When Christoph Schlingensief was awarded the Blind War Veterans' Radio Play Prize for 2002 in the Assembly Hall of the German Federal Council in July this year for his radio play "Rosebud" (WDR 2002), there was no lack of astonishment when the award-winner announced "the birth of revolution from the spirit of the radio play". As an iconoclastic matter, the radio play's mission is to destroy "the pictures imposed on us". Quoting Wagner in his acceptance speech, Schlingensief further asserted, "that the opportunity of the radio play lies exactly there, where the fatigue of the mediocrats, the simulation administrators, the truth constructors begins. […] Therefore we demand: no more external simulations that force us to deceit, but rather the liberation of inner images outside our own bodies. […] No revolution ever started in palaces or parliaments. Which broadcaster, which theater could claim for itself that it had even begun to reach, much less rattle systems? Is not the revolutionary force of `The Mute Girl of Portici' found less in the opera itself than in the revolutionary images that it developed in the minds of those listening? Which format is more directly aimed at the head?" It is in its effect, its signal effect, that the extremely hidden revolutionary force of the radio play as an art form is found. ¹
When Schlingensief proclaimed at the end of his speech, "And then we'll make a revolution and then another and another!", the partially disconcerted audience became aware that the reality presented here purposely had an extremely fragile, in fact staged tone. It is probable that the host and speaker before Schlingensief, the current chairman of the Federal Council and Minister President of Saxony-Anhalt Böhmer (CDU), did not immediately recognize that the proclamation was also an adapted quotation ("And then we'll do another radio play and then another and another!") from Schlingensief's radio play "Rocky Dutschke '68" (WDR 1997). Nevertheless, despite his bored expression, Böhmer could not avoid hearing Schlingensief's tirades against his party and especially against the Hessian Minister President Roland Koch, relating in particular to the fight orchestrated by Koch about the referendum on migration laws in March 2002 in the same room. In other words, Christoph Schlingensief, the enfant terrible of the nineties, had managed - with a grotesque farce of the Berliner Republic, in fact - to turn the radio play into political reality for the space of an unreal moment. Although this was a staged reality, it was one with real actors and a real setting. The fact that the award of the Blind Veterans' Radio Play Prize in this location represents the only opportunity for a radio play author, who is not likely to be a member of the Federal Council, to proclaim the revolution in this hall, must have had the effect of a invitation from fate for Schlingensief. Since he has an actress say, "I want the Blind War Veterans' Prize" ² in one of his radio plays, "Lager ohne Grenzen" ("Camp without Borders", WDR 1999), this invitation appears all the more to present itself as a self-fulfilling prophecy and Schlingensief as the prophet, who came to the mountain.
On the other hand, the fact that even the ARD news program covered the radio play award presentation for the first time is probably due more to the publicity attached to the name Schlingensief than the content of his speech – ARD, which had already invoked a possible scandal with the production of "Rosebud", did not even bother to mention the proclaimed revolution. The scandal no longer takes place. This was once different, as Wolf Wondratschek refused in 1970 to accept the Blind War Veterans' Prize, considered the most prestigious distinction for radio plays in German, for his play "Paul oder die Zerstörung eines Hörbeispiels" (WDR/BR/HR/SR 1969) at the Federal Council in Bonn – he said the location was to closely affiliated with the state for him: "What is obviously to be confirmed there does not apply to me: the good relationship between the writer and the state." ³ For the postmodern Schlingensief on the other hand, the point of his acceptance speech was to unmask this as a radio play itself: "Even my voice was only part of a radio play", thus the cycle of the radio play as staged social reality and of the staging of politics as a radio play was completed in a way that is not untypical for the modern German-language radio play. ⁴
For several years now, it has been the staging, but also the copy, falsification, imitation and even animation of moments of social reality (in the case of the radio play that means recordable, writable, producable and thus thoroughly "broken" reality), in addition to the mediality of the radio itself and especially the device of the radio play, which distinguishes the techniques of the frequently cited "revival" ⁵ and how "up-to-date" the genre is. Using the devices of docu-fiction, feature elements or pseudo live broadcasts, radio play authors ⁶ manipulate, destroy, simulate and duplicate auditive media material and dramatized levels of reality ⁷ for a radio play. At the same time, the radio play today borrows widely from other artistic genres, more than ever before, while most of the themes reflect media constructions of reality.
Radio plays of this kind currently receive all kinds of distinctions, from the radio play of the month, the Prix Europa and the Prix Futura, to the Radio Play Prize of the Blind War Veterans. Yet it still seems that the techniques applied are not running out of steam, but instead produce new nuances again and again, depending on the content.

