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"The Island of Death," the Radioactive Sea, and the Legacy of U235

Well, I wasn’t aware of it when I moved here. Not that such knowledge would have prevented me from moving; but it might have made me more doubtful about my seemingly pristine environs—or about picking the catch of the day from the menu of a local restaurant. The Irish Sea, I mean, and the nuclear waste it contains. Research suggests that the Irish Sea, which separates Ireland from my present home of Wales, is the most radioactive body of salt water on this planet.

Growing up in cold-war Germany, I could conceive of nothing more terrifying than atomic power. My earliest nightmare, which continued to plague me in my pre-pubescence, was of a gigantic bomb. An enormous cannon ball of mass destruction, it was surrounded by a shadowy group of scientists whose proximity to this ominous orb had, to my childish mind, already proven them to be beyond trust and reason.

It was a tableau right out of Dr. Mabuse, or some such German spy-fi horror, reconstructed in the feverish imagination of a troubled child. I have never learned to love the bomb—and never doubted that splitting the atom was nothing short of abject, indefensible madness.

There is no need to conceive of scientists as fiendish or sinister to realize the destructive force of nuclear energy. Whatever the nature of their tamperings with nature, the madmen of melodrama, figures like H. G. Wells’s Doctor Moreau help us cope with our anxieties about scientific experimentation by rendering the unfathomable so grotesque as to classify it as something entirely unrealistic and thus safely distant in the realm of futuristic or fantastic fiction.

On this day, 28 April, in 1947, for instance, one of Moreau’s lesser cousins appeared on US radio’s long-running series of Sherlock Holmes adventures, luring a group of sideshow “freaks” on his remote “Island of Terror” to serve as the guinea pigs for his secret experiments, a study designed to show that the “glandular defects” of his subjects “produce psychological alterations.”

As Holmes endeavored to prove in this decidedly unexceptional piece of run-of-the-mill hokum, truth is “stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” Truth is, however, that fanciful ideas may become physical fact, as the inquisitive minds of the few force man-made realities upon the suffering bodies of the many.

In the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, little was known as yet about the long-term effects of radiation, of the cancers and mutations to threaten future generations. Radio dramatist Norman Corwin was among the first to address the tremendous legacy of the Enola Gay and its deadly mission. “Do not smile, do not smile as though knowing better,” he admonished the nonchalant in “Set Your Clock at U235,” a monologue read on 29 October 1945 by Paul Robeson (pictured above, on the cover for a recording of another radio performance).

Corwin asked Americans the uncomfortable question of what was to become of their “dear-bought, blood-begotten, towering, and grave victory”:

The secrets of the earth have been peeled back, one by one, until the core is bare:

The latest recipe is private, in a guarded book, but the stink of death is public on the wind from Nagasaki:

The nations have heard of the fission of the atom and have seen the photographs: skies aboil with interlocking fury, mushrooms of uranium smoke ascending to where angels patrol uneasily.

Perhaps, Corwin had rather too much trust in mythological figures, in those “angels” on “patrol.” He believed—or at least suggested—that the “chemicking that could destroy us, together with our pots and pans and allies, can also do as bidden by us: outperform whole teams of genii: be servile to the meek: reform our wayward systems peacefully.”

The nuclear disasters of the 1970s and ‘80s should have convinced us that the genii do not feel in any way obliged to “do as bidden by us.” Here, science must be content for once to play itself out on paper. To keep those determined to doctor with or deal in that most lethal of Promethean sparks enchained on the rocks of common sense is our debt to future generations. It’s “elementary.”

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How About a Cup of Freshly Mined Uranium?

Well, we’ve all pulled stunts the memories of which are best pushed back into the farthest recesses of our cranial database—unless, of course, such anecdotal evidence of our dimwittedness might serve some educational purpose or is just too temptingly absurd not to be passed on for a few laughs at our expense. Ever tried walking on water? I sure did—and very nearly drowned in the realization that slipping your feet into a pair of water wings won’t do the trick.

Some folks, myself included, never entirely grow out of this awkward—and at times perilous—stage of rationed rationality, a protracted dizzy spell during which life unfolds as a series of trials by misfire. How comforting it is then to find one’s preposterous self in fictional characters—and to find oneself outdone by them in folly and futility.

