Art History on the Radio: Walter Benjamin and Wilhelm Pinder, 1930/1940

Abstract

It matters little through which sense I realize that in the dark I have blundered into a pig-sty. —Erich von Hornbostel, ‘The Unity of the Senses’ 1 ‘Isn’t it a crazy idea to talk about a painter on the radio?’ – so asked Walter Benjamin at the beginning of an episode of Berlin children’s hour in 1930. 2 He spent the next half hour discussing the artist Theodor Hosemann, so the idea was perhaps not quite so crazy as all that. Indeed, more than one hundred and thirty radio talks were broadcast that year in Germany on the topic of art and architecture, a cataract of discourse that prompts several questions: Why might Benjamin’s audience have thought this exercise foolish? Why broadcast art, and why to children? And what happens to the image in the age of radio? 3 Used as we are to Benjamin’s more oracular productions, it is easy to forget that he was a familiar public figure in his day. He made over eighty radio broadcasts between 1929 and 1932 – the majority of them on children’s hour. 4 As part of the project of reintegrating his fragmentary oeuvre into the academic superstructure it has been noted that the radio work occupies the same terrain as his other work. 5 It is certainly the case that his talks for children concern the inimitably Benjaminian topics of false messiahs, catastrophes, and art in the age of technological reproduction; and his many writings on childhood demonstrate an abiding interest in the experience of youth, education, and media. Despite his disparaging remarks about his ‘bread and butter’ radio work, then, these broadcasts constitute an important, uniquely engaged facet of his work. 6 Engaged in both political and technical senses: His radio work represents his most intimate involvement with a technical medium. These broadcasts therefore cast new light on their author’s theoretical investigations – nonetheless, they clearly differ from his written texts, not least in their phatic familiarity. An examination of three of Benjamin’s radio talks that concern the image can help us to locate these texts within his oeuvre. The first is about Berlin’s Mietskaserne or tenement buildings; the second, the collapse of the bridge over the River Tay in Scotland; and the third, the work of Theodor Hosemann. A close analysis of these texts – listening between the lines – reveals answers to some of the questions I posed at the beginning of this text.