25 Adorno, “Benjamin the Letter Writer,” in Notes to Literature Vol. II, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 237.
26 “Junge russische Dichter” is one of the broadcasts for which there is no precise or reliable surviving manuscript. (See the Appendix.) The GS editors, along with Schiller-Lerg (Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 345), agree that this broadcast probably corresponds to Benjamin’s article “Neue Dichter in Russland,” which was published in the international review i 10 (Amsterdam, 1927) and can be found in GS, 2.2, 755–62.
27 For more information on the dates of broadcasts, see the Appendix.
28 Benjamin to Scholem, January 25, 1930, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 361, 403–4. See also Benjamin’s letter to Scholem on February 5, 1931, where he refers to his radio work in Frankfurt as merely “some piddling radio matters” (Scholem, Story of a Friendship, 211). For further mention of the increasingly constricted conditions that leave him with fewer opportunities to work on radio, see The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 395–6, 399, and Story of a Friendship, 239.
29 The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 404. As his comments suggest, Much Ado About Kasper is, with its provisions for various interventions of sound, noise, and audio-signaling, perhaps Benjamin’s most radiophonically charged and formally challenging piece.
30 Letter to Scholem of July 26, 1932, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 395. For the effects on radio of the Papen government’s coup, including the firing of Hans Flesch as director of the Berlin Radio Hour, see Jelavich, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 241.
31 Benjamin, postcard quoted by Scholem in Story of a Friendship, 239.
32 Benjamin broadcast the radio version of “Berliner Kindheit um 1900” on January 29, 1933, from 6:55 to 7:20 pm. On this broadcast, see Schiller-Lerg, Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 302–3 and 104–7. In their discussion of the complex composition and publication history of Berlin Childhood Around 1900, the editors of the GS do not mention the piece’s radio past (GS, 4.2, 964–70; and GS, 6, 797–9, and GS, 7.2, 691–4). Unfortunately, no typescript of the broadcast survives, and it is not possible to know what selections Benjamin read. He had composed “A Berlin Chronicle” during the first half of 1932, and, during the second half of that year, had started to work on Berlin Childhood. The first selections from Berlin Childhood appeared in print, under pseudonym, in the Frankfurter Zeitung in February and March 1933 (see editors’ notes in GS, 4.2, 966, and “Chronology,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999], 848, hereafter cited as SW; see also The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 399–404). Thus, the radio reading would have been Benjamin’s earliest “publication” of the work.
33 In a letter to Scholem of July 26, 1932, Benjamin writes of the “four books that mark off the real site of ruin or catastrophe, whose furthest boundary I am still unable to survey when I let my eyes wander over the next years of my life. They include the Pariser Passagen, the Gesammelte Essays zur Literatur, the Briefe, and a truly exceptional book about hashish” (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 396). Versions of segments of at least three of these projects were presented on the radio: from the material that became The Arcades Project, we can trace a link to “The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay” (see this volume, 171 n.1). The Briefe mentioned by Benjamin refers to the collection of German letters, with brief introductions and commentary, that ultimately became Deutsche Menschen, in GS, 4.1, 149–233 (“German Men and Women,” SW, 3, 167–235). Initially published under the pseudonym Detlef Holz from April 1931 to May 1932 in the Frankfurter Zeitung, the text was published in book form in 1936. The related radio piece is “Auf der Spur alter Briefe,” in GS, 4.2, 942–4 (“On the Trail of Old Letters,” SW, 2, 555–8). For the book on hashish, which was never published as such during Benjamin’s lifetime, the related radio broadcast is “Myslowitz — Braunschweig — Marseille: Die Geschichte eines Haschisch-Rausches,” in GS, 729–37 (“Myslovice — Braunschweig — Marseilles: The Story of a Hashish Trance,” in SW, 2, 386–93). The corresponding radio text is considered lost; what remains is the text published in Uhu in November 1930.
34 For the figure of the “vanishing point” with reference to “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility,” see Benjamin’s letter to Horkheimer of October 16, 1935 (The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 509).
35 See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [N2a3 and N3,1], trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 462–3.
36 This definition of ekphrasis is from W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 152. To Mitchell’s definition, I would add the “verbal and sound representation of visual representation,” particularly as radio interests itself in audio-signifiers that are not necessarily words (for instance, the “noises” Benjamin introduces in Much Ado About Kasper). Beyond this, however, it is crucial not to presume a fixed understanding of the difference between the “verbal” and the “visual” as objects or modes of presentation. What, after all, is a “visual” object for, presented in the medium of radio? One of Mitchell’s key arguments is that we do not precisely understand this difference, or the relationship of “otherness” between text and image, especially in relation to the status of speech acts, which are “not medium-specific” and “not ‘proper’ to some medium or other” (160).
37 “Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language” (The Arcades Project [N2,3], 462).
38 Benjamin makes note of the psychoanalytic expansion of “our field of perception,” comparing Freud’s publication of On the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, with its emphasis on paying attention to slips of the tongue, with cinema’s “deepening of apperception throughout the entire spectrum of optical — and now also auditory — impressions” (“The Work of Art,” SW 4, 265). For the phrase “hearing-matter,” see “The Work of Art,” 278 n. 29, where Benjamin cites Aldous Huxley’s disparaging commentary on the proliferation of “trash in the total artistic output” of contemporary culture, an explosive, technologically-enabled multiplication of material that includes not only more “reading- and seeing-matter” but also more “hearing-matter.”