Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Part One Interviews
- Part Two A Memoir
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Ancestors
- Chapter 2 On Being Jewish
- Chapter 3 Growing Up in Postwar Socialist Hungary
- Chapter 4 Margit
- Chapter 5 Tapespondence
- Chapter 6 Birth and Demise of a (Counter)revolution: A Boy's-Eye View
- Chapter 7 Broadcasting 1
- Chapter 8 Broadcasting 2
- Chapter 9 Editio Musica Budapest
- Chapter 10 Interviewing: An Obsession
- Chapter 11 Ich war ein Berliner
- Chapter 12 Moving to Vienna
- Chapter 13 Universal Edition
- Chapter 14 Back Catalogue
- Chapter 15 The Psychology of Promotion
- Chapter 16 Farewell and After
- Notes in Retrospect
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Chapter 7 - Broadcasting 1
from Part Two - A Memoir
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Part One Interviews
- Part Two A Memoir
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Ancestors
- Chapter 2 On Being Jewish
- Chapter 3 Growing Up in Postwar Socialist Hungary
- Chapter 4 Margit
- Chapter 5 Tapespondence
- Chapter 6 Birth and Demise of a (Counter)revolution: A Boy's-Eye View
- Chapter 7 Broadcasting 1
- Chapter 8 Broadcasting 2
- Chapter 9 Editio Musica Budapest
- Chapter 10 Interviewing: An Obsession
- Chapter 11 Ich war ein Berliner
- Chapter 12 Moving to Vienna
- Chapter 13 Universal Edition
- Chapter 14 Back Catalogue
- Chapter 15 The Psychology of Promotion
- Chapter 16 Farewell and After
- Notes in Retrospect
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
After an absence of several decades, in May 2011, I visited the wing of Budapest's Broadcasting House, which used to be occupied by the Foreign Broadcasts Department. Not a soul was around. The door to what had been the secretariat of the English Section was locked. Another door, behind which hid the cubicle where I used to type away at my scripts, also refused entry. I felt like a ghost from the past.
When I turned up for work on September 1, 1965, the Foreign Broadcasts Department represented an important branch of Hungarian Radio: it housed a number of “Sections” whose job it was to convince listeners the world over that the socialist system, as realized in the Hungarian People's Republic, was working in an exemplary fashion, proving the superiority of communism-in-the-making over capitalism.
Programs were put on the air in English, German, Italian, Greek, Spanish, and also in Hungarian (it went by the name “Our Native Land”). There was a Central Editorial Board, which provided the sections with daily political commentaries and some other texts to be translated and broadcast by them all. The rest was left to their discretion but was no doubt thrashed out at sessions of section leaders under the chairmanship of the head of the department.
The radio journalists were partly émigré party members, partly Hungarians who were supposed to have a perfect command of the language they broadcast in.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Boulanger to StockhausenInterviews and a Memoir, pp. 303 - 307Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013