At a period in not-too-distant American history—the Great Depression of the 1930s—when formerly secure or relatively well-to-do folks were suddenly forced to live by their wits and found them wanting, radio was a reliable purveyor of reassuring fall-guy tales, stories of crazy schemers like Lum and Abner, proprietors of the Jot-Em-Down Store in the imaginary backwoods community of Pine Ridge, Arkansas.

Never quite satisfied to run their unassuming store, Lum and Abner were always in search of a sure-fire get-rich-quick venture, whether it meant digging for oil or running a matrimonial bureau. Their common sense did not match their ambitions, creating plenty of opportunities for quacks and swindlers.

On this day, 27 April, in 1942, for instance, they were dreaming of real estate, a mighty complex of “Wonderful World Apartments,” for the erection of which they were promised, free of charge, a contractor who, they had not reason enough to doubt, had been responsible for the construction of the Empire State Building.

During the lean years of the depression and the time of personal sacrifices that was World War II, Lum and Abner’s antics were occasionally rendered relevant by drawing attention to a particular need or service, be it the demand for scrap metal or the benefits of local bookmobiles.

Shortly after the end of the war, however, such built-in public service announcements and dramatized propaganda seemed out of touch with listeners who had been told to do without (or do with less) for too long. Freed from the constraint imposed upon them during the war, the creators of radio entertainment could once again be unabashedly escapist and thoroughly commercial.

The dropping of the atomic bomb—a drastic act of getting it done and moving on at last—was greeted as the dawn of a new era: a peaceful one, it was hoped; but certainly one of renewed and indeed unprecedented consumerism, of wish-fulfilment and instant gratification. Rather than being rendered dreadful and threatening, radioactivity was sold to the public as a boon, the very fount of ready-made enrichment.

Barely a month after V-J Day (14 August 1945), Lum and Abner believed themselves to be in possession of this new and most magical source of energy—uranium. If only their neighbor, Cedric Weehunt, had not attempted to boost his own strength by having a sip from the cup supposedly containing “that uranium stuff.” In one of the serial’s ostensibly comic cliffhangers, Lum and Abner assume their friend to have been transformed into a dog as a result of imbibing the substance.

Such clowning around, such Enola Gayety, was a heavy-handed attempt at making light of an incredible burden. Even if the long-lasting effects of radiation were not fully grasped for some time—a horrifying discovery exploited in the sci-fi thrillers of the 1950s—the trivializing of uranium so shortly after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki now comes across as a distasteful act of raising a cup to nuclear fallout, of toasting the loss of thousands of civilians.

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Totalitarian Vistas, Orwellian Dystopias, and the Myopics of Chernobyl

Well, are you ready for United 93, the movie dramatizing the experience aboard one of the planes hijacked on 11 September 2001? New Yorkers were the first to view the film, which premiered last night at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it is being screened alongside sequels and remakes like Mission: Impossible III and Poseidon. Are the popcorn-littered, digital surround-sound blasting multiplexes the most appropriate places to remember the past and commemorate the dead?

Having lived in Manhattan during the terror and aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks—days of fear, frustration, anger and uncertainty—I am doubtful that any traditional film narrative, whether somber of sensational, could deepen our understanding of terrorism, let alone supersede the horrific images that continue to replay in our minds.

Our desire to see for ourselves is sometimes best left unsatisfied, unless the act of seeing—and of not finding—drives home that we must probe not elsewhere, but differently. However impressive, suggestive or manipulative, pictures cannot show us our thoughts that, at best, they can merely provoke. More often, they become too overwhelming or altogether numbing, leaving us in a state of stupefaction in which complex ideas become dim and indistinct, a state quite advantageous to propagandist efforts. I am reminded of the description of the movie theater experience in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a devastating portrait of an insensate mind:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise [. . .]. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman [ . . .] sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself [. . .]. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause. [. . .]

Orwell’s dystopian fiction proved highly useful during the Eisenhower years, when it was appropriated for the purpose of demonizing communist ideals and socialist ideas that, in the depression-stricken period of the FDR administration, had been widely embraced, sanctioned, and partially implemented. A radio adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four that aired on this day, 26 April, in 1953, underscored the timeliness of Orwell’s “prophetic reporting of the future,” by casting newscaster Kenneth Banghart in the role of the narrator.

