Radio and the Auschwitz Trial

Abstract

To most West German radio listeners, the author included, East German broadcasts sounded alien, absurd and nearly incomprehensible. Everyday life in the GDR, as portrayed on air, appeared to consist of a strange mixture of committee meetings in ‘agricultural production collectives’ (Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft or LPGs) and friendship treaties with the Soviet Union. Equally Western broadcasts appeared strange to most East Germans, although possibly more were listening. In a sketch by Alexander Kluge entitled ‘Commentary of a radio-programme listener of the GDR’, the young man, whose job it is to listen and record broadcasts from the West, reassures his girlfriend, who is also listening, not to take the prediction of the end of the universe in a billion years’ time too seriously, as this was West German radio:

It is also not true, what this Western astronomy is saying, replies the GDR programme listener. It is the scientific superstructure of desperation, which represents the downfall of capitalism. This is the capitalist sky, not ours.¹

But the mass media nevertheless produces a certain amount of conceptual confusion, where clear distinctions are rare and everything appears to resemble itself.² Its power surpasses the ideological confines of any superstructure, as conformity carries with it the social reward of enjoyment.³