A Metal Box
Walter Benjamin, Radio Benjamin
Verso, 424pp, £20.00, ISBN 9781781685754
reviewed by Stuart Walton
If the Frankfurt School is properly thought of as maintaining a profoundly critical stance towards the media of mass communication alongside which it developed in the first half of the 20th century, it is equally fair to say that its approach was full of ambivalence. Theodor Adorno famously held radio responsible for 'the regression of listening', in which a studiously contemplative attitude to grown-up music was replaced by the less onerous passive reception of its classics in broadcast form, a phenomenon aggravated by the poorer technical means of sound reproduction available to early radio. In an unpublished fragment written in around 1930-1931, Walter Benjamin convicts radio of the critical error of perpetuating 'the fundamental separation between performer and audience', a separation ratified by its 'technological basis'. The bored listener all too easily turns it off, or twiddles the tuning-dial to something jazzier.
The technical marvel of early radio was soon subject to the congestion of increasing numbers of stations interrupting each other across ever narrower margins of wavelength, which led in the last days of Weimar Germany to the establishment of ten large regional radio stations that would ostensibly guarantee unimpeded reception, but only exacerbated the problem by constructing their own packed schedules. In any case, there was always more likely to be sinister intent: 'Long-range propaganda instruments are desired in case of war.' And indeed by the time of the Nazi takeover in January 1933, a ready-made state network of radio stations lay at Hitler's disposal.
If radio was an all too pliable tool in the hands of dictators, though, its fiercest critics were not above testing its potentials in the interests of progressive thought. Adorno continued to broadcast regularly on postwar German radio until his death in 1969, while Benjamin, as this surprising volume makes evident, was a frequent contributor to Berlin, Frankfurt and Cologne radio in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Poignantly enough, his last ever broadcast – readings from his autobiographical sketches, A Berlin Childhood Around 1900 – went out on the Frankfurt station the day before Hitler became chancellor.
Benjamin's radio work consisted of a mixture of lectures, didactic dramatic works he termed Hörmodelle (listening models) after the Brechtian manner, imaginative dialogues, fairy-tale playlets and, endearingly enough, talks for children broadcast during the late-afternoon Youth Hour. If the listening models concerned such vital matters as the cleverest way to negotiate a pay rise from your boss, the children's talks offer a picture of Benjamin in wholly unfamiliar Uncle Walter guise, regaling juniors of ten years and upwards with a range of topics from the Berlin puppet theatre to astounding true stories of the exploits of dogs.
The 29 children's talks arranged chronologically here give evidence of a pronounced shift in emphasis in the direction of the macabre, the sensational and the mysterious, with dashes of political reflection subtly folded into the mixture of later talks. Aware that nothing holds the attention of young minds better than a mystery, Benjamin gave talks on Kaspar Hauser, the famous Bastille internee known only as the Man in the Iron Mask, and on the opportunist adventurer and occultist swindler Cagliostro. By autumn 1931, the talks began to feature accounts of famous historical catastrophes: the eruption of Vesuvius, the earthquake of Lisbon, a theatre fire in Guangzhou in 1845 that killed 2,000 people, the Tay Bridge disaster, the 1927 flooding of the Mississippi. These gruesome accounts, in which little of the horror is spared, are given in the pedagogical belief that children, if told only about the agreeable side of life, will resort to finding out for themselves about the other side. Amid the captivating mayhem, a talk on stamp-collecting must have gone down like thin gruel.
Anybody tempted to skim through the children's talks will miss treasurable moments of stealth politics and fine dialectical observation. Benjamin was a convinced Marxist by the time he was giving these presentations, and already seems to have had a precisely judged intuition for how much critical acerbity he could get away with. The puppet theatre talk concludes with the observation that, in the United States, one could observe a perfect example of a republic that was about to turn into an effective monarchy. One lesson we can draw from Cagliostro's antics was that he was able to hoodwink people during the alleged age of Enlightenment precisely because their scepticism towards the supernatural had now taken a dogmatic form, so that they failed to reflect seriously on his outlandish claims. '[P]owers of observation and knowledge of human nature are even more valuable than a firm and correct point of view.'
A preternaturally alert ten-year-old already grown beyond the Jackanory stage might imbibe an elementary lesson in the immanent critique favoured by Frankfurt philosophy. 'One can only correctly comprehend something from the outside if one knows it on the inside,' Benjamin notes on a visit to the brassworks at Eberswalde, adding, 'that is true for machines just as it is for living things.' If knowledge is power, it is a power that can be put to the practical use of understanding the way of the world and one's own relation to it. Devoting two successive talks to a visit to the toy section of a Berlin department store, the speaker paints a tantalising verbal picture of its array of attractions but, wary of prompting the young listeners to a frenzy of acquisitive lust, ends the first talk with the observation that the more you understand something, and the more you know and see it for what it is, the less you need to possess it. Whether the younglings fastidiously recalled, when confronted with the Christmas displays, that the rage to accumulate is ideology, we can only guess.
