Harry Heuser

27th Jan 202512th Mar 2025

“… an America that must never happen—that will never happen!”: Revisiting US American Anti-Third Reich Propaganda in the Second Age of MAGA

The script for “Chicago, Germany” as it appeared in the June 7-13 issue of Radio Life

Delving into the “Draft and Ideas” folder set aside for this blog, I came across a fragment titled “‘Chicago, Germany’: A 1940s Radio Play for Our Parallel Universe.” It was intended for posting on 10 November 2016 as a response to a “Trump administration having become a reality.” The draft was abandoned, but no other piece of writing was published in its place.

In fact, the next entry in this journal did not appear until 15 May 2017, and it coincided with the opening of Alternative Facts, an exhibition I staged with students at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, in Wales.

As the abandoned fragment and the ensuing hiatus suggest, the “reality” of the Trump presidency had so rattled me that I could not bring myself to continue a blog devoted to the popular culture of yesteryear, as much as I had always tried to de-trivialize bygone trifles not only by examining them in the context of their time but also by relating them to the realities of the present day.

The exhibition project that kept me busy in the interim, had similar aims. Alternative Facts provided me, as a curator and educator, with an opportunity creatively to engage with the outrage of MAGA by appropriating a phrase that encapsulated the duplicity and travesty of those early days of spurious swamp-draining.

Fast forward to 20 January 2025, the day that Trump returned to office, by the popular demand that is a product of his populist brand, with the singular and single-minded vengeance of a MAGA-loomaniac. Pardon the execrable pun, but I find no words other than that crass neologism adequately to describe a US President who pardons rioters storming the Capitol and defecating on democratic principles, much to the Nazi-salute inspiring enthusiasm of enabling, super-empowered and quite literally high-handed oligarchs who, I suspect, will, rather than Elon-gate this reign, eventually assume the gilded let’s-lay-democracy-to-rest-room that, in the interim, is the seat of Trump’s throne,

It struck me that the time was ripe for—and indeed rotten enough—to pick up pieces of that draft in light or dimness of the current and perhaps irrevocably changed political climate, which, far from incidentally, is the only human-made climate change we are likely to hear about from the US government for the duration, as dramatically shortened for our species and for most lifeforms on our planet as that time may have become in the process.

As a melodramatist who staged the end of the earth both on radio and for the movies (in the 1951 nuclear holocaust thriller Five), Arch Oboler would have much to say about all this—except that what Albert Wertheim has called his “penchant for altered reality” was being “married to his anti-fascist zeal” in propaganda plays sponsored by or at least aligned with the objectives of the US government during the FDR years.

20th Jan 202520th Jan 2025

The Medium Is the Murder: Technology, Human Nature, and “The Voice That Killed” (1923)

Illustration for “The Voice That Killed” (1923) by Leo Bates (1890-1957)

“There is a modern touch about this story that stamps it with the brand of originality.” That is how the editors of Detective Magazine introduced “The Voice That Killed,” a short work of fiction that first—and, as far as I can tell, last—appeared in print on 28 September 1923. The man responsible for this slight but nonetheless noteworthy “touch” of the “modern” was Gwyn Evans (1898-1938), a writer best known for his fanciful contributions to the sprawling Sexton Blake Library.

While I am not prepared to pursue Evans’ trail into the far recesses of that vault of once popular culture, I have read enough of his stories to get the impression that “The Voice That Killed” is representative of Evans’ none-too original fascination with—or, perhaps, his adroit cashing in on the widespread ambiguity of his readers toward—modernity and the rapidity with which, in the years between the two World Wars, technology was transforming every aspect of human life, consuming some lives in the process.

18th Dec 202419th Dec 2024

The Wireless, Herr Doktor Flesch, and the Devil: Hearing, Reading and Translating “Zauberei auf dem Sender” (1924), the First Radio Play Broadcast in Germany

Publication of “Zauberei auf dem Sender” in issue 35 of *Funk* (December 1924)

What is this sound and fury? Just who is behind it all? And why? Rather than making assumptions about the receptiveness—or perceptiveness—of radio listeners back in October 1924, I asked myself those questions as I tuned in belatedly and indirectly, via the internet, to a 1962 recreation of the orchestrated chaos that is Hans Flesch’s Zauberei auf dem Sender.

