Berlin Alexanderplatz

Reviewed by: Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture Peter Fritzsche Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture. Peter Jelavich . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. xvi + 300. $39.95 (cloth). What an excellent idea: to take the most outstanding piece of German modernism, Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, and track its translation into the emerging media of radio and film over the following tumultuous years, in order to analyze the various capabilities of cultural genres, their regulation by the state, and their susceptibility to political events, including, most dramatically, the "breakthrough" of the Nazi Party in the September 14, 1930 Reichstag elections. Peter Jelavich pulls it off with panache and insight. While he points out with clarity the limits Döblin's novel placed on its adaptation into a radio play and then a popular film, he puts the emphasis not on "media aesthetics" but on "extra-artistic historical factors" (xii). In the end, "fear of outspoken right-wing politicians" transformed the cultural landscape of the Weimar Republic and caused the Berlin Radio Hour to drop The Story of Franz Biberkopf four hours before it was to be broadcast on September 30, 1930. Jelavich somewhat overdramatically identifies a "fear psychosis" which not only made government oversight boards for radio and censorship committees for film increasingly skittish about hard-hitting dramatic representations, but, more importantly, made cultural producers much more hesitant to pursue controversial themes. Since it was not the Nazis themselves that forced the decision to cancel Döblin's radio play or to make relatively innocuous the film adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Phil Jutzi, "Weimar's cultural death" has a lot to do with the self-assumed defensiveness of the writers and directors themselves—including perhaps Döblin himself, who is not portrayed as contesting the cancelation, something Jelavich does not explore. In any case, the print media in Berlin clearly did not censor their indignation at the government's weakness, and the Hollywood import, All Quiet on the Western Front, stands as a potential counter example to Jelavich's political analysis. What does become very clear, however, is the deleterious role played by the process of government regulation which, depending on the political winds, pushed radio and film more or less firmly toward the safeground of "nonpolitical," but basically conservative, viewpoints or of pure entertainment, and had done so since the mid-1920s. Jelavich is at his best as he explores how political interference restricted popular cultural genres. A marvelous opening chapter introduces Döblin's novel and his literary intentions. In a fascinating argument, Jelavich persuasively demonstrates that Berlin Alexanderplatz had "more in common with the aesthetics of the nickelodeon than with Weimar cinema." "Kinostyle" was appropriate to represent the "dispersion of the psyche," but, what is more, the media that facilitated that literary strategy of representation were also causes of the "crisis of subjectivity" (18). This double bind, in which the means of representation provided both clarity and complicity, gives the novel its extraordinary strength so that it can be read back and forth without offering a final resolution. For this reason, the substance of the novel already anticipates some of Jelavich's conclusions about the media landscape of the Weimar Republic. It is too bad, however, that Jelavich does not make more of how much the subsequent fate of the radio play and the film is previewed in the media stories choreographed by the novel itself. Jelavich summarizes the difficulties of adaptation across genres: "The novel evokes how a human personality dissolves in the modern, media-saturated enviornment; but paradoxicially, when the story is recounted in precisely those media, Biberkopf is presented as a coherent, autonomous personality. In short, the very image of humanity that is supposedly dissolved by the modern media celebrates its resurrection in the modern media" (xii). But this important theme is not sufficiently developed. Moreover, isn't the pressure to "kitschify," to narrate "happy endings," to imagine the self as big [End Page 584] and strong and lovely the partial effect of media productions? Doesn't the message conjured up at one end come out garbled...

This article explores the way the Radio Play Prize of the War Blind negotiated disability, media and aesthetics in post-war Germany. Initiated in 1951 by the League of the War Blind in the FRG, the prize developed a singular political power and aesthetic influence in the German-language radio play culture of the 1950s. The aim of this article is to discuss the prize within a broader debate about German radio during this critical period of its development from a propaganda tool of fascism to a (supposedly) democratic space of plural opinions and ideas. To that purpose, I will first present the historical conditions out of which the prize emerged. Second, I will reconstruct the discourse about blindness in contemporary writings on the theory and aesthetics of radio plays. I will then analyse Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s radio play Stranitzky und der Nationalheld that deals critically with the constellation of people disabled in war and the radio. Based on this literary perspective on subaltern and powerful voices, my article questions the correlation of Nazi theatre and German post-war radio play. Finally, I will present newly uncovered archival material that proposes a new perspective on the emergence of the radio play in post-war Germany.

