Perhaps the most unnerving, ambivalent presentation of radio’s range and uncertain political import comes in Much Ado About Kasper, where Benjamin turns the radio into an apparatus not only of resistance to official channels of power and knowledge, but also of surveillance and unauthorized listening-in. Toward the beginning of the play, when Herr Maulschmidt, the representative of the radio station, eagerly solicits Kasper to speak on the air, Kasper’s initial response highlights a playfully naïve point of view, one that gives voice to the non-obviousness of the way and the fact that radio works. Maulschmidt, whose absurd name (something like “mouth-smith” or “snout-forger”) satirizes radio as “giving voice,” tells Kasper that he has long sought “to place you, Kasper, the age-old and famous friend of children, in front of the microphone” (203). When Kasper refuses, his explanation becomes a play on the German for radio, Rundfunk.
HERR MAULSCHMIDT: What’s that, Kasper? Do I hear you correctly? You’d turn down the exalted and solemn honor of speaking on the radio?
KASPER: You bet!
HERR MAULSCHMIDT: But why?
…
KASPER: You know, with all those sparks [Funken] flying around [rund], I might try to catch one and then I’d catch fire myself.
HERR MAULSCHMIDT: Kasper, you don’t even know what radio is. Stick close to me and I’m sure you’ll get a better sense of what it’s about. (204)
The play makes good on this promise near its end. After escaping the radio station and being chased by Maulschmidt through various other acoustically signaled locations, including a train station, a carnival, and a zoo, Kasper finds himself back at home, where Maulschmidt turns up to inform him that, unbeknownst to Kasper, he has been on the radio after all. Handing Kasper a thousand marks, he explains that it is his fee for speaking on the air:
KASPER: What’s that supposed to mean?
HERR MAULSCHMIDT: It means that you spoke on the radio, even if you didn’t know it.
KASPER: Well, that must have been in my sleep.
HERR MAULSCHMIDT: Not in your sleep, but in your bed.
FRAU PUSCHI: In bed?
HERR MAULSCHMIDT: He who laughs last, laughs loudest. We at the radio station are even cleverer than you. While you were out in the city perpetrating your scandalous deeds, we secretly installed a microphone in your room, under your bed, and now we have everything you said, on a record, and I just happened to bring one along for you.
…
KASPER: I’ve just heard for the first time what radio is. (219)
This scene highlights the structural significance of sound recording and surveillance to radio. Just as the film camera has “penetrated reality,” the radio microphone has stealthily entered spaces that might otherwise be thought of as beyond capture or out of (over) hearing range, in this case, the domestic space, the private interior, the bedroom.43 The hidden microphone, like the omniscient narrator, can travel across otherwise impermeable bounds, picking up voices and gathering material for new forms of acoustic presentation. The mobile location of radio — including its origin and means of recording and transmission — not only expands radio’s range of hearing (to, say, new locations including the previously unrecorded zones of private speech, dreams, and the sounds of sleep), but also introduces the possibility of stolen speech and unauthorized audio impressions. The voice is subject to new and unseen forms of expropriation.
Benjamin’s most explicit commentary on radio in “The Work of Art” is found in a footnote, where he addresses the acousmatics of the medium, or the technologically enabled “detachability” and “transportability” of the human not only as image but also as voice. Radio and film, Benjamin argues, shift the scope and scene of public presentation for actors and politicians alike, a process that “results in a new form of selection — selection before an apparatus — from which the star and the dictator emerge as victors.”44 Benjamin’s more hopeful, affirmative comments on the politics and potential of radio, along with his broadcasts themselves, project a future for radio that would be built from a broader base, one that would be governed not by the “selection” of the interests of capital or the established networks of power, but by a more chaotic, unpredictable stream of voices. That we are finally able to receive the texts of his broadcasts in English is a testimony to his own enduring star power and the chance endurance of his broadcast texts.
A Note on the Compiling of the Texts
In compiling and editing the radio works, we have relied on the Gesammelte Schriften, whose editors, despite the dispersed status of the radio pieces, provide detailed notes and introductory comments on the archival history and condition of the extant typescripts. We have also made use of the meticulous and invaluable research of Sabine Schiller-Lerg, whose book on Benjamin and radio remains, to date, the most important and comprehensive contribution to the subject.45
Schiller-Lerg’s work provides the most detailed information about the print publications, such as radio journals and their program announcements, which reveal the dates and times of Benjamin’s broadcast performances. In some cases, such archival materials also supply the title of the broadcast and the program or series of which Benjamin’s work was a part. From such sources we learn, for instance, that most of the radio stories for children, broadcast on Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt’s Youth Hour, were typically scheduled for a set period of twenty to thirty minutes. We have included all such data about listed broadcast titles, dates, and times at the end of each chapter, in the section following the text of each translation.
The notes to the texts expand on Benjamin’s mention of proper names and titles, where we thought such information necessary to illuminate an obscure reference or other relevant contextual information. In addition, and with the help of digital searches, we have been able to provide additional information about possible source materials. Written for broadcast performance rather than publication, Benjamin’s typescripts, with very few exceptions, do not give bibliographic details for the texts from which he gathered his quotations; we cannot be certain that he consulted the precise materials or editions to which we direct the reader’s attention. However, particularly given the obscurity of some of these sources, the fact of a matched quotation, even without additional verification in Benjamin’s own hand, may be enough reason to provide a text and context for follow-up, should the reader be interested. In most instances the reference material is in German, which poses a limitation for the English-speaking audience. Notwithstanding this obstacle, and taking into consideration that Benjamin often modifies or abridges the original, such references indicate to the reader that Benjamin is borrowing from or leaning on a source.
1 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 229. The full sentence reads, “Everything which fell under the scrutiny of his words was transformed, as though it had become radioactive,” and in the German, “Unter dem Blick seiner Worte verwandelte sich, worauf immer er fiel, als wäre es radioaktiv geworden” (“Charakteristik Walter Benjamins,” in Prismen, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, [Frankfurt Suhrkamp, 1955], 232). Although Adorno’s metaphor uses a different register of boundary crossing, the German radioaktiv, like the English radioactive, shares with Rundfunk, or radio, a connotation of atmospheric spreading, dispersal, and uncontrolled movement across and within borders and lines of containment; the airwaves, like the air or the atmosphere, represent a quasi-invisible scene or medium of transmission. While the German does not directly imply the coincidence of these two (roughly contemporary) modes of radiality, the notion of Benjamin’s gaze, and from there his work, effecting a radioactive transformation suggests the potentially dangerous, if also exciting and new, power of radio and its power to broadcast. On the early debate in Germany over the use of the Germanized Rundfunk rather than “Radio,” see Peter Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film and the Death of Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 42.