Magic on the Air: Attempt at a Radio Grotesque

INTRODUCTION: BROADCAST DISORDER

Hans Flesch’s Magic on the Air: Attempt at a Radio Grotesque is widely credited as the first German radio play. It was broadcast from Frankfurt on October 24, 1924, on Southwest German Radio, where Flesch was artistic director. As was characteristic of the medium and its technological capacity at the time, the live broadcast was not recorded; the 1924 performance, unavailable for audio playback, survives in the form of a written version published shortly thereafter.¹

Flesch’s text dramatizes problems related to radio as emergent medium, including concerns over who would control the airwaves and what form such control would take.² Acknowledging the uncertain materiality of broadcasting (sent out over “airwaves,” radio not only defies visibility but transmits something of the invisible; the very difficulty of comprehending the mechanism, of grasping the apparatus in the way it works, calls for, as if inevitably, a turn to magic), Magic on the Air gives voice to the threat and perhaps eventually the promise of radio as productively disruptive technology, a nascent medium out of control. From the initial appearance of the Fairy Tale Lady, who interrupts a planned popular broadcast, to a breach in predetermined programming as wide as everyone speaking “whatever pops into their heads,” Magic on the Air plays with variations on disorderly broadcast and notions of broadcast as disorder. These include moments of unscripted, unapproved, spontaneous, and exceptional access to the apparatus: the Fairy Tale Lady, an employee turned intruder, forces her way in; the Magician, the sole character in the play not defined as a radio insider, at least not by terms of employment, appears suddenly, as if out of nowhere, an uncanny, unauthorized arrival made all the more resonant by his stated desire to “conjure in the radio.”³ Along with the break-ins and breaches in perimeter, the making of the broadcast is punctuated by moments of mechanical breakdown and errant reception: the microphone cannot be turned off; the player piano, itself an instrument and figure of dislocated agency, begins working on its own; the Artistic Director hears a distorted version of a song, where, according to his colleagues, “there was nothing to be heard.”

The play’s invocations of a medium gone mad (“The radio station has gone crazy!”)⁴ point to a contemporary tension within efforts to conceptualize, define, and regulate radio. On one level, such tensions are a kind of modernist standard, an articulation of a perhaps generic conflict, at once technological, aesthetic, and historical, between the established and the new, the dominant and the emergent, the predictably programmatic and the somehow still discordant, unruly, or unexpected. On another level, considered within the famously debated category of the Hörspiel, a genre initiated if not fulfilled by Magic on the Air, these tensions turn toward the specificity of the radio and its vernacular forms. What, indeed, is new about radio—radio as broadcast technology and aesthetic experience—and how to allow for the emergence of a specifically radiogenic vocabulary? How to conceptualize, and how to dramatize, the qualities of an artform specific to radio, if indeed there is one? Flesch’s interest in such questions takes on the limits of radio as preapproved, scheduled, and predictable content, playfully introducing the discordant possibility of radio as a scene of uncontrolled and incomprehensible articulation, a setting loose of voices so inchoate and chaotic that they must be dismissed as nonsense or curtailed as mere trickery.

Magic on the Air dramatizes questions pertaining to the possible medial specificity of radio, or of what Flesch (1925) called, looking back on the airing of Magic on the Air, his attempt to hint at an “artform specific to radio” (eine rundfunkeigentümliche Kunstgattung). Flesch’s reflection on his “attempt” is notable both for its emphasis on the unresolved experiment and for its search for a definition of radio via remediation of older, yet still contemporary, aesthetic forms. If Magic on the Air introduces a radio-specific genre, it does so...