Despite its subtitle “Bilge Karasu's Istanbul and Walter Benjamin's Berlin,” this book is not an ordinary comparative study of two writers' memories of their respective cosmopolitan cities. Istanbul and Berlin have often been represented in fictional and critical literature as sites of layered and multifaceted memories. Both cities have served as the setting and even the main character of novels, such as Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz or Orhan Pamuk's Kara Kitap (Black Book), among others. What distinguishes Excavating Memory from many comparative studies is its bold move to bring two writers from different cultural and historical contexts into a dialogue that not only reflectively illuminates their respective works and life stories but also contributes a novel approach to critical comparative studies.As an experimental writer with a philosophical bent of mind and a penchant for nonmimetic expression, Karasu has been a suitable subject for postmodern readings of his work. Gece (1985), his first novel to be translated into English as Night in 1994, can be read as both an allegory of political persecution and a metafiction, where a writer and his or her editor eerily comment on each other's texts in footnotes. Karasu's talent for allegorizing abstract concepts has led to the comparisons of his work with Franz Kafka's parables of transcendent desolation. Night subverts our horizon of expectations to reveal alternative dimensions of reality, in this instance, a reality censored by the state and the subconscious. Despite its singularity of style and context, Karasu's work often necessitates a search for reference points in comparable texts, as it resists any singular interpretation.Although she recognizes the appeal of Karasu's work for postmodern critics, Gökberk endeavors to widen the range of Karasu scholarship by situating his cross-generic writings at the intersection of Turkish and German Studies. In the “Introduction,” she acknowledges that Karasu (1930–1995) and Benjamin (1892–1940), separated in time, place, sociopolitical milieu, cultural context, and even in genre, could not easily be imagined as partners in a hermeneutic dialogue. While Karasu is predominantly a fiction writer, Benjamin is anything but. In any case, Gökberk places both on an equal footing as cultural critics and accompanies them on their way down memory lane to the lost spaces of Istanbul and Berlin, respectively. She braves reading Lağımlararası ya da Beyoğlu, which she translates as “Mother of Black Waters or Beyoğlu,” a posthumously published collection of Karasu's untranslated (auto) biographical sketches of Istanbul's once cosmopolitan enclave Pera—meaning “beyond” in Greek—or the present Beyoğlu, against Benjamin's by far well-known and multiply translated Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Berlin Childhood Around 1900). Her critical objective is to bring “Benjamin's topographically defined concept of remembrance into dialogue with Karasu's poetics of memory” (9). In effect, this hermeneutic approach facilitates the understanding of Karasu's work by reference to parts of Benjamin's work—specifically to the latter's concepts of “dialectical image,” “now-time,” “past become space,” “threshold,” and “redemption.” At the same time, these concepts are concretized by reference to the whole, to the body of Karasu's and Benjamin's writings.While the major focus of Gökberk's study is on a collection of Karasu's sketches about Pera, posthumously edited and published by the late critic Füsun Akatlı, Benjamin's autobiographical work serves as a heuristic premise for explicating Karasu's nonmimetic figuration of memory. Gökberk restates that Benjamin, son of a wealthy Jewish family, who grew up in the Wilhelmine Germany and the Weimar Republic and was hunted to death by the Nazis; and Bilge Karasu, an accomplished master of the Turkish language, an experimental stylist, whose work crossed genres—short story, novel, essay, radio play, and translation—who grew up in Istanbul, lived both in Istanbul and Ankara, and was not forced into exile, are unlikely subjects for a comparative study. Nevertheless, although Karasu's life and work cannot be cast in the tragic mold of Benjamin's fate, his writings are suffused with a sense of such acute displacement that they call for a work of mourning, a Trauerarbeit to bring the trauma of vanished spaces to a level of consciousness, where it can be addressed in writing. In “Mother of Black Waters,” the remembering child's confrontation with the distress of his mixed cultural identity can only be recalled in the poetic expression of the adult narrator.“Introduction” and chapter 1, “Beginnings: Representing Memory,” outline the book's methodology to illustrate that Benjamin's model of reading and writing the past through its remnants in space, especially in cityscapes, can be transposed to texts beyond the western canon. Benjamin's own rendering of memory is itself predicated on Freud's theory of memory. In Freud, what the subject remembers emerges in consciousness as a trace that is a distorted representation. The fragmented and elliptical nature of memory resists the formation of a consistent autobiographical subject in Berlin Childhood and “Mother of Black Waters.” Reminiscing the spatial traces of old Pera's decaying buildings and their shabby interiors in writing crystallizes memory in space.“Beginnings” underwrites the multicultural past of Karasu's Pera with Benjamin's notion of rettende Kritik (salvaging critique). The rescue operation in Karasu's seemingly apolitical account is predicated on mnemonic images of disappearing spaces that precipitously light up. Benjamin's last essay, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“On the Concept of History”), where he formulates his idea of materialist theology, expresses the urgency of seizing the true image of the past that flits by at the moment of its recognizability. Otherwise, it will forever be irretrievable. This recognition, Gökberk suggests, is the salvaging critique in Karasu's Beyoğlu narratives that restore to history, through flashing images, the memory of the “others” vanished from Beyoğlu's social topography, mostly low-income women, widows, seamstresses of ambiguous ethno-cultural background. Excavating Memory places the remembering child in the tableaux of these fading lives, from which male figures, the grandfather and the uncle of the narrator, are absent. Familial memory of these men is associated with the tragedies of the last