– 1987) to take the position as chief controller of the NWDR in October of 1946, who was known and trusted by many German listeners, as well as the many exiles who had worked for the BBC during the war.72 By the time Greene arrived, the NWDR with 2.9 million registered radios was

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-18 9780230_009035_02_cha01 Introduction and Contexts 19 the third largest broadcasting company in Western Europe after Radio- diffussion Francaise and the BBC.73 The state structures surrounding this broadcasting system, however, were only just beginning to form. The tensions that ensued between the centralized structure of the NWDR and the growing influence of the federal states would plague the NWDR for its entire existence. Particularly the politicians of the new state of North Rhine-Westphalia, an area that had been served by the radio station in Cologne since 1926, were not prepared to accept a broadcasting system that subordinated their home station to Hamburg. In contrast to the British, American authorities saw establishing a decentralized, regional structure of broadcasting in the first months after the war as a first step towards the creation of the federal political structures that they envisioned for a future German state. In order to counter what they saw as the development of centralized structures in the Soviet and British zones, the American authorities acted swiftly to create a federal system of government. A decree of 19 September 1945 created the three federal States of Bavaria, Greater Hesse and Württemberg-Baden. Each of the primary radio stations, Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Munich, became the official radio station of the new state, broadcasting from the capital of the state.74 On 25 October 1945, the secondary station at Nuremberg was also brought online, and for a short time, it ‘produced’ the only show broadcast that was on every radio station in Germany, the war crimes trials of the central ranks of the Nazi party. The trials ran every day except Sunday from 20 November 1945 until 1 October 1946. Frankfurt and Stuttgart followed Munich, coming back on the air in the first week of June. These stations were at first provisional due to wartime damage to both, but work on both continued for months and they expanded their reach and remit. The French zone, and the broadcasting that accompanied it, was in many ways an afterthought of the occupation. The French were not officially granted the zone until 12 July 1945, when the other Allied powers were already setting up basic administration in theirs and there were only small relay stations in their zone. In light of this, the decision was taken to build a new network of stations for the entire zone with its centre in Baden-Baden. Baden-Baden was both the seat of the military government, and its location close to the French border also allowed for the necessary materials and information for the station to be brought over from France relatively quickly.75 Unlike the other radio stations in the Western zones, the stations of the French-held areas had German heads from the start of broadcasting, and the French control officers played a slightly lesser role than their British and US counterparts. After

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-19 9780230_009035_02_cha01 20 Voices in Ruins a brief period from October 1945–February 1946, when the station at Koblenz broadcast independently, the full network of the Südwestfunk (‘South-West Radio’, hereafter SWF) began broadcasting 31 March 1946. The skeleton crews of control officers who started up the new stations could not produce any but the most basic programmes. They set about almost immediately to build up a staff of German employees, some of whom had already been employed in broadcasting, and some of whom were starting anew. The number of employees grew steadily throughout the occupation, although as I will discuss in Chapter 3, the turnover rate in some sectors was relatively high. In general, by the start of 1946, however, the stations had a core German staff who were producing the bulk of the programme, under advice, guidance and censorship of the Allied control officers. Developments in the Soviet zone were in some ways similar and in some very different from those in the Western zones. The radio station in Berlin had been abandoned on 1 May, as Soviet troops took over the city and as such had been taken almost entirely intact. Even though the station in Berlin’s Masurenallee was in the British sector when the city was divided, the Soviets kept control of the building. The radio station in Leipzig, at first under American jurisdiction, came back to life locally in the summer of 1945, eventually taking the name and much of the range of its Weimar-era predecessor, the Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (‘Middle-German Radio’, hereafter MDR).76 Regional stations in the northern half of the zone mostly relayed the programme from Berlin, and the stations in the southern half relayed the programme of the MDR. Whereas in the Western zones, efforts were being made to create a broadcast system totally separated from government influence, broadcasting in the Soviet zone was created from the start as a state-run institution. Responsibility for building the new radio station in Berlin was given to Hans Mahle (1911–1999), a member of the group of Moscow exiles centred around Walter Ulbricht. A short time later, in December of 1945, however, all radio production was placed under the authority of the German Central Administration for Popular Edu- cation (Deutsche Zentralverwaltung für Volksbildung) in the Soviet zone. The failure of the negotiations for four-power control of broadcasting in Berlin led the US occupation authorities to begin their own radio station. What began as wired broadcaster DIAS (Drahtfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor) in November of 1945 became wireless station RIAS (Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor) on 5 September 1946. While the other stations in the US zone were eventually given over into German hands, RIAS remained under US control. During and after the 1948–1949 blockade of

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Berlin, the station became a symbol of the ongoing US presence in the city, and developed into one of the iconic institutions of the Cold War.77 The deterioration of relations between the Soviet Union and the British and American Allies that began in late 1946 had an almost immediate effect on broadcasting institutions. After the speech by the US Secretary of State James Byrnes in Stuttgart in September 1946, and particularly after President Truman laid out the so-called ‘Truman doctrine’ in March of 1947, criticism of the Soviet Union and the administration of the Soviet zone was not only allowed, but encouraged at the stations in the US and British zones. A number of left-leaning staff from both the US and British-controlled stations either quit or were dismissed, and a number of them moved over to the Soviet zone (see Chapter 3). This new state of affairs also increased the pressure to turn the radio stations over into German hands, although first steps towards this goal had already begun. Already in January 1946, the US Information Control Division ordered stations to reduce the numbers of American officers at the stations and appoint German heads of station by 30 June, although only Radio Frank- furt managed this with its appointment of Eberhard Beckmann. At Radio Munich, American station head Field Horine, along with two other Amer- ican officers, handed in their resignations in December of 1946 in protest over US occupation policy in general and denazification policy specifically. By contrast to the other Western zones, the French were neither as opposed to the Soviet Union, nor were they in any hurry to turn the station over fully into German hands. In Friedrich Bischoff, they already had a German station head who was widely respected and with whom they could work, and the bulk of the station was run by German employees, so that the growing tension between the other Allies did not have the sort of wide-ranging impact on personnel make-up and overall programming at the station that it had in the British and US zones. In spite of the desire to hand them over to Germans, the deliberations on what form the broadcasting institutions should take were long and intense. Although some of the structures varied from station to station, they are mostly remarkable for their similarities. They were handed over to Germans as public companies, financed by listeners’ licence fees. Con- trol over the stations was split between a director (Intendant), who was responsible for the programme and the day-to-day running of the station, an administrative council and a broadcasting council, made up of representatives of society. The British were the first to hand over their station into German hands, on 1 January 1948.78 Stations in the US and French zones followed over the course of 1949.79 By the time the stations were handed over, the Allied presence in them was minimal, and

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-21 9780230_009035_02_cha01 22 Voices in Ruins they had been running essentially under German direction for months. If anything, operating under Allied control had shielded the stations from political and other social groups that quickly scrambled to gain influence over the stations, particularly through the newly appointed station councils. By the end of 1946, the radio map of Germany was one that was mostly familiar to the German radio audience (see Figure 1.3). Geograph- ically, most of the stations had remained largely in the same place, with

Figure 1.3 ‘The four zones and their stations’ Hör Zu, December 1946. Source: Axel Springer AG.

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-22 9780230_009035_02_cha01 Introduction and Contexts 23 the exception of the French zone. Technically, the radio landscape of broadcast frequencies had remained largely the same since the early Nazi era, when they were laid down by international convention in Lucerne in 1933. Over the course of the war, the situation had descended into chaos, as warring nations saw no need to respect each others’ rights in the airwaves, but long-established domestic stations continued to operate on their regular frequencies. A convention to draw up a new frequency map of Europe met in Copenhagen in 1948. Germany could only be represented by the occupation powers and, as such, did not fare very well. Each occupation zone was granted two AM frequencies. The plan, which took effect in 1950, forced fundamental changes to take place on Germany’s broadcast map, particularly the rapid development of an FM network, but for most of the occupation period, the stations stayed in their familiar physical and technical positions. Whilst embodying some of the major shifts in the political landscape of Germany, the institutions of radio broadcasting also showed great continuities. Even before the occupation zones, let alone the states, were established, all of the major stations except Cologne were broadcasting on the same frequencies as they had before and during the war. The Post had continued to collect licence fees largely unchecked by the end of the war and the collapse of the state.80 The amount of the licence fee, traditionally collected monthly by the postal carrier, as well as the official licence form, remained the same. On one level, this division of radio broadcasting among the Allied powers and their zones was a further mark of the defeat and division of Germany. The armed Allied soldiers who controlled access to all of the radio stations throughout the occupation were reminder enough of this, as were the regular station announcements telling listeners they were hearing a station of the military government. On another level, however, the new radio order also represented in many ways a return to the decentralized broadcasting system that had been established in the Weimar Republic and slowly centralized by the Nazi state in the years leading up to the war. In addition, while they were controlled by Allied officers, many of whom were returned exiles from Germany, the bulk of the station staff were Germans who had lived in Germany during the Nazi era and had experience – at least as listeners, and many as producers – of the radio programming of that time. The dominance and continuity of the radio was not total. Although the radio stations themselves were set up very quickly after the end of the war, not all of the potential listeners had the opportunity to receive them. A survey on radio coverage in the US zone during the winter of

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1945/1946 summed up: ‘Less than one-half of the population had radios in good working order. But nearly one in three radios in the zone was a two-tube Volksempfänger. Practically no radios were operated by batteries. Middle-wave lengths could be picked up by nearly all sets, but one-third of the sets were equipped to receive short-wave also.’81 The lack of radios that ran on batteries meant that radio listening also depended on there being available electricity, a distinct disadvantage given the power cuts that were common in Germany throughout the occupation.82 It should also be noted that in spite of Nazi efforts to promote rural radio listening, radio was also still mostly an urban affair. Not only were the numbers of actual radio sets much lower in the country, the stations themselves, particularly at the start of occupation, did not always reach far out of the cities.83 In the Western zones, the shortage of radios was exacerbated by the fact that 80 per cent of the radio production before 1945 had been in factories in the East that were confiscated or dismantled after the war. As radio production in the West started back up, the radio device re-enacted the phases of its development. In order to be able to dis- tribute radios immediately, factories began by producing simple crystal sets with headphones.84 Since the start of radio broadcasting in Ger- many, building one’s own radio out of various component parts had been a popular hobby, and in the post-war era, this ‘hobby’ became a valuable skill for those who could obtain the parts. In the British zone, where there was almost no radio manufacturing industry, there were many different approaches to the problem.85 Orders were given to town mayors to acquire a few good quality radio receivers to which loudspeakers in public places could be attached, so that news information could be made available to those who did not have their owns sets. In places where this was attempted, however, it was reported that listeners preferred making do with the few available newspapers to radio listening in public.86 Public radio listening was probably too closely connected with its use in the Nazi era for credibility or comfort. In order to meet the high demand and limited financial means of their audience, the British authorities contracted with the new radio manufacturers in their zone to create what would essentially be the next version of the Volksempfänger. This new Jedermann-Gerät (‘everyman-device’), as it was known, featured some improvements over its Nazi predecessor, the most notable of these being FM reception. This new designation for the ‘standard’ radio receiver is quite telling about the changing emphasis of the radio after the war. Whereas Volksempfänger emphasizes the entire mass of listeners, Jedermann-Gerät focuses on the individual consumer. Not

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-24 9780230_009035_02_cha01 Introduction and Contexts 25 surprisingly, would-be purchasers of the new device actually had to wait until 1948 before it came on the market, and even then, it was not yet at a price that could be considered for ‘everyman’.87 In spite of these difficulties, radio listening in Germany expanded rapidly. On 1 July 1948, there were 6.25 million registered radios in the Western zones.88 A registered radio was normally equated to five actual listeners, by which calculation there were over 31.25 million radio listeners – roughly 70 per cent of the population.89 The number of licensed radios represents a low estimate of the numbers who were actually listening, due to high levels of unlicensed listening, which continued from the end of the war until the early 1950s.90 As consumer items, radio sets held a special status somewhere between luxury and necessity. Imme- diately after the war, any device that could be made to function was generally used gladly, no matter how improvised. Whereas families saved and waited to purchase other household goods such as refrigerators and vacuum cleaners until the mid- to late 1950s, new radios were more often acquired as soon as money was available for them.91 For most listeners throughout the occupation period and well into the 1950s, listening to the radio meant almost exclusively listening to their ‘home station’ (Heimatsender).92 When asked, listeners almost uniformly cited ‘good reception’ as the reason for this.93 The signal strength of the post-war stations, as well as the quality of most of the available radio sets made receiving most ‘outside’ stations difficult.94 As late as 1948, nearly one third of the listeners in the British zone could still not pick up the stations in the US zone.95 Though they took note of this degree of listener ‘loyalty’, it did not make the Allied occupiers complacent. Upon becoming aware of this phenomenon, the Americans concluded that ‘if a rival station increased its power, or if better receiving sets were available, audiences might shift accordingly’.96 As I will show in Chapter 5, this assessment showed an incomplete understanding of the habits and preferences of Germans with regard to their local stations. The official handing-over of the radio stations from Allied into German control, while significant in the history of broadcasting in Germany, was essentially a non-event for most listeners.97 There had indeed been ceremonies to mark the occasion at each of the stations, the identification announcements no longer announced ‘a station of the military government’, and in the American zone, even the names of the stations had changed, but from the point of view of station staff or daily programme, there were no other immediate changes. For listeners in Bavaria, in particular, this was a return to the name, and to the role the station had had before the 1933.

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Radio as ‘voice of the Heimat’

Though it is my concern here to show the ways in which the radio reproduced a sense of ‘normal’ times and spaces of Germany, it is obvious but nevertheless necessary to note that neither the space nor the time of Germany had been ‘normal’ since broadcasting began. As we have seen, the tensions between the region, state and radio station in Germany may have been exacerbated by the occupation, but they were by no means unique to it. In fact, if one can speak of a ‘normal’ experience of the nation of Germany, in the sense of something familiar and continuous, I would argue that a feeling of unresolved tension in space must form a significant part of it.98 Since the nineteenth century, the idea of Heimat has been mobilized in Germany to reconcile its scattered geographical and cultural past with the idea of the nation-state of Germany. Instead of focusing on central, national symbols, the idea of nation based around the Heimat looks to provincial spaces as evidence of a common German past. Heimat enthusiasts of the nineteenth century set out to preserve, catalogue and display the Eigenart, or unique quality, of their region and its traditions as part of an authentic Germanness. By the time of the First World War, Heimat had become a widespread, everyday understanding of the nation, one that has been taken up in various forms and for varying agendas in every state that has called itself Germany since. This peculiar interweaving in Germany of local and provincial space with this particular project of national identity means that even today it is difficult to talk about regional identity, or even regions, without implicitly or explicitly talking about Heimat. As Anton Kaes pointedly states, ‘scenes of provincial life are never innocent in Germany’.99 In order to understand the processes of national identity in post-war radio, it will first be my task to examine this particular complex of symbols and demonstrate the way they operated in and around the radio. In so doing, I will also place the radio in the centre of the debate on construction and meaning of Heimat in the post-war era. While the Heimat phenomenon has been repeatedly explored with regard to film and television, in particular surrounding Edgar Reitz’s 1984 series Heimat, the radio has been largely absent in the discussion.100 While the term ‘Heimat’ and many of its associated symbols have become embedded in the discussion of regional space, their meaning has been anything but consistent historically. As a product of the fundamental tension between two often irreconcilable ideas of space, it is the nature of Heimat that it is inexact, changeable and often paradoxical. Indeed, Hermann Bausinger argues that Heimat is best understood

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-26 9780230_009035_02_cha01 Introduction and Contexts 27 not as an entity unto itself, but as an ongoing historical problem.101 In showing the way that the idea of Heimat has operated within the radio programme, I will draw largely on Alon Confino’s study of the development of the Heimat movement in Württemberg before the First World War.102 This does not contradict my assertion that Heimat must be considered in its specific historical context. Though his focus is on a different historical context, his method of examining Heimat as a system for making the nation ‘everyday mental property’ that operated across numerous modes of public expression resonates strongly with the project at hand. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, most of these symbolic processes continued to function in the radio programmes of post-war Germany, even though their meaning was necessarily changed by the different context in which they operated. From the outset of broadcasting in Germany, the Heimat idea has played a vital role in the construction of the radio and its relationship to the people and nation it served. The creation of nine regional broadcasting monopolies was often touted as a ‘natural’ reflection of the notion put forth by nineteenth-century scholars that ‘Germany’ consisted of nine different but related tribes (Stämme), an idea that had become common-sense enough by 1919 to be written into the consti- tution of the Weimar state.103 Once the stations were established, the radio programming set out to reflect the Eigenart of the regions. The ability to report live allowed reporters to go out into provincial spaces and bring the countryside that is at the centre of Heimat imagery into the homes of the mostly urban audience.104 Listeners from broad areas could participate in the ‘unique’ characteristics of individual localities. As a verbal medium, the radio was able to address listeners in the unique voice of regional dialect, soon giving rise to radio’s designation as the ‘voice of the Heimat’.105. The National Socialists, once they took over power, wholeheartedly embraced the Heimat idea in their policies, but in their own particular version of it that leaned very heavily on their ideas of race.106 ‘Blut und Boden’ (‘Blood and Soil’) became the primary designation for the Heimat idea, with the connotations that those without the ‘blood tie’ to the land should be forcibly removed and/or murdered. With regard to the countryside, the ‘blood and soil’ idea was laid down by law in 1933 in the Law of Hereditary Property (Erbhofsgesetz), which stipulated that all farms must be owned by those who could prove their German or ‘tribal’ blood. Even whilst starkly centralizing the production of the radio programme, the Nazis were also keen to emphasize the regional uniqueness of each station and region. Increasingly, however, the production

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-27 9780230_009035_02_cha01 28 Voices in Ruins of the local Heimat became part of national productions, in which several regions were presented at once, each in a stylized form that would be intelligible to listeners from other regions.107 Once the war began, the Heimat became the Heimatfront, and the production of Heimat no longer focused on the specific places of Germany, but rather on producing an image of Germany as a whole as a cosy, intimate place in contrast to the foreign world where the soldiers were fighting. During the war, the representations of locality were first erased from the radio stations and then from the radio programmes themselves, due to the practical considerations of producing a programme for the entire nation and the increased ideological focus on the centralized Nazi state as the sole symbol of the German nation. In the end, as Celia Applegate notes, the forced mobilizations of National Socialism and war ‘required of Germans a nationalism to which all bonds of locality had necessarily to be sacrificed’.108 Though it had drawn very heavily on the idea of Heimat, particularly in its representations of and on the radio, the Nazi state had stretched Heimat to its breaking point. After the war, Heimat, with its focus on provincial and regional spaces, became once more a powerful focus of identity in Germany. The mostly failed attempt by the Nazis to conflate Heimat in the minds of Germans with the National Socialist state and its central apparatus in Berlin helped allow the idea of Heimat, particularly in its aspect of regional representation, to be ‘pulled out of the rubble of the Nazi Reich as a victim, not a perpetrator’.109 The identification with the region was further compounded by the country’s political division as well as the scattering of its population. Indeed, as Bausinger comments,

It is not surprising that Heimat was once more writ large immediately after the Second World War (as it had been, incidentally, after the First). The powerful Reich had been smashed; the people were bound into smaller units, distilled first onto the division into occupation zones and then bounded into federal states and administrative localities that sought to determine and reinforce their own identity. The influx of ‘Heimat-expellees’ was also meaningful for the consciousness of Heimat – the loss of Heimat of these migrants and refugees underlined the value of Heimat.110

Between those soldiers who remained in captivity, those who had been bombed out of their homes and those who had been expelled from the East, over 20 per cent of the population of Germany was no longer where they ‘belonged’ on the map of Germany, and the map was obsolete to

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-28 9780230_009035_02_cha01 Introduction and Contexts 29 boot.111 According to the census from October 1946, a substantial portion of the population of the US and British zones consisted of people who were not natives to the region where they were living.112. In some ways, the contained, local world ostensibly envisaged in Heimat imagery had been created by the destruction of the war. Follow- ing the exceptional mobility of the war, which had uprooted millions of people from their daily routines and familiar surroundings and scattered them across Germany and the globe, most Germans found themselves essentially ‘stuck’ in one place. Roads and railways were destroyed, the forms of public transport that were running were always packed full, and the boundaries between the occupation zones were largely impass- able for the average citizen. As much as Germans were ‘stuck’, however, they were also perpetually on the move. The scattering of the population coupled with the need for sustenance meant that many people were routinely making longer journeys than ‘normal’. The search for lost relatives, the attempt to obtain goods from the country, or simply the trip from the only available housing to the only available work, all required many people to make relatively long journeys and to interact with a wide range of people. This paradoxical mobility in destroyed, uncertain spaces only increased the longing for the (re)construction of the cosy, private, graspable space of Heimat. The heightened consciousness of Heimat in public discourse went hand-in-hand with productions of Heimat in the reconstruction of popular entertainment in Germany. This was particularly the case in cinema, where the genre of the Heimatfilm accounted for one in five German films made between 1947 and 1960.113 Set against the backdrop of rural places such as the Bavarian Alps or the Lüneburg Heath, these films portrayed a cosy local world where tensions between foreign and familiar, past and present could be safely negotiated. Indeed, the sense of place described above, of a static realm ‘suffused with the tropes of mobility’ is very similar to that which has been identified by Johannes von Moltke as one of the defining features of the spatial settings in the post-war Heimatfilm.114 In examining the appeal of Heimat symbolism to post-war audiences, it is important to remember Confino’s key point that as much as it emphasizes the particular characteristics of specific regions, Heimat is also, and perhaps primarily, a national idea. Its purpose is to provide a mechanism by which the markers of local and regional identity become intelligible to ‘natives’ and ‘outsiders’ alike as evidence of membership in a larger German whole.115 The Heimat view of the landscape is the modern, aesthetic gaze of the tourist, that is, someone who is always standing at a remove. Indeed, Heimat imagery was a vital part of tourist advertising

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-29 9780230_009035_02_cha01 30 Voices in Ruins from the late nineteenth century through the Nazi era, and in different form was an integral part of reconstruction of the tourist industry after the war.116 As a space that is at once viewed from ‘outside’, and yet at the same time an intimate, ‘internal’ space where the (German) visitor can feel ‘at home’, Heimat always makes reference to a larger entity than the local space it portrays. In this regard, the Heimatfilm is a case in point. Though foregrounding the landscape of a specific region, such films were clearly aimed at, and readily consumed by, an audience that went well beyond the borders of the region they portrayed, though seldom beyond the borders of Germany and Austria. A complex of national symbols that could thus offer a vision of an authentic Germanness without explicitly referring to the boundaries of Germany, or even necessarily Germany itself, resonated strongly at a time when the definition of Germany was still uncertain. The notion of Heimat integrates geographically and culturally distinct places by creating a sense of a common past that makes an integrated present seem natural. As such, Heimat symbolism is fundamentally about reconciling the ‘authentic’ local past with the modernized present ‘to overcome the inherent strangeness’ between them.117 Heimat appears as a past that shines through on the modern present. If there is any persistent feature, or indeed meaning, of Heimat, then it is this ‘simultaneity of the unsimultaneous’.118 Understanding Heimat as a representation of space that does not deny, but rather embraces, modernity lies at the heart of recent re-evaluations of the long-standing interpretation of Heimat as a deeply anti-modern nostalgia for a pre-modern past. From the Heimat images of the nineteenth century, which frequently included modern factories amid the ‘traditional’ townscapes, to 1950s Heimatfilms, where rural spaces are filled with cars and other trappings of modernity, the idea of Heimat has been to portray a modernity that does not stand at odds with tradition.119 Perhaps more than any other modern development, the radio was able to realize uniquely this simultaneous ‘presence’ of past and present that represented the ideal experience of Heimat. Without having to travel at all, radio listeners were able to take part in village festivals, Heimat evenings and concerts in historic town halls, all of which celebrated a common past, even in the midst of the most modern of surroundings. Within the context of post-war reconstruction, this dual aspect of Heimat, its simultaneous embrace of both modernity and its apparent opposite, acquired particular importance. No matter how great the nostalgia for local, rural spaces might have been, not even the most energetic post-war Heimatler wanted to see Germany’s industrial progress halted.

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The widespread fear of the Morgenthau plan – far out of proportion to the seriousness with which it was regarded by the Allied powers – and the general outrage at the dismantling of German industrial sites by the Allies provide ample evidence that the vision of a modern Germany was just as important as any longing for unspoiled rural space.120 Indeed, with the destruction of Germany, modernization meant not only bringing Germany technically back ‘up-to-date’ with the rest of the world, it also meant moving symbolically beyond the recent Nazi past. Axel Schildt notes a very similar trend in the advertising for the domestic tourism industry in the early Federal Republic.121 Prospectuses for German des- tinations at once highlighted the modern free time amusements of bars, motorboats and cinemas, as well as ‘Heimat-evenings’ and, for example, ‘a valuable look at Frisian folkways, language, old traditions and lovely traditional costumes’.122 Similarly, post-war Heimatfilms, which were also a form of tourism promotion, were filled with the trappings of modern life, especially cars.123 Perhaps one of the most enduring and implicitly understood images of Heimat is its gendered quality. Heimat always appears as the feminine aspect of the nation that remains at home. Heimat does not go to war, but rather it is what the nation goes to war to defend. Women, almost always portrayed as mothers, become the ‘human protagonists’ of the Heimat.124 As I will lay out in greater detail in Chapter 4, these feminine visions of the homeland were particularly mobilized through the radio during the war. In speaking to the soldiers in the field, the radio adopted a feminine voice suffused with tropes of domesticity to create an image of a normal Germany enduring at home while the war fronts expanded across Europe. After the war, feminine imagery was once more particularly mobilized as a symbol of the new, peaceful nation of Germany that developed. Because it looks to those aspects of culture that are supposedly ‘eternal’ and ever-present, Heimat appears also as a process of perpetual rediscovery. This rediscovery can take on many forms. In romantic novels, it was seen in contrast to die Ferne (‘the distance’) or die Fremde (‘foreign lands’) where one travels, eventually to return to the Heimat.125 Similar narratives are staples of the post-war Heimatfilm, which often centre around characters who come into the provincial space from outside and must be (re-)integrated into the community. Certainly this aspect was also central to Heimat in its guise of tourist advertisement: Germans were invited to rediscover the country which had been rendered alien to them by the war. Such rediscovery was also a powerful trope in the production of the region in the radio programmes. In a seminal article, Horst O. Halefeldt

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-31 9780230_009035_02_cha01 32 Voices in Ruins described developments in German broadcasting as a series of periodic ‘rediscoveries’ of the local world by broadcasters and listeners.126 Within the limited mobility of everyday life, this ‘rediscovery’ of places that were still close, but far less reachable than they had been, was both of practical and symbolic importance to numerous listeners. As we shall see, the radio reporting on the state of reconstruction drew very heavily on the language of rediscovery inherent in Heimat symbolism in presenting the process to its listeners. Contained within this apparent process of perpetual rediscovery is also a narrative of perpetual loss.127 As an idea that had grown in response to the changes and loss in ways of life experienced in the shock of modernity, Heimat after the war came to embody the more dramatic losses of the prisoners of war, the bombed out city-dwellers and above all the refugees from the East. What is remarkable about this sense of loss is its ambiguous position between time and space; it is never clear whether the loss of Heimat refers to a time that has passed, or a place that has been removed. This ambiguity can be seen clearly in the following rumina- tion on Heimat by Paul Land, a popular announcer at Radio Stuttgart, announcing a song in one of his regular ‘Operetta Cocktails’:

What is Heimat? A pretty word? You hear it. It has resonance. You read it in a book, but it stays just a ‘word,’ as long as one lives at home. But Heimat is everything, if one is far from it, Heimat is the great longing when one is away in foreign lands, where the people have different customs, other fashions, other languages. Millions of people during the war sensed for the first time what else Heimat is besides a word; that it is everything we have. And still today millions of our brothers live in foreign places; they feel what Heimat means. For them: the Heimat song from the operetta ‘Monika’.128

Land first spoke of Heimat in the present tense (‘it is everything that we have’), as if it were Germany ‘now’ and the loss of Heimat meant the physical removal into ‘foreign’ lands. Once he had played the song, however, he referred not to the longing and loss specifically of the prisoners of war (many of whom may well have been listening), but rather of everyone, himself included: ‘When the longing for our Heimat has stirred up our hearts, what makes more sense than the “Flight into happiness’’? This, too, is the title of an operetta and ...doesn’t it say a lot?’129 Sud- denly, Heimat was not lost in space, but in time, and not so much a place that could be escaped to in any physical sense, but rather an experience of loss that must be escaped from.

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Land’s portrayal of Heimat as ‘just a word as long as you are at home’ returns us to the notion with which I began this discussion: Heimat is ultimately a vision of normality. This is perhaps its greatest affinity with radio, and it is small wonder that Heimat was one of the terms most often connected with the radio after the war. In common parlance, Heimat- sender was used to refer one’s ‘local’ station, or else to the station to which one paid the licence fee. The term ‘voice of the Heimat’ was once more unproblematically invoked in connection with the post-war radio.130 The flexibility of the term also continued undiminished. With reference to the soldiers still in captivity, the ‘Heimat’ invoked was Germany; in the struggle for regional broadcasting in Cologne or Koblenz the ‘Heimat’ was primarily a ‘unique’ cultural region that required a ‘voice’ in the air that would reflect its ‘authentic’ character. This flexibility of meaning must also be understood historically: the Heimat envisaged on the radio in 1923 was not always the same thing as Heimat in 1933, or in 1943, which were quite different again from many aspects of Heimat that have been discussed after 1945. One way or another, however, the question in Germany – in 1923, in 1933, in 1943 and after 1945 – was never seriously whether the radio should be the ‘voice of the Heimat’, but rather what Heimat its voice(s) should represent and how. It is this question, ultimately, that this book will address.

9th June 2008 6:44 MAC/VIR Page-33 9780230_009035_02_cha01 2 Echoes of Days: Finding Everyday Between Exception and Routine

Es bleibt uns vielleicht irgend ein Baum an dem Abhang, dass wir ihn täglich wiedersähen; es bleibt uns die Straße von gestern und das verzogene Treusein einer Gewohnheit, der es bei uns gefiel, und so blieb sie und ging nicht. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Erste Duineser Elegie’ ist nicht in Stimmen, denen wir unser Ohr schenken, ein Echo von nun verstummten? Walter Benjamin, ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’

Introduction

On 1 June 1945, Victor Klemperer noted in his diary: ‘With every broadcast, dozens of times per day, Radio Berlin announces the time, and that is a blessing. But when Berlin says 8 P.M,itis7P.M. here and 9 P.M. in Bremen. The Russians in Berlin have Moscow time, in Dresden it is summer-time, and the English in their region have middle-European’.1 The division of Germany into zones had not only fragmented the space of Germany, but also its time – in this case making it actually appear to run backward, growing later from East to West. Yet in spite of this fragmentation, and in spite of the fact that he had few, if any, engagements or appointments in the chaotic days after the war, Klemperer still regarded the radio’s time announcement as a ‘blessing’. Clearly, it was not the time itself that was a blessing, but the sense of structure to the day, and with it a sense of re-connection with the larger place of Germany. As British broadcasting historian Paddy Scannell has argued, the time structures of broadcasting are their most important aspect, and the key to ‘the unobtrusive ways in which broadcasting sustains the lives and

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-34 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 35 routines, from one day to the next, year in and year out, of whole populations’.2 In particular, he discusses three different practices of broadcasting which help shape listeners’ experience of time. First is its ability to address a public that is actually all of society and bridge the gaps of space and class to bring entire populations, usually within nations, to the same place at the same time. Such moments of simultaneity coalesce through calendrical repetition into a grand narrative of the nation which ‘in the course of many years, over generations ...becomes sedimented in memory as traces both of a common past and of the biography of individuals’.3 In addition to such national events, he also discusses the ways in which daily programming bounds and maintains a sense of social and community time. Programmes such as news and serial drama, he claims, create a picture of an ‘outside’ world which exists in parallel to the day-to-day world of immediate experience. Broadcasting schedules allow this outside world to burst in upon the individual present periodically and act as a sort of portal and gatekeeper between these two spheres. Finally, the regular scheduling of broadcasting itself and the way it is targeted to follow day-to-day routines provide a regular rhythm which help make daily life predictable and tellable. In Scannell’s view, broadcasting’s role in the temporal arrangements of the modern world is thus not merely normative for individual routines, but rather something that from its inception ‘redeemed, and continues to redeem, the intelligibility of the world and the communicability of experience in the widest social sense’.4 Scannell’s observations are based upon his study of developments in Britain, but in spite of the massive upheavals in German society since broadcasting began in the 1920s, similar developments of programming can also be observed. And as in Britain, these developments were accompanied by ongoing crises of intelligibility between the spaces of reception and the address and acoustic spaces of broadcasting.5 To begin to understand how and what programmes meant in occupied Germany, we must first understand the extent to which the radio programmes were able to speak to the everyday times and spaces of their listeners during time when many of their routines had been torn out of their ‘normal’ patterns. In the first section of this chapter, I will explore the way that radio programming, and in particular its structuring of time, constructed experiences of national normality in Germany before, during and after the war. I will begin with an exploration of the relation of radio programming to the onset of exceptional or ‘catastrophic’ time in the experiences of listeners. I will show how the daily patterns of broadcasting addressed and gave structure to everyday life in the present, and helped create a

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-35 9780230_009035_03_cha02 36 Voices in Ruins framework for creating intelligible narratives of the past. In the second section, I will trace how programmers approached the task of creating this daily programme and addressing this ostensibly national audience, shedding light on the combination of practical expediencies and ideological considerations that shaped production and reception. Finally, I will examine light music, the largest single element of the programme, to explore the senses of time that were mobilized in its use in the programme and in public discourse.

Radio times, ‘normality’ and collective memory

In Wolfgang Borchert’s 1947 short story Die Küchenuhr (‘The Kitchen Clock’), the protagonist contemplates the one artefact he has managed to salvage from his destroyed home: a clock, stopped by a bomb at the precise moment he would normally have returned home from work, and been met in the kitchen by his mother. Reflecting on his interrupted routine, he views the stopped clock as the message that the familiar routines of private life were ‘paradise’. The deep sense of loss felt in reflecting on these domestic routines in maternal space obscures the fact that this ‘paradise’ existed within a murderous totalitarian state. Indeed, such memories of a ‘good’ ‘normal’ life before the ‘external’ forces of the war disrupted everyday routine are a common feature in personal memories of the time.6 Margarete Dörr has noted that most of her inter- viewees divided their experience into a ‘normal’ time and a ‘catastrophic’ time. The start of ‘catastrophic’ time was not marked by an external, historical event, such as the beginning or end of the war, but rather as the moment when the war finally disrupted their private, everyday world. Events such as husbands or brothers joining the army, receiving word of a loved one’s death or the first bombing raid are what stand out as the start of the ‘catastrophe’.7 For most Germans still ‘at home’, once the Allied bombing campaign began in earnest, any semblance of normality that might have been maintained in everyday life came unstrung. Confidence both in the government and in the ‘national community’ began to break down and the existing cracks in civil society made by years of Nazi terror began to widen immeasurably. The Nazi Security Service observed that the bombing of Hamburg created ‘in every individual an as-yet unknown need for independent reflection’.8 After bombing raids in Nuremberg, citizens streamed into the affected areas to gawp, rather than to help.9 The ability of radio programmes, either from German or ‘enemy’ stations, to give listeners a convincing sense of parallel experience with a broader national sphere, let alone provide convincing information about

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-36 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 37 affairs beyond their immediate experience, was severely limited. The radio’s primary ‘competitor’ as a medium, before and after 1945, was not newspapers or film, but the Volksmund (‘people’s mouth’), or rumour.10 To dismiss the radio entirely because it no longer credibly channelled the ‘outside’ world would be to misunderstand the complex processes by which media consumers ‘read’ the contents of broadcasting, especially in times of uncertainty. Even without violent breaks between the experience of the everyday world and the public world of broadcasting, the structure of especially news programming carries in it a sense of popular access. As John Fiske argues, news is ‘unruly’ by nature.11 All attempts to put the disjointed events of the entire outside world into a tame, coherent narrative must only be partially successful. Ambiguities in the connections between stories will always be evident in which readers (or listeners) can make their own connections. The ‘pleasure’ of the news, according to Fiske, lies not in acquiring information, but rather from ‘the production of knowledge’ that occurs as people cut through the lines of discourse to make narrative meaning out of the unruly events presented to them.12 Many Germans who listened to both German and foreign news broadcasts felt it was precisely this comparison that allowed them to assemble a picture of the world ‘out there’.13 The need to produce knowledge from conflicting reports of questionable authority, led to unprecedented, if often misplaced, confidence in these individually produced narratives. The Security Service of the SS noted in 1943.

A situation has developed whereby, under such circumstances, considerable sections of the nation no longer regard the press as the best source of instruction, but assemble ‘their own picture’ from rumours, stories told by soldiers and people with ‘political connections,’ letters from the front, and the like. Hence often the most non- sensical rumours are accepted with an astonishing lack of criticism.14

Viewing rumours as a complementary medium to radio emphasizes the collective imaginings also involved in rumour, which, like radio, often only has one foot in immediate private experience. Regardless of whether they ultimately served to support or undermine the regime, the production and spread of rumours probably did as much if not more to create the sense of a ‘national community’ than actual Nazi propaganda. Though the message of rumours is often – one might argue necessarily – sus- pected of being false, the process of rumour always generates the idea of a collective experience.15 After Germany’s surrender, the importance

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-37 9780230_009035_03_cha02 38 Voices in Ruins of rumours in everyday life only increased, much to the consternation of the occupation authorities. The Allied military governments set out to collect as many of these rumours as possible and debunk them via the radio.16 This was no easy task, particularly when the radio stations were identified as the voice of the occupying power. An American Army report in August of 1945 complained, ‘The local grocery store, not the radio, is the chief source of information for the Germans. Most people here have to stand in line for purchases and there sufficient time is spent to hear the latest local news and spread the current rumours.’17 The connection between the everyday routine of listeners (in this case waiting in queues) and the news is important. News, necessarily something that happens ‘out there’ is rendered believable by its being carefully interwoven with the day-to-day that takes place ‘here’. In order for the radio to dispel rumours, it had to step into the role of the Volksmund. Per- haps the most successful single effort in this direction was one made by the NWDR during the bitter winter of 1946–1947. In news broadcasts, the station would announce the position of coal trains ‘in much the same terms as a war-time communiqué about a raid by enemy bombers’ so that listeners would be better able to steal the coal they needed to survive.18 The example of the coal trains is exceptional, but it demonstrates generally how senses of collectivity had not been destroyed, but had come partially unstuck from many of the social and geographical spaces to which they had previously been anchored. It also emphasizes the important difference between radio and rumour, and one which allowed the radio to recapture rapidly some sense of community: the radio addresses collectivities at the same time, in real time. That many listeners felt the radio could, and should, somehow bring together and express this sort of collective experience is reflected in Christof Schneider’s assessment of listener reactions to NWDR broadcasts on National Socialism after the war:

Not a few of the listeners connected criticism or praise of the broadcasts with portrayals of experiences and stories from their own lives. They told in their letters about their life circumstances in the NS and post-war time. Expressing an actual opinion about the broadcasts or series often played a secondary role.19

This process of re-synchronization of individual experience with an imagined collective has been a feature of personal memory production in numerous post-authoritarian societies.20 The same basic urge, to be

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-38 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 39 re-synchronized with the outside world is visible in Klemperer’s viewing the time announcement as a ‘blessing’, and his disquiet at Germany’s divided time. If radio broadcasting is by nature ‘for-me-and-everyone’, to make demands for ‘me’ is to place oneself in relation to an (imagined) ‘everyone’.21 To illustrate this point, consider the following listener complaints from the letters column of the programme guide Hör Zu in 1947:

Away with dance evenings in their present form! We want pretty- sounding dance tunes, full of melody and no rhythmic noise. Put an end to swing and broadcast cultivated dance music. Here are one hundred signatures of like-minded people. The list could be continued at will.22

When will the NWDR finally hear the listener’s cry and broadcast a complete evening programme on Saturdays?23

Where are the popular film melodies in the music shows of the NWDR that are otherwise so nice? Wouldn’t it be possible to take up these popular shows again?24

Sundays I always love to listen to the show We Grant Musical Requests. It’s just that this show is in my opinion much too short. My friends and I have been waiting for weeks now for our request to be granted. We are convinced that the requests of other listeners are being granted faster than ours because they are numerically in the majority; but we suggest that the show time be at least doubled, so that others will have their turn as well.25

None of these writers speak solely for themselves, but rather express their membership of a larger imagined community. The first writer’s request is perhaps the most straightforward in this regard. Convinced she knows the desires of the entire listening public, she says with almost regal authority ‘away with the dance evenings!’ and proves this authority with the signatures of the people around her. The second listener feels no need for such proof, believing that the ‘cry’ of the audience is loud enough for all to hear. The third appears to be making an appeal on behalf of his or her own personal taste, yet the pronoun ‘I’ never appears. Furthermore, the question where are the shows? indicates that there is something missing from its proper place. The last presents an interesting variation on the other three. Whilst participating in the same routine as the imagined

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-39 9780230_009035_03_cha02 40 Voices in Ruins public, the listener makes an assumption they are not in the ‘majority’, and so makes a suggestion to include everybody. All of these letters point to an understanding of ‘me and everyone’ that the radio should address. Vital to this understanding are markers of time: ‘dance evening’, ‘evening programme on Saturday’, ‘again’, ‘Sunday evening’. As Michael Billig points out, such words all carry a form of deixis. Deixis is a term from linguistics, applied to terms such as ‘here’ and ‘now’ that of themselves do not refer to a specific time or place, but rather involve an understood relation between the speaker and the listener. ‘Saturday evening’ is implicitly ‘our Saturday evening’, it is Saturday evening here. They mark a common experience of time, and as Billig notes, a loose, routinized national understanding of space.26 That these letters express such a ‘routine’ understanding of both the radio programme and the audience is not merely of theoretical, but also of historical significance. While they read very much like letters of complaint we might find today in, for example, the BBC’s Feedback, these were written by people under military occupation to a radio station controlled by the occupying power. Two were written during the brutal winter of 1946/1947, when extreme conditions had shut down nearly the entire British zone. This historical context serves to highlight how well-developed the imagination of the radio public was, as well as its importance of such imagination to its listeners. To understand the possibilities of the radio programme as a structure of collective experience and memory, it is important to understand the temporal expectations it generates. Such expectations arise through the regular repetition of similar programmes at the same time on a daily or weekly basis, such as the ‘dance evening’ or the Sunday request programme mentioned in the listener letters above. Temporal expectations are marked by the clock, but they are cemented by the routine of the listener. They are always understood as taking place in what Scannell refers to as ‘my time’, the network of activities and routines in which the listener is involved. As no listener tunes in constantly and actively to the radio, such expectation does not mark every hour or minute in the way a clock does, but rather selective times, chosen by the listener. By tuning in at an appointed time and recognizing a particular broadcast, listeners maintain the sense of a predictable time and world, as well as having a ready marker for communal experience. The content of a show is remembered in part by the way it structures the rest of a day or week. As one Radio Munich listener remembered about the cinema review programme Tönende Leinwand (‘Musical Movie Screen’): ‘That was Thursday evenings from ten to half-past ten. I had to get up very early in the

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-40 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 41 morning, and so I normally went to bed before ten o’clock, except for the one evening.’27 Programmes that are predictable in advance are also more memorable in retrospect. As Kurt Wilhelm, head of entertainment, explained to his Bayerischer Rundfunk listeners about one-off broadcasts in 1953, ‘They are mostly just a time-filler, even if sometimes a high-quality one. Do you remember the broadcast about the poetry of the railway from last summer? Hardly.’28 Such programmes are ‘time-filler’ for listeners because they will not remain in memory. Because they stand outside the structures of daily output, they are mostly empty of meaning within the programme as a whole – or at least, they reflect a perceived ‘emptiness’ of certain times in the schedule. This predictability and sense of overall meaning in the programme was not lost on most radio listeners. When one listener in the letters column of Hör Zu complained about the fact that the station had developed a rigid weekly plan, several listeners responded in the following issue, one citing the ‘pleasant reassurance’ of a regular programme, and another arguing that ‘only that way does one have control weeks in advance and can hold a certain day free for his favourite programme’.29 The regular repetition of specific shows or genres in specific time slots often expands or dislocates itself in linear time. Shaun Moores, in interviewing British listeners about their memories of the early days of broadcasting, discovered that shows broadcast during or after the war were often placed in the speaker’s memory of routines before the war, a phenomenon he ascribes to the cyclical or routine nature of listening.30 In the context of post-war Germany, such findings are quite suggestive for the way the radio might have been able to construct and address memories of pre-war ‘normality’ separate from public events. In order to assess this, a more thorough picture of the way in which the radio created everyday routines across the years will be necessary.

Covering and recovering the days

According to Scannell, the ultimate goal of broadcasting is ‘the supply of a ceaseless, uninterrupted never-ending flow of output’, a service that is always available to anyone.31 Available means being there at a time when the listener is there, but it also means having recognizable meaning within listeners’ experience. To fill a day with a radio programme is to give the day meaning, give the parts relation to one another in the structure of the day and with reference to the days before and to come.

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-41 9780230_009035_03_cha02 42 Voices in Ruins

Though they appear as self-contained entities, the interrelation of programmes within the ‘flow’ of programmes is an important part of how they form meaning.32 In Germany, just as in Britain, such conceptualiz- ations of broadcasting were slowly acquired over time. To augment the general account given in the previous chapter of the radio’s embedding in various spaces in Germany, I will examine here more closely how radio programmes came to address the lives of listeners in Germany.

Covering the days before 1945: between mass event and domestic normality In looking at radio programming in Germany from its outset through to the end of the war, two basic trends may be observed: expansion of the programme to fill more of the day and its increasing uniformity between the various regions.33 Though radio programming that passively chattered in the background during every hour of the waking day was not an artefact from the early days of German radio, the idea of it, and demand for it, was.34 The desire for all-day programming went hand-in- hand with fear of its implications for listeners’ time use. Just as the radio was beginning to enter the lives of all classes in Germany, fundamental changes were taking place in patterns of time use, particularly of the working classes. The eight-hour workday did not appear in mines and industry until 1918, and it was not until 1932 that the 48-hour, six- day working week became standard, and in many places, the 42-hour week (with free Saturday afternoon) was also introduced.35 For the first time in recent memory, the working classes had free time in the sense we understand it now, as time empty of necessity and work, to be used as one pleases. This ‘free’, and therefore ambiguous, time was viewed with as much fear as it was with joy. Both from bourgeois and working- class circles, great efforts were made to ensure that this free time would be used in ways that would develop the individual and society rather than destroy it. The enemy of free time was idle time, time spent doing nothing.36 The radio offered the possibility of staying home without doing nothing. The spectre of idle time soon came to haunt Germany further in the guise of mass unemployment in the wake of the Great Depression, and the radio again attempted to address this audience and give their idle time meaning.37 Just as the radio was employed to address the new mobility of the working classes, its position within the home also had implications for women’s time use. After the First World War, women began to enter public life in unprecedented numbers, both in factories and other public workplaces and as newly enfranchized voters. For many, this role

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-42 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 43 of women in the new economic order was evidence of a loss of tradition, as especially the destruction of a bourgeois ideal of family which had not ever actually existed.38 Some conservative forces in the Weimar Republic saw in the radio the destruction of the family, fearing it would focus attention away from family interaction, while other, no less conservative, visions hoped it would bind all members of the household, but especially the women, more strongly into the safe realm of the home.39 By the time it became a truly mass medium in Germany in the closing days of the Weimar Republic and the early Nazi years, the radio had been embraced as not so much a threat to, but a supporter of, tradition. In the words of Carsten Lenk, ‘the radio presented itself as a medium of moderate, moderated modernity’40 and in spite of some of the radical changes it accompanied, seemed more to re-moor than remove routines and rituals.41 The deep embedding of the notion of radio as a time-structuring device becomes clear when one considers that while these uses and abuses of new time were being negotiated, receiving sets were only just beginning to develop into a form which would allow them to accompany daily life. Although radio broadcasting began in late 1923, radio broadcasting in the sense I have been describing, reaching an audience that was – supposedly – all of society and able to follow the routines of daily life, only began to come about in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As speakers replaced headphones in more and more homes in the late 1920s, the radio became an unobtrusive accompaniment to domestic life, blending in with domestic furnishings and infiltrating individual everyday activity with public and national events.42 Whereas initially the radio had followed the conventions of other public events, such as concerts and public lectures, it began to adopt its own more familiar and domestic forms of address. In short, the radio was not only beginning to become part of the habits and traditions of its listeners, it was developing habits and traditions of its own. In fact, beginning to address en masse the times of individual daily routines in individual dwellings formed an important way in which the radio helped establish distinct realms of privacy that had not previously existed.43 These processes were far from settled when the Nazis gained power in Germany.44 In exploring the embedding of radio in Weimar and Nazi society, Brian Currid has usefully pointed out that throughout much or all Weimar and Nazi eras – to which we can certainly add the period of occupation – there were at best partial answers to Brecht’s famous question about the medium that would speak to ‘everybody’: ‘Who was everybody?’45 The attempt to develop broadcasting that would speak to and as the voice of an entire ‘national

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-43 9780230_009035_03_cha02 44 Voices in Ruins community’ that somehow made its various divisions irrelevant often only served to highlight where the divisions were. Upon taking over the airwaves, the first approach taken by the Nazis to their audience was to interrupt their routines and inundate them with political information and propaganda. As they consolidated their hold on the radio, Nazi programmers interrupted published schedules regularly for political speeches or ceremonious proclamations. Speeches by Hitler and other party officials were inserted into many parts of the programme.46 In addition to frequent political talks and speeches, they also developed a series of radiophonic events and rituals, co-opting the Chris- tian calendar. At first, the bulk of these new traditions were ‘outside’ celebrations. The night of their ‘takeover’, 30 January 1933, was greeted with a ritual torchlight procession through Berlin which was carried via radio to most parts of Germany. By 1 May 1933, they were ready to stage their first major national holiday. Co-opted from the workers’ movement’s traditional May 1 holiday, in Nazi hands it became the ‘day of national work’. Inge Marßolek defines three characteristics of the May 1 celebration which typify not only this ceremony, but the bulk of the ‘outside’ celebrations which were broadcast: the celebration was constructed through the radio from a specific place on a specific day, carried simultaneously to all parts of the nation, and through the use of the live audience at the ceremonial spot, the relationship between the radio and the audience was made the same as between the ‘Führer’ and the ‘national community’.47 By placing reporters and microphones in the assembled crowd, radio listeners did not simply hear the event, they listened to untold numbers of other Germans listening, an experience which was repeated everywhere in Germany. Underlying these grand orchestrations – which are prerequisites of any media event48 –isthe general fact that nationwide broadcasting itself was still an event, and would remain so for many years. Within the first two years of their hold on the radio, the Nazis realized that these attempts to politicize the radio overtly through the creations of mass radiophonic events had failed to resonate with many listeners. Audiences showed themselves, by and large, to be disturbed by the frequent interruptions of the programme and were not interested in the large ceremonial events presented to them. In 1935, the Nazi radio stations adopted a new focus for the programme. Rather than try to bring listeners ‘out’ into a politicized public space, a number of new shows were presented that would address listeners in their private routines. As Monika Pater has observed, routines of broadcasting were explicitly tailored to the comings and going of the male worker within the nuclear

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-44 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 45 family, presenting pleasant music to give him strength to go out into the workspace, and to welcome him back to a cosy home.49

By conjuring-up the family as the guarantor of stability and normality, [the family] became the safe, private space set apart from daily demands. At the same time, this was connected to a duality of inside and outside, of public and private, that obscured the function of these private niches for the stabilization of the system.50

It is important to understand, however, that these two different spatio- temporal constructions of the nation through the radio, while in many ways mutually reinforcing, were also in many ways self-contradictory. As Currid notes in a scene from the 1940 film Wunschkonzert, ‘the national needs to produce itself both as disruptive event and timeless interi- ority’.51 This contradiction was symptomatic of nearly every aspect of national programming in Germany, particularly but certainly not only, in wartime. At the same time that the radio was attempting to normalize itself to the hours of its working public, the actual working hours of that public were changing in the effort to rearm. The regulation which limited the working day to eight hours in 1932 was amended by a decree on 26 July 1934 to allow employers to make numerous exceptions, and by 1938, working hours in many industries were between 58 and 65 hours per week.52 In other industries, on the other hand, unemployment continued and working hours remained low, meaning, on the whole, that the sort of nationally uniform rhythms of time in the radio came more and more to represent a bourgeois ideal of time structure that was far removed from the varied time-use patterns of radio audiences. The beginning of the war only increased the discrepancy. Once the war began in 1939, the pace of work in the factories only increased. In spite of Allied bombing in the later years of the war, much of German industry remained largely intact, and with it the working hours in industry, which, on average, stayed well above 48 hours per week.53 With war imminent, large political events were once more allowed to fill the airwaves. On 30 January 1939, ceremonial broadcasts anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power filled the airwaves of all broadcasters. This action seemed a rehearsal for the week the war began, when all stations in Germany abandoned their regular schedule to broadcast a uniform programme beginning already on 24 August, one full week before the war began. This abrupt change in the radio programme happened simultaneously with another major adjustment in everyday life, the start

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-45 9780230_009035_03_cha02 46 Voices in Ruins of food rationing. The radio guides for the following week did not print programmes, and listeners tuning in to the radio were treated to ‘marches, serious music and individual spoken broadcasts’ interspersed ‘with dispatches and reports that give expression to the tension which grows from hour to hour’.54 Readers were assured that printed schedules would resume the following week, and some regional broadcasting did in fact return shortly. Also, there were set times in the schedules of all programmes when nationwide news was broadcast: 7:00, 12:30, 14:00, 17:00, 20:00, 22:00, and 24:00. Besides keeping the outside events of the war ‘tamed’ into the given slots of the schedule, the propagandists maintained the vision of rapidly moving war by interrupting regularly scheduled programmes to bring ‘special reports’ from the front to the listeners. Listeners never knew when trumpet fanfares would fade in over the programme to bring news of a German victory in some part of the world. Goebbels ensured that these ‘interruptions’ would be carried through in all places at the same time by instituting a uniform programme for all stations in Germany on 9 June 1940. Station identifications between programmes now announced ‘Here is Greater German Radio. Here are all German stations.’ The perpetual disruptions in this new national programme were justified in that announcement of the unified programme:

The more joyful our victory bulletins, the more powerful the events in the West, the more breathtaking the rhythm of the army’s hammer- blows, the more difficult it is in all quiet and three weeks in advance to plan and execute a ‘programme’ in all of its details.55

Because the frequent interruptions made printed schedules pointless, programme guides were stopped altogether on 1 June 1941. This is not to say that there was no longer a regular programme, however. On the contrary, particularly as more and more radio personnel were pulled into the war effort, regular programming became both ideologically and practically important. Over the course of 1942, the excitement of the war and its ever- expanding front began to wane. The beginning of 1943 saw perhaps the biggest changes in radio broadcasting during the war. In weekly planning meetings, the highest broadcasting officials held earnest discussions about which ‘light’ entertainers should be barred from the airwaves that week for no longer supporting the war or for singing jazz, what music was most appropriate to which time of day and how to make the applause during programmes with a live audience not sound so ‘thin’.56 Those

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-46 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 47 tuning into the ceremonies celebrating the 30th of January heard the carefully orchestrated ceremony in Berlin interrupted as the Allies carried out their first daylight bombing raid, delaying the speeches of Göring and Goebbels.57 Wednesday, 3 February, then saw the ceremonial day of mourning for the 6th Army. From then on, the ‘special bulletins’ that had interrupted the regular schedule were largely stopped, with news of the war being confined to the regular hours of news, because the ‘interruptions’ were now coming from the outside. The war that came bursting through ‘windows’ of news in the radio schedule was far less convincing than the war that might come bursting through the roof. The more thoroughly the war disrupted trajectories of everyday life, the more the radio schedule tried to maintain a sense of ‘normal’ routine. Regularity and distraction were of the utmost importance, with broadcasters trying hard to find just the right ‘tone’ to help listeners ‘hold out’. In 1944, though it was clear that much of the audience was tuning out, Goebbels made a desperate bid to justify the radio programme as normal and not representing ‘a diminution in cultural quality’.58 To back up this claim, he spoke of a regular proportion of hours each week given over to the various genres:

A programming schedule has been worked out to which we want to stick and which produces roughly the following balance between different types of programme. Of the 190 broadcasting hours in a week, 32 are made up of regular political talks, 3 of cultural talks; there are 5 in which words and music are combined, 24 hours of highbrow music which listeners have sometimes called ‘difficult’, 15 of folk music, and 55 hours of light entertainment combining music and talking. There are only 56 hours left for the really light music which used to make up a large part of the programme and which is now restricted to a few hours in the morning and at night. 134 hours of broadcasting per week are, therefore, conceived with great love and care and are artistically prepared before they go on the air.59

This statement reveals as much about the methods of ‘spin’ in the Third Reich as it does about the radio programme. A single week has far fewer than 190 hours in it: in order to make the numbers look larger, Goebbels started by adding together the two programmes, which differed from each other only slightly. By separating out ‘light music’ from ‘light entertainment’, he glossed over the fact that over 58 per cent of the programme was decidedly light, and a mere 17 per cent of it was spoken

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-47 9780230_009035_03_cha02 48 Voices in Ruins communication at all. What is most noteworthy, however, is the extent to which the appearance of ‘high’ quality was as important a legitimating argument as was the actual supply of ‘light’ distraction. Besides credibility, German radio had lost much of its availability as an ‘accompanying medium’ for listeners. Although the actual radio transmissions from German stations did not begin to experience serious disturbances from bomb damage until February 1945, night-time silence of the Western stations, bombing raids and frequent power cuts in cities made listening at all hours of the day difficult.60 Furthermore, the competition with Allied broadcasters grew even stronger in the most popular listening times. In August of 1944, the BBC’s German Service began an expanded programme targeted specifically to peak listening hours: 6–8 A.M., 12–2 P.M. and 6 P.M. to midnight.61 As popular as the BBC broadcasts were, the ban on listening to foreign stations made it still too dangerous to have them playing along with everyday activity, but the new broadcast times did allow the secretive ‘inhaling English’ to become a far more widespread and regular part of the days of many Germans.62

After 1945: recovering the days With the exception that the bombs had stopped dropping on the cities, very few aspects of daily life changed for most Germans immediately after the war. For those who continued to work, the Allies kept in place many of the working regulations of the Nazi era, although in reality, the actual hours worked were far less than this, due to difficulties in transport, as well as problems with energy, water and food supply.63 The incentives for paid employment before the currency reform were slim, however. While wages paid in the old Reichsmark would pay for rent and rationed food, they offered minimal purchasing power in the barter economy or on the black market. In 1947, Radio Frankfurt actually hosted a public discussion that was transmitted throughout the US zone on the subject ‘Is it worthwhile to work these days?’64 The few scraps we have of the first days of broadcasting after the war show us programmes aimed far more at dispersing information than at entertaining listeners or accompanying them in their daily routines. Radio Frankfurt’s schedule for 17 June 1945 features news and information in seven languages punctuated by occasional 15-minute music segments.65 The programme was targeted as much at the thousands of foreign labourers who had been forced to work in Germany as it was the ‘native’ audience. The first broadcast from the Soviet zone on 13 May 1945, though covering slightly more than an hour, was very similar,

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-48 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 49 consisting of official statements interspersed with music.66 Neither programme was aimed at accompanying a listener through daily routines, but rather at establishing a new authority. Such programmes bear a passing resemblance to the national programme broadcast in Germany on the outbreak of war. The sort of listening they envision is more like that described during the final years of the war, with listeners keeping one ear on the otherwise meaningless radio noise for the scraps of information that will be vital. The message for listeners to these broadcasts was clear: as the occupiers address the foreign populations in foreign languages, there could be no doubt that Germany, as much more than a geographical notion, no longer exists. The already-existing tensions between the Soviets and the American and British occupiers created a new orientation point for programme production when the Soviet station began broadcasting. By 20 May, the Soviet broadcasters had produced a relatively full daily programme, addressed not so much to a fragmented multinational populace, but to the perceived needs of an imagined unified German audience. As they announced the evening of the first full day of broadcasting,

Berlin is broadcasting again in uninterrupted flow a full daily programme from 6 o’clock in the morning through 1 o’clock at night. A programme with morning music and morning gymnastics, with varied morning programmes, with the Midday concerts and music at tea-time, with cheerful and colourful evening broadcasts and lively dance music late into the night. And in well thought-out segments the broadcaster will bring current dispatches from all over the world, [and] the most important announcements from the administration to its circle of listeners who long for any true piece of news. In commentary, the listener is informed for the first time again in a way that allows him to understand the true world events, and in small segments of all sorts he is allowed to participate in the great construction work driven by a strong motor, namely: the will of the leadership of the Red Army! 67

Information from the ‘outside’ was not specified to a particular time of day, but rather tamed (by the occupation authority) into ‘well thought- out segments’ which would appear from time to time throughout the ‘normal’ activities of a day. Furthermore, the broadcasters’ claim to grant listeners access to the truth of outside events for the first time again placed the everyday experience of radio listening in a grander narrative of time

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-49 9780230_009035_03_cha02 50 Voices in Ruins lost and restored. Radio listening itself was portrayed as participation in the reconstruction of Germany. The stations in the US zone began full-day programming, with large pauses, shortly after they went back on the air. On 23 May 1945, the day after the Soviet broadcasters began full-day broadcasting, broadcasters at Radio Hamburg in the British zone moved the start of their programme from 4:30 in the afternoon back to 6:30 in the morning, although the overall number of minutes did not increase much. Increased at first from six to eight hours, then to nine, the programme featured large pauses in the late morning and afternoon.68 The number of clearly ‘foreign’ broadcasts was quickly recognized as a problem in communicating with the German audience in the American zone, though the lack of resources meant it could not immediately be remedied.69 The more the tensions between the zones grew, the Allied broadcasters felt the need to speak with a native voice. Orders came through from military commanders in the US zone in September 1946 that speeches in English should not be broadcast.70 Similarly in the British zone, this form of programming soon engendered great worries that the degree of ‘outside’ – that is, ‘non-German’ reporting – on the radio would cause listeners to mistrust the broadcasts of Radio Hamburg and switch off – or worse, switch over to the Soviet station. In response to these concerns, by August 1945, a series of regular programmes, offering advice for farmers, housewives, as well as literary broadcasts and announcements of the military government, not to mention scholarly talks, had been adopted to help fill the broadcast day.71 Though far from uniform, by September of 1945, American and British stations had developed regular programmes that were very similar to each other in structure, and the French zone soon followed suit.72 All still had considerable pauses in the late morning and afternoon, and started and finished around the same time. Starting and finishing times were to remain fairly consistent throughout the post-war period – programme expansion was achieved primarily by filling in the morning and afternoon pauses. Above all, these longer pauses did not usually consist of complete silence but were ‘filled’ by a short jingle repeated every few seconds that allowed listeners to identify the station and remained in memory as part of the listening experience for many.73 For the audience, the primary way to find one’s way through the schedules of the Allied stations was simply to tune in. Those desiring printed programme information had to rely on the brief, tiny and often inaccurate schedules printed in the few available newspapers. Dedicated radio programme guides did not appear anywhere in Germany until

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February 1946 with Radiowelt in Bavaria, Radiospiegel in Württemberg- Baden, and Der Rundfunk in the Soviet zone. Hör Zu, easily the best-known of the German broadcasting guides today, did not begin publication until December of 1946, while Funkwelt in the French zone and Radio Almanach in Hesse did not begin until March and May of 1947, respectively.74 While most were not published by the radio stations directly, each magazine was chiefly involved with the local station, printing its schedule most prominently, and more or less maintaining the strongest connection with that station. Hör Zu, for example, had exclusive rights to print the complete schedule of the NWDR.75 The main way listeners found their way through the programme offerings, however, was through chance and habit, a trend that continued well past the occupation era. Even at the start of the 1950s, less than 20 per cent of listeners received such a regular programme guide, and similar numbers consulted their daily newspaper to make their listening choices.76 For the most part, listeners simply tuned in to whichever station got the best reception, usually their ‘home station’, letting habit and their own preferences guide them.77 Especially before the publication of radio schedules, the radio programmers took measures within the broadcast day itself to ensure that listeners would be able to tune in more easily. The main way of doing this was simple repetition. Creating a regular schedule is not only the easiest way for programmers to fill time but it is also the easiest way for audiences to become familiar with the programme.78 Further, there were periodic programme previews during the day. In the early years, this was read at dictation speed, and interspersed with music so that it could also be written down. The opening announcements of shows also carried with them reminders, such as ‘You are hearing – as every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday – our show “Farmers’’ Hour with Folk Music’ so that listeners would be better able to internalize the rhythms of programming.79 Broadcasters at the American stations tended to follow American broadcast traditions and broadcast programmes in 15-minute blocks, a practice that, while well-suited to the U.S. practice of inserting advertisements between the segments, was foreign to many German ears.80 The French programmers also followed a similar practice from French broadcasting, deliberately dividing the programme into many small segments, in order to offer as wide a variety of programming for as differentiated an audience as possible.81 This variety was also intended to serve the interests of general ‘education’ of the German people by offering ‘higher’ alongside ‘lower’ fare. Vladimir Porche, the general director of Radiodiffussion Francaise from 1946–1957, stated,

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For a certain time an order of programmes will be useful that will allow us, for example, to offer a music programme of inarguably higher milieu after an entertainment broadcast. Hence the necessity of approaching the extremes of what can be achieved within certain broadcasts, by constantly – and unobtrusively, so as not to confuse the great masses – raising the tone and value residing in the programme.82

This deliberate juxtaposition of ‘high’ and ‘low’ programmes in order to surreptitiously raise the taste of the listeners soon became a practice entrenched at most of the stations.83 Similarly, an overall shortening of individual shows has been a long-term trend in German broadcasting since the war, as programme-makers have attempted to make the schedule seem livelier.84 While attempting to raise the taste of the listeners was very much in keeping with the overall goal of most of the programme- makers, particularly in the immediate post-war era, such moves towards shorter programmes were also a cause of great concern among German cultural conservatives, just as in the decades before the war.85 Such worries were one expression of an overall, and long-running, concern that listeners would not listen attentively to programmes, but simply use them as background. Peter von Zahn at the NWDR even suggested in one commentary that in future, shows should be separated by a five-minute pause to allow for reflection and to encourage attentive listening.86 The unease with overly predictable programming was not unique to the Western zones (nor, indeed to Germany in the mid-1940s). In spite of their initial attempts to meet the expectations of listeners from pre- war days, many of the most strongly anti-fascist programme-makers in the Soviet zone were also wary of such restorative patterns. In one noteworthy programme, they interrupted the middle of a concert of light dance music to remind listeners that war had been raging not long before, informing them before returning them to scheduled show that the fact that they could enjoy such music as courtesy of the Red Army.87 For many years, ‘surprise’ fade-ins of programmes were common practice as an attempt to make programmes sound more lively and fresh.88 Within a few years of broadcasting, radio programmers had come up with programmes which were familiar to listeners both in their parts and as a whole. These both supplied a sense of daily predictability and a sense of long-term progression in time. This knowledge can be viewed in a broadcast send-up of an average day’s broadcasting written by several of the leading lights of the NWDR as a farewell gesture to Rolf James, one of the departing British control officers in 1948. Its reflexive humour depended largely on an audience’s familiarity with the daily

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-52 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 53 programme. The satirical ‘preview’ from the broadcast thus illustrates this knowledge perhaps better than its everyday counterparts would, and is worth quoting in full:

[fadeout ‘Capri-Fischer’ sung by Rudi Schuricke] And here the programme preview. The radio will bring a very exorbitant programme. Following this preview, you will hear cheerful tunes. The Griffel Sisters will sing. As part of this programme we will remember R.E. James. The morning celebration from Cologne is cancelled, in its place, the Griffel Sisters will sing. At eight o’clock will be in-house news, then ‘The Little Tic’. The school programme must also be cancelled today. In its place will be a repetition of the night programme. Gregor von Rezzori will read his 387th short story, followed by Music before the meal. The Griffel Sisters will sing. In Music after the meal the Griffel Sisters will sing. Following ‘Stylistic howlers in broadcasting’ [die gesendeten Stilblüten], Music in the Afternoon. The Griffel Sisters will sing. After the evening news at 19.00 hours, you will hear commentary by Peter von Zahn who just happens to be in Hamburg. The refugee feature by Axel Eggebrecht has unfortunately been cancelled, but in its place you will another utopian broadcast by Axel Eggebrecht. In the large evening programme at 20:00 hours, ‘Top Performance’ with the Griffel Sisters. In place of our broadcast ‘Homecomer, where to?’ you will hear the broadcast, ‘Where to, homecomer?’ followed by the ‘Echo of the Day’. To conclude the day at 24.00 hours Peter von Zahn will speak. The finance report will come today for a change at 0.05 hours. After the dance music, around 3am, the Super Night Programme by Dr Zotz. In the series Contributions nobody wants to broadcast, you will hear contributions from well-known politicians. Today: ‘Federalism: yes or no.’ [cut to: ‘Was braucht der Mensch zum Glücklichsein’bythe Griffel Sisters].89

While there is no space here to detail the humour of each individual ‘announcement’, a few basic elements are most central to our argument here. The first is the joking reference to the frequent programme alter- ations, underlined here by the cancelled programmes being replaced essentially by more of the same. The second is a perception of the schedule as a series of ‘meaningful’ programmes punctuated by light music, the perpetual sameness of which is parodied through the recurrence of the Griffel Sisters in the mock programme. It is this ‘meaningless’ music, on the other hand, that references most strongly the listener’s activities during the day, namely the music before and after the midday meal. The

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-53 9780230_009035_03_cha02 54 Voices in Ruins emphasis on these two ‘samenesses’ also makes light (and routine) of the tension between the two parts of the programme and by association the tension between programmers and audience. While the unimaginative entertainment segments mock the imagined tastes of the audience, the boring educational segments poke fun at many of the newer elements of the programme, as well as some of the exceptional-yet-routine problems that they addressed, such as returning soldiers and debates over new state formations. Ultimately, the mutual recognition of station and audience implied by these references becomes collusion as the station allies itself with the listeners against politicians by jokingly banning them to the small hours of the morning, out of the sphere of daily routine. The routine of the programme not only allowed for such easy, reflexive references to a common present, it also helped to create narratives of a common past that had been interrupted by war, but not by National Socialism. The ‘return’ of programmes known from before the war was often treated unproblematically as the restoration of normal routine. Such a narrative was made explicit in the programme guide Hör Zu in discussing the NWDR Cologne’s new version of Der Frohe Samstagnachmittag (happy Saturday afternoon) modelled on a popular programme from the Reichssender Cologne before the war. This show had served as the ‘prototype’ radio variety show in Germany, and had been carried by every station in the country.90 Hör Zu waxed unabashedly nostalgic about its return:

When at the beginning of the war the series from Cologne had to be stopped, the disappointment and irritation of the listeners was heard in many unfriendly letters. [ ...] The weekend had lost its overture. The years went by, the times grew ever worse – indeed: one had other worries. Once the war was over, one day there was a North-West German radio and a Cologne studio. [ ...] Now it is finally time again: Der frohe Samstagnachmittag celebrates its happy resurrection after ten years.91

Such nostalgic portrayals of pre-war entertainment were typical for Hör Zu, but it is noteworthy how strongly this particular conception is built around the time structures of the radio programme.92 The entertainment programme, and indeed the radio programme itself, appeared as ‘natural’ parts of daily and weekly life, separated from the political calculations of those who had controlled radio broadcasting. Indeed, the article seems to imply that the Nazi controllers of the radio were only responsible for interrupting the show rather than creating it in the first place. Now

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-54 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 55 that life was once more back to normal, the article implies, the ‘normal’ daily and weekly recurrence of programming could also resume. To better understand the construction of these narratives, we need to look more closely at the way the radio was able produce such times of day as natural parts of daily life, and it is to this that I will now turn.

