Making sunday what it actually should be: sunday radio programming and the re-invention of tradition in occupied Germany 1945–1949

Abstract

Germany at the end of the Second World War was not only a shattered place, but also a shattered time.1 The physical scattering of populations through the mass movements of war and the atomisation of individuals through the oppressive Nazi regime, followed by occupation and the division of Germany into four occupation zones, left Germans with very few collective ‘events’ into which they could place their individual experiences. Oral history and other histories of everyday life consistently reveal that the major milestones of political history, the start of the war in 1939, its end on 8 May 1945, and the founding of the two German states in 1949, did not represent biographical milestones for most of those who lived through the period. Instead, they more frequently remember the war's interruption of their ‘normal’ everyday lives and the markers of the onset of normality at some point in the years that followed. In the place of the war's beginning on 30 September 1939 stand memories of the defeat of the Germa...