In the meantime the case had already been clarified by 1930: after so many Shakespeares, Ibsens, Kleists, Schillers and Goethes, finally radio art, absolute or not, came in abundance: Ernst Johannsen's "Brigadevermittlung" in Munich, Fritz Walter Bischoff's "Song" in Breslau", Friedrich Wolf's "Sos ... rao ... rao .. .foyn ... Krassin rettet Italia" in Frankfurt, as well as Bert Brecht's "Der Flug des Lindberghs" (Lindbergh's Flight), Erich Kästner's "Leben in dieser Zeit" (Life In These Times), Arno Schirokauer's "Magnetopol", and finally even Günther Eich's "Leben und Sterben des Sängers Caruso" (Life and Death of the Singer Caruso), these were original radio plays in unprecedenled qualily and quantity. Fritz Walter Bischoff was of the same opinion: "It only remains to be said", we read "that the two aforementioned directions in radio play development in German broadcasting can be clearly distinguished since 1928. The one seeks to build up the radio play from the valid contents of its poetic - dramatic expression, developing and adapting it to radio. The words, the poetry, are only means to an end for the other direction, in developing an acoustic scenery which following from film, is completely new in tempo and rhythm." [2] No contradiction, as Bischoff found, but still reason enough to lean on the cinematographic, which the literary world of the time understood as the epic techniques of close-ups and inner montages of a D. W. Griffith. In olher words to mentally combine the close-up there with the idea of the acoustical here, whereby original works and adaptations were not to be seen as contradictory, - all this was already practically oriented theory and was begging to be written up.

The legendary radio theorist Richard Kolb writes in the fall of 1930: "Radio waves are like the stream of consciousness (current of thought) which floods through the world. Each of us is connected to it, everyone can open himself to it to receive the thoughts that move the world. The infinitely free stream of consciousness meets our small, closed circle of thought, fed and charged by energies, and through the fine antenna network of our nerves, sets it vibrating .... The invisible stream of consciousness that comes from the source of all and sets the world in motion, is itself set vibrating, directed and guided by the Creative word, that was at the beginning, and carries within the will toward enlightenment of its Creator." [3]

I am quoting from that theoretical text on radio broadcasling which, since its inception, has been more often quoted than any other. Its author: a hardened Nazi, by no means unimportant - later, under Goebbels, broadcasting director in Berlin and Munich where he was responsible for the anti-Austrian hate campaign prior to 1938. It makes one suspicious when no importanl post-war radio broadcasting theorists, neither Heinz Schwitzke nor Eugen Kurt Fischer in 1963, who apologetically place Kolb into the limelight, neither Heißenbüttel nor Friedrich Knilli in the 70's mention these facts. Why, I ask, are such dubious and deleterious paths so persistent in radio broadcasting theory?

Richard Kolb's main thesis is the voice as a bodiless entity.[4] "In the middle", he writes, "stands at every moment the giant image of man, so overwhelming that it fills out the space between heaven and earth."[5]

Lessing is forced to bear the brunt of explaining the "mouvements of the voice" to us, the nuctuations and soaring of voice tones which produce that soulful empathy in the listener: "Not the speaker in front of the microphone is Fiesko, Orest, the Monk ... , but a part of the listener himself, and the co-actors and adversaries become voices of his heart or conscience.[6] Kolb is referring to the famous original radio play by Eduard Reinacher: "Der Narr mit der Hacke" (the fool with the axe), Cologne 1930.

And then come the so often quoted statements: "The Word as creative energy can rise above the voice as a bodiless entity. No longer bound to an image or visual presence, it turns into pure energy as an expression of ... emotional perfection, ... an event in its own rite. It aims at the Source, at the dissolution of everything material, contains the timeless laws and encompasses Beginning and End. Here concepts end, and only the Poet has the Word."[7]

lf this flat school teacher metaphysics, if this crazed psychologizing subjectivity in the fall of 1930 is supposed to have a purpose, then that of covering something up, and that of preparing something. What is covered up is that which radio producers may forget only at the penalty of losing touch with reality: that the radio is a technical communication medium. The Nazis - as we will see - never forgot this. And what is being prepared in this puffed up philosopher's German is the basis of an historically unique (mis)use of media, in which the aesthetics of mass military marches, parades, reports, speeches, uniformed role calls, torch light parades and radio plays will create an amalgam of barbarian propaganda in the calculated interests of fascist power. Or as Kolb says: "Entwined in the consciousness of the people, (the radio play) must enhance and heighten the existence of the individual".[8] Such statements are plain Goebbels-German.