Walter Benjamin - Radio Benjamin

13See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 2, 180.

14The Göttinger Taschenkalender was a popular almanac founded by Lichtenberg’s publisher, Johann Christian Dieterich (1722–1800). Lichtenberg was a prominent contributor and, from 1777 to his death in 1799, its editor.

15Letter from Lichtenberg to G. H. Amelung written at the beginning of 1783. See Lichtenberg, Briefe, vol. 3, 291–3. Benjamin quotes the same letter in his “German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters,” SW, 3, 169–70, first published under his pseudonym Detlef Holz from April 1931 to May 1932 in the Frankfurter Zeitung (GS, 4.1, 149–233).

16Johann Stephan Pütter (1725–1807), German jurist, writer, and professor of law at the University of Göttingen.

17Heinrich Julius Rütgerodt (1731–1775), murderer executed in Einbeck in 1775. Rütgerodt appears in Johann Caspar Lavater’s influential theories on physiognomy, which were satirized by Lichtenberg.

18François Gayot de Pitaval (1673–1743), a French legal writer, compiled a multi-volume collection of famous criminal cases, Causes célèbres et intéressantes, avec les jugemens qui les ont décidées (1734–1743). After the work was translated into German in the mid-eighteenth century, “Pitaval” became a synonym for anthologies of true crime.

19See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 4, 120.

20See Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, vol. 2, Fragment XVIII, “Zerstörte menschliche Natur, Rütgerodt” (Leipzig: Weidmanns, Erben and Reich, 1776), 194–5.

21See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 3, 110.

22Ibid., 218.

23In a letter to Dieterich written on October 31, 1775, Lichtenberg reports that he saw a number of executions in London. See Lichtenberg, Briefe, vol. 1, 242.

24See Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, vol. 5 (1844), 334–5.

25See Lichtenberg, Briefe, vol. 3, 1l5ff.

26Ibid., 12.

27See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 3, 189.

28Ibid., 85–6.

It is the critical error of this institution to perpetuate the fundamental separation between performer and audience, a separation that is undermined by its technological basis. Every child recognizes that it is in the interest of radio to bring anyone before the microphone at any opportunity, making the public witness to interviews and conversations in which anyone might have a say. While people in Russia are drawing these inevitable conclusions from the apparatus, here the dull term “presentation” rules, under whose auspices the practitioner confronts the audience almost unchallenged. This absurdity has led to the fact that still today, after many long years of experience, the audience, thoroughly abandoned, remains inexpert and more or less reliant on sabotage in its critical reactions (switching off). Never has there been a genuine cultural institution that was not legitimized by the expertise it inculcated in the audience through its forms and technology. This was as much the case in Greek theater as with the Meistersingers, on the French stage as with pulpit orators. Only this most recent age, with its relentless fomenting of a consumer mentality among operagoers, novel-readers, leisure travelers, and the rest, has created dull, inarticulate masses — an audience in the narrow sense of the word, one with no standards for its judgment, no language for its sentiments. Via the masses’ attitude toward radio programs, this barbarism has reached its peak and now appears ready to recede. It would take just one move: for the listener to focus his reflections on his real reactions, in order to sharpen and justify them. But the task would be insuperable if this behavior were, as the programming directors and particularly the presenters like to believe, largely incalculable, or else solely dependent on the content of the programming. The slightest consideration demonstrates the contrary. Never has a reader snapped shut a book he has just begun as willfully as listeners switch off the radio after the first minute of some lectures. It is not the remoteness of the subject matter; this would often be a reason to listen for a while, uncommitted. It is the voice, the diction, the language — in short, too frequently the technological and formal aspect makes the most interesting shows unbearable, just as in a few cases it can captivate the listener with the most remote material. (There are speakers one listens to even for the weather report.) Only this technological and formal aspect can ever develop the expertise of the listener and stem the barbarism. The matter is self-evident. One need only consider what it means that the radio listener, as opposed to every other kind of audience, receives the programming in his home, where the voice is like a guest; upon arrival, it is usually assessed just as quickly and as sharply. And why is it that no one tells the voice what is expected of it, what will be appreciated, what will not be forgiven, etc.? The answer lies solely in the indolence of the masses and the narrow-mindedness of those in control. Of course, it would not be easy to adapt the behavior of the voice to the language, for both are involved. But if radio were to rely only on the arsenal of impossibilities that grow more plentiful each day, drawing, for example, only on negative attributes to create something like a humorous typology of speakers, it would not only improve the standard of its programming, it would also have the audience on its side, as experts. And nothing is more important than that.

“Reflexionen zum Rundfunk,” GS, 2.3, 1506–7. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.

Written in 1930 or 1931, no later than November 1931. Unpublished during Benjamin’s lifetime.

On the Mutual Supervision of Their Educational Roles

“Theater and Radio”: an unbiased consideration of these two institutions does not necessarily evoke a sense of harmony. The competitive relationship here is not quite as fierce as between radio and the concert hall. Yet one knows too much of the ever-expanding activities of radio and the ever-deepening crisis in the theater to even begin to imagine a collaboration between the two. Such a collaboration nevertheless exists, and has existed for quite some time. To the extent that it has occurred, it has only been of a pedagogic nature. Southwest German Radio recently initiated such a collaboration, and with considerable enthusiasm. The station’s artistic director, Ernst Schoen, was one of the first to turn his attention to the works recently put forward for discussion by Bert Brecht and his literary and musical colleagues. It is no accident that while these works— Der Lindberghflug, Das Badener Lehrstück, Der Jasager, Der Neinsager, etc. — are unequivocally pedagogical, they also constitute a bridge between theater and radio in a wholly original way. 1The basis for these programs soon proved viable. Similarly structured serial programs, such as Elisabeth Hauptmann’s “Ford,” were soon broadcast on school radio, while issues confronted in daily life — the upbringing and education of children, techniques for professional success, marriage difficulties — were casuistically addressed through examples and counterexamples. 2The Frankfurt radio station (together with that in Berlin) provided the impetus for such “listening models,” written by Walter Benjamin and Wolf Zucker. 3The breadth of these activities allows for a closer look at the principles of this work, while simultaneously preventing it from being misunderstood.