“Theater und Rundfunk, Zur gegenseitigen Kontrolle ihrer Erziehungsarbeit,” GS, 2.2, 773–6. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.
Published in Blätter des hessischen Landestheaters in May, 1932.
1 Brecht’s Der Lindberghflug [Lindbergh’s Flight], with music by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith, based on Brecht’s radio play Der Flug der Lindberghs [The Flight of the Lindberghs] (1930); Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis [The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent], cowritten by Brecht with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Slatan Dudow, with music by Hindemith (1929); and Der Jasager [He Who Said Yes], by Brecht with music by Weill (1930); and Brecht’s Der Neinsager [He Who Said No] (1930).
2 Elisabeth Hauptmann (1897–1973) was a German writer who collaborated with Brecht on works including The Threepenny Opera (1928) and Happy End (1929).
3 On Benjamin’s collaboration with Wolf Zucker, see, in this volume, “A Pay Raise?! Whatever Gave You That Idea!” (292), and “Listening Models” (373).
4 Brecht’s Eduard II [Edward II] (1924); Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera) (1928); Der Jasager [He Who Said Yes], and Der Neinsager [He Who Said No].
5 See Benjamin, “Gespräch mit Ernst Schoen” (GS, 4.1, 548); “Conversation with Ernst Schoen” (trans. Thomas Y. Levin in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael Jennings et al. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008], 397). Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 398.
CHAPTER 42. Two Kinds of Popularity
Fundamental Principles for a Radio Play
The radio play What the Germans Were Reading While Their Classical Authors Were Writing, a few samples of which have been excerpted for readers of this issue, attempts to take into account some fundamental considerations on the popularity to which radio ought to aspire in its literary dimension.1 For all of radio’s revolutionary aspects, it is in relation to our understanding of popularity that it is, or should be, most innovative. According to the old conception, popular representation — no matter how valuable it may be — is derivative. And that is easy enough to explain, given that before radio there were hardly any forms of publication that actually correlated to popular or educational aims. There was the book, the lecture, the newspaper, but these forms of communication in no way differed from those through which the progress of scholarly research was disseminated among circles of experts. Consequently, popular representation was undertaken in scholarly forms and had to forgo its own original methods. It found itself constrained to clothe the content of certain domains of knowledge in more or less appealing forms, in some cases relating it to shared experience and common sense; but what it produced was always secondhand. Popularization was a subordinate technique, and public estimation of it testified to this fact.
Radio — and this is one of its most notable consequences — has profoundly transformed this state of affairs. On the strength of its unprecedented technological potential to address unlimited masses simultaneously, popularization has outgrown its well-meaning, humanistic intentions and become an endeavor with its own formal laws, one that has elevated itself just as markedly from its former practice as did modern advertising technology in the previous century. In terms of experience, this implies the following: popularization in the old style took its point of departure from a sound basis of scholarship, imparted in the same way that scholarship itself had developed it, but with the omission of more difficult lines of thought. The essence of this form of popularization was omission; by and large its layout remained that of the textbook, with its main parts in large print and its excursus in small. However, the much broader, yet also much more intensive popularity sought by the radio cannot content itself with this approach. It demands a total transformation and rearrangement of the material from the standpoint of popular relevance. It does not, therefore, suffice to attract interest with some timely inducement, only to once again offer the curious listener what he can hear in any old lecture hall. To the contrary, everything depends on convincing him that his own interests possess objective value for the material itself; that his questions, even when not spoken into the microphone, call for new scholarly findings. In this way, the external relationship between scholarship and popularity that prevailed before is supplanted by an approach that scholarship itself cannot possibly forgo. For here is a case of a popularity that not only mobilizes knowledge in the direction of the public, but mobilizes the public in the direction of knowledge. In a word: true popular interest is always active; it transforms the substance of knowledge and has an impact on the pursuit of knowledge itself.
The livelier the form in which such an educational endeavor claims to proceed, the more indispensable the demand that a truly lively knowledge unfold, and not just an abstract, unverifiable, and general liveliness. This applies especially to the radio play, insofar as it has an instructive character. The literary radio play in particular is as little served by the arts-and-crafts cobbling together of so-called conversations, plucked from anthologies and from excerpts of works and letters, as by the dubious audacity of having Goethe or Kleist at the microphone, reciting the words of the script writer. And because the one is as questionable as the other, there is only one way out: to address the scholarly questions directly. And that is what I am aiming for in my experiment.2 It is not the heroes of German intellectual history themselves who make an appearance, nor did it seem appropriate to make heard the greatest possible number of excerpted works. In order to gain depth, the superficial was taken as a point of departure. The aim was to present the listeners with what is in fact so prevalent and so gratuitous that it invites this typification: not the literature, but rather the literary conversation of the day. Yet this conversation, unfolding in coffeehouses and at fairs, at auctions and on strolls, was preoccupied with poetry schools and newspapers, censorship and the book trade, secondary education and lending libraries, Enlightenment and obscurantism in unforeseeably diverse ways; this conversation simultaneously maintains an intimate relationship to the questions posed by an advanced literary scholarship ever more concerned with researching the historical factors that determined literary production. To reconstruct the debates over book prices, newspaper articles, lampoons, and new publications — in themselves the most superficial debates imaginable — is anything but superficial as a scholarly undertaking, for such retroactive invention also makes considerable demands on the investigation of facts with respect to their sources. In short, the radio play in question strives for the closest possible contact with the research recently undertaken in so-called audience sociology. It would see its highest confirmation in being able to captivate the specialist no less than the layman, even if for different reasons. And with that, the concept of a new popularity appears to have found its simplest definition.
“Zweierlei Volkstümlichkeit: Grundsätzliches zu einem Hörspiel,” GS, 4.2, 671–3. Translated by Jonathan Lutes and Diana K. Reese.