years of the Ottoman Empire, like the bloody counterrevolution of March 31, 1909, by religious sects against the Young Turks. The decline of the empire and “the old non-Muslim bourgeois order of Pera is thus projected onto the lives of the male family members” (163).Likewise, in Berlin Childhood, elusive memory is captured in writing that settles over the vanished sites of Berlin's Old West. In chapter 2, “From Berlin's Old West to Istanbul's Beyoğlu: Narratives of Memory, Narratives of Lost Topographies,” Benjamin's and Karasu's constructions or reconstructions of memory connect around the recovery of something to remember from a “lost place.” A comparative analysis of the figure of arcade in Benjamin and in Pera arcades shows that while the promise of pleasure inherent in the arcade was geared toward material consumption, this promise is set, both in Paris and in Istanbul, in the larger context of the drive to modernity. What Excavating Memory does well is not to bring Benjamin and Karasu into a tête á tête conversation but rather interweave their strategies of remembering through an examination of critical literature on both writers, particularly on Benjamin.Throughout the book, Gökberk pursues her critical objective of revealing how distortion and fragmentation of remembrances in Benjamin's and Karasu's autobiographical writings not only resist a historicist-positivist approach but also foreground space as a keeper of memory. She draws liberally on theories of remembering by Freud, Paul Ricoeur, Henri Bergson, and Maurice Halbwachs to illuminate configurations of mnemonic narratives in both Karasu and Benjamin. She also makes judicious use of Benjamin scholarship by German critics. Although the theoretical references elucidate the parallels in Karasu's and Benjamin's respective poetics of memory, it is important to emphasize that theory does not merely function as an overlay here, rather text and theory reciprocally explain each other. Reading Karasu and Benjamin through the lens of memory theories reveals political-historical and cultural imperatives of the structural distortions and discontinuities in their narratives.Karasu's life as a successful Turkish writer, who was neither persecuted nor forced into exile, cannot be likened to the interrupted life and work of Benjamin, first by denial into an academic career, then being forced into a continuous exile from which there was no return. However, Gökberk's study, more than any other biographical information about Karasu, portrays the writer's distinct and multiple “otherness” as a gay man and son of a Jewish father and a Greek Orthodox mother in a predominantly Muslim Turkey. Moreover, Karasu's portrayal as an “other” has implications that go far beyond the persona of the writer and reveal the dark pages of recent Turkish history. In chapter 4, “Bilge Karasu in Historical Context: Identity Formation in the Shadow of ‘Turkification,’” arguably one of the most compelling chapters of the book, Gökberk integrates Karasu's personal history into the larger history of Turkey's nation building, thereby bringing cultural and political critique to bear on literary life. The chapter outlines the Turkification policies of the Republic from its foundation in 1923 through the 1960s, which included the Capital Levy on minorities, the “Citizen, speak Turkish” campaign, and the pogrom of September 1955, predominantly targeting the Greek minority, whose stores and businesses were looted in an assault that was shamefully reminiscent of Kristallnacht. The mass hysteria was fomented by the political party in power, whose leaders are now seen as responsible for planting the seeds of political Islam in Turkey. Gökberk raises the question of why Karasu's work at the time, when he had established himself as an avant-garde writer, reveals no indication of the oppression he may have experienced as the offspring of an inter-ethnic, inter-religious couple. The ethnic otherness suppressed in his major writings emerges through the cracks in Beyoğlu narratives. “It is as if the author, despite his unwillingness to ‘come out,’ embarks on exploring his origins by conjuring up the mnemonic site Beyoğlu as a cipher of difference, even if enveloped in profound ambiguity” (123). This to me justifies the sustained analysis of Beyoğlu narratives over Karasu's better known and prized avant-garde work.Chapter 9, “Crazy Meryem as the Saint of Beyoğlu's Marginalized: Toward a Final Reading of Difference,” a kind of excursus, portrays Meryem, the iconic ageless madwoman type, as a composite image of the dispossessed. A threshold figure, she takes the reader to the sights of a pluricultural Pera of a bygone age, from which she is already exiled. This devalued figure of the woman outcast hypothetically represents not only the old Christian widows clad in black and the street cats but also the childhood of the narrator.The “Conclusion” recapitulates major principles of the analytic approaches in the book. Here, Gökberk reflects that despite the connections between Karasu's and Benjamin's poetics of memory, their “configurations of the past do not always converge.” While Benjamin resists scripting a referential life story by operating “within the associative web of language,” à la Freud, Karasu proceeds by “covering and uncovering selfhood” (248). Nevertheless, she argues that the experience of displacement that defines a persecuted and exiled Jewish writer and a Turkish minority writer, who, as I see it, may have pursued a kind of innere Emigration, judging from the “cover” of his major works, remains the associative link between their memory texts.As the abovementioned citations from the book show, not only does the study present a sophisticated analysis of the poetics of memory, it is also written in a fluid style with highly quotable passages. Gökberk's commitment to situating Karasu in a world literary space he justly deserves was clearly a strong motivation for this comparative study of poetic remembrance. The final section of the book, “Prospectus for New Trajectories in Karasu Studies and Beyond,” suggests several directions for future Karasu criticism. Yet for many a reader the appreciation of Excavating Memory may remain incomplete—like the texts it analyzes—until the Beyoğlu narratives are translated. For this reviewer, the fact that neither author—especially Benjamin—lived to see the growing body of the posthumous laudatory reviews of their works, bathes these mnemonic narratives in the poignant light of their authors' fates.