Hours across the years

Since the earliest years of broadcasting, the ‘peak’ listening times have been known to programmers, essentially as three ‘spikes’ of increasing size from morning to evening, in audience numbers. The first was between 7 and 8 A.M., when listeners were getting up in the morning, the second between 12 and 1 P.M. surrounding the midday meal, which until late in the twentieth century was the main meal of the day for which many working people returned home, and the third the evening ‘prime time’ between 7 and 10 P.M.93 Such peak times did not merely represent everyday listening habits, but rather were tuned to a larger series of routines, namely the coming and going from the private space of the home.94 I will offer a short account here of the development of morning and evening structures. By exploring the continuities and changes in these daily narratives over the years, I will show how the radio programmes maintained a vision of a normal boundary between public and private space. The general content of morning broadcasting has not varied a great deal, across the stations or across the years. Indeed, the basic staples of the time signal, news, weather and light music were staples of morning radio which are quite familiar to radio listeners today.95 The specific emphasis on the light quality of these programmes was greatly heightened in the Nazis drive to find a programme that would embed itself in listeners’ routines. They proclaimed, ‘we make his breakfast pleasant from 6:30 until 8, we ease the pain of separation for his wife’.96 The Reichssender Cologne was pioneering in this regard, with the popular personality of Rudi Rauher introducing the music in light, chatty tones. As one listener praised the show in 1934,

The oldest [child] goes to school so fresh and cheerfully; he says then: Mummy, the radio-man said it’s time for school, I have to go now. They like to hear it when Mr Rauher makes all kinds of jokes. The radio already brings cheer into our house in the morning this way ...97

By 1936, the morning routine of all of the stations had been more or less standardized. The start of the day had been pushed back to 6 A.M. with

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-55 9780230_009035_03_cha02 56 Voices in Ruins a ‘morning greeting’ for the listener, followed by a chorale and ‘morning saying’ and gymnastics at 6:10. At 6:30, there followed a concert from one of the broadcast stations, relayed by all others. There was a pause in the concert at seven for the first news of the day. The overall tenor of morning programming, as it is on radio almost everywhere to this day, was cheerful. Year 1935 also saw the start of the morning programme ‘Good Morning, Dear Listener!’ (Guten Morgen, Liebe Hörer!)at the Deutschlandsender. The response to this new programme was apparently immense and accordingly, there was little or no change in this pattern throughout the Nazi era, even through the end of the war.98 One of the most interesting aspects of the morning programme was the presence of a regular session of gymnastics. The practice was begun in Germany by radio pioneer Alfred Braun from Berlin in 1925, and the idea slowly caught on all over Germany.99 Though not directly a product of Nazi ideology, the vision of a nation getting up in unison for morning exercise certainly fitted comfortably within its parameters. Dis- ciplining time use with physical exercise was one of the facets of many National Socialist organizations, and such rigid time order was to remain in the memories of many Germans as a positive aspect of life in the early 1930s.100 By 1936, every station in Germany was broadcasting a brief gymnastics programme. At the close of the morning hour, the airwaves were officially turned over to housewives, and a second programme of morning gymnastics specifically for housewives began. This was also the only real aspect of the morning programme that was seriously disrupted by the war. In an uncharacteristically unpopular move, morning gymnastics were removed from the programme of all German broadcasters by 1942, though the desire for them was clearly still present, both during and after the war.101 The radio programmes of the post-war era picked up almost immediately where those of the Nazi era left off. In the earliest schedules of the NWDR, for example, the day began with cheerful tunes (‘morning melodies’) and news in its familiar 7 A.M. slot. The music belonged almost exclusively to the ‘light’ genre. NWDR morning gymnastics then followed at 7:15. They changed time slot again in the summer of 1947, moving back to their pre-war position of 6:05. The presence of gymnastics programmes at a time when food was rationed and dwelling places were often very cold is truly remarkable, especially as their presence can only properly be explained by their popularity. Just as the radio programmers of the Nazi era received many requests for gymnastics when they had been removed, so the programmers of the post-war era had received numerous requests to re-institute them.102 Articles in the

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-56 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 57 programme guides acknowledged that present conditions made doing gymnastics difficult in the mornings, but stressed the fact that they would help to keep weakened bodies limber and elastic.103 Certainly not all listeners appreciated them, as one listener wrote in 1946,

In this time when everyone is cold, everyone is hungry, everyone is sick and does not know if he will be able to keep himself above water, ‘they’ invite us to do gymnastics. Who has energy left for athletics? Who’s got time, desire? Who is capable of developing extra with these calories? Only black marketeers, thieves or favourites I think – but not working people.104

One can only speculate about the reasons for the ongoing popularity for such programmes, but a large part of their appeal must have been their maintaining of a sense of group routine in private space. The format of the programmes, which did not vary at all between stations, added to the sense of group activity. While the leader of the gymnastics session called out the movements to live accompaniment on a piano, a group of women in the studio went through the routines described (see Figure 2.1). These women were, of course, totally invisible to the listening audience, but their presence was made known to the listeners at the start of the programmes, as well as in the advertisements for them in

Figure 2.1 NWDR morning gymnastics with Hildegund Bobsien. Source: NDR

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-57 9780230_009035_03_cha02 58 Voices in Ruins the available programme guides. Furthermore, by (theoretically) maintaining healthy bodies in spite of the poor conditions, such programmes helped listeners to maintain a sense of normality. One of the most noteworthy things about the morning programmes of the stations of the post-war era is their apparent change of gender, both in the speakers and in the audience addressed. One of the first places this is apparent is in the morning gymnastics programme. Before the war, there had been a separate programme for housewives later in the morning, supposedly after their husbands had gone to work, while in the post-war schedules there is only gymnastics programme, often in the middle of the peak hours of the morning. That these programmes were aimed primarily at their female audience can also be seen not only in the gender of the ‘studio gymnasts’ but also in the fact that the leaders of them, in contrast to their Nazi-era counterparts, were all female. This was in fact a more overtly gendered address to an audience that had been understood for a long time as female.105 In addition to the gymnastics programmes, the announcers of many of the morning programmes were women as well. Programmes for women were also more common in the early morning. At Radio Munich, for example, the ‘Good Morning, Dear Listener’ of the Nazi era became ‘Good Morning, Dear Housewife’ (Guten Morgen, Liebe Hausfrau!), the popular programme for women. As I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter 4, these changes in part reflect more general changes in the gendered structures of broadcasting. Morning programmes were geared more than any other time of day towards presenting listeners with a sense of regularity and continuity. This can be seen above all in the address to their listeners that they adopted, as this scripted exchange from the SWF’s ‘Melodien am Morgen’ makes clear:

1st Speaker: Right, and now I finally want to tell the listeners the exact time – my wife is waiting for it – our alarm clock is busted .... 2nd Speaker: Now listen here, those are private matters ...you can’t just use the station as your home telephone .... 1st Speaker: Oh, come on ...Darling ...listen ...it is now exactly 7 ... (exact time). 2nd Speaker:(shaking head:) He’s totally lost it ....106

Present-day readers familiar with morning radio in Britain or America will find little that is unfamiliar in this exchange. In this short piece of dialogue between songs, the private space of the home is multiply

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-58 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 59 synchronized with the public world of the radio broadcast. Besides syn- chronizing listeners with the clock, by directly addressing a single specific listener who is trying to wake up, the announcer imagines an audience of listeners who are at home. Furthermore, by ‘phoning home’ the announcer reinforced the image of himself as ‘one of us’ to the listeners, with a ‘normal’ marriage and home – however less ‘normal’ such things were at the time. For an audience that had grown sensitive to propaganda, however, there was also a fine balance to be struck between addressing the time habits of listeners and attempting overtly to shape them. Listen- ers at Radio Frankfurt complained that comments between songs in the morning concert such as ‘in the meantime, it’s already x o’clock, high time to be getting up’ were too patronizing.107 This look at the morning radio programmes in Germany of the immediate post-war period has demonstrated, among other things, that the nature of morning broadcasting has become one of the great universals of the Western world. The combination of cheerful talk, short pieces of news and light music is a formula that has not changed greatly across continents or years. Because it is meant to accompany listeners out into social space, perhaps more than any other time, morning broadcasting attempts to create the sense of bringing listeners together – a sense that well-served the creation of ‘mass culture’ in the Nazi period. Simultan- eous concerts broadcast everywhere in Germany, as well as morning gymnastics – which afforded listeners the sense of literally moving in unison – may have done much to cement this feeling. In the post-war radio schedules, this light-hearted and above all regular address offered listeners a predictable and personable vision of a normal nation going about its daily routine. In contrast to the morning, the evening period, roughly between 18:00 and 22:00, has long been known to broadcasters as the time when most of their listeners would be tuning in. Programming for these hours has, accordingly, seen the most controversy as well as the most variation over the years.108 Still, by 1936, evening programmes had developed a uniformity and regularity that was unprecedented in Germany. 18:00 saw the broadcast of a concert from one station, which was carried by all the rest, which would last between 90 and 105 minutes. This was followed by a short information broadcast, of 15–30 minutes, also frequently shared between some or all of the stations, followed by news at 20:00. The end of the news broadcast marked the move into ‘entertainment’ for the evening. This was the vision of a ‘normal’ evening which continued through to the outbreak of war. The initial months of war saw the formula of evening broadcasting broken up once more. At times which varied from

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-59 9780230_009035_03_cha02 60 Voices in Ruins station to station, all of the stations would switch their programme over to the Deutschlandsender. For all of the stations in what is now Germany, this switch took place during prime listening hours, between 18:00 and 20:00. The evening block began with a concert of light orchestral or brass music from the Deutschlandsender called Nach des Tages Arbeit (‘After the Day’s Work’), to bind listeners back into the home. This was interrupted every 30 minutes by reports from the front, political commentary and similar pieces, easing listeners into and out of the sphere of the war. In general, spoken broadcasts once more moved into the early evening hours, bringing listeners ‘artistic’ renderings of the events of the war, as well as programmes extolling the greatness of German culture. As in the years leading up to the war, the 20:00 news marked the transition into the entertainment portion of the evening. One of the major changes in this was that the war became part of the ‘entertainment’. One of the most significant new additions to the wartime radio programme, primarily in the evening hours, was news in foreign languages as part of a propaganda service for the nations nearby. Besides acting as news and propaganda for listeners in other countries, these segments also gave listeners an impression of a Germany turned outwards on the world, expanding via the airwaves to the areas they were expanding with armies. As the course of the war turned, the radio programme simplified considerably. Local variations in programming had disappeared, and the programme from day to day had few, if any variations. ‘Peak hours’ were divided roughly into three segments: an hour of music starting at 18:00, a programme called Eine Stunde Zeitgeschehen (‘An Hour of Current Events’) from 19:00 and 20:00, followed by the 20:00 news. On 21 May 1941, the information/entertainment dividing line of the 20:00 news which already governed practice by 1936 was set in stone by decree from Goebbels.109 Except for news segments at 22:00 and 24:00, the rest of the evening was devoted to music, with the final concert being ‘Musik für die Wehrmacht’, an echo of the popular Wunschkonzert. Perhaps the most notable change in evening broadcast patterns – or indeed broadcast patterns in general – following the war was the resur- gence of information broadcasts in the early evening hours which took place in all of the occupation zones from their first days of broadcasting.110 Clearly, these programmes were designed to reach the largest number of listeners, feeding what the occupation powers judged, by most accounts rightly, to be a starvation for information and education. It stands to reason that in the first months after the war, the start of the evening, the traditional time for news, was by far the most important period of the broadcast schedule. The early evening brought the local

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-60 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 61 news and announcements of the military government. At the American stations, and at the NWDR, this was one of the only ‘locally produced’ segments of the show. In Stuttgart, for example, the first segment of the early evening was reserved for announcements of the military government. In many places in Germany, the curfews imposed by the military government also created a literally captive audience for the evening radio programme, at least where there were radios and electricity to power them.111 That the radio should serve as incentive and compensation for compliance can clearly be seen in the military government announcements from Stuttgart on 14 July 1945, where immediately following the announcement reminding listeners that the curfew of 9:30 P.M. remained in force until further notice, it was announced that the Beethoven concert held earlier that evening in Stuttgart would be carried in the programme starting at 10 P.M.112 Very little has remained of these first broadcasts of any of the stations, but the few manuscripts that have survived from the ‘Military Government Hour’ at Radio Stuttgart offer some insight into what these first programmes were like. Even though the information was local, the tone set by the style of programme and announcements was very much the voice of the occupying power. Even the announcements of local cultural events had a military edge to them, as in the announcement of a series of concerts from July 1945: ‘In keeping with the orders of the American regional commander of the military government, cultural activities are allowed to continue. In what follows, we announce the musical events planned for the Württemberg state theatre.’113 Critique of these broadcasts from both the German programme advisors and the audience was not slow in coming.114 The show soon changed its name to Echo des Tages (‘Echo of the Day’) and expanded its focus from military pronouncements to include more local news and cultural events. This shift of title also marked a pronounced shift in the deixis in the programme’s address. No longer pronouncements of the ‘foreign’ military government, it was an echo of ‘our’ day, which was then defined by the news stories, as well as by the station itself as the day of the closer space of the region. The show also carried a further ‘echo’, namely of its pre-war predecessor that had initially been pioneered in Berlin, and which was also the name adopted by a similar programme of the NWDR.115 In the first months of broadcasting in the British zone, the evening was marked primarily by its ending the afternoon pause in the schedule. In September, 1945, the airwaves in the British zone came back to life at 17:30, broadcasting a segment of children’s programming until 18:00.

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This was followed by the news, read at dictation speed, as a way of producing a sort of ersatz newspaper for those who were not able to hear the news.116 As Heinz Schwade, who put this broadcast together, explained, ‘We had to read very slowly, so the housewives at home could write it down on paper. It was said, for example that curfew is at nine, tomorrow there is only electricity from ten until eleven instead of ten to twelve, the next coal train comes at, etc.’117 The programme in the British zone from late 1945 showed a stronger tendency towards ‘cultural’ broadcasts, with readings from literature, classical music alongside local news and informative broadcasts. News, and then a further current events programme came at 20:00, after which entertainment was the order of the evening. One of the informative broadcasts that found a somewhat firm place in the early peak hours of the NWDR was English lessons from London. This marked the first foreign language instruction during peak listening hours since the Weimar Republic. Another show that appeared frequently in the later parts of the early evening segment which appeared frequently was Wir denken an Euch (‘We’re Thinking of You’), a programme for German prisoners of war, but literary readings were also common to the slot. Follow- ing the main entertainment show of the evening, news, weather and the report from the Nuremberg trial rounded out the peak hours at 21:45. In January 1947, the evening took on the form it would keep roughly throughout the occupation period. This move was most likely to have been motivated by the budding Cold War. In August of 1948, Hugh Carleton Greene ordered that the news broadcasts be moved back from the full hour to 15 minutes before, so that listeners could ‘compare with the Berlin News’ from the Soviet zone.118 The switch also meant that 20:00 became firmly entrenched as the main entertainment broadcast of the evening. In the journal Hör Zu, which came into existence as the programme guide for the British zone around this time, the 20:00 broadcast of the NWDR was always printed in bold, cutting across both the columns of listings (see Figure 2.2). The 20:00 broadcast almost always lasted until 21:45, when the next segment of news was broadcast. Unlike the other parts of the schedule, the 8 o’clock programme was the least serialized section of the broadcast day. On the whole, the evening hours show both a clearer break with broadcasting practice before the war than other parts of the schedule, and also highlight some of the different approaches adopted by the different occupation powers to ‘re-education’ of their audiences. British broadcasters moved in almost the opposite direction, beginning with shorter

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Figure 2.2 20:00 as the highlight of the day: NWDR schedule, Hör Zu,29 January 1947 segments and more day-to-day information, moving into a schedule that, especially in the later hours, moved in large blocks of entertainment. American broadcasters sought to present listeners with a broad range of shorter segments in varying orders. In the French and American zones, more than the other two, occupiers sought to construct a direct cultural communication, both in segments such as ‘France Speaks to the German People’ and ‘The Voice of America’ as well as the presence of their own native language and cultural products. Indeed, pointing to the language lessons and other ‘foreign’ broadcasts in the schedule of all the zones, one reviewer in Radiowelt concluded, ‘Whoever “brings in’’ German radio stations, either out of hobby interest or because his home station does not always agree with him, will easily notice that they are oriented to their occupation zone and occupation power.’119 In spite of these stylistic

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-63 9780230_009035_03_cha02 64 Voices in Ruins differences, however, there were a number of scheduling and programming practices that also spoke to longer-standing domestic broadcasting. The most constant feature was the pivotal point of 20:00, which from the early Nazi period signalled the end of information and the beginning of entertainment. The extended news and information from the occupied stations in the early evening opened the ‘window’ onto the ‘outside’ world much wider than the tight controls of the Nazis had allowed. But even after 1945, this ‘window’ could be relied upon to close at 20:00, and listeners would be transported back into the realm of the home for the bulk of the evening.

‘Light’ music – rhythm of the age?

Though not in the proportions of the Nazi era, light music was one of the largest parts of the radio schedule, and one of the most popular with the audience. For the heads of the station on the other hand, it was often regarded essentially as schedule-filler. When describing their winter programme in 1946, for example, the NWDR did not mention it at all.120 Heinz Schwitzke, head of the NWDR’s drama department in the 1950s, lamented that even ‘before the invention of the radio, irrelevant music had long since been invented’121 and this had determined the inevitable development of the radio programme. For programmers such music was the ‘nothing’ that one talked about when saying there was ‘nothing’ on.122 For the listeners, on the other hand, such music was of the utmost importance. All of the stations in Germany were flooded with requests for more ‘light music’, particularly in response to their multiple attempts to raise the taste of their audience with more ‘serious’ material. In the polls conducted by the stations, music, and in particular light music was also by far the best-preferred sort of programming.123 Very vocal letters received by the stations let programmers know when they did not play enough, or ‘proper’ music. Far from being mere ‘time-filler’ for the audience, listening to light music was an active performance of identification on the part of many listeners. It should be noted, for example, that dance music was frequently danced to in private households in the evenings, a practice that carried on unchecked from the 1930s through the 1950s.124 Dancing in private took on even greater importance when the Nazis banned dancing in public in 1941. There were many ways around the restriction but it was still felt by many women to cut into one of the best and most inexpensive forms of leisure.125 While public dancing was banned, the increasing amounts of light music and dance music in the radio schedules marked out the home even more strongly as the safe

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-64 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 65 realm of recreation. This special emphasis on light music as a symbol of stability made the desire for ‘normal’ ‘proper’ ‘German’ music a high priority for radio audiences. While they placed heavy emphasis on light music as a sign of stability, the visions of music they created in the radio were anything but stable. One good illustration of this is what was probably the most effective use of music on the radio in the Nazi era: the Sunday afternoon Wunsch- konzert für die Wehrmacht (‘Request Show for the Armed Forces’). Begun initially as a show to benefit the Winter Relief Fund, the show came into its own after the outbreak of war. For the price of a small donation to the war effort, listeners could write in to request a song for a loved one or to commemorate a special occasion. Because the show reached the front line as well as the domestic lands in Germany, it was constructed as means of linking the soldiers with their loved ones at home. The show was envisioned as a national family in the airwaves, with births and engagements and other personal moments were announced. Individual experience (well-vetted so as not to deviate from Nazi ideals) became part of a nationally consumable biography in an atmosphere of domesticity. While it did not ignore the war, it tried to make it seem a passing phase in the ongoing biography of the national family. David Bathrick points out, ‘To be sure, there was still the military march music, yet it was situated now as but one dimension of an expanded horizon in which public and private were conjoined in domestic harmony.’126 The music of the Wunschkonzert, while most often ‘light’ in character, was a mixture of numerous genres. It opened with Hitler’s favourite march, the Baden- weiler, and over the course of the programme took in opera and operetta, popular film tunes, lullabies and folk tunes. The great variety of music from different genres and eras was meant to underline the impression of all of society coming together in a greater whole, while at the same time implicitly creating a sort of national canon of music. The genre or time period of the music was not as important as its ‘Germanness’. As Currid argues convincingly, as often as not, the attempt to create this illusory sphere of national harmony revealed more cracks than it concealed.127 The heavy emphasis on Germanness in music also required an ‘other’, against which it could be defined, and it found that other in jazz music. A highly racialized campaign against jazz had been launched by the Nazis, and specifically by Josef Goebbels. In spite of this now well-known prohibition, however, the actual musical palette available to Germans was far more heterogeneous in style than most accounts allow for. Nazis set out to create their own version of jazz, though calling it ‘modern rhythmic dance music’.128 Particularly, the musicological work of

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Brian Currid has gone far in showing the many ways in which jazz and swing rhythms, complete with their exoticized racial associations, were accepted and promoted under National Socialism.129 Popular music was also an area where the radio overlapped very strongly with the film industry. Especially as both media were under the control of the RMVP, this allowed for multimedia marketing of the highest order. The Wunschkonzert, for example, formed the main narrative device for the 1940 film of the same name. Furthermore, popular films supplied many, if not most, of the popular tunes of the day. One of the most popular genres of the Nazi film industry was the revue film. Based clearly on the Hollywood musical, revue films produced many of the popular Schlager, or chart hits, on the radio. These films were also a venue where popular composers such as Franz Grothe, Peter Kreuder and Michael Jary were able to work ideologically suspect elements, and even suspect instruments like the saxophone into the music. By cloaking these influences with Germanized arrangements, these composers were able to push the boundaries.130 In the very first months of occupation, most of the music at the German radio stations was considered suspect by the occupying forces. The entire record collection at the station in Munich was confiscated, for example, until the music could be vetted for ‘inappropriate’ material. March and military music was targeted, and certain ‘serious’ composers, namely Wagner, were barred from the airwaves. Just how sensitive the controllers could be to musical offerings is illustrated by an incident at Radio Munich in August 1946. The song Wer will unter die Soldaten der muss haben ein Gewehr (He who wants to be a soldier must have a gun) was played in one of the morning shows as part of musical medley, without words and for about eight seconds. Although it was pointed out that ‘other texts of non-military nature (Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten) exist for the same tune’, it was decided that the medley should not be played again.131 A very similar incident occurred in the early days of the SWF.132 In spite of this level of scrutiny, for the Allied control officers, the ‘lighter’ segments of the programmes, as well as the personnel who created them, were generally not considered part of the re-education effort. Whatever function light music might have served in the radio schedules of the Nazi era, the music itself was not seen as politically representative of Nazi authority. Just as only 141 of over 700 German films were considered ‘politically objectionable’ by the Allied Control Commission, most of the songs and stars featured in them were considered acceptable as well.133 Some popular singers and composers were considered to be

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-66 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 67 severely compromised by their activities in the Third Reich, though their treatment varied from zone to zone. For example, Franz Grothe, who, besides writing the music and popular songs for many of the Nazi era’s most popular films, had been in charge of light music for the national radio programme during the war, was barred from appearing on Radio Munich and considered ‘undesirable’ at the SWF.134 At the NWDR, on the other hand, songs by Grothe appeared periodically in the light concerts in early 1946, and almost daily by June of 1947, and he remained much in demand at the station for many years.135 Most others, such as the singer and bandleader Rudi Schuricke and the popular composers and performers Michael Jary, Gerhard Winkler, Peter Igelhoff and Werner Bochmann had no problems at all beginning afresh in the post-war era. Jary, leader of the light radio orchestra in Berlin at the end of the war, was essentially kept on in this post, with the same orchestra, after the Soviets took control of the station.136 Bochmann wrote many of the popular show jingles for Radio Munich, and Igelhoff was granted his own show there in 1947. Many popular singers who fell out of favour with the Nazis during the course of the war were also welcomed back whole-heartedly. The singer Lale Andersen (1905–1972), whose 1939 rendition of ‘Lilli Marleen’ became one of the iconic songs of the war, and who could still be heard entertaining German troops in 1941, was barred from performing in 1942, and Goebbels, who did not like the song, tried to have it played as little as possible. In this effort he had little success – it had become a favourite song of the soldiers on all sides of the war, with English versions sung by Marlene Dietrich and Vera Lynn as heavily desired in the Allied radio broadcasts as Andersen’s version was in the German airwaves.137 Rosita Serrano, ‘the Chilean nightingale’ (1914–1997), a Chilean singer and film star who was the darling of Berlin in 1938, and Evelyn Künnecke (1921–2001), whose father Eduard Künnecke was one of the most celebrated operetta composers before and during the Third Reich, had both been barred from the airwaves in 1942 for singing what passed for jazz.138 All of these names appeared in radio schedules and in live radio concerts almost immediately following the war. Popular Schlager from film and record were only one element of ‘light music’ in the post-war programmes. Operetta was perhaps the most common form of light music in the schedules. In retrospect, Kurt Wilhelm spoke of there being ‘almost too many’ operettas as part of the post- war programmes.139 A survey conducted by the NWDR in 1949 showed operetta to be by far the most popular genre of light music.140 In addition to older works by Offenbach (who, as a Jewish composer, had been

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-67 9780230_009035_03_cha02 68 Voices in Ruins banned from the airwaves throughout much of the Nazi era) and Strauss, operettas by Lehar, Künnecke, Lincke and Dostal, staples of the Nazi programme, were also prominently featured in post-war programmes. Operetta tunes filled many of the ‘light’ morning and afternoon concerts, and, as whole or parts, formed a regular part of the evening concert rotation. At the NWDR, the prime time Saturday evening programme was always devoted to operetta. Though it is difficult to substantiate from the available material on programming choices, operetta appears to be something of a compromise: with its operatic singing style, it was at once suitably artistic to please those who worried about the taste of their listeners, while both ‘light’ enough and German enough to please those who were looking for entertainment. Operetta falls into the category of ‘higher’ light music, and was often grouped in concerts with opera melodies as well. Operettas, while on the ‘high’ side of the entertainment scale, also evoked a trouble-free past. As Tim Bergfelder has argued about the operetta film, most operetta is ‘essentially nostalgic in its outlook, constantly invoking an invariably joyous nineteenth century Vienna under the benevolent rule of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor’.141 In announcements during the popular ‘Operetta cocktail’ at Radio Stuttgart, the veteran announcer Paul Land made this escapist and nostalgic aspect of the operetta explicit:

Especially today, when life presents us such bitter riddles, one wants to live in operetta-land – there where the scantily-clad muse calls to us, ‘Enjoy! Enjoy without limit! As long as your skin is still smooth and white, as long as you can still choose, as long as you can still desire and are desired! – Whoever hates crazy, effervescent folly is a fool! Therefore call out with this beauty from the [Dostal operetta] ‘Flight into happiness,’ ‘I’m just looking for a little adventure!’142

The show quoted here presented songs from two operettas by Nico Dostal (1895–1981), ‘Monika’, first performed in 1937, and ‘Die Flucht ins Glück’ (Flight into Happiness), from 1940. The function of the operettas that Land points to overtly is precisely the function they had been meant to serve during the time they were written, namely as an anti-modern foil to the present. Ironically, however, they seemed better able to fulfil this purpose within the context of the occupation than they had under National Socialism due to anxieties over authenticity of völkisch productions. Currid notes that during the Nazi era, ‘not only was the spectre of Berliners in Bavarian drag a problem in the musical production of

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Heimat, the musical tradition of folk-like music in the popular vein was also seen as suspect of what was seen in Nazi period as Jewish kitsch’.143 Land’s announcement above in fact emphasized precisely these excessive elements of operetta: a sort of Heimat drag that audiences in destroyed urban spaces could don vicariously for the space of a short ‘cocktail’. Far from embracing these elements of excess as traditions that had resisted Nazi attempts at creating a national acoustic, however, the pleasure of operetta appeared here as a sort of doubled nostalgia: a longing for a pre- war ‘normality’ that had never existed in which longing for a pre-modern past that had never existed was unproblematic. Much of the music that was popular in Germany looked towards the past, either in its continuity with the recent past or its nostalgic invocation of an idealized past, or both. Asked in a recent interview to define Unterhaltungsmusik in retrospect, the popular Radio Munich announcer Ernst Höchstötter stressed, ‘That is German music’, in contrast to swing or other American genres. He then pulled some titles out of his collection to show the interviewer. Though Höchstötter associates himself primarily with the post-war era, all of the songs he named for the interviewer were from before 1945, and all but two were written during the Nazi era. I have added composers and dates to his list to illustrate the point:

‘Blauer Himmel’ [Josef Rixner 1936], that’s a tango. ‘Die Feuerzangen- bowle’ here, the overture [Werner Bochmann 1944], ‘Schön war die Zeit’ [Peter Kreuder, 1937] or here, ‘Ein Student Geht Vorbei’ [Julio C. Ibanez, ca. 1929] ‘das Neapolitanische Ständchen’ [Gerhard Winkler 1936] ‘Variationen über ein Wiegenlied’ [Ernst von Dohnányi 1913] ‘Wenn ein Junger Mann kommt’ [Franz Grothe 1940]; melodies from Hans Carste, was also well-known German composer of Unterhaltungsmusik. ‘Ich weiß es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehn,’ Zarah Leander [Michael Jary 1942].144

The apparently seamless transition of many Nazi-era musicians, composers and singers into the post-war radio schedules did not pass without notice or comment. Particularly those who had been actively opposed to the regime often felt unease at their continued popularity. Fritz Benscher at Radio Munich criticized listeners on air for requesting music by some many well-known entertainers from the Nazi era – with the result that the director of popular music, Jimmy Jungermann, quickly replaced him as the moderator of request programmes.145 Similarly, the director of (serious) music at the SWF, Dr Heinrich Strobel, had expressed great dismay at the ‘backward’-pointing nature of much of the popular music that

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-69 9780230_009035_03_cha02 70 Voices in Ruins reminded listeners of the Third Reich.146 Strobel’s objections seem not to have carried over into programming practice, however. An advertisement for the SWF morning show Sing Schon am Morgen from the start of 1948 speaks of ‘many popular Schlager-melodies with many well-known artists’, among which it names Rosita Serrano, Ilse Werner, Lucienne Boyer, Evelyn Knight, the Andrews Sisters, Nelson Eddy, Willi Forst, Willy Fritsch, Peter Igelhoff, Peter Kreuder and Rudi Schuricke.147 Sand- wiched in between singers who were well known from popular cinema and radio in the late 1930s and early 1940s are a small number of ‘foreign’ names, none of whom, with the possible exception of the Andrews Sisters, sang anything that stood outside the expectations of ‘light’ music that had developed in the Schlager-audience over the course of time. The heavy rotation of popular songs – also a frequent complaint from the Nazi era – continued in the post-war era.148 The joking repetition of ‘Capri-Fischer’ and the Griffel Sisters in the NWDR programme satire above make reference to this. This was not only true of hits that were already well known before the end of the war. The re-forged relations between popular composers and radio stations, particularly through their various in-house ensembles meant that Schlager production and distribution got underway quickly after the war, particularly compared to most other everyday commodities.149 New hits were introduced regularly, often announced with enthusiasm in programme guides or at live events, like variety programmes such as the SWF’s one-year anniversary discussed in the next chapter. Whilst these frequent new productions were announced in terms of progress forward, they also looked back. Many of the ‘new’ Schlager-hits written in the late 1940s and early 1950s often drew on themes and melodies, either from older Schlager or from Nazi songs.150 One of these, Theo Mackeben’s ‘Und über uns der Himmel’ (‘And the Heavens Above Us’ from the 1947 film of the same name by Josef von Baky) even drew on the tune for ‘Ich hab mich ergeben’ – which the NWDR played at the end of all of its broadcasts, and was one of the suggestions for the new national anthem of the German state.151 The quick reappearance of German Schlager (and the debates surrounding them) was also accompanied by ‘foreign’ elements. Within the very first schedules in the Western zones, jazz, particularly by American bands, featured prominently in the programme. Because there is so little documentation of the musical part of the programme from the earliest period, it is difficult to say how much jazz was played, though evidence shows that one midday slot in the schedules of Radio Frankfurt remained the exclusive domain of band leaders such as Henry King, Dave Rose and

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Glenn Miller through the beginning of 1946. Perhaps more importantly, it is clear that for a large part of the audience it was played far too often, as those at the stations soon came to discover.152 It should be pointed out that the rejection of jazz was not total, but that opinions were quite polarized. The 1946 listener survey conducted by Radiowelt showed 49 per cent of the younger audience (ages 16–20) claimed to like jazz especially, while 30 per cent in the same age group ‘always turned off’. Among older listeners, however, over half of the 30–50 age group and 73 per cent of the over-50 age group ‘always turned off’.153 Similarly, many Germans polled in the British zone as to whether they thought music during the Third Reich was inferior to music written before or since, responded that music written during the Third Reich was not inferior – and cited jazz as a case in point.154 The row over jazz in post-war Germany has largely been presented in history as a hold-over from Nazi propaganda which had condemned it as ‘degenerate’ and ‘racially inferior’ music. There is no denying that such notions underlay a good deal of jazz’s rejection. As one Radio Munich listener wrote in 1946,

It is simply beyond comprehension why the European sound instruments – drum, trumpet, cymbal – we have had until now are no longer enough and one must all of a sudden find the variety of rhythmic sounds on a bunch of primitive Negro instruments so beautiful. The South American Negro origins cannot be denied; in its rhythm it is even a problem for white Americans, who, it has been shown, always fill the post of drummer with a Negro or descendent of Negroes.155

‘Goebbels sent greetings!’ comments Heide Riedel laconically after citing the racialized language of listener protests against jazz after the war.156 In fact, most scholarship on light music after the war has come to such summary conclusions.157 While we must acknowledge the strong influence of Nazi racial propaganda in the rejection of jazz among listeners, it is also important to understand that this represents an extreme, if undoubtedly widespread, form of a broader discourse on the ‘national’ qualities of popular music. As Currid has shown, even during the Nazi era, discourse on the ‘national’ nature of popular music varied widely, and was not all tied up in racial propaganda.158 A British survey allowed that some of the German reactions to ‘modern music’, were roughly the same as would be expressed in Britain.159 Numerous complaints about jazz stressed not its ‘inferior’ racial origins, but rather its general foreignness and percussive

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-71 9780230_009035_03_cha02 72 Voices in Ruins nature. Overemphasis on rhythm, and particularly the drums, in jazz music was a misapprehension of the genre in Germany that dates back to the Weimar era.160 As one listener to the NWDR complained in Hör Zu, ‘What should the worker say who after a hard day’s work is looking to recover and relax and – hears jazz and swing, but is not in the mood to dance? Must we be overfed on foreign dance music? There is such wonderful light German music – modern as well!’161 The listener’s mobilization of ‘normal’ working routine and of the domestic sphere as a site of retreat from ‘noise’ of the outside world here segues automatically into a complaint about the ‘foreignness’ of jazz. At the same time, however, the listener’s insistence that light German music is ‘modern as well’ reflects the intimate connection of light music to a sense of simultaneity and progress that adheres to light music. This listener’s response becomes more intelligible if we take up his question, which is one seldom addressed with any seriousness in existing historiography: Why did they have to listen to jazz? Part of the answer has simply to do with the records that were available from the occupation forces. But this was clearly not the whole story. An equally unproduct- ive corollary to over-determined accounts about the operation of Nazi (racial) ideology in popular music seems to be the assumption that music from outside Nazi Germany was somehow value-free. The underlying implication seems to be that if it were not for Nazi racism, jazz would ‘naturally’ have been widely accepted. This assumption is not only made by scholars now, but was also part of the logic of the occupiers and some of the German staff at the stations after the war: it was part of an effort to bring Germans ‘up to date’ with the rest of the world. Upon closer inspection, notions of progress underlie all of the arguments for it, as well as many of the arguments against it. ‘Jazz is a dialect in the language of our time’, argued Josef Marein in Hör Zu, ‘it is not without reason that such important musicians as Ravel and Stravinsky have said it so emphatically, as if it were an important public declaration of belief’.162 Similarly, Dr Panofsky of Radiowelt wrote in 1946:

Every time finds its corresponding expression in music. Our time, in its tempo, the increased rhythm of work as well as life, has selected jazz. It meets with its carefree freshness and unproblematic nature your need for light fare, it electrifies our nerves that have been dulled somewhat by the noise of everyday life: no-one can escape from it, as long as they have a little bit of the dreamer next to all their hardness, soft, longing melodies that are and will remain a small reflection of everyday romance in our sober times.163

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Or as Funkwelt explained to its readers in 1947:

‘Jazz!’ is the musical expression of our time. It came into being about 30 years ago in New Orleans and has since conquered the entire world. In jazz the 150-year-old separation between ‘popular’ and ‘artistic’ music has been bridged again for the first time.164

What is most striking about these comments is that while they are applied to a form of music that is understood to be ‘foreign’ to the various national acoustics, they do so in the terms very similar to those in which the discussions of national music were framed in the Weimar and Nazi era. In particular, the purported ability of jazz to rejoin the ‘artistic’ with the ‘popular’ drew on long-standing concerns surrounding the new forms of musical production of which radio was a central part.165 In fact, the sentiments about jazz cited here are hardly different from those expressed in the late 1920s.166 Both proponents and opponents of jazz cite its ‘inescapability’, so intricately tied in with the processes of modernity as to be inseparable from them. Ironically, jazz’s apparent rhythmical innovation and modern quality, its ‘perennial fashion’, which Adorno posited as its appeal to the masses, is precisely what was apparently rejected by many listeners.167 Conversely, what many German proponents of jazz were actually praising was not its illusory innovation, but its ongoing sameness that mirrors modern life outside the home. In response to the large-scale rejection of jazz, most radio stations soon moved it to a late-night time slot, where the shows were aimed at ‘connoisseurs’. The titles of the shows, such as Jazzfreunde unter sich (‘Jazz Fans Among Themselves’) at Radio Munich, as well as their late-night time slots, show this clearly. Those who wanted to listen to jazz during prime time listened to American or British Forces radio.168 Although much of the language used in rejecting jazz stressed its foreignness, German audiences were not only interested in domestically produced light music. At Radio Munich, where perhaps the largest percentage of the audience were most vehemently opposed to jazz, one of the most popular shows was Thursday evening’s Johnny und die 10 der Woche (‘Johnny and the 10 of the Week’), a version of the American hit parade announced by ‘Johnny’ (Hans Joachim Gotthard), in which listener requests determined each week’s top hit. The show’s popularity could be measured on the response from listeners, which accounted for well over half of the listener post to the station throughout 1946 (see Figure 2.3).169 Bing Crosby’s ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ was one of the most common number one songs, and became the emblem of the show, while

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Figure 2.3 Listener postcards to Radio Munich’s Die 10 der Woche. One (top) ‘threatens’ presenter Johnny with torture if he does not play ‘Spring in Texas’ and Bing Crosby’s ‘Cowboy Song’ (‘Don’t Fence Me In’). The other (bottom) requests song lyrics. Source: Bayrischer Rundfunk.

other popular favourites included Hollywood film melodies ‘Minnie from Trinidad’, ‘I Know Why (And So Do You)’ and ‘Chattanooga Choo- Choo’, and songs from the American hit parades such as ‘Candy’, ‘Spring in Texas’ and ‘Sweet Dreams Sweetheart’.170

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Bing Crosby’s ‘Cowboylied’ and Judy Garland’s ‘Minnie from Trinidad’ fitted in very well with other songs that, much like their German Schlager counterparts, sang of fictionalized exotic faraway places or nostalgic past homelands. Though jazz, too, also expressed an exotic ‘other’ – as much a cause for its acceptance among some listeners as its rejection in others – many saw it as the spectre of a modernizing and yet primitive America that threatened European culture.171 By contrast, German Schlager, particularly alongside counterparts from other nations, offered something far more akin to ‘perennial fashion’: an ‘international’ yet domestic(ated) music that at once moved beyond the recent past through its novelty, whilst remaining clearly within its confines and conventions. Unlike jazz, it appeared as a way forward that also provided a way back through national time and domestic space.

Conclusion: echoes of days

Heinz Schwitzke, in describing the radio premiere of Wolfgang Borchert’s iconic post-war play ‘Draußen vor der Tür’ on 13 February 1947, asserted that ‘never before had [the radio] possessed so much power over people, here or anywhere in the world’.172 By being able to present a group of listeners with a play that dramatically and cathartically expressed their collective experience, he believed, the radio had the power to change its listeners. What this overview of the programme development in the post-war era has suggested, however, is also largely the opposite. While programme-makers had a more or less ‘captive’ audience, in order to reach people who were tired, hungry and sceptical, they also had to listen and respond as quickly as possible to their often contradictory demands. The beginnings of the Cold War intensified these anxieties about the audience, with each side fearing it would lose listeners to the other and attempting to adjust their programmes accordingly. The power and meaning of any broadcast lay only partly in its content and in large part in its ability to be there when it was expected and address the times and spaces of listeners. While this is a basic truth about broadcasting in most places at most times, the dominance of radio as a medium after 1945 meant that it also had powerful implications for the way Germany could be experienced and remembered. In evaluating the role of the radio under National Socialism, Kate Lacey has pointed out that the very traits of broadcasting that Scannell has argued are productive of democracy in British broadcasting, namely the ‘communicative entitlements’ implied by a mixed service on national channels available to all, were also key aspects of broadcasting under

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National Socialism. She suggests that such structures may have provided a democratic impulse even under a profoundly undemocratic regime.173 Observing the negotiation of time patterns in broadcasting after the war seems to support this hypothesis, but it also serves to demonstrate the limitations of that impulse. As audience responses before, during and after the war show, the ongoing temporal structures of broadcasting, obviously and explicitly addressed to private routines and spaces, provided a basis for at least some listeners to demand ‘what about me?’ from both Nazi- and Allied-controlled radio stations alike, though within limited, differing and changing frameworks of expectation. Exploring these frameworks of expectation through the medium that was ‘for-me-and-everybody’, the question ‘what about me?’ turns us back once more to Brecht’s query ‘and who was everybody?’ As we have seen, there were, and had been, few ready answers to that question immediately after 1945. In spite of, and in many ways because of, National Socialism’s emphatic insistence on broadcasting as an expression of the all-encompassing ‘national community’, broadcasting was never able to fully encompass its audience within a national (socialist) framework. The inability to successfully negotiate between eventful time and normal time is one ready example of this. For many, the ‘private’ address and reception of radio programming helped to hold open the idea of a public detached from the state. As Currid rightly insists, the counter-publics imagined in such moments remained only a promise or potential and did not of themselves constitute resistant practice.174 In the case of the continuities in post-war Schlager, in fact, I would suggest that they carried over with the contradictions between their status as mass consumer commodity and national artefact intact but with their functions reversed, at least for some listeners. Whereas under National Socialism, they had been able to suggest non- or even counter-national identifications within ostensibly national frameworks of signification, after the war they could reference a national public in the framework of mass consumption. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, this reorganization of national identity around consumption helped to set the stage for some of the discourses of national identity in the early years of the Federal Republic. To remember collectively, people must be able to imagine the collectivity of which they are part, and most, if not all, imagined radio collectives were multiply circumscribed as private before and after 1945. The apparently depoliticized sphere of the home and family made it the safest place to build narratives of identity for many listeners. Reconnect- ing, or even reconciling, individual experiences with the idea of such a

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-76 9780230_009035_03_cha02 Echoes of Days 77 collective involved the ongoing depoliticization and indeed universalization of such realms. For better or worse, this too was a practice that the maintenance of radio routines fundamentally enabled. To illustrate this, let us return for a moment to Wolfgang Borchert’s broken kitchen clock. In its normal context, the clock had connected the household to the universal world of clock time, and in fact served as a medium by which external entities, not least of which the state, were able to assert control within that sphere. Encountered in the ruins of a home, however, it only signified its absent domestic context, which itself was mostly unintelligible to those around until the young man explained. As opposed to clocks, Scannell argues that broadcasting has ‘a for-anyone- as-someone structure that mediates between the for-anyone structures of publicly available anonymous (mass-produced) usable things and the for- someone structures of purely personal things’.175 Broadcasting constructs times as universally knowable and communicable, and make personal time broadly tellable, and in echoing these hours and days forward, helps to make experiences memorable. While the construction of ‘our time’ is tied intricately to the structures and ideas of nations, they appear to be simply natural or universal. Even in the absence of a believable nation, through its private address, broadcasting was able figuratively (and, as Victor Klemperer noted, quite literally) to maintain and repair this clock within a relatively short time. But it still signified first and foremost as personal time, private space and universal experience. Significantly, in considering broadcasting’s relations between ‘my time’ and ‘our time’, Scannell remarks, ‘if I ask myself to whom am I answerable, to whom am I accountable – the answer that comes back is “me’’ ’.176 The relative dominance of radio throughout this period makes Germans’ much remarked-upon tendency to cast themselves as helpless victims or to uni- versalize their experiences so as to accept no specific responsibility no less troubling, but possibly more intelligible. Studies which have sought to understand how radio programming addressed the National Socialist past immediately after 1945 have tended to focus exclusively on developments after 1945 and on programmes such as political commentary and fictive accounts of the Nazi past. While such accounts are important, particularly for grasping the development of public discourse on National Socialism, they are not sufficient for understanding how Germans remembered themselves in relation to the nation. This is because they only consider half of what radio is about: mass address. Studying the radio as a medium addressed on a mass basis to individuals in private space reveals a number of ways in which the past echoed forward into the present, and how meaning was constructed out

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-77 9780230_009035_03_cha02 78 Voices in Ruins of those echoes. We can only do this, however, if we also step back across the 1945 divide to look at the ways in which ideas of ‘normal’ lives and routines could be constructed under National Socialism. Doing so brings into focus a set of contested spaces and identities which the radio helped to construct, and it is to these I will turn in the remaining chapters.

10th June 2008 19:22 MAC/VIR Page-78 9780230_009035_03_cha02 3 Familiar Voices: Representations of Personalities and Pasts

We’re established now on the continent ...so listen closely ...in just a moment now: Don’t expect to hear metallic speech from a rosette of amplifying horns on the high poles of the public address system. But listen – for a modest voice, as sensible and intimate to you as the quiet turning of your own considered judgment. Now we’re ready. The voice you hear will be that of the conqueror: the man of the hour, the man of the year, of the past ten years and the next twenty. Norman Corwin, On a note of triumph, 1945.

Introduction

The radio’s dual position in public and private space involves not only imagining the times and spaces of the radio audience, but also the times, spaces and identities of the voices that come through the radio. Just as the temporal routines of radio programmes are based around imagined listeners’ activities within the home, those who speak on the radio position themselves within these imagined routines through a number of acoustic and rhetorical devices. Listeners come to know the various voices on the radio and expect them to behave within certain parameters that are at once appropriate to the institution, genre of programme and to their personality. For those who spoke on the radio stations of occupied Germany, being ‘known’ was filled with contradictions. As Germans working for Allied-controlled stations, speakers had to legitimate themselves to different authorities, often with different expectations. Internally, the words and biographies of the station employees had to convince Allied control officers that they were fit to serve the post-war public and represent a new democratic Germany. At

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-79 9780230_009035_04_cha03 80 Voices in Ruins least in theory, before anyone could be heard or named on the air, Allied controllers had to pass judgement on that person’s past. Furthermore, they also had to work with other German colleagues who in many cases were less forgiving than the Allied authorities were. Outwardly, German radio personalities also had to legitimate themselves to their various German audiences, who saw them variously as ‘quislings, traitors and lickspittles’, sympathetic intermediaries and occasionally brave voices of resistance against the occupation authorities.1 As relations between the Soviet and Western authorities deteriorated, the dynamics of these balancing acts changed profoundly for many station staff, particularly those close to the political left. Because these negotiations over personal legitimacy took place in and around the radio, they were never merely about individuals or the stations they represented. Implicitly and explicitly, representations of personalities on the radio formed an important site where narratives of ‘normal’ German identities were produced and contested. In this chapter, I will show how such narratives were shaped on and through the radio in negotiations over legitimacy, authenticity and familiarity. These are three aspects of speaking that are intricately intertwined, mutually reinforcing and, in ordinary times, generally taken for granted. As I use it here, legitimacy refers to a speaker’s perceived right to be speaking on the radio. Some, but not all, sense of legitimacy in occupied Germany came from perceptions about the person’s activities and opinions before 1945, and so depended on listeners’ knowledge (or lack thereof) of a speaker’s past. Authenticity, in turn, has to do with the speaker’s relation to, and delivery of, the text that is being spoken. Senses of authenticity carry over onto senses of legitimacy. As Theo van Leeuwen argues, ‘authenticity is about validity. Authentic talk, whether broadcast or otherwise, is talk which can be accepted as a source of truth, beauty, sincerity, and so on’.2 Speech can be judged authentic because it appears to be the speaker’s own opinion or feeling, or conversely, that the speaker has completely set aside personal feelings or opinions to channel the meaning of another author’s text. Familiarity, finally, is about the sense of relationship between the speaker and listeners. It can refer both to the sense of knowing somebody through frequent encounters with them as well as to gestures and behaviour that simulate or imply such knowledge. Importantly, familiarity does not necessarily imply social intimacy or informality, though it is often aided by it. Instead – and this is where it overlaps most strongly with authenticity – it has more to do with speakers acting within expected parameters that are established through previous encounters with the same speaker or similar contexts.3

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This prior knowledge in turn is entwined with the sense of legitimacy: through repetition comes the authority of tradition.4 In what follows, I focus on each of these issues in turn to show how the relations between them were reconstructed and negotiated in various contexts on the radio and embedded into new narratives about personalities and pasts. I will first look to how narratives of personal legitimacy were constructed on and through the radio, particularly surrounding official and unofficial processes of denazification. This will provide a general biographical overview of station staff with an eye in particular towards understanding how these various groups were represented on the radio. At its centre stands the paradoxical position of the radio station employees as representatives of their German audience and as exemplars of a new and re-educated Germany. It will thus look at the ‘normal’ ways that station voices were presented to listeners in addition to the more extraordinary cases which the radio stations brought to light. The next section moves closer to explore how these issues carried over into debates on the authenticity of talk. I will show how these aesthetic debates were tied closely into visions of a ‘new person’, and more precisely a ‘new man’, in Germany. Finally, to highlight issues of familiarity, I will look at presentations of well-known cinema stars from the Nazi era on the radio. Drawing on recent work that has explored the role of stars in the Third Reich, I will explore the particular and important ways that the radio as a medium reframed these star personalities in the context of post-war Germany.

Legitimacy: vox populi?

When they took over the radio stations, Allied controllers in most zones had very little idea whom they would find to work at them. In most places, a certain number of radio station personnel were on hand or nearby, but because they had worked for the Reichssender, it was not clear to the authorities how many of them should be allowed to continue. Based mostly on information from émigrés, the Allies had further compiled lists of people who would be politically reliable, which brought left-leaning Weimar-era journalists such as Axel Eggebrecht in Hamburg and Eberhard Beckmann at Frankfurt into the stations. The rest were brought in over time via a number of formal and informal networks, job adverts in newspapers and pure coincidence. While a clean political record was one of the most desirable criteria, skills and talent, as well as desire and ability to work alongside Allied controllers turned out to be the deciding factor in employing many people.