“Perhaps you’re wondering why a newsman is appearing in a Theatre Guild on the Air dramatization,” Banghart introduced himself and the play.

It’s because George Orwell’s great novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, deals with the most terrifying subject in the news today: the threat to all free men of communism or totalitarian domination in any form. In fiction, Orwell creates for us a picture of what life might be, should the totalitarian forces succeed with their plan to become the earth’s masters.

It was a masterplan that—according to the disposable logic of America’s emerging consumer culture—was the due course of communism itself.

Thirty-three years after this broadcast—on 26 April, in 1986—the iron curtain was still firmly in place, keeping much from view and leaving more to the imagination of cold-war stirred westerners. It did not keep the radioactive cloud from moving westward, however well guarded the secret of the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl—or of its extent, at any rate—might have been. The boundaries we create in our minds, those we mind, and those we mindlessly accept, are no hindrances to the invisible force of destruction unleashed by hubris, ignorance, and greed.

Being pointed to it by someone who is generally a purveyor of visual treats, I took a virtual tour of the wasteland that is the area around Chernobyl today: a ghost world that will remain uninhabitable for generations to come. Not surprisingly, what renders these images—and the video clip above—most profound is what we do not get to see, what becomes tangible only to our receptive minds: the hazards of the half-life, the sorrow of lives lost, and the misery of life’s blind ambitions.

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An X-ray Visionary for the Atomic Age

Magic is the fishiest of arts; so, it seems quite appropriate that, over at New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, illusionist David Blaine attempts to wow onlookers by stepping into a tank of water and staying submerged for a week. I’m not sure whether such aquatics qualify as superheroics, but Gotham Citizen seem more likely to embrace Blaine’s antics than cynical Londoner, who may have cheered Tom Cruise at the Mission Impossible 3 premiere today, but who were less-than-impressed by Blaine’s 2004 out-of-lunch box stunt. After all, the USA are the birthplace of latter-day superheroes such as the 20th-century graphic arts creations whose cinematic offspring keep populating (or perhaps quelling) our imagination, an army of X-Men among whom, the charm of Tobey Mcguire notwithstanding, Superman still reigns supreme.

Although rather fond of comic books as a child—and still partial to the exploits of Tintin and Snowy—I have never been much intrigued by those super-powered, larger-than-life action figures. Indeed, I have always been suspicious of such secular saviors, avenging angels whose awe-inspiring wrath seems to demand the belief that worthy ends—ends worthwhile for you and your kin—justify violent deeds, that trust in some higher power will take care of the alien, the evil, or the merely inconvenient and, for that matter, of everything else amiss in the western-centric universe.

On this day, 25 April, in 1941, the Superman of the airwaves—the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet original having been cloned nearly as often as Santa Claus—was still dealing with comparatively trifling substances like nitrate; four-and-a-half years later, he was facing far more dangerous and destructive forces, personified by the insidious Atom Man. Let’s make that Atom Mann. Shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima, there was nothing more daunting than a nuclear weapon—unless, of course, that weapon was wielded by a runaway Nazi.

Until the Communists could be trusted to take over, after an appropriate period of vilification, the Nazis remained very much alive in American culture as mythical figures of evil incarnate. That they had considerably less political prowess after VJ-Day only made them all the more suitable for seemingly innocuous, a-political thrills, for which purpose they were transformed into characters akin to the wicked stepmother in Grimms’s fairytales.

Outage by nuclear power is what threatened the man of steel in the fall of 1945. As the announcer of the radio serial Superman vs. the Atom Man summed up (in a script published by Watson-Guptill),

Henry Miller, the Nazi Atom Man [ah, that Henry Miller], threatened to destroy every man, woman, and child in Metropolis by drowning! While all police authorities, aided by the army, guard every inch of the city’s waterways, and Superman hover high in the heavens, searching for the deadly foe who has twice brought him close to death, Miller, unseen by anyone, is slipping through the dark woods in the hills above Metropolis, bent on shattering the dam holding back the water in the city’s gigantic billion-gallon reservoir, and engulfing Metropolis!

