Hans Flesch – Harry Heuser

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.

Tag: Hans Flesch

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

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