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Thorough procedures for denazification were initially developed at all of the occupation stations. Many of the best-known radio personalities from the Nazi era were barred outright, and those from the highest levels were arrested and put on trial. At Radio Hamburg, orders were issued that all speakers whose voice would be recognized from previous work in Hamburg were to be sacked.5 At all Western stations, every employee was required to fill in a questionnaire of 131 questions.6 Furthermore, the questionnaire of every person whose name appeared in a broadcast had to be checked before the broadcast could go forward.7 The immediate focus on public recognition of voices allowed a certain leeway in hiring, however, especially of desperately needed personnel. Announcers, technicians and musicians, normally anonymous to radio listeners, would be hired provisionally pending a satisfactory report. This pragmatism soon expanded further, and other skilled, but potentially compromised, personalities were hired ‘on probation’. Such practices, which were common to all of the occupation zones, resulted in rapid turnover for several months after the war.8 Rudi Rauher, for example, who was one of the first people hired at the NWDR Cologne, was dismissed again in Feb- ruary 1946.9 Like many others who had initially been barred, Rauher was back on the air around the time the station was handed over from Allied control, working as a freelancer with no permanent relation to the institution.10 While finding politically acceptable personnel was a challenge, there was never a shortage of willing employees or performers. With the film industry moving very slowly, in no small part due to denazification processes there, and with newspapers also delayed by the licensing process, the radio stations had a privileged situation as institutions that could pay musicians, artists, actors and journalists, either on permanent or freel- ance basis. As the writer Hans Werner Richter of the Group 47 recalled, ‘almost everybody lived from the radio’.11 Pay for permanent employees was not high, but steady, and the jobs often provided important ‘fringe benefits’ that variously included contact with networks of cultural and political elites, excuses and means to travel to the countryside which could be combined with personal ‘hamster trips’ and access to a heated building.12 The years of occupation and beyond saw almost perpetual upheaval in personnel. In retrospect, several overlapping patterns or waves are discernable. The first such pattern concerns those who began in the early months of the occupied stations and left shortly thereafter. In addition to those hired on probation and later deemed unacceptable, a number of new staff found operating under Allied control and censorship

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-82 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 83 intolerable and left as a result of disagreements over manuscripts or programme direction.13 This wave had scarcely waned around the middle of 1946 when disintegrating relations between the Soviets and the Western allies led to new internal tensions at the stations, and resulted in another wave of resignations and sackings around the end of 1946 and start of 1947. These tensions led to two further, partially contradictory patterns. The acceleration of the denazification process in the West meant that many who had been considered unacceptable at first were now taken on in increasing numbers. On the other hand, accusations of involvement with the Nazi regime also began to surface against many sitting employees, often stemming from communist party circles on both sides of the zonal boundary. These were in part corroborated by the discovery of the Nazi party registry in Bavaria in 1947. Scandals periodically rocked stations in the Western zones for many years to come. The personnel situation at the stations in the Soviet zone was no more stable due to the periodic purges of staff that took place as the SED hierarchy asserted its hold over the stations.14 Against this background of constant change, however, the stations slowly built up permanent staff in which certain general trends were visible. Arnulf Kutsch’s biographical survey of station employees hired during the occupation presents a basic picture of the background and experiences of those who worked at the stations, the broad outlines of which have been confirmed in later research.15 The average age in Kutsch’s sample was 32, with over two-thirds of the sample falling between the ages of 20 and 35. The bulk of these, then, would have spent their young adulthood in the Nazi era; unsurprisingly, three quarters of the sample were involved in the war, either as soldiers or in propaganda companies, and 23 had been prisoners of war. Over half possessed previous media experience in Germany during the Nazi era, while a much smaller number (13 of 72) had suffered some form of repression during the Third Reich, ranging from being barred from study or career to arrest and imprisonment. Most significantly, Kutsch concluded ‘that a media occupation or even a leading position in media organizations of the Third Reich clearly did not of itself represent an obstacle to working in the broadcast organizations of the occupation period’.16 This conclusion corrected a long-standing myth that German broadcasting had undergone a complete change of elites after the war.17 Party membership had neither been a necessary component of a domestic media career in Nazi Germany nor for work in military propaganda companies. Experience as a war reporter was thus actually considered desirable because it meant workers would be familiar with some of the

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-83 9780230_009035_04_cha03 84 Voices in Ruins technology and practice of reporting and with working under difficult conditions. The careers of two of the first ‘voices’ of the ‘Talks and Features’ department at Radio Hamburg, Axel Eggebrecht and Peter von Zahn, illustrate the sorts of continuities that were possible in German media. These two have been perhaps overemphasized in broadcasting history, not least due to their own ability to build personal myths through their later careers. Viewing them here as typical rather than exceptional cases nevertheless highlights more general trends, and also sets the stage for lengthier discussion of them in the sections that follow.18 Eggebrecht (1899–1991) was a literary journalist and a film writer before 1945. Because of his political activities on the far left, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned in 1933 and barred from writing until 1935; from that point on, he made a living writing screenplays for Viennese director Willi Forst.19 He came to the NWDR in June of 1945, and was offered a post in the ‘Talks and Features’ department. Peter von Zahn (1913–2001) had studied history and journalism and worked for a Berlin publisher until being drafted into the army in 1939, where he served as an officer in a propaganda company. He came to the station in July of 1945, having written a commentary on the German prisoners of war, and was given the post of the head of the ‘Talks and Features’ department. In addition to his tasks as head of the department, he was one of the NWDR’s regular political commentators and leading reporters. In 1948, he took up the post as head of the newly opened NWDR studio in Düsseldorf, before becoming the station’s American correspondent. Both had journalistic training and a broad range of experiences, both had remained in Germany throughout the Nazi era and both were virtually unknown to most radio listeners in 1945. There is now historical consensus that there were substantial continuities in personnel in broadcasting after 1945, and several people who had faithfully served the Nazi-controlled stations, if not in the party, were able to continue their careers. Because such studies have largely been geared towards understanding the nature of the institution, it is more difficult to gain a picture of how listeners experienced these continuities and discontinuities in personnel. Broader studies that have explored patterns of employment do not often differentiate between those who were known voices and personalities and those who worked away from the microphones. These are important differences, when one considers, for example, that most of the influential returned émigrés worked more behind the scenes as control officers, writers, and advisors and relatively few were regular radio personalities.20 Furthermore, there is less overall

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-84 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 85 sense of the mobility of careers and perceived attachments to specific stations which were very important to the presentation of voices on the air. I will approach these issues here by tracing the ways both continuities and ruptures were portrayed. Many personalities who had gained popularity before 1945 were still in high demand, particularly in lighter portions of the programme. This was of course in keeping with the overall perception of light programmes as ‘non-political’ and so, barring too close an association with the Nazi regime, it was relatively easy to continue a career. The popular Swabian presenter and dialect actor Albert Hofele, for example, who had been grudgingly kept on through Nazi radio until the start of the war, returned to the Stuttgart station in August 1945 and soon became its ‘Swabian calling card’.21 Because radio announcers were not always named on the radio before and after 1945, not all continuities between the pre- and post-war periods were strongly noted. Paul Land at Radio Stuttgart and Ernst Höchstötter at Radio Munich had both been radio announcers at their respective stations beginning in the late 1930s, but it was only after 1945 that they became well-known radio ‘stars’. This stardom was due in part to their announcing popular shows of light entertainment, which were in personable, informal style, in which interaction with listeners, often in the form of post to the show, was highly encouraged. Comparing the post-war fates of three of the best-known reporters in German broadcasting, Bernhard Ernst, Alfred Braun and Paul Laven, provides a clear example of the inconsistencies between people and zones that must have been apparent to listeners, as well as some of the ways in which well-known personalities were presented. All three men were pioneering reporters who began their careers in radio with its institution- alization in the mid-1920s. Each rose to national prominence, though they were each primarily associated with a single station. Bernhard Ernst (1899–1957) had been a broadcaster for the station in Cologne since it began in 1924, and his career carried on there seamlessly through 1933 and 1945. At the NWDR Cologne, he was initially given responsibility for ‘all actuality programmes, news and special features, such as Mil Gov announcements, farmer and women’s talks, children’s hour, dialect, etc.’ in August of 1945 before the station began broadcasting.22 Although he was clearly the senior employee at the station in terms of age, experience and perhaps personal authority, he was never made head of the station.23 Outwardly, he soon became the main voice of the radio station in Cologne and inwardly his influence was strong.24 His reappearance in broadcasting was celebrated as the return of a familiar, trusted and local voice.25 Locality, stemming from his long association with the station

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-85 9780230_009035_04_cha03 86 Voices in Ruins and his being a native of the region was an important part of Ernst’s self-presentation. A personal profile in Hör Zu from 1948, where he is pictured without his trademark pipe, jokes: ‘Microphone and pipe go together with Dr Ernst like ...[Ernst now speaking:] “Come on, say it: like my Westphalian stubbornness goes with my thick head. An impression that’s easy to get because I always say what I think’’. ’26 Ernst also identified himself equally strongly with the form of radio he had helped to invent in Germany, the live local reportage. Asked in the interview if he had a hobby, Ernst replied ‘One? Three of them. My regular trips to the Ruhr, my conversations with the ordinary people, with workers, housewives, and – my sport reports.’27 His connections with Nazi-controlled institutions do not appear here because Ernst identifies himself entirely with external spaces, as the voice out there among ‘the people’ as part of the land. Berlin-based personality Alfred Braun (1888–1978) had led a more checkered past with regard to the Nazi regime.28 Dismissed and briefly imprisoned by the National Socialists in 1933, he emigrated to Switzerland shortly thereafter. Unlike other exiles, however, from whom he actively tried to distance himself, Braun worked hard to restore his reputation and return to Germany. He was eventually successful and returned to Germany in 1939, where he became a war reporter and worked also closely with the film industry, and in particular director Veit Harlan. Immediately after the war, Braun found work at Radio Stuttgart, but was dismissed again in November of 1945 in light of his role in National Socialist media. The Soviet-controlled station in Berlin soon began making overtures to Braun, including a high salary, and he took up employment there in January of 1947. Once back in Berlin, Braun made much of his attachment to the place, providing the voice of dialect characters and later acting as the host of a popular local magazine show.29 He remained at the Soviet station until the end of his contract – and therefore through the blockade of West Berlin – in February 1950, when he moved back to the West. In 1954, in spite of official suspicions about his involvement in the East (his involvement in the Nazi media industry was no longer an issue) he was made the first head of the Sender Freies Berlin when the NWDR dissolved. Ironically, Paul Laven (1902–1979) from Frankfurt, who of the three had arguably offered the most resistance to Nazi politics, was the only one who was not able to continue a career in broadcasting after 1945.30 Initially barred from broadcasting, Laven was eventually brought before a tribunal, whose decision in 1948 dismissed all charges against him. By that time, however, in aggressively pursuing a position at the

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Figure 3.1 ‘Voices in Pictures’ Radiowelt introduces popular announcers, 1947. Source: Bayrischer Rundfunk. occupied stations, he had alienated the Allied controllers and station head Eberhard Beckmann at Radio Frankfurt and was not granted radio work again. It is important to note that here, too, place played an important role: most of Laven’s vain attempts to restart his broadcasting career were aimed at trying to get him reinstated in Frankfurt, the place where he ‘belonged’ in German broadcasting. From the journal’s beginning, the inside cover of Hör Zu featured a segment which featured the picture of a radio personality along with a short biographical blurb. Other programme guides had similar features, as well as occasional photo spreads where the photos of the sometimes anonymous voices were presented (see Figure 3.1). Such comments were naturally light-hearted and short, but nonetheless offered a glimpse of the course of radio careers for listeners. For example, Hör Zu’s piece on Herbert Zim- mermann, the reporter who later became famous as the announcer of the 1954 Football World Cup final, outlines in quick sentences a very typical career trajectory for many of the younger generation who started careers on the radio:

Changed schools regularly, but otherwise successfully inoculated. Already as a little tyke liked to hear himself speak. Conscripted from the school bench. Wounded in 1942, hospital in Berlin, where he made first practical encounter with the radio. Then a soldier again. After the war’s end, finally a radio announcer.31

For those who had worked in broadcasting before 1945, the fact that they were experienced, and quite possibly known to listeners, was usually mentioned, normally in a positive light. In pieces on Paul Land and

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Ernst Höchstötter, for example, vague and unproblematic references were made to their longer history on the radio, particularly their longer-term attachment to their specific stations.32 The most common feature of such biographies is their emphasis on consistency of personality. This is underlined by short, mostly empty references to their experiences under Nazi rule, which serve essentially as reminders that the person in question had been there; questions of their compliance or resistance to Nazi rule were largely immaterial due to their remaining consistent in their own characters. Such portrayals were, of course, appropriate to the context. No reader of Hör Zu in 1947 needed to be reminded who had controlled radio and nation before 1945, and drawn-out discussions of political complicity or resistance would not have fitted the remit of a brief personal profile in a popular magazine. This is also the point: in most cases, the radio presented a context where ordinary, consistent biographies of individuals could be constructed. On the whole, station staff appeared as ‘ordinary Germans’. By far, not all public portrayals of radio personnel’s pasts were as neutral as those mentioned above. Especially in the cases of the young political commentators Herbert Gessner and Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, their biographies as young, politically engaged and anti-fascist Germans were considered part of their value in the re-education effort. The 25- year-old Herbert Gessner (1920–1956) came to Radio Munich in 1945 with a history of major and minor resistance against the Third Reich, including desertion from the army and participation in the brief Munich uprising in April 1945. Von Schnitzler (1918–2001) was the son of a wealthy Cologne banking family and had been politically active in socialist politics, as well as business, before being called into the army in 1939. He was captured by the British in 1944 where he was retrained at Camp Ascot and began working, anonymously, as per regulation, in the BBC’s German Service. He came to the NWDR in the autumn of 1945, and took up a post as political commentator at the station in Cologne at the start of 1946.33 With the change in political atmosphere around the end of 1946, their credentials were not sufficient to shield them, and in fact worked against them, in combination to their connections to the communist party, as we will see below. As both public institution and mass medium, the radio was doubly implicated in the denazification process. Not only did the process among station employees take place more publicly than many others, but it also played a large role in how the public experienced the process as a whole. Besides reporting from the major and minor trials of National Socialists, there were also numerous cases that were almost literally ‘tried in the

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-88 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 89 media’. One of the first such cases, which I will describe in greater detail below, was that of the actor Mathias Wieman (1902–1969), who had sought out Axel Eggebrecht at the NWDR in August of 1945 because he was barred from performing, not least for his role in the pro-euthanasia film Ich Klage An (I accuse, Wolfgang Liebeneiner 1941). In response, Eggebrecht decided to interview Wieman on the air and question him about his past. The show, which aired 5 September 1945, was essentially a public denazification, and was one of the very first programmes by a German author to deal with the issue of National Socialism and denazification on the air.34 This show was significant not merely for Wieman, but also for Eggebrecht. Two weeks after this programme aired, Eggebrecht took up an assignment as the NWDR’s reporter and commentator at the trial of the SS guards of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. While stressing the fairness and objectivity of the trials when reporting from them, in his final commentary, Eggebrecht criticized strongly the tribunals’ passing of the death sentence on 11 of the men.35 His role in the ‘public’ denazification of Wieman added to his authority with the German listeners as a commentator on the process of denazification. Besides the cases that were ‘tried by the media’, the radio also brought listeners the news of the cases that were tried in the courts. The most public case of denazification in Germany was the Nuremberg war crimes trials, which were broadcast nightly from Nuremberg over all German stations. In the US zone, this turned out to be a scandal of its own, but one which only became public many years later. As a means of maintaining control over the presentation of the trials to the public, the only radio reporter from the US zone who was actually allowed into the courtroom was ‘Dr Gaston Oulmàn’, a reporter for Radio Munich. The reporter was Viennese confidence man and former Nazi party member Walter Ullmann. Ullmann had been imprisoned during the Nazi era for fraud and when freed by Allied soldiers in 1945, he gave his identity as a journalist of French-Cuban ancestry who had been persecuted under the Nazi regime.36 He proved convincing enough that the Americ- ans employed him and gave him perhaps the most important reporting task of the occupation period. Among the many remarkable aspects of his career as reporter and commentator on the trials was the relatively small role he actually played in it. His commentaries on the trials, with the exception of the last one, were put together for him by American station head Field Horine.37 In addition, soon after the trials began, it was decided that his voice was not suited to the radio, and so his commentaries were actually read by Fritz Mellinger, who later became the head of the Nuremberg studio.38 Over the course of 1946, ‘Oulmàn’s’ identity

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-89 9780230_009035_04_cha03 90 Voices in Ruins was uncovered by the American occupation authorities, largely due to his ongoing activities on the black market.39 Rather than expose him, the Americans let Oulmàn/Ullman slip away to the French zone, where he worked for Radio Saarbrücken as chief editor until his dismissal there under further suspicion of his activities. It was only then that his actual identity became known in Germany.40 Perhaps the most important moment in the publicity of the denazification process apart from the Nuremberg trials came in a commentary by Herbert Gessner at Radio Munich on 28 October 1946. Gessner laid out all of the irregularities in the work of Anton Pfeiffer, the special minister in charge of denazification in Bavaria. Having pointed to 6600 out of 11 000 cases where people were given milder classifications than the law demanded, Gessner went on to show several specific cases where friends and associates of Pfeiffer received preferential treatment while many smaller party members were given harsh sentences. In the scandal that followed, Pfeiffer was granted airtime to defend himself, which he did largely by pointing to the trust that had been placed in him by the Allied authorities. Willi Hoegner, the president of Bavaria, sent a note to the American military government, protesting Radio Munich’s criticism of his minister. The American military government did not force the station to fire Gessner, nor did they defend him, or investigate his allegations. At about that time, a profile of Gessner appeared in Radiowelt, clearly aimed at defending him. The article claimed that its purpose was to portray not the ‘radio commentator and his sensational case’ but rather to sketch ‘the characteristics of an exceptional representative of the German youth, the bulk of which lost its international connection through its past’.41 In contrast to the sort of ‘ordinary’ portrayals of station staff mentioned above, this much lengthier piece traced in detail Gessner’s various forms of resistance against the Nazi regime. The attempt to legitimate Gessner as a long-time anti-fascist and heroic member of his generation went mostly nowhere, however. Within a month of the commentary that started the controversy, Gessner left Radio Munich, and moved to Radio Berlin in the Soviet zone, where he became, for a time, one of the leading political commentators.42 Gessner’s departure from Radio Munich, while it stemmed immediately from his confrontation with the civilian government in Bavaria, was also part of the larger trend that began in late 1946 and carried on through the first half of 1947. The change in politics that had been signalled in September of 1946 also changed the climate at the stations, particularly for left-leaning staff. In that time a number of high-profile personalities left stations in the West and moved to the Soviet zone,

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-90 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 91 where many of them appeared on the Soviet-controlled station in Berlin. In addition to Gessner from Radio Munich, the chief political editor Hans Mayer and the writer Stephan Hermlin left Radio Frankfurt, and at the NWDR, where next to the Cologne Intendant Max Burghardt at least six other leading employees were sacked and many moved to the Soviet zone.43 The most notable, and vocal, of those leaving was Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, who had been moved from his post at the NWDR Cologne to a lesser position at the NWDR Hamburg in June of 1947, and dismissed from the station all together in November of the same year. In his open ‘farewell letter’ to Hugh Greene, von Schnitzler wrote, ‘Hitler’s journalists are as popular as the propagandists of his soldier’s stations, as the Jud-Süss actors and the morale-boosting singers of home front.’44 While Greene ignored and later made light of these accusations, they clearly did have merit at least in their reference to the functions many popular and high-ranking voices had held before 1945.45 German station staff were not only able to intervene on behalf of their fellow Germans when they were accused of Nazi involvement, but also to intervene against them, publicly or privately.46 Mathias Wieman’s co-star in Ich Klage An, Heidemarie Hatheyer (1918–1990), was made the centre of controversy at Radio Munich in 1947. Unlike the case of Wieman at the NWDR, at Munich 23 German employees led by announcer Hannes Stein publicly blocked an appearance by Hatheyer in spite of the fact that she had been cleared by the American control authorities and over the objections of head of entertainment Helmuth M. Backhaus.47 In the end, the show was not broadcast, and Backhaus resigned.48 The result- ing controversy resulted in a flood of letters to the programme guide Radiowelt, mostly in support of Backhaus and Hatheyer.49 In the following issue, the Radio Munich employees issued a statement of their position:

It contradicts our understanding of justice that so-called prominent people who for the wider public are associated with the ideas of the Third Reich – even if only by appearance – can earn money at Radio Munich, while harmless party members are no longer allowed, for example as cashiers or doormen.50

The statement echoed very strongly the accusations by Gessner (with which this incident was very clearly connected) and widespread perceptions of the denazification process, but also illustrated the peculiar positioning of the radio station in public society. They placed themselves on the side the ‘harmless party members’ as opposed to the prominent

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-91 9780230_009035_04_cha03 92 Voices in Ruins star, but at the same time there was also a definite patronizing element to the statement, referring to the ‘wider public’ who associate Hatheyer with the Nazi ideology, and are the same people to whom the statement is addressed. In sum, in their efforts to build station staff that would represent the new Germany, the Western occupiers succeeded – despite their best intentions. The occupied radio stations mirrored all too closely the contradictions of denazification and reconstruction efforts in many other parts of public life. In public discourse, and in particular in the attacks from broadcasters in the Soviet zone, the ongoing presence of many known personalities of the National Socialist era provided ample fodder for those who believed that the stations were given over to restorative elements. At the same time, there was a widespread belief among listeners and politicians that most of the stations, in particular the NWDR Hamburg and Radio Munich, and even the US-run RIAS in Berlin, were ‘red’.51 Because these debates were confined mostly to the political portions of the programmes, the growing permanent station staff in various departments also allowed for the development of numerous narratives of normalization to form around many voices of everyday broadcasting. Ultimately, legitimacy came to centre far more around issues of individual consistency rather than any sort of political activity in past or present. Within this context, the return of well-known voices who had been barred at the start of the Nazi era was inevitably hailed in station publicity and programme press as the return of known and trusted voices, and a return to a pre-war normality.

Authenticity: forming new people in front of the microphones

The point of entry to radio work for Peter von Zahn, head of ‘word’ broadcasts at the NWDR, was a commentary he was invited to write in 1945 about the condition of his fellow German officers in the large POW camp in Pülsen in Holstein. The recording of this commentary also served as a sort of microphone test. Von Zahn describes in his memoirs the reaction of control officer Alexander Maass upon listening to it: ‘He listened to the report and rocked his head thoughtfully from side to side. “What he says is not bad. But how he says it, that’s impossible. He doesn’t speak like a German. Nobody will listen to it. He doesn’t command.’’ ’52 Maass’s doubts were reportedly strong enough that he planned to read the commentary himself but was dissuaded by his fellow

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émigré, control officer Walter Everitt, who suggested the commentary would lack ‘authenticity’ if it were not read by its author. Describing this, von Zahn allowed:

Based on his experience, Alexander Maass was absolutely right. Nobody on the radio back then spoke as strangely as I did. The German radio listener had been exposed for twelve years to the markedly clipped, wilfully sporty style of speaking that still rings in our ears from old newsreels; whatever was not said in tones of command with a northern German accent could only have come from émigrés, Jews or ‘other traitors’.53

This small episode contains the key elements of a conflict that continued in Germany for many years around the presentation of personalities on the radio. At its core are two different ideas of authenticity in the speaking voice. One, voiced by Maass, is built around the speaker’s authentic Germanness as signified by a specific accent and manner of speech. The other, espoused by Everitt, looks instead to the authenticity of the speaker as a unique individual, speaking from personal experience and expressing individual opinions. As I will show, these two different modes of authenticity had a far longer history and were to compete throughout the occupation period. Besides its specificity, it is also important to be alert to the story’s alleg- orical register. In von Zahn’s narrative, the incident serves to underline the novelty of his voice and the beginning of new broadcasting practice that it represented. In trying to establish this novelty, however, von Zahn blurs together all that came before him, and draws a strange parallel between the experience of the Weimar-era broadcaster and anti-fascist émigré Maass and the ideological construction of radio voices under Nazi domination. The effect is similar to that of the dismissive epithet ‘Goebbels snout’ [Goebbelsschnauze] for the Volksempfänger, which also established a metonymic connection between Nazi-era radio and a particular sort of aggressive, ‘barking’ voice.54 Such modes of radio talk were associated only with specific portions of radio output (political commentary, news presenting and reporting) rather than the programme as a whole. Questions about appropriate and authentic voices were neither unique to Germany nor to the occupation era. In Germany, as elsewhere in the world, the intimate forms of mass address allowed by the radio did not emerge fully formed any more than the device itself did, but rather were continually adapted to different constellations of power between states,

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-93 9780230_009035_04_cha03 94 Voices in Ruins stations and audiences, changing ideas of personality and what consti- tutes authentic talk in what circumstances.55 In Germany, however, these processes of cultural appropriation were strongly influenced by the two political caesuras of 1933 and 1945. The attempts in the mid-1930s to address radio programming to the imagined routines of everyday life described in the previous chapter accompanied a greater adaptation of the spoken address on the radio to addressing a public in an imagined, cosy home. Radio personalities such as Rudi Rauher (who was already known to listeners from Weimar radio) gained widespread popularity through their less formal forms of talk, which helped to situate them within the ‘inner’ world of their listeners during ‘lighter’ segments of the programme. Ideologically, radio speakers under National Socialism were supposed to be expressions of the principle of charismatic leadership [Führerprin- zip], and speak from and to the ideals of the ‘national community’.56 As in many parts of National Socialist political aesthetics, however, the ideological construction of radio voices was often contradictory. In keeping with the idea of charismatic leadership, speakers were expected to use their voice to create an experience for listeners, not only of the subject of the talk, but of the speaker as an ideal representative of the Volk. Guidelines put out by the radio stations in 1936 stated that ‘the voice of the radio speaker must be resonant, expressive and very flexible. Above all it should grant expression to a “personality’’ [Persönlichkeit] so that the listener is moved and captured by it time and again’.57 As Erica Carter points out, Persönlichkeit in German, and particularly in National Social- ist aesthetics, has a different genealogy from the Anglo-Saxon notion of personality. It refers not to the series of emotions and habits of the discrete individual, but rather to the unique and transcendent essence of individuals that is the source of their connection with the collective, and most particularly, the racially defined Volk.58 In this regard, it is particularly noteworthy that the dramatic flexibility of voice stressed here found a particular exemplar in the ‘Führer’ himself, whose addresses had an unusually high range of pitch and volume.59 In Nazi-era discourse on radio voices, the voice as the expression of the racialized body and traits of the voice was considered its ultimate purpose, to the point that the words that were spoken were considered irrelevant.60 At the same time, however, the National Socialist masters of the radio, like the masters of the cinema, were keen to make sure that the medium would have broad popular appeal. As Sabine Hake has shown, the aesthetics of Volkstümlichkeit (‘popular appeal’ and/or ‘folksiness’) and Wirklichkeitsnähe (‘closeness to reality’), also propagated in official

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-94 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 95 circles, often led to contradictory aesthetic conclusions.61 A popular treat- ise on radio reporting from 1939 – quotes from which reappeared 14 years later in the trade journal Rundfunk und Fernsehen – presented a very different focus, one that pointed away from the charismatic ideal and towards the individual reporter’s vocal feet of clay as the source of their appeal:

It is truly a good thing that the ‘radio reporter an sich’ has not yet been invented, let alone discovered. He [sic] would be as perfect as the Venus de Milo, and just exactly as boring. The little flaws, the tiny and really almost a bit annoying habits, are what have made some radio reporters so beloved and well-known.62

While contradicting the ideal of the speaker as charismatic leader, such views certainly fitted within the National Socialist portrayal of the radio as close to the Volk. As Hake has argued, the contradictions of National Socialist aesthetics were in part enabled by the fact that theory and practice were widely separated, where aesthetic theory served to prop up or gloss over contradictions in practice or widespread aesthetic continuities from the Weimar ‘system’ that they claimed to have revolutionized. While certain forms of radio talk were ideologically loaded with notions of race and charismatic (male) leadership under National Socialism, the broader notions of Volkstümlichkeit or Volksnähe actually supported very different sorts of authentication, and indeed a range of styles of speaking on the radio. With the beginning of the war, there was a greater polarization of the programme between heroic reports of wartime progress and more folksy distractions from it, the latter taking the form of light music and variety programmes such as the Wunschkonzert that tried to create an image of national domesticity. Particularly as the reports from the front began to lose credibility, so too did the ‘heroic’ voices that reported them. The growing uncertainty and fear imbued more intimate and sincere modes of speaking with renewed meaning for listeners, as can be seen in a peculiar phenomenon that occurred in the latter years of the war. At the height of the Allied bombing campaign, in two separate cities, Nuremberg and Hamburg, figures rose to prominence on the radio for the calming, sympathetic way in which they provided vital information for inhabitants of the beleaguered cities before and after bombing raids. Both men were dubbed ‘Onkel Baldrian’ (‘Uncle Valerian’) by listeners for their gentle, soothing voices.63 In each case, the title of ‘uncle’ was central to the way listeners interpreted the figure in the airwaves. As opposed to the heroic masculine voices reporting from

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-95 9780230_009035_04_cha03 96 Voices in Ruins the front, these voices represented to listeners a close, domestic masculinity, ‘as if a good housefather were stepping into the cellar where his frightened family was’.64 The notions of authenticity and sincerity attached to these voices was due in no small part to the fact that the information they provided was local and therefore verifiably accurate, qualities that for most listeners set them apart from most other voices that came through the radio.65 Nevertheless, listeners’ sense of personal connection to such soothing, avuncular voices is particularly noteworthy in contexts where, as scholars have pointed out, the fabric of face-to- face community was wearing very thin.66 The sense of distance between the familiar voice and party authority was clearly some of the appeal of these voices. Though Georg Ahrens, Hamburg’s ‘Baldrian’, was immediately beneath the Gauleiter in local party hierarchy, the attachments listeners formed towards him seemed to be separate from the rest of the party. By contrast, Arthur Schöddert, Nuremberg’s ‘Onkel Baldrian’, who was not a party member, apparently raised suspicion in local party leaders who sought to connect him more explicitly with the party.67 The pseudo-familiarity of these radio voices provided the connection with a more abstract collective and vaguely national ‘family’ than was afforded by face-to-face encounters or with most overt propaganda from the party. With the end of the war, a new discourse about voices rapidly came to the fore in intellectual circles in Germany. In her discussion of the construction of German memories after 1945, Aleida Assmann has pointed to one of the key debates on the ‘new person’ that should be created in German society.68 This can be seen as part of the general turn among German thinkers to discourses of universal humanity in order to explain and/or ignore the specificities of the recent German past. Assman highlights in particular philosopher Dolf Sternberger’s discussion of the notion of ‘character’ as one of the obstacles to creating new people. Character, in his definition, is a construct of virile masculinity that is maintained as a mask of hardness and in defiance of any personal experience or emotional reaction. According to Sternberger, the character ‘has no history, no biography – that is the thing. That is the thing that hopelessly removes him from the world of the conscience and of culture [Bildung]’.69 In place of such a pastless character should come a citizen who ‘speaks a natural, free and open language in public’.70 This renewed focus on natural and open language as the mark of ideal personhood placed new and different emphasis on the voice as expression of the internal, individual being over the (racialized) body, and a view of the voice as merely its instrument or reflection. On the radio, such natural

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-96 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 97 and open language could also stand in place of a biography similar to the vague and ‘normal’ biographies presented in the programme press. This renewed focus on the voice as expression of the true inner person found powerful echoes in the discourse about the appropriate nature of radio talk at the occupied radio stations, and perhaps not least due to the fact that many of the elites at the stations had close ties to the same intellectual circles where the debates on German guilt were taking place.71 One of the primary goals of re-education, one that was stated explicitly to listeners, was to teach Germans to form their own individual (political) opinions. The radio thus provided a unique tool in this effort because of its reliance on the voice as the expression of the ‘inner’ individual. The microphone, which was able to capture all of the voice’s nuances in intimate, ordinary speech, was thus transformed in discourse ‘from a technical device into an instrument for seeking truth’.72 A piece by Axel Eggebrecht in the NWDR’s programme bulletin in 1946 described the microphone as a means not just for revealing, but actually creating such ‘new people’:

The microphone is a highly sensitive instrument that amplifies every action, every excitement; but it also reveals every dishonesty and inner uncertainty. No sense appears as immediate as hearing; therefore immediacy is the first law of radio. If, for example, participants in a ‘round table’ of the NWDR who take themselves too seriously jot down their objections and opinions on little notes like school pupils, they will necessarily come off worse than those who go ahead and stutter or misspeak occasionally, but who let the listeners experience immediately the development of an opinion. [...] The radio must look everywhere for people who are capable of unfettered personal expression of their views. The years of oppres- sion still have effects that move into the individual spirit and its most private form of expression, language. It is the task of the radio to do everything possible to create change here and to form new people in front of the microphones.73

In practice, the sort of unrehearsed, spontaneous speech that Eggebrecht alluded to was extremely rare, given that almost every word that went out over the air from the occupied stations had to be presented to a censor before broadcasting. The available manuscript material attests to the pre- scripted origins of even the most trivial and chatty talk that went out

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-97 9780230_009035_04_cha03 98 Voices in Ruins over the airwaves. Outside reporting could feature unscripted speech, but only because it had to be pre-recorded and therefore could be thoroughly screened prior to broadcasting. The ‘round table’ mentioned in the quote above, where various experts gather around a table to discuss an issue in a live, unscripted broadcast, was an exception rather than a rule.74 Ad-libbing by German radio speakers was certainly not encouraged and could conceivably have been grounds for dismissal, if the deviation from the script were egregious enough. By and large, then, radio speakers were required to reproduce scripted speech as authentically – that is, as if it were not scripted – as possible. In short, authentic radio talk was largely a matter of sincerity. Sincer- ity is, as Scannell argues, a performative paradox – it is the performance of not performing. In his examination of the popularity of Vera Lynn’s performance on wartime radio, he highlights her method of interpret- ing songs such that the emotions expressed in songs relate directly to personal experience, even though the situations in the songs do not. The songs thus sound ‘sincere’ because they stem from within.75 Such modes of performance, he argues, were only made possible – and necessary – by the coming of microphones. These same arguments came to fore in a 1948 Hör Zu article that stressed the contrast between the ‘inner world’ of personal emotions conveyed by the microphone and the falseness of stage acting:

The microphone wants to be spoken to like the ear of a good friend who is with us in the same room. If the speaker forgets the group that is listening besides this friend, if he [sic] thinks not of them, but of just this one among the many, then he will arrive soonest at the non-artificial tone of inner, and therefore convincing, simplicity. False pathos, on the other hand, that effect-chasing, booming, trumpeting din of words, loses all of its splendour in the speaker and reveals the inner hollowness, the discrepancy with the true being of the person that stands behind it. Incorruptibly and truthfully the microphone passes on through the speaker [of the radio set] what was spoken in front of it.76

This conventional wisdom for actors on radio was extended also to priests and pastors who were invited to offer the morning reflection on the radio. In order to address listeners in ‘internal’ domestic spaces, they were told to avoid tones used in the pulpit and instead adopt an intimate manner of speaking that drew on the speaker’s own internal experience.

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The speaker should put himself in the place of the listener, who is perhaps preparing himself [sic] for work in an unheated room, who is cold and hungry. If one wants not just to speak to him, but grab him internally and carry him along, the listener must sense the person and not just the theologian behind the words, who understands the needs and worries of others and has the desire to share the knowledge that he has struggled for himself.77

Scannell argues that these intimate modes of address possible in broadcasting let it ‘tear down the fence’ between art and everyday life by replacing the aesthetic values by which performances are judged with moral and social values of everyday interaction such as genuineness and sincerity.78 In the minds of many involved in re-education efforts at the stations, the fence between performance and life had indeed been torn down with the help of broadcasting, but with violence and from the wrong direction. The ‘aestheticized politics’ (in Benjamin’s terms) of National Socialism was seen as having entered via the radio into private homes and in Eggebrecht’s words above, ‘into the individual spirit’.79 Along with this sense came a suspicion towards forms of overly dramatic speaking. The description of ‘effect-chasing, booming, trumpeting’ performances in the citation from Hör Zu above evokes descriptions of Nazi propaganda and Nazi-era public speaking as much as it does stage performance.80 Such suspicion extended also to the sort of ‘verbal painting’ that was part of the common reporting style in Germany, which used image-filled language as well as broad speed and pitch modulations to create an ‘experience’ for the listener in the airwaves. In 1946, the control officer Edward Rothe voiced his worries about Bernhard Ernst, opining that Ernst ‘will never understand that National Socialism has gone belly-up, that the pompous fanfare of a Nazi announcer (even if it has been done by him like this “for 21 years’’ and before 33) is unbearable’.81 Similar objections to an outmoded ‘pathetic’ style were voiced as reasons not to re-employ Paul Laven in Frankfurt.82 Rothe’s direct connection between Ernst’s style of reporting and the Nazi era points not only to the ideological loading of modes of address at the post-war stations but to a dilemma in the way authentic personalities were to be presented. Ernst had indeed spent 21 years developing a radio personality in part through a specific way of speaking. To change suddenly this way of speaking, even if it had meant adopt- ing a ‘fresher’, more conversational mode of speech, would have been to risk inauthenticating that talk to listeners who had come to know him over time.

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A vital, yet tacit, aspect of these discussions was the gendering of speakers. The references to speakers and listeners as masculine in many of the quotes above follow then-common linguistic practice in German, but also reflect assumptions that the subjects of discussion are indeed male. Certainly, the arguments about ‘character’ mentioned above assume a male subject and militaristic ‘male’ education. As I will discuss in the next chapter, debates about women’s expanding roles in society and on the radio were marked by the opposite concerns. As women entered increasingly into public life, and into more traditionally male parts of the programme, they were accompanied by nagging questions as to whether they would maintain their universal femininity, and at the same time, their Germanness. For men, and for men’s voices, on the other hand, their Germanness was less in question. In her analysis of Nazi- era stars in post-war cinema, Sabine Hake points to the very important role played by male stars in reconstructing national images. The male body, she argues, ‘seemed both less compromised by the ideology of race and more fit to preserve the surviving dreams of nation’.83 Just as the male body was particularly conducive to channelling national images, male voices were particularly effective in emphasizing the survival of the nation. The production of the voice as the true and ordinary expression of the person took on a special significance here. Bodies place damage, disfigurement or aging on clear visual display, while such elements are far less extreme, if at all apparent, in the disembodied voice. Particularly in a time when broken male bodies were a commonplace sight, as well as a constant theme of news and drama in all media,84 the regular (in the dual sense of ‘predictably recurring’ and ‘normal’) sound of male voices on the radio constructed an aural space where men of all ages still functioned fully, in spite of any physical damage they may have had.85 Furthermore, through its domesticated mode of address, the radio was able to portray men implicitly in peaceful, domestic settings at a time when large numbers of men were either dead or still in captivity. Many broadcasters quickly came to perceive this almost total absence of ‘fresh’ talk, authenticated by the speaker’s spontaneous production of it, as a problem of credibility, particularly when addressing an audience that was fairly sensitive to propaganda.86 Radio Stuttgart had become aware of this early on through a show called Die öffentliche Meinung spricht (‘Public Opinion Speaks’), which featured anonymous commentaries, labelled as ‘the opinion of a listener from Stuttgart’ (for example) which were read by the reporter Alfred Braun. Although Braun was well known throughout Germany, the anonymity of the letter-writers, along with

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-100 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 101 the heavy-handed nature of the opinions, did not make for convincing broadcasts. All the same, practice in the US zone was normally for trained announcers to handle most of the speaking. The main exceptions to this were political commentators, such as Herbert Gessner. The attempt to authenticate his words as his individual opinion through the standard American broadcasting disclaimer (‘the views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the station’) met with confusion from German audiences. They heard in it an official condemnation of the speaker’s comments, and the practice was soon abandoned.87 In the British zone, they took the opposite approach, and distributed guidelines based on BBC practice that manuscripts should ideally be written by their speakers or at least adapted to the speaker’s personality. Conversational tone and allusion to personal experience were also considered helpful.88 The exception to this rule in the early years was also quite telling: economic commentator Julia Nusseck’s youthful female voice was not considered authoritative enough to be credible to her ‘serious’ subject matter and so her commentaries were read by a man. Attempts to make scripts sound more dynamic also brought more speakers into play and emphasized their individual voices. Longer segments of information, as well as lighter segments, were likely to be scripted for two or three voices, sometimes in dialogue with each other (see Figures 3.2 and 3.3). In addition to loosening up the sound of the broadcast, such practices made listeners more aware of distinctions in voices.89 Women’s voices also began

Figure 3.2 Team of speakers during the show Kreuz und quer durch Deutschland (‘All Around in Germany’). In the middle, Ms Schmitz. Photo: SWR/Vollrath.

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Figure 3.3 Echo des Tages (‘Echo of the Day’) daily news and reportage programme, begun at the NWDR in 1947. Team of speakers (right to left) Elef Sossidi, Tessy Kuhls and Werner Jörg Lüdecke (author of the programme). Photo: NDR. to appear in such teams of broadcasters, which created a further contrast and marked a clear departure from Nazi-era tradition, when such mixed dialogues were confined almost entirely to women’s programmes and variety shows. These dialogues also cast speakers as personalities, normally as people ‘playing themselves’, as was in the case in request programmes such as Radio Munich’s musical requests or the SWF’s film programmes. Authenticity of speech was further recognized as an important weapon in the general competition, and eventual war of words that was developing between the Western and Soviet powers. In particular, it was an area where many at the station in the Soviet zone felt they had a deficit, particularly in political broadcasts.90 The need to come up with broadcasts that were able to convince all of the various internal groups at the stations who were vying for power and legitimacy, as well as the Soviet authorities, made the production of truly fresh and spontaneous broadcasting even more difficult than it was in the West. Some ‘authenticating’ elements were not deliberate. Shortages of staff, material and organization at the post-war stations, combined with the fact that many of the staff were new to broadcasting, often created a different sort of ‘looseness’ in programmes. Internal station documents and a significant number of listener complaints attest to various small and large breaches of radio etiquette, such as stammering, mispro- nunciations and other slips of the tongue.91 The result often sounded

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-102 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 103 somewhat amateurish in the ears of listeners, as well as some leading station staff, and was hardly encouraged. There is no way of determining whether, where and to what extent such relatively frequent moments of human error endeared or alienated audiences. It does seem safe to say, however, that such occurrences created an image of many radio voices as authentic people, their ‘authority’ as competent broadcasters notwithstanding. As anecdotal evidence of this, a short piece in Radiow- elt describes a case where an announcer played the wrong record: ‘Then comes the voice of the woman announcer [Ansagerin], slightly embarrassed, but with nice chumminess [Burschikosität]: “Sorry, dear listeners, I got the wrong record!’’ And if I am not mistaken, I believe I hear for the first time from this announcer a slight hint of a Bavarian accent.’92 In this passage, what pierces the public ‘face’ of the speaker is not the microphone, but a simple mistake, but what fills the void are markers of personal authenticity, marked here by the less formal tone of voice and the trace of dialect. The result of this shock of familiarity as portrayed here is clearly a sense of closer connection with the speaker rather than a disruption of the broadcast. From listener letters it becomes very clear that many had very strong – and widely differing – opinions about voices and what form of speaking should be used for which occasions. The following letter, complaining about the reporting by Andreas Günter (actually Elef Sossidi, see Figure 3.3) and Gregor von Rezzori reporting from the Nuremberg trials for the NWDR, is a case in point:

It should simply not be allowed that speakers address each other during the broadcast (and in this case using the informal ‘you’). It should furthermore never happen again that the speakers find themselves completely unprepared for such an historic event. The second speaker, Herr von Ritory [sic] may be a brilliant moderator, but proved here to be incompetent with his undignified report. People of his kind should introduce evening cabaret shows, but never again appear for such occasions!! In future, reports of historic events, especially of such shocking occurrences, the German listener expects dignified, objective and well-considered reporting.93

Although this is one response to one broadcast, it not only demonstrates how closely some listeners paid attention to matters of presentation, but it also shows that not all attempts to create more personal, lively broadcasts were appreciated. Indeed, here the expressions of personality (in its anglophone sense) are seen as markers of a lack of objectivity.

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These various and sometimes contradictory aspects of production added up to a programme that often sounded like exactly what it was: in a state of transition. While many of the genres of programming had stayed roughly the same, the way in which they were approached was sometimes radically different, due not least to the way they were delivered. These tensions would be an ongoing feature of radio production for many years. A 1953 discussion of sport-reporting styles in various countries captured the contradictory demands placed on radio speakers:

The report must appeal in its linguistic form through richly varied images, should go in-depth with the aim of creating a mental- spiritually complete experience, and in spite of that be a true image of the course of events. The speaker himself should show just as much personal participation in the event as he [sic] maintains inner distance and ability to judge. The radio sport reporter the way the German listener wants him is, viewed under the light, impossibility! Here, too, our national character of always wanting to turn ideals into reality without compromise becomes apparent.94

As we have seen, however, far from pointing to any sort of overarching ‘national’ trait, such contradictory desires for reporters in fact reflect a long-standing inability of national theories and ideologies in Germany to come to grips with the practices and expectations of broadcasting. It is against this somewhat complicated backdrop that we must view the case of Peter von Zahn with which I started this section. In the first issue of Hör Zu, the first edition of what would become the regular feature ‘Die/den möchte ich sehen’ was dedicated to Peter von Zahn (see Figure 3.4).95 The photo is so obviously posed to portray him as intro- spective that one is tempted to read it as a playful attempt to pierce the ‘mask’ of external appearance. The description that accompanies it, however, is couched without irony in terms that closely resemble descriptions of the ‘new man’:

Two months after the collapse one heard this voice in Germany for the first time. Since then it has belonged to the solid core of the NWDR. What it said was not always new, but it said it in a new way: civil, personal, from person to person, with heart. Some people find it too soft, for some Peter von Zahn speaks too slowly. But on the other hand, everyone can understand him. The spoken broadcasts of the NWDR all have something of the unique quality of the 33-year old of today: simple, but not primitive, moderate without being devoid of emotion.96

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Figure 3.4 Peter von Zahn, from the first issue of Hör Zu, 1946. Source: Axel Springer AG.

This short blurb highlights the multiple significations that were attached to Peter von Zahn through his voice: his emergence as ‘new’ after ‘the collapse’; his vague connection with the pre-1945 past (‘what it said was not always new’) and his widespread familiarity in the present; his position as being one of the audience (speaking ‘person to person’ so that ‘everyone’ understands him) and at the same time as symbolic of the station and the programme as a whole (a sense reinforced by his being the first photo printed in the new journal). Listening to recordings now, one does not hear immediately what sounded radically new about his voice in 1945, not least because it became the example for so many journalists after him.97 It is relatively high-pitched, somewhat nasal and youthful-sounding, with a distinct Saxon accent, audible particularly in the vowel sounds.98 This regional connection was underlined when he occasionally spoke in full Saxon dialect as a sort of self-parodying party trick in less serious broadcasts.99 His slow speed of delivery, noted in the blurb above, was combined with unusually placed pauses, traits which he also attributed in part to adapting from his native Saxon dialect.100 Of themselves, none of these

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-105 9780230_009035_04_cha03 106 Voices in Ruins elements were particularly out of the ordinary on German radio. As we have seen, more familiar or conversational styles of speaking were not uncommon during ‘lighter’ segments, such as morning and light music programmes. His speed of delivery would also not have been out of place either in various forms of Heimat reportage or in any of the various form of ‘morning celebrations’, both of which were important parts of post- war schedules. Traces of regional accents were also not unheard-of in certain segments of the programme, and the ‘struggle with dialect’ was often an authenticating part of speaker’s biographies.101 Perhaps what was most novel was that all of these elements were combined in one voice and that it came from a person in the relatively authoritative position of a political commentator and section head. Through his frequent and distinctive presence in the airwaves, von Zahn became a widely known personality and quickly became the personal addressee of enormous amounts of post from listeners. These ranged from thoughtful discussions of current issues through to complaints about foul language used on the airwaves through to invitations to meet in person.102 Some of von Zahn’s accessibility drew in part from a perception of him as a German, separate from the occupation power. He caused a great stir in late 1946 with a commentary called ‘Umgang mit Siegern’ (dealing with victors) in which, among other things, he reminded listeners that victors were only human, and easily spooked by Germans. As such, he claimed they ‘need special treatment, like frightened game or embarrassed children. So: no sudden movements, no unexpected shouts’.103 This gentle mocking of the occupation troops was coupled with more serious criticism of the occupiers, but also acknowledgement of the destruction Germans had unleashed across the continent. The commentary proved quite controversial, and also was the subject of a great deal of post to the station. These gestures helped to authenticate von Zahn to many people as a ‘man of the people’. As he writes in his memoirs,

The petrol station attendant did not ask, do you have ration cards? He said, hey you are so-and-so! If you confirmed this, the floodgates of political contrariness could open, or out would come the information that from listening one had always assumed I was small and dark-haired and wore horn-rimmed glasses. Even more surprised now to meet a young man with blond hair. Oh, put those ration-cards away!104

This description is clearly a composite of different encounters, but is actually quite in keeping with the sorts of reactions that are visible in post

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-106 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 107 he received. The reference to his physical appearance highlights another factor that made him seem radically new: the high-pitched, thoughtful and occasionally somewhat academic-sounding voice came from a body that bore all the hallmarks of the Nazi racial ideal and had until recently been an officer in the German army. The relationship between von Zahn’s presence as a voice on the airwaves and his past as a German officer came into the public eye shortly after he took up his new post at the head of the NWDR studio in Dusseldorf, where one of his main jobs was to report regularly on the situation in the Ruhr. In September of 1944, von Zahn had written a newspaper article called ‘Unser Trotz’ (‘our defiance’) encouraging the readers to hold out against the ‘brutal’ forces of the Allies. His wife, a British citizen, had been staying with the Zahn family friends the von Stauffenbergs, two of whom were at the centre of the nearly successful assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944. The article, according to von Zahn, was written in an attempt to prove his loyalty to the regime and save his wife.105 The article was brought to light in the Hamburger Volkszeitung, which stood close to the communist party, shortly after von Zahn had delivered a commentary in favour of the Ruhr statute, which was opposed by many parties in Germany. Von Zahn took time in one of his commentaries to defend himself in which he drew heavily on his position with relation to the audience. The title Vertrauensbasis zwischen Publizisten und Hörer (‘the basis of trust between journalists and listeners’) reflected von Zahn’s overall rhetorical strategy. He explained the surrounding circumstances of the article and, addressing the fact that portrayals of the July 20 plot in the Soviet zone had shifted from positive to negative, also pointed to his brother-in-law, who as part of the communist resistance had spent time in a concentration camp.106 As the title of the commentary suggests, however, these points were framed by the overall interpretation of the article as an attempt to break the ‘trust that has accumulated over the course of the three and a half difficult years between a certainly not very small number of listeners and readers and a few German journalists’.107 The circumspect terms with which he asserted the existence of this trust were of course part of this rhetorical strategy. He finished the comment by pointing to the article’s timing, coming shortly after his commentary on the Ruhr statute, repeating the reference to accumulated trust:

It was of course not pleasant that someone stood up and advised calm, caution and reflection. Someone who in addition had gained a little bit of trust in some circles in three and a half years of journalistic activity. He had to be removed; his voice had to be discredited.108

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By invoking the relationship between himself and the audience, von Zahn highlighted the aspects of his familiarity to the listeners as being more important than his work in the past. The reference here to his voice – and after the word ‘voice’ he placed a short, characteristic von Zahn pause – was to be taken literally. This he was able to set in contrast to the ‘foreign’ powers behind the newspaper that attempted to unseat him. To be clear, I am not suggesting that his response to the accusations was disingenuous, nor arguing that this one commentary saved his career. Given the state of relations between the Soviet and the Western zones in Germany at that point, it seems unlikely that this would have forced his resignation. This shows, however, how he was able to invoke his own sincere character and sense of relationship with the audience in mounting this defence, traits that were borne in no small part by the presentation of his voice. Peter von Zahn’s novelty as a speaker came not merely from how he spoke, but also in what capacity. It was that he spoke from a political commentator and representative of the institution of the radio that made his voice seem radically new to most, and like the first exemplar of a ‘new man’ to some. For all of his popularity, as well as his influence on broadcasting in years to come, it is also important to remember that his voice was also reason for many listeners to reject his style of speaking, particularly in the early years of his career. Some rejection of him was of course also based in part on the sensitive issues on which he offered comment, not least the Ruhr issue. The accusation about his past was by far not the most potentially career-damaging attack that would come his way as a result of it. It is nevertheless quite telling that as he changed in capacity more from political commentator to reporter, his popularity, and the appreciation of his voice also improved. A survey conducted in 1952 on reactions to von Zahn’s ‘roving reporter’ series Von Nah und Fern (‘From Near and Far’) and Aus der neuen Welt (‘From the New World’) showed a far more favourable reaction to his reports from the Ruhr. Above all, the earlier survey had shown a strong division of opinion ‘not about the series, but about its speaker’:

Peter v. Zahn was often described as ‘grumbler’ ‘demagogue’ and ‘constant critic’, especially in political and politico-economic matters. In addition, his manner of speaking was described as ‘unbearable.’ If the show From Near and Far led to a substantially more favourable resonance with listeners, From the New World finds an audience even more open and benevolent. Although the voices that reject Peter von Zahn’s manner of speaking have not fallen silent, they have moved

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into the background behind the positive judgments. A second notable characteristic is undoubtedly the fact that – as opposed to the year 1950 – women represented proportionally the higher percentage of the listening audience of his broadcasts.109

The report offers no reason why the presence of more women in the survey should make it show a bias in favour of his voice. The implication is that women, traditionally associated with more chatty, personable speech and with lighter and less political sections of the programme would ‘naturally’ react more positively to such a speaker.

Familiarity: radio saves the cinema stars?

The discussion thus far has been entirely concerned with the presence of people who were associated directly with the post-war radio institutions, in most cases as permanent employees. The struggles over their personal pasts and their presentation was therefore in part also about the legitimacy of the new radio institutions in representing Germany. Most of these people were primarily known as voices on the radio. In this final section, I will explore the peculiar functioning of the radio in society by considering the case of cinema stars, that is, personalities who were unquestionably known to German audiences but whose public presence was not as fully circumscribed by the radio. With the disappearance from the public sphere of the top Nazi leadership, stars played a dispro- portionate role as representatives of the nation. I will look to the ways in which star personas were produced and shaped through the radio, shedding light on an often-overlooked point of overlap between radio and cinema. Furthermore, I will show how through their presentation of stars, the radio institutions and programme press positioned themselves and the medium of the radio within the lives of listeners and in relation to the problematic nation. Economically and symbolically, stars were particularly available to the radio stations immediately after 1945. Stardom is by definition a multimedia phenomenon; what grants people star status is the series of significations that surrounding them, which work both inside and outside the cinematic text. Stars in Germany, particularly in Nazi Germany were, if anything, even more multiply mediated than their Hollywood counterparts due to the integration of media industries and dictatorial state. Dismantling and denazifying UFI, the monolithic German film industry, had a higher priority for the Western Allies than the producing of new films, and the shortage of resources for film-making meant

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-109 9780230_009035_04_cha03 110 Voices in Ruins that there was not a great deal of available cinema work in the Western zones. Stars’ old work was still kept in the public eye through the release of a number of ‘acceptable’ titles from the UFI back catalogue, including premieres of some films that had not been released before the war’s end, but most new performance opportunities were to be found on stage and on the radio, or often both at once in shows such as large variety programmes.110 For less well-known cinema actors, the move to radio could end up more or less permanent, as in the case of Liselott Klingler, hailed in the late 1930s as a budding new film star, and in 1945 hired at Radio Munich as an announcer of light entertainment (co-presenter of the popular music request programme with Ernst Höchstötter) and women’s programmes.111 Besides ‘direct’ encounters with cinema stars on the radio in the forms of songs or radio plays, the programmes of the post-war era began very quickly to update listeners on the world of film in regular film preview and discussion shows. At the SWF, this was an interactive programme, hosted by four hosts in a chatty format (the hosts used first names only and addressed each other and the audience with the informal ‘you’), where listeners could write in to request what stars or films they wanted to hear about, or to hear songs from the films. No doubt this interactive nature, and its connection with what ‘everyone’ wanted to know, made the show extremely popular, particularly with German prisoners of war who were listening from outside of Germany.112 The radio programme press, which in many ways doubled as illustrated magazines, also re- cemented such connections between listeners, the radio and world of cinema stars. Hör Zu for example, ran a weekly feature called ‘Wo sie blieben und was sie trieben’ (where they were and what they were up to) that brought listeners up to date with the activities of a well-known personality. The largest proportion of these were UFI film stars, although they also included some Hollywood stars, famous musicians, conductors and other celebrities.113 As the title of the series suggested, these were short articles designed very much to bring readers back ‘up to date’ with familiar stars after they had lost touch during the war. Such connections with the world of stars, particularly through the radio, and in connection with the programme press possessed the same sense of ‘life in parallel’ as serial drama and news highlighted in the previous chapter.114 In keeping with the overall construction of entertainment cinema as ‘non-political’, and very much like the ‘Die/den möchte ich sehen’ features in the front of the magazine, these biographies mentioned very little about the actors’ relations to the Nazi regime, and resistance to or repression by the Nazi regime are not given any significant meaning.115 Lu Seegers has

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-110 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 111 noted Hör Zu’s overall nostalgic conception of pre-war entertainment, also to be found in the announcements of appearances of Nazi-era stars on the post-war stations.116 The stars’ voices, according to one 1947 article, allowed a ‘look back on the years when we were doing better. And this remembering can lift us for a few hours out of grey everyday life, out of the worries and needs of our times, can for a short time render forgotten – what we have lost’.117 Popular stars thus presented a meeting place of past and present. Through their performances, they appeared as symbols of an intact world in the past. As people, and personalities, they also represented the continuities of ideal types into the present. Some of this stems from a key aspect of stars highlighted by Richard Dyer, namely their contradictory construction as simultaneously ‘ordinary’ and ‘special’.118 To explore these dynamics, I will focus analysis here around two different star appearances on the radio, one ‘special’ and one ‘ordinary’. Rather than look at dramatic performances, I have chosen moments where the stars appeared as themselves. For one, this was a situation that was to be found almost uniquely on the radio, and furthermore is where the dual presence of the star as person and as sign is perhaps most apparent. I will look first at the ‘extraordinary’ conversation between Axel Eggebrecht and Mathias Wieman at Radio Hamburg in 1945 mentioned above, where Wieman’s apparent involvement in the Nazi era was explicitly discussed. Next, I will turn attention to an ‘ordinary’ performance by the late Ilse Werner as the finale of the SWF’s anniversary variety show in 1947, and point to the various ways this performance was framed with regard to the audience. These are certainly two very different contexts, but in each case, I will show how the performative aspects of the star’s personality were addressed and framed through the radio into narratives of German pasts and present. Mathias Wieman began his career during the Weimar Republic and grew to prominence as a well-known heroic actor in the Third Reich, having starred as Michelangelo (Michelangelo, Curt Oertel, 1940) and Robert Schumann (Träumerei, Harald Braun, 1944) on screen and as Faust (Schauspielhaus Hamburg, 1940) on stage. His status of ‘German genius’ had also earned him a seat on Ufa’s powerful ‘artistic committee’ in the late 1930s, which set out to stamp German film with a particular National (Socialist) aesthetic.119 He was also well known as the main voice of the very popular Sunday morning radio programme the ‘Unser Schatzkästlein’ (‘Our Little Box of Treasure’, about which see Chapter 5), where he recited the ‘treasures’ of German poetry. In a very real sense, Wieman was the embodiment, and above all voice, of ‘high’ German culture.

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His interview with Axel Eggebrecht was extraordinary in many ways. Apart from being one of the very first discussions on the airwaves where Germans discussed the issue of personal complicity with the regime, its format of a discussion between two Germans speaking as themselves was essentially unique. Broadcasting precedents for such an encounter did not exist, and it seems to draw alternately on a variety of modes, such as star interview, educational sketch or radio debate. Listening to the conversation in full, it is clear from the fully formed, often dramatic sentences they speak, and not least the occasional rustling of paper, that the conversation was scripted (hence its sounding like an educational sketch), although it does occasionally sound as if they might also be improvising. Both men had experience as script writers, and it is likely that the dialogue was a collaborative effort.120 Some commentators have pointed to the conversation’s scripted nature as an inauthenticating aspect that listeners will have dismissed as all-too-blatant propaganda.121 While this is certainly an important consideration, understanding the conversation in its different registers, particularly as a star performance, suggests a more nuanced reading of the programme’s significations and ambiguities, and well as to some of the particular ways in which radio helped to construct public personalities after the war. The conversation opens like an interview with a star, with Eggebrecht asking Wieman about his plans, and whether he will stay in Hamburg. Wieman responds that he is currently in one of the Allied-held control areas where he gives poetry readings and care for the soldiers who are waiting for their release. Eggebrecht praises him for undertaking this ‘political task’, and does not mention that this current task might be connected to some of the difficulties Wieman was having getting permission to perform in other venues. Indeed, the issue of Wieman’s actual political stance under National Socialism is taken care of early in the interview. Eggebrecht brings up a case where Wieman had been in open conflict with the regime and had been attacked publicly for doing so, to which he adds ‘and you are being attacked again today, if for completely different reasons’.122 When Eggebrecht asserts that he was publicly perceived as connected to the Nazi regime, Wieman answers with a litany that would come to sound very familiar over the years that followed: ‘I can’t imagine that. I was never in the party. I was banned by Goebbels for years. In the end, I kept myself ever more clearly and visibly distant from everything that was officially desired.’ Eggebrecht affirms this, almost impatiently: ‘I know that. I know all that, and that’s why I am sitting next to you with a clear conscience’ and with that, 3 minutes into the 15-minute conversation, the question of Wieman’s personal political beliefs is closed for

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-112 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 113 the rest of the interview. Wieman’s involvement on Ufa’s ‘artistic board’ or his work in Ich Klage An is not discussed. Instead, Eggebrecht pro- ceeds to question why it is that people associated Wieman, the ‘portrayer of idealistic youth, yes, how should I say it? German dreamers?’, with National Socialism. The term ‘dreamer’, to which both return throughout the conversation, refers both generally to Wieman’s star persona and specifically to his 1944 film role as Robert Schumann. Eggebrecht asserts that he ‘embod[ied] in appearance and effect a type that the empire of darkness could place as a veritable ideal before its seduced youth. The so-called heroic, northern person. Through you a nebulous, hazy ideal image began to gain form and colour’. Eggebrecht attacks Wieman for being a dreamer who attempted to preserve the nobler or higher aspects of German culture, largely through his embodiment of those aspects. Yet, it is precisely these aspects that Wieman continued to embody in the interview. Its lack of authenticity as ‘fresh talk’ notwithstanding, the broadcast is quite effective aurally, marked by the contrast of Wieman’s trained deep, rich tones, and Eggebrecht’s dry, higher pitched and somewhat piping voice. This contrast is emphasized by Wieman’s frequent use of dramatic radio style, featuring a broad range of pitch, speed and dynamics, and Eggebrecht’s generally quicker and more conversational tone and language. Eggebrecht’s knowledge of Wieman’s past displayed in the opening sentences, as well as the less formal mode of address they adopt, using the formal ‘you’ (Sie) but using only surnames and not titles, establish an important level of familiarity between the two men. This basic level of intimacy forms the basis for the very hard questioning of Wieman at the centre of the conversation. At times, Eggebrecht frankly scolds the actor, to which the latter responds at first chastised, and then building once more into dramatic mode. This happens twice in succes- sion in the following exchange, which begins with Wieman addressing Eggebrecht’s condemnation of his role in the Schatzkästlein and in the poetic ‘ceremonial hours’ for the Hitler Youth:

Wieman: Yes, er, Eggebrecht. You are now accusing me ...of having ...participated, of having done something. You consider what I ...er, er, what I did artistically to be the misguided acts of a thoughtless dreamer. Isn’t that a contradiction? [brief pause, then, declamatory:] Was it not right and necessary that I tried to realise my, well let’s say it: my dream? Eggebrecht:[leaping in immediately] That’s just it! You couldn’t do that! If you believed that, you were just dreaming yourself. And there are

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times when one is not allowed to dream. Otherwise the dreamer is simply misused by those who act, by those who act brutally. (Wieman: mmm) He becomes, I want to use an image here, he becomes the beautifully painted fireplace screen, behind which it is damned easy to start up a hellish fire that afterwards sets the whole world ablaze. Wieman:[Quietly] Yes. Yes. Maybe it was like that. But – [voice now louder, firmer:] I want to try to say something more. You see, there is not only this world. [pause] There are powers that stand above it, that incorruptibly and indestructibly endure every collapse. These [pause] are what I want to serve and these are what I wanted to serve then.123

The scripting of the conversation actually reinforces its peculiar double voice: both men literally ‘play themselves’. Wieman’s response to Eggebrecht’s questioning is at once an unsuccessful defence of his star persona as well as a sincere performance of it. The stopping and stammering as he looks for words (whether he is looking for them in his mind or on paper is not always clear) authenticates him as a person, while his ascent once more into eloquence (with voice slowing dramatically on ‘right and necessary’ and then ‘incorruptibly and indestructibly’ in the passage above) affirms him as persona. Eggebrecht, too, shifts registers, but stays far closer to the conversational. In the passage cited above, he stays aurally and linguistically ‘down to earth’, first announcing his use of a high-flung metaphor then grounding it once more (whilst maintaining, as he does throughout when referring to the Nazi era, its infernal theme) with the colloquial phrase ‘damned easy’. Most of the interview continues in this manner, with Wieman pointing to ways in which he attempted to preserve an ideal German culture, and Eggebrecht dismissing them by showing how they were hijacked or ignored by the regime. The interview approaches its climax as Wie- man asks, ‘but what should we have done? Deny our dream?’ Eggebrecht responds bluntly, ‘No. But ...fight for it. Or ...be silent for it. And therein lies a guilt that I, too, feel very strongly today.’ With this reference to his own role in the Nazi film industry, Eggebrecht states that in retrospect even the most ‘unpolitical activity’ was too much, and that only through concrete resistance does one earn the right to cultural life ‘when demons seize control of the powerless world’. From this point on in the interview, they talk almost entirely in terms of ‘we’, which means by turns the two men in before the microphones and Germans in general. After finally conceding that the task of attempting to save some parts of German

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-114 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 115 culture had been in vain, Eggebrecht finally invites Wieman to reflect on what is to be done now.

Wieman: I would say: on top of guilt, comes atonement, and not penance. I want to say: the demons above us have been chased away. And now it is necessary to drive the demon out of our own soul. And one should not say to us, you can’t do that, you are all infected. Isn’t it precisely in the sick organism that the healing defensive remedy, the saving serum, develops? We see signs of it everywhere. Yesterday ...er ...I gave you the writings of a released officer. There this man speaks, as he calls it, of the dangerous characteristic of the German to wrap even doubtful things in the mantle of faithful idealism. That is one side, which can be misled, one side of that German characteristic that I think we need to call upon and point toward the positive.