Subtitled “Versuch einer Rundfunkgroteske” (“an attempt at a radio grotesque”), Zauberei is widely considered to be the earliest exponent of the Hörspiel (literally, “ear-play”) to be broadcast in Germany, or, to be precise, that nation’s Weimar variant, Germany’s first, flawed and spectacularly failing experiment in democracy.

In December 1924, a few weeks after the play was performed live in a studio in Frankfurt am Main, the script appeared in an issue of Funk, a German periodical devoted to radio technology and broadcasting.

Now, “Funk” in German refers to wireless transmission—but, when it comes to Zauberei auf dem Sender, the “funk” you may be left with could well be blue.

27th Nov 202412th Mar 2025

“… unequal emission”: “Interference,” “Modern Wireless,” and the “Wilds of Electronia”

Illustration by Ern Shaw (*Modern Wireless*, Nov. 1924)

“Many plays have been broadcast, but none of them seems to me to have the pep that is needed to get not merely across the footlights but across the ether.” Complaints such as this one are all too familiar to me; in fact, they were launched so frequently against radio culture that, years ago, they prompted me to contest them.

To misappropriate the famous question posed by the feminist critic Linda Nochlin, I asked “Why Are There No Great Radio Writers?” The objective was not to find examples to the contrary—those queer, quirky and quicksilver exceptions that can serve to prove the rule—but to query the question itself as (mis)leading and to expose the biases underlying it.

5th Nov 20247th Nov 2024

Resonant Bodies, Wandering Mind: Indirections Leading to Pável Aguilar’s “Acordeones Anticoloniales” (2022) via Naples, Cologne, New York City and Aberystwyth

Pável Aguilar, Acordeones Anticoloniales (2022), “New Humanism”; installation view, Museum Ludwig; photograph by Harry Heuser

Get out much? Going places? Ready to take the part of “tourist”? Loaded with loathsome connotations, “tourist” has become a tainted word associated with a lack of regard for the cultures and customs of people who are forced to host the multitudes heading south for a few rays of sunshine and a dip in the sea, or whatever the local attractions the attractiveness of which the locals are promptly deprived by strangers that temporarily lay claim to them.

I am a “visitor,” not a “tourist.” That is a distinction I have always insisted on making when the latter label is affixed to me by New Yorkers, native or otherwise, who assume that my non-native tongue will stop wagging eventually to lick stamps set aside for picture postcards showing sights in the absence of which, once my “vagabond shoes” are back where they presumably belong, I am destined to suffer those “little town blues.”

To my mind, “visitor” better represents the close relationship that I—made in Germany, remade in/by NYC and based in Wales, as my Instagram profile proclaims—have with certain places, including Manhattan, whose sounds I recorded during my first visit in 1985 so that I might envelop myself in the metropolitan air by playing them back in the smalltown confines of my parents’ house.

Not that returning to places we once called home always feel like a homecoming, as my visit to that house in December 2022, after an absence of thirty-four years, persuasively drove home.

It was on that trip to the motherland that I went back as well, albeit not for the first time, to Museum Ludwig, the opening of which in 1986 I had greeted as a sign that Cologne had finally moved out of the shadow of the cathedral that towers over the cityscape like a two-fingered salute.

In front of Wallraf-Richartz Museum and Museum Ludwig, with Cologne Cathedral in the background, 20 Nov. 1988

Coming back, I was relieved to find that, during my absence, Museum Ludwig had not stood still and was still committed to engaging with the here and now, as its exhibition series Hier und Jetzt promises to do. Especially reassuring to me was the series’ 2022/23 iteration Anti-colonial Interventions (8 Oct. 2022 – 5 Feb. 2023). “Identity and Otherness” had long been a thematic strand of my art history teaching, whose attention to the marginalized derives from a personal history of dislocation, estrangement, and longing.

17th Oct 202417th Oct 2024

Retroactive Selfies: Hidden Snapshots, Open Wounds

“Keeping up with the out-of-date” am I? Well, sometimes the motto I chose for this journal hits home like a slap in the face. Not a knock-out punch, mind. Just the kind of cuff that crimsons the cheek all the more because it is unnervingly public. Now, I am not slap-happy. If I keep going way back for more and go on reflecting at length on the ostensibly passé that others could care less about it is because, to my mind, time is not of the essence. That lingering tingle is, and I sting easily.

Whether or not we engage with it, there is no out-of-date as long as our memory serves. Or, rather, it dictates, like a fingerpost redirecting us into the remotest regions of our mental landscape. When it comes to our past, it matters little how long ago an experience dates back or however long in the tooth we are getting. The past can still get at us, provided we are fortunate enough—if indeed we feel quite so appreciative—to have faculties that keep us from letting bygones be … well, you know the rest.

