Border Territories

Border Territories: Listening to the Soundscapes of Postwar West German Radio Drama explores how narrative radio drama shaped and responded to public discourses on listening, memory, and democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany from 1945 to 1965. Through ten case studies of radio dramas produced at the North(west) German Radio in Hamburg (NWDR/NDR), a creative center of radio storytelling in the postwar period, the book examines the soundscapes of these works as unique acoustic realms where the multilayered and associative power of voices, music, noises, and silence were mobilized to sound what oftentimes could not be said. Part I focuses on the "remapping" of the radio soundscape from the National Socialist ideal of an immersive and homogenizing sound world, into a new discursive space in the immediate postwar period. It traces the development of two distinct dramaturgical styles—the Border Territory, which mirrored the fragmented postwar geography of occupation and experiences of dislocation, and the Radiotopia, a heterogenous realm of plural voices and opinions that reflected the urge toward democratization. Part II focuses on how radio dramas produced by NWDR/NDR in the 1950s and early 1960s responded to a crisis of listening that emerged in the aftermath of National Socialist rule, which questioned whether fascist propaganda had rendered German audiences passive, or if German ears could be "retrained" to become critical receivers. This new history of radio in postwar Germany provides both innovative models for analyzing language and sound in acoustic drama and insights into the complex collaborations between writers, composers, sound engineers, directors, and actors that produced these works.