Making a National Family with the Radio: The Nazi Wunschkonzert

The story of the “Wunschkonzert” in Nazi Germany is at the same time the history of one of the most successful propaganda projects to take place in the Third Reich. “Wunschkonzert,” literally “Wish-Concert” but translated more faithfully as “concert by request,” was originally the name of an extremely popular radio program in which listeners could send in bids for their favorite songs and have them played by a live orchestra before what was truly a national audience. It was also the name of a 1940 Nazi film about that radio program which itself has been described as one of the biggest German box office hits of the wartime.

My task will be to tell those two stories, one about the radio program, the other about the film, as a way of talking about the role of the entertainment industry as a disseminator of Nazi propaganda during the twelve-year period between 1933 and 1945. Works about propaganda in the Third Reich often barely even mention the role of the “Wunschkonzert.” ¹ When one thinks of mass media in the service of the Nazi Party, what most likely comes to mind are films such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will about the 1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremberg or her extraordinary documentary film about the 1936 Olympics. Or one might think of the scurrilous anti-Semitic films like Jud Süss or The Eternal Jew, which were made and distributed in preparation for the final solution beginning in 1941. Or, most insistently, one is reminded of the shrill, piercing radio voice of the Führer himself, intoning his messages of hate over airwaves controlled by the one-party system.

But these were not the only means that the Party employed for garnering support and political legitimation. Nor were they the most successful ones. Of increasing importance was the use of light entertainment in an attempt to bind together the Volksgemeinschaft, the community of the Volk or the people as they called it, into one big happy family. The early years of Nazi rule saw the official media featuring the spectacle of marching troops, torch parades, political speeches to the masses, and brown shirt films directed toward organizing disenchanted male youth into the party. However, it soon became clear to Joseph Goebbels and his entire ministry that the Volk was simply fed up with all this “politics.” The answer, they decided, was to make the invocation of their political message a less obvious and overbearing one, to present their political positions in the wrappings of culture.

Certainly the radio would play a very special role in the new communication system. In the development of larger goals, radio programs were seen as having to transcend the pluralism and excessive intellectuality of the Weimar Republic in order to strive for a Volkbildung (the formation rather than simply the education of a people) in a larger sense: now they spoke of forming a new folk soul of “true and genuine life”; of a “deeper” sense of values than are communicated in the belief systems of bourgeois democracies. ² This “metaphysics of the radio,” as it was called, suggested almost a religious calling, and was literally defined as such in a leading media journal: “The art of the radio [Rundfunkkunst] seeks to leave the marketplace and return to the church, to a church, which will encompass all its listeners with the same atmospheric powers and which is capable of bridging distances just like the all uniting House of the Lord. Here the central actors are no longer individual destinies, but rather ideas, they are community creating powers which speak forth with one voice in a manner that moves the many.” ³

One of the most successful renditions of this “art of the radio,” was the “Wunschkonzert,” which has been described as the “miracle working invention” of Heinz Goedecke. ⁴ The program had its debut in January of 1936, and the format as originally planned was to have five different orchestras playing over a four hour period from eight until midnight on the Deutschlandsender. ⁵ All a listener...