The infernal symbolism used by both men was typical of early discussions of the Nazi past, both in East and West and helped to build a rhetorical wall between National Socialist ‘demons’ and ‘ordinary’ Germans. Christoph Classen argues that such language may be read as evidence of how the terminology of National Socialism was internalized and automatically reused afterwards against the Nazis.124 A similar rhetorical continuity may be seen in Wieman’s invocation of ‘infec- tions’ in the ‘organism’ of the people. As invoked here, it also carried over more specifically onto Wieman’s body with the implication that he already developed his ‘immunity’ before the end of the war, and that as an embodiment of German tradition, his physical presence among the German soldiers would help them develop their own immunity. Overall, the effect of the conversation is contradictory. Eggebrecht argues forcefully, and Wieman concedes, that building and maintaining his star persona as the voice and body of ‘high’ German traditions only served to foster the Nazi regime. Yet rhetorically and aurally, Wieman maintains and rebuilds that same familiar persona. On the purely aural level, Wieman sounds the part of the tragic hero throughout, defending ‘true Germanness’ not against National Socialism, but against Eggebrecht’s hard questioning. The end, however, is not tragedy: in the closing moments of the conversation Wieman once more assumes the mantle of the voice of German literature by closing with lines of poetry. ‘I see it this way: [reciting voice:] let each one light his tiny light, and a tiny light is, as the poet says, larger and more forceful than any darkness.’ Eggebrecht interjects a ‘warning’ to listeners not to escape once more

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-115 9780230_009035_04_cha03 116 Voices in Ruins into ‘dreams’ but to remain clear-headed and in this world, accepting ‘responsibility for every small action, for every thought and every word’. Wieman then closes with a Dichterwort (‘poet’s word’): ‘you should not dream your life, but live what you dream.’ Thus the ultimate outcome of the interview remained thoroughly ambiguous, seeming to hang in the air between trying to show some sort of change in Wieman, but also to point to his consistent behaviour as a person, that was then ‘misused’ by the Nazis. The interview nevertheless had consequences. If Eggebrecht is to be believed, the interview enabled Wieman to continue his career, much of which he did in precisely the same sorts of roles as he had played before.125 Ilse Werner (1921–2005) had had a very different career from Wieman’s. She became a rising star only in the late 1930s and early 1940s, playing mostly ‘girl next door’ roles. Such a persona made her particularly ideal for starring roles in films such as Wunschkonzert (‘Request Show’, Willi Forst, 1940) where she played the sweetheart of soldier Herbert (Carl Raddatz) and by extension all of the soldiers at the front. Naturally, she also appeared in the radio programme of the same name from time to time and was held up as a soldier’s sweetheart. Shortly after her film career had begun, she also began a career in singing, where she became known above all as a talented whistler, which she displayed with almost virtuoso precision in the jazz-infused title song to the 1942 film Wir Machen Musik (‘We’re Making Music’, Helmut Käutner). She had begun work briefly at Radio Hamburg immediately after the war, but was soon barred from performing pending consideration of her role in the Nazi film industry. She was allowed to perform again around the end of the 1946. Even once she was allowed, however, her attempts to restart a film career were met with limited success. Like many young actresses known from the Nazi era, Werner had difficulty competing with the large number of up-and-coming young stars such as Hildegard Knef who were not known before 1945.126 Once allowed to perform, she appeared primarily as a singer, before leaving Germany in 1948 as the wife of an American journalist. Werner’s difficulty in restarting a cinema career in Germany must be seen paradoxically alongside what appears to be fairly widespread popularity. A 1947 survey conducted for the SWF’s film show, for example, put Werner among the most popular stars, alongside fellow UFA stars Kristina Söderbaum and Marika Rökk.127 Particularly once she was no longer barred from performing, she often appeared on the radio both live and on record. The SWF perhaps went furthest to promote her appearances to listeners, although she was actually living in either the British

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-116 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 117 or US zone much of the time.128 She appeared on the front cover of the first issue of French zone’s weekly illustrated Funkwelt in 1947 and again the following year 1948.129 It was thus fitting that Werner would be the finale in the variety performance to mark the one-year anniversary of the SWF, alongside a number of other ‘stars’ most of whom were well known before the war. In a two-page photo spread called Sterne am Himmel des Südwest- funks (‘stars in the sky of the SWF’) describing the event, its prominent stars were interviewed. Lale Andersen, for example, says ‘in 1942 I was barred from performing. Now I am going to nourish my old love of the microphone again. I am really an old radio fixture’.130 She neglects to mention that the bar on her during the war had been lifted nine months later due to audience demand, and instead makes it sound as if she is returning to the microphone for the first time following the war. Dir- ectly beneath this, Magda Hain, famous for her rendition of Gerhard Winkler’s best-selling 1943 song ‘Capri-Fischer’, is quoted saying simply ‘in 1942’ – the same year Andersen was banned – ‘I hung up my career as a secretary and became a coloratura soprano.’131 In one of the only artist ‘interviews’ in the article that discusses the transition into the post-war era at all, Ilse Werner states, ‘I don’t have any film plans for now. My work on the radio is fulfilling enough at the moment. One shouldn’t push one’s way to the top again so quickly – be modest, and, starting all over from the beginning, show that we are not all such bad people.’132 While acknowledging that there has been a break in her career, Werner glosses over the fact that she was effectively barred from making films by making it sound as if it were her own choice. Particularly taken together, these statements reveal a great deal, not only about the relationship between film and radio, but also about the relationship between radio and the audience within the system of audiovisual stardom. Whereas cinematic aspect of stardom involved distance from the audience, the position of the star on the radio was one of familiarity, one that was reinforced multiply by the intimate registers of sound in both radio and cinema.133 Andersen’s presentation of herself as ‘an old radio fixture’ not only belies the fact that she had only been known to most radio listeners for at most four years, it also emphasizes the radio as a familiar, everyday feature of life. Similarly, Werner’s description of radio work as ‘starting from the beginning’ is quite telling. The implication is that being on the radio involves being among the listeners; it is being someone just like everybody else. Consequently, she portrays a rise from this position back into film stardom not only as a personal redemption, but rather something that will redeem everyone. While in a very different

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-117 9780230_009035_04_cha03 118 Voices in Ruins context, a logic similar to that in the Wieman interview was at work, namely the star’s redemption as representative of the nation’s redemption. Whereas Wieman would achieve this through remaining heroically true to German culture, however, Werner’s redemption would come through retracing the steps of the classic star narrative from ‘ordinary’ to ‘special’. The appearance of so many nationally known stars from before 1945 framed the event, even though it was celebrating the anniversary of the station for one occupation zone, as a national event. For one, it carried strong echoes of the national variety events such as the Wunschkonzert from pre-1945 broadcasting. These echoes of a national event provided the subtext for many of the performances. This was also clear in the statements of the stars mentioned above, and from many of the other performances in the show, which among other things, played heavily on stereotypes of other nations.134 These subtexts also shed light on the introduction given to Ilse Werner, accompanied by the composer Werner Bochmann and Josef Niessen, one of the longest given to any performer in the show:

Werner Bochmann discovered Ilse Werner in 1940. Wrote for her back then the well-known hits ‘Das ist meine Melodie’ [That is my melody] ‘Du und ich im Mondenschein’ [You and I in the moonlight], these little hits, these wonderful hits, that made her so famous. They are here together for the first time in public, and they are singing new creations from Werner Bochmann, at first a waltz, ‘Nur für Dich’ [only for you] and then a premiere! ‘Junger Mann, liebe fängt man aber anders an’, [young man, that’s not how you start love] sung tonight for the first time and Ilse Werner has asked through me for your forgiveness that she will be coming out with a small slip of paper where she’s written the words, the key words. She’s only learned the song yesterday, it’s really a tiny little slip of paper. Ilse Werner, Werner Bochmann, Josef Niessen: three stars in our radio sky – and what three stars are worth today...well, you know that yourself.135

The first thing that is striking about this announcement is the complete silence on her film career, which was what had genuinely ‘made her so famous’ and would certainly have been what came to mind for the audience when she appeared. This silence highlighted her connection with Bochmann and focussed on the novelty of that evening’s performance, which was authenticated as extremely new by Ilse Werner’s needing notes to perform the song. At the same time, the story of her ‘discovery’

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-118 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 119 fitted in with Werner’s star image as an ‘ordinary’ girl – certainly more than her background as the daughter of a Dutch consul from Indone- sia and classically trained actress would have. The final comment about the ‘worth’ of stars placed them back in the world of the listeners by couching them in the terms of other everyday commodities from the pre-war era. But the meaning, of course, was ambiguous: their ‘worth’ could mean either their increased value as now-scarce consumer commodities or their diminished purchasing power as familiar German stars in the changed post-war and post-Nazi world. Put more simply, it was up to the audience to decide if this premiere was, metaphorically speaking, finally a pound of real coffee or a big handful of now-worthless German currency. The pleasure of the comment lay in this ambiguity, which admitted enjoyment of the performance as well as a sense of ironic distance from it, coupled with the sense of community evoked by the shared joke. The comment highlights above all the fluid boundary between nostalgia and parody where so many popular productions of the era seemed to reside. Both nostalgia and parody are born of the simultaneous pro- prietary embrace of, and acknowledgement of distance from, familiar products of the past. Werner’s performance was, for her, unremarkable. As an actor, she had been trained at one of Germany’s best-known academies for both stage and screen; as a singer, on the other hand, she was essentially untrained until well into her film career and most of her professional singing was done into microphones.136 Her voice was a sturdy and melodious alto, but the important feature of her singing was her style, which seemed to draw as much on her skills as an actor as any training as a singer. She sang with little vibrato and drew often on speech-like diction, elements that were brought to the fore in her SWF performance, such as a short laugh on the word ‘laugh’ in the first song. In short, her singing was marked by its sincere style. The only actual speaking she did during her appearance was to announce the title of the second song, and apologize briefly again, using the familiar ‘you’, for using a crib sheet. Such personable singing was underlined by her trademark whistling, which she did on each of the songs. In this, perhaps more than anything else, she embodied the paradox of a star’s ‘specialness’ by elevating a sort of everyday skill to the level of a virtuoso. On the whole her performance was exactly what was expected: a brand-new production of what was well known; a virtuoso performance of ordinariness as the finale to a celebration of a special occasion. In her memoirs, Werner attempted to explain ‘why the thread to the audience had broken’ after 1945. ‘I had the bad luck that I was simply an

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“old UFA star’’ to people. Not old in years, but a known face.’137 Of course, we can only speculate on what her cinematic fortunes might have been had she not left for America in 1948. However, judging from her popularity on the radio at the time she left, it is equally hard to imagine that she would not have been able to continue as a radio personality. In fact, I would suggest that she was effective on radio for much the same reasons that it was problematic for her to restart a career in cinema. On screen, she was perhaps too present: at once too well known to symbolize the sort of innocent ‘fresh start’ through her ‘girl next door’ persona, and yet being known as such also made it difficult for her to embody narratives about the past convincingly. Performing as herself on the radio, however, she was a known, ‘ordinary’ sort of voice which at the same time channelled narratives about a more ‘special’ glamorous past. Eventually, she embraced this sort of dual signification as a trademark. When she did return to Germany and made a comeback in performing, it was mostly as a singer and television personality, although her previous career as an UFA star was always an important part of how she was known.138

Conclusion: strangely familiar

The relative preservation of the radio as a medium was only partially matched by any sort of stability in the voices and forms of address that came through it after 1945. The ongoing and contradictory efforts by Nazi broadcasters to find a mode of address that fitted within their ideology and still maintain a dwindling audience in the waning days of the war was mirrored at the occupied stations in the months and years that followed as they tried to build practices that would suit ever-changing visions of the nation(s) that were taking shape. The results were a series of experiments, more than a few false starts and bitter disputes both on and off the air about who would represent Germany on the radio and how. Nevertheless, the ongoing position of the radio in, and its address to, the private and domestic realms of listeners clearly did allow for certain narratives of continuity and discontinuity to form around particular personalities and forms of speaking. Both the narratives of continuity as well as those of change were ambiguous and often self-contradictory. This is visible above all in the division between ‘political’ and ‘non-political’ parts of the programme. While fierce political battles were waged on the air about the past activities of certain figures at the stations, the radio also presented listeners with a number of ‘ordinary’ German voices, some of whom were known

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-120 9780230_009035_04_cha03 Familiar Voices 121 and some who were not. Particularly in non-political sections of the programme, long-term attachments to a station and place could actually reinforce rather than hinder careers once initial political scrutiny was passed. These continuities legitimated not only people, but also the stations themselves in the eyes (or rather, ears) of many in the audience. In the overtly political portions of the programme, more open, personable forms of speech heralded a break with the Nazi past and the arrival of a ‘new man’ and new era of civil civic discourse. At the same time, more intimate modes of address in other parts of the programme implicitly or explicitly generated senses of continuity and familiarity that suggested a common past. As the cases of the two stars highlighted above show most clearly, these narratives were often made more ambiguous through the radio stations’ ambiguous dual role in society as both medium and public institution. Whereas the critical discussion of Wieman’s past also became a performance of his ‘eternal’ role as the voice of German literature, Ilse Werner’s ‘ordinary’ performance was also an extraordinary occasion that was coded in many ways as national, though whether it represented the past or present of the nation was not entirely clear. The intimate mass address uniquely enabled by radio does not by any means totally determine the meaning of broadcast speech or song, but it is never peripheral to it. To radio audiences in Germany, understandably dubious about the content of much radio programming in 1945, matters of presentation were perhaps more vital than ever to the credibility of information, but also of various forms of entertainment. Such aesthetic matters also represented a realm, like the light music programmes highlighted in the previous chapter, in which listeners themselves had felt enfranchised to speak back to programmers under National Social- ism and under Allied occupation alike. Discussions of presentation and presenters were a means for listeners to express their attachments, desires and expectations not only of specific presenters, but also their visions of ideal national subjects. Perhaps even more so than in discussions over the content of texts, it was in the presentation and reception of voices that listeners began to make sense of the past through the radio. Prising apart the interwoven discourses of legitimacy, authenticity and familiarity surrounding radio voices helps us to move beyond the questions of institutional denazification or aesthetic continuity which have up to now dominated discussion.139 Instead, they let us start to see what was actually at stake for speakers and listeners: the everyday relationship between their selves and the other imagined subjects with whom they shared past, present and uncertain future. Except for those associated most closely with the Nazi regime, radio seemed to render irrelevant

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-121 9780230_009035_04_cha03 122 Voices in Ruins notions of legitimacy based around one’s role in Nazi-controlled institutions or activities. Participation in Nazi-era radio sometimes caused unease around some speakers, but was seldom enough of itself to bar people from the microphone. On the contrary, radio training and the ability to speak as a familiar voice was more often helpful than detri- mental to a further career in broadcasting. This situation further loaded the senses of authenticity which mediate between the text and representation in broadcast speech, bringing to the fore and complicating the long-standing disjunctures between the sense of voice as marker of the person and marker of the nation. These notions were in turn complicated by the continuation of so many people who had worked in broadcasting and built up a series of familiar character traits that identified them to and with their audiences. As we have seen, these familiar traits were not always easy to reconcile with the new modes of address suggested by the discourse of the ‘new man’ and universal personhood, precisely because they would have undermined the very sense of personal continuity upon which the trust of personalities depends. For the most part, these contradictions were not resolved, but left sitting, sometimes uncomfortably, side-by-side. Modes of address changed often quite literally from one moment to the next. Within these unsettled styles of speaking and discourses surrounding the voice, there were a number of strategies of remembering and forgetting available. Taking this on board, we must also recognize that neither the apparent continuities nor the obvious changes necessarily represented a productive confrontation with the Nazi past. As we have seen, the continuities of personalities, particularly in lighter entertainment, were based around the assumption that these programmes were and had always been of themselves apolitical, in spite of any political use to which they had been put. These were also marked by modes of address that had fitted only loosely into official national socialist aesthetics. In other segments of the programme, by contrast, the re-orientation towards talk as an authentic production of personhood, rather than Persönlichkeit, whilst it represented an aural break with past practice, also suggested ways in which a continuous private, personal and apolitical past could be traced through the years of National Socialism.

9th June 2008 6:48 MAC/VIR Page-122 9780230_009035_04_cha03 4 Time Consuming: Addressing a Nation of Women1

[T]his much can be said with certainty: the German woman of all social strata will take part in working life far more than before, standing side by side with her fellow male workers, helping to turn the big wheel – the wheel of reconstruction. That is the economic side, which stems from the relative numbers of men and women. But another question is: what will become of the unique character of a woman? Is a woman’s unique character in danger? What will become of her actual womanliness – of her true being? Toni Püchel, ‘Is our womanly nature in danger?’ SWF, 19472

And who helps me? No-one. Well, the radio. Then it’s better. Hamburg housewife in the late 1940s, describing her household tasks3

Introduction

Gabriele Strecker, the head of women’s programmes at Radio Frankfurt, described Germany in the aftermath of the war as ‘optically speaking, a country of women’.4 The loss of millions of men over the course of the Second World War, as well as the large numbers that remained in captivity meant that in 1946, women outnumbered men by approximately 7 million. The imbalance was to be found primarily among the younger generations. There were over 1700 women between the ages of 25 and 30 in the Western zones for every 1000 men of similar age, and similar proportions in the age groups 20–25 and 30–35.5 Known generally as the Frauenüberschuß (‘surplus of women’), this situation became the focus of a number of debates about the order of German society that would

123

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-123 9780230_009035_05_cha04 124 Voices in Ruins emerge from the occupation. On the one hand, women had entered into the paid workforce in record numbers in the wake of wartime mobilization, and there were many who questioned both the right of women and the benefits to women in remaining there. On the other hand, the relative numbers of women and men gave rise to many questions about the future of women in the role of wives and mothers which had been heavily sanctioned during Weimar and Nazi years. High rates of youth criminality and widespread prostitution, symptoms in large part of the economic conditions in Germany, were taken as evidence of the moral degeneration caused by the want of proper familial order in society. For the men that remained or returned, the high levels of rape and prostitution were taken as evidence of their inability to protect the women in society, and further added to the humiliation of Germany’s military defeat.6 In short, there were few, if any, social issues in post-war Germany that did not revolve in a fundamental way around questions of where women would take their place in public and private spheres of society. The ambiguity of women’s position fed even deeper fears, such as that voiced by Toni Püchel of the Südwestfunk cited above, as to whether the very nature of women was ‘in danger’. The visibility of women in the immediate post-war period would also have profound impact on popular memory and the narratives of national identity that developed in the years that followed. In her study of post- war memory, Elizabeth Heineman shows how women’s experiences of the crisis years between 1943 and 1948 were ‘universalized’, and came to stand for the nation as whole in national narratives.7 Pointing to three specific images, the female victims of war, the ‘women of the rubble’ and the fraternizer with the occupation army/prostitute, she shows in each case how these images became abstracted into symbols of the German nation. The women victims of war, bombed by Western Allies, expelled and raped by armies from the East, recast the nation as a whole as the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of the war. ‘Women of the rubble’ presented an image of heroic reconstruction and hard work, whereas the fraternizing woman came to stand for the moral degeneration of ‘Western’ society caused by Germany’s defeat in war. In each of these symbols, Heineman points out, the images obscure the ambiguities in the stories of the women involved – or in the case of the victims of rape, obscure the women themselves8 – invariably to their detriment in receiving public aid or sympathy in their hardship. The ‘universalization’ of any immediate experience is almost always the accomplishment of mass media. In the case at hand, the radio was particularly implicated in helping to shape the consciousness of women

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-124 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 125 in public space after the war, not only because of the medium’s dominance, but through a series of long-standing associations with feminine spaces. As Kate Lacey has pointed out in her study of women’s radio before the war, in separate but parallel ways, women and radio broadcasting both issued fundamental challenges to the boundaries of public and private space.9 Just as women entered more fully into public life during the Weimar Republic as voters and paid workers, the radio began to bring public events and discussions into the traditionally feminine space of the home. Largely as a result of the economic crisis of the immediate post-war era, the roles of both women and the radio were also greatly expanded. Just as radio gained unprecedented dominance in Germany through the economic situation at the end of the war, the war and post-war situation mobilized women in public space as never before. The 1950s saw a great shift in this trend as many women left paid employment and devoted themselves to the domestic sphere once more. Until recently, feminist scholarship on post-war Germany has tended to focus on how this ‘withdrawal into the private’ effectively denied women a political voice, even whilst relying more heavily than ever on women’s unpaid labour in the home to support the economic recovery of Germany.10 Within this narrative, a greater political role of women in society is considered one of the many ways in which the ‘chance of 1945’ was missed in the Federal Republic.11 In her study on women and consumption in 1950s Germany, Erica Carter has argued convincingly for a re-evaluation of this narrative.12 Drawing on examples from government policy to city planning, she argues that in the social market economy of the Adenauer government of the 1950s, citizenship was redefined not around the political activity of the voter, but in the economic activity of the consumer – specifically the female consumer. This redefinition, she argues, gave women access to a new kind of public power in society. While acknowledging the many ways in which women did indeed bear the brunt of national recovery, she also points to the ambiguities inherent in women’s new social position. In what follows, I will bring the concerns in Lacey’s analysis of pre- 1945 women’s broadcasting forward into dialogue with Erica Carter’s study of post-war women’s consumption to show the fundamental role played by the radio in redefining the role of women in the developing West German society. The argument will proceed in three parts. In the first, I will examine the ambiguous positioning of women in public and private space in the post-war era, and the various ways these positions were reflected by the radio. I will outline the positions held by women and women’s programmes at the stations and in the schedules,

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-125 9780230_009035_05_cha04 126 Voices in Ruins providing a brief overview of shows produced by each station. In the next section, I will look more closely at the way programmes for women addressed women’s activity in society. I will argue that in the years of scarcity before the 1948 currency reform, a woman’s time gained unprecedented value as a consumer ‘commodity’. Building on arguments from Chapter 2, I will show how women’s programmes’ efforts to structure and discipline women’s time use prefigured women’s role as consumer citizens in the social market economy of the Federal Republic. Finally, in the third section, I will show how the image of the female (time) consumer was combined in women’s programmes with essential notions of femininity in creating new narratives of German national identity. Placing these ideas in the broader context of the debate on the role of women in society, I will show how they became instrumental in forging new definitions of femininity and Germanness that would take root in 1950s society. Although women’s programmes never made up a substantial part of the time of the programme week, ranging from 20 minutes per week in the earliest SWF schedules to the 45–60 minutes daily at Radio Munich, they represented an important meeting place of numerous discourses on everyday life as constructed by the radio. As a service targeted at one specific segment of the population, these programmes were given limited space in the schedule in keeping with the ethos of the radio as the ‘medium for all’. On the other hand, the ‘target group’, defined simply as women, represented over half of the audience, a fact of which radio broadcasters were well aware. A survey conducted by the Munich- based program guide Radiowelt in 1946 showed that women were not only a larger overall portion of the audience, but that the women also tuned in for an average of six hours per day – nearly 50 per cent longer on average than their male audience.13 Among this female audience, the popularity of broadcasts for women, especially among housewives, was also well documented.14 While the audience was defined largely as ‘the women’, it is important to emphasize here Doris Schubert’s reminder that ‘the women’ in Germany, even though many faced similar problems and issues, must not be considered as a homogenous group with similar backgrounds and experience, and still less as a ‘community of solidarity’.15 Furthermore, as Heineman asserts, ‘the German woman’, as a generic construct that emerged in the years following the war, generally stood for ‘German women who were politically and racially acceptable to the Nazi regime.’16 By addressing women as a single group, Frauenfunk programmes often created an illusory picture of a (national) women’s community, crossing

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-126 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 127 lines of class, generation and experience that tacitly accepted such assumptions.

A woman’s place

How ‘private’ is it? Besides the right to vote, which had been granted to women in Germany in 1918 (and denied to men and women equally after 1933), the most significant entry of women into public space during the first half of the twentieth century was in paid employment. With Germany’s rapid industrialization, and the push towards rationalization in the Weimar era, women had entered into paid work in record numbers. Shortly after the Nazis took power they instituted a programme of economic incentives for women to leave paid employment upon marriage, such as loans available if a woman left work, plus debt forgiveness for every child born afterwards. These programmes came in addition to laws that limited or prohibited women working in certain occupations as well as an active campaign vilifying ‘double earners’. While these programmes, on the whole, did not actually reduce the number of women in the workforce, they created a clear ideological picture of the ‘proper’ place of women within marriage and family.17 Rather than actively mobilizing women in industry, pre-war Nazi policy mobilized young women in private homes, requiring all girls to give a ‘service year’, working either in a household or as farm maid. With the start of the war, women were once more encouraged to enter into paid work, if cautiously, so as to avoid disturbing the ideological picture. In 1937, the armament drive had led the Nazis to drop the clause excluding working women from marriage loans, which both greatly increased the number who accepted them (42 per cent of marriages in 1939) and brought many more women into paid employment.18 Further active steps towards women’s employment were not taken until 27 January 1943, as the siege of Stalingrad was drawing to its devastating close, when it was decreed that all women between the ages of 17 and 45 register for service in defence of the nation. Even this policy made it clear that this was not to be a permanent situation. As women replaced more men in the workplace, they were normally granted temporary contracts, with the understanding that following the war, they would exit the workforce when the men returned. In spite of this change in policy, Nazi propaganda in the press and on the radio had remained largely silent on the subject of women’s work, both in trying to recruit women into the workforce and in acknowledging the women who were working there.19

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With the start of Allied occupation, there was a renewed mobilization of women, in both paid and unpaid employment. Almost seamlessly, the Allies continued the mandatory registration of women between the ages of 14 and 50 with labour exchanges and a short time later, the ‘service year’ for all single females under 21 was introduced in the North Rhine province and other parts of Germany.20 It was largely this programme which first gave rise to the now-iconic ‘women of the rubble’ (Trümmerfrauen), women employed to clear the rubble and debris left by the bombing. Other women were either forced into rubble clearing duty because they had belonged to Nazi women’s organizations, or indeed had taken up this work because physical labour would entitle them to a better ration card.21 In spite of the fact that household work involved longer hours and was usually more physically exhausting than paid labour, housewives were only granted the so-called ‘hunger or ascen- sion card’ (Hunger- oder Himmelfahrtskarte), which, sinking as low as 800 calories per day, literally meant slow starvation, unless one was able to find other means of obtaining food.22 Ironically, these ration cards were labelled ‘normal consumer’ (Normalverbraucher).23 In spite of the real and perceived challenges to women’s role as wives and mothers presented by their larger role in paid employment, Nazi propaganda, wartime bombing and post-war scarcity all served to re- focus many women on the private realm of the family as perhaps never before. As we have seen, Allied bombing of cities and Nazi domination of the public sphere had destroyed most sense of a national or community solidarity in wartime. What these forces had not accomplished, competition for scarce resources in the immediate post-war era completed. Theft, black market activity and any number of activities which would normally be unacceptable were undertaken in the name of the survival of one’s own family.24 Though for many women, memories remain of a larger social solidarity, both before and during the war, most contemporary evidence suggests that on a practical, everyday level, the family – specifically, one’s own family – became the primary focus of the effort to survive.25 Even within families, however, scarcity created great tensions as individual members – usually men in the cases that are cited – often stole or hoarded food from other family members.26 Faced with such scarcity, it was often the women, and the mothers, who were expected to sacrifice and do without so that husbands and children could have enough to eat.27 Given both these internal tensions within families and the living conditions in the post-war era, it would be problematic at best to speak of movement into or within private spheres of activity as a ‘retreat’.

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As a result of the war, and in particular city bombing, private life was on display as it had never been before. The everyday journey through Germany’s destroyed cities showed passers-by the private spaces of homes literally opened to public view – some of which still had people living in them. As part of Ernst Schnabel’s 1947 ‘collective diary’ experiment of the 29th of January, 1947,28 one female NWDR listener, portrayed in the broadcast with a thick Berlin accent, described her daily walk through her home city peering into living spaces laid bare by bombing:

‘Paul Düring, Dentist’ it says on the post. [Laughs] And the church has no roof, and here a whole block is missing, and here you can see they had a tiled bathroom. Sometimes they were also covered with green oil paint. But at least they had tiles in the kitchen! Last year, the year before, there were still sometimes tattered curtains hanging in the window frames, but now they’re gone too. Such worn things! Someone probably took all the curtain rods for firewood.29

The perverse sense of being able to peer from the street into kitchens and bathrooms, the private spaces of houses, is coupled here with mourning for a lost material cosiness, of a ‘normality’ and economic stability expressed through the trappings of intimate private space. In the living spaces that remained, cramped conditions challenged the sovereign private space of the single family, as families were forced to share available space. Those whose houses were destroyed by bombing were moved in with relatives or were given quarters in the houses that remained. In 1950, there were still only two dwellings for every three households, and nearly as many subtenants as there were primary renters.30 The home, as summarized by one contemporary source, ‘had lost its meaning as a place of relaxation from the pace of everyday life, as source of pleasure in life and as centre for the crystallization of the family’.31 In addition to those who had been bombed-out, the large numbers of refugees from the Eastern zones were often housed in large improvised shelters, emergency barracks and Quonset huts, shared by multiple families with only curtains or blankets between them for privacy. Such emergency shelters remained over 10 per cent of the total dwellings in many parts of Germany when the occupation ended. Another voice from the ‘29th of January’ (adapted from the letter that won first prize) reported from such a bunker at 3 A.M., describing conditions that must have been familiar to thousands of listeners:

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Forty people are too many for one shelter. You hear everyone who comes and goes. It goes on like this all night: in, out. It’s eating all those turnips that does it. The little one is crying again ...Just what should I cook today? ...If only you didn’t hear everything! Miss Kress’s bed is creaking next door. Has a visitor. And now old Schmidt is crying, too. Wants food. Can’t understand why his children are letting him go hungry. He’s crying. If only he wouldn’t scream! Wants to go home to his farm in Silesia, and just doesn’t understand anything anymore. And now two beds are creaking. And the kids are screaming again. And now someone’s singing back there too. Now someone’s singing too! Arrgh!32

These close living conditions made people privy to every aspect of private life of the people around them. As the woman’s comments in the broadcast make clear, these cramped conditions also meant that women’s sexual behaviour was on display at a time when it was also under increased moral scrutiny in public discourse. For many who lived as subtenants, who were mostly people on their own, the landlords or main tenants often took it upon themselves to police morals as well, controlling who could visit and when.33 This was a realm in which the radio played an important role in everyday life – much as it had during the Nazi era – acting as a sort of ‘acoustic curtain’ to maintain some form of privacy in such cramped conditions.34 Along with a broken visual divide between public and private space was a broken aural divide, where in a very different way to that described in Chapter 2, the radio served as a sort of boundary and gatekeeper.35 While private spaces were increasingly visible, the struggle for the means of everyday survival also meant that an increasing amount of ‘private’ activity was entering into public space. Public parks were ploughed up and allotted to private citizens to grow additional food. Notices everywhere in public space advertised private possessions available for barter against other needed goods. Even personal loss became a matter for public display, visible in the groups of women to be seen in most major train stations with photos of missing relatives, in the hope that an incoming traveller will be able to provide information of their fate. Erica Carter has rightly expressed doubt about the ready equation of women’s activities surrounding the home with entirely private space, even in ‘normal’ times. She argues that both in media aimed at housewives and in the public places such as shops where goods for the household are procured, there has always been a public element to

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-130 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 131 the work of running the household since the dawn of mass consumption.36 In the years immediately following the war particularly, ‘women’s unpaid labour took place as much in the streets as in the home’.37 Even where men were present and able to work in the ‘traditional’ division of roles in the family, with food scarce and the value of money limited, the time and scope of traditional women’s work of procuring and preparing basic necessities expanded greatly, and with it the visibility of women in public space. Acquiring basic necessities for daily living often meant standing for hours in queues with fellow citizens to buy food on ration cards, combing through the black market or following rumours of possible food sources. In addition to their public presence working and going about their daily errands, a number of public leisure pursuits were still available to the women with time and means for them. Cinemas were up and running shortly after the war and well attended. Bars and dancehalls were functioning once more, and were primary locations for fraternizing with occupation soldiers for the women who did. ‘Fraternization’ was of course officially banned for both US and British troops at the outset, though in the American zone this was scarcely enforced, and the restrictions were also relaxed for British troops a short time into the occupation. In public discourse, women’s fraternization was seen as largely tantamount to prostitution, and women seen with occupation soldiers were frequently threatened or attacked.38 Though to a far less extreme extent, similar ambivalence accompanied, and indeed had long accompanied, many forms of women’s leisure in Germany. The increased visibility of women, coupled with the uncertainty about the coming order of society only increased this ambivalence.

A woman’s place on the radio In her study of Nazi radio production, Daniela Münkel has shown that while large numbers of women were employed at the radio stations, policy and practice dictated that women could only be engaged in realms for which men were considered to be either unsuited or in which they were not interested. The relatively new jobs in radio were quickly divided along gender lines into posts suitable for women and for men, lines that mirrored the ideal division of labour in the bourgeois household. In a woman’s newspaper in 1935, these roles were laid out explicitly:

There are only a few individual female announcers at the stations. On the other hand, the women have found areas of work – as tellers of fairy-tales, as friendly, helpful auntie for the kids, as chatty advisor on

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home economics and fashion, and as producers for women’s art and women’s questions – that men have no desire to penetrate and which can therefore not do without a woman’s participation.39

Before the war, women made up over 27 per cent of radio station personnel, though predominantly as secretaries and in other ‘behind- the-scenes’ posts.40 Women working in programming at the stations were to be found primarily, though not entirely, in the Frauenfunk, or children’s or girls’ departments.41 With leaders of the NS Frauenschaft, the National Socialist Women’s Organization, placed at the head of every Frauenfunk department in Germany in 1933, women could begin or quickly advance their careers in broadcasting through positions in this organization or in the BDM, the Nazi association for girls. Besides the negative definition of a women’s place in broadcasting as everywhere men did not wish to be, many active justifications for women’s exclusion from most programme work were also put forward. The pitch of women’s voices was judged unsuitable for the radio due to the technical limitations of the radio’s voice reproduction, for example, and the ‘chatty, informal’ nature of women (as coming from the intimate sphere of the home) was judged entirely unsuitable for ‘serious’ broadcasts, in particular politics.42 As in many other parts of the workforce, the drawing of men to the war meant that the ranks of women working for the radio swelled. During the war, the number of women working at the stations rose considerably: all of the sound technicians trained at the stations after 1942 were female and by 1943, women made up just over 40 per cent of the personnel at the stations.43 While more ‘visible’ at the stations, women were still almost without exception employed as announcers for women’s broadcasts, or for ‘light entertainment’. As we saw in Chapter 2, however, it was precisely this ‘light music’, designed to distract from the hardships of the war, which increasingly filled the schedules. This programming strategy coincided with the lack of men at the stations to mean that female announcers became almost exclusive presenters of light programmes, giving them an unprecedented presence on German airwaves.44 The association of women announcers with light music stemmed not only from a perception of them as generally more chatty and less formal. Much light or ‘sentimental’ music had long been associated with women, both directly and through their association with genres of film oriented towards women.45 On the radio, some programmes of light music during the day (both before and after the war) were explicitly addressed to housewives, and the use of female announcers for such programmes

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-132 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 133 at other times was one indication of an implicit address to a female listenership. The expanded role of women’s voices in the airwaves during the war found a more direct ideological justification in an address to male audiences as well. Once the war started, the idea of Heimat was carried over onto the nation in the form of the ‘Heimatfront’. As the radio became constructed as the voice of the Heimat, the virtual space where the ‘national family’ divided by war could meet once more, women’s voices were activated even more in the role of real and virtual wives and mothers to the men at the front.46 In trying to create the image of Germany as a ‘national family’ in the airwaves, even children’s programmes were mar- keted to soldiers as the voices of ‘their’ families and children.47 Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is the character of ‘Grete Schmidt’, who read a weekly ‘Greeting from the Homeland’ (Gruß aus der Heimat) every Friday evening in the form of a ‘letter’ to the soldiers at the front. ‘Grete Schmidt’ was explicitly constructed as the ‘virtual sweetheart’ for all of the soldiers at the front, and kept deliberately anonymous, so that every German soldier could imagine her as their ‘dream girl’.48 As with most, if not all, Nazi attempts to address the mass audience as a national family, the portrayal of ‘Grete Schmidt’ highlighted many of the contradictions it attempted to reconcile. For the anniversary of the broadcast, Der deutsche Rundfunk printed a full-page photo spread of every soldier’s ‘dream girl’ going about her daily routine, always shot from behind so as not to reveal her identity (see Figure 4.1). Signific- antly, she was never shown in domestic space, but rather out in public spaces, at a typewriter in a factory, waiting for a streetcar in front of the Gedächtniskirche in Berlin, shopping for books and food items, and of course, speaking into a microphone. On the one hand, these activities simply marked her as a single woman, which was a vital part of her character. At the same time, however, they also portray her as independent, and underline the role of women as consumers in society. The photo spread can perhaps best be read as a mostly unsuccessful attempt to portray a normal, peaceful, everyday feminine homeland that is mobilized exceptionally for war. The unease surrounding these images is visible in the fine-print captions on the photos, which are at pains to portray the activities of this ‘well-dressed girl of our time’ as not serving her own needs or desires but rather the war effort by explaining that she is shopping ‘for the soldiers’ and typing ‘in an armaments factory’.49 As we have seen, the Allied occupiers, often advised by exiled Germans, made many of the initial hiring decisions at the stations. This group

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Figure 4.1 ‘Grete Schmidt remains unknown!’ Der Deutsche Rundfunk, 1940. Source: Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv. stood generally closer to the political left, which traditionally was more amenable to the expansion of women’s role in the workforce. Further- more, there was a longer tradition of women on the airwaves in Britain and America than there was in Germany. Women who worked in leading roles at the stations have often said in retrospect that they found the

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-134 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 135 occupation officers easier to get along with than their German counterparts, particularly after the stations passed out of Allied control.50 Besides those who worked in more ‘traditional’ areas, about whom more will be said below, all the Allied occupied stations had women in other leading positions which had earlier been almost the sole domain of men. These included Dr Julia Nusseck, head of financial programmes at the NWDR, Cläre Schimmel, ‘head producer’ (Oberspielleiterin) of plays at Radio Stuttgart, and Valentine Miller, in charge of ‘special broadcasts’ and later ‘foreign politics’ at Radio Stuttgart.51 In addition to those in leading positions, a number of women started out during the occupation as reporters, a field which had also been mostly the domain of men in Germany.52 While this list could be continued, the cases cited above are nevertheless exceptional, in multiple senses of the word. Overall, the range of tasks performed by women at the stations, at least at first, did not change greatly from the final years of the Nazi era. Perhaps most notably, the role of young women as the feminine voice of the Heimat (though no longer the Heimatfront), addressing German soldiers in captivity continued almost seamlessly. At the NWDR, ‘Grete Schmidt’ was replaced by ‘Barbara’ (portrayed by three different women over the course of the occupation), who since May 1945 had presented greetings and messages to the prisoners of war.53 Though women made up a large portion of the staff at the stations, they were still seldom found in editorial positions, and when they were, it was generally in women’s programmes or in other traditional feminine spheres such as children’s programming.54 Accurate information, especially on the announcers, can be difficult to obtain for the early years of the stations, though in general, over the first decade after 1945, numbers of male and female announcers grew far more even.55 Even if female announcers remained quite common at the post-war stations, the ‘natural’ gendered division of announcing labour remained largely in place, with women responsible for women’s programmes and light music.56 The SWF opened its very first programme with light music, announced by the young Jutta Telge-Wangemann. Similarly, the earliest programmes from Radio Stuttgart featured light ‘Latin’ and jazz music announced by ‘Maria Carlotta’ in the afternoon and early evenings.57 The duty rosters for Radio Stuttgart show that as the programme developed, these boundaries for women speakers remained entrenched, where light music programmes were the primary domain of women announcers, and the sole domain of women presenters.58 This division was conscious and taken by many as ‘natural’. Marianne Reichert-Wirges,

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-135 9780230_009035_05_cha04 136 Voices in Ruins one of the announcers for Radio Koblenz, recalled of the earliest months there:

[I]n the afternoons there was always an hour or two of political opinion or there was a broadcast ‘The Parties Have Their Say’ (a quarter-hour) – that was a man’s affair, we only had to make an opening announcement and the corresponding closing. Then one had free time; one would go into any room to put together the variety programme for the next Saturday. Ideas came that one put to paper immediately; normally ideas came at night, when we all sat together. Everyone contributed something, then it was all shuffled together so it could be typed the next day.59

As portrayed, women working at the station considered themselves genuinely equal partners in programme production, while at the same time accepting as normal that they should take no part in political broadcasts. Negative reinforcement of these boundaries often came from listeners, and more often from female listeners. Valentine Miller, the political reporter who became the head of foreign politics at Radio Stuttgart in 1948, complained of numerous letters from women that ‘openly expressed reproach that a woman would deal with politics’.60 Similarly, Radiowelt’s questioning of Radio Munich’s audience revealed that 65 per cent of the women and 51 per cent of the men ‘rejected women as announcers’.61 Maria Poll, the only female announcer at Radio Munich not involved in traditional women’s roles was noted for her ‘full alto voice’.62 That women with ‘darker’ voices (i.e. more like a man’s) had more authority and were therefore more useful for ‘serious’ broadcasting had already been formulated explicitly in German radio in 1933.63 Visually, as well, Poll is featured more in the style of the men than that of the women. Unlike the other women who are smiling, engaging with another person out of the picture Poll is pictured looking down, as if absorbed in her own serious thoughts. This ‘dual’ nature of the ‘serious’ deep-voiced female announcer was also the subject of protest from one listener: ‘she seems to me to be the adversity of the circumstances per- sonified. Why does she have to have such a terrible “bass’’ voice?’64 This, too, was nothing new. Throughout the debate surrounding women’s announcers before the war, the opinions of listeners, particularly women listeners, were often mobilized as a reason for denying women a larger role on the radio.65 Many of the women interviewed by Margarete Dörr internalized the view of the ‘non-political’ woman, in part in response to the destructive politics of the Nazi regime, and in part because they felt it was simply their place in society.66

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In the radio programme guides and the promotional materials produced by the stations, women were simultaneously more visible and promoted the image of the female announcer as light-hearted friendly voice. Emphasizing these aspects of women’s character was often mobilized as a way of reconciling their work outside of the traditional roles at the stations. The bulk of Hör Zu’s light-hearted description of Julia Nusseck, head of financial programmes, is spent explaining the ‘paradox’ of a young woman who knows so much about economics. The article quotes an internal review of one of her commentaries, which highlights the perception of a woman’s voice as unsuitable for political broadcasting: ‘Not even that sprightly young-girl voice of Nusseck’s could detract from the strong political effect.’67 In the end, readers are encouraged to listen to her, not because of the content of the commentaries, but because of Nusseck’s feminine traits. ‘Intelligent women are usually unnerving’, the writer asserts, ‘But Nusseck is not only intelligent, she is also charming and clever. You can see here that it must be so.’68 Similar treatment was given to Rose-Marie Schwerin, the young reporter who was also made ‘cover girl’ of that week’s magazine.69 Both the continuity and novelty in the positioning of women at the Allied-occupied radio stations is perhaps captured best on the front cover of the small publication celebrating the first year of the SWF (see Figure 4.2). In the photo, which commemorates her announcement of the first SWF programme, Jutta Telge-Wangemann stands smiling behind the microphone, hands outstretched, as if caught in the middle of an enthusiastic conversation. There is little in this photo that would undermine the continuity of the image of women as friendly, sociable voices, associated with light-hearted programming. The image’s novelty lies in its use to represent the station as a whole to its domestic audience. While women and women’s voices were often projected outwards during the Nazi era as the feminine voice of the homeland to be defended and/or desired, such images had seldom, if ever, been allowed to stand for broadcasting as a whole. In the context of the one-year anniversary celebrations, the young, female announcer was able to signify the intimacy, familiarity, general benevolence, not to mention desirability, that the relatively new and still-occupied broadcaster wanted to project to its audience. Whereas women outside of more traditional women’s positions were still presented in terms of their feminine aspects rather than their specific expertise, women’s ‘traditional’ place in Frauenfunk attracted employees with a wide range of backgrounds and skills. By far, the easiest, if not automatic, place for a woman to find work in programming was

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Figure 4.2 Jutta Telge-Wangemann, one of the first female announcers at the Südwestfunk, 1947. Photo: SWR/Vollrath. within women’s programmes.70 The placement of new female personnel into Frauenfunk was made easier by the overall lack of people with unquestionable pasts and experience in women’s broadcasting. Because women’s programmes had been essentially the sole remit of the National Socialist Women’s Organization before 1945, most of the women who had gained experience in women’s radio during the Nazi era were not allowed to continue. Once founded, the Frauenfunk departments became a repository for intelligent, well-educated women at the stations. The examples of two heads of women’s broadcasting are perhaps the clearest demonstration of this. At the NWDR Hamburg, the department was given over to Dr Helga Prollius. Prollius had spent the years from 1932 to 1944 finishing doctoral studies in philology and medicine, as well as working at the radio stations in Frankfurt and Prague. She had held various posts, from writer and reviewer in the ‘art’ department, to announcer, to head of the music studio, where she was also trained as a sound tech- nician.71 Besides her academic background, she thus had some of the most thorough and varied radio experience of anyone working at a radio

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-138 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 139 station in Germany, none of which suggested a position in women’s programmes. Perhaps the best known beyond her position as head of women’s broadcasts was Dr Gabriele Strecker of Radio Frankfurt. With a background in languages and history, Strecker completed her study of medicine during the war and became a practising doctor. In addition to her new post at Radio Frankfurt, shortly after the war she also became an active member of the women’s movement in Germany. She was the first German woman to attend the international women’s congress in 1946, began a long career writing books of history, and serving as a CDU member of the Hessian assembly from 1954–1962. Other heads of women’s broadcasts showed a more ‘typical’ background in traditional women’s careers. Coming out of the workers’ education movement in the Weimar Republic, Ilse Weitsch, head of Frauenfunk at Radio Munich, had studied education, psychology and sociology before working variously as a teacher and social worker. Barred from teaching when the Nazis took power, she had survived until 1945 as a journalist and advertisement copy writer.72 Helma von Feldmann, head of Radio Stuttgart had also been pressed into political advertising during the Nazi era.73 Marie Theres van den Wyenbergh, who had been head of women’s programmes at the WERAG in Cologne from 1933 until the ‘co- ordination’ of the station in 1933, was the only other head of women’s programmes in the post-war era besides Helga Prollius to have prior radio experience. She had come from a more ‘typical’ female education. She was a trained nursery school worker (Kindergärtnerin) and welfare worker before taking up the post on the radio.74 Besides the placement of the women themselves, the placement of women’s departments within the organizations also tells much about the roles of women within radio broadcasting. Encompassing a large range of programmes, defined not so much by content but by their target audience, women’s departments were somewhat difficult to place within one section at the station. Though they began at some stations in ‘current affairs’ or ‘news and politics,’ by 1947, most had been moved into less ‘serious’ sections. Women’s programmes at the NWDR, for example, were at first within the remit of the ‘actuality’ section; they were moved into the ‘cultural word’ section in 1946 – at about the same time when a woman took over the department. Similarly at Radio Frankfurt, when Gabriele Strecker moved from youth programming to start the department for women’s programmes ‘from nothing’ on 1 May 1946, it marked her move from the ‘news and politics’ section into ‘cultural broadcasts’.75 Hans Mayer, then head of programmes for the station, had argued with control officer Golo Mann to keep women’s broadcasts in the ‘news and

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-139 9780230_009035_05_cha04 140 Voices in Ruins politics’ section. Though Mann agreed that these broadcasts served a political purpose in ‘indicating the kinds of attitudes they could develop and the kinds of actions they could undertake with the aim of contribu- tion to the “self help’’ and “democratization’’ of the Germans’, they were seen far more as serving the everyday needs of one segment of the population, and so not directly ‘political’.76 Though they stated overtly their goal of women’s re-education to participate in the political decisions of the state, the stations’ placement of women, and women’s departments, often reflected a separate set of values. The radio stations in Germany reflected many of the paradoxes of women’s position in German society as a whole. Though they were ‘visible’ in the public space of the airwaves in greater numbers, and in more leading positions than at any time previously, they still most often carried on in the roles which had been well established in the Weimar and Nazi era. Perhaps most significantly, however, the expansion of women’s voices on the air, which had been intended as a temporary measure in order to represent the ‘home front’ to the men in the field, became a trapping of a new normality. Particularly as notions of appropriate radio voices began to distance themselves from the emphatically masculine modes of speaking and address, women became more available outward signifiers for broadcasting.

A woman’s place(s) in the programme: a matter for the experts Though their start was uneven, by the start of 1947, the Frauenfunk of most of the stations adopted similar patterns in the schedules as well as a more or less uniform, if quite broad, palette of topics. In general, the programmes fell into roughly two categories. Shows with tips on household and hygiene, child-rearing and marriage advice addressed women in their traditional domestic roles as wives and mothers. These shows will be discussed at greater length in the sections that follow. Shows on careers for women, shows that discussed women’s legal issues, their role in the new Germany, as well as portraits of women from past times or foreign countries, further presented female listeners with ‘public’ images of women. The ambiguities in women’s roles at the stations were often reproduced within women’s programmes. For example, though women’s programmes were strong advocates for women’s rights and concerns in the workplace, the actual workplaces they promoted were not necessarily new territory. The list of professions proposed for ‘5 minutes for women’ by the NWDR in 1946, for example, does not stray far from the realms already accepted in society as professions for women: teacher, journalist, paediatrician, technical assistant, craftswoman, welfare worker, actress,

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-140 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 141 domestic helper, nurse, nursery worker, secretary, saleswoman, librar- ian.77 Sabine Friedrich, in surveying the list of women’s professions introduced in the Frauenfunk of the SWF starting in 1948, also concludes that ‘the traditional distribution of roles was nevertheless maintained’.78 While her overall assessment is largely accurate – professions described include officer, worker, saleswoman, film and radio splicer (Cutterin), as well as housewife and wife of the country doctor – it should be noted that the list also includes ‘diplomat’, and a discussion of women’s careers in the justice system.79 The one feature that almost all of these programmes had in common was their overall educational tone. This, too, was largely unchanged from previous eras. The very first Frauenfunk broadcasts were created at a time when the processes of industrialization were transforming women’s work in the domestic sphere from an area of individual expertise to an ‘expert system’, reliant on external systems of technical knowledge.80 As Kate Lacey has described the process,

The commercialization of food and textile manufacture and the spread of academic medical science encroached on areas of traditional female expertise and, it has been argued, created in place of productive, knowledgeable women a deskilled and undervalued domestic labour force. The disruption of time-honoured ‘natural’ practices, together with the scientification of domestic and mother- ing tasks, undermined women’s faith in their instinctive abilities and in the ways of their mothers and created a willing audience for the professional expert.81

Women’s programmes in the Weimar Republic had rapidly become the domain of these domestic experts, establishing the programmes as a place for women to keep themselves ‘up-to-date’ with the latest knowledge. Representatives of housewives’ groups offered talks on latest ‘scientific’ advances in domestic technology and rationalization of domestic work, medical doctors advised on proper hygiene for women and children and psychologists laid out proper child-rearing methods.82 During the Nazi era, as the programmes were taken over by the Nazi women’s organizations, keeping women ‘up-to-date’ also meant keeping their habits and routines in line with Nazi political and economic policies.83 This conception of Frauenfunk’s fundamental function as the provider of the latest expert advice to women carried on seamlessly following the war. Even before departments for women’s broadcasts were established,

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Figure 4.3 ‘ “You take.’’ Frauenfunk helps cook!’ Recipes are tested ‘scientifically’ for women’s use. Radiowelt 2:3 (1947). Source: Bayrischer Rundfunk. the radio stations set about locating speakers who could deliver individual talks to women on various areas of expertise. Once the Frauenfunk departments were established, they quickly established themselves once more as ‘expert’ links to local and state ministries for labour, as well as a series of doctors and psychologists to provide the latest scientific advice on hygiene, household medical matters and child-rearing. Even the recipes provided as part of housewives’ programmes were subjected to ‘scientific’ scrutiny by the stations before they could be broadcast (see Figure 4.3). Beyond this basic educational nature implicit in the generic expectation of Frauenfunk after the war, they were also marked with an explicit agenda of re-education handed down by the Allied control officers and embraced whole-heartedly by the programme-makers. Re-education was understood at the outset as the opposite of addressing women in the home, encouraging them instead to move and think in spheres beyond the domestic world. In her summary of the department’s activities in 1949, for example, Gabriele Strecker named ‘re-education of the German woman from apathy to participation in political and public events’ as the main purpose of women’s programmes at Radio Frankfurt.84 In a similar vein, Helga Prollius told the readers of Hör Zu:

It matters above all ...to initiate women into the wide realm of their non-household-related duties and tasks. There has to be more for

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them than the three ‘C’s’: cooking, children, and church [Küche, Kind, Kirche]. Frauenfunk cannot just be satisfied with giving housewives recipes for proper food preserving, it must become a stimulator and educator. For women there is a binding responsibility particularly in these times: to influence life in the state community in their interests and with all the positive power of life.85

Two things are noteworthy in these statements. First, though encouraging the active participation of women beyond the domestic sphere, none goes so far as to suggest that duties within that sphere are not still the sole domain of women. If anything, they draw on images of women in their reproductive roles as influencing public life, a point which I will discuss in further detail below. Secondly, the project of getting women to participate in public life, presented as a radical break with the programmes of the Nazi era, shows itself to be a further project of keeping women ‘up-to-date’. Prollius’s emphasis on women’s public duties ‘particularly in these times’ underlines this idea. Participation in public life is discussed, not so much in terms of an opportunity, let alone a career, for women, but rather as a task they must perform in addition to the other aspects of their lives. Seen another way, such programmes are above all about modernizing women, and getting them to understand their position within the new ‘expert system’ of the democratic state. In discussing the role of women in public life in Germany in the 1950s, Erica Carter has argued that the housewife, who manages the family finances and purchases rationally according to the latest information, was seen as the model citizen for the new nation. Examining the efforts made by state authorities and advertisers to educate women into this role as ‘citizen-consumer’, she notes that these efforts are always accompanied by an underlying sense of unease. The exhortations towards rational participation in the new consumer democracy are always accompanied by the fear that women might somehow not understand their duty, or by their nature as private beings ruled by pre-modern irrational forces, would fail to fulfil their role in society. I would argue that a similar unease underlies many of the various educational efforts of the Frauenfunk of the immediate post-war era. While maintaining that sense of unease, women’s programmes also represented a compromise, by being a conversation between the (unskilled) housewife and the expert at the station. A programme at the SWF on ‘proper preserving’ illustrates this point. The programme began with a ‘scientific’ expert explaining the basic principles of preserving.

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After the expert has spoken, the show then presents a dialogue between two housewives, where one explains to the other how to preserve specific fruits. Here, the housewife does not speak as a scientific expert, but rather the voice of experience; she has learned the skill of preserving. The programme closes with a light-hearted dialogue between a husband and wife on ‘yawning and snoring’. The wife complains to her husband that his yawning is impolite, while he explains its scientific necessity. Though the dialogue has no other relation to the rest of the programme, it still followed the same basic pattern, of the male ‘expert’ explaining science, while the woman explains social rules.86 Kate Lacey’s description of the format of women’s programmes from the Weimar era as a conversation or point of contact between representatives of the listeners and the experts87 were explicitly formulated by Gabriele Strecker in 1949 as the ideal format for women’s programmes: ‘it is intended to depart more and more from manuscript and presentation and that many, indeed most broadcasts will be offered as free conversations between women who speak either as experts or representatives of the listeners’.88 This formulation carries with it two fundamental images that lie at the heart of women’s radio: the first is the intimate, informal mode of address that characterizes women’s conversation, and the second is a community of female listeners united in this conversation. The continuity within this conversation was not merely a question of radio genre, it also needs to be understood as an ongoing continuity in the very real points of mediation between women, particularly housewives, and the various public bodies, as well as manufacturers. From the first beginnings of mass consumer societies in the early twentieth century, housewives and women’s groups, among others, have had an important influence in mediating between production and consumption.89 By quickly reforging the links between women’s organizations and other public bodies, post-war Frauenfunk departments created and maintained a point of dialogue that would grow in force with the reconstruction of mass consumption over the course of the coming decades. The imagination of this feminine public sphere was not solely in the minds of the programme-makers. The research conducted by the radio stations reveals a large and dedicated audience for Frauenfunk. The audience for women’s broadcasts did not just tune in regularly, but was also particularly responsive. A report compiled by the women’s department of Radio Munich in April of 1946 cites a number of remarkable phenomena as evidence of the close link they had with their listeners. A programme on the plight of refugees, for example, brought in a spate of unsolicited

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-144 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 145 donations, and similarly, a single unrepeated call for experiences with children during the women’s broadcast elicited 1250 letters. The station also received visitors, including a Bavarian farmer’s wife who rode several hours on the train to ask advice on her marriage, asking, ‘It’s you, you’re the ones who are there for women, right?’90 The retrospective report on women’s programmes compiled by Gabriele Strecker at Radio Frankfurt similarly reports that in addition to a large number of listener letters, ‘the activity in the women’s section is complicated somewhat by the great stream of visitors, that I am happy to say often consists of listeners’.91 As women’s ‘experts’, the Frauenfunk departments at the stations served as an ersatz-solidarity for that which was missing from most everyday interaction. To what extent the radio in general, and women’s radio specifically, accounts for memories of women’s solidarity is now impossible to say, but it is clear that women’s radio, as a space of interaction between women that was not defined by competition for scarce resources, was peculiarly available for the construction of such memories. This was also true because any notion of women’s culpability or collaboration with the Nazi regime was hardly, if ever, discussed.92 As I will lay out below, such a discussion would not have fitted comfortably in the new narratives of women’s role in society as the upholders of the peace, based around their activities in the private sphere.

A woman’s time

The female radio audience had been assumed to be an audience of consumers since the Weimar era.93 From that time on, women’s programmes have sought to control and direct women’s consumption activities. In each period, a different series of household experts sought to bring women’s activities, and in particular their consumption, in line with state goals. By promoting consumption as a political activity, Lacey argues, the Nazi state distracted women from their own political help- lessness. Erica Carter has argued convincingly that although this process certainly continued throughout the 1950s, the increasing redefinition of citizenship around the consumer rather than the voter in the social market economy of the Adenauer government transformed women’s roles into far more ambiguous positions. While acknowledging the many ways in which women did indeed bear the brunt of national recovery, she also points to the ambiguities inherent in women’s new social position that also offered considerable space for agency and resistance.94 In what follows, I will draw on Carter’s arguments to show how many of

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-145 9780230_009035_05_cha04 146 Voices in Ruins these same ambiguities were embedded in the structure and content of women’s radio, particularly in issues surrounding the consumption of women’s time, in the economy of scarcity prior to the currency reform. Doris Schubert’s exhaustive study of women’s work in the post-war era shows convincingly how women’s unpaid labour in the home was mobilized to fuel Germany’s economic recovery. Rebuilding heavy industry rather than concentrating on consumer goods, Allied and later West German economic policy relied heavily on the unpaid reproductive labour of women to fill in the gaps in supply of the things necessary for everyday life.95 As Schubert points out, the mobilization of women’s reproductive work was not new in Germany. In their drive to create households that reflected the desired autarky of the nation as a whole, the Nazis encouraged individual housewives to spend extra time on labour such as preserving surplus vegetables and sewing family clothes, which could have been handled more efficiently by industry.96 The need for household labour would only increase with the shortages of the war and immediate post-war years, and nearly all of this labour fell to women. A 1947 survey of women in Berlin showed that even women who worked in paid labour were also largely responsible for the bulk of the reproductive labour of the household, which could add up to eight extra hours of work per day.97 Seen in this light, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that women’s time was one of the most valuable resources in post-war Germany, and their choices in utilizing it were of utmost importance, both economically and symbolically, for the reconstruction of Germany. In the period before the currency reform, the simple equation ‘time is money’ was somewhat more complicated. Time, and in particular women’s time, had a much higher exchange value than the old Reichs- mark. Obtaining daily needs, legally at least, was more a matter of having the time to stand in queues for goods than having the money to buy them. In Berlin in 1947, food purchased on the monthly ration card only accounted for about 12 RM per person per month – approximately four days wages for the average working woman and two days for the average working man – with additional rationed food not adding much more to overall expenditures.98 Acquiring the additional things necessary for survival beyond these basic rationed goods meant spending an even greater amount of time, either producing them or acquiring them by any number of legal or illegal means. Extra food could be grown in gardens or allotments, extra fuel could be gathered and/or stolen, clothes could be mended out of whatever material could be found. Black market goods were too expensive to pay for out of earned wages, and so acquiring them usually meant finding the means to barter.99 Perhaps the most

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-146 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 147 common, and time-consuming, alternative to scraping by in the city involved making so-called ‘hamster trips’ to the country, where food supplies were more plentiful. Such trips could take up entire or multiple days, and involved both the physical exertion of carrying goods back from the trip and the mental exertion of attempting not to get caught by the authorities on the return trip. An economy based not around money, but around direct access to consumer goods, also had profound implications for the social divisions in society. Far from creating a levelled-out ‘classless’ society, as some had projected, this new economy of scarcity had redefined the divisions. As a report from the German Economic Institute stated in 1947,

Access [to consumer goods] is determined by ...the ability to get hold either of goods that one can use directly oneself, or of goods that have a highly-valued ‘payment’ [barter] value; other options include the legal, or even illegal, appropriation of parts of an officially-controlled production process. The social differences in living costs, as defined by monetary income, are thus to a large extent overlaid, or even cancelled out, by the reality of alternative means of access to consumer goods.100

This new state of affairs meant that having time away from the formal economy and normal domestic work was not just a symbol of higher socio-economic class, it was actually one of its determining factors. For women in paid employment who also had to see to their households, the uneven distribution of time was one also a great source of social tension. A report compiled by the women’s department at Radio Munich in March of 1946 stresses this fact in its summary of women’s attitudes. Professional women who, the report notes, were spending for 10–11 hours per day at their jobs, simply did not have time to queue for the scarce items such as fish, non-rationed spreads and vegetables available to women whose primary work was in the home. ‘The envy increases with the increase in hunger’ the report summarizes, ‘the lethargy we had noted until recently is transforming, in many women as well, into an emotional, increasingly explosive attitude, directed against the idlers, the “Prussians’’ [Bavarian epithet for northern Germans] the refugees, against the big Nazis, and sometimes against the occupation as well’.101 In the scarcity of the immediate post-war era, the housewife, as the woman with time, was more than ever defined as the primary consumer in society. It is not my intention here to suggest a radical re-evaluation of the post- war economy based around the commodity of women’s time. Instead, in highlighting the relations between women’s time and consumption in

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-147 9780230_009035_05_cha04 148 Voices in Ruins the goods-based economy of scarcity, I am seeking to reveal the multiple implications of the time-structuring medium of the radio in constructing the public image of the female consumer in post-war society. In her account of women’s consumption after the war, Erica Carter stresses the role played by magazine and radio advertising in addressing women as consuming citizens.102 Not only does it address women individually as consumers, it also imagines a ‘community’ of female listener/consumers in Anderson’s sense. With goods scarce in the immediate post-war era, advertising did not play a major role in many publications – and in any radio broadcasting in the Western zones – until after the currency reform.103 Similarly, the few women’s magazines that had been started up before the currency reform were plagued by the same paper shortages as newspapers and other print media, and so did not reach a large audience.104 In fact, they reached much of their audience through the reviews of women’s magazines that were often featured in the programmes of the Frauenfunk.105 I have already shown how the imaginings of such a female community were forged around the Frauenfunk of the Allied-controlled radio stations within a short time after the departments were founded. Furthermore, in the absence of advertising, women’s programmes offering household advice were the furthest-reaching media products that addressed women in their role as consumers.106 Radio programming requires a peculiar use of time on the part of listeners. Whereas print media, when available, require full attention at any time or place available to the listener, radio programmes allow listeners to engage in most secondary activities, but require listeners to be in the presence of the radio – normally in the home – at specific times. ‘Target groups’ are defined, from a programming perspective, by their patterns of time use.107 To speak to women in the home during the day was thus to speak to them as middle-class women. The placement of the radio within the home created a fundamental tension with programmes that addressed women in other capacities. In particular, the placement of women’s programmes during the daytime excluded most women who were in paid employment, even if the programmes themselves encouraged women in the workforce.108 Those who were producing shows for women were well aware of the dilemma, but those responsible for the structure of the programme as a whole did not always provide the necessary time slots. After the first year of women’s programming, Gabriele Strecker had established that very few working women were able to tune into women’s broadcasts, and so requested that an occasional early evening time slot also be offered. With the support of station director Beckmann, and by offering to give up some daytime slots,

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-148 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 149 it was agreed.109 The first questionnaire of the NWDR produced similar results.110 With more men returning from the war and attempting to re-enter the workplace, the right of a woman to work was seriously questioned in public debate. As often as not, the positioning of the discussion in the schedule could end up as a de facto political statement against women working, even if the show itself advocated the opposite. At the NWDR, for example, a discussion in spring of 1949 in the series Fragen aus dem Berufsleben der Frau was placed at 4:45 on a Friday afternoon, a time when very few working women were able to listen. The speaker, a representative of North Rhine Westphalia’s Labour Ministry laid out the ministry’s official position on women in the workplace, emphasizing that work was not only a right of women in an economic sense, but also for her self- fulfilment as a person: ‘A one-sided biological valuation of the woman, often disguised these days in the notion of the woman that belongs in the home, is wrong because it does not see the woman in her entire personality.’ Specially highlighted in the NWDR’s official programme announcements as an important broadcast for women, the irony that mostly housewives would have heard it was almost certainly not lost on the listeners.111 If women’s time was a scarce resource in everyday routine, time for women was also scarce within the radio schedule. Unlike broadcasting in the present day, with its seemingly endless channels and programme choices, listeners in the post-war era had very limited programme choices and the minutes available in the daily schedule for women’s programmes were scarcer still. The relatively low priority given to women’s programmes within the schedules meant that women’s programmers often had to struggle, especially for early evening slots, for the minutes to broadcast their programmes. On the other hand, daytime slots, especially outside of the prime-time blocks, were far more readily available and seen as a ‘natural’ place for service programmes. As we have seen, these non-peak times were considered a low enough priority that the stations actually went off the air in the early months of occupation until there were sufficient programmes (and electricity) to fill them. Though it cannot be clearly demonstrated that the positioning of women’s programmes in the radio schedules was necessarily the product of a conscious effort to discourage working women, evening segments grew rarer at some stations as the occupation wore on. The general conservative shift at Radio Munich that came in the later years of occupation meant that women’s programmes were pushed into more and more inconveni- ent times of the day.112 At other stations, such as Radio Stuttgart and

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Radio Frankfurt, the political engagement of the heads of the station led to women’s programmes expanding in the early evening sector. The resource of time was also a factor in the growing Cold War, although in slightly unexpected ways. Particularly for the first two years of the occupation period, disagreements between the occupying powers were kept carefully out of the public sphere, and were essentially banned from the radio. In spite of this, and in spite of the fact that audiences were mostly loyal, broadcasters in the West were terribly concerned to keep listeners ‘at home’ in the airwaves as much as possible. As relations worsened, ‘prime time’ hours, when ‘everyone’ would be assumed to be home, particularly the early evening, became important spots for political programmes and commentary. When it came to women’s broadcasts, however, the same issues that plagued the timing of broadcasting in the Western stations were intrinsic to the Soviet zone as well. An important aspect of women’s programming in the Soviet zone was to educate women into their role in the new socialist society, which included full employment and rights for women. Accordingly, in the early years of occupation there were weekly broadcasts for working women in the evening hours.113 As the situation worsened between the Soviet zone and West, however, rather than maintain what might have been an exclusive audience, women’s programmes were moved back out of the evening hours, where they remained until the mid-1950s.114 The domestic sphere of women’s consumption, which would soon develop into one of the key ‘battlegrounds’ of the Cold War, was thus chosen in the airwaves in part by default, owing to the ‘natural’ assumptions about women’s social roles on both sides of the divide.115 Even among housewives, who were theoretically in the home all day, women had to make careful calculations with their time to be able to tune in to Frauenfunk broadcasts. Time was one of the main reasons cited for not listening to Frauenfunk in research conducted by the stations. Just as the very regular time-slots were credited as one of the keys to the success of the Frauenfunk at Radio Munich, the lack of predictable programmes was one of the things most often complained about at Radio Frankfurt.116 Many of the housewives surveyed by the station in 1948 had asked that the station move women’s programmes to a regular time slot, or at the very least announce more sufficiently when the next women’s show would be broadcast so that they could tune in.117 A survey of housewives conducted by the NWDR in 1950 showed very similar results. Just over half of the women questioned cited the time of day as the reason they did not listen, and 58 per cent said they were prevented by children or housework. In fact, the main group the survey

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-150 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 151 identifies as never able to listen were those who were married to men whose work did not leave them free to listen to the radio at the time of the broadcast.118 There is a fundamental tension, then, between women’s programmes, which educate women in proper time use, and the danger that they might take up too much time. This was a substantial part of the NWDR’s rationale for keeping their housewives’ programmes to a 5-minute segment. The scarcity of women’s time was almost as ubiquitous a concept as that of the ‘surplus of women’. There was hardly a discussion of women’s issues that did not make a mention of it, and hardly a housewives’ show that did not offer women ‘scientific’ or rational advice on how to preserve this precious resource. Erica Carter has demonstrated convincingly that the actual ‘age of consumption’ in Germany did not begin with the acquisition of major consumer goods in the late 1950s but with women’s additional managerial labour to save money for such goods in the early 1950s. This, she argues, was the fundamental shift between the pre-currency reform subsistence economy and the social market economy of the Adenauer era. Domestic technology was sold as freeing up a woman’s time, allowing her to be with her family.119 We can see from the programmes of the post-war era that the rationalization of women’s work to create time for ‘proper’ feminine pursuits prefigured this shift. Women’s radio programmes in the post-war era addressed women in a similar way to the mode of advertising later on, as Erica Carter says, ‘simultaneously as the feminine product of nature and as a rational managerial force for its subjection’.120 This can be seen above all in the way that educating women in the ‘proper’ use of their daily time often brought with it implicit messages about the overall purpose of their life- time. In the morning segment in January of 1947, the SWF presented a clearly scripted conversation between a ‘Frau Becker’ and ‘Frau Arnold’ on how to keep children busy on winter and rainy days. After complaining that she is unable to keep her children playing together as nicely as Frau Becker’s do, Frau Arnold admits,

I grew up as an only child without brothers or sisters and I had very little to do with children before my marriage. I always had a job, so that there was no chance for me to concern myself with children. And now the household leaves me little time.121

The emphasis on motherhood over any other sort of work for women is threefold in this short passage. Frau Arnold begins with an implicit

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-151 9780230_009035_05_cha04 152 Voices in Ruins critique of her own mother for not having more children and thereby distancing her from her ‘natural’ understanding of children. Similarly, in her later life, Frau Arnold is ‘distracted’ from motherly matters first by being in the workplace, then by the work of the household. Frau Becker’s reply confirms this notion: ‘Well, even as a heavily burdened housewife, a little half-hour is something you can create through good and effective time organization for the instruction of your little children.’122 The rationalization of the work in the home is necessary for a woman to fulfil her actual function as mother to her children. After the dialogue is over, the show’s announcer addresses the listeners, underlining this point:

Don’t you think as well that we should take as much time as possible for our children? Believe me, the years until the children begin school are the very finest for us mothers. In no other age are the children so close. The older they get, the more we have to give them over to life with all its duties. We ourselves feel richly rewarded by these hours with our children. The children, however, will carry the memory of these hours through their entire lives.123

Beyond admonishing women to consume their time as mothers, women’s programmes also encouraged women to spend their scarce time maintaining their feminine appearance. In a talk at the SWF entitled ‘Is our womanly nature in danger?’ the author notes the ‘surplus of women’ – two men for every seven women in the 20–40 age group in Baden – and worries that through this situation that women will cease to be women. She tells her listeners,

Even if we must admit that besides family and profession there is little time left over for caring for our appearance. It is unquestionably one of our feminine responsibilities to commit the necessary time for these things. With enough will, this is possible too!124

In the absence of consumer goods to purchase, women were exhorted to consume their time creating the luxuries that cannot be bought. Just as they offered women recipes for making meals out of whatever scarce foodstuffs were available, women’s programmes also frequently offered tips on how to make cosmetics and clothes out of available materials. The ability to manufacture such items was viewed as an essential feminine skill. The author continued,

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A look at life will teach you that two different women will make two fundamentally different things from the same scant material. The first will make an awkward, clumsy thing, where one can tell at a glance ‘Aha, there wasn’t enough material!’ Another woman, with consideration and a deft hand, will make a charming, attractive thing of it. We women should always think about how we appear. The proper instinct and a clear eye for the present moment will let us find the way. As hard as it is today.125

For a woman to spend her time making herself attractive is portrayed here not as a private pleasure, but rather as a public duty. This focus on the duty of women to make themselves feminine both through rationalized activity, the rationalized use of time, and in spite of rationalized spheres of activity betrays once more the sense of unease in the position of women as rational time-consumers. Women’s programmes both acknowledged the scarcity of women’s time and sought to discipline women into specific ways of viewing and using it. Besides programmes that attempted – mostly in vain – to keep women in the formal economy, women’s programmes also promoted an image of the rational consumption of time as the essential role of a woman in the post-war era.