Critics of Berlin Alexanderplatz (WDR, West Germany, 1980) most often focus on the extended love plot between Franz (Günther Lamprecht) and Reinhold (Gottfried John). This focus is not surprising, given that the vexed relationship between Rainer Werner Fassbinder's leading men is the most prominent storyline in the miniseries. However, across nearly sixteen hours, Berlin Alexanderplatz also introduces us to Paula (Mechthild Grossmann), Minna (Karin Baal), Ida (Barbara Valentin), Frau Bast (Brigitte Mira), Polish Lina (Elisabeth Trissenaar), Eva (Hanna Schygulla), the widow (Angela Schmid), Fränze (Helen Vita), Cilly (Annemarie Düringer), Trude (Irm Hermann), the Whore of Babylon (uncredited), the waitress (Elke Haltaufderheide), and Mieze (Barbara Sukowa). Across successive episodes, these minor characters offer a version of seriality inside the serial form that is Berlin Alexanderplatz. Ultimately these figures make up one vast composite character, a combinatory form that echoes the superimposed photographs from the Weimar era that appear in the miniseries's credit sequence. Both the credit sequence and the serial women offer ways of representing Germany's past as a variegated, multidimensional site. Though often peripheral to the miniseries's major plot arcs, the female characters upend the interpretive authority of the voice-over. Their presence unsettles the voice-over's construction of a somewhat monolithic, omniscient, and in many ways melodramatic historical imagination of the Weimar period.Through the placement of the female minor characters, Berlin Alexanderplatz challenges the traditional terms of value often associated with the historical television miniseries. Contra contemporaneous miniseries like Heimat (WDR/SFB, West Germany, 1984), Roots (ABC, 1977), and Days of Hope (BBC, UK, 1975), Berlin Alexanderplatz does not utilize its extended running time to create an increasingly complex or multigenerational story line. Instead, the extensive breadth of the miniseries allows for an experiment with minor character forms, offering the intimacy often associated with extended serial viewing but refusing legible modes of sympathy and attachment. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, this inscrutability becomes an irritant within the miniseries's larger narrative arc, preventing the mourning of the dead women across the series and the mourning for the lost past for which they often provide a symbolic counterpart.

