The Invisible Theater: The Rise of Radio Drama in Germany after 1945

THE INVISIBLE THEATER: THE RIS~ OF RADIO DRAMA IN GERMANY AFTER 1945 RADIO DRAMA IS ALMOST TOTALLY IGNORED BY CRITICS on this continent. And no wonder; for all artistic purposes, the genre has become. extinct in America.. Not so in Europe; where the unique pos~ibilities of the art form have been fully realized, and where radio drama leads a flourishing artistic life, fully independent from the moloch TV which brought about its downfall in America. The striking difference between the state of radio drama in America and Europe is brought out forcefully if one compare~ handbooks of the art published here and there. In Americ3;, commercialism and mass appeal stand as categorical ,imperatives: "The radio audience wants entertainment, not education, and it wants it made obvious. It prefers comedy with a happy ending, and it does not like subtle humor. The situation must be within the e"perience of the audience. The story should be peopled withAm~rican characters •.. the hero and heroine come from. the middle class ... the stories must be clean, and injusticeandvillainy must be p~nished.. '.~ . Neither children nor adults demand good dire~tionand artistic acting."1 Notwithstanding the fact that American poets such as Saroyan and Anderson have occasionally been heard on radio, the medium has, by and large, abdicated ~s an artform. The situation is entirely different in Europe. The BBC's Donald McWhinnie,in his thoughtful and penetrating. book The Art .of Radio (Lond~n, 1959) fully justifies radio drama as an independent , individual form of creative art, with its own artistic canon. Similar attitudes prevail .inmost European countries. But nowhere has the development of radio drama as a new art form been as striking as in Germany after 1945. The statistics alone are impressive. Of approximately 200. radio plays published in Germany since 1927, 160 belong to the period between 1945 and 19601 West Germany leads all other European countries with about 500 plays broadcast annually, of which 25% can 1 James Whipple, How to Write for Radio (New York, 1938), p. 12. The same commercial principles underlie postwar handbooks of broadcasting, such as David R.Mackey, f"ama on, the A.ir (New York, 1951), or Abbot and Rider, Handbook 01 BroadcaStmg (New York, 1957). 259 260 l\10DERN DRAMA December be said to be artistically valid. In fact, looking through the Horspielbilcher published annually since 1950,one is struck, not only with the quantity, but also the quality of the plays produced. Radio drama was given official recognition as a full-fledged literary form in 1959, when the Bilcherpreis of the Gesellschtift filr D'eutsche Sprache und Dichtung went to Giinther Eich, whose parable plays for radio represent a major contribution to contemporary theater. The importance of the genre has also been recognized in East Germany , where the first Horspielbuch came out in in 1960.2 Unfortunately , the introduction to the book immediately reveals the handicaps of the system. The editor points with pride to the growth of radio drama in East Germany (from IS original plays in 1956 to 42 plays in 1959), but goes on to demand from young writers drama "of high ethical and educational value"-,a requirement which, thus apodictically formulated, can only lead to the. abortion of artistic values. Indeed~ the three plays3 included in the little anthology appear sadly anaemic, a fact which does not prevent the editor from attacking dramatists in capitalistic countries, who "exploit technology for mystical and surrealistic works, whose unhealthy philosophy is thus made more effective." With due apologies to the Kleine Horspielbuch~ I shall concern myself here only with' those "mystical and surrealistic" works produced in West Germany. The amount of energy, experimentation , talent and imagination which the medium of radio was able to command in the post~waryears is particularly astounding in view of the fact that those were the years of the Theaterkrise, years when theater in Germany was one vast desert, when critics looked nostalgically back to Brecht, and hopelessly forward to a bleak future. This critical gloom is not without justification. Looking over recent anthologies, one is struck with the generally poor artistic quality, and quite often, the irrelevance of the plays.4 The first...