1. Introduction

In 1955 Heinrich Böll Composed one of the most biting satires about postwar German radio; a short story entitled “Dr. Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen” (Dr. Murke's Collected Silences). The story takes place at a radio station, where Murke spends his days recording and editing, all the while partaking in a secret hobby—at the end of each day he collects the snippets of “dead air” cut from the programs, pastes them together, and brings them home to listen to the silence. For Murke, silence is an antidote to the superficial and morally empty productions of German radio in the age of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle); yet implicit in Murke's desire for silence is a critique of the silencing of the memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust. German radio's complicity in this history is addressed directly in the story by Murke's technician, Humkoke, who reveals his own entanglement with the radio propaganda machine of National Socialism. Speaking of an occasion when he was once asked to cut a four-hour-long speech by Hitler by three minutes, Humkoke quips: “Als ich anfing, das Band zum erstenmal zu hören, war ich noch ein Nazi, aber als ich die Rede zum drittenmal durch hatte, war ich kein Nazi mehr” (As I began to listen to the tape, I was still a Nazi, but after I had heard the tape three times through, I was no longer a Nazi).

Murke's hobby and Humkoke's confession bring to the foreground a disturbing ambivalence rooted in Nazi radio's “assault on the ears”; for these men, silence is a refuge and the act of “tuning out” a necessary defense mechanism. Böll's story, which was read on the radio in a pro-duction by Radio Bremen in 1958 and eventually dramatized as a radio play (SR 1965, SWR/SF 1986), thus grounds the tensions surrounding Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the deep-seated anxieties evoked by the sounds of radio and the act of radio listening that persisted in German-speaking culture well into the 1950s.

Böll was not alone in his desire to use the radio drama genre as a means of critically reflecting on and satirizing both the radio as an institu-tion and postwar society in the Federal Republic more broadly.