Reviewed by: The Berlin Novels of Alfred Döblin: "Wadzek's Battle with the Steam Turbine," "Berlin Alexanderplatz," "Men without Mercy," and "November, 1918", and: Vision and Revision: The Concept of Inspiration in Thomas Mann's Fiction, and: New Subjectivity and Prose Forms of Alienation: Peter Handke and Botho Strauss Carol Bedwell David B. Dollenmayer . The Berlin Novels of Alfred Döblin: "Wadzek's Battle with the Steam. Turbine," "Berlin Alexanderplatz," "Men without Mercy," and "November, 1918."Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. 216 pp. $32.50. Karen Drabek Vogt . Vision and Revision: The Concept of Inspiration in Thomas Mann's Fiction. Germanic Studies in America. New York: Lang. 168 pp. $24.00. Linda C. DeMeritt . New Subjectivity and Prose Forms of Alienation: Peter Handke and Botho Strauss. New York: Lang, 1987. 278 pp. $41.95. In his concisely written Introduction, David B. Dollenmayer presents the author of "monumental epics of social upheavals and mass movements" as a stylistic innovator whose technique of writing from subconscious inspiration often produced the "formless, surging incoherence one would expect from such a technique." He characterizes Alfred Dublin's Berlin novels as "engaging, disturbing works of a great and unique prose stylist" that document "the dilemma of a progressive writer caught between the ideological fronts that would tear the Weimar Republic apart." In the first chapter, the author gives a brief biography of Döblin, explaining the origin of the sexual conflict that surfaces again and again, the influence of artistic Futurism, with its glorification of dynamism and speed, and the development of an objective style that presents the totality of the real world without attempting to interpret it. Chapter Two, tided "Wadzek's Battle with the Steam Turbine" for Döblin's second published novel (1918), introduces a work that developed away from the direction (man against technology) indicated by the title to a preoccupation with family life. The rather grotesque protagonist, Wadzek, who ultimately abandons his idealistic role in love and in public life, is seen as the antithesis of the traditional hero. [End Page 829] Each of the remaining chapters deals with a major work and only peripherally with Döblin's other writings (plays, essays, reviews). The protagonist of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Franz Biberkopf, is a representative victim of modern industrial society; released from prison, he determines to live a decent life, but his resolution is thwarted by three increasingly severe disasters culminating in the death of his great love, Mieze. Finally accepting his guilt, he is resurrected as a new man at the end of the novel, determined to live in solidarity with others within the context of urban life. This work, says Dollenmayer, "owes its fascination and greatness primarily to the way in which it is told": the inclusive, kaleidoscopic montage technique, equal in importance to the hero. The city stands at the end of the novel, says Dollenmayer, in a positive relation to the individual who has accepted responsibility for himself as well as his need for dependence on others. Yet the ending remains open, Biberkopf's plan for redemption as yet unrealized. The chapter on Men Without Mercy (Pardon wird nicht gegeben, 1935) is characterized as Döblin's most conventional and most autobiographical novel. The struggle between freedom and authority is expressed in family relations as well as in society by the protagonist, Karl, who exemplifies in his career the futility of hopes for the revolution. The last chapter deals with November, 1918 (1937-1943), described as the culmination in the progression of Berlin novels. Its protagonist, Friedrich Becker, undergoes a religious conversion analogous to that of his author at the time of writing; Becker sacrifices himself for his fellow men and "represents the narrator's desperate attempt to raise his story out of the realm of history, to suggest a transcendent alternative mat focuses on the individual soul rather than a society in turmoil." Dollenmayer addresses his theme of the massive city novels with easy competence. Although he characterizes Döblin as the most difficult of all his contemporaries to summarize, he succeeds well at imparting the essence and the flavor of the works he discusses. He is not uncritical; he sees that these works...