That atomic power was capable of doing far more lasting harm, such as the fallout still studied and debated in Chernobyl, was apparently deemed too frightening for the listener—and too inconvenient for the serial writer.

In his radio dis-incarnation, Superman may have enjoyed the endorsement of psychologists (as claimed by the contemporary magazine article above); but his presence was nonetheless contaminating the air by spreading the notion that there is always someone out there to put things right—right for the good citizens of a certain nation that believes itself vulnerable enough to be in need of long-range missiles and short-order mythologies.

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Trivializing History Is a Dangerous Assignment

Well, I have always been somewhat of a ham, even though my own life has remained the only long-running drama in which I have had the good fortune to play a sizable part. Yesterday, the cured meat was of the smoked variety. I spent the weekend, it having been a sufficiently dry one, at last, watching our gargantuan compost heap go up in flames (or smolder, at any rate). As the plumes wafted over the fields, I was reminded of the invisible cloud that, back in April 1986, made its way westward across Europe.  

Brian Donlevy in the television version of Dangerous Assignment

I am referring, of course, to the nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl power station, the fallout and immediate aftermath of which I well remember as I saw polluted playgrounds being closed in Germany, pharmacists profit from outbreaks of hysteria, and toxic milk vanish from supermarket shelves (to be shipped, in powered form, to apparently immune consumers in the Middle East). It was a disconcerting experience worth recalling today, as oil prices in the West are rising nearly as fast as concerns about emerging nuclear powers in the East.

Is there any drama equal to the times in which we live? Is it in need of fictionalization? Can—and should—our fears—as far as they are felt by those who prefer to numb their pain or ignore its sources—be melodramatized and acted out for us in order to bring distant terror home and to render vague anxieties concrete?

During World War II, the mass media of radio and film tried to do just that—letting the home front see and vicariously experience what was at stake overseas. Such blatant propaganda would hardly be Hollywood-endorsed or swallowed whole today, be the objective ever so unobjectionable to the many.

I thought about this again last night, when I caught the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce thriller Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), which was shown on the British cable channel UK Drama. In it, the wireless becomes a tool used by the enemy—my ancestors from Germany—to instill fear and doubt in the British people. The air is contaminated by the less than subtle influences of a demoralizing force not unlike that exerted by the infamous Lord Haw Haw.

The thriller sought to counter this terrifying voice by giving the speaker a face, by turning fascism into a concrete figure—and a single one at that. As ideas become flesh, they not only seem more readily conquerable, they very nearly vanish altogether behind the mask created for the purpose of propaganda.

Melodrama operates by processing the abstract—the tangled roots of a problem—into a visible, tangible entity. What makes melodrama unlike life is not that it offers a happy ending—not all melodramas end happily, no matter how strongly our viewpoint might be enforced—but that it embodies and thereby obscures what is most potent and problematic in its disembodiment: the war of ideas.

Melodrama does not encourage its audience to perceive the ideological bases of any problem. It deals in specifics, thereby encouraging us to believe a problem to be solvable if only its manifestations can be overcome. Instead of making us question the sources of our fears—which may well be our own ignorance—melodrama provides more or less ready answers, for which reason it is the idiom of propaganda, used by politicians the world over with considerable success.

What has this to do with Chernobyl, you might ask. Well, the atomic age got under way by creating the illusion that nuclear power is safe as long as it is in the right hands—which means, of course, our own. It was a belief instilled in western minds ever since the dropping of the bomb that ended World War II. Popular storytelling, whether overtly propagandist or not, has assisted in selling atomic power as a safe source of energy and in justifying the nuclear arms race of the cold war.

On this day, 24 April, in 1950, for instance, Steve Mitchell (portrayed by Brian Donlevy) went on another Dangerous Assignment (in a US series of episodic radio thrillers so titled), this time in search of a missing nuclear physicist. A few weeks earlier, Mitchell (pictured above, in one of his TV adventures) had been sent to the Middle East to prevent a uranium-enriched sheik from creating an atomic bomb. The peril, such fictions insisted, lay not in the substance, but in its possessor.

As I shall explore in subsequent essays, the airwaves carried a great deal of such propagandist fiction into US homes during decade following the end of the Second World War; some of these stories trivialized uranium in everyday American life while most others demonized foreigners with a hankering after atomic might.

