RFE/RL Broadcasting and West German Society: Caught between Nature Protection Activism and Anti-Americanism ✣ Yuliya Komska Introduction “Invisible but audible.” Since radio’s coming of age in the 1920s, descriptions of the medium have often used these two adjectives.1 For decades, the two attributes reinforced the impression of the medium’s ethereal workings. That impression was illusory, however. Radio came with a most substantial tech- nological entourage. Transmission towers stood tall; wires crisscrossed the air in plain sight; equipment-filled recording studios claimed vast space. In this light, “intangible, yet solid as granite,” the words of the U.S. radio pioneer Lee de Forest, is a more fitting contrast.2 In some cases—cue corporate icons, such as the wave-haloed transmission tower logo of RKO Radio Pictures—the technological trappings embodied and promoted radio’s vigor. On other, less readily recognizable occasions, they turned out to be a liability. The history of Radio Free Europe (RFE until 1976, when it changed to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, or RFE/RL), arguably the most influential Cold War broadcaster, with services into five East-bloc countries (Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania) in six languages, throws into sharp relief the fine line between the advantages of radio technologies and their pitfalls.3 1. Andreas Fickers, “Visibly Audible: The Radio Dial as Mediating Interface,” in Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 411–439. 2. Father of Radio: The Autobiography of Lee de Forest (Chicago: Wilcox & Follett, 1950), p. 4. 3. RFE’s sixth service, Albanian, was active only from 1951 to 1953. In this article, RFE refers to the station prior to 1976, whereas RFE/RL is reserved for the period following 1976. References to the station over the whole period are rendered as just RFE. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 20, No. 3, Summer 2018, pp. 180–206, doi:10.1162/jcws_a_00824 © 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 180 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00824 by guest on 23 September 2021 RFE/RL Broadcasting and West German Society Only in the last twenty years have scholars begun to address the long- overlooked materiality of sound media.4 Even more recent is their effort to study the media’s environmental impact and their attendant concern with “greening.”5 “Can we have a sound media that is ecologically sound?,” Jacob Smith asks in a plea to make his object of study “eco-sonic”; that is, capable of propagating environmental consciousness.6 Andyet,outsidetheacademy this awareness established itself much earlier, during the Cold War years. To historicize the present-day scholars’ quest for the eco-sonic, this article re- counts a standoff between two forces that played important roles in shap- ing the final decade of the Cold War: international radio broadcasting and environmentalism. The confrontation, which ultimately pitted Bavarian bird protection ac- tivists against RFE/RL, played out in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from 1983 to 1993. The conflict started regionally, with a broad allegation that large broadcasting installations in the south were harming feathered crea- tures. Little by little, the standoff gained national notoriety, with none other than RFE/RL’s technologies and their purveyors branded as deliberate bird slaughterers. My account of the protracted incident contributes to the eco- history of Cold War broadcasting, unwritten as yet. It captures the station’s delayed recognition of the impact that its deceptively immaterial dissemina- tion of information via the airwaves had on nature and human beings. At the same time, the article adds a chapter, if only a brief one, to the history of U.S. relations with the FRG and, in this case, to the history of anti-Americanism, which RFE often reflected during its Cold War–era existence. In the following, I introduce the antagonists. First, I describe RFE and its extensive array of technologies—a feature that the station’s published histories 4. Examples include Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); David L. Morton, Jr., Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward and Archeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); and Elodie A. Roy, Media, Materiality and Memory: Grounding the Groove (London: Ashgate, 2015). The field of media archaeology, propelled by such scholars as Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo, provides a backdrop for many ongoing reevaluations. See the programmatic chapter “Media Theory and New Materialism,” in Jussi Parikka, What Is Media Archeology? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), pp. 63–89. 5. See, among others, Karin Bejsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and the Public Problem of Noise in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Jacob Smith, Eco-Sonic Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). I thank Daniel C. Hallin for directing me to the book by Maxwell and Miller. 6. Smith, Eco-Sonic Media, pp. 1, 6; emphasis in original. 181 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00824 by guest on 23 September 2021 Komska rarely treat at length.7 Then, I provide a brief note on the position of Bavarian bird protection activists. In the early 1980s, they had begun to forge links with West Germany’s burgeoning environmental movement, from which they had previously separated themselves. Subsequently, I recount the incident that pitted RFE/RL’s transmission towers, the engineers servicing them, Bavarian raptors, and nature protection volunteers in a standoff that lasted ten long years. The story pivots on these central questions: Were the preservationists concerned exclusively with the rescue of Bavaria’s avian population? Or was their intention also to compromise RFE/RL by discrediting the sine qua non of the station’s existence? Can the two motives even be separated? The article suggests that, in an age newly concerned with technology “not as an end in itself but as an aid,” ecological goals became inextricable from Cold War–era political demands.8 The coda sketches the long view that frames this linkage in the specific case of RFE/RL by fleshing out how the controversy over the station’s alleged avicide fits within the extended Cold War chronology of U.S.- FRG tensions prompted by the broadcaster’s operations. RFE and Its Technologies First set up in 1949, RFE epitomized international Cold War radio broad- casting in the minds of many. Analysts in the West, among them Timo- thy Garton Ash, recall it as a radio station “second to none” or even as the 7. These histories, written predominantly by former staffers, focus on personnel relations, surveillance by East-bloc secret police, fundraising practices, and the station’s relations with U.S. federal agencies. See Sig Mickelson, America’s Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (New York: Praeger, 1983); Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 2003); A. Ross Johnson, Radio Free Eu- rope and Radio Liberty: The CIA Years and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Richard H. Cummings, Cold War Radio: The Dangerous History of American Broadcasting in Europe, 1950–1989 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009); and Radio Free Europe’s “Crusade for Freedom”: Rallying Americans behind Cold War Broadcasting, 1950–1960 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010); and Paweł Machcewicz, Poland’s War on Radio Free Europe, 1950–1989 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). The exceptions to this rule are Robert T. Holt’s early study, Radio Free Europe (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), and accounts of jamming, such as George W. Woodard, “Cold War Radio Jamming,” in A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta, eds., Cold War Broadcast- ing: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: A Collection of Studies and Documents (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010), pp. 51–63. Woodard’s essay does not focus on RFE/RL exclusively. 8. Hans-Peter Lühr, Umwelt und Technologie—Chance für die Zukunft (Hamburg: McGraw-Hill, 1987), p. 22. See also Josef Huber, Die verlorene Unschuld der Ökologie: Neue Technologien und su- perindustrielle Entwicklung (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1986), p. 12. Both Lühr and Huber draw on American sources. 182 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00824 by guest on 23 September 2021 RFE/RL Broadcasting and West German Society politically “most influential [station] in history.”9 Its Communist adversaries, writing in the 1980s, denounced it as “the most classic example of the Ameri- can propagandistic aggression and intervention into [other countries’] domes- tic affairs, pursued by the U.S. for 30 years without a pause and with great consistency.”10 Former listeners, such as the Romanian film director Alexan- dru Solomon and his interviewees for the documentary Cold Waves (Romania, 2007), reminisce about the broadcaster’s omnipresent and far-reaching sound in their native towns and villages.11 Their testimonies suggest that RFE’s pre- dominantly exile staffers may well have fulfilled their ambition to provide a “surrogate home radio” service despite being hundreds of kilometers removed from the destinations of the station’s short and medium waves.12 Listener numbers, which reportedly surpassed those of the Voice of America (VOA) and the BBC World Service, contributed to RFE’s stature.13 However, they were not the only source of the station’s perceived uniqueness.