17th Sep 202418th Sep 2024

The Defined, the Definitive, and the Infinite: Thoughts Provoked by the Absence of “A Million Casks of Pronto”

Scoop up a tidbit, seemingly at random, however half-baked or nutritiously dubious. Ask what made you stick your fork—or spork or chopstick—in it. Reflect on why that morsel suits your palate, if indeed it does, at that particular moment in time. Present your thoughts on a platter meant for sharing. Hope for company, but don’t count on it. That, in a coconut shell has been my approach to writing for the web since I commenced this journal back in the blogging heyday of 2005. Eight hundred and forty-seven entries on, I am still at it, even though my diet, constitution and taste for potluck have changed considerably.

Not that I know exactly what those “Million Casks of Pronto” alluded to in the title of this blog entry contain; but more about that in as “pronto” as I can manage, especially since, as Wordsworth might have put it, these are lines composed a few minutes from Bronglais Hospital, where I went—and went under—for an endoscopy today. Gallstones be damned, I am in a reflective mood, and those “Casks,” which were tossed onto the airwaves back in 1924, have been on my mind for quite some time now.

31st Aug 202411th Oct 2024

The Posthumous Papers of the Uranium Club: Farm Hall, Stagecraft, and Lecturing in a Pickwickian Sense

Cover of the theater program for the Theatre Royal Haymarket production of *Farm Hall* (2024)

No horses—wild, domesticated or strictly metaphorical—would have dragged this fool (meaning, yours truly) to see Only Fools and Horses, a musical adaptation of a 1980s Britcom that made hay of nostalgia at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, where it enjoyed a record run before the stable doors closed, at last, in April 2023. How relieved was I then, returning to London after an eighteen-month-long hiatus, to find that what I assumed to be legitimate drama or, at any rate, a show beyond the dog-and-pony variety had returned to a venerable venue where, over the years, I had taken in plays as varied as William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? (2000), and James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter (1966).

Granted, none of those theatrical evenings—certainly not the heavy-handed 2015 revival of the delightfully immaterial Harvey—were more memorably dramatic than The Rivals, during the 23 December 2010 performance of which I witnessed a member of the cast gallantly jumping off the stage to assist a fellow theatregoer suffering a stroke.

Nothing approaching such drama, scripted or otherwise, materializes in the course of the ninety minutes or so that historian Katherine Moar sets aside for the development of her episodic “snapshot,” as she calls it, of Farm Hall, the titular setting of a play about what happened in the summer of 1945 when a group of German nuclear scientists—members of the Uranium Club—were being kept under surveillance at a house in Cambridgeshire, only to learn, listening to news broadcast by BBC radio, that the United States had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

31st Jul 20242nd Aug 2024

Kamala’s Laugh: Risibility, Homo Ridens, and the Hope of “Good Riddance”

Granted, this 1945 book has little to do with
the current debate about statespersonship and laughter

You might say that laughter has gotten us into this mess. Well, I am saying it, and I, though hypergelastically inclined (meaning laughter-prone) in my youth, am not laughing much at and about this present moment in time. By “mess”—an understatement, surely—I mean the state of global politics, and the state of our political discourse in particular.

Could laughter—supposedly the best medicine—also get us out of this mess? Might it be a symptom of our ailment as well as its cure? Not, I venture, if we carry on trying to laugh it all off. In the act of trivializing matters in hopes of dematerializing danger by declaring it risible, we run the risk of nixing democracy—a system predicated on the willingness to listen—altogether, throwing it away with a hearty tossing back of our heads in a communal display of hilarity. A ditch, after all, is not called a ha-ha for nothing.

16th Jul 2024

Asphalt Expressionism: The Creativity of Looking

I have been asked, at some point during the run of my exhibition at Gallery Gwyn, to give a talk. I requested that the event be announced as ‘an evening with.’ Asphalt Expressionism was intended to be inclusive and interactive, and the scheduled get-together, likewise, should promote exchange. A conversazione, perhaps, but not a lecture.

Given that the smartphone is my primary means of creating the images huddled under the fanciful umbrella of Asphalt Expressionism—a series of digital photographs of New York City sidewalks—reference to the ubiquitous technology strikes me as an effective way of connecting with those who, phone no doubt in hand, might be joining me that evening.