A (German) woman’s nature

Keeping women ‘German’ Programmes which portrayed the women from other nations were a regular part of women’s programming at all of the radio stations. The underlying point of many of these was to give German women examples of women who were successfully active in public space. There was an underlying message about the progress of nations in many of these – showing the standard of a ‘modern’ nation with which Germany must catch up. In one of the very first of such programmes from the NWDR, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler discussed the women he saw in England. Though emphasizing their role in political and public life, he also pointed out to female soldiers during the war:

They always looked well-groomed and well-kempt, and almost all of them carried on a strap over their shoulder a bag with lipstick, com- pact and eyebrow pencil in it. Whether on duty or at leisure, they were always cheerfully made up.126

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Later on, there was another segment that discussed French women. In contrast to von Schnitzler’s portrayal of English women, this segment mentioned that the French were not as legally ‘up to date’ with regard to women as the Germans, having only granted them the vote in 1945. It was careful to stress, on the other hand, that women nevertheless exer- cised a lot of power in French society, judged by the respect they afforded to mothers. Like the discussion of English women, the talk emphasizes that French women are always feminine.127 Common to all of these portrayals of women of other nations is that, no matter what other aspects of their lives are described, they always contain a description of them as maintaining their feminine charm. The message to the German audience was that femininity is a universal trait that German women must also always maintain. Whatever their role might be, their measure as women is in caring, understanding and beauty. In so doing, they did more to create a sense of universal femininity than to present a picture of diverse cultural activity. In light of the widespread prostitution in Germany, for whom women were making themselves ‘feminine’ was also a major issue of women’s national belonging. One of the few pieces on the radio which discussed the problem came not from the Frauenfunk, nor did it come from a woman, but rather from Walter von Hollander, in a piece called Die jungen Mädchen um zwanzig (‘Young Girls Around 20’) broadcast as part of the ‘youth’ segment. Von Hollander argues that a man can – or should be able to – do without the ‘nicer’ things in life. But when women are deprived of luxuries, they get ‘spiteful and hard’.

A woman is not made beautiful by love alone, as it says in one schmaltzy operetta, but rather also by the pampering, conciliatory things in life. By pretty clothes, by silk stockings, by nice underwear that sits comfortably, by intact, well-fitting shoes. All things we don’t have, and now that these things are once more available in the surrounding world; now that once in a while a fashion magazine falls into our hands, in which fur-wearing idle women from other countries lounge at the wheel of luxury cars, some young German girls are overcome by a certain bitterness.128

The bitterness that German girls feel towards women of other countries in possession of luxuries was seen by von Hollander as parallel to the bitterness that German men feel towards the Allied soldiers.129

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It is embittering for the young German men to look on as the young women flock to the doors of the dance halls with foreign soldiers, as they vie for the favour of the victors. We know the reasons; we should not judge too harshly. The woman has always fallen to the stronger and more successful. Wherever there is an occupying army the picture is the same. The German girls are no worse – though, mind you, no better – than girls of other countries, and with this fact our as yet un-eradicated national arrogance should be burned out of us.130

Though speaking of ‘burning out’ the ‘national arrogance’ of the Germans, von Hollander nonetheless builds up a picture of a world in which a nation’s pride is dependent on the ‘virtue’ of its women. Instead, he exhorted German girls to look beyond the material goods of the occupying powers and return their sights to the men who have other gifts besides money. Finally, he concluded, ‘Resigned, contrary, nihilistic girls are totally unfit for love and for a fruitful marriage. And marriage is, in the end, throughout all worries, troubles and errors, the goal of most young girls.’131 In the end, von Hollander’s point is paradoxical. On the one hand, he points out that women ‘naturally’ need consumer goods to be happy, and if they are not happy, they are unmarriageable. However, if women fraternize with the occupation soldiers, who will give them those things, they are un-German. It is curious that, even though the ‘surplus of women’ was a well-recognized situation in Germany, von Hollander still invokes the goals of marriage and family as the ultimate goal for women. To be fully German, a woman must rationally overcome her ‘natural’ need for the immediate consumer gratifications offered by the occupation soldiers in order to attain the ultimate feminine goal of (German) marriage and motherhood – however impossible such a goal was.132

Upholders of the peace We have already seen how women were mobilized in wartime propaganda as the voices of the home, as well as the feminine voice of home for remaining prisoners of war. As the peaceful and nurturing voices of the Heimat, women were used to create an image of a stable ‘national community’ for the soldiers. In addition to the ambiguous images of independent women that I pointed to above, the instrumentalization of women’s ‘nature’ as carers of the nation was also highly ambiguous within the propaganda war. While Nazi propaganda was appealing to women to maintain a brave and caring face for the sons and husbands at

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-155 9780230_009035_05_cha04 156 Voices in Ruins the front, Allied propaganda was appealing to women to save their soldier sons and husbands by urging them to resist the war effort.133 In the reconstruction of Germany, the ‘nature’ of women as peaceful, domestic voices was mobilized more strongly than ever in public discourse.134 One of the most important overall agendas of radio programmers was the restoration of civil society, and in particular stressing to listeners that it was the burden of women to keep the peace in the home and between families. During the weekly segment for listener questions at Radio Munich, Oberrechtsrat Langer answered a female listener’s legal question about the responsibilities of subtenants, reminding her that

even the best legal instruction and the best-intentioned official advice cannot produce successful communal living if three things are missing, namely community spirit, mutual consideration and heart. Do not forget this, dear listener, when you set about laying the boundaries of the rights and duties of your dwelling partners. As experience teaches us, it is mostly the female part that can tune the harmony of a community to a major or minor key, if not banish discord entirely.135

He went on to say that primary tenants need to be polite and not speak ‘in harsh tones of command’ to their subtenants. We have seen how commanding tones of voice became connected metonymically with Nazi authority, and how broadcasters attempted to distance particularly men’s speech from such associations. Here, such notions are projected outwards onto the audience, which reveals some of the problematic gendering surrounding these notions: the voice of male authority was reminding a female listener (as well as the rest of the audience) that she needed to maintain her domesticated feminine voice in order to maintain civil society. The stress on a woman’s role as keeper of the peace was as often pointed to as a reason for women to stay out of politics as it was for them to be involved. Such arguments stressed that if women were to remain women, and thereby do the most good for society, they should not sully themselves with the male world of politics. An NWDR broadcast from 1946 asked the question, ‘Why do men not like to marry clever women?’ The author, Barbara von Teskow, argued that women in politics and in the workplace lose their femininity, or their ‘motherliness’ (which she sees ‘not as a biological function, but rather a state of mind [Geisteshal- tung]’). On the one hand, she acknowledged that women had been kept deliberately away from the reins of power. In the next paragraph, however, she warned women who wonder why men favour less intelligent

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-156 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 157 women that the question is ‘a warning cry of nature. They have sinned against the motherly spirit in their being!’136 The role of women in public life – in short, women’s citizenship – consisted not so much in public activity, but rather in ‘civilizing’ men towards more ‘feminized’ public action.

Let us leave a man his ‘toys’: technology, abstract sciences, the different forms of debating club, while we make the things that retain humanity, the social conscience with all of its practical application inside and outside of marriage. Don’t let us ask why men don’t like to marry clever women, but rather let us scrutinize ourselves: are we woman enough to turn men into ...human beings?137

The ‘civilization’ of men into peaceful behaviour involved re-orienting men around the home and consumption activities of the domestic sphere. In a 1948 essay on the question, ‘Do men make history?’, Friedel Hömke at the NWDR Cologne contrasted the power of political activity with everyday activity in a short potted history:

The woman wanted to be looked after, and the children needed to flourish and become people. To bring them up properly, one needed furniture, houses, schools, streets, books, light and warmth. Adam saw to all of these things, his male successors see to all of these things because to this day, like their ancestor, they share the precious fruit of life with their Eve, and so, like old Adam, they take this blessing and curse upon themselves. In this way men make history, but this sort of historical action has nothing to do with that of the so-called ‘great’ men, and is much more related in nature to, and influenced by, the female way of making history.138

The association of Hömke of men’s daily activity with women’s position in the domestic sphere reinforced the image of the domestic sphere as a peaceful realm away from the violence of ‘history’. She went on to point out that even though men and women fought equally for representation in the European revolutions, women did not maintain their domesticat- ing influence over men. Instead, ‘wifey sat once more at home behind the stove, handled the pots and pans, had children and once more forgot to pay attention to the way the men, the newly freed mass of men, made history’.139 The ideal which Hömke was implicitly constructing for the new society in Germany is a mass femininity, made up of domestically minded individuals.

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Not only for listeners, but also for some of the programmers of the Frauenfunk, the role of women as social rather than political actors was comfortable. As Helma von Feldmann, the head of Women’s Pro- grammes at Radio Stuttgart recalled of her work, ‘I have always had a great interest in social matters, and a good deal of love for humanity, and I have always enjoyed helping people ...from the psychological and social side, not from the political side.’140 While she was clearly more interested in women’s direct political involvement, Helga Prollius’s statement from Hör Zu cited above about the responsibility of women in public life also supports such a differentiated view of women’s political influence: ‘to influence life in the state community in their way and with all the positive power of life’.141 In encouraging women to move out of the traditional private sphere, she highlights rather than rejects the ‘natural’ vision of women. Prollius’ choice of words in pointing to women’s role in the new ‘state community’ (staatliche Gemeinschaft) is particularly telling about the role envisioned for women. Though clearly distancing herself from the racially defined Volksgemeinschaft (‘national community’) of the Nazi era, Prollius underlined community (Gemeinschaft) rather than society (Gesellschaft) as the proper remit of women.

Conclusion: a nation of women?

In spite of the many continuities from the Weimar and Nazi periods, it would be difficult to dispute that in many very real ways, year 1945 was actually a turning point in the relations between women and the radio. What had been intended as a temporary and largely unacknowledged wartime expansion of women’s roles in broadcasting became permanent and acquired new explicit meanings at the Allied-controlled stations. On the whole, the radio stations in all four occupation zones were interested in promoting the rights and privileges of women. Women’s departments in particular saw themselves as advocates of a progressive notion of the role of women in society, which included active participation in the political processes of democracy. On the other hand, by their placement during the day, as well as in their subject matter and terms of discussion, women’s broadcasts also continued to define women largely through their roles in the domestic sphere, particularly as mothers and housewives. Too often, analyses of women’s programming in occupied Germany have mostly stuck to these public/private dichotomies, articulated as relations between domesticity, framed by motherhood and unpaid reproductive labour on the one hand, and paid employment and engagement

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-158 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 159 with formal politics on the other. Largely due to the material scarcity after the war, it has been easy to overlook the factor that has complicated these views of women’s programmes – and of women’s position in society – since the Weimar Republic, which is the feminine gendering of consumption. Like radio, consumption is an activity that is neither fully public nor private, but in fact transgresses the boundaries and transforms the nature of both. To a large extent, the material scarcity of the post- war years along with the destruction of the material boundaries between public and private, made the role of women as consumers more, and not less, important and conspicuous. Elizabeth Heineman has argued that women’s memories and experiences of crisis years between 1943 and 1948 were ‘universalized’, and came to stand for the nation as whole in public discourse.142 The three images Heineman discusses are all exceptional images, women who have been torn out of ‘normal’ routines by the war. Such images were abundantly available during a period of time when homes and ‘private’ activity were open to public view in unprecedented manner. What has emerged from this exploration can be described as the beginnings of a further process of universalization, of the image of the rationally consuming, middle-class housewife that emerged in the 1950s as one of the icons of ‘normality’ in Germany after the war. In some respects, this ideal type was a vague and necessary foil to the extraordinary images Heine- man cites: a representation of the normality from which they had been ripped, and to which the nation as a whole might someday return. The image of women as consumers positioned them as vital mediators between past and future. ‘Eternal’ feminine roles such as wife or mother could mark a link with the past, while consumption provided the trappings through which the modern, up-to-date future could be glimpsed and measured. Programmes that instructed women on how to prepare foods that resembled things known from pre-war times, or kept women appraised of the latest fashions and how to manufacture them out of available materials spoke heavily to these concerns.143 In addressing the multiple roles of women in post-war German society, women’s programmes constructed an ideal image of women as rational consumers of their time, maintaining their heterosexual and maternal femininity whilst becoming thoroughly integrated in the modern economy. While the strong focus on women’s consumption of their time was novel, such anxieties over women’s consumption certainly were not. To use a metaphor that draws on the gendered assumptions of the time: the nation’s clumsy embrace of mass consumption during the Wei- mar Republic and Nazi era grew more intimate, but no less awkward, as

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-159 9780230_009035_05_cha04 160 Voices in Ruins the Western occupied zones moved towards becoming West Germany. Programmes that addressed women during the occupation were shot through with the twin anxieties of whether German women would be feminine enough and thus true to their ‘timeless’ nature as wives and mothers, and whether consuming women would stay German enough though following their ‘natural’ (irrational) feminine impulses. Though they were not often seen as such by those running the stations, women’s programmes were perhaps the most successful segments of the radio programme, both in terms of the size and interest of their listenership and in their fulfilling of contemporaneous goals of broadcasting. They were able to address a regular, devoted listenership from a relatively broad range of social backgrounds, as well as provide a sociable forum where listeners had a voice in the programme, but could still be ‘educated’ by experts. Viewed in this way, women’s programmes probably came closer than any other part of the programme to imagining an ideal public sphere. They offered a meeting place for women that was not defined by competition for scarce resources and offered debate and discussion on a wide range of public topics. The progressive, and clearly inclusive, nature of these programmes had its limits, however. As David Morley has pointed out, drawing on the fundamental arguments of Nancy Fraser and others, any supposedly singular public sphere will always have mechanisms of exclusion.144 Apart from the obvious gender boundary of such programmes, a number of factors, not least their positioning in the home during the day, also marked an implicit class boundary, one that was reinforced by the new economic conditions. At the same time, the gendered address of the radio was also not so easily contained by women’s programmes. The difficulty in deciding where women’s departments should be placed within institutional structures after the war can be seen as one manifestation of this. As we have seen in the previous chapters, a number of the aspects of programming that have appeared here as explicitly gendered feminine were also part of more general trends in radio development after the war. The radio’s emphasis on women’s time use in the domestic sphere echoes the paternalistic unease mentioned in Chapter 2 about the taste of the public in general. The fact that these concerns were targeted in particular at light music, with its associations with a female listenership, was certainly not coincidental to these concerns. Similarly, the emphasis on more personable speech as an authenticating marker of speakers made women more readily available as representations of broadcasting and its imagined community as a whole. I have shown here how such feminine traits of voice and behaviour were often put forward as the markers of and/or means of creating

9th June 2008 6:50 MAC/VIR Page-160 9780230_009035_05_cha04 Time Consuming 161 the ‘other’, non-militaristic Germany. The multiple ways in which the radio addressed its listeners as occupants of a feminized, bounded domestic sphere was significant at a time when the boundaries of that sphere were multiply challenged. The gendering of those realms as feminine was paradoxically one of the ways in which they were made to seem stable, even as their boundaries and composition were undergoing profound change. Johannes von Moltke has productively described Heimat as an apparently static place that appears upon closer inspection as the intersection of a number of mobilities, a description that also accurately describes the domestic spaces addressed by the radio.145 The projection of these traits outward onto society as a whole, and as I will show in the next chapter, onto specific constructions of national space, was also the work of the radio. This returns us to the relationship between the nationally universalized images of disrupted women’s lives that Heineman describes and the routine and eternal femininity invoked by the radio. The radio’s address to a visible nation of women provided further building blocks to those who wished to construct a nation of victims.

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Ein kleines Häuflein Diplomaten macht heut die große Politik sie schaffen Zonen, ändern Staaten, und was ist hier mit uns im Augenblick? ‘Wir sind die Eingeborenen von Trizonesien’ (Words and Music, Karl Berbuer, 1948)1

Introduction

A prominent feature of first issue of Hör Zu was a full-page map of Germany’s new radio landscape (see Figure 1.3). The map put in concrete visual form what most people more or less already knew about the structures of broadcasting in Germany. In addition to this relatively ‘neutral’ information, however, the caption beneath it, written by Peter von Zahn, expressed clearly a sense of discomfort about the relationship between the radio and its ‘new’ territories:

So this is the state of things! At first glance, little seems changed. A few station names are missing, but a few new ones have been added. From this point of view, one could almost overlook the most important change: We only have zonal broadcasting left. Four different broadcast systems, more or less following the example of their respective occupation powers, lead their own small-state lives. Their broadcasts sometimes reflect narrow-minded parish-pump politics, and only seldom do their voices blend into a chorus ...

162

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All of us build on our smashed four walls the boundaries of our own little world, but only the short-sighted forget or lose sight of the view into the distance, the view of tomorrow!2

Such open criticism of the de facto broadcasting policy of the Allies might seem surprising, particularly in the first issue of a newly licenced journal. Published in December of 1946, however, this criticism was very much in keeping with the principles that had been laid out three months earlier in the landmark speech by U.S. Secretary of State Byrnes, declaring that the zonal boundaries should not be regarded ‘as self-contained economic or political units’.3 The surprising element, as so often, lies in what was supposedly unremarkable: that ‘little seemed changed’ when looking at a system of broadcasting that was every bit as truncated, divided and occupied as the nation it served. Noteworthy, too, are the terms in which von Zahn expressed his dissatisfaction. Whereas Byrnes’ speech focussed primarily on occupation policy, von Zahn’s drew on a particular vision of a past and future landscape of Germany. He mapped the four separate broadcast systems of the occupation powers metaphorically onto ‘native’ landscape features of decreasing size from ‘small states’, to small towns/parishes (‘narrow-minded parish pump’) then to the ‘ruined four walls’ of individual houses, portraying a Germany reduced to a ‘mere’ province. His comments were reacting to the possible division of Germany implied in Allied policy since Byrnes’ speech, as well as fears of Germany being turned into a provincial state by the dismantling of its industry. In making them, however, he also evoked the disparaging interpretation propagated in Nazi years of Germany’s pre-1871 past as Kleinstaaterei, a series of petty small state rulers who kept the German people divided.4 The final paragraph makes the link with Germany’s past more explicit: the view over regional boundaries is not just a view into other regions or the rest of the world, it is a view of ‘tomorrow’ Germany, or broadcasting that can speak to all of Germany, is portrayed as a destin- ation in time and space, with the implication that in being regionalized, broadcasting – and with it Germany – was stuck in the (pre-national) past. For many, however, the lack of national broadcasting did not represent a great loss. In the American zone, where the system of ‘one state, one station’ was established quite soon after the German capitulation, the new situation was seen by many not as a halting of progress, but as a return to Germany’s ‘natural’ temporal track. The apparent restoration of the structures of Weimar broadcasting helped to add to this impression. In his 1947 Christmas address, Rudolf von Scholz, the first German Intendant of Radio Munich, said of the station:

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It is certain that it will be German, whatever it has to say or offer. And it is also certain that it can only be so if it is also Bavarian in the appropriate way. For there is no Germanness that hangs in empty space as a thought construction or ambitious demand. There is only one [Germanness], and that is as one with the real life of the limited Heimat, tied into history and the heritage of thought and faith in which our knowledge and conscience rest.5

In von Scholz’s view, Germany was an artificial construct unless reflected through the traditions and habits of local space, the ‘limited Heimat’ – however ‘limited’ the large state of Bavaria might actually be. The reference to a Germany separated from its regional identities as ‘empty space’ is quite telling here. The ‘emptying of space’, that is, the physical distancing of the forces that govern social life from the immediate presence of those they act on, is one of the conditions that Anthony Giddens describes as one of the ‘consequences of modernity’.6 Von Scholz essentially mapped onto Bavaria a pre-modern sense of immediate and local interaction that could somehow be reconciled with the larger, modern space of Germany in whatever shape it would eventually take. The juxtaposition of these two statements reveals much about the terms of debate surrounding the space (and time) of Germany and the broadcasters that should serve it. Though they stressed opposing aims for broadcasting in Germany, both speakers actually argued from a very similar geographical vision. Both portrayed Germany as a series of individually unique but equally ‘German’ regions in need of a broadcasting system that would speak naturally and authentically to and for the Germans (who were also Bavarians, Westphalians, Saxons etc.) who inhabited that space. In this chapter, I will show how these symbolic tensions between state, station, nation and region were negotiated within the radio programmes. In the first section, I will look at the programme expectations of the Allied controllers, German staff and the audiences with regard to the territories where they were situated. In the sections that follow, I will explore the programmes themselves. I will begin by looking at the way the radio stations addressed the uncertain spaces that they served in the initial months after the war to examine how routine ways of referring to broadcast spaces developed. By looking at the modes of spatial address in a number of genres and programme structures, I will show how the symbolic vocabulary of Heimat permeated the programme well beyond ‘traditional’ Heimat programmes. In the final section, I will focus on the ways that radio stations addressed the problematic new spaces that began rapidly to reify around them as the Cold War took shape. Here,

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-164 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 165 too, I will point to a number of ways in which the images and vocabulary of Heimat were mobilized explicitly in order to integrate audiences into the new boundaries and political structures of Germany. Since this chapter discusses several different definitions and divisions of roughly the same space, it will be useful to define some basic terms of reference to avoid confusion. For my purpose here, ‘region’ or ‘regional’ refers to any culturally defined sub-national area in Germany, whether or not its boundaries coincide with those of past or present administrative entities. This will therefore include linguistic regions as well as the many former political entities that ceased to be before 1945. It should be noted that of the nine states in what would become the Federal Repub- lic of Germany (not including the city states of Hamburg and Bremen, or the Western sectors of Berlin) only three, Bavaria, Schleswig-Holstein and the Saar, were considered cultural regions at the time they were formed. By ‘broadcast territory’, I mean primarily the group of districts that pay radio licence fees to a particular station, which of course only roughly corresponds to the technical range of the stations. In speaking of ‘local’ areas, I typically mean a single city or county (Kreis) – roughly the area in which one would live and move on an everyday basis. Signi- ficantly, ‘local’ broadcasting, in the sense we have today of programmes produced within a local area solely for that area, did not exist in any permanent form in Germany during the years covered by this study.7 But it is precisely the way the sense of locality was transferred on to these larger regions, as well as how localities were addressed within these larger regions, that we must explore.

Programme concepts

Allied plans A narrative exists, casually referred to but seldom explored in the literature on German broadcast history, that expressions of regional culture did not play any significant part in the programmes of the occupation period. The reason cited for this is Allied suspicion of their ‘blood and soil’ connotations. These conclusions have usually been drawn by looking at specific departments for regional culture within the institutions, such as dialect and folk music,8 or specific genres of regional programming, such as local news or plays in dialect.9 Understanding Heimat as a vocabulary of symbols that works in and through a number of textual genres in everyday life forces us to take a broader look at the way that the idea of Heimat was interwoven in German broadcasting. Such an approach also demands that we take a slightly closer view at how those

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-165 9780230_009035_06_cha05 166 Voices in Ruins who were creating the radio programmes conceived of the geographical space of Germany. Although the Americans had set up the regionally divided broadcast system in their zone to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of any eventual central power in Germany, their ‘non-nationalistic’ focus of programming was largely conceived as an outward-, not inward-looking enterprise. The ‘Radio Branch Policy Principles’ from the US zone makes this abundantly clear:

The commonly recognised proclivity of the Germans toward an inor- dinately generous nationalistic estimate of their own cultural and scientific accomplishments demands that considerable time, thought and skill be devoted to the presentation of cultural and scientific pursuits among other nations.10

Indeed, the most frequent ‘voice’ to be heard from the stations in the American zone was the Voice of America, which was broadcast several times per day. On the whole, however, regional identity only entered negatively into American considerations to the extent that it seemed a threat to Allied control. The ‘Radio Branch Policy Principles’ only make specific reference to regional broadcasting with regard to political separatism: ‘With regard to German territorial unity and the delineation of the German frontiers the principles laid down in the Potsdam agreement are rigidly adhered to; expressions of Bavarian or other particularisticism [sic] are held to a minimum.’11 The staunchly Catholic ‘free-state’ of Bavaria had never sat easily with a nation dominated by Prussia and after 1945 political separatism was a considerable force in the minds and the politics of the state. In places where the political pressures of separatism were not so strongly felt, expressions of regional identity were generally considered to be acceptable for the anti-nationalist agenda desired by the Allies. By the beginning of October 1945, for example, Hans W. Gatzke, Radio Frankfurt’s ‘Chief Editor, radio section’ described the station’s twice-monthly dialect broadcast to his superiors as having a ‘strongly anti-Prussian note [and] was suppressed under the Nazis’.12 In the British zone, where the demands for separate stations would eventually plague broadcasting for many years to come, the occupiers showed no real reservations at all.13 Allowing ‘local patriotism’ to develop was considered necessary in the highest circles of British authority to get Germans to accept the new territories that had been created.14 In many ways, this was quite typical of the British procedures of programming,

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-166 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 167 which relied largely on the model of the British institution to do much of the work of re-education and allowed the German personnel to create programmes to serve the specific needs of the public.15 As it was, many of the very first speakers and themes chosen for radio broadcasting were aimed specifically away from topics that would address all of Germany.16 A short list of possible informative speakers and topics put forward by the military government of Hanover in June of 1945 included speakers who could give talks on such Heimat-oriented topics as ‘The Character and Value of Low German’ and ‘The Low German Popular Song’.17 In the French zone, regional themes were given more specific priority than in the American or British zones. According to French ideas, the station was to give ‘broad consideration in reporting of local themes as well as France and world politics’.18 This focus on either ‘local’ or ‘French’ themes can be seen as directly pointing attention away from ‘German’ sentiments which is consistent with French attitudes to the station.19 Particularly with regard to the station in Koblenz, this policy created a profound ambiguity of purpose. Anton Tilman Veit, the first head of the station, openly favoured the creation of a separate state in the Rhineland, which was well in keeping with French goals for a future German state.20 On the other hand, due to its size and placement, Koblenz was also the only station that could be heard outside the zone. As such, some at the station felt that the programmes from the station needed to reflect a broader interest in its programme. Furthermore, it was recognized that supporting too strongly a separate state and station in the Rhineland, could create unrest in the region in the (likely) event that a separation of the Rhine region did not come to pass. Indeed, upon hearing Koblenz’s first broadcast, Pierre Ponnelle, the head of Section Radio, commented, ‘I believe it was a psychological mistake to give the Rhenish listeners the hope of an autonomous regime.’21 By and large, Allied policies at the Western stations with regard to regional sentiments on the radio show a high level of pragmatism. Regional identity represented not so much an ideological issue for them but either an expedient or hindrance to control policy. Where it suited their needs in getting their audience to accept new circumstances, the Allied controllers were happy to foster a sense of regional identity. More often than not, however, the strength of regional sentiments, as well as the power of local churches and politicians in mobilizing them, were underestimated or misunderstood. As Heide Fehrenbach has pointed out of Allied film supervision, the occupiers ‘were privy to neither local longings for a revitalized village life nor resentments felt towards policies (Nazi or other) regarded as disruptive to that goal’.22

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‘Native’ notions Because there were few clear policies from the Allied occupiers regarding regional broadcasting, the ‘regional’ content of programming was largely determined by the German personnel. Employees of the radio stations tended to be as regionally scattered as the audiences they served, but there were small contingents of ‘locals’ at all of the stations. For the most part, it was these long-time station employees, especially those who had begun their broadcasting careers during the Weimar Republic and, to a lesser extent, those who were new to broadcasting, who determined the course of regional programming. In the British zone, the quirks of personnel led to a peculiar dicho- tomy between the Hamburg and Cologne stations. It so happened that in Hamburg, many of the leading personalities were not from anywhere in the British zone at all, but rather from Saxony. As Peter von Zahn recalled, ‘Sometimes you could have believed that the broadcasts were coming from Dresden or Leipzig. We had no reservations at all as far as our accents were concerned. In Hamburg, that made us seem suspect.’23 Among many of the leading personalities in Ham- burg, there was a general distaste for Heimat broadcasts, largely due to a sense of their ‘provincialism’.24 In Cologne, by contrast, the tone was set in part by Bernhard Ernst, whose ideas of the role of broadcasting in the region were well established in his 21 years of working at the station. When plans were being made for Cologne to begin its first one-hour slot in the programme of the NWDR, Ernst wrote away to the Westphalian Heimatbund, asking for their help in constructing programmes that would be, in his words, ‘as heimatlich as at all possible’.25 In the French zone, Intendant Friedrich Bischoff had brought with him many conceptions about radio programming from his time as the head of broadcasting in Silesia during the Weimar Republic.26 After being fired by the Nazis in 1933, he had made his career as a novelist and poet, writing works that he claimed in 1947 ‘grew out of the Silesian spirit and the Silesian landscape’.27 In his first plans for the programme of the SWF from February/March 1946, he had sketched out a concept that showed clearly both his own ideas of Heimat:

It should be the task of the talks department to understand the current and present problems of ‘German people’ and to react and offer solutions in individual talks and dialogues. By contrast, the literary department should take up the poetic word and besides that,

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do justice to the ‘special folk character and tribal structure of the Swabian-Allemanic area’ beyond all current political events.28

Bischoff’s statement draws a contrast between the ‘German Menschen’ whose problems are ‘current and present’ and the timeless ‘folk character’ and tribal nature of the region, which are the realm of literature and art. These initial concepts were then laid out particularly for the regional studios at the beginning of 1948: ‘It is the task of the individual studios to express the special political and cultural-political interests of their Heimat and in the area of music, literature and entertainment as well as reportage to let the character of their broadcast area come alive.’29 In the first years of Radio Munich, very few of the leading lights of the station were Bavarian. Both Ernst Höchstötter and Kurt Wilhelm, among the first Bavarians who worked for the station in relatively high capacity, saw themselves as ‘Bavarian ambassadors’ to the American control officers and to the non-Bavarians who held many of the key positions at the station.30 It was not until Rudolf von Scholz took over as Intendant in 1947 that the station as a whole became, in Bolz’s words, ‘Bavarian with force’ (‘mit Gewalt bayrisch’).31 Von Scholz, himself ori- ginally from the Baltic region, had been the head of the current affairs department at the Munich station until his dismissal in 1933. He publicly stated his aims to turn Radio Munich into a ‘Bavarian station’.32 Von Scholz’s Bavarian focus fitted in well with the spirit of the broadcasting law enacted by the Bavarian parliament, which endures to this day. The law stipulates that the station must reflect ‘the unique quality of Bavaria’ (die Eigenart Bayerns) and that ‘in the selection of its representatives the division of the State of Bavaria by tribes should be taken into consideration’.33 Radio Stuttgart did not face the same sorts of struggles over its regional programming, and indeed soon became known for its strong regional identity, often referred to as the ‘Spätzle-station’ after the traditional Swabian noodle dish.34 Perhaps the most influential person in this regard was Albert Hofele, the station’s so-called ‘Swabian calling-card’.35 On the radio, Hofele was virtually synonymous, not only with Swabian radio culture, but also with regional culture in general. In justifying a less regionally oriented programme than the main station in Stuttgart, the head of the station in Karlsruhe (in the region of Baden) replied, ‘there is no badisch Albert Hofele’.36 It is more difficult to make definitive statements on their position with regard to regional broadcasting at Radio

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Frankfurt. The first station director, Eberhard Beckmann, himself a native of Frankfurt, while accepting the regional focus of the station, was at best ambivalent towards it. In 1946, he said of the station’s regional news programme:

No matter if the burning questions of German life-interest are solved, and no matter what the solution looks like, for years and decades the individual will remain tied to his home area. Here where he possesses his living is where he will stay rooted, thanks to Nazi misdeeds, in a way that seems downright medieval in the great victorious democracies.37

On the whole, the German staff at the stations considered the production of regional identity as an integral part of their work in making radio programmes, although opinions on its meaning and proper place varied within and between stations. It must also be said that nuanced views of the problems of Heimat symbolism after the Nazi era did exist and indeed many were sensitive to the brown shadows cast by some expressions of regional identity. Albert Hofele, the creator of ‘Aus unserer schwäbischen Heimat’ (‘From our Swabian Heimat’) responded to a listener who complained that the show’s portrayal of his home town in the popular programme had left out some of its ‘native’ humour:

I do know the book on the Pforzheimer goldsmith jokes you referred to; all that glitters is not gold, however, and not every story can be used today. Even if it means some material will not be as big a hit as one would wish, one must do without some jokes, because they simply seem no longer acceptable in the present times.38

In light of these circumstances, the notion that regional programming was kept out of occupation-era broadcasting has some merit, but is far from the whole story. It is indeed well documented that higher numbers of ‘regional’ broadcasts came into the schedules as more control was given over into German hands at the stations towards the end of the occupation era.39 Moreover, there is certainly a case to be made that the aversion to regionally related broadcasting felt in some circles at the occupied stations was due as much to its provincialism as to perceived connections to Nazi ideology. The central place that regional identity had in many forms of popular entertainment, such as folk comedy and sketch humour, made such genres a low priority of both Allied controllers and many of the native staff who were attempting to raise the

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-170 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 171 taste of their audience. As I will lay out in greater detail below, however, such a narrow focus on the traditional ‘low’ genres of regional programming has distracted from a thorough exploration of the true role of regional identity in the reconstruction of the radio programmes in occupied Germany.

Assessing the regional demand Perhaps more than any other aspect of broadcasting, the audience’s ‘need’ for regional programming is difficult to assess, largely because it is one of the needs most taken for granted. As Leo Flamm has wryly observed, in broadcasters’ drive to come ‘closer’ to listeners, audiences are seldom asked ‘if they even want the broadcasting equipment that has been placed in front of their door, and which should then presum- ably broadcast from their front yard’.40 Historians who have set out to demonstrate that the regional systems that developed in Germany were the result of the external political pressures from church leaders or local politicians have further obscured our understanding of the demand for such programming.41 While there is little reason to doubt such assess- ments, they speak past the actual audiences for such programmes. I will begin to fill this gap here by exploring the expectations and demands expressed by the audience to the radio stations. The need for some local aspects of programming immediately after the war could quite legitimately be taken for granted. Especially when there was no post, telephone or newspaper, the value of accurate local information about military government orders or food distribution, which made up the bulk of local news can hardly be underestimated.42 Furthermore, programmes that took local circumstances into consideration, such as women’s broadcasts that tailored their recipes towards the rations distributed locally, were of known value to the local population. Furthermore, when these needs were not met, audiences were generally not shy about bringing it to the attention of the stations. Beyond these immediate needs, however, it is not always easy to gain an impression of how important regional identification was to listeners. The OMGUS surveys, for example, portray a populace who were extremely loyal to their local station ‘mainly because of good reception’, though one will search in vain in the surveys for questions about the regional identification of the station or the regional content of its programmes.43 The scarcity of basic goods exacerbated regional tensions considerably. In a time where the population of almost every region was confronted with unprecedented numbers of people from ‘outside’, however, regional difference became a major focus of bitterness.44 Refugee populations in particular faced the great enmity of the native population.45

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In order to explore the range and impact of audience demands for regional programming, we can look to the case of Radio Munich. The boundaries of state, region and broadcast territory had remained largely consistent in Munich from the Weimar era through the end of the occupation era and there was also perhaps the heaviest expectation from listeners that the station should reflect the ‘unique character’ of the region. For those controlling the station, it was impossible to overlook the strong and vocal desire expressed by the audience for ‘Bavarian’ programming. The centralized radio programme of the Nazi era had left listeners of what had been the most stubbornly regional radio station for many years desiring a new ‘Bavarian’ station that was not always in keeping with the aims of the programmers. Complaints about the ‘Prussian’ slant of broadcasting filtered into nearly every section of the station. An American report from May 1946 dismissed most of these sentiments as purely xenophobic: ‘Criticism of the programmes is usually received from die-hard Nazis and separatist Bavarians who object to foreign colour and anti-Nazi policies on the air.’46 In many respects, the accusation of ‘non-Bavarian’ does indeed appear to have been a catch-all accusation for programme content that listeners felt was foreign or unpleasant. The Bavarian case also shows how the perception of listeners did not always reflect what was actually broadcast. In particular, there were constant complaints that there were simply too few Bavarians announcing the programmes. One listener in March 1946 wrote in to complain that ‘the announcer of the Frauenfunk has a good voice, but her breathing is too loud. Would it not be much better to have a Bavarian announce this program?’47 Of course, Maria Sigg and Grete Schorn, the regular Frauenfunk announcers, were Bavarian. Nevertheless, the station received enough listener complaints about there being too many ‘Prussians’ on the air that they finally took the unprecedented step in mid-1947 of publishing the birthplaces of a number of its leading personalities: ‘Of the 23 names published, 7 were from Munich, a further 3 had lived in Munich for “several decades’’, 5 other Bavarians, 3 Württemberger, 1 Austrian and only 5 “real’’ northern Germans.’48 Some of this listener perception was a product of the fact that radio announcers had their accents largely trained away for radio work, although upon close listening, light southern German accents are discernable in many of the announcers at Radio Munich. It is perhaps a reflection of the change in atmosphere at the station that Ernst Höchstötter spoke with a far more pronounced Bavarian accent in recordings from later years than he did during the occupation.49 Besides the rejection of voices that did not sound familiar, there was also clearly an active desire on the part of listeners to hear specifically ‘Bavarian’ programmes again. Concretely, this came in the form of a

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-172 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 173 strong demand for folk music. Ernst Höchstötter recalled the problems in coming up with any music programming from the station:

We couldn’t broadcast music programmes right at the start, because our entire music archive had been removed. It had been confiscated by the Americans, so that no German marches [laughs] could be played on the American station. We played a lot of American music, which did not always please a large portion of our listeners. They just wanted to hear our Bavarian music again.50

The first ‘audience research’ conducted by the station – 25 people ‘inter- rogated on the streets’ in July of 1945 – seemed to confirm Höchstötter’s assessment of the audience’s desire.51 Within a very short time, Bavarian folk music became a ‘fixed point’ in the popular weekend midday slot by September 1945, and increased steadily over the course of the next few years.52 Station head Field Horine noted with exasperation in June of 1946:

As far as the mass of Bavarians is concerned, the staff of the station cannot avoid the impression that Bavaria would be happy if we broadcast yodelers and ‘Schuhplattler’ and ‘Schrammelmusik’ twenty-four hours a day. The pressure for more and more Bavarian folk music is continuous and unrelenting; but with our present large complement of it we feel we have reached a saturation point.53

Railing against Radio Munich as ‘non-Bavarian’ became proverbial enough in the early years of the station that Kurt Wilhelm, author of the popular dialect series Brummlg’schichten joked, ‘It happened in these years that on an otherwise harmless Saturday night a show could be heard on Radio Munich, in which they spoke Bavarian (yes, they actually spoke Bavarian at Radio Munich).’54 If the case of Radio Munich demonstrates that not showing enough ‘regional’ character could be the cause of dissatisfaction with the station, the case of Radio Koblenz confirms the obverse: a programme that identified itself as the voice of the ‘limited Heimat’ would be greeted in large part by audience approval. Though very little of the actual programme or the responses to it remain, contemporary sources from the station all point to the regional identification of the station as a primary source of its acceptance among listeners.55 The presiding director of the station, Dr Hans Becker, though acknowledging that the audience went beyond the area around Koblenz, stressed that it was ‘people from the Rhine area, whom everyone knew and who were familiar with Rhenish

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Eigenart and culture’ who spoke from the station.56 This familiarity, the French control officers noted, came especially in contrast to the broadcasts from Radio Luxembourg, which at that time were largely filled with stories of Nazi misdeeds.57 Though not in quite such an amount, the NWDR also received requests for more folk music and folk entertainment, and ‘lighter’ material in general (this last was true of all of the stations). In general, the station seemed relatively content that the path it had chosen was the correct one. In a report of listener letters from February 1947, the station seemed content to admit that ‘the intellectual circles of listeners from all Zones rated the programme of the NWDR as the one with the highest level in the political and cultural department. From the broad masses of people rose dissatisfaction, as more entertainment and Heimat broadcasts were in demand’.58 In particular, a poor radio production of Karneval, the traditional pre-Lent celebration in the Rhineland and other Catholic areas ‘caused another flood of calls for Cologne to have its own station’.59 Some listeners genuinely did also take issue ‘when an announcer with genuine Saxon accent reads the news of the Northwest German Broadcasting’.60 As a result of the many complaints the station received from those wanting more local representation, the NWDR conducted a survey of listeners in January and February 1948 to assess the demand. Specifically asked if they would like an hour per day when alternately Cologne and Han- nover/Hamburg could broadcast for their area only, listeners in Lower Saxony and North Rhine Westphalia responded two to one in favour of the idea, with listeners in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein far less in favour.61 Nevertheless, many listeners in the North also felt that the NWDR was not doing enough to reflect their regional identity. Listener letters such as the following were not uncommon in the letters page of Hör Zu:

Why are there not more plays in Low German on the NWDR? Four plays of this kind in one year is a truly shameful total for our Low German Heimat. Where are the popular Low German folk shows and the traditional Hamburg harbour concert?62

A poll conducted at Radio Stuttgart showed that regional programmes were among the best-loved broadcasts. ‘Our folk music with Albert Hofele’, with 79 per cent of regular listeners tuning in, was the best- liked music show, and Aus unserer Heimat (‘From Our Heimat’) with 59 per cent was the most popular ‘cultural spoken broadcast’.63 Similarly at Radio Frankfurt, which for a long time was the least popular station in

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-174 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 175 the American zone, the regularly recurring Heimat shows were among the most popular spoken broadcasts, particularly among older listeners.64 Older listeners were a powerful demographic in post-war Germany, due not least to their large relative numbers. These would have been generations who had experienced the First World War in some form, and many would also remember the Heimat-oriented programmes of Weimar Germany. For them, such programmes would have had carried the memories of a familiar, pre-war world. It is clear that there was a regular and substantial part of the audience for whom markers of regional identity were an important characteristic of radio programming. The meaning of these markers varied greatly, however. Not only did such programmes present listeners with a sense of re-connection to the local world, they provided a vision of the ‘uniqueness’ and essential quality of the region that became a rallying point for protest against programmes, music or voices that were perceived of as ‘foreign’. Heimat rhetoric provided a ready bounding mechanism, which could be used to exclude ‘polluting’ elements from the idealized ‘pure space’ of broadcast territory, coded alternately as regional or, more often, as national.65

The place in the programme: making a region in the airwaves

In this section, I will look at the way the programmes addressed the space of the territories they served, particularly in the period leading up to the end of 1946 and the beginnings of the Cold War. To guide this argument, I will focus on the case of the radio station in Cologne, showing the way the station developed a regional programme, and the pressures and influences that went into that production. Due to its position, both in Germany and within the structure of the NWDR, Cologne was subject more than perhaps any other station to the tensions of space and broadcasting in Germany during the occupation. On one hand, it was the ‘main’ station for the historically new State of North Rhine Westphalia, which, though created with an eye towards control and administration of the Ruhr,66 mapped almost exactly onto the broadcast territory of the WERAG established in 1927.67 On the other hand, however, it was not the main station of the NWDR, but rather relayed the centralized programme, which mostly came from Hamburg. Comparing similar programming in the other stations in the Western zones, I will show how the programme forms employed in Cologne formed part of a general vocabulary of space in post-war Germany.

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Creating local ‘windows’ When Cologne started broadcasting in the network of the NWDR, it began by taking a single hour in the daily schedule, from 19:00 to 20:00, the traditional early-evening slot for regional or secondary stations to broadcast their own programme. The first broadcast, on 19 September 1945 featured a festive programme of speeches by station personnel and local politicians, celebrating Cologne’s return to the airwaves. Bernhard Ernst gave the first address of the evening, identifying himself as ‘one of your brothers’ and the station as the ‘voice’ of the Rhineland, Ruhr and Westphalia:

The healthy optimism of the Rhinelander, the well-tested activity of the industrial worker, and the praiseworthy stubbornness of the Westphalian in well-balanced amounts should guide our work. In this spirit we call out to all of you who are listening the happily encouraging ‘Loss john!’ of the Rhinelander, the earthy, heartfelt ‘Guad goahn!’ of the Westphalian, and we unite both with the old miner’s call that has become a daily greeting for a large part of our homeland: ‘Glück auf!’68

The landscape evoked by Ernst is a generic and idealized cultural landscape – the humorous and optimistic city dweller, the earthy, stubborn farmer and the industrial worker. Similar to the Heimat images described by Confino,69 they present general iconography of people and landscape, which is then tied in to the individual regions of Western Germany by means of the phrases in dialect, just as the ‘particular’ church towers in the townscape images represent the individual Heimats. These various ‘regional’ notions were then reinforced by the pieces that followed: addresses of the heads of the North Rhine province and Westphalia, the ‘Westphalia-song’, the miner’s song, ‘Glück auf, Glück auf!’ and finally a segment entitled ‘Cologne Gallows Humour’, featuring jokes in Cologne dialect relating to life among the rubble in the city. Tying all of these elements back together into one ‘natural’ space, the show closed with the announcement ‘This is Northwest German Broadcasting. Our first broadcast from the Rhenish-Westphalian Heimat is now ended.’70 It was plain to see that the daily one-hour programme from Cologne that began the following week closely followed Ernst’s intention to make the station as much a station of the Heimat as possible. The hour began with a 15-minute segment of ‘West German’ news, though as no recordings or transcripts remain, there is no real way of knowing if this news

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-176 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 177 was different in structure or tone than the general news for the entire zone produced in Hamburg. The rest of the one-hour programme consisted of a series of spoken features, tied together with a variety of short pieces of music. The features fell mostly into three categories: updates on the present state of affairs in the region, household tips and small chats on the traditions and culture of the region such as ‘From dear old Cologne’ and ‘Westphalian proverbs’.71 In many cases, two or three of these categories were combined, in features such as ‘What does the Lower Rhenish mother sing to her child?’, and ‘Westphalian black bread’.72 All of them produced a picture of the ‘timeless’ elements of the region as a foil to the destruction and reconstruction of the cities. The ‘local’ nature of the daily hour from Cologne was also underlined by the chatty, informal announcements that tied the various programme segments together, as in the following exchange between Rudi Rauher and another speaker, Kallinisch:

Kallinisch: Can you tell me what will be broadcast in the next 40 minutes? Rauher: Gladly. We will find out in a minute how things stand in Bielefeld, and then at seven-thirty we’ll talk about Liszt and hear a few works by the composer and around seven-fifty-four we will hear about a thousand-year-old village that has been newly rebuilt. Kallinisch: So, how do things stand in ... Rauher: Wait a minute, before that, we want to enjoy the overture to Mozart’s opera ‘The Marriage of Figaro’.73

This sort of informal banter (as ‘canned’ as it was) invoked a closer, domestic atmosphere, marking the broadcast from Cologne as something more local and accessible than the rest of the programme produced in Hamburg. This overlapping of the timeless Heimat with the work of reconstruction was particularly underlined in a weekly series called ‘Wie steht’s in Rheinisch-Westfälischen Städten’ (‘How do Things Stand in Rhenish- Westphalian Cities’). The show discussed a different city in the broadcast area each week, and combined up-to-date news on the state of reconstruction with a sort of historical travelogue. The title and focus of the show carried strong echoes of a series called ‘Our cities in the Rhineland and Westphalia’ broadcast by the WERAG in the late Weimar era.74 Cities were described in classic terms of Heimat, as an excerpt from the edition on the town of Soest demonstrates,

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‘Much-honoured Soest’ with its famous churches of green sandstone, its winding streets and alleys, friendly half-timbered houses, its city walls, in short, with its unique cityscape, was in the years before the war the epitome of the medieval German city.75

The description follows closely the pattern of Heimat-images described by Confino, which focus on a picture of a German home town with the landscape in the background. The description, though emphasizing the ‘unique’ cityscape, at the same time, focuses in the end on its generic quality as the epitome of a German town. With the exception of the colour of the sandstone in the churches, however, there is nothing in the description that would differentiate it from any other medieval city. Following a closer, though not terribly close, description of the damage to the old town, it goes on to describe the work of restoration that has begun.76 Listeners are assured that the question ‘can old Soest be res- cued?’ ‘weighs heaviest on the minds of the men responsible’, in spite of the more pedestrian worries of ‘commerce, transport, accommodation, sewage, water and light’ for which they are also responsible.77 In fact, only one short paragraph in the middle deals with the ‘modern’ aspects of life and everyday problems of the town. After that, the rest is devoted to a meeting of local artists with the mayor and local association for Heimat preservation (Heimatpflegeverein).78 Clearly, the most important aspect of bringing home the ‘present’ state of German cities involved a detailed description of the preservation of the past. In essence, the show portrays a dual rediscovery, the internal ‘discovery’ or re-connection of the people of Soest with their past and traditions, and the radio listeners’ ‘rediscovery’ of Soest as part of their ‘local’ Heimat. Similar programmes at other stations also adopted elements of Heimat symbolism in their regular rotation. Within months, the local news format of the ‘Rundschau aus dem Hessenland’ at Radio Frankfurt had been expanded to include a regularly recurring series of features, many of which contained elements of Heimat symbolism such as a weekly ‘town portrait’ of a town in the broadcast area of Frankfurt, similar to that from Cologne described above. An early feature of Radio Munich broadcasts was a show called ‘Radio München Besucht’ (‘Radio Munich visits’), where, as the title suggested, reporters went out into Munich and the surrounding country and ‘dropped in’ on local events. Because the format of the show involved going out and speaking with ‘local’ people, this was one of the first segments where Bavarian dialect could be heard regularly. The show was intent enough on creating pictures of Heimat that where it did not find them, it invented them. Some of these programmes

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-178 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 179 were not so much direct reporting, but rather a sort of pseudo-reportage that sometime borders more on rustic comedy than news.79 Another regular segment from Radio Munich, ‘Der Bürgermeister Spricht’ (‘The Mayor Speaks’) began within the first months of broadcasting and soon became a fixture of the Sunday schedule. In the beginning, this was a weekly address by the mayor of Munich, Karl Scharnagl, providing announcements of the local administration, and providing information about the state of reconstruction in Munich. Beginning in November 1946, once elections had been held in most towns, the mayors of other towns in the Bavaria were also given time to speak on the show. With this change in the show, it soon became an opportunity for local mayors to present a picture of their town to listeners, and highlight their own personal accomplishments in reconstruction.80 Josef Gallmeier, mayor of Landshut, began his talk with classic Heimat imagery: ‘The far-seeing emblems of the medieval duchy-town of Landshut, the great Hans Stethaimer’s brilliant legacy in the form of the St Martin’s Church and the Castle Trausnitz, begun in 1204, have, like the three- gabled town hall, with its famous historical great hall, survived Hitler’s insane war.’81 Besides acting as rallying points for local pride, and signs of hope in the reconstruction effort, the Heimat imagery in such programmes was often invoked as a contrast to the ‘foreign’ elements in the radio programme. An article in the first weeks of Radiowelt describes one such feature from Radio Munich, setting it in contrast to the ‘foreign’ programmes that were broadcast at other times:

You came home last Tuesday in the late afternoon, were a bit tired from the efforts of the day. As always, you turned on the radio, and there was the quiet fear that perhaps yet again ... But there you suddenly heard familiar names in a familiar tone: out of a sketch grew suddenly a picture of Munich with its great and varied history. That was ‘something different for a change.’ It was something that touched everyone and made them a little bit sentimental, as so many beloved places of memory now lie in ashes and debris; but it made one proud at the same time: to be able to live in this city, that, in spite of all the wounds of time, will never bleed away or die, because its life-force can be obliterated neither by fire nor by rubble.82

The ‘perhaps yet again ...’ in the opening sentence refers to jazz, which was of course a well-known subject of complaint from many listeners. The reference is made clearer by the fact that ‘something different for a

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-179 9780230_009035_06_cha05 180 Voices in Ruins change’ (Mal was anderes) was the name of a regular light music and/or jazz broadcast. Such an oblique reference further cements this comment as an appeal to opinions that are understood (and supposedly shared) by all native readers. The overall message is clear: ‘you’ (man, the general you) do not like ‘foreign’ jazz, ‘you’ are interested in the history and reconstruction of ‘your’ native city. The drive to re-connect listeners with the regions that had grown physically inaccessible was soon overlapped by the symbolic agenda of rediscovering the Heimat in the airwaves. While it is clear that providing listeners with a combination of both useful and interesting information about the world around them was foremost in the minds of many of the programme producers, the language available to discuss regional events and reconstruction was infused with Heimat symbolism.

Pieces of home: service broadcasts Not long after the station at Cologne began broadcasting, its role in programme production changed. Rather than acting as a strictly ‘local’ station, it began to produce shows for the whole of the broadcast area. At the start of 1946, Cologne’s one-hour ‘window’ in the schedule was removed, and Cologne began to produce more segments of the daily programme, many of which were placed in rotation with similar programmes from Hamburg. A good proportion of these programmes came in the area of service broadcasts for specific groups, such as programmes for women, children, farmers and the churches. Although these sections were regionally produced, and very often addressed regional audiences, they were seldom considered ‘regional’ broadcasts, either by contemporary programme-makers or within the available histories of broadcasting in Germany. There were numerous practical reasons for the rotation of service programmes between Hamburg and Cologne. Besides allowing Cologne more of the desired hours in the programme, it also allowed stations to give more airtime to local officials and experts. Furthermore, one of the underlying ideas behind having parallel departments in the same organization was to engender a productive level of competition between them. Programme producers in Cologne quickly turned their efforts from attempting to gain more time in the programme to producing higher quality programmes.83 Particularly in the literary sections of the programme, the high quality of production this generated from both sides is almost universally acknowledged.84 Some of these programmes had strongly regional character, while the origin of others may not have been

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-180 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 181 identifiable at all, because the NWDR did not begin announcing the origins of programmes until March of 1947.85 The morning programme, for example, which consisted of discussions on child-rearing as well as household health tips from ‘our house doctor’, though alternating with programmes of the same name from Hamburg, did not contain strong markers of regional identity. If the regionally based production of such service programmes did not necessarily reflect a Heimat-based vision of the region in Germany, it did provide a structure that was readily available for the construction of such visions. The equation of the individual home, and in particular the feminine sphere, with the nation, is also one of the central tropes of Heimat imagery. We saw in the previous chapter how the feminized domestic sphere was mobilized as a representation of Germany. In addressing women after the war, radio programmes invoked feminine behaviour and consumption as the model for the new ‘peaceful’ nation of Germany. By making women’s programmes a matter of regional production, the radio stations, consciously or unconsciously, gave each regional station the feminine voice of the Heimat. Like the NWDR, each of the regional studios of the SWF had their own Frauenfunk departments separate from the central station at Baden-Baden. Radio Munich’s filial station at Nuremberg also produced its own programmes for women, even when it was only producing 15 minutes of programme daily, and in spite of the fact that Munich possessed a strong and successful women’s department.86 If the association of women with the region was mostly structural in the case of women’s programming, the symbolic association was much more explicit in shows that addressed children. When speaking to children, the radio adopted a parental mode of address, such as in this announcement by the speaker Thea Cronenberg as part of the local hour from Cologne in November of 1945:

Listeners big and small! Yes indeed, this evening for a change there’s something for our smaller listeners, who can perhaps stay up for another quarter-hour for it. Yesterday was St Martin’s Eve, and we told you all about the St Martin traditions and the St Martin Song. After many years the great St Martin’s parade moved through the streets of Düsseldorf once more.87

By addressing the children’s ‘normal’ bedtime, and ‘allowing’ them to stay up a little bit later, the radio became a secondary parent, speaking to all the children in the region as part of a common ‘family’. The focus

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-181 9780230_009035_06_cha05 182 Voices in Ruins on regional space is in this case reinforced by the report on St Martin’s parade in Düsseldorf. St Martin’s Eve (10 November) is a holiday that is celebrated in numerous ways around Germany. During the Nazi era, these local celebrations were eclipsed, phased out and partially co-opted by the national November 9th commemoration of the Nazis’ failed coup of 1923.88 This celebration of St Martin’s Eve in 1945 was therefore celebrated as a re-connection of children not only to the local region, but with traditions which stood outside of Nazi ideology. Speaking to children in the motherly ‘voice of the Heimat’ also meant speaking to children in the ‘mother tongue’, local dialect. One of the earliest series of school programmes of the NWDR was ‘lebendige Sprache – lebendige Landschaft’ (‘Living language, living landscape’) which outlined the various dialects spoken in the region.89 Programme segments aimed at smaller children (Kinderfunk) were also strongly regional in character, with one of the first featuring Lis Böhle, a Rhenish dialect poet and radio author well known during the Nazi era,90 wel- coming Cologne children back after the summer holidays and listening to the adventures they had in the country. Such vacation programmes for children were a regular annual feature in the programmes, both at Cologne and at other stations.91 Sending children to the country during wartime and in the immediate post-war era was done with mostly less-than-romantic motives. During the war, children had been evacuated to the country to keep them safe from the city bombing. In the years following the war, children were often sent so that they could help with the harvest, and also to ensure that they would have enough to eat in the face of the food shortages, particularly in the cities. In the show cited above, these practical concerns are covered over by the celebration of the children’s re-connection with the ways of the country. It begins with the voices of children, reciting verses in Cologne dialect, describing helping out on the farm. The final verse, recited by all of the children together, dreams of a ‘return’ to the land: ‘Yes we don’t want to go to college / what we want is clear to us / to drive across the fields and mead- ows / with the ox, the horse and wagon / to marry a solid farmer’.92 Towards the end of the show, to ‘prepare’ the children for the start of school, Böhle tells them a story supposedly remembered from her own school years. The story was about a teacher who ‘did not look on the outside like she was so kind at heart on the inside’, and even acted ‘in the place of a mother’ for Röschen, a girl in her class whose mother had died. Böhle ends the stories by reminding the children: ‘yes, be grateful and glad if your mother, your Mama is still alive. Be good and obedient, because particularly your mother deserves it.’93 At this, the kids all sing a

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-182 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 183 song in dialect about the self-sacrificing work that mothers do for their children. The re-connection to the ‘maternal’ realm of the country that began the broadcast is thus carried back over onto their lives in the city, focussed first on the school teacher, and finally around the person of their mother. The content of children’s programmes did not consist entirely of regional, or even German, imagery. Radio Munich’s Sunday children’s hour, ‘Christa und Maxl laden euch ein’ (Christa and Maxl invite you over), while it did feature traditional German content, by far the most popular item was the serialized stories of Dr Doolittle by Hugh Lofting, which were also quite popular in other zones .94 These stories were framed on the other hand by the show’s regionally bound child presenters, Christa und Maxl, who spoke with noticeably Bavarian accents, envisioning a cosy local home, into which all of the children of the region were ‘invited’. The format of children’s programming at most stations – already well established in previous years – which involved having a group of ‘radio children’ in the studio to whom the programmes were immediately addressed, usually in a pseudo-parental voice, helped to create this vision of a regional ‘family’ in the airwaves. Perhaps the most extreme form of this sort of parental address came from Karl Kempf, the ‘Fairy-tale Uncle’ of the SWF. At the beginning of his programmes, he would read out birthday greetings to specific children who were listening, as well as parental admonitions, such as

I’m calling Wolfgang Schenk from Freiburg, be good to your Mummy and don’t always answer back, and you, Herbert Heiland from Emmenlingen, you must be more industrious and study instead of running around in the streets all the time, yes and who seems to be scared of water as well? So Herbert, from today onward don’t you make any more worries for your dear mother.95

One can only imagine the impact this must have had on the children whose names were called. Though the show is hosted by the male ‘Uncle’ Kempf, he actually underlines the feminine domestic space implied by the show by his reference to each child’s mother, who, it is implied, is the one who will be injured by their misbehaviour. As in the broadcast on St Martin’s Eve from Cologne cited above, one of the main times that children were addressed in tones of the Heimat at all of the stations was on holidays. The stations did this both individually and collectively. In 1947, the Soviet-controlled station in Berlin initiated

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-183 9780230_009035_06_cha05 184 Voices in Ruins a series of holiday broadcasts for children, called Auf dem glücklichen Stern (‘On the Happy Star’) to which every station in Germany contributed and that were broadcast on every station. The first show was at Pentecost 1947, then similar shows were done at Christmas, Easter and the last took place at Pentecost 1948. The shows were remarkable for several reasons. For one, with the exception of the Nuremberg trials, they are the only broadcast that was carried by the stations of all four occupation zones. Furthermore, the programmes were initiated at a time when the relations between the occupation powers, as well as between the Eastern and Western radio stations were rapidly souring. Sadly, perhaps the most remarkable thing about them is that they have been largely forgotten. There are no known recordings of any of them, and manuscript fragments only exist for the final one, on Pentecost Sunday, 16 May 1948, in which not all stations may have participated.96 In the broadcast from Cologne, the children are met by Hänneschen, a character from Cologne’s puppet theatre (who speaks in heavily dialect- coloured German) and go on a fantasy trip by train down the Rhine from Cologne.97 In the manuscript from Stuttgart, the show ‘finds’ the children from Stuttgart already walking in the countryside, when they come across a farmer and his son, driving their cows to a traditional market in the nearby town. Upon meeting the farmer’s son, one of the children admonishes the other to speak in dialect, so the boy will believe that they are really from Stuttgart.98 After having the traditions of the market explained to them by the farmer and his young son, the broadcast ‘fades out’ as the children follow along to the market. Radiowelt’s review of the first show (which had the same format) raved, pointing especially to the show’s musical offerings:

it was once more apparent that many songs that individual tribes claim for themselves have become common German cultural property. Here through the ether a better Germany spoke to us: that of deep sentiments and intimacy. A mood-lifting hour. Bravo Berlin!99

These national broadcast events, portraying Germany as a series of unique and unspoiled domestic landscapes, in short, a series of Heimats, was thrown into sharper relief by the fact that the weekend of the final show also marked the 100th anniversary celebration of the first German national assembly in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, held on the 18th of May.100 The event, though commemorating one of the first national milestones in German history, was marked more by national division than unity.

