Erika Mann, the BBC German Service, and Foreign-Language Broadcasting during WWII

Foreign-language broadcasting projects in the United Kingdom and the United States faced momentous challenges during World War II, a time when totalitarian regimes had successfully appropriated wireless technology for propaganda purposes. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would argue, countries such as Nazi Germany had turned radio into an agent of political repression by creating passively receptive audiences who uncritically absorbed fascist doctrines.¹ When war broke out in Europe, Hitler’s party had already colonized the airwaves at home to leave dissenters no opportunities to make their voices heard on the radio.² But as the case of “Lord Haw-Haw’s” “Germany Calling” program demonstrates, the Nazis had also set up a range of foreign-language services, hoping to conquer the European continent (and the rest of the globe) through the calculated use of sound.³ Technological progress had not improved international relations. On the contrary, such transnational broadcasting initiatives as the ones pursued by the Nazis evidenced how easily new communication systems could be exploited to support expansionist claims made by political aggressors.⁴ How, then, could the Allies develop their own foreign-language programs if transnational broadcasting had become stigmatized as Nazi Germany’s propaganda tool? Few doubted that the dissemination of counterpropaganda over the wireless was an essential aspect of Allied warfare because these transnational broadcasts would allow communication with listeners in Germany who could be encouraged to overthrow their totalitarian leaders. But what kind of programs would be most effective in converting listeners—who had been living, willingly or unwillingly, with Nazi propaganda for almost a decade—into allies? And who were the individuals best suited to gain influence with these listeners?

To address these questions, this article examines Erika Mann’s involvement with German-language broadcasting projects initiated in Britain and the United States during World War II. Her case, I argue, provides insights into some of the challenges faced by radio administrators, government officials, and intellectuals who were charged with confronting Nazi propaganda without recognizably replicating the despotism associated with broadcasts from Germany. Mann is a crucial person to consider in this context because she was involved with foreign-language broadcasting initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic. As a well-known actress, writer, and political activist who categorically opposed Hitler and who also happened to be the oldest daughter of the German Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Thomas Mann, she was one of the celebrity figures called upon in Allied attempts to reach German listeners. In 1940, Duff Cooper, Britain’s Minister of Information, assisted her in addressing Nazi Germany via BBC microphones, providing her with broadcasting experience that also allowed Mann to work in an advisory capacity for the Roosevelt administration when the US set up its German-language broadcasts in 1942.

In response to Ian Whittington’s suggestion that “the tendency to downplay the roles played by human systems in shaping and regulating” the “mutually influencing technologies” of the modern period amounts to a critical “shortcoming” in radio studies, I use Mann’s experiences as radio broadcaster and consultant to discuss the various, at times controversial, directives informing editorial decisions, program delivery, and staffing choices in Allied broadcasting to Germany.⁵ Mann’s politically inspired cosmopolitanism clearly echoed modernism’s international sensibilities, but her BBC work occurred at a time of unprecedented political unrest. At this moment, political convictions of intellectuals such as Mann were put to the test because the global spread of fascism seemed to leave them no choice but to lend their support to democratic governments that many of them considered only insufficiently liberal or tolerant in outlook. In a move that Ian Whittington has termed a “calculated instance of collaboration,” these public intellectuals “who chose to broadcast” on behalf of the Allies accepted that they had “traded a measure of their independence for a voice in an anti-fascist struggle that they judged to be more significant than other (still significant) ethical and political issues.”⁶ In Mann’s case, it meant participating in transnational broadcasting initiatives that celebrated objectivity, neutrality, and authenticity as ideological linchpins...