Anxious Ears: Soundscapes and the Art of Listening in Postwar German Radio Drama

HUMANITIES BROADCAST - Caroline A. Kita is associate professor of German and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of ‘Jewish Difference and the Arts: Composing Compassion in Music and Biblical Theater’ (Indiana UP 2019). Her research encompasses German and Austrian Literature, German-Jewish Culture, music, theater and radio drama.

The success of National Socialism in mobilizing the radio for propaganda purposes led to widespread anxiety and distrust of the medium in the burgeoning postwar democracies of the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria. Could Germans and Austrians be taught to critically listen? Or would their ears remain passive and susceptible to indoctrination? This paper will examine how narrative Hörspiel of the 1950s and early 1960s offer a site for exploring these questions, by drawing on brief examples from radio plays in which characters display anxieties surrounding listening – the sense of being overwhelmed by sound and unable to discern its messages; the fear of being transformed into mechanized receivers and transmitters of sound, and the desire to “tune out,” or to choose not to listen. It reveals how these works reconstruct traumatic or problematic experiences of listening to encourage a different kind of engagement with the radio medium grounded in a critical, self-reflective act of reception.

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