The published script as it appeared in We Stand United, an anthology of radio plays by Stephen Vincent Benét and “decorated” by Ernest Stock.
I commenced this journal back in 2005. It was intended as a continuation of, and promotional vehicle for, my doctoral study “Etherized Victorians: Drama, Narrative, and the American Radio Play, 1929–1954.” Its title, broadcastellan, was meant to declare me to be keeper of a vast Luftschloss—a neglected alcazar of the air, immaterially composed of numberless radio recordings I determined to play back.
As of this post, broadcastellan is nearing its twentieth anniversary. While I do not take this as an opportunity, let alone an excuse, to reissue older posts, I nonetheless wonder: When history seems to be repeating itself, perhaps I may be justified to do the same, if only to demonstrate that not every “been there” necessarily translates into a feeling of “done that,” and that not all twice-told tales are a rehash—not, at least, when you approach them from a perspective that has profoundly, even fundamentally, changed along with the context, your life experience and your attitude toward the world.
I devoted one early entry to “The Undefended Border” (1940), a play by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943). Revisiting it now, in the age of the MAGA tariff wars and annexation threats, I cannot but think of the loose cannon that is recklessly flouting, or at any rate tarnishing, the legacy of the rusty “lone cannon” commemorated in Benét’s play.
The Bookshop by the Sea, where I purchased A Century of Detective Stories
The Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth, where I live, has no shortage of bookstores, first-hand and otherwise. At one of them—The Bookshop by the Sea, which sells both old and new volumes—I purchased, some time ago, A Century of Detective Stories. Published in 1935, it is an anthology of crime and mystery tales introduced by G. K. Chesterton, whose outrageous “Fad of the Fisherman” I found occasion to discuss here previously.
Ystwyth Books, where I purchased Death by Marriage by E. G. Cousins on the day I posted this blog entry.
Trying to live up to its title, A Century of Detective Stories is a brick of pulp, and it is not easy to handle when you are reclining in a lounge chair hoping to catch those rare vernal rays that are the oft unfulfilled promise of summer on the typically temperamental and frequently bleak west coast of Britain.
Oxfam Bookshop, Aberystwyth, where someone beat me to a large selection of Three Investigators books on the day of writing this entry.
Aberystwyth and its environs have, in part for that reason, been the setting of murder mysteries, among them the noirish detective series Hinterland and the quirky retro-noir novels of Malcolm Pryce. And, as I am writing this, the place is a veritable crime scene, with local booksellers displaying mystery novels and hosting literary events dedicated to the art of murder. It is all part of Gwyl Crime Cymru, billed as “Wales’ first international crime fiction festival.”
Waterstones, Aberystwyth, where I tend to purchase copies of British Library Crime Classics.
Meanwhile, I am still catching up with A Century of Detective Stories. Selections include narratives by Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Marie Belloc Lowndes, as well as works by some of the biggest names in crime fiction written between the two World Wars: Agatha Christie, H. C. Bailey, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Edgar Wallace, to drop just a few. The diversity of this collection is part of its strength and appeal. Its title is nonetheless misleading.
First page of the script for the first episode of You Can’t Do Business with Hitler
“This is Douglas Miller speaking. I’ll be very blunt and to the point. I want to give you a picture of Nazi trade methods and Nazi business methods as I saw them during my fifteen years in Berlin.” Intimate and immediate in the means and manner in which, in the days before television and internet, only network radio could reach the multitudes of the home front, the speaker addressed anybody and somebody—the statistical masses and the actual individual tuning in. The objective was to persuade the US American public that “You Can’t Do Business with Hitler.”
The statement served as the title of a radio program that first went on the air not long after the US entered the Second World War in the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, an act of aggression that prompted the United States, and US radio, to abandon its isolationist stance. Overnight, the advertising medium of radio was being retooled for the purposes of propaganda, employed in ways that were not unlike the methods used in Nazi Germany.
You Can’t Do Business with Hitler was also the title of a book by Miller on which the radio series was based. Upon its publication, lengthy excerpts appeared in the July 1941 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, the editor of which introduced the article by pointing out that Miller had personally “observed German industry and particularly noted the ruthless determination with which it was directed after Hitler came to power.”
During the 1920s and ‘30s, Miller had served as Commercial Attache to the American Embassy in Berlin and had subsequently written an account of his experience. In You Can’t Do Business with Hitler, he argued that his long record of service “entitle[d]” him “to make public some of [his] experiences with the Nazis and—after drawing conclusions from them, discussing Nazi aims and methods—to project existing Nazi policy into the future and describe what sort of world we shall have to live in if Hitler wins.”
Posting this—the 855th—entry in my blog, on the day after the national election in Germany in 2025, in which the far-right, stirred by Elon Musk and JD Vance, chalked up massive gains, and in the wake of the directives and invectives with which the second Trump administration redefined US relations with many of its global trading partners—I, too, am projecting, anticipating what “sort of world” we shall find or lose ourselves if “Nazi methods” take hold in and of western democracies.
Far from retreating into the past with a twist of the proverbial dial, I am listening anew to anti-fascist US radio programs of the 1940s to reflect on the MAGA agenda in relation to the strategies of the Third Reich regime, asking myself: Can the world afford to do business with bullies?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Harry Heuser 