Walter Benjamin - Radio Benjamin

GS Gesammelte Schriften , 7 vols., with supplements, eds. Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppenhäuser et al. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972–1989).

SW Selected Writings , 4 vols., ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003).

Translations in this volume are based on Benjamin’s radio typescripts as published and edited in the Gesammelte Schriften . Information about individual broadcasts, including dates and location, are provided in a section following each translation, just above the notes. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations, including translations of texts cited by Benjamin, are by the translators. The editor of this volume is indebted to the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften ; the notes to the translations in this volume borrow from and expand upon their work.

The editor would like to thank a number of friends and colleagues who supported this project along the way: Joseph Massad, Martin Harries, Virginia Jackson, Jonathan Zittrain, Andrew Rubin, Jacqueline Loss, Andrew Coletta, Chris Coletta, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Andrew Magliozzi, Berit Schlumbohm, Till Jesinghaus, and Ryan Shiraki. Ursula Marx at the Benjamin Archive in Berlin was especially helpful, as was Thomas Küpper, who, as co-editor along with Anja Nowak of the volume devoted to Benjamin’s radio works in the forthcoming German new critical edition, Werke und Nachlaß , shared invaluable information as well as his excitement about the project. I would also like to thank the translators, Jonathan Lutes, Lisa Harries Schumann, and Diana Reese, for their hard work. I am grateful to them for allowing me to work closely with them on the translations, for being so open to my queries, and for their thoughtful contributions to conversations about the volume as a whole. To Jonathan Lutes, who was a collaborator from the start, I owe particular thanks. It was because of his encouragement and enthusiasm that the idea for the volume took off. Lisa Harries Schumann generously agreed to join the project midway, and without her contributions it would not have been completed. At Verso, Mark Martin and Lorna Scott Fox expertly guided the book’s final stages. I am indebted to them and to Sebastian Budgen, who supported the project from the beginning.

Lecia Rosenthal

Theodor Adorno has used the term “radioactive” to describe the explosive appeal of Walter Benjamin’s writings. 1Unpredictable and wide-ranging, the power of Benjamin’s work has registered in its generative, cross-disciplinary effects. Widely associated with his writings on photography, as well as his contributions to fields including film, architecture, Jewish theology, Marxism, translation studies, and studies of violence and sovereignty, Benjamin is far less well-known for his contributions to the early history of radio.

From 1927 to early 1933, Benjamin wrote and delivered some eighty to ninety broadcasts over the new medium of German radio, working between Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt. 2These broadcasts, many of them produced under the auspices of programming for children, cover a fascinating array of topics: typologies and archaeologies of a rapidly changing Berlin; scenes from the shifting terrain of childhood and its construction; exemplary cases of trickery, swindle, and fraud that play on the uncertain lines between truth and falsehood; catastrophic events such as the eruption of Vesuvius and the flooding of the Mississippi River, and much more. In addition to the radio talks and plays specifically produced for children, Benjamin delivered a variety of pieces on subjects from practical advice on how to manipulate the boss, and the rhetoric of self-help and self-promotion (“A Pay Raise?! Whatever Gave You That Idea!”), to Enlightenment debates on literary taste and the popularization of reading practices ( What the Germans Were Reading While Their Classical Authors Were Writing ). In the radio play Lichtenberg , Benjamin places various apparatuses of surveillance in the hands of “moon beings,” externalized, otherworldly figures who stand in judgment, not unlike omniscient narrators (and, Benjamin suggests, followers of psychoanalysis), over the human capacity for unhappiness. And these are only some of the texts that we find among Benjamin’s total output for radio.

Most of Benjamin’s works for radio have never before been translated into English. Radio Benjamin presents, for the first time, a collection in English devoted specifically and entirely to Benjamin’s work in this medium. Section I presents the surviving texts of Benjamin’s “radio stories for children,” the talks he wrote and delivered for the Youth Hour on Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt. Section II includes the two radio plays Benjamin wrote for children, Much Ado About Kasper and The Cold Heart (the latter co-written with Ernst Schoen). Section III comprises selections from Benjamin’s “literary radio talks,” his lectures and readings as well as the surviving texts of radio dialogues and Hörmodelle , or listening models, along with two radio plays not written specifically for children’s programming. Finally, Section IV presents selections from Benjamin’s writings on radio that were not written for broadcast or delivered on air.

Interrupted Reception

Despite their thematic and formal richness, and notwithstanding the seemingly inexhaustible interest in all things Benjamin, the radio works have received surprisingly little critical attention. Even as Benjamin continues to be known and anthologized for his pioneering study of the effects of technologies of reproduction on the experience, consumption, and understanding of the work of art, his contributions to the early history of radio broadcasting and his thinking on the subject remain relatively ignored or underrepresented in discussions of his legacy, as well as in debates surrounding the last century’s proliferation of new media, and of sound media in particular. Faced with this material, we might well ask how such works could have remained so obscured, or, to use a more media-specific metaphor, so comparatively unheard. I shall address this question through two speculative explanations, one related to the history of the medium and to the archival conditions of Benjamin’s radio work, the other biographical. In the process, we will follow the publication history of the radio materials, picking up on the interferences that have contributed to their interrupted reception along the way.

The dissemination of Benjamin’s radio broadcasts has been subject to the forms of dispersal and loss often associated with the auditory object more generally. As one critic has argued, “As historical object, sound cannot furnish a good story or consistent cast of characters nor can it validate any ersatz notions of progress or generational maturity. The history is scattered, fleeting, and highly mediated — it is as poor an object in any respect as sound itself.” 3In other words, it is not only because Benjamin, working for radio in its infancy, delivered live unrecorded broadcasts unavailable for future audio playback, or even because he failed to keep a complete written archive of the typescripts, that we are left with an imperfect account of the radio works as a whole, that is, as scripts, performances, and works of art. Rather, while such contingencies and others, including the difficult, complex history of the extant manuscripts, are certainly part of the history of Benjamin’s radio works, and though the story of what has been lost must, paradoxically, be somehow included or acknowledged, the impossibility of giving a complete account remains an essential component of the medium of sound broadcast and audio performance itself.