3 Lichtenberg met David Garrick (1717–1779), the influential English actor, playwright, and theater manager, in London in 1775. Lichtenberg wrote about the encounter in his “Letters from England,” on which Benjamin loosely bases the scene that follows. See Lichtenberg, Briefe, eds. Albert Leitzmann and Carl Schüddekopf, 3 vols. (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1901–1904), vol. 1, 237. See also Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, vol. 3 (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1844), 197ff.
4 Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V.
5 August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) and Konrad Eckhof (1720–1778), renowned actors of the German stage.
6 See Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriffen (1844), vol. 6, 50–3.
7 “Steht auf, ihr lieben Kinderlein!” a church song written by the Lutheran Erasmus Alberus in the mid-sixteenth century, was collected in a number of Lutheran hymnals as a “morning song.” Clemens von Brentano and his brother-in-law Ludwig Achim von Arnim included it as “Morgenlied” in their collection of romanticized folk poems and songs Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–1808). It was later set to music by Anton von Webern, Max Reger, and Armin Knab among others. [Trans.]
8 Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, ed. Ludwig Christian Lichtenberg and Friedrich Kries, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1800), 40.
9 James Cox (1723–1800) was a London jeweller, toy maker, goldsmith, clockmaker, and inventor whose firm produced elaborate automata and mechanical figures. He opened his museum in the 1770s.
10 See Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, eds. Lichtenberg and Kries, vol. 1, 26.
11 See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, ed. Leitzmann, 5 vols. (Berlin: B. Behr, 1902–1908), vol. 4, 47.
12 The denial of a life insurance policy (“Sterbethaler Direktion”) is mentioned by Lichtenberg in a letter to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi dated February 6, 1793 (see Lichtenberg, Briefe, vol. 3, 69). However, Benjamin probably invents the letter from the insurance company.
13 See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 2, 180.
14 The 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.
15 Letter 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).
16 Johann Stephan Pütter (1725–1807), German jurist, writer, and professor of law at the University of Göttingen.
17 Heinrich 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.
18 François 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.
19 See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 4, 120.
20 See Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, vol. 2, Fragment XVIII, “Zerstörte menschliche Natur, Rütgerodt” (Leipzig: Weidmanns, Erben and Reich, 1776), 194–5.
21 See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 3, 110.
22 Ibid., 218.
23 In 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.
24 See Lichtenberg, Vermischte Schriften, vol. 5 (1844), 334–5.
25 See Lichtenberg, Briefe, vol. 3, 1l5ff.
26 Ibid., 12.
27 See Lichtenberg, Aphorismen, vol. 3, 189.
28 Ibid., 85–6.
SECTION IV: Writings on Radio, Off Air
Included here are some of the texts Benjamin wrote specifically on the subject of radio, but that were not planned or delivered as radio broadcast material.
CHAPTER 40. Reflections on Radio
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.