Radiofimmel: German radio in popular fiction, film, and the urban novel, 1923--1932

The unparalleled significance of social technologies to modern culture is largely undisputed. Instruments of mass communication—radio, television, film, and the internet—not only dictate how we communicate but how we perceive reality. During the Weimar Republic, radio\u27s ability to circumvent international space, rapidly transmit information, simultaneously address millions and, in the process, dramatically reconfigure how audiences accessed news, engaged art, and spent their leisure time, ignited a new era in cultural history. And yet, rather than confronting the range and scope of Weimar\u27s cultural response to wireless, the historiography of radio has largely confined itself to matters of institutional development and daily programming: studies examining institutional development have been primarily dedicated to the political and financial considerations which launched the radio industry, while studies investigating daily programming have been mainly devoted to an art form made for the airwaves, namely Hörspiel.^ In contrast, my dissertation assembles new representations of radio broadcast found in popular journals, science fiction novels, and silent film, interrogating how modern culture\u27s rapidly expanding technocult(ure)—replete with new media fantasies of utopian households and socio-cultural equity—was also plagued by fears of disembodiment, mind control, alien invasions, and home-surveillance. As I examine how these low culture depictions often anticipated and even formulated high culture debates concerning virtual reality, I reveal how radio triggered a period in cultural history when sound aesthetics challenged visual paradigms of artistic representation in literature and film. Significantly, whereas most studies engaging this phase of media history document radio adaptations of literature (think Hörspiel), my study documents the inclusion of radio aesthetics in literature. Moreover, this study presents crucial data regarding radio\u27s impact on modern cinema, uncovering the sound medium\u27s decisive influence on the content and form of celebrated sound films. In sum, via a host of new, yet to be discussed cultural artifacts my project probes the debut of wireless technology in pulp fiction and silent film, revealing radio\u27s high-profile emergence in works of art and culture beyond the airwaves and establishing the critical role of radio aesthetics in Weimar literature and film.