George Tabori (1914–2007), a Hungarian-born British playwright of Jewish decent, is closely associated with German Holocaust theatre. Less well-known is his prolific career in German radio drama. This contribution traces the trajectory of Tabori’s short story ‘Weissmann und Rotgesicht’ and its adaptation for German radio in 1978. The overall theme of its narrative can be identified as the issue of competing minoritized groups (Jews and Indigenous Americans), their respective identity politics and mechanisms of ‘othering’. My analysis first asks how the short story presents these questions, as it was written in a North American context primarily shaped by the popular cultural format of the western movie. Secondly, I ask how the topic is culturally and medially transferred to the radio play form, considering the production’s West German context of the late 1970s. My interest is guided by the question whether and how we can read this 1978 radio play as an intervention in the debate on the representation of the ‘Indian’ in popular German culture and its simultaneous erasure, several decades after the Holocaust, of the Jew.

This article analyses the German radio play adaptation of Philip Roth's novel Indignation (Empörung, 2010) from an audionarratological perspective and shows how both the book and the radio play offer potential for multisensory experiences on the part of readers and radio audiences. The article furthermore explores how the two media differ in their semiotic and sensory affordances and possibilities. It is argued that aural signs and signals predetermine certain aspects of the storyworld in the radio play: for example, characters' and the narrator's voices, soundscapes, but also ambient sound and music. Due to its focus on the aural channel, radio drama calls on audiences' imagination in distinct ways, while also complicating narratological concepts. The ‘transcriptivity’ from written to spoken text that is inherent in the transposition of novel into radio play accounts for the fact that the radio play also adds new multisensory and interpretive dimensions to its pre-text. It therefore has to be considered in its own right, as an artistic form appealing to its audiences through its own sensory channels.