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Many Happy Reruns: Charlotte Brontë

Well, I am feeling strangely liberated. A few days ago, I learned that my BlogMad account had been wiped out as a result of some database corruption—a common occurrence, if comments from fellow web journalists are any indication. I chose not to sign up anew right away, luxuriating instead in the thought of temporarily forgoing those new-fangled ways in favor of an old-fashioned book. Despite my doctorate in literature, I don’t read nearly as much as I ought to these days. So, I took advantage of the first warm day of the season, ripped off my shirt, and grabbed . . . a Trollope. Anthony Trollope, that is, who happens to be one of my favorite authors. Recently, I picked up his Cousin Henry (my, doesn’t this begin to sound so Carry On!) after discovering that this novel is set in Wales, that strange and wild country west of England I am still struggling to call my home.

Now, Trollope was a decidedly pragmatic novelist. His novels, on the whole, do not concern boys and girls in the throes of love, but—how refreshing!—mature men experiencing various kinds of moral dilemmas or sophisticated quandaries. Elizabeth Bowen wrote a radio play about the author and his characters, but I have yet to come across a production of it. For romance I turn instead to something like Jane Eyre, whose author, Charlotte Brontë, was born on this day, 21 April, in 1816.

What it does not tell you, of course, is that Jane Eyre happens to be one of the most frequently radio-dramatized novels of the Victorian era or, for that matter, of any era. Next to Dickens’s “Christmas Carol,” no other story has aired more often than Jane’s, even though she was often rendered next to unrecognizable in the process.

To those familiar with and fond of the original narrative, the liberties taken by the version-crafters for screen and radio can be rather exasperating. Yet the disdainful sophisticates who dismiss the resulting pop-cultural bastards sight unseen (or sound unheard) sure miss out on some audacious rackets, such as the pitch made by the announcer of the Lux Radio Theatre in the introduction to the 14 June 1948 broadcast of Jane Eyre (or some such gal’s tale)! To accommodate the show’s sponsor, the spokesperson for Lever Brothers was called upon to ponder the question how Ms. Brontë—who, according to one biographer, liked lace—ever managed to wash her clothes without the benefit of Lux Flakes.

Rather more insightful was a radio lecture delivered on 3 April 1949 during the NBC University Theater production of Jane Eyre, in which Deborah Kerr (pictured above, in another kind of commercial dilemma) portrayed the titular heroine. Noted novelist James Hilton provided a brief but smart commentary, touching upon the reception of the novel, its biographical background, its historical significance, and its relevance for twentieth-century audiences.

To be sure, Hilton conceded, Jane Eyre was a “good story with all the popular ingredients—melodrama, romance, and a happy ending”; but

what gave it life is what gave it birth: a quality of passionate imagination which could make a shy spinster governess the equal, in her own mind and by her own showing, of a Sappho or a Cleopatra.

Come to think of it, Hilton’s mentioning of H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica in this context recently induced me—someone more readily influenced by smart authors than smarmy advertisers—to get hold of a copy of the latter novel as well.

Many cuts and bruises were inflicted upon plain Jane during those supposedly aureate days of radio; and, with an emphasis on romantic melodrama at the expense of narration, more attention was drawn to that screaming madwoman in the attic than to the reflections of the troubled young governess who discovered her secret. In this respect, old-time radio was like a Victorian orphanage: expect to find negligence, exploitation, and very little recognition, let alone respect, for the suffering brainchild.

Through it all, Jane Eyre survived considerable hardship and cruelty to remain, to this day, one of the most robust heroines of all fiction.

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On This Day in 1943: Peter Lorre Gives Voice to "A Moment of Darkness"

Well, I am generally slow to catch up. As the broadcastellan maxim—”Keeping up with the out-of-date”—suggests, I am forever belated in my response to the news of the world, food for thought I tend to chew more slowly than the dinner on my plate. Having just learned from a fellow web-journalist that the mind of ousted American Idol finalist Mandisa might be considerably less broad than her frame, I thought of other occasions on which the message of a voice seems out of tune with the messenger, moments in which timbre and text, sound and image, appear to be at odds. One such occasion was “A Moment of Darkness,” a radio play by noted mystery writer John Dickson Carr that aired on this day, 20 April, in 1943.

