Et is the decisive advantage of this book-long essay by Stephan Krass about radio and its time that it comes from a radio historian and theorist who – as editor of Südwestrundfunk in Baden-Baden – can look back on decades of practical experience with the medium. Especially when Krass discusses the current position of public service broadcasting in the broad field of podcasts, online content networks and other “venues” of the Internet, his experience with the functioning of broadcasting stations and his encyclopedic knowledge of the “archival treasures” come from now a hundred Years of radio history credited the cultural-political and cultural-historical quality of his proposals. And at the same time, the theoretical and media-historical background of the professor at the Karlsruhe “Center for Art and Media”, Bertolt Brecht’s writings on radio, Walter Benjamin’s “Listening Models” or the suggestions of the “Stuttgart School” around Max Bense and Reinhard Döhl allow him in a sovereign way for to address current problems.
The book unfolds the history of the medium in elegantly written episodes that do not deny the influence of the feature structure, but instead make it literarily fruitful. It analyzes the primal scenes of an art form that Friedrich Kittler aptly characterized as “misuse of army equipment” after its original place of use. It first proved itself in the documentation of a sporting and technical feat, Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic flight in 1927 and a technological catastrophe, the fire of the LZ 129 zeppelin when it landed in Lakehurst, New Jersey, ten years later. Both events were, as it were, duplicated in real time by the new medium (actually, they only came about through the simultaneous reporting) – a process that was of fundamental media-historical importance and immediately triggered theoretical attempts at self-understanding.
Stephan Krass: “Radio Times”. From ether spooky to podcast.
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Image: zu Klampe Verlag
The paradoxical structure of the new form of distribution, the strange and unknown mixture of presence and absence, triggered productive irritations. She reminded the Viennese essayist Anton Kuh of spook, the American writer of obsession. A miniature history of the recent present emerges in the chapter on the pirate pop radios of the 1960s that broadcast offshore from the North Sea. In the age of unlimited Internet availability of any music title, nobody can imagine what it was like when “the voice on the radio suddenly announced a title that you had heard once and would have walked barefoot to the North Pole the next time.” Tape and cassette players, portable and pocket radios owe their existence to such epiphanies in front of the radio.
A delightful vignette from the book introduces the radio town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, which since the 1950’s has been named after an early trivia show that aired from there. With the arrangement of Pythagoras, who addressed his students from behind a curtain so as not to distract them from his spiritual messages through his physical form, Krass brings to light a surprising parallel radio action from ancient cultural history that actually tells a lot about the paradoxes of the broadcasting teaches.
The media-historical journey goes into the lowlands of the political abuse of army equipment by Hitler and Stalin and up to the heights of the West German culture radio of the reeducation period after the war and the radio essayism of the fifties, in the time of the big radio talks between Benn and Becher, Adorno, Bloch and Gehlen and literary radio play culture up to the 1960s.
Not for a moment do the experiences and anecdotes of the long-time practitioner or the reading fruits of the media-historically well-informed theorist push themselves to the fore in this book, which is in the best sense of the word audience-friendly. It keeps its erudition within reach, but at a distance, in extensive and well-written footnotes. Anyone who would like to find out about the history and production conditions of a medium in an entertaining yet dignified way, which may have seen its classic period behind it, but has proven a new and sometimes surprising stimulating power in the Internet age, can turn to this book.
Stephan Krass: “Radio Times”. From ether spooky to podcast. zu Klampe Verlag, Springe 2022. 256 p., hardcover, €24.