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The ceremonies, held in Frankfurt, were not attended by those from the Soviet zone, and featured mostly Western diplomats.101 The juxtaposition of these two radio events, the carefree children’s holiday and the somewhat fraught ‘official’ national ceremony point to the relative ease with which Heimat imagery allowed for broad identification in Germany in contrast to any national political symbols, which are as often as not emphasized division rather than unity. As Anton Kaes has argued, ‘Germany as a nation or state cannot be a Heimat; only the familiar landscape, the delimited and intimate scene of childhood, can serve this function.’102 In creating a radiophonic ‘scene’ for children, the adult longings for an unspoiled Heimat of cosy, familiar relations were clearly the ideal mode of expression. ‘Re-connecting’ children to the ‘authentic’ markers of Germany, local dialect, countryside and holiday traditions offered a vision of an ongoing, maternal Germany that, if not existing in the present, might be returned to in the future. Within the realm of children’s broadcasts, which spoke mostly to an urban audience, the countryside was portrayed as the safe, comfortable realm where children could be re-connected with the ‘old’ traditions of Germany. Farmers’ broadcasts, on the other hand, spoke not only of the countryside but also to the countryside. Given the symbolically and ideologically loaded nature of the portrayal of rural spaces, farmers’ programmes within the radio programme for the entire nation have tended to speak with a double voice, which aimed as much at exploring and displaying the country and its traditions to radio listeners as it had been about supplying farmers with information.103 The dual voice of these programmes was sharpened during the Nazi era. The name of the programme, ‘Blut und Boden’, already gives a good indication of the ideological vision behind the programme. The head of farmers’ programmes at Cologne, Karl Holzamer, later claimed he tried to escape the ideology of the programmes by spending much of his time by going out into the countryside to report from farms. As Daniela Münkel has pointed out, while not necessarily expressing the most racist elements of Nazi policy, such productions of the working countryside fit in comfortably within the National Socialist view of the country.104 The relationship between city and countryside was radically altered by the war. With most of the cities ruined by bombing, the country was one of the only places that was still working, and with the overall shortage of food, agriculture was Germany’s most vital industry. As highlighted in the previous chapter, far from viewing the country from a distance as a romantic place for recreation, many city-dwellers experienced the really existing country on ‘hamster trips’, attempting to illegally obtain scarce

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-185 9780230_009035_06_cha05 186 Voices in Ruins food from the farmers. As with nearly every aspect of the post-war food shortage, this situation was also the source of great tension. The relative plenty in the countryside did not merely make it seem and unspoiled, but an over-privileged realm. The strident tones and threatening language of one commentator from Radio Koblenz in 1947 expressed these tensions amply:

They should consider that democracy means rule by the people [Herrschaft des Volkes]! That a people can have great patience, that the mood of a hungry people can nevertheless tip over from in a highly dangerous way from one day to the next. The great number of those who are sitting out there in their villages and have not lost a fraction of what the bombed-out and the refugees have had to sacrifice should understand clearly that the war is indeed over, but its consequences are still highly effective; and a hungry section of the population, particularly when it is in the majority, is all too easily tempted to carry out the distribution of burdens such that those they believe suffered least from the war will now be struck hardest by it.105

Indeed, city-dwellers accused farmers of ruthless profiteering, taking their last durable goods in exchange for basic foodstuffs.106 For the farmers, who were required to deliver all of their produce to the authorities, the constant stream of visitors from the city put them under considerable pressure. Besides this new relation to the city, the nature of the countryside itself was facing great change. A large proportion of the Eastern refugees, many of whom came from agricultural backgrounds, were settled in rural areas in the West, creating inter-regional tension in the space that is ordinarily the symbolic preserve of regional identity. Given these large numbers of refugees, and particularly in the wake of the Nazi policies which had kept large farms together, land reform was considered both a desirable and an unavoidable consequence of reconstruction.107 In light of all of this, the Allied occupiers considered programmes for farmers to be quite important.108 For listeners, farmers’ programmes often also offered advice for those with gardens, which were an important part of obtaining food for significant portions of the population.109 The need to reach farmers when they could actually listen to the radio also meant that farmers’ programmes were given relatively good broadcast slots, normally during the midday block.110 In general, live reporting, which had very much been a staple of farmers’ programmes in Weimar and especially Nazi times,111 was not a possibility for them in the first years after the war, given the scarcity of

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Figure 5.1 Reporter Horst Scharfenberg of the Südwestfunk central studio in Baden-Baden, interviews farmers from the border region. Photo: SWR/Vollrath. radio cars. Nonetheless, the stations quickly developed a network of connections with local officials, farmers and other rural correspondents.112 Once there were radio cars available, reporters headed for the countryside quickly (see Figure 5.1). Even without live reporting, portrayal of the countryside, complete with clucking hens and grunting pigs – as well as conversations between farmers – was still considered an important part of creating an authentic- sounding broadcast.113 At the NWDR Cologne, for example, beginning in August of 1946, much of the information in the farmer’s broadcast from Cologne was passed on in a conversation between two fictional Western farmers, Heinrich and Wilhelm. With only paper manuscripts remaining, which do not show any signs of dialect, it is difficult to say whether the characters spoke in regionally coloured accents.114 Never- theless, their recurrence as characters discussing issues affecting farming in the Western regions, as well as their association with the station in Cologne, marked them as local and familiar. As part of their rooting in the regional space they share with the listeners, they are also rooted in common time, as in the start of this dialogue from October of 1946:

Heinrich: Wilhelm, I fear the worst this time, I fear the very worst ... — Wilhelm: I do, too! (Laughing) But only when I see you, Heinrich, with your face of doom. Then I truly fear the worst, too!

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Heinrich: You contrary so-and-so! You have no idea why I fear the worst! Wilhelm: And I don’t want to know! The main thing is, I know you are an eternal pessimist! With the Nazis you were already preach- ing to me ... (imitating Heinrich) ‘Wilhelm, I fear the worst, where will this lead? It won’t last much longer’ (normal again) There you had every reason. And now you’re already fearing the worst again? Heinrich: Aw, what’s all your stupid nonsense about? I’m not interested in politics and all that! I’m talking about my livestock in the pasture! The feed there is getting mighty low!115

This reference to the Nazi era is an interesting addition to a dialogue that is otherwise entirely concerned with the how to cope with a shortage of cattle feed while still making the legally required milk deliveries. Within the dialogue, the reasons for the shortage of feed are never explicitly discussed nor connected in any way with the Nazis or the war. As such, this brief exchange seems intended as a sort of ‘denazification’ of the two fictitious characters, and by implication most farmers in the region. But Heinrich’s scepticism about the Nazis seems not to come from any conscious engagement with Nazi politics, but rather is portrayed as a sort of inborn and idiosyncratic farmer’s intuition. Heinrich’s answer, dismissing the thought that he might be talking about ‘politics and all that’, banishes any thought of participation in, or responsibility for, the realm of politics even further. One could replace the reference to the Nazis with one to a harsh winter without changing the nature of the dialogue at all. This is, of course, a rhetorical strategy that has long been commented on as a feature of individual memories of the Nazi past.116 But within the context of the farmer’s dialogue it gains a further dimension, resituating not only the people but the place itself outside of National Socialism – or any other form of politics. Dialogues in similar format were the most popular feature of the farmer’s broadcast at Radio Frankfurt, ‘der Hessische Landbote’ (‘The Hessian Rural Messenger’). The two farmers, Heiner und Philip, along with ‘Frau Babett’ became extremely well known and popular with the show’s audience.117 Perhaps the most folk-oriented farmers’ programmes came from Radio Stuttgart, which were filled with sketches in Swabian dialect, and interspersed three days per week with folk music. Similarly, at the SWF, where farmers’ programmes were the sole responsibility of the regional studios, the use of local dialect was considered one of the key features that allowed them to connect to their audience.118

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As with children’s programmes, farming programmes emphasized their Heimat element most strongly during holidays. At the stations in the American zone in particular, they changed focus completely, from discussions of agriculture to discussing folk traditions in the country.119 Such discussions of folk tradition could sometimes carry disturbing echoes of the recent past. A farmer’s Christmas broadcast from Radio Stuttgart declaimed in 1946,

But where could German folkways have been better and more genuinely maintained than with the folk who are tied to the soil, with our farmers? The city-dweller was always more accepting of foreign influence than the farmer, whose being was hardly changed by foreign infiltration. One must only know our farmers; one must experience them at their work, in family circles, at their festivals: here they are whole fellows, men German to the core, with healthy senses that look into the eyes of the future with a steady gaze. In their ways and customs such a solid disposition of character is apparent that with them they will also certainly lay valuable foundations in the reconstruction of our people.120

Although the bulk of the programme consisted of pieces in Swabian dialect, the show made no reference to the region at all, but to the tie of the ‘German’ farmer to the land.121 The overtly xenophobic version of Heimat expressed here, highlighting the strength of the ‘German’ farmer in his resistance to ‘foreign’ ways, does not differ in any way from that propounded by the Nazis, or in the most conservative circles during the Weimar Republic. It is doubtful whether the continuities would have been lost on any listener familiar with Nazi-era radio.122 This manuscript is by all accounts extreme, and it is not my intention to portray all farmers’ programmes as a hotbed of National Socialist sentiment. What this passage does reveal, however, is that such expressions were certainly possible on the radio if made within the context of talking about tradition in the countryside. The representation of farmers’ folkways in connection with holidays highlights the double voice of farmers’ programmes. With their almost ethnographic explanations, they seem not so much speak to the rural population – who supposedly knew what their traditions were – but rather about them. For all of the confident talk about farmers preserving German tradition, these programmes above all are responding to the threat of loss of those traditions. Georg Seeßlen notes that ‘with the urb- anisation of all walks of life, Heimat finally became an experience that

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-189 9780230_009035_06_cha05 190 Voices in Ruins for the rural population as well could only be realised in the realm of free time’.123 In her oral history of Eastern refugees in Hesse, Uta Müller-Handl has pointed out a telling difference in the sense of tradition between rural and urban refugees. Refugees who had come from cities often consciously told their children about the mostly rural customs of their former Heimat. Those from rural areas who resettled in rural areas in the West, and therefore could continue many of their practices and routines, were less aware of ‘passing on’ regionally bound customs.124 It would be over- stating the case to argue that the Heimat focus in farmers’ programmes was entirely the product of urban-based fantasies about the countryside and its traditions. Whoever else they thought was listening to such programmes, the programme-makers knew that the bulk of their audience was the rural population. I would argue, however, that this leaking- through of Heimat imagery reflects an ongoing unease with regard to rural space in Germany, very much akin to that described surrounding women in the previous chapter. The discussions of the present-day challenges and changes that were taking place in the countryside ran the risk of portraying a countryside that was severed from the ties of national tradition. An overemphasis on the ‘traditional’ aspect of the country would not have portrayed a countryside that reflected the experience either of those living in rural areas or those who frequently visited them. Though they were seldom, if ever, referred to as ‘regional’ or ‘Heimat’ programmes, the regular service programmes for women, children and farmers all drew to a greater or lesser extent on the ideas and symbols of Heimat. The fact that such programmes were never mentioned in any of the arguments for regional programming underlines how deeply embedded such ideas were in the minds of both radio programmers and listeners. The regional construction of these programmes was simply considered a ‘natural’ way for radio stations to reflect the space around them. Home service and Heimat do not represent a zero-sum game, of course. From studies of broadcasting in ‘normal’ times and places, we are now used to the idea that programmes such as shipping news and weather reports can provide constant banal reminders of the nation as homeland.125 What is noteworthy in the case of Germany, however, is the degree to which these banal markers of a broader nation were inscribed onto programming practices that were explicitly regional in character.

Sunday126

We have seen how the Heimat-oriented markers of regional identity that lay in the background of many service programmes were brought to the

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-190 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 191 fore in connection with holidays. The sense of connection with past times afforded by recurring holidays also led to the representation of the region as a past space, with an emphasis on the close, intact nature of rural areas and the supposedly unchanged, unchanging life led there. Before moving on to discuss the integration of the stations into the new regional boundaries taking shape in Germany, I will pause here to explore further this connection between the cyclical time of tradition and the regionally marked space of Heimat. In order to do this, I will focus in particular on the Sunday programme, which is both the most regularly recurring ‘traditional’ day and the site of the longest-running broadcast ‘traditions’ in Germany.127 In addition to its status as ‘tradition’, Sunday is also when people have had the most free time for the radio, as the ‘dominator of domestic free-time’.128 Indeed, as surveys from the 1930s through the 1950s reveal, the ‘valleys’ in the curve of radio time use on Sundays were often on a level with some of the ‘peaks’ of weekday use.129 It is surprising that although the popularity of Sunday programming has been widely recognized, both in the use statistics from the stations and in the lives and memories of the listeners,130 the Sunday programme, as a concept and category unto itself, has been essentially ignored as a topic of academic discussion.131 There are multiple connections between Sundays and the time and space of Heimat.132 Both Sunday and Heimat, in spite of their appearance as being ages old, are modern creations. The day free of work that gave Sunday its modern meaning was only made law in Germany in 1919.133 Nevertheless, as a day set aside by Christian tradition, Sunday always looks backward in time. It is a time when, as I defined Heimat above, the past can shine through on the modern present. Though it is defined by the modern working week, and it recurs with great regularity, Sunday is seen as the antithesis to everyday routine, a space of non- modernity woven into the timed pace of modernity. Besides the time of Heimat, Sunday also suggests the multiple places of Heimat symbolism. As the day free of work, Sunday is the time when men can be with their families, in the space of the home. Furthermore, it is leisure time when families are free to go out into the countryside.134 Besides these family-oriented activities, Sunday also suggested a trip to church, where, in the local spaces longed for in Heimat imagery, the entire community gathered. The affinity of Sunday with Heimat lies also in the fact that their integrative nature derives from a basic emptiness that allows them to be filled with multiple meanings. As Heimat stands interchangeably for the town, region or nation, Sunday stands interchangeably for free time, private time and community time. In the words of the ethnographer Rolf

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Lindner, ‘Sunday remains, frayed at both ends, a day hanging in limbo, at once weighty and weightless, interminably long and much too short, peculiarly torn back and forth, pubescent. The actual place Nowhere, the true Utopia, that is Sunday.’135 The description of Sunday as nowhere is quite telling. In my introduction, I talked about the uncertainty of the position of Heimat between time and space. This ambiguity becomes readily apparent in its relationship to Sunday. Much of what defines the time of Sunday are tropes of space (homes, churches and towns), while what defines the place of Heimat are tropes of time. However recent the ‘old’ traditions of Sunday may have actually been, the importance of Sundays in maintaining a sense of continuity and normality for Germans in the post-war era would be difficult to dispute. Even in times of the greatest economic scarcity after the war, demographic research shows that special foods and activities were reserved for Sundays in the vast majority of households in West Germany.136 In addition to their meaning in private lives, the rituals and routines of Sunday have a very powerful public aspect as well. They are at once ‘component of subjective lifestyles and life habits on the one hand, as well as a component of the collective (memory-)culture on the other’.137 In art, film and song, the rituals of Sunday have now become iconic public symbols of the ‘private’ world of the 1950s. The trip to church, the Sunday walk, the large family meal, dressing up and visiting relatives, all form part of a structure that at once calls forth many specific individual experiences, and yet is recognizable and communicable as a common experience. As a medium that simultaneously addressed listeners within the home and as an imagined community on the air, the radio was particularly implicated in the creation of Sunday as an entity in the lives of Germany. The inward-looking, but nevertheless national understanding of Sunday programmes was established well before the National Socialist control over them. Attempts in the late 1920s to create a series of Europe- wide international concerts on Sunday evenings met with protests above all in Germany and Austria, who argued that such times should be reserved for national and local programmes.138 The value of such tradition was also immediately apparent to National Socialists. With their emphasis both on the idea of the home as refuge from the outside world and the need to bring the entire nation together, the Nazis considered the content of the Sunday programme of utmost importance. It was also the one part, of all segments of the broadcast week, that was felt to be one of their bigger successes.139 In her survey of women who lived through the war, Margarete Dörr discovered that it was staples of the Sunday programmes, the Wunschkonzert and the Schatzkästlein (about which see

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-192 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 193 below) which remained – with almost universally positive associations – in memory.140 It was precisely the sense of ‘everybody’ coming together in a familial, non-political setting that these women cited as the positive experience of the programme. From the very first days of broadcasting, Sunday schedules at all of the stations of the post-war era were set aside from the weekdays by a number of different conventions, many of which were reminiscent of, if not directly carried over from, programming practices of previous years. Because they expected listeners to be at home during the entire day, the broadcast pauses in the late morning and afternoon that were a feature of weekday programming were largely absent.141 Furthermore, Sundays as a general rule featured much longer broadcasts on average than the rest of the week, particularly during the morning and afternoon. The home space suggested by Sunday programming was largely the ‘inner’ world of the nuclear family. While children’s programmes were one of the most fixed points of Sunday afternoon schedules,142 there were very few, if any, shows which addressed women in any other capacity other than as mothers. Sunday schedules in the post-war era followed a general pattern that only seldom changed, timed largely to the ‘traditional’ activities of a Sunday. The early Sunday morning was not a great deal different from weekdays at most stations, apart from occasionally being more ‘serious’ in tone, or, in the case of the NWDR, distinctly regional with either the ‘Harbour Concert’ from Hamburg or the ‘Miners’ Concert’ from Cologne. The mid- to late morning then changed to a more reflective tone, largely devoted to church programming, either church services, Morgenfeier (see below) or also religious music. After the long midday concert, Sunday afternoon saw programmes that addressed the ‘family’ of listeners as gathered together. The early afternoon was normally devoted to children, followed either by long afternoon variety programmes or with large symphony concerts. This gathering of ‘everyone’ was also the occasion for shows where listener letters were read on the air, such as ‘Der Hörer hat das Wort’ (‘listeners have their say’) at the NWDR, and its equivalent at other stations. In the summer months, sport broadcasts were also a vital part of the Sunday programme. These had been among some of the first local broadcasting to come into the schedule, and continued at the NWDR to be one of the programmes that was also produced separately by the Cologne and Hamburg stations for their listeners.143 The evening programme was then normally the main event of the week, the week’s radio play at Radio Munich, the ‘Volkstümliches Konzert’ at the NWDR, all of which were aimed at entertaining the entire audience if at all possible.

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In general, the more the Sunday programme stayed focused around these private spaces, the greater resonance it had with its audience. It is no surprise that the audience for Heimat programmes was some of the most vocal in this regard. As one listener in the British zone wrote in to complain to Hör Zu,

For several weeks now there have been power cuts on Saturday and Sunday. Unfortunately that is the time in Hamburg and also in other regions for the popular show ‘The Old Love.’ As this is the only show in Low German (and why is that?) it is painful for us to go without it. I don’t know if these power cuts are justified on Sunday when the whole family is finally together.144

The connection of Sunday with both the regional space (where Low German is spoken) and the family space appears here as natural. The writer, in referring to ‘the whole family’ being together is envisioning not just one family, but every family, gathered together in private space across the entire region. This doubled ideological space of nuclear and regional ‘family’ articulated by the radio then serves as a basis to demand a redistribution of the then limited resource of electricity away from the work of the weekday. A correspondent to Radio Stuttgart’s regular broadcast ‘Aus unserer schwäbischen Heimat’ (‘From our Swabian Homeland’) expressed similar sentiments:

My dear Stuttgart station!

I have the urgent need to thank you yourself and all of those who work on the show ‘From the Swabian homeland.’ The goldenly humorous as well as the deep sentimental content of these shows make them an experience for me every time. The inner peace that is lost in the haste and hurry of the weekdays returns through your broadcast every Sunday afternoon, and reminds one that there are still people who have not lost their sense of the humour and of the seriousness of life, and who give some of this to their fellow humans. I am steadfastly convinced that your shows mean great inner recovery not just for me, but for many of our fellow people, and are what make Sunday afternoon what into what it actually should be.145

This letter expresses a number of expectations, not just of what a Heimat programme should be, but of the nature of Sunday. Both Sunday and Heimat appear above all as an ‘inner’ refuge from the ‘haste and hurry’

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-194 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 195 of the rest of the week. The writer’s emphasis on the simultaneous ‘sense of the humour and the seriousness of life’ also points to the catch-all nature of Sunday/Heimat symbolism. Whatever the actual content of the sentiment involved, its vital element is the sense of distance from the modern world ‘outside’ which allows ‘internal’ sentiments to recover.

The bells of home: church services One of the main features of Sunday broadcasting, and the one which normally suggested ‘community’ coming together was the weekly church service. Within their first weeks on the air, all of the radio stations in Germany began broadcasting regular religious services, marking the end of a six-year long exclusion of the churches from radio programme production in Germany. Like the churches themselves, church programmes had led an often ambiguous existence in Germany after 1933.146 Toler- ated at first as part of both social and radio tradition, church programmes were slowly pushed out of the radio in the years leading up to the war, ending in their final removal in April of 1939. The Nazis sought to replace Christian services with their own pseudo-religious celebrations for the Hitler Youth, which they placed deliberately into the time spot that had been the place for Christian services.147 The popularity of these programmes was limited, however, and after a time they faded from use. Church programmes, besides their association with the universal entity of the church, also carried strong associations with local space. As with other ‘service’ programmes, some of this association was structural. In the two centralized institutions in the Western zones, NWDR and the SWF, church programmes were the remit of the various regional studios.148 In the American zone, church services were one of the first programmes to be produced locally when most of the programme was being supplied from Radio Luxembourg, and after programme sharing was established between the stations, church programmes were never exchanged. In the interests of plurality, the church services alternated each week between Catholic and Protestant services, even in those areas that were predominantly one or the other, such as in the predominantly Catholic South. Wherever possible, however, the regional element of the service was maintained. As soon as the station in Cologne was up and running at the NWDR, for example, it seemed ‘natural’ that Cologne in the mostly Catholic West would take over the production of the Catholic services, while Hamburg would remain responsible for the Protestant services in the mostly Protestant North.149 The actual purpose of such broadcasts had long been a subject of argument in Germany. Especially the Catholic Church, with its emphasis in

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-195 9780230_009035_06_cha05 196 Voices in Ruins weekly services on the physical act of communion, was adamant that a broadcast church service could not replace the physical attendance in church.150 Furthermore, the churches worried that listeners might not listen with the proper attendance or reverence. Decades after church services were routine occurrences in the radio schedules, listeners were warned that ‘simple listening, perhaps even alongside another activity, is an unworthy profaning [of the service]’.151 The radio services, it was decided, were primarily intended for those who were prevented from physically attending. In post-war Germany, this meant above all those who were still in prisoner of war camps or in hospitals, which were not insignificant numbers.152 Particularly for those listening in prisoner of war camps, these services were genuinely the sound of the homeland in addition to being the sound of the church. The mass on the radio brought listeners together in a specific place, and the church within it came to stand not for the small community surrounding it, but rather the whole of the range of the radio as well. This effect was achieved in particular with the ringing of the church bells, which traditionally would call mass-goers in the local area to church. The sound of church bells, just like the church tower at the centre of the townscape, was an important feature of Heimat imagery and historic church bells was a key focus of preservation efforts throughout the twentieth century.153 ‘Bells rang to summon the community, on Sundays and holidays, and to announce important news; theirs was a sound of human activity and human society.’154 Broadcast over the radio, the sound of church bells extends this ‘local’ call out to the entire mass of listeners. Before the church service broadcast from Berlin in 1930, for example, the bells from the Garrison church in Potsdam summoned listeners, connecting not only to the church traditions, but also to the Prussian military traditions.155 By 1942, the desire to dissociate themselves from the church led the heads of programming to all but erase church bells from the radio. In the post-war era, church bells were once more highly symbolic, as the voice of both a church and a local tradition that had been silenced by the war.156 As the ‘jingle’ for the SWF studio in Freiburg, ‘when the brazen chimes of the bells of the Freiburg Minster sound, every listener in Baden, Württemberg and Hohenzollern knows that his Heimat-station is speaking to him’.157 Radio Frankfurt’s ‘Rundschau aus dem Hessenland’ included the ringing of the bells of one of the churches in the broadcast area, coming in a break the Saturday evening variety programme to ‘ring in Sunday’, a practice that dates back to the middle ages – and one that is also a feature of some radio stations in Germany today.158 Its function in the programme of Radio Frankfurt was to associate the large

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-196 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 197 virtual space implied by the radio audience (‘Hessenland’), especially on Saturday evening when ‘everybody’ was listening, with the local space of community and tradition. Similarly, Christmas was also rendered not just a religious holiday, but a national holiday, as a broadcast recording the bells of cathedrals all over Germany became a staple of the Christmas programme. As Germany gained new territories, during the Nazi era, first the Saar, then Austria and then the so-called Warthegau in Poland, it would add the bells of the major cathedrals to the Christmas programme. In the uncertain space of occupied Germany, this tradition was carried on, though in varying forms and at varying times at the different stations. Though most stations changed the formats and times slightly from year to year, as well as the churches that were included, this tradition has remained strongly in the memories of many radio listeners.159 Just as the church tower is the centre of a Heimat image, the church service in the airwaves carried this sense of Heimat space over onto the broadcast territory of the station. To help generate this image, newspapers would also print a picture and a description of the church where the service was to take place, a practice that was also taken up occasionally in Hör Zu and the other programme guides.160 The Heimat orientation of such pictures was readily apparent, as in the note in the margin of a Sunday schedule from 1947: ‘The NWDR will broadcast the Lutheran church service from St Maria’s in Husum. In our thoughts we see an age-old little church, battered by the storms of many centuries ....’161 The very heavy markers of Heimat space contained within the church service suggest that their purpose went beyond those who were not capable of attending their local church, and were aimed at creating a larger sense of locality within the broadcast territory of the station.

The inner world: Morgenfeier, Schatzkästlein and Heimat shows Besides the broadcast of services from actual churches, another form of church programme specifically designed for the radio had been part of broadcasting since the early 1920s. The Morgenfeier (‘Morning Celebra- tion’) was a combination of hymns and other religious music with Bible readings and spoken reflections on religious themes. Where the radio church service brought listeners into a Heimat space ‘out there’, the Morgenfeier emphasized the ‘internal’ space of the home. The mode of address was also tailored to create this sense of inner space. As one of the creators of these services explained,

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This is not the place for the sermon, but rather the personal address from human to human, where the announcer of the Word certainly speaks in the name of the church, but not as liturgist or preacher but rather as pastor in the private sphere of another. From this arises a different form of speaking and a different style for such addresses that differ greatly from congregational sermon in the church service162

The Morgenfeier addressed an audience in a closely bounded private space, cut off from the world of daily troubles. The establishment of sacred space is, of course, an integral part of any sort of religious ritual. What is interesting about the spaces implied by both the church service and the religious Morgenfeier on the radio is that they draw very heavily on visions of space that are also deeply entwined in the production of national and regional identity. One of the most common versions of these programmes was built on the prototype of a popular Nazi-era programme called unser Schatzkästlein (‘Our Little Box of Treasure’), which began in the years before the war, and carried on almost through the end. It was in form essentially a Morgenfeier, devoted, as its name suggests, to the celebration of the ‘treasures’ of European culture, authenticated further by the voice of Mathias Wieman. Although the poetry sometimes leaned towards the ‘blood and soil’ end of the spectrum, the show sold itself largely as a quiet, inward-focused show which presented ‘eternal’ works which would remain untouched by the events of the world outside. As such, its function within the schedule of the Nazi radio programme was very similar to that of the escapist Schlager tunes that filled so many other parts of the schedules. Much like wartime Schlager as well, shows modelled on the Schatzkästlein found an almost immediate home in the schedules of the post-war stations. The first was the Soviet zone’s, ‘Besinnung und Einkehr’ (‘Reflection and Meditation’) on 27 May 1945, which was put together by Heinrich Burkhard, one of the creators of the Schatzkästlein.163 At other stations, the NWDR’s Stunde der Besinnung (‘Hour of Reflection’), Radio Stuttgart’s Die Einkehr (‘Meditation’) and Besinnlicher Morgen (‘Reflective Morning’) and SWF’s Das Unzerstörbare (‘The Indestructible’) and Das Unvergängliche (‘The Immortal’) soon became entrenched parts of the Sunday schedule. All of these shows built consciously on the tradition of Das Schatzkästlein. Their titles alone give an indication of what they are meant to convey: ‘eternal’ aspects of German culture that could be rediscovered through shutting out the modern world and looking internally.

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A manuscript of Die Einkehr cited above quickly confirms this impression. Next to poems by Eichendorff, Friedrich Wilhelm Weber, and music from Schumann, Schubert, Brahms and Beethoven, there were also short prose pieces with a distinctly nostalgic ring to them, such as ‘Winterfreuden’ (‘Winter Joys’) by the German essayist and critic Bogumil Goltz (1801–1870), that begins:

Finally one morning we found the first thin ice rim on the creek or on the pond – how that captured our childish hearts! Now the new world, the new order of things was really there! Happy was whoever could dig up an old ice skate, that in a pinch could consist of an old knife blade wedged into a block of wood.164

Besides taking place in an unspecified rural space, the piece takes place entirely in an unspecified time – there is nothing at all that would indicate that it had been written in the previous century. It ends, ‘never, never again have I grasped the beauty of living things as in that childish, paradisiacal innocence of happiness, where the entire soul is intoxicated with the wonder and beauty of the world’.165 It presents listeners with an image of the world that was intact at some indefinite point in the past. The blurring of the boundaries between the presentation of religious observance and ‘high’ German culture in the Morgenfeier and Schatzkästlein-type programmes was not accidental, particularly in post- war Germany. Both the church and the traditions of German art and literature appeared as eternal aspects of life. During the war, the Schatzkästlein had helped listeners, as they saw it, to keep the war in perspective as a fleeting, modern moment next to the eternal worth of German culture.166 After the war, especially in the face of the massive destruction and the shame of defeat and occupation, it is small wonder that such programmes remained popular. ‘Healing by quotes’ (‘Heilung durch Zitate’), the retreat into the ‘eternal’ works of German culture, was a very common answer to the problems of both the recent past and the troubled present. The weekly shows on Sunday brought listeners out of ‘a hypo- critical, guilt-bringing time’ (‘einer verlogenen schuldbringenden Zeit’), and reconnected them with a Germany that had supposedly always existed.167 This ‘other time’ was mapped multiply on to ‘internal’ spaces: the world of the listeners’ ‘inner feelings’ (as opposed to external activities), as well as the inner space of the home, marking these out as the spaces both for remembrance and healing. The ‘traditional’ Heimat shows, which were also quickly entrenched in the Sunday schedules, served a very similar purpose. Sunday Heimat

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-199 9780230_009035_06_cha05 200 Voices in Ruins programmes were very similar in format to the Morgenfeier or the Schatzkästlein. They consisted mostly of folk music and dialect poetry, often tied together around a theme. Initially, these were primarily musical broadcasts.168 Sunday morning throughout much of 1946 at the NWDR consisted of a rotation between the ‘Harbour Concert’ produced in Hamburg and the ‘Miner’s Concert’ produced in Cologne. This was significant both in its continuation and its modification of long-standing tradition. The Harbour Concert is perhaps the longest-running feature of broadcasting in Germany. Begun at the NORAG in 1929, it was soon carried by almost every station in Germany (except, of course, Bavaria) as part of their Sunday morning programme. It was happily continued in the Nazi programme, almost to the very end of the war. The show took place on a different ship each week in Hamburg’s harbour. Beginning with the bells of Hamburg’s famous ‘Michel’ (Church of St Michael), the show celebrated in light-hearted fashion the city (and the nation’s) maritime and colonial history.169 By placing this long-running feature in rotation with a similar concert that highlighted the essential feature of the Western Germany, the coal mines of the Ruhr, the NWDR created the image of their broadcast territory as two separate Heimats, one North- ern and one Western. This parity was maintained when, late in 1947, the Harbour Concert and another broadcast, ‘die alte Liebe’ (‘The Old Love’), were joined into one and put into rotation with ‘Glück Auf!’ a broadcast for miners from Cologne in the popular Sunday midday slot (11.40– 12.30). The announcement for the new show, called, in Low German dialect, Bi uns to Hus (‘With Us At Home’) explains,

‘Bi uns to Hus’ is less narrow and restricting and also satisfies the pas- sionate enthusiasts of Low German Platt. It gives us the possibility to speak of things besides seafaring, things that happen on the Elbe and the Weser, on the coast and inland – wherever the Low German language reaches.170

Besides the title of the show, which already invokes a ‘home’ space, the description here offers us a view of an organically bound space, where the ‘local’ language is what provides the ‘possibility’ to speak about the way of life of the people there. While describing a vast region (‘wherever the Low German language reaches’), it describes the region as a place of largely pre-modern activities and relationships. In the French zone, on Sunday afternoon came the ‘Stimme der Heimat’ (‘Voice of the Heimat’), which was produced by each of the regional studios in four-week rotation.171 Beginning in August 1945,

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Radio Stuttgart devoted the Sunday edition of its ‘Echo of the Day’ to a ‘special Swabian broadcast’. Comprised of folk music, poetry and anec- dotes in local Swabian dialect, the show soon changed its name to Aus der schwäbischen Heimat (‘From the Swabian Homeland’) and acquired its own place in the Sunday schedule, which it maintained for years to come. Within a short time, the show came under the direction of Albert Hofele, and developed into a standard form of a Heimat show, with a combination of dialect poems and regional folk tunes, put together and frequently moderated by Hofele. The world of these shows was also focused on close, familiar places, often ‘visiting’ towns in the region or presenting nostalgic reflections on home and family life.172 Taken together, the programmes on Sunday, even when bringing listeners ‘out’ into the world, mostly served to reinforce the mental boundaries between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ and ‘public’ and ‘private’ space. The space of the home and the space of the region were repeatedly invoked as close inner spaces where the ‘true’ life of Germany continued. The repeated emphasis on the bounded nature of Sunday routines, both in the programmes and among their audience, were clearly aimed at building memories of the past and hopes for the future with the positive associations of familiarity and kinship. Particularly for younger people, however, who did not feel as personally either the sense of responsibility or as much of a sense of loss in the wake of the war, this persistent invocation of bounded space was often experienced, and remembered, as a trap. The persistent ‘traditions’ of Sunday radio programming, particularly in combination with the authority structures of many families, deeply entrenched this generation gap.173 As one Bavarian listener recalled of the early post-war years,

I still remember the terrible opera concerts at Sunday dinner. There was no chance to escape from it, and just as little chance [of escap- ing from] the clever commentary by my father from his opera guide, trying – in vain – to expose me to this cultural treasure.174

This private sense of being trapped has carried over into the public reproductions of the memory of the reconstruction era, and indeed has played a significant part in the analysis of Heimat genres.175 Repres- entations of Sunday in song, film and art are filled with images and metaphors of captivity.176 While such ‘captive’ representations of Sunday have become the dominant public memory of them, the radio diversity offered by ‘format’ radio has allowed radio stations to preserve the original ‘traditions’ of Sunday programming as well. Almost all of the radio

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-201 9780230_009035_06_cha05 202 Voices in Ruins conventions discussed above can be found on at least one channel of any of the public service broadcast stations, as part of a format targeted to ‘older’ listeners.177

The programme in the place: re-integrating the regions

Refugees: the ‘outsiders’ within Perhaps the greatest challenge to the imagination of an ongoing and stable regional culture in the West of Germany was the presence of the millions of refugees from the East. In many ways, they represented the ongoing uncertainty about the form Germany would eventually take. For one, the status of the places the refugees had come from was still uncertain. Although it was apparent that in all likelihood, these lands were lost for good, there was an ongoing official silence as to what their fate would actually be. In the British zone, a decision had been taken at the NWDR not to discuss the future of the region at all.178 The guidelines in the American zone had said that all discussions of the matter were to refer only to the Potsdam agreement, which itself had left the question open.179 With the change in policy heralded at the end of 1946, even though the question seemed even closer to resolution, there was still not a definitive answer.180 Besides the uncertainty of the future of the East, the major problem, both practically and symbolically, was the presence of the refugees in the West. Most refugees were settled in rural areas, the traditional location of ‘native’ culture. Furthermore, in the cities, refugees often were taken in before the native populations that had left as a result of the bombing had been able to return. This was a fact that was highlighted by local officials when discussing the issue on the radio.181 Besides the reports on the news that reported the arrival of the refugees, in their role as the voice of the military government, the radio stations also were one of the main places where information for and about the refugees was distributed. At the end of 1945, as a part of their more general effort to acquaint their listeners with the problems of administration and reconstruction, the military authorities started a ‘special publicity campaign’ over the radio in their zone to explain who the refugees were, why they were there and who should be looking after them. The primary goal of this campaign was to get the local populations and administra- tions to accept some responsibility for settling the refugees, as well as keeping the movement of people within the zone as co-ordinated as possible.182 In what is probably the only remaining manuscript from this

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-202 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 203 effort, Bernhard Ernst interviewed a city councillor from Düsseldorf who was charged with taking care of the refugees there. Much of the discussion, particularly from the councillor, is a matter-of-fact discussion of the problems that need to be addressed. What is most remarkable about the interview is how much time is spent, especially by Ernst, talking not about the refugees, but rather about the ‘hard-tested West’, a phrase that recurs several times in the short interview.183 This is clearly meant as an appeal to local pride in order to get the natives to accept the situation as best they can. At the same time, however, it actually emphasized the difference between the natives and the refugees. These differences were made abundantly clear in an observation from the councillor, in making an appeal for understanding between the two groups: ‘The people who have this hard journey behind them will not be coming here in the best of moods. And they are coming to people who have been hard-tested by fate.’184 The contrast between the two groups, those who are ‘not in the best of moods’ and those who have been ‘hard-tested by fate’ inspires far more sympathy for the natives than it does for the refugees. Particularly after years of a Nazi regime that constantly invoked a German ‘fate’, and the need to sacrifice in the face of this fate, the appeal carries an implicit suggestion that those in the Rhineland are more German than the refugees who are arriving. Within this dialogue, the notion of Heimat is used more as a term of exclusion than inclusion. The word is only used in connection with the Rhineland, thus not as a place that is lost to the refugees as it would come to signify later, but as a place to which thousands of evacuated and captive natives of the Rhineland are hoping to return. Discussions about the refugees, particularly in the initial years of occupation were filled with images of pollution. Some of this was related to the very real problems of disease that tend to arise from any situation where large groups of people need to be housed with limited shelter and sanitation. This was also one of the first aspects of the refugees mentioned in the interview cited above.185 Posters in the town of Peine in Lower Saxony warned its natives: ‘Eastern refugees can infect you with typhus without knowing they are ill.’186 Even after they were somewhat settled, accusations of being dirty were one of the most common descriptions from the natives.187 Dirt or pollution are of course common metonymic and metaphoric associations with people who are nomadic or displaced, and also build up ideas of the ‘native’ homeland as pure space.188 The vocabulary of Heimat, which depended on the sense of an organic connection between the local people and the land they live in to authenticate a larger Germanness, became problematic when the ‘locals’

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-203 9780230_009035_06_cha05 204 Voices in Ruins from one area settled in another. As one pastor in rural Lower Saxony explained the refugee problem,

The refugees are not worse than we are, they only have different ways. They know no free peasantry ...The great question is whether we become completely infiltrated with foreign elements or whether it is good for us to receive fresh blood through the refugees. Whether this blood is pure is very much the question. The influx ...carries the danger that the original character of our Volkstum will lose its authenticity through mixing with a character alien to its land and ways. The decline of the Low German speech is showing this already.189

The pastor was clearly perplexed in the face of people whose ‘uniqueness’ meant they were authentically German, and yet were apparently very different. The vocabulary readily available to him within the context of Heimat to express this tension was that of the ‘purity of blood’.190 But this appeal to a racially based Germanness was also not entirely satisfactory to explain what the pastor felt was being lost. Instead, his worries pivoted around a loss of authenticity of the Germanness of the local population that would mean an unacceptable severing of ties with the past. As the refugees began to settle, the radio stations began to address the problems of assimilation and understanding. One of the first of these, part of the series ‘Bridges of Understanding’ at the NWDR in 1946, featured a dialogue between a farmer from the area around Hamburg and a ‘refugee’ from the Sudetenland, addressed the tension between these two populations, particularly in rural areas.191 Shortly thereafter, they began a series called Der Neue Nachbar (‘The New Neighbour’) that ran for much of the next year that advertised itself as ‘a broadcast for natives, and those who would like to become natives’. Numerous appeals went out at all of the stations for assistance and understanding for the refugees. Within the effort to generate understanding between natives and refugees, the programmes that showcased the local Heimat were explicitly geared towards making the new refugees feel at home. As the ‘Bavarian Diary’ at Radio Munich was described at the start of 1948,

The new series on Monday evenings, ‘Bavarian Diary’ will provide a sort of radio Baedecker, with which the many immigrants will get to know the state of Bavaria, its natural beauty, its cities and towns and its people with their ways and customs. We will talk with the people out there and thus provide the listener with a picture of their serious, deep-rooted culture, wherein the earthy Bavarian humour should also

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not be neglected. ‘I am making the effort to turn radio Munich into a Bavarian station’ says Rudolf von Scholtz.192

Much like Friedrich Bischoff’s address to the local stations of the SWF cited above, the creation of local Heimat was very much an outward-looking enterprise, even if the ‘outsiders’ it addressed were within. Turning Radio Munich into ‘a Bavarian station’ involves primarily acquainting ‘immigrants’ with Bavaria. By addressing the show to ‘immigrants’, the show is able to gloss over the fact that the aspects of Bavarian culture the show will be highlighting are also ‘foreign’ to the bulk of the ‘native’ urban audience they will be addressing. This production of Heimat as a combination of advertisement for the coming tourist industry with an explicit appeal for the integration of the refugees is a clear precursor to the values of the post-war Heimatfilm. Over the course of 1947, it began to grow clearer that the refugees would not be able to return home. At that point, in ever increasing amounts, the radio stations began to produce shows that celebrated the Eastern Heimats (see Figure 5.2). The integrative function of these programmes was conscious. When first proposing that shows devoted to the folk ways of the refugees be taken up in the programme, one

Figure 5.2 ‘The refugee problem, a question of politics, economics and – the heart.’ An article in Radiowelt discusses the Eastern refugees in 1946. Source: Bayrischer Rundfunk.

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-205 9780230_009035_06_cha05 206 Voices in Ruins of the control officers at Radio Frankfurt argued, ‘One reason is that their Eigenart and their way of life would become more familiar to the inhabitants of Hesse and that way a greater understanding between new citizens and old inhabitants would be made possible.’193 By the end of 1948, when the imminent division of the remaining parts of Germany made the loss of the East appear even more certain, shows dedicated to remembering the lands of the East became even more prominent parts of the programme.194 This pattern was also taken up by the SWF, once the French zone began to take on refugees from the East, in a regular series called Unvergessene Heimat (‘unforgotten Heimat’) dedicated to the East (Figure 5.3). By the time the occupation ended, Heimat had become synonymous with the refugees and their assimilation. This was also entrenched in the Heimat-oriented departments of the radio stations, particularly the producers of folk music.195 The popular Aus der Schwäbischen Heimat at

Figure 5.3 ‘Song from Silesia’. An article in Radiowelt from 1949 presents memories of the lost Heimat. Source: Bayrischer Rundfunk.

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Radio Stuttgart changed its name in 1949 to simply Aus der Heimat (‘From the Heimat’) to incorporate the refugees into the community. Within the regionalized broadcast system of post-war Germany, the lost lands of the East became the only ‘regional’ Heimat that was regularly produced in every part of the new nation. The integration of the refugees’ loss into the regional ‘voices of the Heimat’ helped to incorporate the sense of loss felt by many of the ‘natives’ in the face of the destruction caused by the war. As a show in the SWF’s Frauenfunk on the plight of the refugees described them:

These people’s great loss was not of house and farm, money and goods, cherished furniture and equipment – many of us have had that pain as well. What is irretrievably gone for them is the totality of these things, everything that defines the term Heimat: neighbours, friends, and family, landscape and climate, language and habit, for centuries bound together, interwoven, intertwined, the fine and yet so sturdy weave of the Heimat, the total concept.196

While describing the specific loss of the refugees, the sense of home as a ‘total concept’ the speaker has offered a definition of the things that are lost generally through modernity, and that were fundamentally torn apart during the war. By contrasting the plight of the refugees to that of ‘us’, however, the tacit message here is that the sense of wholeness in the West might still exist – if not now, then at some point in the future, when the ‘house and farm, money and goods, cherished furniture and equipment’ have once more been obtained. In this one short passage, the multiple meanings and (dis-)locations of Heimat become apparent, standing at once for Germany as victim (in the person of the refugee) and Western Germany as the new Heimat as potential place of renewal and return. It is not a coincidence that this description comes in an appeal to the ‘infinite breadth of feminine understanding and feminine goodness of heart’ of local women. Heimat was not merely the feminine- gendered aspect of the nation, it was an aspect that women were called upon actively to embody in order to make the nation into Heimat.

Federal states and secondary stations As I have shown thus far, ideas of Heimat clearly contributed strongly to the vocabulary of space in post-war broadcasting. In constructing and conflating regional space, home space and radio space, radio programmers developed a way of talking around many of the uncertainties regarding the past and future of the space called Germany. Now in this

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-207 9780230_009035_06_cha05 208 Voices in Ruins final section, I will look to the way the radio programmes addressed themselves to the new federal states, and new nation, that began to crys- tallize in the latter years of occupation. I will once more take up the example of the station in Cologne at the NWDR as a narrative guide, drawing on examples from the other stations as they arise. The latter half of 1946 and the start of 1947 saw a marked shift in the situation both of Germany in general and at the radio stations in particular. At no station were these changes more dramatically felt than at the NWDR Cologne. In August of 1946, after much deliberation, the state of North Rhine Westphalia was formed, along with its neighbouring state of Lower Saxony a short time later. In the wake of US Secretary of State Byrnes’ speech in September, the politics of occupation shifted dramatically towards German recovery and perhaps the division of Germany. In October, Hugh Carleton Greene took over as the head of the NWDR, and within months, many of the leading figures in Cologne, including its director and its chief political commentator, had left and resettled in the Soviet zone. Immediately after the state was founded, the new state government began agitating for an independent station in Cologne.197 The ‘broadcasting committee’ that had been established under the authority of the presidents of the Westphalia and the North Rhine Province even before the state had formed, took the formation of the new state as a renewed call to action. It passed a resolution in October of 1946 that in essence demanded that the state should have ‘its own means of expression’ – which meant, essentially, its own independent station in Cologne.198 Above all, however, the new government’s main criticism of the NWDR was that the station in Cologne was contributing too many music shows and not enough cultural and political material to the programme of the NWDR. As Schaaf has pointed out, this was primarily an attempt from conservative and church circles to gain influence over a programme that they considered to be under the direction of too many left-wing elements.199 The arguments that were brought forth, however, all made an appeal to an essential, native way of life and thinking.200 Wherever possible, however, the ‘essential’ quality of the region was conflated with its political and/or religious character. An editorial in the Kölnische Rundschau, organ of the CDU in Cologne, argued in 1946, for example,

It belongs to the many oddities of our time that our people [Volk], that is Christian in its widest social strata, must be subjected again and again to broadcasts that, coming from materialist-socialist circles, contradict its being, thought and perception. [ ...] We raise again and

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again, with increased emphasis, the call for our own Cologne station deserving of the name Heimat-station, whose broadcasts are carried by the unmistakably Christian foundations of the mentality of the overwhelming majority of its listeners.201

The churches, primarily Catholic, but Protestant as well, began to demand that Cologne be made an independent, Christian station.202 As far as the structure of the station was concerned, General Director Hugh Carleton Greene and his successor Adolf Grimme both resisted all attempts to make Cologne an independent station, usually pointing to the fact that the necessary AM frequencies were simply not available for such a venture. Within the programme, however, many attempts were made to give Cologne more of an identity in the airwaves, though the variety of these often short-lived attempts highlights the ongoing instability of the situation. Beginning in March of 1947, individual show announcements as well as the programme guides announced the origin of each broadcast as a way of raising the profile of the individual stations. The daily 10-minute spot of news from Western Germany that had entered the programme in July of 1946 was replaced by a 5-minute ‘West German commentary’ in April of 1947. While apparently a nod to the political aspirations of the state, the CDU was still displeased with the choice of the commentator, Walter Steigner, a member of the Social Democratic Party.203 This show, in turn, was replaced at the beginning of November 1947, by a new ‘regional’ programme, Aus unserem Westdeutschen Tagebuch (‘From Our West German Diary’), a 30-minute show in the same 7 P.M. spot in the programme as the first broadcasts from Cologne had been. The show was put together by Bernhard Ernst, who was himself representative of the station in Cologne and the territory it served. The show covered a broad spectrum of regional interests, from current events and sport to ‘city and landscape portraits’.204 This combination of current events and Heimat-esque ‘portraits’ of the landscape and historic towns was symptomatic of the way that the post-war radio stations in general referred to regional spaces. Even before the state of North Rhine Westphalia had been created, these were the terms in which it had been discussed in the original ‘local’ programme in 1945. By speaking with a ‘regional’ voice to the large and culturally varied broadcast territory, the programme added the weight of Heimat to the newly created state. Within the total programme output of the NWDR, such a programme also placed Cologne in a peculiar position. On the one hand, it was producing a significant proportion of the NWDR programme, even if not as

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-209 9780230_009035_06_cha05 210 Voices in Ruins much as Hamburg was. Most of Cologne’s contributions entered the programme in daily or weekly rotation with equivalent programmes from Hamburg. In this regard, it was genuinely acting as a second ‘primary’ station for the British zone. On the other hand, however, news was still compiled in Hamburg, and much of the programme was controlled cent- rally from there as well. In this sense, Cologne acted far more like a secondary regional affiliate to Hamburg. The daily ‘local window’ in the programme provided by Aus unserem Westdeutschen Tagebuch, as much as it was considered as a concession to the needs of North Rhine Westphalia, actually reinforced this impression. With regard to the conventions of radio programming in Germany, the station was neither completely a ‘regional’ station, nor did it have the full autonomy and programme representation of a main station. The regional tension in the programme between Cologne and Hamburg grew more complicated in May of 1948, when the studio in Hanover began broadcasting the Funkbilder aus Niedersachsen (‘Radio pictures from Lower Saxony’). The show was broadcast every weekday morning from 11:30–12 during a pause from Hamburg and Cologne, and went out from Hanover over a network of smaller relay stations. In its structure, the show was not decidedly different from Aus unserem Westdeutschen Tagebuch, providing reports on current happenings in the state. What upset those in Cologne was first of all the perception that the balance of programming was shifting further north towards Hamburg. Furthermore, that Hanover should be given a slot in the programme to broadcast solely to its own state smacked of the sort of broadcasting autonomy desired by its more populous neighbour to the West, which had to ‘content’ itself to share a central programme with Hamburg.205 The centralized broadcasting system in the French zone worked somewhat more amicably than that in the British zone. To be sure, there were tensions between the centre and the regions, particularly between Koblenz and Baden-Baden, but the relationships were nowhere near as bitter as those in the British zone. One of the main reasons for this almost certainly lies in the technical ability for the regional stations to broadcast independently of one another. Twice per day, almost every day, the regional studios had time to produce programmes just for their region, in addition to anything else they produced for the total network. This situation would have made it difficult for any one region to feel that the others had any advantage over them. Any regional political tensions were also somewhat assuaged by the ‘Stunde der Regierung’ (‘Government Hour’) that was allotted to each state government as part of the regional programme.206 In the concept of the SWF, it was the role of the regional

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-210 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 211 studios to add local ‘authenticity’ to the general programme produced in Baden-Baden. At the July 1946 opening of the studio in Kaiserslautern, the largest city in the Palatinate, Friedrich Bischoff expressed pleasure ‘that the Rhenish Palatinate and Hesse have finally regained a voice in the ether’.207 The radio station, according to Bischoff,

should testify to the fact that the true Germany is still there and sends its voice out to find an answer of forgiveness and brotherly sympathy. [ ...] Under the name of the Südwestfunk [ ...] a group of stations is united that should become so familiar to the Frankish and the Alemannic tribe, to the Rhineland, to the Hessian and to the man from the Palatinate¸that everyone has the feeling that they can depend on their Südwestfunk.208

The ‘regional’ programmes were clearly focused around producing images of the local Heimat, with such shows on themes such as ‘Rhenish Destiny’ from Koblenz, ‘On Palatinate nature and customs’ from Kais- erslautern or ‘Allemanic Heimat history’ from Freiburg.209 Bischoff’s statement makes clear, however, that the regional identity produced by the stations was aimed at the goal of creating a larger, authentic- feeling Germanness. He stresses this first by pointing to the idea that it is the region that can testify to the ‘true’ and peaceful Germany to other nations, a statement aimed most obviously at the French occupiers. He then turns this image of a ‘true’ Germany inward to the SWF listeners, to whom the network will appear as an authentic German home that ‘everyone’ can rely on. Such integrative notions of Heimat were also consciously employed by the station in trying to get them to accept some of the changes in the political geography. The series Erbe und Leistungen der Heimat (‘Heritage and Achievements of the Homeland’), which ran between March and August 1949, was designed to convince listeners of the necessity of the consolidation of the north and south Baden into one province. The programmes were primarily travelogues of the various cities and museums in Baden, along with historical talks about the history of the state of Baden, to convince listeners that the state was naturally (as the title of one of the talks is called) ‘Die ganze Heimat’ (‘The Whole Heimat’).210 In the American zone, where each radio station served only one state, there was understandably less political pressure for regional representation. Particularly in the states of Württemberg-Baden and Hesse, both historically new entities, the desire to create a sense of belonging to the new state was accompanied by the need to address the regional

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-211 9780230_009035_06_cha05 212 Voices in Ruins differences of the state. Roving ‘local’ programmes, such as Radio Stut- tgart’s Echo des Tages or Radio Frankfurt’s very regular ‘Rundschau aus dem Hessenland’ (see above), came increasingly to serve this purpose. Particularly, the regular ‘Rundschau’ saw a large part of its mission in creating ‘Hesse-consciousness’ among listeners in the new state.211 The other side of the coin, the representing of regional difference, was considered the role of the regional studios. In Hesse, the studio in Kassel reopened in March of 1948 and began its regular programme Rund um Kassel (‘All around Kassel’) in the evening programme which paid special attention to events and places at the north end of the state. As popular as this programme was, it overlapped in both time slot and subject with the ‘Rundschau’ and the two programmes were put together the following year, much to the dissatisfaction of the authorities in Kassel.212 In Württemberg-Baden, the situation was slightly more complicated. The northern part of Baden, which now belonged to Württemberg-Baden, had always been served by the station in Stuttgart, and it had been a source of contention for much of that time.213 The regional stations in Baden, Heidelberg and Karlsruhe, though they produced the regular news programme Echo aus Baden (‘Echo from Baden’)214 in addition to hiring local artists and orchestras, showed relatively little interest in producing many programmes at all that expressed the regional identity of the station. In light of much of the rest of this chapter, it is difficult to accept Lersch’s argument that this was simply following the ‘contemporary understanding of the roles of the broadcast station and its outlying branches’.215 Both the historical precedent in Germany before 1945 and the example of the nearby SWF suggest that assertions of regional uniqueness were precisely what listeners expected of local stations. Especially within the strongly regionally oriented programme from Stuttgart, the absence of such programmes from Baden was sorely missed by many listeners, and complaints about it would plague the station for many years to come. Munich, as the capital of a state that had remained almost entirely unchanged as far as its boundaries were concerned, had a much easier time asserting itself in the programme as the ‘voice’ of Bavaria, with or without its regional station. As part of the effort to make the station a ‘Bavarian’ station, a new programme in the early evening Bayrisches Tagebuch (‘Bavarian Diary’) was introduced from Munich, which offered local reporting from all over the state, with emphasis on the landscape and traditions of the region. The ‘Voice of Franconia’, the station in Nuremberg, on the other hand, did not appear a great deal in the programme. Even during the Weimar Republic, Munich had not allowed

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-212 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 213 its regional station much airtime of its own, and after the station’s dramatic role in broadcasting from the war crimes tribunal had ended, this situation was largely to continue.216 It goes without saying that at the time the Federal Republic was founded, the spatial entities of state, broadcast territory and cultural region were far from satisfactorily reconciled. The closure of the SWF studios in Koblenz and Kaiserslautern in 1950, the complications in broadcasting caused by the founding of the state of Baden-Württemberg in 1952 and the division of the NWDR in 1955 all bear witness to this. At the same time, however, it is also clear that there was a vocabulary in place for addressing these differences on the radio. The mixed magazine of regional news combined with features on regional culture proved a successful formula in regional broadcasting that has changed only slightly in the years after 1945. The success of such programmes was owed in large part to their ability to present to listeners at once visions of local, familiar space that were both ‘here’ and ‘now’ and essential voices of a region that has maintained its unique characteristics throughout time.

Conclusion: re-placing the nation

One of the NDR’s most popular radio programmes in recent years has been the comedy series Neues aus Stenkelfeld (‘The Latest From Stenkelfeld’).217 As its title indicates, the show presents a series of ‘reports’ from the mythical northern German town of Stenkelfeld. These reports introduce listeners to a cast of aging, quirky and cantankerous characters (janitors, local politicians, Schlager-composers and similar pillars of the community), whose struggle to maintain order and the semblance of tradition in their small town whilst keeping ‘up to date’ spirals rapidly into the absurd. To this radio historian, and especially to this expatriate American whose German ‘home’ is a small village in Schleswig-Holstein, the show’s multiple reflexivities are positively hilarious. For all that the show pokes fun at tradition, many of its conventions also per- petuate long traditions of German comedy.218 Much like radio sketch comedy of the first decades of radio broadcasting, characters’ markers of locality form mostly an authenticating ornament for a stereotypical petit- bourgeois narrow-mindedness that could as easily be placed anywhere in Germany.219 Very typically, however, these ultimately national tensions of generation and class are mapped onto rural space and local identity. Without taking it too seriously as a social critique, and though it seldom mentions the word ‘Heimat’, the show is best understood if read as another reflexive turn in the production of Heimat.220 Its send-up of the

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Heimat idea lies not so much in its exaggerated and stereotypical characters as in its pitch-perfect quotation of the styles and genres of regional reportage. Trained High German reporters’ voices interact in all seriousness with local characters with heavy northern accents or speaking mock Plattdeutsch. As the action spins out of control, the reporters attempt – in vain – to maintain the frame of ‘quaint yet normal locals’ around them. The joke is thus on the broadcasters, as they open their familiar ‘local window’ only to present a view not onto authentic products of a maternal homeland, but onto cranky old men who are themselves producers and consumers of Heimat. That the familiar place and inherent tensions of Heimat imagery on the radio still provide the raw material for self- reflexive yet light-hearted comedy offers a good point of departure to reflect on how that relationship developed 60 years earlier. By the time they were officially handed back over into German control, all of the radio stations in Western Germany were able to lay substantial claim to the title ‘voice of the Heimat’. These claims were contested, to be sure, not least by those who wished to exert more control over broadcasting. But the fact that this was a strong point of contestation reflected the widespread consensus among German programmers and audiences that the radio stations in the still-occupied territory should speak to, for and/or as the Heimat. Particularly amidst the spatial disarray of Germany immediately after the war, it was not always clear what that actually meant, however. While the most visible points of struggle were the more traditional forms of Heimat expression on the air, the consensus was built around the far broader series of institutional, programming and listening practices that this chapter has traced. While some programmes, particularly those identified in the latter part of this chapter, mobilized notions of Heimat with an explicit agenda of integrating listeners into the new boundaries of West Germany, Heimat iconography was also woven more seamlessly into a wide range of programme structures, genres and modes of address. It has been my contention that, just as in the lighter-hearted case of Stenkelfeld, we can best make sense of what Heimat meant on the airwaves by focussing on how more implicit constructions of time and space related to the explicit content of programmes. To put this another way: in order to understand what was extraordinary about Heimat on the radio, we must also grasp what seemed ordinary about it. This is not an easy task for the historian, not least because it was also a challenge for radio broadcasters before and after the war. As I showed in Chapter 2, Nazi programmers, whilst pushing to create a system of broadcasting that would reach the entire nation, had struggled to come up with ways of addressing the entire nation in any sort of routine,

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-214 9780230_009035_06_cha05 Re-placing the Nation 215 ordinary way. The regionally divided system of broadcasting they had inherited presented both limitations and possibilities in this regard. The most natural-sounding productions for speaking to the nation as a whole were ones from individual stations that were taken up in programmes nationwide, such as the Harbour Concert from Hamburg or the Happy Saturday Afternoon from Cologne. When the programme was fully nationalized in the opening days of the war, the acoustic expressions of the entire nation were aimed at projecting the nation well beyond its borders to the expanding war front and hearing it echo back. As that front itself began to come back, Heimat could only be mobilized as a vague sense of maternal domesticity that was a distant memory, unstrung from any specific rooting in a place. Immediately following the war, it is clear from the discourse of controllers, station staff and audiences that opinions varied greatly on how to place Heimat or other forms of regional sentiment with regard to the German nation and the Nazi past. This ambivalence, at least, was well-placed. While Heimat could be an expression of belonging and integration in the smaller units of space which the stations addressed, it also offered a platform for a wide spectrum of xenophobic expression. It could be wielded against Nazis and Allied occupiers with equal dexterity, and sometimes in the same breath. In the Rhineland and in Bavaria in particular, it was often a voice for political separatism as much as a means of identifying with a larger German nation. As we have seen, before it was more broadly embraced as a means of integrating refugees into new areas and a victimized western German national identity, Heimat rhetoric was often used as a means of excluding them from local space. These differences in explicit meaning of Heimat, and the varied ambivalence towards them, more or less remained in place throughout the occupation and well beyond.221 It is not surprising, then, that the structures and symbols of Heimat appeared most often in their least divisive forms and in the least ‘political’ parts of the programme. Local reportage and service programmes that addressed specific segments of the population all built on notions of the essential character of the regions to give them a sense of authenticity. Their framing within the daily programme built on long-standing broadcasting traditions which served to reinforce the sense that they were a natural and normal way of addressing space in Germany. Re-placing such ‘essential’ elements as women, children, farmers and churches in a regional landscape in turn helped to construct the regions as innocent realms. Such images of the region stood in particularly stark contrast to the fraught political landscape and broken urban landscape that found expression in other parts of the programme, and in everyday experience.

