Radio Benjamin review – Walter Benjamin’s conversations with strangers in ‘voice land’

The philosopher’s faith in the power of radio is captured in this collection of scripts for his early broadcasts

Walter Benjamin, one of the first theorists to ponder the social impact of mass media, understood that new technologies are somehow supernatural: they elasticise the laws of physics and in doing so extend our physical powers. Benjamin thrilled to the uncanny tales of ETA Hoffmann, who conjured wizards and ogres “out of thin air”, and he was equally entranced by the way thin air mysteriously transmits radio waves. In 1927, five years before he exiled himself from Germany in advance of the Nazi putsch, Benjamin began a series of experimental broadcasts on this new medium. His scripts, here collected for the first time, were conversations with people who remained invisible, unknown – strangers in the limbo he called “voice land”.

Benjamin welcomed radio as a “theatre of education”, less an addition to the stock of “cultural goods” than a means of training the judgment of its audience and encouraging independent thought. He wrote playlets that acted out techniques for resolving “typical conflict situations of modern life”; for instance, demonstrating how to ask your boss for a raise or a friend for a loan – useful tools in the hyper-inflationary 1920s. Benjamin also used radio necromantically: like the medium at a seance, it relayed messages from spirits wandering through the remote German past. In one of his more ambitious scripts, the Voice of the Enlightenment vies with the Voice of Romanticism for possession of the country’s soul, with portentous gongs marking the rounds of the metaphysical debate.

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