Was Benjamin’s career on radio a “successful” one? Benjamin could hardly have argued his way out of the end of his work for radio. Perhaps, individually and together, the radio texts offer a different measure through which to evaluate his career and to read the value of his on-air achievements. Though they were ultimately unable to lift him above what he called the “ruin” and “catastrophe” that threatened his life and work, the radio broadcasts were central to his writings; some of the written works most important to Benjamin were presented, at one time and in one form or another, on the radio.33 The broadcast pieces further our understanding of a wide variety of Benjaminian themes.
Reading the Radio Works: What Is Radio for Benjamin?
Readers of Benjamin’s work will be familiar with some of the thematic concerns of the radio pieces. Just as Benjamin focuses in the “Work of Art” essay on the problematic appearance of the “vanishing point” of aura under the changing conditions of the present,34 in the radio pieces, Benjamin’s gaze often falls upon traces of disappearance and the vestiges of obsolete social forms. Thus, in the radio stories for children that focus on Berlin, Benjamin is interested in presenting a Berlin that is in the process of becoming fossilized. In “Street Trade and Markets in Old and New Berlin,” for instance, Benjamin presents the erstwhile market hall as an exemplary scene of outmoded nineteenth-century social relations. After evoking, through the literature of Adolf Glassbrenner, the “market women” and “hawkers” that peopled the markets of “old Berlin,” he concludes, “Most of this sort of business has utterly vanished from the streets of Berlin” (14). And, he continues, just as the classic hawkers have disappeared, so too have sand-delivery men and colporteurs.
In order to present such typologies of vanished life, Benjamin must catalog and read their traces in the present. The problem of the preservation, appearance, and representation of social forms precisely in their moment of evanescence is, of course, hardly novel to Benjamin’s work for radio. It is rather the crux of his discussion, in The Arcades Project, of the “dialectical image” and “dialectics at a standstill.”35 Yet radio introduces a specific, medially driven problem of presentation: not only how to locate and present the traces of a disappeared past, but how to cite the auditory trace — the past as sound and the past in its historically specific sound forms. Is there a specific audio form for the exemplary remainder? Is there a specifically auditory scene or form of the dialectical image? How does radio, and Benjamin’s radio work in particular, confront the much older problem of ekphrasis, or “the verbal representation of visual representation”?36 How to conceive of the specifically “auditory” remainder in the context of a past that remains silent, a past that precedes the technologies of audio archivization and sound reproduction we have become so accustomed to today? Or, to put such questions, which speak to debates around the definition and nature of medial specificity, in a Benjaminian register: How does radio translate or transpose the dialectical image, which Benjamin argues is found “in language,” into language on the radio?37 Is there such a thing as a recognizable radio language, or language as it sounds and signifies “on radio”? How do Benjamin’s well-known arguments in the “Work of Art” essay, in which he names the camera-enhanced visual experience as the scene of the discovery of the “optical unconscious,” enable us to ask whether and how new forms of “hearing-matter” might pave the way for something like an “auditory unconscious” to make itself heard?38 Similarly, we might ask whether and how Benjamin’s comments about the effects of technological reproducibility on the appearance and disappearance of aura might carry over to, and be changed by, an attention to the effects of new techniques of sound recording and sound amplification on the experience and spectrum of hearing. Does sound recording bring into focus, or perhaps even into hearing, something like the vanishing of an auditory aura?39
Benjamin’s radio addresses do not provide us with a direct or simple answer to such questions about the possible medial or sonic specificity of radio. Indeed, where they do foreground the acoustic dimensions of radio as a medium, they also place emphasis on the literary and written text as the mode of transmission of spoken language.40 Still, the radio texts leave us with questions about how to approach not only the specificity of Benjamin’s radio voice, but also the interactions between the radio texts and his other work. These are questions for future scholarship.
Such scholarship might also consider how Benjamin exploits and plays with the imposed “blindness” of the medium. In both Much Ado About Kasper and The Cold Heart, Benjamin creates scenes in which fog imposes limitations on sight, forcing the characters to embody the condition of the radio listener, a condition of relative blindness that leads to a kind of amplified call for audio and cognitive attunement, for listening in to both what is said and what cannot be heard. How, if at all, does this attempt to sort out a specific channel for auditory intake support and/or contradict the mixed-media approach of the radio works as a whole?
It is, by now, a truism of media studies that every new medium reinvents those that came before it. If Benjamin’s texts for broadcast encourage us to ask how he understood the unprecedented aesthetic potential and political implications of radio, they also compel us to consider how radio reinterprets the very definition of a medium. When adapted for or broadcast over radio, is a “literary” text still literature? What happens to literature “after” radio? How does the shift from the printed page to the airwaves recast notions of popularity and the public? Benjamin takes up such questions and acts of remediation in his radio play, What the Germans Were Reading While Their Classical Authors Were Writing, in which he dramatizes the difficulty of pinning down a specifically contemporary definition of “popularity” and “popularization.”
It would not be Radio Benjamin if concerns over remediation — the refashioning of old media in the new; ongoing changes to the modes of broadcast, dissemination, and consumption of art — were delimited as exclusively aesthetic or formal. Readers of the works presented in Section IV will quickly recognize a Brecht-inspired attempt to bend radio away from unidirectional transmission in favor of a two-way apparatus, a radio that turns the listener from a passive consumer into an active producer, expanding the public’s understanding of its own expertise.41 In addition to the more explicitly political and theoretical concerns expressed in those essays, Benjamin puts forward a pedagogical approach in the children’s radio pieces, a mode of storytelling that, for instance, invites his audience to tune into and even to teach their parents a critique of commodity fetishism (see the last paragraph of “Berlin Toy Tour I”). Indeed, the radio stories for children display a range of educational scenes and topics, such as the opening of “The Rental Barracks,” where Benjamin offers his audience an architectural history they are unlikely to learn from the usual authorities (“Prick up your ears and I’ll tell you something you won’t often hear in your German lessons, or in geography, or in social studies …” [56]).42 In “Cagliostro,” Benjamin uses a story about a swindler to dismiss any notion of the Enlightenment as inoculation against or triumph over the supernatural. Benjamin’s presentations of such “alternative” sources of hearing and learning comingle the high and the low and include sources such as the popular literature of Glassbrenner and the Berlin puppet theater, as well as the works of Hoffmann, Fontane, and Goethe; other, perhaps even more unexpected learning sites include children’s books, children’s toys, factories and department stores, treatises on witches, the history of the Bastille, folklore, newspapers, and illustrated magazines, to give only a partial list of Benjamin’s sources and the situations and stories he draws on.