Benjamin didn't shy away from treating subjects such as alcohol prohibition, in a talk on bootleggers, or the witch trials of the seventeenth century, the latter permitting him to introduce the audience to the 1631 humanist counterblast of Friedrich von Spee against the hysteria of the ecclesiastical persecutions. 'His work proved how necessary it is to place humanity above scholarship and subtlety.' Regular listeners who absorbed even a fraction of what Benjamin told them in these incipiently disastrous years in Germany would have been well-placed to assist in the construction of the new Federal Republic as they came of age after the defeat of Hitler.
The technological fascination of radio during its early years had scarcely weakened by the turn of the 1930s. Developing out of wireless telegraphy from Marconi onwards, it stood at the forefront of the great leaps in communications technology by which the last century transformed scientific breakthrough into forms that were both miraculous and alienating. The bewitching allure of an invention that could relay voices from the ether out of what were apparently the crudest types of apparatus – literally often nothing more than a metal box on the table – was just that. It held its first generation of home users spellbound, and did nothing to conceal the apparent link to the spirit world that its very immateriality seemed to promise. During and after the gargantuan slaughter of the Great War, there were many who fancied they heard the voices of their lost ones, embodied in their very disembodiment, crackling over the airwaves through the radio cabinet, in hopeless compensation for their actual bodies having been blown to irretrievable pieces. 'Dear invisible ones!' Benjamin greets the audience of one of his adult talks.
Even while he used the medium to educate and contend, he remained deeply suspicious of its inherent contradictions. A cultural institution that doesn't engage the receptive expertise that all previous cultural forms inculcated in their audiences, from the Greek tragic theatre to Victorian pulpit oratory, suggests that it will treat them as nothing more than passive consumers. What reduces people to the philistine idiocy of switching it off in protest is not the content, but the voice in which it talks to them. 'And why is it that no one tells the voice what is expected of it, what will be appreciated, what will not be forgiven?' Benjamin demands. The answer to that would prove to lie in the very medium that provoked it. Regression to the indolence of political defeat, reinforced by the ideological narrow-mindedness of those in control of the entertainment media, are the story the Frankfurt School would tell of 20th-century culture. A voice booming through the speaker telling Germany to awake conceived its audience in much the same way as would its successor, peddling the soothing balm of 'easy listening' after the ensuing cataclysm – as a malleable mass.
The technical marvel of early radio was soon subject to the congestion of increasing numbers of stations interrupting each other across ever narrower margins of wavelength, which led in the last days of Weimar Germany to the establishment of ten large regional radio stations that would ostensibly guarantee unimpeded reception, but only exacerbated the problem by constructing their own packed schedules. In any case, there was always more likely to be sinister intent: 'Long-range propaganda instruments are desired in case of war.' And indeed by the time of the Nazi takeover in January 1933, a ready-made state network of radio stations lay at Hitler's disposal.
If radio was an all too pliable tool in the hands of dictators, though, its fiercest critics were not above testing its potentials in the interests of progressive thought. Adorno continued to broadcast regularly on postwar German radio until his death in 1969, while Benjamin, as this surprising volume makes evident, was a frequent contributor to Berlin, Frankfurt and Cologne radio in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Poignantly enough, his last ever broadcast – readings from his autobiographical sketches, A Berlin Childhood Around 1900 – went out on the Frankfurt station the day before Hitler became chancellor.
Benjamin's radio work consisted of a mixture of lectures, didactic dramatic works he termed Hörmodelle (listening models) after the Brechtian manner, imaginative dialogues, fairy-tale playlets and, endearingly enough, talks for children broadcast during the late-afternoon Youth Hour. If the listening models concerned such vital matters as the cleverest way to negotiate a pay rise from your boss, the children's talks offer a picture of Benjamin in wholly unfamiliar Uncle Walter guise, regaling juniors of ten years and upwards with a range of topics from the Berlin puppet theatre to astounding true stories of the exploits of dogs.