368 Comparative Drama Anthony Edward Waine. Martin Walser. The Development as Dramatist 1950-1970. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1978. Pp. 394. DM 48. Martin Walser is one of a very small number of contemporary writers in German whose literary reputations derive almost equally from novels or novellas and dramas. Only the Austrians Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard, together with Max Frisch and perhaps Günter Grass, are similarly at home in both genres. Walser has tended to alternate between writing prose and dramatic works, and it is therefore no coincidence that his two most recent works, Das Sauspiel (1975) and Ein fliehendes Pferd (1978), were drama and novella, respectively. These two works have been widely acclaimed by German critics, underlining the convic­ tion of many that Walser has earned his place beside the finest con­ temporary prose writers as well as the best playwrights. For this reason alone it is to be regretted that so few of his works have thus far been translated into English. Walser began his literary career, however, in still another genre. He got his start in the early 1950’s while still a student of literature and philosophy in Tübingen, as a writer and director of radio plays for Southwest German Radio. He ended his studies with a dissertation on Kafka, and it was this writer, together with Brecht and the philosopher Heidegger, who exerted the most influence on his early writings. Marxism and existentialism represent, in most ways, very different ways of view­ ing the world, the former tending to be more optimistic, public, and engaged, the latter more pessimistic, private, and passive. As writers, Brecht and Kafka are, of course, very different, so it should be no sur­ prise that Walser’s writings were marked by an intriguing and, in my opinion, very productive tension between the world views, styles, and themes of these two masters. This tension has remained with Walser, even though it gradually became Beckett, rather than Kafka, who has served as the model which stands in opposition to Brecht. The radio play (Hörspiel) is a far more significant literary form in the German-speaking world than in our own. Like several of his con­ temporaries, it was here that Walser tried out many of the themes, structural models, and dialogue styles which would appear in his stage plays. Only in 1957, after the success of his first novel Ehen in Philipps­ burg, did Walser quit the radio station and begin to devote himself full­ time to the larger literary forms. His efforts paid off richly in the acclaims he received for his second novel Halbzeit (1960), which was the first part of a trilogy including Das Einhorn (1966) and Der Sturz (1973). At the same time, however, that Walser was gaining a substantial repu­ tation as a novelist, he was also achieving recognition as a playwright. His first stage play, Der Abstecher, which drew heavily on the earlier radio plays, had its premiere in 1961 at the Munich Kammerspiele. Be­ tween that year and 1970, Walser wrote and had performed six additional plays for the theater. It is, as the title of Waine’s book indicates, Walser’s development as a dramatist from the early radio plays in the 1950’s through his seventh stage play in 1970, Ein Kinderspiel, which is the focus of this admirable study. Anthony Waine is a young British lecturer in German Studies at the Reviews 369 University of Lancaster. His book is, like many which are published by Bouvier, a slightly revised Ph.D. dissertation; yet, a few critical com­ ments I will make notwithstanding, his book is superior not only to most dissertations, but to most of those which are subsequently published. It is certainly one of the better dissertations published by Bouvier. The fact that he is at times a bit wordy and repetitious or that he has not completely erased a certain “dissertation style” detract only minimally from a well-written book. Waine’s thesis or starting point, stated in the foreword and evident throughout, is that Walser the dramatist deserves the same recognition and critical attention as artist as Walser the novelist. He contends that this has not...

In German-speaking research on ‘Hörspiele’ or radio plays, there is little to be found when it comes to adequate theoretical tools for analysing a radio play. Radio drama is still widely seen as a literary genre and is therefore analysed by literary studies theories or drama theories. This article argues that radio drama is an acoustic art form in its own right and should be analysed as such. Its aim is to support this argument first by describing the historical reasons that led to the misinterpretation of the art form, and then by presenting a methodology, based on semiotic and narratological theories, that enables scholars to analyse a narrative radio play by integrating all of its acoustic features. The article seeks to emphasize that music, noises and voices and also technical features like electro-acoustical manipulation or mixing, can be, and often are, used as tools to signify story elements and therefore should be analysed accordingly. To demonstrate the applicability of the model, a short analysis of some German radio plays is presented at the end of the article.

The object of the study is the history of the relationship between state power and statistical science in the Russian Empire in the second half of the XVIII – first half of the XIX centuries. The author examines the practices of censorship supervision over the publication of research papers in the field of state studies – an early descriptive direction of statistical science. The article analyzes the main stages of the development of legislation in the field of the civil press and highlights the key claims that the censorship authorities had against the authors of statistical works. Special attention is paid to the study of the social and political context in which the evolution of censorship restrictions on the dissemination of statistical data took place. It is noted that the tacit ban on the publication of any statistical information, which existed in the middle of the XVIII century, was replaced by the liberalization of censorship legislation at the beginning of the Alexander reign. In the future, with the formation of statistics-state studies as a political science, the attention of the state to the content of these works became more and more intense. The growth of conservative tendencies in domestic politics led to the fact that the government increasingly suppressed the free interpretation of statistical materials. The formation of the institution of departmental censorship in the mid-1820s gave rise to the problem of the plurality of censorship authorities, which became a serious barrier to the development of state studies. It is concluded that a broad interpretation of the norms of censorship statutes made it possible for interested ministries to delay the publication of statistical works for a long time, or not to allow them to be printed at all under the pretext of inaccuracy or secrecy of data.