“A Moment of Darkness” is one of Carr’s ambitious but far from satisfying attempts to make up for the inadequacies of the medium by complicating the kind of plots that radio is least successful in rendering: the “whodunit.” The murder mystery is a genre best suited to novels, page-turners that permit the confounded to do just that: turn the pages, forward and back. On the air, such puzzles are often marred by a lack of pieces, or red herrings, due to the limited number of suspects and clues a listener can be expected to tell apart and pick up within the short time allotted for the drama.

In the fall of 1942, when Carr became the head writer for a fledgling US radio program titled Suspense, he devised alternate ways of mystifying his audience, of casting doubt about the outcome of his thrillers.

As I discuss it in Etherized Victorians, my study on so-called old-time radio, Carr not only asked listeners “whodunit,” but “how done,” by presenting posers involving locked rooms, less-than-obvious weapons, as well ingenious acts of committing and concealing crime. Unlike the reader, the listening audience is rarely equal to this double challenge of guessing the “who” and “how,” considering that there is no chance to recap or retreat in order to evaluate the (mis)information provided. The likely response is that of utter dumbfoundedness, a puzzlement of the least intellectual sort that, in turn, may trigger feelings of exasperation or indifference.

Later Suspense dramatists well understood and expertly solved this problem by emphasizing the “most dangerous game” of the manhunt or exploring the mental state of criminal and victim. Determined to trick his audience with surprises rather than tease them with suspense, Carr decided to heighten the element of doubt and suspicion, to exploit the prejudices of the listener in ways that sounded entirely radiogenic: foreign accents suggesting fiendish acts. In “The Moment of Darkness,” as in Carr’s “Till Death Do Us Part,” such a foreign-tongue twist was delivered by the enigmatic Peter Lorre.

During World War II—and for many years thereafter—harsh Germanic tones often sufficed to taint or undermine a speaker’s message, to make listeners question the sincerity of the utterance or the motives behind it. His Teutonic tongue made Lorre a formidable wartime villain; and his voice, which could be disconcertingly oleaginous, sly, or sinister, inflected with hysteria and madness, only fueled the imagination of Americans prejudiced against foreign influences.

Given the diversity of US culture, however, the networks did not altogether endorse the exploitation of accents—particularly European accents—as reliable signposts of a certain, unmistakable nationality, a mother tongue bespeaking the fatherland of the enemy. Radio writers like Carr were advised not to use voices as a means of identifying—and disqualifying—a speaker as un-American. According to the logic of pre-Political Correctness, Lorre’s character, a sham shaman, is not at all what he sounds, a vocality/locality mismatch that not so much teaches the audience to question their prejudices but to distrust their ears altogether.

There is no such thing as accent-free speech, of course; but those, like me, whose first language is not the one in which they primarily speak are often self-conscious about the sound of their voice, or at least keenly aware of the doubt and derision it might provoke.

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On This Day in 1943: Arthur Miller Asks Americans to "Listen for the Sound of Wings"

As I sat at my desk on this cool, gray April afternoon, looking out onto the Welsh hills, I found myself transported back to—or at least forcefully reminded of—my childhood in Germany. It wasn’t the view of my present surroundings that brought on these not altogether pleasant recollections. It was a recording of Arthur Miller’s “Listen for the Sound of Wings,” a radio play first broadcast on this day, 19 April, in 1943. While not a great dramatic achievement, it serves as a reminder to me just why I have not set foot on German soil in nearly sixteen years.

It is not any single event that made me vow never to return in anything other than a wooden box. It is the sense of being tainted, of being part of a violent and terrifying past which isn’t past at all but still very much present in the minds and attitudes of the German people. That one side of my family was somehow connected with one of the characters in the play—Joachim von Ribbentrop, for whose family my grandmother worked as a seamstress—only makes such reflections about my native country more dreadful to me.

Miller’s play dramatizes the life of Martin Niemöller, a German pastor who dared to speak up against the Nazi regime, and act of treason for which he was imprisoned and for which he nearly lost his life. Miller’s portrayal and the performance of the avuncular, gentle-voiced Paul Lukas, make Niemöller sound like a naïve believer who, concerned about the decline of faith in Germany, agrees to side with the emerging Nazi party when promised that, once in power, the fascists would assist in restoring the erstwhile prominent role of the church.

