Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio (review)

At first glance, the title of Daniel Gilfillan’s new book Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio suggests that the reader will find a history of the radio play in Germany. But this is not what the book is about. Taking as his starting point Bertolt Brecht’s “Radiotheorie” developed around 1930, the author is instead interested in an experimental “logic opposed to a traditional understanding about the unidirectional practices of broadcast” (166). Thus Gilfillan addresses political and aesthetic aspects of radio broadcasting from the Weimar Republic to the age of the internet. In so doing, he is searching for “a transgressive, tactical, or alternative media practice” that necessitates “an experimental turn away from the duplicative nature of the government-sanctioned entertainment broadcasts which characterized the earliest days of German radio, and a concerted effort toward creating innovative program designs, intermedial content, and technical prowess to leverage radiophonic space for acoustic artists” (166). The book accordingly contains a survey of the post-World War I public broadcasting system in Germany, which was organized by Hans Bredow, an engineer with the Telefunken company who was appointed secretary of telegraphy, telephone, and broadcasting affairs in 1921. During the war, radio had become an important military communication device that, after the German defeat, was used by demobilized armed forces to foment the Socialist revolution. It took about four years to put an end to this anarchic “Funkerspuk,” to regain full governmental control over the broadcasting stations, and to institute a clear divide between secret military and public civilian use of radio technology. Against this background of a government monopoly on telecommunications, public broadcasting had to remain strictly non-political and entertaining. Brecht’s “Radiotheorie” and its critique of the unidirectional use of a bidirectional means of communication can be seen as a late echo of these events.

In addition to Brecht, Gilfillan’s theoretical guidelines are Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s 1970 essay “Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien” and a 2004 article by art historian Dieter Daniels on mass media and art (“Interaktion versus Konsum: Massenmedien und Kunst von 1920 bis heute”), which turns against the argument that media theorist Friedrich Kittler set out about the birth of public broadcasting in Germany in his 1984 book Grammophon, Film, Typewriter. That argument stated that German entertainment radio during the 1920s was nothing other than governmentally sanctioned misuse of military equipment (“ein Mißbrauch von Heeresgerät”), to stamp out all dangerous forms of misuse by non-governmental instances. Gilfillan, who seems to be ambiguous about Kittler’s position, primarily wants to highlight the artistic “retooling” of radio as a medium. Accordingly, he reads Brecht’s 1929 radio play Lindberghflug and the corresponding theoretical considerations as an attempt to cut the medium off from its roots in wartime military communication. One should add that Brecht’s critique of public broadcasting was in fact a not at all peaceful attempt to return to the revolutionary conditions of the postwar years and to transform radio listening into an activating stimulus for the proletarian masses.

But what exactly is radio from Gilfillan’s point of view? It is a “space of performance,” which allows “the immaterial world of electromagnetic frequencies” to be entered through “the material world of electronic objects” (135–136) or sound. Following media artist Joe Milutis and his recent reactivation of 19^th-century ether mysticism (Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything), Gilfillan describes radio as a disembodied and immersive experience, a cyberspace avant la lettre. The book begins with a chapter on Atau Tanaka’s 2002 multimedia project Frankensteins Netz / Prométhée Numérique / Wiretapping the Beast, an interactive live radio play produced by Südwestrundfunk and its website Audiohyperspace. Akustische Kunst in Netzwerken und Datenräumen. Chapter Two looks back to the Weimar Republic and to the experimental work of Hans Flesch as art director of the broadcasting stations in Frankfurt and Berlin. Surprisingly, Gilfillan does not make any reference here to Wolfgang Hagen’s comprehensive...