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The continued regional division of the radio also allowed stations to capture back national symbols within their broadcasting territories. In shows on the model of the Schatzkästlein, for example, radio in occupied Germany actually reversed the situation of broadcasting before 1945. Instead of regionally produced shows being broadcast to an entire nation, shows that had been staples of national broadcasting were recast onto the smaller broadcast territories of the occupied stations, giving the ‘other Germany’ long since suggested by such shows a new location in national space. Heimat on the radio, and indeed Heimat in general, was thus not a single space but a series of tropes that related local spaces to the nation as a whole. Johannes von Moltke adapts Confino’s notion of Heimat as a local metaphor for the nation to insist that the relation between the two is in fact metonymic, that is, of a part standing for the whole, rather than metaphorical, in which both terms share in the same meaning. In drawing this distinction, he is able to present a more nuanced reading of the spatial elements specifically of Heimat in cinema as a place shot through with connections (including radio) to the larger entity of the nation.222 Tropological relationships are seldom stable, however, but are rather points of slippage in culture.223 Indeed, I would suggest that some of the power of the Heimat idea is its ability to be both metaphor and metonym. This slippage is central to the way it was constructed on the radio. Radio programmes not only carried listeners aurally ‘outside’ to the rural places of Heimat that stood metonymically for the nation, they also projected the markers of locality onto individual homes and broadcast territories as a whole, in a much more metaphorical connection of the local with the national. We can thus best describe the ‘place’ of Heimat in post-war radio programmes as a series of interwoven structures of expectation, which could be mobilized to link disparate spaces that variously included individual (family) dwelling, occupation zone, cultural region, broadcasting territory, federal state and nation. Perhaps the best expression of this can be found in the national Auf dem glücklichen Stern broadcasts for children mentioned above. There, the combined structures of a children’s programme, a religious holiday and the portrayal of visits to region-typical countrysides added up to a sort of perfect storm of Heimat associations that made an inter-zonal national radio celebration thinkable at a time when relations between East and West were disintegrating rapidly. As I showed above, contemporaries viewed these programmes not as a showcase of regional identities, but as evidence of a stock of traditions that had been nationalized, indeed as the voice of ‘a better Germany’.

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If it was difficult for Germans after 1945 to conceptualize the relationship between the radio and the spaces they served without implicit or explicit appeal to Heimat, we should also be cautious about attempting to conceptualize Heimat historically without the radio, especially after 1945. If we accept the notion of Heimat as ‘everyday mental property’, which we must if we are to capture its enduring power, then we have to understand it through the medium in which Germans encountered Heimat literally every day. On a basic level, this allows us to see prefigured in radio broadcasting a number of modes of Heimat production and consumption that informed cinema and tourism promotion a short time later. Above and beyond this, however, paying attention to the peculiar way Heimat was mediated through the radio usefully complic- ates our understanding of how it functioned as a structuring concept in post-war Germany. As a case in point, Confino argues in his discussion of the ‘dissonance’ of Germans’ restarting tourism promotion in 1945 that there were no mass media.224 Correcting this historical assertion by pointing to the presence of the radio supports rather than undermines his immediate point about moving beyond our own expectations to understand our historical subjects’ conceptions of normality. But it also highlights the pitfalls of his wider approach to Heimat based primarily around printed and visual sources. While this focus rightly acknowledges modernity’s tearing away of relations between space and place and greater focus on the visual, it does not take full stock of multiple media through which social life is reconstituted in the modern world. Work on sound in cinema, and particularly Currid’s analysis of the ways in which domesticated sounds break into and out of cinematic space, has pointed to the importance of this relationship between aural and visual spectacle in generating the modern experience of place.225 Partic- ularly in the Heimatfilm, sound is one of the key devices that allows the construction of its heterogeneous spaces through its dislocation from the visual scene.226 These disjunctures between sound and space were also important in constructing listening experiences. As we have seen in this and previous chapters, Germans after 1945 frequently described radio listening as hearing an intact past echoing forward into the broken present, sometimes as hope for a repaired future. Considering these intertextualities adds new layers to our understanding of both. There is a dissonance, for example, in Johannes von Moltke’s connection of the Heimatfilm’s much noted emphasis on ‘(audio)visual spectacle’ with its ‘promise to visualize’ images of Heimat’.227 Considering the important role of the radio in Heimat construction after the war allows us fruitfully

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-217 9780230_009035_06_cha05 218 Voices in Ruins to unbracket the audio, and see that much of what these films actually promised to visualize was the already aural experience of Heimat on radio and record. Programmers and audiences alike were also clearly aware of how ima- ginary, or phantasmagorical, the places of Heimat were on the radio.228 This is as true of the imagined family homes from which people listened as it was of the supposedly natural regional spaces to which they listened. We must remember that while listeners used radios to connect themselves to the sociable communal spaces of Heimat, they also used them as acoustic walls to shut out their neighbours. Similarly, urban radio audiences immediately after 1945 probably knew more about the nature and problems of the really existing countryside than at any time before or since, and the fact that rural spaces remained intact compared to the cities did not merely invoke longing and nostalgia, but also bitterness and division. In that sense, rural towns and landscapes were not so much the places as the placeholders of Heimat. But these contradictions reflect the enduring problem of Heimat, which is also a large part of its remarkable resilience: it is always somewhere else. It could appear to be ‘the indestructible’ after 1945 because it was virtually untouchable. The appreciation of Heimat-oriented radio programmes depended in large part upon the remoteness of their audience from the places they portrayed. As I have shown, many, if not all, attempts to create a Heimat space in the airwaves were implicitly or explicitly addressed to an audience that was always standing in some way ‘outside’. Even when Heimat was supposedly here, it was only questionably now. In programmes such as Sunday afternoon Heimat shows and holiday programmes for farmers, portrayed traditions seemed to drop out of time, leaving it unclear whether they were memories of something lost, perhaps forever, to the past, or else the promise of something that could be returned to or redeemed in the future. Radio, which perhaps uniquely expresses both collective intimacy and distance, is ‘naturally’ a voice of the Heimat, which is almost by definition simultaneously familiar and distant. That distance, it seems, can be expressed in terms of time, space, nostalgia or irony – and from that perspective, Stenkelfeld and the ‘happy star’ are not as far apart as they might seem.

9th June 2008 6:54 MAC/VIR Page-218 9780230_009035_06_cha05 6 Conclusion: Voices in Ruins? Radio and Normalization After 1945

Family portrait with radio: normality, mediation and memory

In the first episode of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat, several families from the village of Schabbach go for a picnic in the nearby ruined castle of Baldenau one Sunday in 1923. Paul, the young man whose sudden unex- plained departure is the opening gesture of the series, sets up an antenna for his home-built radio in the castle, and in the middle of the picnic tunes in the mass from Cologne Cathedral. Although this radio serves throughout the episode as a symbol of Paul’s fernweh (‘longing for far-off places’), for the other villagers hearing the mass, it does not so much bring them ‘out’ to distant realms, but rather re-enchants their familiar surroundings with new meaning. ‘We needn’t have gone to church this morning!’ says Wiegand, the town bigwig, clearly far more moved by the distant mass than he had been by the local one. Paul’s mother exclaims, ‘all of Baldenau is one single church!’ and then within this ‘church’ all fall silent, listening in rapt attention to the music. Once Paul stops the music to tune the antenna better, this trance breaks and the elder villagers fall to complaining (with no sense of irony) about other signs of the modern world – in particular the behaviour of young women – and the moment of national communion quickly gives way to the divisions in the small community. A short time later, as the villagers gather for a group photo, Paul shouts excitedly that he’s received a ‘distant station’, which turns out to be Vienna, with tenor Leo Slezak singing Schubert. This time, the moment of wonder fades and the sound of Schubert’s ‘Linden Tree’ drifts into the background behind the voice of Paul’s brother Eduard, the photographer, admonishing everyone to look ‘friendly’ for the camera.

219

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As the music continues, the shot changes to a sepia tone image supposedly from Eduard’s still camera, but the image is actually not so stable: the wind still blows and the figures still move slightly. The shift to this (pseudo)photographic view also dislocates the radio music from its die- getic position and it becomes instead the memory of sound connected to the image. No longer a ‘distant’ element, the music instead forms an integral part of the scene that reaches out from it and grants access to it from a remote point in time. The radio thus doubly displaces the scene, both for the characters within it and for the cinematic spectators, causing it practically to shout Doreen Massey’s assertion that ‘that place called home was never an unmediated experience’.1 I have shown here how the radio mediated places called home in Germany at a time when the definitions and boundaries of those places had been profoundly destabilized. Indeed, though it is set amidst different sorts of ruins, Reitz’s unstable snapshot is practically a pastiche of images that have echoed throughout this book: a local family and community in a rural tourist spot listening to a church service and ‘high’ German culture on a Sunday; young women are admonished to stay feminine and everyone is told to appear ‘friendly’, in spite of the obvious divisions in the group assembled. The eventful moment and potential disruption in the lives of the local community turns towards the future as a portrait of a familiar (if unstable) communal normality.2 Such family portraits with radio were already legible by 1945 as a common, everyday image of the private life of the nation, reproduced and consumed by broadcasters and listeners alike.3 During the history this book has traced, such images and settings appeared most often as ideals from the past that might be returned to in the future. By the time Reitz’s film came out, such images belonged entirely to the past, and in fact the scene would have spoken to audience’s personal experiences not from the 1920s, but in the first decades of the Bonn Republic before the advent of television. It is the enduring role of the radio in making such private moments tellable as national stories that I have sought to highlight here. In this book, I have examined a number of ways that Germans used the radio after the war to construct images of normal times, normal people, normal places and indeed a normal nation that could be valid measures, and even validations, of their haunted past, blasted present and uncertain future. My underlying premise has been that, for programme-makers and listeners alike, such production of normality was probably the fundamental purpose of the radio not just after 1945 but since before 1933. As it became embedded in German society during the crisis-ridden decades of the 1920s and 1930s, the radio offered unprecedented possibilities for

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-220 9780230_009035_07_cha06 Conclusion 221 reconstituting the relationships between ‘individual and mass’, and ‘citizen and state’. Broadcasters used projections of the normal through the radio to help normalize the structures of state domination, especially, though certainly not only, once broadcasting was under direct control of the Nazi state. For many listeners, the radio served as a means of maintaining a normal sense of self either as part of, in spite of, or ambiguously alongside, Nazi-dominated structures of society. Throughout the period, notions of normality were mobilized at a number of scales, variously to define moments of crisis, to express hope for the future, to ignore or justify terror and mass murder and to give bearable, tellable shape to some of what had been lost or destroyed. At the same time, efforts to envision any sort of mass-scale normality faced ongoing problems of intelligibility and trust, and Nazi attempts to create visions of a monolithic, racialized national public often revealed more contradictions that they reconciled. Wartime mobilization and destruction, coupled with Germany’s defeat, occupation and guilt posed daunting new challenges to imagining collective presents and pasts through the radio, but, as I have shown, also offered a number of possibilities. I have not taken for granted that broadcasters or listeners always succeeded in creating a sense of a normal, let alone stable, relationship between the personal world and broader spheres of the social. Quite the contrary, by exploring these processes with an eye towards their contradictions and contestations, I have attempted to shed light on when, how and for whom they were effective. In a recent essay, Alon Confino has argued that understanding how Germans remembered the Nazi era requires writing ‘a history of sensib- ilities’, which would attend to ‘the configuration of what is and what is not considered being normal and happy within a culture at a given moment’.4 Studying the radio can be, and I think must be, an important part of such a history. Broadcasting does not merely present programmes, it orders them in relation to each other according to notions of what is normal. It both maintains and interrupts individual routines and places them in relation to broader events of nations and the world. Like the practices of tourism that Confino explores in his essay, broadcasting even more so ‘places our daily life and practices – of small occurrences, norms, behaviours and ways of thinking – within the history of big events’.5 The radio was able to serve these functions even when many of the aspects of normality it spoke to, both at the personal and the national level, were absent from the lives of listeners. As Confino stresses, ‘[t]he normal is not an appraisal of reality, it is an appraisal of value. It is based on a process of comparison and analogy with previous experiences as well as with future expectations’.6 The relative preservation and availability of radio,

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-221 9780230_009035_07_cha06 222 Voices in Ruins as well as its address to the temporal and generic structures of daily life, made it a primary location for such comparison and analogy. As I have shown, an appeal to a ‘normal’ order of lives and routines formed an important part of listeners’ responses to programmes from the Allied- controlled stations, both those that dealt with the big events of the past and those that dealt with smaller issues such as programme timing or proper sort of music. By showing how the various boundaries that struc- tured programme practice were defined, maintained, transgressed and adapted to a number of purposes, I have illuminated the peculiar role of the radio in shaping the ways that West Germans could and did imagine themselves and their nation after 1945. The notion of ‘normalization’ has long been a fraught one in German historiography, not least when it comes to understanding the legacies of the Nazi era. Particularly studies that have sought to compare the processes of modernization in Nazi Germany have stood open to the accusation of wanting to ‘normalize’ or ‘relativize’ National Socialism and its crimes.7 This has certainly not been my intention here. Wherever one stands on the issue of National Socialism’s ‘modernity’, however, it is indisputable that it was mediated through the most modern systems communication of its day, which were subject to similar problems, durabilities and limitations as those in other places and times. I hope to have demonstrated that to understand the problems and possibilities of the radio as a mediator of normality after 1945, we must be willing to follow the patterns of broadcasting back across the murky dividing line of the war’s end into the Nazi era. In a similar pragmatic vein, I agree with Confino that ‘studying how Germans came to terms with the Nazi past is a historical topic that should not be bound to the post-1945 era’.8 Especially as many of the spatial, temporal and generic aspects of broadcasting remained more or less intact or were quickly restored after 1945, we should be alert to similar durabilities in listening practices and interpretations. Beyond this general historiographical argument, however, I also agree with Brian Currid that analyzing National Socialism as a form of domination that is historically comparable to other forms of domination, including liberal democracy, does not ‘normalize fascism’, but rather makes critical tools available to ‘de-normalize recent and current forms of the social’.9 As the preceding chapters have shown, most aspects of broadcasting immediately after 1945 appeared no more normal than most other aspects of life in Germany, but instead shared the same fragmentations, contradictions and ambiguities. In particular, the contradictory meanings of May 1945 were etched deeply on the radio. Its institutions and

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-222 9780230_009035_07_cha06 Conclusion 223 infrastructures were divided along the same lines as the zones of military occupation, and yet to many they represented a return to the regional broadcasting systems that had gone before. Many Germans who worked at the occupied stations felt a genuine sense of new beginning after 1945, with the corresponding spirit of excitement, improvisation and experi- mentation. In this sense, the radio did give voice to a part of Germany that saw itself as liberated in 1945. Ironically, many of those who started at the occupied stations felt their work was much more restricted after the stations were handed over into German hands. At the same time, however, the stations’ regular announcement of Allied military authority and the censorship of manuscripts also offered persistent reminders of the nation’s defeat. The daily reports from the Nuremberg trials and other reports on the denazification process, particularly in the first years of occupation, provided numerous intimations of the nation’s guilt. By contrast, denazification of radio stations followed the same incomplete and inconsistent patterns as in many other parts of society, and especially as the occupation drew to a close, they mostly helped to build the exculpatory narratives of personal integrity and non-involvement that would characterize much of West German discourse throughout the decade. To begin with, at least, discussions of, and references to, the Nazi past were regular and commonplace on the radio, and the selective silences about it were, at least in retrospect, deafening. As I have shown, much of the programme, particularly the entertainment sections, was considered apolitical and hung somewhere ‘in between’ long-standing broadcasting tradition and new beginnings. In spite of the aforementioned contradictions, the relative preservation of the radio presented widely available means for constructing national narratives. Paddy Scannell has argued of broadcast media that although the initial phase of technological enchantment that accompanied their introduction has long since passed, ‘their magic has not vanished. It has simply been absorbed, matter-of-factly, into the fabric of ordinary daily life’.10 In Germany, the internally or externally produced disruptions to daily life since broadcasting began meant that such ‘absorption’ was a slower and perhaps more contested process than in Britain, but it is clear that by 1945 the radio’s presence in homes was long since taken for granted. In fact, the radio’s strong presence at a time when the social fabric had come almost completely unravelled allowed its ‘magic’ to re-emerge in multiple ways, not as a new technological miracle, but as the essence of an exemplary normality in extraordinary and uncertain times. Germans during and immediately after the war often expressed what we might call shocks of normality, either at finding elements of a formerly

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-223 9780230_009035_07_cha06 224 Voices in Ruins ordered and predictable life within the disordered world or the concomit- ant discovery that the extraordinary sights, sounds, smells and activities of everyday life in occupied Germany no longer seemed remarkable.11 Such shocks were a fundamental part of the experience of radio listening in occupied Germany. Finding familiar programmes at familiar times created a sense of temporal continuity and normality, even in the case of programmes like morning gymnastics, where the programmes seemed to stand very much at odds with the actually existing situations of listeners. The technological apparatus of microphones, transmitters, receivers and speakers appeared not only as an accessory to ordinary daily life, but as a series of resonant metaphors for daily life that were mobilized to revital- ize or re-enchant the broader spheres of social interaction with a sense of authenticity and universal validity. The preceding chapters have revealed several such metaphors (echo of the day, revealer of insincerity, women’s consumable time and voice of the Heimat) that were mobilized in a number of programming and listening practices after 1945. The systems that mediate everyday life in the modern world seem to be particularly available for such re-enchantment, which helps to reorder or reaffirm relations, particularly at moments of change.12 Significantly, when such systems do re-emerge into view, they do so apparently divorced from the relations of power that formed and continue to structure them. In this regard, East Germans’ retrospective adoption of the Ampelmännchen as a focus of attachment and resistance as spatial and temporal arrangements of daily life came unstuck after 1989 can be seen as analogous to the metaphoric revitalizations of the radio.13 These systems that mediate everyday life appear, much like images of home and Heimat, to be basically empty and disinterested, which is what allows them to be filled with sentiments of community and harmony.14

Re-socializing the nation: homes and Heimat

I began this book by questioning the ways in which it was possible to imagine the German nation in 1945, when both the spatial boundaries of the nation and the sense of collective simultaneous progress in time had been fundamentally interrupted. I have shown how a number of programming practices constructed visions of bounded, domestic spaces, both individual family homes and the rural spaces of Heimat, where ideas of common ‘normal’ pasts and national belonging could be reassembled. Indeed, the painstaking onscreen conflation of family space, rural space and the nation in the scene above was a routine operation in German radio well before 1945. David Morley has argued that communication

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-224 9780230_009035_07_cha06 Conclusion 225 technologies are key points for mapping ‘the articulation of the domestic household into the “symbolic family’’ of the nation (or wider group)’. They do this by ‘both transgressing the boundaries of the household – bringing the public world into the private – and simultaneously producing the coherence of broader social experience’.15 Taking this aspect of the radio as the centre point of analysis has opened important perspect- ives on how radio functioned within the processes of reconstruction. Building on the fruitful historical work that has traced the often contradictory ways in which the radio’s intertwining of localized places and ‘national families’ functioned ideologically under authoritarian regimes, I have charted a number of ways in which these images and their functions continued and transformed into key structuring concepts in West Germany’s society after 1945. Focussing on the ways that radio helped reconstruct and renegoti- ate boundaries between ‘internal’ worlds of listeners and the ‘external’ worlds of historical events offers us an important historical perspective from which to question what the Heimat idea was meant to reconcile the relationship between the local and the national, without privileging one over the other as more or less authentic or ‘grounded’.16 Susannah Radstone has recently made a similar argument, problematizing the series of binary oppositions between public and private memory by insisting on the mediated nature of memory at all scales.17 Elizabeth Heineman has demonstrated the importance of complicating such binaries when analyzing the possibilities for constructing narratives of personal and national identity in Germany.18 The mobilizations of a private female ‘everybody’ that she highlights were based upon a generally agreed constructed boundary of the ‘internal’ world of personal experience and agency with the ‘external’ world of national, historical events. I hope to have shown here the extent to which such boundaries were constructed through the radio, and how it made private experiences publicly imaginable and available in a multitude of ways before image and print sources were anywhere near as widespread. To couch this in the metaphorical terms of this book’s title, we must remember that not only the ‘voices’ of the radio, but the ruined ‘local’ places they spoke to were mediated as well. To insist upon the mediated nature of the local and the domestic does not in the least suggest that the personal experiences of exhaustion, loss, cold and hunger were either unreal or unimportant, but instead it allows us to understand more clearly where, how, for whom and as what they were significant. In summing up the transformations of Heimat in cinema, Johannes von Moltke draws fruitfully on the work of Raymond Williams to argue

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-225 9780230_009035_07_cha06 226 Voices in Ruins that Heimat in the modern world must always be read as a dialectical response to the mobilizations and displacements, particularly through modern capitalism.19 This provides an important perspective on the role of the radio in addressing the myriad manifestations of uprooting in Germany in the wake of the war. I have highlighted here radio’s peculiar affinity with the exceptional and paradoxical mobilities that marked the years immediately following the war. The combination of mass- scale wartime mobilization, the expulsion and repatriation of Germans from the East and the destruction of a number of larger social networks through terror and war gave rise to what can be described as extreme forms of ‘mobile privatization’, to use Raymond Williams’s important term.20 While Germans (and not only Germans) were increasingly on the move for numerous reasons, their movements were also more than ever oriented towards the preservation of home and family. In spite of this increased mobility, however, Germans in the years after the war were also in many ways ‘stuck’, both in space, due to the physical and legal restrictions to movement, and also in time, with the sense of being cut off from the continuing progress of the world. In short, the feeling of moving while standing still was multiply inscribed onto daily life in Germany after the war. By imagining private spaces collectively, the radio was able to parallel these experiences, offering listeners access to a sense of mobility and sociable interaction that was nevertheless bounded off from the often risky public spaces that they traversed physically. In the preceding chapters, I have pointed to several moments of mass participation in radio programmes that seemed to stand at odds with the lack of trust that often characterized many face-to-face social interactions. As is visible in post received by the stations, the interpretations of broadcast content varied greatly, but even in most critical responses it is clear that listeners used the radio to imagine a private ‘national community’. In fact, the idea of such bounded, private spaces of home formed the rhetorical basis for assertions of what did and did not belong inside the domestic sphere of the nation. As I have shown, the meaning and boundaries of these idealized bounded realms were contested at a number of levels and it is by observing these tensions and contestations that we begin to see the important role played by the radio in envisioning what a ‘normal’ German society had been and would be. Exploring constructions of home spaces through the aural medium of radio has served as an important reminder that the places of home and nation were (and are) not just mediated, but multiply mediated phenomena in the twentieth century. As Brian Currid has shown, the dislocation of sound made possible by microphones was a key aspect of the albeit

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-226 9780230_009035_07_cha06 Conclusion 227 contested and fragmentary disembedding and reassembly of the nation in the rise of audiovisual mass culture in Weimar and Nazi Germany.21 Especially, because many of the public visual markers of the nation, from public buildings to human bodies, were destroyed or compromised in 1945, sound gained greater currency. The domesticated mass address of radio broadcasting formed an important building block in constructing usable notions of national identity after the war. The more personable modes of address afforded by the radio were central in reorganizing notions of personal legitimacy around the authenticity and consistency of personality. Similarly, radio stations projected images of local places onto their wider broadcast territories using acoustic markers of Heimat, such as regional dialect, folk music and church bells, to authenticate and legitimate themselves to their audiences. For many listeners (not to mention some broadcasters), the ‘external’ other of these harmonious and sociable domestic spheres was foreign jazz (sometimes as opposed to its domesticated cousin) and other trappings of apparently untamed modernism. Analyzing the dynamics of proximity and distance, presence and absence as articulated through the sounds of radio broadcasting has benefited greatly from considering how they were embedded within a broader audiovisual sphere of mass cultural production that included the music and cinema industries. The presentation of popular cinema stars on the radio provided one telling example of how radios’ dominance helped to shape developments in other media. The renegotiation of stars’ place in national narratives under changing definitions of ‘ordinary’ and ‘special’ after the war took place in many circumstances on the radio. While my immediate point here has been to highlight the predominance and importance of the radio after 1945, my broader aim is to highlight the need for a more broadly based media history that will be better able to take these intertextualities and intermedialities on board. By exploring how the radio projected bounded spaces of domesticity onto broader realms of the social, I have further provided an important perspective on the increasingly unstable gendering of this divide after 1945. This has both underlined the key role that constructions of gender played in the reconstruction of German identities more generally, as well as shed valuable light on the complex and often contradictory negotiations that accompanied the positioning of women on the air and the address to women, who were the majority of the radio audience. I have shown in particular how the radio addressed the contradictions between women’s changing position in the moral and symbolic economy of the nation on the one hand and their increased role in the

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-227 9780230_009035_07_cha06 228 Voices in Ruins material economy on the other. As I have argued, the increased value placed on domestic, feminized projections of the nation through the radio was a key factor in the universalization of women’s experience as national experience. The contradictions inherent in these projects are perhaps best captured in the implicit regendering of less formal modes of address as the hallmark of Germany’s ‘new man’ and the simultaneous explicit exhortations to women to recivilize public discourse with their ‘naturally’ maternal and civil traits. Even before the currency reform, I have shown how in addressing women’s time use, the radio mobilized the idea of the rationally consuming woman as a symbol that could mediate between the contradictory discourses of the nation as innocent ‘natural’ feminine homeland and as modern progress, both of which had grown more emphatic in the conditions immediately following the war. Heineman rightly points out, images of women as symbols of the nation often masked the situation and experiences of actual women. At the same time, I would suggest, following Erica Carter, that on the whole radio programmes’ increasing implicit and explicit orientation towards female listeners also suggested new spaces and forms of public agency.22 The problems with this gendered divide also flags the enduring tensions between the radio’s role as representative of the nation(state) and its place in the world of consumer commodities. Such tension is more or less endemic to broadcasting models across the broad spectrum of state involvement from directly state-run institutions through to a number of public service models.23 That these tensions were reconfigured, but not erased, by changing political regimes in Germany was as true of 1945–1949 as it was of 1933. Even during times after 1945 when ‘normal consumer’ denoted starvation rations, the radio maintained a number of connections to multiply mediated regimes of consumer culture. Both directly and through the available programme press, radio stations kept listeners abreast of events in national and international spheres of cultural production, particularly popular music and cinema. Heimat as well, largely a vicarious pleasure for urban radio audiences immediately after the war, became increasingly commodified in the form of Heimatfilm and tourism as both industries came into their own in the 1950s. I have shown how some popular programmes invoked the doubled nostalgia for the modern audiovisual pleasures of the pre-war period and the pre-modern places and pasts they often embraced, which at the same time articulated a sense of progress continuing and hope for a return to ‘normal’ regimes of consumption throughout daily life. In many ways, programmes that addressed audiences as consumers imagined (German)

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-228 9780230_009035_07_cha06 Conclusion 229 publics that were more broadly and more immediately imaginable than programmes directed more explicitly at addressing audiences as German citizens. This should be clarified. My argument is emphatically not that the radio inherently generated indifference or passivity towards the political sphere. I would suggest, to the contrary, that radio stations were possibly more effective than any other institution or effort in occupied Germany at encouraging and enabling democratic participation in formal political processes. This was due not only to their broad reach and the emphasis programmers placed on political topics, but also in part due to their efforts to create more participatory and debate-oriented models of programming, or, as we saw in Chapter 3, through their more personable approach to political commentary. This goes to the crux of my actual argument. Radio programmes most effectively brought politics into the private spheres of listening when they either acknowledged the boundaries between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ via their framing in the overall programme or when they fitted political events into the domesticated modes of address of the private sphere. In so doing, they reinforced the idea of domestic spheres as fundamentally civil, innocent and largely apolitical spaces. Seen this way, the problem posed by the radio’s reinvigoration of the public sphere in terms of the private was not to do with whether it encouraged involvement in events outside the domestic sphere, but rather the extent to which it limited notions of accountability for (in)activity within it. In his analysis of Holocaust portrayals on German television, Wulf Kansteiner has raised similar questions about the ability of the medium to address critically the bystanders of Nazi crimes. Many ZDF programmes, he argues, created ‘an uncanny resemblance between the passive viewers who were surprisingly willing to watch the Holocaust unfold onscreen and the actual bystanders of the Holocaust’, many of whom made up the television audience.24 While acknowledging the medium’s limitations, Kansteiner rightly criticizes television producers for not being willing to push these limitations to try to develop a more critical assessment of what was in fact the most widespread response to Nazi crimes. In the case of the radio, however, the concerted attempts by some at the radio stations to develop a more critical stance towards the bystanders of Nazi Germany stood directly at odds with the projects of normalizing the boundaries between public and private that informed the frameworks of programming and listening. This raises an important point about German memory more generally which closer attention to the construction of places on the radio helps to make clear. I agree fundamentally with Rudy Koshar’s conclusion that

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‘the reestablishment of common national pasts was necessary if a more critical engagement with the history of Nazism was to take place’.25 This was a task to which the radio was well suited, in spite of, and in part because of, its limitations in generating such critical engagement. The restoration of many structures of radio programmes not only preceded, but, as I showed in the last chapter, mediated the reconstruction of physical structures. Just as conservators saw in cities ‘archipelagos of memory’ around churches, town halls and ‘typical’ buildings (a focus of attention that was reproduced in radio programmes), analogous archipelagos can be discerned in the structures and genres of radio broadcasting that bounded off domestic and rural spaces. Beyond their mediation of the physical sites of memory, such as in reports on reconstruction in the countryside, radio programmes provided a number of less spa- tially bound referents for a common past and present around which narratives of (national) community could be based. Much like the historic buildings that Rudy Koshar discusses, they provided ‘an objective backdrop to the reconstruction of normality’.26 To a degree, these have continued to function. Carolyn Birdsall observed recently how a group of elderly women, upon meeting new people in their own age-group, sang old and widely known popular songs from their youth to establish a common ground for interaction. She argues that ‘[f]or these elderly people, music from their youth provides a shared and stable reference point, perceived as a “non-political’’ and thus legitimate aspect of their childhood memories’.27 Understanding the way the radio opened spaces for remembering through its reproduction of bounded realms of experience returns us to the question of the boundaries themselves. In this study, I have drawn on Paddy Scannell’s work that explores, and frankly celebrates, the sociable practices of broadcasting which help to render modern worlds intelligible. Following these concerns in examining radio in post-war Germany has revealed important layers of meaning in the texts and contexts of broadcasting immediately after the war and, as has probably been evident, I share a great deal of Scannell’s enthusiasm for these positive aspects of broadcasting. Nevertheless, some criticisms of this approach are especially relevant to the discussion here. In particular, David Morley has rightly insisted that the sociability of broadcasting is not universally available, but rather is bounded by the very modes of sociability that make it available to its target audience, as broadly defined as that might be.28 I have pointed here to a number of such bounding mechanisms, but perhaps the most important was the one implicit in the enduring structures of broadcasting. Almost by nature, the main avenues for

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-230 9780230_009035_07_cha06 Conclusion 231 identification and remembering through radio programming, even those that would emphasize a break with the past, were most readily available to those who had remained in Germany, and had access to radio programmes during the Nazi era.

Changing to stay the same

This last consideration leads us finally to the thorny question of the dynamics of continuity and change as they appeared on the radio after 1945. In her sketch of radio and memory after 1945, Inge Marßolek contends that continuities in some segments of programming were mobilized to absorb the shock [abfedern] of the new in other parts.29 She points in particular to the areas of light entertainment and the emphasis on ‘eternal’ German culture as having such cushioning effects, where the conservative tastes of audiences eventually set the tone of broadcasting for many years to come. While I have shown that such calculations and negotiations did indeed take place, I have also demonstrated that such a metaphor must be applied cautiously in analyzing the programme so as not merely to reproduce many of the radio programmers’ own perceptions and assumptions about what they were doing. As I argued above, the more continuous elements of the programme did not appear to listeners necessarily as static areas, but rather as areas where progress forward in time could be seen as restarting, whilst remaining ‘rooted’ in tradition. Several such sites have been revealed over the course of this enquiry. The daily structures of the programme itself, the feminine gendering of the domestic sphere, not to mention the construction of Heimat, all were areas of continuity from before 1945 that also incorporated substantial transformations and new meanings in the circumstances of life after the war. But I have also pointed to a similarly ambiguous dynamic in a number of the more radical departures from past practice. Many of the most stylistically new elements of the radio programme, such as the changing modes of address and reportage, served to emphasize characteristics of personality and place that were supposedly enduring and untouched by National Socialism. Radio was thus perhaps one of the earliest sites where the dynamics of ‘modernization in reconstruction’ identified by Axel Schildt and Arnold Sywottek became visible.30 Over the last decade, historians have dismantled the notion, which had grown up as a central plank in Germany’s intergenerational politics, that Germans had been ‘silent’ about the past immediately after the war.31 Looking more closely at the continuities of programming has also revealed further ‘commemorative noise’.32 As I have shown here, while

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-231 9780230_009035_07_cha06 232 Voices in Ruins some elements of programming, such as popular songs and personalities, did continue more or less seamlessly after 1945, but they were not accompanied by silence. Their meanings were subject to contestation precisely because these elements of programming were viewed as essentially apolitical. Because they were not seen as politically loaded and potentially taboo, debates over the right sort of light music, the proper mode of address for announcers or the regional representations of stations allowed for a broader scope of debate about the past and present than the formal political sphere did. This is certainly not to say that debate was more progressive, but rather that it was perhaps more hon- est and more representative of the ways that Germans viewed themselves and their past. As we saw in the discussions of jazz in Chapter 2 and in the farmers’ Christmas broadcast in Chapter 5, these were areas where more or less racist ideas that had been dominant during the Nazi era could emerge ‘safely’ into public discourse. I would argue that such elements of radio programming served a very similar function to the practices and rhetoric of tourism (which also was visible in several radio programme genres) discussed by Confino in that they represented ways to discuss and express attachment to the pre-war past.33 The familiarity and ubiquity of many of these continuous elements also made them available for ironic readings, as I showed most explicitly in the case of Ilse Werner’s performance in Chapter 3. Such moments of irony or reflexivity as were visible in programmes themselves seldom seemed intended to subvert totally dominant readings of them, but rather to express unease about their proper place in the post-war present. Without valorizing them as critical engagement with the past and the processes of reconstruction, we can best read such moments of ambiguity as appealing to the sort of tactics of memory described by Michel de Certeau.34 They help to hold open the potential to extract personal experience from the dominant narrative at some later time when it is possible or necessary to do so. These tactics were well-rehearsed under National Socialism, and there were sound reasons why they might have continued after the war, particularly among Germans who viewed the occupation as the replacement of one system of dictatorial domination with another.35 I have suggested here that immediately after 1945, such moments of ambiguity often served as a safe means of holding open attachments to aspects of life in Nazi Germany, by offering an irony that permits nostalgia, and vice-versa. The ambivalence about the continuities on the radio after 1945 returns us once more, as it were, to Heimat, and the family portrait with radio with which I began this discussion. Like so many German films before

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-232 9780230_009035_07_cha06 Conclusion 233 and after it, Heimat seeks to come to grips with the nation via the local and the personal. This has been perhaps the recurring strategy for understanding – and also criticizing – the nation in Germany. Indeed, the portrayal of radio in films about the past is often a clear signal of their stance on this relationship. Hitler’s voice through a Volksempfänger is both a German and a Hollywood cliché for the intrusion of the ‘distant’ Nazi state into the (otherwise innocent) domestic sphere, often serving as the basis of exculpatory narratives of ordinary citizens’ non- involvement. By contrast, radio in Fassbinder’s films about the early years of the Federal Republic interrogate the boundaries of domestic spaces, showing the political forces that exert power over them, which characters within them often ignore.36 In Heimat, interestingly, the radio is not portrayed as intruding but rather is something that the locals themselves embrace and use – before, during and after the Nazi era – to connect their world to spaces beyond. These encounters are often marked by points of unintelligibility or misconnection, and, in fact, later moments of radio listening in the series actually show an increasing disconnection, even as the stations they tune in grow physically closer.37 Even though it tells a very partial history of radio (ultimately, that is a film director’s task), it offers an eloquent means of tracing the connections and disconnec- tions in the spatial transformation of modernity.38 In exploring the role of radio at the moment of its dominance, I have sought to underline the ways in which it can help us to map this longer history of connections and modernization more carefully. But beyond this, I have shown the productive ways in which a longer-term history of broadcasting in Germany allows us to look the other way through the lens and see the extent to which broadcasting has enabled the recurring strategies of engaging with the nation in terms of the local and personal. Such a history gives us access to one of the profound dialectics of modernity between voices, the transient yet vital markers of human personality and agency, and ruins, the enduring porous-walled structures that are the incomplete and oddly shaped building blocks of the past.

9th June 2008 7:21 MAC/VIR Page-233 9780230_009035_07_cha06 Notes

1 Introduction and Contexts

1. Bergfelder (2005, 19–52); Fehrenbach (1995, 51–68); See Koszyk (1999). 2. Raymond Williams astutely points to the tension between the notion of ‘image’ as a copy or representation and as something imagined. See Williams (1983, 158–159). 3. Glaser (1985, 16). 4. Assmann (1999, 124–125). 5. Margarete Dörr aptly takes this phrase as the title of her three-volume account of women’s memories of the period. Dörr (1998a,b,c); See also Meyer and Schulze (1984, 178). 6. On the notion that German suffering has been repressed, particularly in the discussion surrounding W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur and Günter Grass’s Im Krebsgang, see (among others) Moeller (2006); Nolan (2005). 7. See the documentary series Die Grosse Flucht (2001), by Guido Knopp, and the drama Dresden (2006), both ZDF. On Knopp particularly, see Kansteiner (2006, 154–80). 8. Heineman (2001, 21). 9. See also Radstone (2005). 10. Anderson (1991). 11. See, for example, Dörr (1998c, 446–447). 12. See Marßolek (1999a, 146); Moores (1988, 145). For a complex account of the relation between situation and content of radio in memory, see Falkenberg (2005). 13. Marßolek (1999a, 149–150). A current CD compilation of radio hits of the 1940s’ encompasses this uneasy sort of memory: the cover features a closeup of a Volksempfänger, complete with Nazi party emblem central in the photo, but no other relationship between the regime and the songs on the disc is made, and the texts discussing the artists are all celebratory. Time and space are fragmented here as well: the two-disc set is divided into ‘national’ and ‘international’ hits. While all but one of the ‘national’ hits are from before 1945, nearly half of the ‘international’ (meaning American) hits are from after, which further seems to point to an ongoing problem trying to place the German radio experience in international context. Radio Hits der 40er Jahre (2001 Classic Hits Tonträger). 14. Dussel (2002, 127); on RIAS, see Rogasch (1995); Galle (2003). 15. Exceptions are to be found almost entirely in German language scholarship: Jost Hermand’s (1986) work on the cultural reconstruction of Germany, which includes a lengthy section on developments in radio, and more recently Axel Schildt (1993, 1995), who has considered mass media in general and the radio in particular as a central part of his discussions on everyday life in the 1950s.

234

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16. Symptomatic of this is the five-volume history edited by Hans Bausch. See Bausch (1980); Bessler (1980); Diller (1980). See also Mettler (1975); Schaaf (1971); Williams (1976). 17. On film, see Bergfelder (2005, 2–3); on radio drama, see, among others, Bloom (1985); Schwitzke (1963). A more contextualized account of radio drama, taking in popular programming as well was given in Bolz (1991) and this was carried further in the comprehensive account in Wagner (1997). 18. Hamm et al. (1999); von Rüden and Wagner (2005); Boehnke et al. (1995); Köhler (1991); Bassenge (1998); Bolz (1991); Friedrich (1991); Galle (2003); Lersch (1990). 19. Bolz (1991); Friedrich (1991); Lersch (1990); von Rüden and Wagner (2005). 20. Dussel (1995; 1997; 2002). 21. See von Rüden and Wagner (2005); Wagner (2000); Wagner (2003); see also the lengthy interviews on Wagner’s NWDR history project website, www.nwdr-geschichte.de under the heading ‘Zeitzeugen’. 22. There have been repeated calls to make radio a more central focus in history more generally; Dussel (1999); Schildt (2001). 23. Marßolek and von Saldern (1998a,b). 24. Lacey (1997). 25. Marßolek (1999a). 26. Classen (2004); Schneider (1999). Of these two studies, Classen’s is by far the more sophisticated work, both methodologically and theoretically. Com- bining discourse analysis, theories of collective memory, and theories of dictatorship, he is able to reconstruct in great detail the spaces available for collective memory and identity formation within the shifting political frameworks of the first decade after the war. 27. Confino (2006, 225). 28. Anderson (1991). 29. See, among others, Briggs and Burke (2002); Giddens (1990); Thompson (1995). 30. Connerton (1989); Confino and Fritzsche (2002); Billig (1995). 31. Scannell (1996, 6), his emphasis. 32. Halbwachs (1992). 33. Lacey (1997, 4–5). 34. Ibid., 4. 35. See Marßolek and von Saldern (1998a,b); Lacey (1997). 36. To name just a few: Carter (1997); Confino and Koshar (2001); Schildt (1995); Ten Dyke (2001); Wildt (1994). 37. See Carter (1997); Moeller (1993). 38. Dussel (2002); Friedrich (1991); Schneider (1999). For a succinct critique of this approach, see Marßolek (2002). 39. DRA (1995); Marßolek and von Saldern (1998b); Riedel (1994); Classen (2004); Galle (2003). 40. Carter (1997). 41. In Lersch (1990, 34). 42. The station at Kaiserslautern in the Palatinate, for example, had at first belonged to the Bayerische Rundfunk, then the Reichssender Munich, the Reichssender Frankfurt, then the Reichssender Saarbrücken, until the end of

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the war. After the war, it came into the network of the Südwestfunk, served from Baden-Baden, before being closed in 1950 and the studio moved to the state capital of Mainz. 43. Halefeldt (1997, 30). 44. For details of these arrangements, see Halefeldt (1997); Lerg (1984); Pabst (1984). 45. Halefeldt (1997, 123–124). 46. Lacey (1997, 34). 47. Though connections existed earlier, the first ever national relay broadcast (‘Ringsendung’) that went out simultaneously over every German radio station happened one month before the Nazis took power, on New Years Eve, 1932. 48. In Lacey (1997, 51). 49. Frei (2001, 55). 50. Diller (1980, 186). For an overview of the way this was carried out at individual stations, see also Burandt (1991); Heimann (1975); Wagner (2000, 29–35). 51. Party membership, while helpful to a career in Nazi radio was not essential to keep one’s post. Furthermore, many who had gained their posts through party membership lost them again due to incompetence. Münkel (1998a, 55–56). 52. Münkel (1998a, 52–56). 53. Pater (1998, 149); Riedel (1999, 89). 54. Lacey (1997, 247). 55. In Schmidt (1998a, 259). 56. Riedel (1999, 91). 57. The VE301 alone accounted for 2.5 million new registered radios by the end of 1937, Schmidt (1999, 141). 58. Ibid., 144. 59. See Falkenberg (2005, 120–121); Hensle (2003, 19–21; 185). 60. Currid (2006). 61. As keen as Goebbels was to have public death sentences as deterrent, it was relatively widely known that lighter penalties or just a warning were far more likely, unless one also disseminated the information heard. Hensle (2003, 95–97). 62. Briggs (1970, 434). 63. Wagner (2000, 39). 64. Briggs (1970, 692). 65. Ibid., 679. 66. Gauleitung München-Oberbayern ‘Unterrichtung der Bevölkerung über die Luftlage’ (January 1944), BArchB R55/1254:200. 67. Lersch (1990, 15). 68. Kutsch (1991, 99). 69. It was an odd historical chance that in addition to Radio Hamburg, the first Allied station on German soil, the British zone also contained the last Nazi radio station, the Reichssender Flensburg, which signed off for the last time on 13 May, 1945, Paul (2000). 70. Kutsch (1991, 111–112). 71. Ibid., 102–103; 113.

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72. In surveys conducted in the US zone immediately after the war, Greene was the third most popular ‘enemy’ personality on the air, favoured more highly among younger listeners Diller (1998, 57). He went on to become the director general of the BBC. 73. Kutsch (1991, 120). 74. Whereas the British had found their own model of public service broadcasting largely adaptable to the situation in Germany, the Americans found two major obstacles preventing the introduction of broadcasting based on the privatized American system. First, there was simply not enough private capital left in reliable hands to finance private stations, nor would the number of available frequencies allow for more than one station per region. Second, retaining strict control over a private station did not appear feasible. The creation of different stations, one for each region, was considered a compromise solution. Nevertheless, the Americans did conclude ‘commercialization of all or part of radio in the US zone can be considered as long range policy’ if the technical conditions should arise to allow it. Halefeldt (1980, 181); Bolz (1991, 29–30). 75. Friedrich (1991, 43). 76. Fischer and Pietrzynski (1995, 45). 77. See Galle (2003); Rogasch (1995). 78. Hugh Greene remained chief controller until 15 November of that year, when control passed to Adolf Grimme, the former culture minister of Lower Saxony. 79. Bausch (1980, 158–159). 80. See Lersch (1990, 52); and further WDR Jahrbuch, 1955, p. 3; Report on the finances of Radio Frankfurt 15.3.1948, HR-HA, Chronik 48/1. 81. ‘Radio Listening in Germany Winter 1946’ (1 March 1946), DRA/F, OMGUS Surveys, Report 8. 82. The Volksempf änger had been used to encourage people to electrify and modernize their homes, and so very few models that ran on batteries were available. Schmidt (1999, 145). 83. Schildt (1995, 215). 84. Riedel (1999, 165–167). 85. Ibid., 44–50. 86. Rölle (1997, 104). 87. Riedel (1999, 168–169). See also ‘th,’ ‘Es gibt noch kein Jedermann-Gerät’ Hör Zu 3:52 (1948) 2; also minutes of the sixth meeting of the NWDR Administrative Council 27–29 October 1948, WDR-HA, 6156. 88. Schildt (1995, 212–213). 89. See Die Ansage (22–28 December 1946) 1, and Friedrich (1991, 187). 90. Schildt (1993, 213). 91. Abelshauser (1987, 87). 92. Dussel (2002, 127). 93. Nine out of 10 listeners surveyed in the American zone in 1947 cited good reception as the reason for their station choice, ‘Radio Listening in the Amer- ican zone and in Berlin,’ DRA/F, OMGUS Surveys, Report 45. Better reception was also one of the main reasons cited for tuning in the NWDR in British zone in 1946, ‘German Reaction report number 11’ 29 December, 1946, PRO, FO371/64516.

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94. As ever, there have been exceptions. Listeners in the South-West routinely tuned in the German language stations in Switzerland, for example, which in many cases they were better able to receive than their ‘home stations’. 95. ‘6. Hörerumfrage des, NWDR’ Die Ansage 22 (1 June 1948) 2. 96. ‘Radio Listening in the American zone and in Berlin’, DRA/F, OMGUS Surveys, Report 45, 2. 97. Falkenberg (2005, 242). 98. The difficulty West Germans had in referring to the space of their nation and who belongs in it has been well-documented in ethnographic studies of West Germany, see Borneman (1992); Forsythe (1989). 99. Kaes (1989, 164). 100. See Fehrenbach (1995), chapter 5; Höfig (1973); von Moltke (2005); Kaes (1989, 161–192); Morley and Robins (1995); Boa and Palfeyman (2000). 101. Bausinger (1990, 76–77). 102. Confino (1999). 103. Pabst (1984, 76–77). 104. Halefeldt (1983); Köhler (1991, 353–356); Schumacher (1997, 607ff.). 105. Karst (1984, 276). The German word Mundart, meaning dialect, has very similar connotations to the word Eigenart, referring to the unique essential quality of the people of the region. 106. For an excellent discussion of the interaction between National Socialism and the Heimat movement, see Applegate (1990, 197–227). 107. Pater (1998, 149). 108. Applegate (1990, 225). 109. Ibid., 229. 110. Bausinger (1990, 85). 111. Overesch (1979, 100). This number represents refugees from the East as well those who were evacuated as a result of Allied bombing. It does not take into consideration that half again as many soldiers were still in captivity as well. 112. The French had not agreed to take eastern refugees in their zone. Volks- und Berufszählung vom 29. Oktober 1946 in den Vier Besaztungszonen und Groß-Berlin (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1947). 113. Höfig (1973, 166). 114. von Moltke (2002, 25). 115. Confino (1999, 144–145). 116. Ibid., 180; Confino (2006, 194ff.). 117. Confino (1999, 110). 118. Cremer and Klein (1990, 38). 119. von Moltke (2002, 24); Confino (1999, 183). 120. The plan, proposed by Henry J. Morgenthau in 1944, foresaw the complete dismantling of all industry in Germany, converting it to an agrarian state. The plan was dismissed as unworkable shortly after it was proposed, though the mention of it continued to haunt the popular imagination in Germany for many years. 121. Schildt (1995, 185–188). 122. Ibid., 186. 123. Confino (1999, 170–171); von Moltke (2005, 120–128).

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124. Kaes (1989, 168). Anton Kaes argues that the great unspoken message of Edgar Reitz’s (1984) film Heimat is that ‘wherever [central character Maria] is, there is Heimat’. 125. Applegate (1990, 9). 126. Halefeldt (1983). 127. Confino (1999, 120ff). 128. ‘Operetta-Cocktail’ written and presented by Paul Land, 9 June 1946, SDR-HA, Sendenachweise. Emphasis in original. 129. Ibid., my emphasis. 130. Karst (1984, 276).

2 Echoes of Days: Finding Everyday Between Exception and Routine

1. Klemperer (1995, 7). Dresden was still controlled by the Americans at that point in time, and Bremen by the British. 2. Scannell (1988, 15). 3. Ibid., 19. 4. Ibid., 29. 5. Currid (2006, 19–64). 6. See Herbert (1986). 7. Dörr (1998c, 446–448). 8. Bajohr (1998, 332). 9. Gregor (2000, 1057). 10. Dussel (2002, 243). The German word Volksmund (people’s mouth), which is notably in the singular, does not only refer to rumours (for which there is also the specific word Gerucht), but to any popular saying or turn of phrase. 11. Fiske (1989, 174). 12. Ibid. 13. Diller (1998, 57). 14. In Peukert (1987a, 54). 15. Vansina (1985, 6). 16. See, for example, the collections from 1945 to 1946 in the British zone, PRO FO1049/15; FO1049/419 and the OMGUS surveys. The first ‘audience research’ carried out by Radio Munich, a series of ‘Information Bullet- ins,’ always featured a segment on current rumours, see BR-HA, RV/24.3. See also Karl Eduard von Schnitzler, ‘Gerüchte’ 12 April 1946, WDR-HA, Sendeprot. HF, MF; Radio Frankfurt discussed the possibility of a regular series that would address and dispel rumours. Protocoll, Programmsitzung, 17 September 1946, HR-HA, Radio Frankfurt Programmsitzungen. 17. ‘Information Bulletin No. 5’ Frederick Fox to 6870th District Information Services Control Command 30 August 1945, BR-HA, RV24.3. 18. Greene (1969, 46–47). 19. Schneider (1999, 190). 20. See, for example, Lass (1994, 96–97); Skultans (1998). 21. Scannell (1996, 13). 22. Helga Löttler, from Hagen, ‘Unsere Leser Schreiben Uns’ Hör Zu 2:13 (1947) 2.

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23. L. W. from Witten an der Ruhr, ‘Unsere Leser schreiben uns’ Hör Zu 2:34 (1947) 2. 24. K. M. from Lüneburg, ‘Unsere Leser Schreiben Uns’ Hör Zu 2:5 (1947) 2. 25. J. D. from Cuxhaven, ‘Unsere Leser Schreiben Uns’ Hör Zu 2:6 (1947) 2. 26. Billig (1995, 94–96). 27. Falkenberg (1999, 277). 28. Kurt Wilhelm ‘Der Funk und seine Hörer’ 1 February 1953, BR-HA, HF/2242.2. 29. ‘Unsere Leser schreiben uns’ Hör Zu 2:27 (1947) 2. 30. Moores (1988, 37). 31. Scannell (1996, 10) and passim. 32. Williams (1990, 86ff.). 33. See Schumacher (1997). 34. Bessler (1980, 21); Schumacher (1997, 356–357). 35. Becher (1990, 155). 36. Such fears can be seen expressed in Robert Siodmak’s 1929 film Menschen am Sonntag, which documents a day in the life of five young working people in Berlin. Four of the young people go out into the green public space of the Nicolassee and fill their one day of leisure with various activities while a fifth a young woman, sleeps away the entire day. 37. Schumacher (1997, 605–606). 38. Peukert (1987b, 110). 39. Lacey (1997, 34–35). 40. Lenk (1999, 211). 41. Scannell (1988); Thompson (1995). 42. Lenk (1999). 43. Currid (2006, 141). 44. Marßolek (1999b, 122). 45. Currid (2006, 29ff.). 46. Dussel (2002, 181–184); Pater (1998, 99). 47. Marßolek (1999b, 122). 48. See Dayan and Katz (1992). 49. Pater (1998, 189–191). 50. Ibid., 241. 51. Currid (2006, 56). An early and seminal formulation of this theme is also found in Schäfer (1981). 52. Noakes and Pridham (1984, 370). 53. Schildt (1995, 80). 54. (no author) ‘Warum keine Programme?’ Der Deutsche Rundfunk 17:37 (1939) 1. 55. (no author) ‘Hier sind alle deutschen Sender!’ Der Deutsche Rundfunk 18:23 (1940) 2. 56. All of these issues can be found, for example, in a meeting of the RMVP’s broadcasting committee on 6 January 1943, BArch R55/696:104. 57. Kempowski (1993, 593–594). 58. In Noakes (1998, 503). 59. Ibid. 60. See correspondence of the RMVP, 16 February 1945, BArchB R55/20010:78.

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61. Briggs (1970, 692). Ironically, these ten hours represent more daily airtime than Radio Hamburg had in its first months of broadcasting under British occupation. 62. In order not be overheard, it was recommended that BBC broadcasts be listened to with one’s head and the radio under a blanket, as one would with inhaling salts. It is, of course, impossible now to know for sure how many people were listening. In a survey conducted in areas occupied by the US in April and May of 1945, about half of the respondents claimed to have listened to foreign broadcasts. Though one must naturally be suspicious of answers given by Germans to the occupying power, it is intriguing that three separate polls in three separate cities revealed roughly the same percentages. On the other hand, 43 per cent of those surveyed indicated that they had begun listening to ‘forbidden’ stations before the war began – when no stations were actually forbidden. Diller (1998, 56). 63. Schildt (1995, 80). 64. A. H. A., ‘Wir hörten,’ Radiowelt 2:29 (1947) 5. 65. Bausch (1980, 16). 66. DRA (1995, 15). 67. In Fischer and Pietrzynski (1995, 40). 68. Schneider (1999, 73). 69. It was reported to Radio Munich, for example, that ‘30 per cent complained bitterly about the foreign language broadcasts’. ‘Information Bulletin No. 4’ Frederick Fox to 6870th District Information Services Control Command 24 August 1945 BR-HA, RV24.3. 70. Protocoll, Programmsitzun, Radio Frankfurt 17 September 1946, HR-HA, Radio Frankfurt Programmsitzungen. 71. Rölle (1997, 119). 72. Friedrich (1991, 96ff.). 73. Falkenberg (2005, 225–226). 74. Diller (1986); Seegers (1999). 75. Seegers (1999, 164). This full access to the programme did not necessarily mean that the printed schedule was more accurate than those in the newspapers had been. In the ‘letters’ column of the first 15 weeks of Hör Zu, at least one-third contain complaints that the broadcast deviated from the printed schedule. 76. Schildt (1995, 230). 77. Merritt and Merritt (1970). 78. Scannell (1996, 10). 79. Landfunk mit Volksmusik, 11 June 1946, SDR-HA, Sendenachweise. 80. Lersch (1990, 78). For example, a commentator in Radiowelt set this feature of the American-occupied stations, particularly his native Munich, as further evidence of the station’s foreignness, next to its lack of ‘native’ Bavarian programmes. A.H.A., ‘Wir hörten ...’ Radiowelt 2:29 (1947) 5. 81. Friedrich (1991, 96). 82. Ibid. 83. Kehm (1990, 130). 84. Fluck (1993, 103). 85. Dussel (2002); Schwitzke (1955).

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86. Peter von Zahn, ‘Über den Rundfunk’, 9 February 1948, NDR, sound document F825076. 87. Classen (2004, 106). 88. Dussel (2002, 245). 89. ‘Abschiedssendung für Rolf James’, 11 September 1948, NDR, sound document F827951. Ingeborg and Gisela Griffel became well known in all occupation zones shortly after 1945 as a singing duo loosely modeled on the American Andrews Sisters. See ‘Sterne am Himmel des Südwestfunks’ Funkwelt 1:3/4 (1947); ‘Die möchte ich sehn! Die Geschwister Griffel’ Hör Zu 3:47 (1948) 2. 90. See Pater (1998). 91. ‘Der Frohe Samstag-Nachmittag’ Hör Zu 4:26 (1949) 3. 92. Seegers (2003, 326–327). 93. Dussel (2002, 121). 94. Scannell (1996, 150). 95. Ibid., 149. 96. Pater (1998, 191). 97. In Schmidt (1998a, 341–342). 98. Pater (1998, 190). 99. Jenter (1998, 74–75). 100. Herbert (1986); Stommer (1981). 101. The RMVP ‘Evaluation of listener letters’ from 5 August 1942 reported that ‘morning gymnastics are once more in high demand!’ BArchB R55/596:55. 102. The first issue of the Berlin guide Der Rundfunk claimed, for example, ‘If frequent letters indicate interest in a broadcast, then everyday morning gymnastics must be the best loved and most cherished.’ Der Rundfunk 1:1 (1946) 5. 103. See ‘Sind Sie Frühaufsteher? Dann ...’ Hör Zu 3:32 (1947) 3; ‘Wer locker lebt, hat mehr vom Leben,’Radiowelt 2:17 (1947) 5. 104. Listener letter to the NWDR from 6 March 1946, in Schäfers (2005). 105. Schmidt (1998a, 351). 106. ‘Melodien am Morgen’ 24 December 1946 7:30–7:55, SDR-HA, Sendenach- weise. 107. Programmsitzung, 13 August 1946, HR-HA, Radio Frankfurt Programms- itzungen. 108. Bessler (1980, 26–27). 109. Noakes (1998, 502). 110. Dussel (1997, 468). 111. Evening power cuts were to plague radio listeners (and citizens in general) throughout the first years of the occupation. 112. Military government announcements, 14 July 1945, SDR-HA, Sendenach- weise. 113. ‘Military government programme’ 12.7.1945, SDR-HA, Sendenachweise. 114. Lersch (1990, 81). 115. ‘20 Jahre Zeitfunk’ 5 March 1954, SWF-HA, Sound document 5951215. 116. See WDR-HA, NWDR Programmfahnen. 117. Schwade et al. (2001, 322) 118. Kutsch (1991, 133).

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119. A.H.A., ‘Wir hören ...’ Radiowelt 2:29 (1947) 5. 120. ‘Das Winterprogramm des NWDR’ Die Ansage 18 October 1946, p. 1. 121. Schwitzke (1955, 264). 122. Scannell (1996, 6). 123. Dussel (2002, 233); Schildt (1995). An official survey of the US military government also noted that ‘taste in musical programmes varies widely, though in general, most German radio listeners want light music of one kind or another’. ‘Radio Listening in the American zone and in Berlin’, p. 7, DRA/F, OMGUS Surveys, Report 45. 124. Dussel (2002, 124–125). 125. Dörr (1998a, 351). 126. Bathrick (1997, 118). 127. Currid (2006, 54–58). 128. Bergmeier and Lotz (1997); Kater (1992). 129. Currid (2006), see especially 196–199. 130. Prox (1979, 78–80). 131. Horine correspondence, 15 August 1946, BR-HA RV/24.4. 132. Joachim E. Behrendt, ‘Erinnerungen an die ersten Tagen des SWF’, SWF-HA (no signature), p. 2. 133. Hake (2001, 5). 134. Bolz (1991, 49); Dussel (2002, 68); Friedrich (1991, 175). 135. Dussel (2002, 227). 136. Galle (2003, 337). 137. Bergmeier and Lotz (1997, 187–188). 138. Ibid., 142; ‘Protokoll über die Rundfunkbesprechung am 3 June 42’, BArchB R55/696:12. 139. ‘Kurt Wilhelm erzählt über die Anfangsjahren’, 7 September 1972, BR-HA, Sound Document 24340. 140. Dussel (2002, 362). 141. Bergfelder (2000, 83). 142. Paul Land, Operettencocktail 9 June 1946 21:15–21:45, SDR-HA, Sendenach- weise. 143. Currid (2006, 206–207). 144. Ernst Höchstötter, interview with Heike Zulla 9 February 2000, emphasis in original, BR-HA, HD/1028. Hans Carste (1909–1971), wrote popular songs and film music during the years of the Third Reich and went on the head the light orchestra for RIAS and later the Sender Freies Berlin Vogelsang (1990, 264). Many thanks to Jörg Wyrschowy of the DRA in Wiesbaden for his assistance in identifying the composers and dates. 145. Bassenge (1998, 117). 146. Friedrich (1991, 150). 147. ‘Sing schon am Morgen!’ Funkwelt 2:1/2 (1948) 6. 148. Falkenberg (2005, 222–223). 149. The close relationships more than once led to conflicts of interest, particularly in the widely publicized ‘scandal’ surrounding programme- director and Schlager-lyricist Kurt Feltz at the NWDR. Dussel (2002, 376–379). 150. Ritzel (1998). 151. Ibid., 295.

