The difficulty of identifying the radio works within the Gesammelte Schriften is compounded by the multiplicity of programming categories into which they fall. Schiller-Lerg has identified at least eight separate programming categories for Benjamin’s radio production: Tales, Lectures, Book Hour, Conversations, Radio Plays, Listening Models, Youth Radio, School Radio.18 While these categories need not govern our reading of the radio texts, the Gesammelte Schriften makes some confusing choices, collapsing, for instance, the important categories of the Hörspiel [radio play] and the Hörmodell [listening model].19
Along with the complex archival and publication history of the works for radio, we can cite Benjamin’s own “negative attitude toward much of the work he did for money” as one of the factors that has, perhaps, contributed to their continued perception as relatively “unimportant.”20 In his affirmative reassessment of their value, suggesting that Benjamin’s radio pieces “also contain sediments of his decidedly original way of seeing,” Scholem has pointed us in the right direction.21 In an attempt to account for the relatively discounted status of the radio pieces within the Benjaminian œuvre, we turn to some of Benjamin’s comments on his remunerated work, including the work for broadcast.
Regional radio broadcasting was introduced in Germany in October 1923.22 By early 1925, Benjamin had begun to think of the radio, or rather of writing for print periodicals supported by the new medium of radio, as a possible source of income. In a letter to Scholem dated February 19, 1925, Benjamin writes from Frankfurt: “I am keeping an eye open for any opportunities that may arise locally and finally have applied for the editorship of a radio magazine or, to be more precise, a supplement. This would be a part-time job, but it probably will not be so easy for me to get because we are having trouble agreeing on the honorarium. The situation is that Ernst Schoen has had an important position here for months now. He is the manager of the Frankfurt ‘broadcasting’ station and put in a good word for me.”23
This comment introduces three threads that will persist throughout Benjamin’s work for radio. First, it suggests the intertwining and interdependence of print and broadcast media in Benjamin’s career. Second, it points to the financial insecurities that will continue to preoccupy him and which will nearly always be in the foreground when he mentions his contributions to radio. And third, it highlights the way in which Ernst Schoen, a school friend of Benjamin’s who worked for the Frankfurt radio station Südwestdeutsche Rundfunk and who would become, in 1929, its artistic director, will consistently be credited with having helped Benjamin to launch and sustain his radio career, at least until political pressures made it impossible for either of them to go on working in German broadcasting.24 As Adorno puts it, “The few years during which Benjamin was later able to live relatively free of worry, following the failure of his academic plans and prior to the outbreak of fascism, he owed in no small measure to the solidarity of Schoen, who as program director of Radio Frankfurt provided him with an opportunity for regular and frequent work.”25
While Benjamin did not secure the position in Frankfurt in 1925, he would continue to consider the radio a source of much-needed income. He gave his first broadcast, a lecture entitled “Young Russian Poets,” from Radio Frankfurt on March 23, 1927.26 In 1929, Benjamin’s engagement with radio became more frequent and intensive. That year, he gave at least thirteen broadcasts: a total of eight readings or talks from Frankfurt, and five talks on children’s radio from Berlin. In 1930, he gave at least thirty-seven broadcasts, making it his most productive year on the air. In 1931, his work would be heard on the radio approximately twenty-one times; from January through September of 1932, thirteen times; and finally, twice in January 1933.27
Yet even as Benjamin’s work for radio became more frequent, or perhaps precisely as he became more dependent on it, his epistolary comments on the material remained, for the most part, disparaging. In his correspondence, he almost always mentions radio in the context of pressing financial concerns, anxiety over which only increased in the years leading up to his departure from Germany in March 1933. His work for radio is among “the work I do simply to earn a living,” and in response to what appears to be a request from Scholem for an archive of Benjamin’s “works for the radio,” Benjamin writes even more pointedly, in a letter of February 28, 1933, that he hasn’t “been successful in collecting them all. I am speaking of the radio plays, not the series of countless talks, which [will] now come to an end, unfortunately, and are of no interest except in economic terms, but that is now a thing of the past.”28 Here we note that amid Benjamin’s ongoing disdain for the majority of his work for radio, presumably including the stories for children and the literary radio talks, he spares the radio plays and singles out Much Ado About Kasper in particular as “notable from a technical point of view.”29
By the summer of 1932, Benjamin was to experience the effects of an increasingly constricted set of options for his contributions to radio. In July, he wrote to Scholem that the “reactionary movement … has affected my work for radio,” pointing to the Papen government’s takeover of the airwaves.30 By the fall of 1932, Benjamin, writing to Scholem from Provermo, where he was staying with Wilhelm Speyer (coauthor of “Prescriptions for Comedy Writers”), would again comment on the increasingly limited radio situation, noting that he was left “completely deprived by the events at the Berlin radio station of the income that I used to be able to count on, and with the gloomiest thoughts.”31
Benjamin’s last transmission from the Berlin station was the children’s radio broadcast “The Mississippi Flood of 1927,” on March 23, 1932. His last broadcast from Frankfurt was “Aus einer unveröffenlichten Skizzensammlung Berliner Kindheit um 1900” [From an unpublished collection of sketches, Berlin Childhood Around 1900], on January 29, 1933. This was a selection from what would become Benjamin’s famous text, Berlin Childhood Around 1900.32 The next day, January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor, and the Nazi torchlight parade was sent out over the airwaves as the very first nationwide live broadcast.
In Benjamin’s surviving listening model, “A Pay Raise?! Whatever Gave You That Idea!” (cowritten with Wolf Zucker), Benjamin considers how to argue one’s case, highlighting one’s own value as an employee. A playfully didactic take on the rhetoric of self-promotion, Benjamin and Zucker argue for learning how to successfully present oneself and ask for a salary increase, at the same time making the case for tuning in, since one might well profit from listening to the radio. Read alongside Benjamin’s own disparaging, often discouraged remarks about his own radio career, “A Pay Raise?!” resonates as an ironic commentary on Benjamin’s own sense of indebtedness and failure, as well as on the limitations of what the text repeatedly calls “success.” If “A Pay Raise?!” puts forward a model of self-interest and self-help in which the individual need only learn to be confident and persuasive enough to transcend any and all resistance to his cause, promoting a self-help ideal in which it is enough to say that success means “contending] with life’s difficulties in a relaxed and pleasant manner” (302), Benjamin’s ambivalence about his own career suggests that the simplicity of the model is also its flaw. What would it mean to approach life’s “struggles [as] a kind of sport … as [one] would a game” (302), given an economic and political context in which the stakes of the game make “success” a far less obvious, less clearly achievable ideal as well as a matter of survival?