Review Essay: Avoiding conventional understandings: the enduring legacy of Eliot Freidson

Lacey, Kate. Frequencies: Gender, Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923-1945. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P 1996. 299 pp. $24.95. Kate Lacey' s recent book, adds to the growing list of important studies examining the historic development of the public and private spheres. Her study also offers a substantial contribution to the history of and cultural studies. Frequencies is an interdisciplinary history of women in broadcast in Weimar and Nazi Germany, drawing on historiography, but also media and cultural studies, feminist theory, and political philosophy Lacey's aims are twofold: she is interested in the history of women in radio, both as broadcasters and prospective listeners, and in the function of in contemporary discourses about radio. In conjunction with these concerns, Lacey examines the real and discursive redefinition of the private and public spheres that helped bring about. As she argues, there exists a dialectical relationship between politics and the development of radio, in which gender ideology informs the definition and practice of broadcasting and [...] broadcasting becomes one of the cultural modes in which is produced, reproduced, and transformed (11). Frequencies is divided into three major sections. In part one, German Radio and Gendered Discourses, Lacey outlines the development of policy, from the early commitment to non-political to the explicitly political of Nazi Germany. Lacey frames the contemporary social and political debates about as a response to the of crisis that marked the Weimar period. In the second section of the book, Feminine Frequencies, Lacey looks more closely at the history of women' s in Weimar and Nazi Germany and the many continuities that existed between the two periods. In her chapter on the Weimar years, Lacey traces the beginnings of regional and national broadcast, and concludes that, with some regional differences, all programs addressed women as housewives and mothers, and only occasionally as citizens, and in either case from a middle-class standpoint. Lacey makes apparent that this earlier model of the female listener as housewife and mother carried over easily into the National Socialist period, although the philosophical underpinnings of their policy differed. Under the National Socialists, policy no longer included the early pedagogical ideals found in Weimar. Instead, as Lacey argues, had a structural function [...]. The space that women had carved out within the broadcast public sphere became exclusively devoted to reinforcing women's exclusion from the public sphere in a broader sense (125). As Lacey points out, this model of the female listener was maintained in through the war, despite the often blurred boundaries between the home front and front line. In the last section of the book, Experts on the Air, Lacey looks at the development of the radio and the role of consumerism in broadcasting. During the Weimar era Lacey sees the expert as masking the status quo of women's domestic work by recasting it as new and modern. …

This chapter provides a literary and historical glimpse into the political fortunes of the great writers and novelists of the Weimar era, focusing on Kurt Tucholsky, Alfred Döblin, and the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Tucholsky (1890–1935) was foremost a polemical political journalist, a humorist, and a writer of satiric poetry for the cabarets of Berlin. No ills of the Republic escaped his witty scrutiny, but when the Republic failed he ended his life in despair. Heinrich Mann (1871–1950) was both a prolific writer of fiction and one of Germany's leading political essayists. In response to the cultural changes of the twenties, he developed a new aesthetic for fiction that helped him preserve his utopian ideal of a democratic Germany. Döblin (1878–1957) expressed his criticism of post-war German society with greatest success in Berlin Alexanderplatz. Thomas Mann (1875–1955) is a representative of those writers who had great difficulty in moving away from their aesthetic and autonomous view of literature to a more “democratic” way of writing.

This essay surveys BBC radio drama from the 1920s to the 1940s to show how these plays exhibit many traits we commonly associate with modernist literature. Because radio drama appealed to the ear alone and often used multiple studios, mixing narrative, music, and sound effects, it embraced certain modernist formal devices such as stream of consciousness, fragmentation, linguistic experimentation, as well as mythic paradigms. While drama is often under-represented in surveys of modernist literature, I argue that radio drama can help to fill this void.

This essay surveys BBC radio drama from the 1920s to the 1940s to show how these plays exhibit many traits we commonly associate with modernist literature. Because radio drama appealed to the ear alone and often used multiple studios, mixing narrative, music, and sound effects, it embraced certain modernist formal devices such as stream of consciousness, fragmentation, linguistic experimentation, as well as mythic paradigms. While drama is often under-represented in surveys of modernist literature, I argue that radio drama can help to fill this void.