In Benjamin’s radio play for children, The Cold Heart, cowritten with Ernst Schoen, the character of the Radio Announcer attempts to entice the other characters (lifted from Wilhelm Hauff’s eponymous tale on which the script is based) to join him in “Voice Land,” a spatializing trope for the delocalized zone of broadcast, a frame for the uncertain space and invisible borders of radio transmission. He says to them: “You can come into Voice Land and speak to thousands of children, but I patrol the borders of this country and there’s a condition you must first fulfill” (224). This “condition,” as explained by the Announcer, turns out to be an allegory for one of the material and medial conditions of radio, and of other media of audiophonic broadcast more generally: radio, he insists, will require letting go of the material trappings of the body. The characters must agree to “surrender all finery and relinquish all external beauty,” an act of disrobing and disembodiment that places an oddly sartorial emphasis on the otherwise generic problem of radio’s need to transform the visual into the strictly auditory. In Voice Land, then, “nothing is left but [the] voice.” A subtraction with a gain: this “voice will then be heard by thousands of children simultaneously” (225).
Radio criticism has come to refer to this condition — the strange and powerful effect whereby a voice, boosted by a medium (sometimes thought of as a “new” one), emanates extra-broadly, becoming disconnected from body and point of origin — as the acousmatic voice. The acousmatic voice is a “voice whose source one cannot see, a voice whose origin cannot be identified, a voice one cannot place. It is a voice in search of an origin, in search of a body.”4 As the “condition” stipulated by the Announcer suggests, one of the effects of the acousmatic voice is that it radiates so broadly, both exceeding and redefining the limits of the human voice in its ability to make itself heard.
If the radio voice is always disseminated from afar, from an invisible off-site, the questions introduced by this acousmatic radiophony (how does the amplification and diffusion of the radio voice produce new experiences of both intimacy and distance? how does radio’s technologically enabled disintegration of voice and body itself become invisible, or, as it were, inaudible?) are, in Benjamin’s case multiplied by the strange status of radio works without sound: while Benjamin is known to have delivered most of his radio talks himself, and to have “directed, acted in, and narrated” his radio plays and listening models, there are, unfortunately, no extant audio recordings of his voice.5 A fragment of one of the broadcasts of Much Ado About Kasper has survived, but Benjamin’s voice is not part of the audio-archival residuum.6 For such works, where the textual trace represents a kind of pre- or post-figuration of an audio event and broadcast performance, we must read and imagine what we cannot hear.7
Benjamin’s radio texts, produced during what, in retrospect, appears as a medium’s period of incunabula — those early works that are “notoriously fragile and difficult to hear”8—bear witness to the difficulties of categorizing the written, threshold material prepared in advance of an audio text. Particularly in the absence of any extant recording of the broadcast, how do we understand the archival, object, and textual status of the remaining typescripts, prepared by Benjamin, often through dictation and with the help of a typist?9 How do we define the shifting boundaries of the radio work — as historical event and surviving text, singular performance and reproducible artifact, live broadcast and published material? In this regard, perhaps most challenging are those broadcasts Benjamin is known to have given but for which there is no reliable surviving typescript.10
Of the relationship between musical score and performance, Adorno has written: “Every score is, in a way, only a system of prescriptions for possible reproduction, and nothing ‘in itself.’ ” This formulation takes stock of the retrospective investment in the event and experience of live performance as exuding an “aura or authenticity,” an auratic surplus perceived as lacking not only from the musical script but also from the recorded performance or radio broadcast.11 If, unlike musical scores, Benjamin’s typescripts represent the traces of materials prepared for one or two broadcasts, rather than initiating templates intended for ongoing or infinitely reproducible future performances, they are nonetheless all that remains of the textual, on-air performances he gave. In at least one instance they have been subsequently taken up for audio dissemination, having been regrouped, reread, and recorded.12
The dispersal of Benjamin’s radio works — as sound objects, performances, written documents, broadcast material — has been reflected in and compounded by the complex publishing and archival history of the works. The Gesammelte Schriften does not gather the radio works together in one place or introduce them as a discrete set of texts.13 Rather, they remain scattered under various headings and in different volumes throughout the multi-volume work. The reasons for this are, in part, historical, and the itinerary of some of the radio typescripts is worth noting; their story, an account of multiple seizures and relocations, not only contributed to the relative inaccessibility and obscurity of the radio works during the years of the production of the Gesammelte Schriften, but also bears witness to a Cold War archival history that remains, in large part, still to be written. As an archival history, it is necessarily an account of destruction and preservation, loss and containment; such an account is both part of the archive and its limit. Certainly one hopes that as the Benjaminian legacy continues, and as the works for radio receive more attention, more details will emerge concerning this layered history.
When Benjamin fled Paris in 1940, he left behind a part of his archive in his apartment, including the remaining typescripts of some of his radio texts. (According to the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften, these were materials Benjamin felt were “unimportant,”14 a bias that has been exacerbated in his posthumous legacy.) Confiscated by the Gestapo, they escaped destruction only through a series of chance events: mistakenly packed into the archive of the Pariser Tageszeitung [Paris Daily News], they were saved in 1945 through an act of sabotage. Later taken to the Soviet Union, they were transferred around 1960 to the GDR. Initially held in the Central Archive in Potsdam, they were then moved in 1972 to the literary archives of the Academy of Arts in East Berlin. The editors of the Gesammelte Schriften were denied access to these materials until 1983.15
The collection of typescripts for the radio stories for children was first published in 1985, when they appeared under the title Aufklärung für Kinder [Enlightenment for Children] (ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985). They were later included in the Gesammelte Schriften, where they appear in the final volume as “Rundfunkgeschichten für Kinder” [Radio Stories for Children] (GS, 7.1, 68–249). Other radio-related materials remain scattered throughout the Gesammelte Schriften: Benjamin’s “literary radio talks” are not presented together, and remain even less visible as a group.16 The radio plays, as well as the surviving example of Benjamin’s listening models and the one remaining radio dialogue, are similarly dispersed. The forthcoming new critical edition of Benjamin’s complete works will correct this problem and, for the first time in German, gather these materials in one place.17