Akustisches Drama: Radioästhetik, Kultur und Radiopolitik in Österreich 1924–1934 ed. by Primus-Heinz Kucher and Rebecca Unterberger (review)

In a world increasingly dominated by electronic visual and aural impressions, it is easy to forget that such images are often transferred by the same “wireless” technology that revolutionized communications a century ago—and still does today. This volume on the rise of radio as an important medium of culture, entertainment, and politics in Austria in the 1920s and early 1930s provides a valuable documentation of the radically transformed era in which new media such as sound recordings, radio, and talking films were not only supplanting previous technologies and cultural genres (for instance, the telegraph, silent films, live concerts, and theater performances) but also competing with one another in a revolution of evolving media that continued throughout the twentieth century and that continues to this day.

Most of this volume is composed of contemporary magazine and newspaper articles as well as the interviews of the time, framed at the beginning and end with a short essay by each of the editors. Primus-Heinz Kucher’s opening piece focuses in large part on the individuals and trends that shaped early Austrian radio, while Rebecca Unterberger looks at the debates conducted in the print media concerning radio and its evolution, especially as documented in Die Radiowelt, the leading Austrian journal of radio culture in the 1920s and early 1930s.

The many contemporary texts and interviews collected here, although focused on Austria, impart a real sense of the media and cultural revolution occurring at that time throughout Europe and cite many of the best-known representatives of German-speaking culture to help document radio’s evolution in the interwar years. Not only major Austrian cultural figures, such as Karl Kraus, Alfred Polgar, Franz Werfel, Stefan Zweig, Arnold Schönberg, and Anton Wildgans are cited here, but also a number of non-Austrians, such as Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, with Charlie Chaplin and H. G. Wells thrown in as well, as a nod to the leading media markets of that moment, United States and Great Britain.

Despite Austria’s tenuous economic and political situation after World War I, its nascient radio industry grew exponentially throughout the late 1920s and the early 1930s, expanding from 47,000 listeners in November of 1924 to some 130,000 just four months later. More importantly, the many debates that characterize the rise of radio in those years were conducted in Austria with great vigor on all sides, even if such debates were not entirely reflected in official policies for radio. One of the earliest and longest-lasting debates centered on the question of who should control the airwaves and what kind of programming should be supported. All sides of this debate claimed support for a “democratic” radio system but could not agree what that actually meant. The position that eventually carried the day viewed democratic radio as one that suppressed overt political programming of any sort as too divisive, preferring instead entertainment and educational broadcasts. The “listener participation” model that was put forward by some observers, but which stood at odds with ravag’s “top down” system of governance, would not gain a significant foothold in Austrian radio until after 1945. When the corporate state came to power in 1934, the existing policy served the new one-party state all too well.

One of the more significant cultural discussions of those years concerned the question of whether this new medium could and would generate new genres of the spoken word, such as the radio play, the radio novel and others. Hans Nüchtern, who was influential in shaping early radio programming on ravag, preferred the works of well-known authors to new and experimental texts and saw the public’s enthusiasm for radio as a kind of compensation for having been deprived of cultural pleasures in the difficult years after World War I. Many established writers were, however, skeptical of the new medium. Arnolt Bronnen, for example...