11 - On the Air: Clandestine Radiophonic Protest Groups in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, 1976–77

Summary

I. Introduction

In The German-Speaking Regions of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the common practice of listening to the radio is deeply rooted to this day in an imperialist and thoroughly misogynistic war economy despite independent radio's persistent efforts to recast itself as a story or his-tory machine—a Geschichtsmaschine, as free as a bird. The vehemently contested role of this “medium of socialization” can be traced in the checkered fates of those broadcasting practices little concerned with upholding the status quo or even adamantly opposed to it. Identifying the breaks and continuities in their endeavors sheds some light on socio-technological and sonic aspirations to democratize society, which still reverberate with radio producers and listeners today.

II. Radio Policy Interrupted

The advent of radio in the early twentieth century opened up entirely new ways of doing politics. The mass medium forged practices that allowed it to govern listening in two ways. First, it addressed content and auditory modes of dramaturgy—in a now allegedly “authentic” voice—to a poten-tially infinite public that it constructed, familiarly, as “dear listeners.” Second, the socio-technological strategies pursued in, with, and through the medium of radio established certain listening environments that served to discipline, domesticate, and homogenize the public broadcast and any bodies engaging with it.

Media philosopher Bernhard Siegert points out that pioneers of radio in Germany emerged from the military context. It was their technical training and experience in wiretapping, and the simplicity characteristic of the early “wireless sets,” that enabled the Funker (radio and telephone operators) both to receive and transmit signals. Immediately after World War I, the German Army's intelligence unit reported that a large num-ber of these devices had been stolen from within its own ranks. A short time later, former military Funker occupied two radio stations of the Deutsche Reichspost (German Imperial Mail), near the capital, as well as a telegraph office in Berlin. Amid the revolutionary upheaval, these events fueled a diffuse fear of revolt by technologically savvy networks. It is this event that inspired Siegert's reflections on radio as a contested cultural technique encompassing the acts of speaking, transmitting, receiving, jamming, and listening—and also interference.