Eventually, the pastor realizes his grave mistake—an error in judgment that not only endangered his own life but led to the persecution and slaughter of millions. Resisting attempts at cajoling or coercing him into cooperation, he yet remains hopeful as, from his prison cell, he looks westward to “Listen for the Sound of Wings”—the wings of allied planes that to him are angelic messengers who signal that the “word is born again.”

Niemöller’s past, his initial acceptance—and indeed support—of anti-Semitism is being glossed over in this propaganda play to emphasize the message that one of the great American freedoms—the freedom of religion—was under attack elsewhere and that it was a mission of the US military to protect such rights at home and restore or establish them wherever threatened. What Miller’s play does not represent is captured in Niemöller’s own words, uttered some thirty years after the end of World War II. Here is one version of the original (which was initially spoken and not written down), followed by my own translation:

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen, ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen, ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen, ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Juden holten, habe ich geschwiegen, ich war ja kein Jude.
Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

When the Nazis came for the Communists, I kept quiet.  After all, I was not a Communist.

When they locked up the Social Democrats, I kept quiet.  After all, I was not a Social Democrat.

When they came for the Labor Unionists, I kept quiet.  After all, I was not a Labor Unionist.

When they came for the Jews, I kept quiet.  After all, I was not a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

The Germans were fortunate in having had a rescuer in the United States; but enough remains of the spirit of fascism and of professed realizations or belated admissions of its dangers, as exemplified by Niemöller’s story, to make me uneasy about the Teutonic nature. And then there was the time, decades after the end of the Third Reich, when I, too, was introduced to the von Ribbentrop family, my grandmother having remained loyal to them long after Nuremberg. Perhaps that is why, when I am looking eastward, I still listen for the sound of the right wing.

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On This Day in 1944: A Dead Soldier Speaks Up to Stir the Living

I have often found comfort in the notion that the dead may survive in the minds of those who recall them. It is no mere vanity to desire such afterlives. Indeed, the concept of lingering in each other’s thoughts by virtue of some worthy deed or memorable word can be a significant motivational force in our lives. I am not sure, however, whether the self-images we try to instill in the minds of others as potential extensions of our corporeal existence are to be considered a noble attempt at rescuing our finite lives from triviality or whether these transferable or continuing selves are a construct that trivializes the finality of death. After all, does not the realization that we are perishable render each hour we have left so much more significant?

During times of war such as these, the possibility that those lost are never truly gone or might yet return has particular resonance. Radio, in the pre-television years, was often thought of or exploited as a spiritual medium. Gathering around the receiver to hear voices from the unreachable beyond—or the far away, at any rate—could assume all the magic of a conjuring act: a high-tech séance. As I have argued in Etherized Victorians, my doctoral study on so-called old-time radio in the US, broadcast propaganda often availed itself to addresses from the hereafter, words akin to the cries of “Remember me,” uttered by the Ghost in Hamlet, to stir and motivate the listener.

On this day, 18 April, in 1944, such a ghost voice was cast into the living rooms of America by radio playwright Norman Corwin (whose works I have frequently discussed in this journal). It is the voice of a soldier killed in action. “As for his life,” explains the narrator of “Untitled” (a recording of which you may find here),

there is no straightforward account available, but there are several people who could piece it together, although they cannot always be relied on to give you a true interpretation of the facts.

Through the various recollections of others, including those who thought little of him, the soldier’s unwritten biography comes to life. It is a conventional one, all told, if giving your life for an ideal may be justly labeled “conventional.”

Corwin’s soldier is not an action hero, but a man of doubts, a thinking fighter—or fighting thinker—who, in today’s parlance, chose to engage in a war on terror—and that terror, still very much alive today, was fascism. Rather than relying on others to give an account of his beliefs, the dead man picks up on and tears apart their words—some shallow, some insincere—like a radio commentator taking issue with so-called facts. The memories of those lined up to speak for him are proven to be too distorting or inadequate to capture the true self of the deceased who, according to the justice of the radio poet, is now given the opportunity to speak up for himself.

