Introduction and Contexts

Abstract

This book departs from a single historical observation: in the years immediately following the unconditional surrender of Germany in May 1945, the radio was the best-preserved and most popular medium of mass communication. Almost without interruption from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s, the radio was not only the primary source of information, but also one of the cheapest sources of entertainment and one of the wealthiest supporters of culture. During the Allied occupation of Germany after 1945, this dominance was particularly pronounced. Most radio stations only fell silent for a matter of weeks or even just days before restarting under the authority of the Allied occupiers. By contrast, newspapers were locally bound and plagued by paper shortages, and cinemas were showing mostly older and foreign films while the German film industry slowly began production.1 Indeed, an argument can be made that if ‘Germany’ was to be found anywhere in 1945, it was more in the airwaves than amidst the rubble landscapes, mass migrations and fragmented populations that characterized Europe at the end of the Second World War. Particularly during a period of time when the boundaries of nation and region, as well as ‘public’ and ‘private’, were being rebuilt and reconfigured, the dominance of a medium that both transgresses and helps to define such boundaries had profound implications for the way Germans came to imagine themselves and the nation(s) that would emerge. This book explores those implications by charting numerous ways that radio broadcasting addressed and maintained practices of everyday life in the western occupation zones that became the Federal Republic in 1949.