The 29 children's talks arranged chronologically here give evidence of a pronounced shift in emphasis in the direction of the macabre, the sensational and the mysterious, with dashes of political reflection subtly folded into the mixture of later talks. Aware that nothing holds the attention of young minds better than a mystery, Benjamin gave talks on Kaspar Hauser, the famous Bastille internee known only as the Man in the Iron Mask, and on the opportunist adventurer and occultist swindler Cagliostro. By autumn 1931, the talks began to feature accounts of famous historical catastrophes: the eruption of Vesuvius, the earthquake of Lisbon, a theatre fire in Guangzhou in 1845 that killed 2,000 people, the Tay Bridge disaster, the 1927 flooding of the Mississippi. These gruesome accounts, in which little of the horror is spared, are given in the pedagogical belief that children, if told only about the agreeable side of life, will resort to finding out for themselves about the other side. Amid the captivating mayhem, a talk on stamp-collecting must have gone down like thin gruel.
Anybody tempted to skim through the children's talks will miss treasurable moments of stealth politics and fine dialectical observation. Benjamin was a convinced Marxist by the time he was giving these presentations, and already seems to have had a precisely judged intuition for how much critical acerbity he could get away with. The puppet theatre talk concludes with the observation that, in the United States, one could observe a perfect example of a republic that was about to turn into an effective monarchy. One lesson we can draw from Cagliostro's antics was that he was able to hoodwink people during the alleged age of Enlightenment precisely because their scepticism towards the supernatural had now taken a dogmatic form, so that they failed to reflect seriously on his outlandish claims. '[P]owers of observation and knowledge of human nature are even more valuable than a firm and correct point of view.'
A preternaturally alert ten-year-old already grown beyond the Jackanory stage might imbibe an elementary lesson in the immanent critique favoured by Frankfurt philosophy. 'One can only correctly comprehend something from the outside if one knows it on the inside,' Benjamin notes on a visit to the brassworks at Eberswalde, adding, 'that is true for machines just as it is for living things.' If knowledge is power, it is a power that can be put to the practical use of understanding the way of the world and one's own relation to it. Devoting two successive talks to a visit to the toy section of a Berlin department store, the speaker paints a tantalising verbal picture of its array of attractions but, wary of prompting the young listeners to a frenzy of acquisitive lust, ends the first talk with the observation that the more you understand something, and the more you know and see it for what it is, the less you need to possess it. Whether the younglings fastidiously recalled, when confronted with the Christmas displays, that the rage to accumulate is ideology, we can only guess.
Benjamin didn't shy away from treating subjects such as alcohol prohibition, in a talk on bootleggers, or the witch trials of the seventeenth century, the latter permitting him to introduce the audience to the 1631 humanist counterblast of Friedrich von Spee against the hysteria of the ecclesiastical persecutions. 'His work proved how necessary it is to place humanity above scholarship and subtlety.' Regular listeners who absorbed even a fraction of what Benjamin told them in these incipiently disastrous years in Germany would have been well-placed to assist in the construction of the new Federal Republic as they came of age after the defeat of Hitler.
The technological fascination of radio during its early years had scarcely weakened by the turn of the 1930s. Developing out of wireless telegraphy from Marconi onwards, it stood at the forefront of the great leaps in communications technology by which the last century transformed scientific breakthrough into forms that were both miraculous and alienating. The bewitching allure of an invention that could relay voices from the ether out of what were apparently the crudest types of apparatus – literally often nothing more than a metal box on the table – was just that. It held its first generation of home users spellbound, and did nothing to conceal the apparent link to the spirit world that its very immateriality seemed to promise. During and after the gargantuan slaughter of the Great War, there were many who fancied they heard the voices of their lost ones, embodied in their very disembodiment, crackling over the airwaves through the radio cabinet, in hopeless compensation for their actual bodies having been blown to irretrievable pieces. 'Dear invisible ones!' Benjamin greets the audience of one of his adult talks.
Even while he used the medium to educate and contend, he remained deeply suspicious of its inherent contradictions. A cultural institution that doesn't engage the receptive expertise that all previous cultural forms inculcated in their audiences, from the Greek tragic theatre to Victorian pulpit oratory, suggests that it will treat them as nothing more than passive consumers. What reduces people to the philistine idiocy of switching it off in protest is not the content, but the voice in which it talks to them. 'And why is it that no one tells the voice what is expected of it, what will be appreciated, what will not be forgiven?' Benjamin demands. The answer to that would prove to lie in the very medium that provoked it. Regression to the indolence of political defeat, reinforced by the ideological narrow-mindedness of those in control of the entertainment media, are the story the Frankfurt School would tell of 20th-century culture. A voice booming through the speaker telling Germany to awake conceived its audience in much the same way as would its successor, peddling the soothing balm of 'easy listening' after the ensuing cataclysm – as a malleable mass.