These lines, uttered toward the end of the play, are some of the finest written for radio—or any medium, for that matter. They are worthy of Shakespeare, and certainly worth quoting here and remembering thereafter: “I am dead of the mistakes of old men, / And I lie fermenting in the wisdom of the earth.”

It is not enough to live on in the minds of others from whose sundry impressions our existence might be retraced. Instead of becoming the mental playthings of our contemporaries or former associates, we must seize the chance to communicate our own minds while living. This journal may serve as a record of my thoughts.

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On this Day in 1938 and 1949: Jack Benny Lays an Egg and Hatches It Well

Well, you can’t expect profundities from someone who sports a fake mustache and spots of white paint on his pelt, someone who traipses along the hedgerows in slippers and underwear to go in search of a sound. Easter or not, it was one of those days on which reason lays an egg.

Even if you didn’t observe the self-denial rituals of the season, you can gather that the bleak and lean months are over. You might catch The Easter Parade on television, for instance, or step into a dyed egg that hasn’t been hunted down. You might come to realize that Lent is so yesterday by noticing how the chocolate bunnies have suddenly disappeared from the shop windows, making way for Mother’s Day reminders; or, if you, like me, moved far from the fattening crowd, you can tell it’s time for a feast when the lambs are getting bold or anxious enough to bolt and too big to make it back into the fold once it gets tangled up in wires and brambles, as was the misfortune of the lost one above. Is it just me, or does the woolly one bear a resemblance to American Idol finalist Elliot Yamin?

Now, I am neither shepherd nor hunter. I was busy spring-cleaning, freshening up the paint on my bedroom walls (hence the aforementioned spots), when I got distracted by the noisy lament of the latent dish across the way. Protecting one’s patch of green from being chomped up by hunting down the voracious herbivore that will soon be someone else’s dinner is, though a seasonal probability, not exactly a tradition to be cherished. Unlike Jack Benny’s Easter gambols, which took place on this day, 17 April, in 1938, among animals far wilder and people more peculiar than those above described

Gaily attired in a “funny double-breasted suit” and that most radiogenic of footwear–squeaking shoes–Benny decides to cut short his weekly broadcast to take his gang to the circus. The old skinflint even springs for a round of balloons. Resident crooner Kenny Baker is unimpressed by the offer: “Naw, that’s for children. I want a Tom Collins.” You’d appreciate one, too, getting through some of these early routines.

Having feasted their eyes on the sideshow attractions touted as the “most stupendous aggregation of freaks and curiosities this world has ever seen,” they all saunter over to the main tent, only to learn that Benny’s free passes are no good. Leave it to Benny to come up with a solution that does not involve payment, even if it leads him straight into a lion’s cage.

Eleven years later, on 17 April, in 1949, Benny, just returned from New York, was heard Easter-Parading down Wilshire Boulevard. The creaky old routines sure had gotten smoother since 1938, even though success did not stop Benny, whose long-running program had just changed networks, from being troubled by thoughts of cancellation, as this excerpt from his diary reveals:

April 8: Talked to my sponsor today.
April 9: Talked to my sponsor today.
April 10: Talked to my sponsor today.
April 11: Talked to my lawyer today.
April 12: My lawyer talked to my sponsor today.
April 13: My lawyer will be my summer replacement.

As Benny strolls down to La Brea, greeting passers-by in Easter Parade fashion, there are amusing run-ins with a motley crew of recurring characters (including Benny’s frustrated violin teacher Professor LeBlanc and the chirpy Mr. Kitzel; listening in on the wire are nonchalant telephone operators Mabel Flapsaddle and Gertrude Gearshift).

I would fit right in, I think, especially with that fake mustache I just mentioned. It’s not that I am too follicle-challenged to sprout one. I drew it last night to humor my adopted family, the folks in Connecticut and New York for whom I had appeared on camera for a holiday video conference. They had never seen me without facial hair, which I took off a few days ago after a failed attempt at Don-Amecheing it to pencil-thin perfection. In fear of being threatened with a “summer replacement” of my own, I swiftly grabbed the next best pen and transformed myself for my fastidious audience. As it turns out, the ink is of the waterproof and permanent variety. Now, pardon me while I continue my spring cleaning in front of a mirror . . .