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152. Dussel (2002, 379–382); Riedel (1999, 174). Jazz was also cited by Germans polled immediately after the war as something they had disliked about the Allied broadcasts during wartime, Diller (1998, 57). 153. ‘Statisik des Geschmacks’ Radiowelt 1:38 (1946) 12. 154. ‘German Reaction Report Number 11’ 29 December 1946 PRO, FO371/64516. 155. In Dr W. Panofsky,‘No zum Jazz’ Radiowelt 1:5 (1946) 3. The other letters in the same article did not focus as heavily on the racial element of jazz, but rather pointed to its un-European or un-German nature that made it unfit for German listeners. 156. Riedel (1999, 174). 157. Bassenge (1998, 115); Scharlau (1996, 221). 158. Currid (2006, 131–132). 159. ‘German Reaction Report Number 11’ 29 December 1946, PRO FO371/64516. 160. Kater (1992, 14). 161. K.-H. G. from Iserlohn, ‘Unsere Leser Schreiben Uns’ Hör Zu 2:19 (1947) 2. 162. Josef Marein, ‘Jazz – eine Kulturschande?’ Hör Zu 2:44 (1947) 7. 163. Dr W. Panofsky, ‘Yes zum Jazz’ Radiowelt 1:4 (1946) 4. 164. J. E. B [probably Joachim E. Behrendt], ‘Jazz!’ Funkwelt 19/20 (1947). 165. Currid (2006). 166. See Stoffels (1997, 958). 167. Adorno (1967). 168. Falkenberg (2005, 208–209). 169. See ‘Monatlicher Posteinlauf’, August 1947, BR-HA, NL/2.148. 170. ‘Ein Jahr Radio München’ 31 May 1946, BR-HA, Sound document 8314; ‘Die 10 der Woche’ Radiowelt 2:23 (1947).The film songs mentioned were all featured in Hollywood films cleared for showing in Germany in 1947. ‘Chattanoga Choo-Choo’ and ‘I know why (and so do you)’ are from Sun Valley Serenade (Twentiethcentury Fox 1941); ‘Minnie from Trinidad,’ is from Ziegfeld Girl (MGM 1941) (see Fehrenbach 1995: 261–264). 171. Poiger (2000, 137ff). 172. Schwitzke (1963, 258). 173. Lacey (1997, 237–239). 174. Currid (2006, 118). 175. Scannell (1996, 174). 176. Ibid., 175.

3 Familiar Voices: Representations of Personalities and Pasts

1. von Zahn (1991, 266). 2. van Leeuwen (2001, 396). 3. See Scannell (1996, 134ff). 4. Thompson (1995, 185). 5. Schneider (1999, 42). 6. Koch and Glaser (2005, 146–147). 7. This was at least the case for the British zone. See memo from Bernhard Ernst to Winter, Jesse, Busse, Bauck and Labriga 17 September 1946, WDR-HA, 9466. 8. Wagner (2005a, 29–32).

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9. Apart from being a popular announcer at the station in Cologne, Rauher was one of the stars of the popular broadcast ‘Der Frohe Samstagnachmittag des Reichssenders Köln’ (‘The Happy Saturday Afternoon of the Reichssender Cologne’), which was carried by most stations between in Germany before the war. 10. On Rauher’s return, see ‘Der Frohe Samstag-Nachmittag’ Hör Zu 4:26 (1949) 3. 11. In Schneider (1986, 161). 12. The memoirs of the NWDR employees in particular are filled with stories the lengths employees would go to to remain in their heated offices as long as possible, see von Zahn (1991, 265–266). By contrast, the head of the news department at Radio Frankfurt complained to station head Beckmann that the cold working conditions were slowly causing the entire department to fall ill. See Otto Herr to Eberhard Beckmann, 25 January 1947, HR-HA, Intendanz. 13. Lersch (1990); Wagner (2000, 78–81). 14. See Classen (2004); Galle (2003). 15. Kutsch (1986a); Wagner (2005a, 29–44). 16. Kutsch (1986a, 206). 17. Bausch (1980, 151). 18. In addition to his autobiography, Eggebrecht wrote many radio features and gave numerous interviews about his time at the station. See Kutsch (1986a, 196–197). Eggebrecht in particular built on his public biography and persona throughout his life in part as a means of addressing questions of German guilt and memory. Peter von Zahn’s long career in documentary, and in particular his 1991 memoir, provided him ample opportunity to build up a substantial myth around himself. See von Zahn (1991). 19. Bel-Ami (1939) and Wiener Blut (Viennese Blood, 1941). 20. As ever, there are exceptions, most notably Fritz Eberhard, eventually head of the station at Stuttgart, as well as one of its first political commentators; see Wagner (2000, 78–81). His activities and writings as an exile provided fuel for attacks from the right throughout his career. See Wagner (2003). 21. See Köpfe des Rundfunks: Sprecher (Berlin: Rothgiesser und Diesing, 1934) p. 84; ‘Albert Hofele’ SDR-HA, Personnel catalog, 2354. 22. NWDR Employee list from August, 1945, WDR-HA, Personalliste. 23. When he was hired, his former colleague and now control officer Alexander Maass spoke of being able to make him ‘second in command’. See Dordevic (2000, 31). 24. Winter (2002). 25. Manuscript, Aus Rheinland und Westfalen, 19 September 1945, WDR-HA, Sendeprot. HF, MF. 26. ‘Den möchte ich sehn! Bernhard Ernst’ Hör Zu 3:12 (1948) 2. 27. Ibid. Ernst had presented the first live sport broadcast on German radio in 1925. 28. Except where noted otherwise, this account of Braun’s career comes from Jenter (1998). 29. Galle (2003, 309, 329). 30. Unless otherwise noted, this account of Laven’s career draws on Biermann (1989).

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31. ‘Den möchte ich sehn! Herbert Zimmermann’ Hör Zu 2:5 (1947) 2. 32. See ‘Paul Land’ Radiospiegel 1:12 (1946); ‘Lilott und Ernst erfüllen Hörer- wünsche’ Radiowelt 2:23 (1947); ‘Die Stimmen, die Sie kennen, wir hier mit Namen nennen’ Radiowelt 4:13 (1949) 7. 33. Kutsch (1989, 261); Schneider (1999). 34. Schneider (1999, 275). 35. Ibid., 157–160. 36. Ibid., 258. 37. Bassenge (1998, 26). 38. Haffner (1999, 37). Interestingly, however, at least one of Karin Falkenberg’s informants did remember his ‘strange’ voice. Falkenberg (2005, 200). 39. Bolz (1991, 37). 40. A detailed, but sensationalized, account of Ullman’s career can be found in Alexander (1978). 41. E. M. Wagner, ‘Wer ist Herbert Gessner? Profil eines jungen Deutschen’ Radiowelt 1:41 (1946) 6. 42. Like many emigrants from the West, Gessner’s career at Radio Berlin soon ran a foul of the power structures in the East as well and while the immediate reasons for his young death in 1956 are unclear, his career’s political dead end was surely related. See Classen (2004, 373). 43. Wagner (2000, 96–98); Schaaf (1971, 13). 44. In Kutsch (1989, 252). Ironically, the station to which von Schnitzler moved, Radio Berlin, had also just recently hired Alfred Braun, the assistant director of Jud Süss. 45. Greene (1969, 46). 46. See also Wagner (2005a, 24–25). 47. Hannes, or Hans, Stein (1911–1989), the first chief announcer of the Radio Munich, was both a native of Bavaria and an influential associate of Fritz Benscher. Very little biographical information on Stein is available – he also did not like having his picture printed in the programme guides (see Figure 3.1). I am grateful to Sabine Rittner of the historical archive of the Bayrischer Rundfunk for sending me what information was on file at the archive. 48. Bassenge (1998, 139). Backhaus returned to the station as it was being handed back over into German control, and remained for many years. 49. See ‘Der Fall Backhaus’ Radiowelt 2:11 (1947) 4. 50. In ‘Und noch einmal: Fall Backhaus’ Radiowelt 2:17 (1947) 4. 51. Bolz (1991); Galle (2003); Geserick (1991); Schaaf (1971); Wagner (2003). 52. von Zahn (1991, 247). 53. Ibid. 54. On the continuing problems of retrospective accounts of Nazi-era sound, see Currid (2006, 2–5). 55. See Scannell and Cardiff (1991, 161ff); Douglas (1999, 161). 56. Münkel (1998a, 67–69). 57. ‘Richtlinien für Rundfunksprecher’ 1936, in Wagner (2005b, 273), emphasis in original. 58. Carter (2004, 27). 59. Falkenberg (2005, 65). 60. Gethmann (2006, 174–176).

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61. Hake (2001, 173–174). 62. O.W. Gail, from Die kleine Flasche mit dem Kabel 1939, excerpted in Rundfunk und Fernsehen 1:3/4 (1953) 34. 63. Bajohr (1998, 322–323); Falkenberg (2005, 142–147). Valerian is an herb known for its calming properties. 64. Bajohr (1998, 323). 65. Nuremberg’s ‘Baldrian’, while he provided local information, was not a local- sounding voice, but rather a native of Westphalia. His acceptance among the populace was thus even more remarkable given that regional prejudices were greatly exacerbated by wartime (and later post-war) hardship. Such recognition calmed, but by no means eliminated the severe prejudice Schöddert and his family faced living in a small Franconian village after the war, Falkenberg (2005, 147). 66. See Bajohr (1998); Gregor (2000). 67. Falkenberg (2005, 146–147). 68. Assmann (1999, 105ff). 69. Sternberger (1949), in Assmann (1999, 107). 70. Ibid., 109. 71. Assmann (1999, 111). 72. Wagner (2006). 73. Axel Eggebrecht ‘Rundfunk und Hörer’ Die Ansage 24–30, 1 November 1946. 74. Similar shows, with similar formats, Fragen, die alle angehen (‘Questions That Concern Everyone’), for example, at Radio Stuttgart, did exist at other stations as well, but were still a very small proportion of the overall programme. 75. Scannell (1996, 67). 76. ‘Dr F.’, ‘Das Mikrofon als Verräter’ Hör Zu 3:45 (1948) 4. 77. Ellie Behrendt ‘Die Entwicklung des “Kirchenfunks’’ im NWDR’ 19 January 1949, StAHH 621-1 NDR 539. See also Becker (1955, 271–272). 78. Scannell (1996, 74). 79. Benjamin (1968, 241–242). 80. This is in contrast, however, to Nazis’ own descriptions of proper speaking, which also viewed actors as suspect. See Schmölders (2002, 178). 81. In Wagner (2005b, 271). 82. Biermann (1989, 215). 83. Hake (2001, 221). 84. Broadcasts for the prisoners of war were a regular occurrence through much of the occupation period at all of the stations, as were calls for help for war wounded. An iconic example of the portrayal of ‘broken male’ is Wolfgang Borchert’s play ‘Draussen vor der Tür’, which premiered as a radio play on the NWDR 13 February 1947 and on stage 9 months later. The play centres around the mentally and physically damaged soldier Beckmann, and its iconic status was compounded by Borchert’s own young death due to linger- ing health problems from the war. This compound image of the damaged male body and the expressive individual radio voice was also captured and institutionalized in the name of Germany’s national prize for radio drama, the ‘prize of the war-blind’. 85. In a case where the voice on the radio stood literally in the place of men in society, Ernst Höchstötter from Radio Munich recalled one listener

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whose husband had died in the war who began to identify him as her husband. Ernst Höchstötter, interview with Heike Zulla 9 February 2000 BR-HA, HD/1028. 86. The term ‘fresh talk’ was coined by Erving Goffman, to denote spontaneous speech, which is perceived as being composed by, and uttered on behalf of, the person who is speaking, or in Goffman’s terms, the speaker is animator, author and principal. See Goffman (1981, 229). 87. Herbert Gessner (no title) Radiowelt 1:7 (1946) 4. 88. Rölle (1997, 121). 89. Programmsitzung, 13 August 1946, HR-HA, Radio Frankfurt Programm- sitzungen; Plauderei über Radio München, 1 August 1965, BR-HA Sound document 20605. In the latter, speaker Hannes Stein points to multiple readers as an American practice. He further recalls an arrangement when sharing news-reading with Hamburg native Fritz Benscher that he would leap in when Benscher was in mid-sentence to provide correct pronunciations of Bavarian place names. 90. Classen (2004, 106–107). 91. See the exchange between Studtman, memo ‘An die Nachrichtensprecher’ (no date given, but February 1947) and reply from speaker Kurt Glass, 15 February 1947, about bad news reading and the reasons for it, HR-HA, Indendanzakten; Sendeleitung. 92. OWG, ‘Gedanken am Lautsprecher: Life’ Radiowelt 2:9 (1947) 5. As I will show in Chapter 5, Bavarian accents were an important issue at Radio Munich. 93. Letter to Peter von Zahn from a listener in Munich, 1 October 1946, StAHH, 621–1 NDR 1517, emphasis in original. 94. E.R.D. ‘Stilunterschiede des Hörberichts’ Rundfunk und Fernsehen 1:3/4 (1953) 37. 95. The first six issues of Hör Zu used this space to introduce ‘leading lights’ of the NWDR. After that readers could write to request whom they wanted to see. The result of this was that most of the people pictured were singers and other entertainers, most of whom were not permanently attached to the station. 96. Peter von Zahn Hör Zu 1:1 (1946) 2. 97. Wagner (2006). 98. At the risk of calling up an inappropriate mental image, it is easiest to describe his voice to Anglo-American readers by saying that it has a similar timbre but slightly lower pitch than Jim Henson’s ‘Kermit the Frog’ character. 99. The New Year’s programme 1945 and the satirical send-up of the NWDR programme for departing British Chief Controller Rolf James are at least two examples, von Zahn (1991, 279); ‘James Memorial Show’ 11 September 1948, NDR Sound document F827951. 100. von Zahn (1991, 273). 101. An article on Stuttgart’s chief announcer Paul Land notes, for example, ‘once upon a time [ ...] he, too, as the son of a Swabian schoolmaster, had to struggle with his dialect’. ‘Paul Land,’ Radiospiegel 1:12 (1946) 8. 102. See von Zahn correspondence, StAHH 621-1 NDR 1517. 103. Peter von Zahn, ‘Umgang mit Siegern’ Nordwestdeutsche Hefte 1:8 (1946) 6. 104. von Zahn (1991, 276).

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105. Ibid., 220–229. 106. Classen (2004, 252–253). 107. Peter von Zahn, ‘Vertrauensbasis zwischen Publizisten und Hörern’ 13 January 1949, manuscript: WDR 10235, NDR sound document F825894. Emphasis based on the sound document. 108. Ibid. 109. ‘ “Aus der neuen Welt’’ (Umfrage NWDR-Familie zur Sendung am 1 January 1952)’ StAHH 621-1 NDR 1021, 1. 110. Fehrenbach (1995). 111. Carter (2004, 176). 112. Friedrich (1991, 151, 304–307). 113. In 1947, all of the persons featured were involved in cinema, and all but two, composer Michael Jary and director Fritz Lang were actors. Twenty-one of the 32 personalities named were UFI stars, four more (Marlene Dietrich, Henny Porten, Adolf Wohlbrück and Lucie Mannheim) were German stars who had left Germany early in the Nazi era. 114. Scannell (1988, 28–29). 115. In the piece on Victor de Kowa, for example, it mentions simply, ‘Since 1940, he belonged to an illegal resistance group. When it reaches the end, he stays in Berlin’ and with that, the subject of his resistance is closed and the remainder of the paragraph discusses his activity on the stage in Berlin after the war. What the ‘it’ was that ended is up to the reader to decide. ‘Ew.’, ‘Wo sie blieben und was sie trieben: Victor de Kowa’ Hör Zu 2:32 (1947) 12. 116. Seegers (2003, 326–327). 117. ‘Das gab’s nur einmal. Zu der grossen Kabarettsendung aus der Traumwelt des Films’ Hör Zu 2:7 (1947) 5. 118. Dyer (1998, 33ff). 119. Carter (2004, 36–37). 120. Wieman had written at least one script during his time in Ufa’s artistic committee. Carter (2004, 37). 121. Schneider (1999, 131). 122. ‘Über den Segen und Unheil deutscher Träumerei’ 5 September 1945, NDR sound document F820918. 123. Ibid. 124. Classen (2004, 117–119). 125. Eggebrecht and Jarchow (2001, 327). In addition to literary readings at the NWDR, he did series of poetry readings in Stuttgart for Christmas, 1947 (SDR-HA Sound documents 6011678; 6321353/Z00; 6321354/001), and in 1949 was the voice of Goethe in the NWDR series Goethe erzählt sein Leben (Goethe narrates his life) as part of the 200th anniversary of his birth. 126. See Hake (2001, 221). 127. ‘Rund um den Funk’ Radiowelt 2:33 (1947) 7. How much these numbers had to do with answers coming in from soldiers in captivity can only be speculated. 128. Werner (1996, 165–215). 129. Funkwelt 1:1/2 (1947); 2:1/2 (1948). In the latter, she is shown in a still from a pre-1945 film role, although the cover is apropos of an appearance as a singer. See also ‘Ihr Wunsch: Hörerlieblinge’ Funkwelt 1:9/10 (1947) and Funkwelt 1:25/26 (1947) 13.

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130. ‘Sterne am Himmel des Südwestfunks’ Funkwelt 1:3/4 (1947). 131. Ibid. 132. Ibid. 133. See Currid (2006, 152–154). 134. Among others, the singer Will Glahé sang a ‘Hungarian’ song in broken German and the show’s host Alexander Geimer presented a monologue of the story of Adam and Eve as told by a Frenchman. The latter took clear, but mostly harmless, aim at the French occupiers. 135. ‘Ein Jahr Südwestfunk’, SWF-HA, sound document 5450239. 136. She claimed not to have been able to read music at the time of her ‘discovery’ (in 1941, rather than 1940 as stated by Geimer) by Werner Bochmann. Werner (1996, 26). 137. Werner (1996, 174). 138. Her own memoir spends nearly half of its pages describing her life and film career before 1945. A The headline announcing her death in a Dutch newspaper provided a darker mirror image of this self-portrayal: ‘ “Nazi-Nightingale’’ Ilse Werner (84) dies’, De Volkskrant 9 August 2005. 139. An important exception to this is Christoph Classen’s work on broadcasting in the Soviet zone, which explores in detail the language and emplotment available to regime victims to discuss their experiences on the air, Classen (2004).

4 Time Consuming: Addressing a Nation of Women

1. Much of this chapter was published as Badenoch (2007). 2. Frauenfunk, 30 January 1947, SWF-HA, Bestand Manuskript-Sammlung Hörfunk. 3. In Wildt (1994, 129). 4. Strecker (1981, 53). 5. Schubert and Kuhn (1984, 238); Heineman (2001, 33). 6. Moeller (1993, 25). He also points out that in public discussions of rape, it was often the feelings of the German men, rather than the sufferings of the women that were the primary focus of discussion. 7. Heineman (2001). 8. See Grossmann (1997). 9. Lacey (1997). 10. See Schubert and Kuhn (1984). 11. Ibid., 17–20. 12. Carter (1997). 13. Men reportedly listened 4.3 hours per day on average. ‘Statistik des Geschmacks’ Radiowelt 1:38 (1946) 12. See also statistics in Dussel et al. (1995, 88). 14. Wolfhart Müller claims 71.5 per cent of housewives enjoyed the Frauenfunk programmes of the NWDR; see ‘Hörer-Umfrage’ Hör Zu 2:47 (1947) 3. See also Wolfhart Müller ‘Hausfrauen Umfrage, 10–20 Mai 1948’ Department of Listener Opinion, HR-HA Intendanzakten, Abteilung Hörermeinung. An NWDR survey of housewives from 1950 found that the ‘5-minute’ broadcast was quite popular (68 per cent listened, 23 per cent ‘regularly’ and just

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over half of them ‘occasionally’) across all incomes, education levels and ages. ‘Wünsche zum Frauenfunk – Nichtberufstätige Frauen (Haus- frauen)’ February/March 1950, Forschungstelle der NWDR-Geschichte, Hamburg. I am grateful to Hans-Ulrich Wagner for this document. 15. Schubert and Kuhn (1984, 37). 16. Heineman (2001, 50 n. 13). 17. Moeller (1993, 15–19). 18. Ibid., 15–16. 19. Lacey (1997, 144–145). 20. Schubert and Kuhn (1984, 63); Moeller (1993, 25). 21. Heineman (2001, 50). 22. Disadvantaging of women in ration distribution was systemic and unaba- shed. Besides the more dire examples of food distribution for housewives, it was announced over Radio Stuttgart in August of 1945 that ‘with the bad supply situation of tobacco products caused by the lack of supply sources, women cannot be allotted tobacco products of any sort until further notice’. Manuscript ‘Program of the Military Government’ 17 August 1945, SDR-HA, Sendenachweise. 23. One of the many ironies of this lies in the fact that the word is gendered male. The common (again male-gendered) term ‘Otto Normalverbraucher’, denoting ‘ordinary person’ or consumer stems from the ration card. The term probably achieved its widest circulation through the name of the character played by Gerd Fröbe in the satirical 1948 film Berliner Ballade (Robert A. Stemmle), but it was already in use beforehand. See, among others, Lersch (1990, 69). 24. Schubert and Kuhn (1984, 146–147). 25. Dörr (1998c, 373–374). 26. Schubert and Kuhn (1984, 44–45); Moeller (1993, 29–30). 27. The scenario of a man taking extra food and the woman nobly sacrificing her share has become the iconic image of the age in Wolfgang Borchert’s much-anthologized 1947 short story ‘Das Brot’. After catching her husband stealing an extra slice of bread in the middle of the night, the wife accepts his feeble excuse of having heard a prowler, and the next evening gives the husband some of her bread. In Borchert (1988, 304–306). 28. In one of the most famous features of the post-war era, the NWDR announced a competition in the middle of the bitter winter of 1946–1947. Listeners were invited to write in their experiences of the 29 January 1947. The 35 000 letters received were turned into an 80-minute feature broadcast, narrating the day in the life of Germany from midnight to midnight. See Badenoch (1995); Wagner (1990). 29. Schnabel (1984). 30. Schildt (1995, 91). 31. Ibid. 32. Schnabel (1984). The letter on which this is based lists even more noises and names, showing how little privacy there was in such quarters. See StAHH 621-1 NDR 1186. 33. Schildt (1995, 91). 34. Falkenberg (2005, 195).

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35. Anton Kaes has remarked upon how Rainer Werner Fassbinder used this particular authentic detail of the early post-war years in The Marriage of Maria Braun to highlight the relations and disjunctures between public and private events. Kaes (1989, 88–89). 36. Carter (1997, 78). 37. Moeller (1993, 23). 38. See Biddiscombe (2001). 39. In Münkel (1998a, 83). 40. This is roughly the same proportion of women in the total population in paid work in 1938. See Schubert and Kuhn (1984, 247–248). 41. Münkel (1998a, 85). 42. Lacey (1997, 204). 43. Münkel (1998a, 92); Riedel (1999, 205). 44. Lacey (1997, 205). 45. Currid (2006, 94ff) As Andreas Huyssen has argued, this association of women with the the products of mass culture also has a much broader scope. See Huyssen (1986). 46. Bathrick (1997); Lacey (1997) Chapter 5; Pater (1998, 224–237). 47. See ‘Soldaten hören Kinderfunk’ Der deutsche Rundfunk 18:10 (1940). 48. ‘Die Heimat sendet “was für’s Herze ...’’ ’ in Der deutsche Rundfunk 18:8 (1940). 49. ‘Grete Schmidt bleibt unbekannt!’ Der deutsche Rundfunk 18:14 (1940). 50. Bassenge (1998, 111); Ingenhoven and Kemper (1985, 134). 51. Schneider (1999); Wagner (2005a); Gerhard (1998); Kehm (1990, 70–71); Wördemann (1998). 52. Wagner (2005a, 43). 53. ‘Die möcht ich sehn! Dreimal Barbara’ Hör Zu 2:4 (1947) 2. 54. Notable names in this regard are, among others, Els Vordemberge, head of children’s programmes at the NWDR Cologne, Lydia Meissner-Feil, in children’s programmes at Radio Stuttgart and Dr Hertha Sturm, head of youth programming at the SWF. Friedrich (1991, 87); Schneider (1999, 53). 55. This is based on lists of SWF and NWDR Cologne employees. I am grateful to Jana Behrendt of the SWR historical archive in Baden-Baden for compiling this list. Personnel lists, NWDR Cologne, August, 1945 and 1 July 1952, WDR-HA, Personalliste. 56. Of the women announcers pictured in Figure 3.1 in the previous chapter, all but Maria Poll (see below) either worked in women’s programmes or in ‘light’ music broadcasts. 57. See manuscript, ‘Nachmittagsmusikprogramm 12:15–12:30’ ‘Musikalisches Abendprogramm 19:45–19:59’ 11 August 1945, SDR-HA, Sendenachweise. 58. ‘Announcer’ (Ansager) refers to those who introduce and close a show, whereas ‘presenters’ (Sprecher) are responsible for the primary speaking during the broadcast. 59. Gedächtnisprotokoll – Angete Schüler/Sprecherin Marianne Reichert-Wirges (4 October 1971) SWF-HA, Bestand Agnete Schüler. 60. In Wördemann (1998, 19). 61. ‘Statistik des Geschmacks’ Radiowelt 1:38 (1946) 12. 62. ‘Die Stimmen, die Sie kennen, wir hier mit Namen nennen’ Radiowelt 4:13 (1949) 7.

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63. Lacey (1997, 204). 64. Wochenbericht, Hörerpost 27.1-2.2. 1948, BR-HA, HF/20884. 65. Lacey (1997, 203). 66. Dörr (1998c, 238–251). 67. ‘Die möcht ich sehn! Dr Julia Nusseck’ Hör Zu 2:12 (1947) 2. 68. Ibid. 69. ‘Die möcht ich sehn! Rose-Marie Schwerin’ Hör Zu 2:10 (1947) 2. 70. Ingenhoven and Kemper (1985, 134). For many beginners in broadcasting, both male and female, it was often a department where they were taken on until they could move on to ‘higher’ things. Kurt Wilhelm, long- time head of entertainment at the station in Munich, and Karl Eduard von Schnitzler, political commentator first at the NWDR and then for the rest of his life in the Soviet zone/GDR, both began their radio careers in Frauenfunk. 71. ‘Die möchte ich sehn! Dr Helga Prollius’ Hör Zu 3:30 (1948) 2. 72. Pauly (1949, 122–123). 73. Klingner (1998, 65). 74. Friedrich (1991, 255). 75. Gabriele Strecker ‘Tätigkeitsbericht Frauenfunk’ 1949, HR-HA, Chronik 49/1; Hartenian (1984, 254). 76. Ibid., 255–256. 77. Memo from Egon Wassenberg to Major Henry 8.2.46, WDR-HA, 9497. 78. Friedrich (1991, 136–137). 79. The list also includes ‘gas station attendant’ and ‘taxi driver in Berlin’ which, while not terribly intellectual trades, are indeed a step aside from ‘typical’ female professions. ‘Fünf Jahre Frauen- und Familienfunk 1947/1952’, SWF-HA, programm 8. 80. Giddens (1990, 27–29). 81. Lacey (1997, 153). 82. Ibid., 149–164. 83. Ibid., Chapter 7; Reagin (2001). 84. Gabriele Strecker ‘Tätigkeitsbericht Frauenfunk’ 1949, HR-HA, Chronik 49/1. 85. ‘Die möchte ich sehn! Dr Helga Prollius’ Hör Zu 3:30 (1948) 2. 86. ‘Familienfunk’ 13 June 1946, SWF-HA Bestand Manuskript-Sammlung Hörfunk. 87. Lacey (1997, 196). 88. Gabriele Strecker ‘Tätigkeitsbericht Frauenfunk’ 1949, HR-HA, Chronik 49/1. 89. See Oldenziel et al. (2005, 136–137). 90. Ilse Weitsch (?) Report to Mrs Lepman 20 April 1946, BR-HA, RV24.1. 91. Gabriele Strecker ‘Tätigkeitsbericht Frauenfunk’ 1949, HR-HA, Chronik 49/1. 92. Bassenge (1998, 110); Lersch (2003, 7–8); Schneider (1999, 130, 135). 93. Lacey (1997, 169). 94. Carter (1997). 95. ‘Reproductive labour’ here refers not merely to the work of child-bearing, but rather to all of the unpaid labour, shopping, cooking, etc. that allows paid, productive work to continue. 96. Reagin (2001, 176). 97. In Carter (1997, 52–57). 98. Schubert and Kuhn (1984, 40–41, 317).

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99. Ibid., 41. The study shows that four 1500g loaves of bread cost 150 RM on the black market, nearly three times the cost of the monthly food rations for an average family of four, and over half the monthly income. 100. In ibid., 37. Thanks to Sarah Patey for her help with this translation. 101. [Ilse Weitsch ?] Report to Mrs Lepman 20 April 1946, BR-HA, RV24.1. 102. Carter (1997, 95). 103. Curiously enough, radio advertising did take place in the Soviet zone, specifically from Radio Leipzig, well before the currency reform. It first began at Radio Munich and at the SWF in 1948. It is also worth not- ing that both Helma von Feldmann at Radio Stuttgart and Ilse Weitsch at Radio Munich had acquired backgrounds in advertising before the end of the war. 104. The well-known women’s magazine Constanze did not start until March of 1948, two months before the currency reform. Even in the mid-1950s, the highest circulation for a woman’s magazine in the Federal Republic was 645 000. See Grum (1985, 138). 105. For example, Aus Frauenbüchern und Frauenzeitschriften Mondays 16:45–17:00 in the 1947/1948 Winter programme of the SWF. 106. An argument can be made that cinema, particularly in ‘women’s genres’, was almost as widespread and addressed women, though in a slightly different way, as consumers. Unlike radio listening, cinema involves public consumption, and also involves consumption purely for pleasure. Furthermore, it presents models of lifestyle, fashion, etc. I would argue in this instance, however, that the consumer messages of these films were somewhat problematic, as most films featured a substantial removal in space in the case of the many Hollywood films shown, or in time, in the case of the many older German films which were also heavily featured in post-war German cinemas. German films which consciously addressed German women’s consumption in the present did not appear in any sort of large number until after the currency reform. 107. Neverla (1992, 19). 108. Lacey (1997, 52). 109. Programmsitzung 15 April 1947, HR-HA, Radio Frankfurt Programmsi- tzungen. 110. Wolfhart Müller, ‘Hörer-Umfrage’ Hör Zu 2:47 (1947) 4. 111. See Die Ansage (1949) 10, p. 5. The broadcast’s date – April 1 – probably also caused a few wry grins. 112. Bassenge (1998, 112). 113. Galle (2003, 330). 114. Münkel (1998b, 153). 115. See Oldenziel et al. (2005). 116. Bassenge (1998, 107). 117. Wolfhart Müller, ‘Hausfrauen Umfrage, 10–20 Mai 1948’, HR-HA, Intendan- zakten, Abteilung Hörermeinung. 118. ‘Wünsche zum Frauenfunk – Nichtberufstätige Frauen (Hausfrauen)’, Forschungstelle der NWDR-Geschichte, Hamburg. 119. Carter (1997, 60–62). 120. Ibid., 97.

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121. Manuscript Loni Lauxmann-Kinzelmann ‘Wie beschäftigen wir unser Kind an Regen- und Wintertagen?’ Familienfunk 27 January 1947, SWF-HA, Bestand Manuskript-Sammlung Hörfunk. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Manuscript, Toni Püchel ‘Ist unsere frauliche Eigenart in Gefahr?’ 30 January 1947, SWF-HA, Bestand Manuskript-Sammlung Hörfunk. 125. Ibid. 126. Manuscript ‘Die Englische Frau im Kriege’ by Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, 3 November 1945, WDR 9365. 127. Manuscript, ‘Die Französin’ 30 January 1946, WDR, Sendeprot. HF, MF. 128. Walter von Hollander, ‘Die jungen Mädchen um zwanzig’ Nordwestdeutsche Hefte 1:6 (1946) 48. Hollander’s argument based on the ‘operetta’ song echoes both forward and backward. The song was performed by the glamorous Zarah Leander in the Gustav Froehlich’s 1938 film Heimat. The female characters in Edgar Reitz’s 1984 Heimat watch the film and during this song, Pauline comments to her husband that she has a fur coat as pretty as Leander’s and is looking for an occasion to wear it. 129. Moeller (1993, 20). 130. von Hollander, ‘Die jungen Mädchen’, 48. 131. Ibid., 49. 132. A similar calculation must be made in Hans Deppe’s popular Heimatfilm from 1951, Grün is die Heide, of a woman who must choose whether to go and make her career in America or remain in Germany and marry the (somewhat older) mayor of the small town in the Lüneburg Heath. 133. Lacey (1997, 139–140). 134. Kuhn (1986, 25–33). 135. Manuscript ‘Der Hörer hat das Wort’ (no date given), BR-HA, SN10. 136. Barbara von Treskow, ‘Warum heiraten Männer ungern kluge Frauen?’ Nordwestdeutsche Hefte 1:8 (1946) 41. 137. Ibid. 138. Friedel Hömke, ‘Machen Männer die Geschichte?’ Nordwestdeutsche Hefte 3:4 (1948) 21. 139. Ibid. 140. In Klingner (1998, 66). 141. ‘Die möchte ich sehn! Dr Helga Prollius’ Hör Zu 3:30 (1948) 2. 142. Heineman (2001). 143. These activities were not limited to Germany. British cookery in wartime and post-war areas was also often designed to keep up appearances of normality and class distinction rather than actually nourish or taste good. I am grateful to Sarah Moss for pointing this out. 144. Fraser (1992); Morley (2000, 114). 145. von Moltke (2002).

5 Re-placing the Nation: Between Home Service and Heimat

1. ‘A small heap of diplomats/makes todays great politics/they create zones, alter states/and what’s up here with us at the moment?’

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2. Peter von Zahn, ‘Die vier Zonen und ihre Sender’ Hör zu 1:1 (1946) 3, ellipsis in original. No author is given – Wolfgang Schütte attributes it to von Zahn: Schütte (1975, 220). 3. Reprinted on the website of the US Embassy in Germany: http://www. usembassy.de/usa/etexts/ga4-460906.htm, accessed 1 September 2002. 4. Applegate (1990, 221–222). 5. In Bogner (1999, 154). 6. Giddens (1990, 18–19). 7. An argument can be made that the Western stations in Berlin or Radio Bre- men were ‘local’ stations, but due to their importance beyond the local level I would hesitate to classify them as such. RIAS and NWDR Berlin were representing Allied and national interests as much as local. NWDR Berlin carried the programme for the entire British zone, and RIAS, while in its initial years only reached the city of Berlin, expanded by 1948 to reach further and further into the Soviet zone, Galle (2003, 238). Radio Bremen served a size- able enclave in western Lower Saxony above and beyond the city of Bremen where the NWDR signal was weak, Kutsch (1986b). 8. Marßolek (1999a, 171); Schusser (1999). 9. Flamm (1993). 10. ‘Radio Branch Policy Principles’ no date (1945/1946), BR-HA, 24.4. In all zones, these ‘other nations’ should not necessarily be taken as just the respective occupation power, as the schedules, especially in the cultural programmes of the various stations in the early years of broadcasting show. Bolz (1991); Dussel (1995); Wagner (1997). 11. ‘Radio Branch Policy Principles’ no date (1945/1946), BR-HA, 24.4. 12. Hartenian (1984, 239), his brackets. 13. See Freiburg (1974); Geserick (1991); Schaaf (1971); Tracey (1982). 14. The British foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, considered this to be particularly essential in the question of the fate of the Ruhr, arguing that a state which followed the boundaries of two pre-existing provinces would make more sense to Germans and allow for the rise of local patriotism, Steininger (1996, 242–243). 15. See Bance (1997, 25); Kutsch (1991); Wagner (2005a, 30). Wagner points out that this was much in keeping with the British colonial practice of ‘indirect rule’. 16. Rölle (1997, 106). 17. Memo from the Commander 229/305 MG Hanover Region to MG 30 Corps, 23 June 1945, PRO FO1030/379. 18. In Friedrich (1991, 89). 19. Ibid., 56. 20. Kahlenberg (1996, 596). 21. In Karczewski (1997, 59). 22. Fehrenbach (1995, 79). 23. von Zahn (1991, 257). 24. Franz Winter commented in 1946 that in particular Heitmüller considered the evening prime time block ‘too valuable for Heimat broadcasts’. Franz Winter to Bernhard Ernst, 31 October 1946, WDR-HA 10016. 25. In Schulte-Ahlen (1970, 26).

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26. It is one of many ironies of post-war broadcasting that probably the most influential person from the territories east of the Oder-Neisse line working in German broadcasting happened to be employed in the French zone, where refugees from the East were not taken on throughout much of the occupation period. 27. Quoted in ‘Friedrich Bischoff’ SWF Intern 1 (1976) 18. This should not give the impression that Bischoff was entirely provincially minded, however. He is also famous for a Weimar-era piece of drama that dreamed of a worldwide broadcasting network, Hallo, hier Welle Erdball (Hello, This is Wavelength Earth). 28. Friedrich (1991, 96). 29. In Ibid., 152. 30. See, interview with Kurt Wilhelm, BR-HA, Sound Document 24340; Ernst Höchstötter, interviewed by Heike Zulla 9 February 2000, BR-HA, HD/1028. 31. Bolz (1991, 72). 32. Hans Maier, ‘Radio München soll ein bayrischer Sender werden’ Radiowelt 3:2 (1948) 8. 33. In Schütte (1975, 228). 34. See, for example, ‘Wir hören ...’ Radiowelt 2:29 (1947) 5. 35. ‘Albert Hofele – Leben für den Funk’ in Südfunk 2 (1968) 16. 36. In Lersch (1990, 130). 37. In Arnold (1995, 35) 38. Albert Hofele to Gustav Gall, 1 March 1948, SDR-HA, 4580. Without the text in question, one can only speculate about the content of the jokes that was considered objectionable. Judging from Hofele’s response, it would seem likely that they were anti-Semitic. What is perhaps most significant about this response is that the phrase Hofele uses to explain that the jokes were inappropriate (in German ‘für die heutige Zeit nicht mehr tragbar’) is one well known from the Nazi era. 39. Bolz (1991, 518–520); Flamm (1993); Karst (1984); Köhler (1991, 358–362). 40. Flamm (1993, 3). 41. Bierbach (1984); Lerg (1984). 42. Greiner (1999, 126). 43. ‘Radio Listening in the American Zone and in Berlin’ Report Number 45, Opinion Surveys Unit, OMGUS, 17 Feburary 1947, p. 1, DRA/F. The reasons listeners could cite for choosing a station were ‘good programmes’, ‘good music’ or ‘good reception’. 44. Dörr (1998c, 55–75). 45. See Schulze (1997). 46. In Bolz (1991, 151). 47. From daily summary of post, 27 March 1946, BR-HA, RV 24.4. 48. Bernhard Pollak, ‘Wetterbericht auf Bayrisch?’ Radiowelt 2:21 (1947) 4. 49. Compare, for example, ‘Ein Jahr Radio München’ from 31 May 1946, BR-HA, Sound document 8314 and ‘Plauderei über Radio München’ from 1 August 1965, BR-HA, Sound document 20605. 50. Ernst Höchstötter, interviewed by Heike Zulla 9 February 2000, BR-HA, HD/1028. It should be noted that the ‘again’ in Höchstötter’s statement here refers not to a direct continuation from wartime programmes when

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most folk music had been removed from broadcasting, but to pre-war and Weimar times when Bavarian folk music had been a substantial part of the schedule. 51. Memo from Sgt Louis Harap to Captain Ross, Chief, Intelligence section 6 July 1945, BR-HA, RV24.8. 52. ‘Bavarian Folk Music with Alfons Hofbauer’ played Sundays 13:30–14:00 starting 12 August 1945, and moved to Saturdays in the same time slot two weeks later. At that point, both Glücksbuam Schrammel quartet and the Kapelle Seidel came into regular rotation in these weekend afternoon ‘Bavarian Music’ slots. 53. ‘Summary of Listener Reaction to Radio Munich’ from Field Horine, Head of Radio Munich to the Office of the Director of Information Control, OMGUS, 19 June 1946, BR-HA RV/24.4. 54. Kurt Wilhelm Brummlg’schichten (Munich: Dr Heinrich Buchner Verlag 1948) 4. 55. Karczewski (1997, 88). 56. In Ibid., 90. 57. Ibid., 89. 58. Rölle (1997, 121). 59. Ibid. 60. Manuscript, Der Hörer hat das Wort 30 October 1949, WDR-HA 4490, emphasis in original. 61. ‘Erforschung der Hörermeinung: Lokale Belange’ Die Ansage 11 (28 April 1948) 1. 62. H. H. Münster, ‘Unsere Leser schreiben uns’ Hör Zu 2:2 (1947) 2. 63. Lersch (1990, 150–151). 64. ‘Report on the 3rd survey’ Wolfhart Müller, Radio Frankfurt, 29 June 1948, HR-HA, Intendanzakten, Abteilung Hörermeinung. 65. Morley (2000, 214–217). 66. Ribhegge (1997); Steininger (1996, 241–243). 67. Bierbach (1984, 94). 68. Aus Rheinland und Westfalen 19 September 1945, WDR-HA Sendeprot. HF, MF. 69. Confino (1999, 162ff) 70. Aus Rheinland und Westfalen, 19 September 1945, WDR-HA Sendeprot. HF, MF. 71. Aus Rheinland und Westfalen, 22 and 23 October 1945, respectively, WDR-HA, Sendeprot. HF, MF. 72. Aus Rheinland und Westfalen, 2 and 20 November 1945, respectively, WDR- HA Sendeprot. HF, MF. 73. Aus Rheinland und Westfalen, 14 December 1945, WDR-HA Sendeprot. HF, MF. 74. See Schumacher (1997, 616). 75. ‘Wie Steht’s in ...Soest?’ 7 December 1945, WDR-HA Sendeprot. HF, MF. 76. The manuscript of the broadcast shows that a description of the fire damage in the local abbey was edited out, though whether for reasons of time or politics is unclear. 77. ‘Wie Steht’s in ...Soest?’ 7 December 1945, WDR-HA Sendeprot. HF, MF.

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78. Heimatpflegevereine were local associations that were set up, mostly in the late nineteenth century specifically for the ‘preservation’ of local traditions and nature. On their beginnings, see Confino (1999). 79. Undated Manuscripts, ‘Radio München Besucht’, BR-HA HF/2244. 80. Bassenge (1998, 78–79). 81. Der Bürgermeister Spricht, 24 November 1946, BR-HA HF/1901.2. 82. ‘Pan.’ [Dr Panofsky] ‘München von Einst im Rundfunk von Heute’ Radiowelt 1:4 (1946) 3. Ironically, Panofsky was also the author of the article ‘Yes zum Jazz’ on the facing page, where he collected the opinions of the listeners who were proponents of jazz. 83. Freiburg (1974, 296). 84. Schwitzke (1963, 298–300); Wagner (1997). 85. Die Ansage (16–22 March 1947) 1. 86. Radio Nuremberg to Dr Hopichler, Radio Munich, 9 August 1946, BR-HA, RV/24.6. 87. Aus Rheinland und Westfalen (speaker Thea Cronenberg) 11 November 1945, WDR-HA, Sendeprot. HF, MF. 88. Connerton (1989, 42). 89. See, for example, Karl Petry, ‘Niederrheinisches Platt’ 19 February 1946, WDR-HA, Sendeprot. HF, MF. 90. See Karst (1984, 274). 91. For example, Heinz Kohlhaas ‘Funkkinder erzählen von ihren Erlebnis- sen in den grossen Ferien’ 7 September 1948, WDR-HA, 5507. See also Hildegard Hein, Manuscript ‘Der Funk und seine Hörer’ 4 October 1953, BR-HA HF/2242.3. 92. ‘Lis Böhle und die kölsche Pänz’ 2 October 1946, WDR-HA Sendeprot. HF, MF. 93. Ibid. 94. Bolz cites in particular fairy tales by Grimm brothers, as well as the nineteenth-century Bavarian ‘Punch and Judy’ figures by Franz Graf von Pocci, Bolz (1991, 137–139). 95. Karl Kempf, Manuscript, ‘Kasperle besucht den SWF’ Kinderfunk 8 June 1947, SWF-HA. Bestand Manuskript-Sammlung Hörfunk. 96. It is difficult to say how many stations participated. Although the NWDR programme announcements indicate that all stations will be participating (Die Ansage 19 (1948) 4) neither the SWF nor Radio Munich listed it in their schedules, nor are there manuscripts in the archive of either station. 97. Els Vordemberge, Manuscript ‘Ringsendung des Kinderfunks am Pfingst- montag’ 16 May 1948, WDR-HA 10086. The manuscript is only a fragment, without any indication of how it was placed in the rest of the show, or how the ‘trip’ ends. 98. Walter [Farmer’s son]: Na, bisch du von Stuttgart? Hans: Hajo, mir alle sind von Stuttgart. Ursula: (lachend) vo Schtuegert, sag’s no glei richtig, sonscht meint er’s stimmt gar net. Manuscript, ‘Pfingsten auf dem glücklichen Stern’ 16 May 1948, SDR-HA, Sendenachweise. 99. A. H. A, ‘Wir hörten ...’ Radiowelt 2:23 (1947) 6.

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100. See ‘Im Zeichen der Paulskirche’ Süddeutsche Funkwoche, in HR-HA Chronik 48/II. 101. See the particularly pointed commentary by Herbert Geßner at Radio Berlin, 15 May 1948, DRA/P B204-02-01/0104. 102. Kaes (1989, 170). 103. Köhler (1991, 355). 104. Münkel (1998a, 61–62). 105. R. Walter, ‘Der politische Kommentar der Woche,’ Echo der Zeit (Studio Koblenz) 14 June 1947, SWF-HA, Sound document 7950711. 106. This bitterness was captured in public fantasy by a widespread legend of farmers who had ‘Persian rugs in their cow stalls’, a phrase which to the present day is associated with ‘hamster trips’. 107. See, for example, Wilhelm Heitmüller’s 1946 NWDR commentary ‘Revolu- tion des Dorfes’ where he recommends that the reform be carried out according to production – all farmers who do not produce up to standard should be dispossessed and their land redistributed among the refugees in Schüddekopf (1980, 265–267). 108. Winter (2002). 109. This is made explicit, for example, in a memo from the Radio Frankfurt. ‘Vorschlag zur Ausgestaltung der Sendung “Der hessische Landbote’’ ’ Abteilung Politik 22 July 1947, HR-HA Indendanzakten. The NWDR, on the other hand, ran a separate programme for gardeners. 110. Finding the proper time to reach farmers did take a short while at many stations. See ‘Vorschlag zur Ausgestaltung der Sendung “Der hessische Landbote’’ ’ Abteilung Politik 22 July 1947, HR-HA, Indendanzakten; Walter Joos ‘500 mal Landfunk’ Der Funkkurier (3 March 1949) 1; Correspondance Peter von Zahn with Meyer-Billburg, 7 December 1946. StaHH, 621–1 NDR 1517. 111. Münkel (1998a, 62). 112. Winter (2002). 113. Walter Joos ‘500 mal Landfunk’ Der Funkkurier (3 March 1949). 114. As they would have been speaking for both Rhineland and Westphalian agriculture, it seems unlikely that it would have been strong. In the first Heinrich and Wilhelm manuscript from 16 August 1946, Heinrich is described as a ‘dark, powerful farmer’s voice’ and Wilhelm a ‘bright male voice’. Manu- script, WDR-HA 5045. From these descriptions, they were likely analogous to some of the more ‘rural’ sounding characters such as Joe Grundy or Bert Fry on the BBC radio serial The Archers. Such regional, but not entirely dialect voices can indeed be heard in the SWF farmer’s broadcasts from Koblenz, April 1947, SWF-HA, sound document 7950711. 115. Franz Winter, Manuscript, Landfunk 11 October 1946, WDR-HA 5045. 116. See Herbert (1986). 117. See Activity Report, ‘Politics and News’ HR-HA, Chonik 49/1; “Vorschlag zur Ausgestaltung der Sendung ‘Der hessische Landbote’’ ’ Abteilung Politik 22 July 1947 HR-HA, Indendanzakten. Some of the popularity of the show was due to Hermann Hanschmann, the voice of Heinrich, who had been a known voice on the radio in Frankfurt starting 1930. Hanschmann died in December of 1946, and was shortly replaced as ‘Heinrich’ by another actor. See HR-HA Chronik 46/4.

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118. ‘Die Sender des Südwestfunks: Freiburg und Sigmaringen’ Funkwelt 1:19/20 (1947) 5. 119. See also, for example, Radio Munich 9 June 1946 11:15 Für den Landwirt ‘Betrachtung über bäuerliche Pfingstbräuche und aktuelle Hinweise für die Landwirtschaft.’ 13:00 Für die Landfrau ‘Bayerische Pfingsten’. 120. Walter Jooss, ‘Landfunk – Weihnachtssendung’ 24 December 1946, SDR-HA Sendenachweise. 121. One of the few High German pieces, ‘Knecht Rupprecht’ by the northerner Theodor Storm, was not attributed. 122. It is also interesting – and somewhat alarming – to note that this manuscript appears to have been censored for Nazi content. The paragraph that follows the one cited is struck out on the manuscript. It begins ‘Even as the Romans penetrated our land the ancient Germanic tribes were celebrating the festival of the Winter Solstice ...’. Apparently the reference to the pagan rites of the ancient Germans, as well as the view of even the ancient Romans as invading foreigners, overstepped the bounds. Ibid. 123. In Keuler (1992, 20). 124. Müller-Handl (1993, 206). 125. See especially Billig (1995, 94–96); Morley (2000, 106–107). 126. Much of this section has been published as Badenoch (2005). 127. The Sunday morning ‘Harbour Concert’ from Hamburg, for example, was started in 1929, and has carried on, without only minor pauses, essentially into the present. Similarly, Werner Höfer’s ‘Internationale Frühschoppen’, which began in 1952, was broadcast every Sunday until the late 1980s. 128. Schildt (1993). 129. Bessler (1980, 85–87); Dussel (2002, 121); Friedrich (1991, 109). 130. Falkenberg (1999, 225); Schildt (1995). 131. Individual Sunday shows have been discussed, of course, but not the programme as a whole. See Halefeldt (1979); Heckman (1979); Pater (1998, 224–239). Stephanie Burandt is somewhat unique in laying out, albeit briefly, a separate section on the Sunday programme in her treatment of the Reichssender Hamburg, although her account does not provide a great deal of analysis on the meaning of the programme as a separate entity unto itself. Burandt (1991, 62–63). 132. Confino (1999, 171). 133. Kosok (2001); Schildt (1995, 255). 134. Confino (1999, 112, 171). 135. In Kosok et al. (2001, 8). 136. Wildt (1994, 43). 137. Kosok et al. (2001, 9). 138. Fickers and Lommers (2008). 139. Sicherheitsdienst, Leitabschnitt München 20 October 1941, BArchB, R55/1090:57. 140. Dörr (1998a, 364–366). 141. In the British and Soviet zones, there were no pauses at all on Sundays from the outset of programming. In the American zone, the pauses disappeared quickly, in the afternoon by October 1945, and in the morning by July 1946. When broadcasting in the French zone began in March of 1946, afternoon broadcasting on Sundays was continuous, and the morning pause was

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shortened by religious services. In the beginning of 1947, broadcast pauses on Sunday disappeared entirely. 142. Anyone with a strong enough radio on a Sunday afternoon in 1947, for example, would have had a choice between three different children’s programmes at 2 P.M. (Frankfurt, Stuttgart and SWF), and at 2:30, the two remaining stations, NWDR and Radio Munich, had their shows. The Soviet zone’s children’s show then followed at 3 P.M. 143. For example, Radio Stuttgart’s ‘Program d. Militärregierung’ 14 July 1945 announces the first football match since the occupation began: 15 July 1945 Stuttgart vs. Cannstatt would be broadcast the following day, SDR-HA Sendenachweise. 144. Th. S. Hamburg, ‘Unsere Leser Schreiben Uns’ Hör Zu 2:36 (1947) 2. 145. Carl Eggmayer to Radio Stuttgart, 15 February 1948, SDR-HA 4580. 146. Bauer (1966, 80–100). 147. Ibid., 93. 148. Friedrich (1991, 153–154). 149. As it turned out, this ‘natural’ assumption was not appreciated by all. The Catholic churches in the North, as well as the Protestant ones in the West, had asked that this order be shaken up, and it was agreed that it could be done. Memo to Maaß/Burghardt from Deputy Controller of Programmes, 31 May 1946, WDR-HA 10016. 150. In the early Weimar years, radio stations were even expected to put in a pause in the schedule from 10–11 on Sunday mornings so that listeners could and would attend their local church. See Heitger (1991, 21). 151. Becker (1955, 269). 152. Winter (2002). 153. Koshar (1998, 192–193; 260–261). 154. Confino (1999, 168). 155. This was, among other things, the burial place of the Prussian King Frederick the Great. The sound of these bells was banned from the airwaves of the SWF in 1947. 156. See Koshar (1998, 260–261); Ruhl (1984, 142). 157. ‘Die Sender des Südwestfunks: Freiburg und Sigmaringen,’ Funkwelt 1:19/20 (1947) 4. 158. Röder (2001, 22). 159. Falkenberg (1999, 277–278). 160. Winter (2002). 161. In Hör Zu 2:24 (1947) 8. The blurb then explains, almost apologetically, that the church is not actually terribly old, but rather had been rebuilt in the early nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it does mention that the new church was attended – and the old one sadly missed – by Husum’s most famous son, the romantic writer Theodor Storm. 162. Becker (1955, 271–272). 163. Fischer and Pietrzynski (1995, 43). 164. Die Einkehr ‘Verschneit liegt rings die ganze Welt’ Radio Stuttgart 30 January 1949, SDR-HA Sendenachweise. 165. Ibid. 166. Dörr (1998a, 364–366). 167. ‘Das Unzerstörbare’, in Funkwelt, 1:2 (1947).

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168. For example, ‘Rheinish-Westfälischer Sang’ from Cologne 30 September 1945. At Radio Munich starting 12 August 1945, 13:30–14:00 on Sundays was reserved for Bavarian folk music. By contrast, this time slot was filled on every other day of the week with ‘Music of today’. 169. Burandt (1991, 57); Halefeldt (1979). 170. Die Ansage (23–29 November 1947) 1. 171. Friedrich (1991, 154). 172. See Aus der Schwäbischen Heimat. ‘Junge war!’ 26 January 1947, SDR-HA Sendenachweise. 173. Falkenberg (1999, 277); Schildt (1993). 174. In Falkenberg (1999, 277). 175. von Moltke (2002, 24–25). 176. See Kosok et al. (2001, 60, 72). Another good example comes from popular dialect songwriter Wolfgang Niedecken, who in a verse of his 1982 song ‘Weißte noch?’ describes a Sunday scene from his childhood where he is ‘wedged in’ between the coffee-table and his aunts. 177. Such Sunday music request programmes are now popularly known as ‘Erbschleichprogramme’ – programmes that allow younger people to ingra- tiate themselves with their older relatives, so as to be remembered in their will. I am grateful to Heidrun Ultes-Nitsche for pointing this out to me. 178. Rölle (1997, 117). 179. ‘Radio Branch Policy Principles’ no date (1945/1946), BR-HA 24.4. 180. The final uncertainties about these lands did not disappear until after German unification. The Mitscherlichs cite the ongoing claims made by the Federal Republic towards these lands as a prime example of the German phantasies about the war that are symptomatic of the ‘inability to mourn’ Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich (1977, 14). 181. For example, Hans Ziegler, mayor of Nuremberg, in Der Bürgermeister Spricht 8 December 1946, BR-HA HF/1902.2; Dusseldorf City Councillor Dr Auerbach. Aus Rheinland und Westfalen 16 November 1945, WDR-HA Sendeprot. HF, MF. 182. Rölle (1997, 141). 183. Bernhard Ernst interviews Dusseldorf Oberregierungsrat Dr Auerbach. Aus Rheinland und Westfalen 16 November 1945 WDR-HA Sendeprot. HF, MF. 184. Ibid. 185. Ibid. 186. In Wasmund (1986, 180). 187. Schulze (1997, 59). 188. Morley (2000, 33–34). 189. In Schulze (1997, 61), his ellipses. 190. The question of ‘pure blood’ here refers in particular to those refugees from the so-called Warthegau, the former Prussian province of Posen, which had been ceded to Poland in 1920 and taken by Germany in 1939. Mainly Cath- olic, and speaking a very different dialect to those in Lower Saxony, they were often seen as being more Polish than German. Pomeranians, who were Protestant and spoke a dialect of Low German that was readily intelligible, if noticeably different, to natives of Lower Saxony were more trusted and readily integrated there than those from the ‘Warthegau’ or from Silesia, Schulze (1997, 62–63).

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191. In Schüddekopf (1980, 262). 192. Hans Maier, ‘Radio München soll ein bayrischer Sender werden’ Radiowelt 3:2 (1948) 8. 193. Memo from Cohrsson 8 March 1947, HR-HA Chronik 47/1. 194. For example, NWDR, ‘Schlesische Heimat’ 22 January, 1949 19:00; Radio Munich ‘Lied aus Schlesien,’ 9 January, 1949 15:00. The prime placement in the schedules – weekend evenings and afternoons in winter – says much about the high importance given to such programmes. 195. See WDR Jahrbuch (1955) 63. 196. Dr Elise Kuraner, Spiegel des Alltags ‘Wir Frauen und die Flüchtlinge’ 17 August 1949, SWF-HA Bestand Manuskript-Sammlung Hörfunk. 197. Schaaf (1971, 22–28). 198. Schaaf (1971, 23). 199. Ibid. 200. Karst (1984, 276–278). 201. ‘Wir brauchen einen Kölner Sender’ Kölnische Rundschau 5 April 1946, WDR- HA 9475. 202. Rölle (1997, 131–132). 203. Schaaf (1971, 25). 204. Flamm (1993, 114). 205. Flamm (1993, 111–113). Why Hanover was given this programme, in the face of all of the agitation from Cologne, has been a matter of much specu- lation. Flamm suggests it was a pilot programme for the FM channel that was being started the next year. Wolfram Köhler speculates further that the show was also produced with the growing division of Germany in mind. Hanover could easily be heard from Leipzig in the Soviet zone and vice versa. Such a local programme would help keep listeners in Lower Saxony ‘at home’ while for the listeners in ‘Upper’ Saxony, it would provide a showcase of the reconstruction in the West, Köhler (1991, 360–361). In the atmosphere in Germany in May of 1948, it is hard to imagine that considerations of this sort did not play at least some role in the creation of the show. 206. Friedrich (1991, 155–159). 207. ‘Sender Kaiserslautern eröffnet’ (News item) 9 July 1946, SWF-HA Bestand Manuskript-Sammlung Hörfunk. 208. Ibid. 209. Friedrich (1991, 154). 210. Ibid. 154–155. 211. Arnold (1995, 37). 212. Mösinger to Beckmann, 5 September 1949, HR-HA, Kassel-Chronik 49/1. 213. Lersch (1990, 123). 214. This began in August 1946, once a week in the evening schedule, increased to 2 days per week in 1947, before becoming a daily programme at 13:00 in February of 1948. 215. Lersch (1990, 127). 216. Haffner (1999, 85); Schumacher (1997, 397). 217. The series on NDR2, authored by Detlev Gröning and Harald Wehmeier, has now ended on the radio but has also produced a series of nine CDs plus an animated film, in addition to a ‘town website’, http://www.stenkelfeld.de/.

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218. Perhaps the most direct ancestor of Stenkelfeld came from the Silesian comedian Ludwig Manfred Lommel (1891–1962), whose mostly one-man show about a radio station in the mythical Silesian village of Runxendorf was the flagship of his career that spanned seamlessly from the Weimar Republic through and including the war until his death in the Adenauer era. 219. Keuler (1992). 220. Due to its light-hearted nature, I would not go so far as to label it an anti- Heimat production. Perhaps the most vocal ‘critique’ is to be found in the show’s mocking of the historic amnesia of enclosed world of Heimat. In the town’s fictional ‘chronicles’, the entry for 1944 (which is the only one between 1897 and 1958), notes merely that the local football club ‘survived with a lack of substitutes [ersatzgeschwächt] the first round of the regional cup’. See Stenkelfeld online, http://www.stenkelfeld.de/, consulted 16 September 2007. 221. Neil Gregor has pointed to the ways in which locality had also been used as means of denying forced labourers sympathy – and vital supplies – immediately after the war. Furthermore, he points out that ‘the “local’’ has been a key site of resistance to some of the more questioning, reflective elements of the dominant critical national discourse as it has emerged in recent decades’ (2003, 632–633). 222. von Moltke (2005, 224–225). 223. This is a point that has been brought home to me most strongly in the work and teaching of the anthropologist James Fernandez. See in particular Fernandez (1986). 224. Confino (2006, 215). 225. Currid (2006). 226. von Moltke (2005, 91). 227. von Moltke (2005, 84), his emphasis. 228. Giddens (1990, 18–19).

6 Conclusion: Voices in Ruins? Radio and Normalization After 1945

1. Massey (1994, 164). On the multiple mediations of home in Heimat, including this scene, see Kaes (1989, 178–181); von Moltke (2005, 218–220). 2. This is very typical of Reitz’s approach to media throughout the film, see von Moltke (2005, 220). 3. From the late 1920s through the 1950s, radios were often central features of family portraits. See the wonderful series of photographs in Falkenberg (2005). I have borrowed the phrase ‘private life of the nation’ from the title of Joe Perry’s forthcoming book on Christmas traditions in Germany. 4. Confino (2006, 224). 5. Ibid., 222. 6. Ibid., 216. 7. On the uses of ‘normality’ in historiography generally and on the Nazi era specifically, see Berger (1997, 124–141). 8. Confino (2006, 224). 9. Currid (2006, 63).

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10. Scannell (1996, 5). 11. Confino (2006, 215–217); Koshar (1998, 202). 12. See von Grote (1994). 13. Moran (2004, 222). For an excellent exploration of the importance of everyday consumption for the spatio-temporal ordering of world in East Germany, see Ten Dyke (2001). 14. Particularly for visual symbols of home, emptiness seems to be a key precon- dition. On the emptiness of Heimat imagery, see Confino (1999, 169). Nora Rathzel has also pointed out that German women’s images of happy homes are always empty of people, in Morley (2000, 57). 15. Morley (2000, 3). 16. This is the fundamental point made by Doreen Massey in her trenchant critique of the interplay between space, place and gender, Massey (1994). These insights provide a vital point of departure for the studies of home that have informed this book, see Morley (2000, 4–5); von Moltke (2005, 11–12). 17. Radstone (2005). 18. Heineman (2001, 19–20); Meyer and Schulze (1984). 19. von Moltke (2005, 227–231). 20. Tellingly, Williams cites the inexpensive radio set as an ‘index of a general condition and response’ (1990, 21). 21. Currid (2006). 22. Carter (1997). 23. As Kate Lacey has highlighted, the authoritarian model of Nazi broadcasting and the public service model shared a number of basic characteristics. Lacey (1997, 237). 24. Kansteiner (2006, 125). 25. Koshar (1998, 243). 26. Ibid., 242. 27. Birdsall (2008). 28. Morley (2000, 111). 29. Marßolek (1999a, 170). 30. Schildt and Sywottek (1993). 31. Confino (2006); Confino and Fritzsche (2002); Koshar (1998); Moeller (2001). It is perhaps ironic that while many of these studies have drawn on metaphors of sound to counter the ‘myth of silence’, none have actually looked closely at the role of actual sound. 32. Koshar (1998, 199–200). 33. Confino (2006, 217ff). 34. Certeau (1984). 35. Marßolek (1999a, 170). 36. Kaes (1989, 82–83). 37. While Paul’s radio in the 1920s is used to tune in distant cities such as Vienna and Hilversum, in an episode set in 1967, Maria’s son Hermann directs a concert which is broadcast from the SWF in Baden-Baden. 38. von Moltke (2005, 223–226).

9th June 2008 7:22 MAC/VIR Page-266 9780230_009035_08_not01 Bibliography