Reality Turn

Media reality is usually addressed in radio plays with techniques such as the "misuse" of original soundtracks, crossediting interviews, phony broadcasting errors, fakes, news samples, (pseudo-) scientific statements, etc. It may also be presumed that sophisticated methods that have long since prevailed in the audiovisual field are currently not only being transferred to the radio play, but also refined and perfected with the means inherent to it. At the same time, the tendency to make "reality" the topic has long since arrived in the mainstream. For instance, the festival "Radio Play Week" that takes place at the Academy of Arts in Berlin organized a special edition this year on the theme of "authenticity": "The radio play's search for genuineness, truthfulness, for a truly contemporary language, has resulted in new forms of the radio play in recent years, outside the realm of fashions and clichés. Dogma, improvisation, documentary elements and sound art [...] For this reason, one day of the festival will be devoted to the topic of `authenticity'." ⁸

The two plays that were awarded the Radio Play Prize of the Blind War Veterans in the previous years also took "authentic" material as their explicit point of departure, although in very different ways. Walter Fritz' radio play "Pitcher" (WDR 2000), winner in the year 2000, which deals with the "pitching" of voices, makes use of digital speech modification and decontextualized interviews. Both techniques are made explicit here. For instance, it is said right at the beginning: "This is a fiction, in which nothing is real but the voices - but how real are voices?" According to the jury, the convincing cleverness of "Pitcher" was found in the "meticulous form of interlinking the authentic and the fictive. This is because the precisely calculated and technically perfected procedure [...] always allows us to recognize immediately that it deals with a new reality - specifically media reality." ⁹

A year later, in his speech about the prize-winning play "Crashing Aeroplanes" (based on material using authentic black box recordings from crashed airplanes) by Andreas Ammers and FM Einheit, the eulogist Jörg Drews also focussed on the reality turn: "Even in the smallest particle of their radio plays, they unmistakably present all the quoted and newly created sound material as something that is not 1:1 authentic, natural and unbroken, but rather always as something conveyed through the media. Art, including modern radio play art, has an aspect about it, however indirect that may be, under which it is certainly obliged to `reality', the non-media reality. Yet at the same time, all the reality that it represents has always been, and to an especially high degree since the 20th century, something mediated, constructed." ¹⁰

Of course, the "authentic", the difference between fact and fiction, has always been one of the central themes of the radio play (not only in German-language radio plays). ¹¹ The legendary "The War of the Worlds", written by Howard Koch and performed by Orson Welles in 1938, assumed an early and justifiably frequently cited pioneering role in terms of staging authenticity. In addition, the aforementioned tendencies also build on a "transparency of the medium" that has been called for since the late sixties with the New Radio Play. This has been worked through by productions such as Wondratschek's "Paul oder die Zerstörung eines Hörbeispiels" ("Paul or the Destruction of an Audio Sample"), Mauricio Kagel's "(Hörspiel). Ein Aufnahmezustand" ("(Radio Play). An Acceptance State", WDR 1969), Helmut Heißenbüttel's "Was sollen wir überhaupt senden?" ("What are we supposed to broadcast anyway?", SDR/SFB 1970), but also radio play collages such as Ludwig Harig's "Staatsbegräbnis" ("State Funeral", WDR 1969) and "Staatsbegräbnis 2" (WDR 1975), Ferdinand Kriwet's "Radioselbst" ("Radio Self", WDR 1979), and Ror Wolf's "Schwierigkeiten beim Umschalten" ("Difficulty Changing Channels", HR 1978) or his "Der Ball ist rund" ("The Ball is Round, HR 1979).

As far as this new interest in the transparency of the medium is concerned, now no longer intended to be progressive but playfully implemented instead, this is also an effect of a conception of the radio play that is more than ever aware that the radio has a media "exterior". Thus it may be noted, for instance, that once the "pop radio play" began to prevail in the mid-nineties (a term reanimated from the early seventies), it was no longer a big step to radio play pop as an amplifying medium for the tendencies noted. In his radio play "Hörspiele und andere Geräusche in der Popmusik" ("Radio Plays and Other Noises in Pop Music", Autorenproduktion 1997/2002), Hermann Bohlen asks about a "pop music sound carrier with a 20% portion of radio plays" in a record shop in Berlin, for instance, finding little comprehension. In the meantime, a trend has emerged in pop music, according to which producers such as DJ Koze take the use of radio play elements for granted. On the other hand, it was particularly the so-called pop radio play that propelled the elements of the current treatment of reality. This current self-understanding of the oscillation of the radio play in the direction of other media (or the private hard disk as a new production space) plays just as crucial a role as the number of (usually digitally simulated) media that come up in contemporary radio plays - from the cassette recorder all the way to phony new technologies.

Realities Re-Mounted

The reason that the broadcast plays are often not original radio plays, but rather adaptations, is that the radio play trends sketched out above are frequently based more on theater than literature. Examples of this might be the "Gießener Schule" ¹² or the so-called "Ambiente Theater" (Carla Spies/Thomas Doktor). The production team Stefan Kaegi, Helgard Hauf, Daniel Wetzel and Bernd Ernst (who all studied applied theater studies in Gießen), for instance, moving in various combinations between theater, radio play and fine art, can be cited as an example of the influence of the Gießen school on the radio play. ¹³ Under the name "Rimini Protokoll" Haug and Wetzel produced the play "'c8Deutschland 2" (WDR/Theater der Welt 2002) as a radio play version of the theater play of the same name, which was performed in 2002 at the Schauspielhalle Bonn-Beuel. A parliamentary hall almost became the location for a radio play production in this case too: originally planned for the old plenary hall of the Lower House of the German Parliament in Bonn, but then prohibited by the House President Wolfgang Thierse, 666 participants arrived to echo a parliamentary debate in real time that was broadcast from the parliament in Berlin. In the radio play version this effect and event oriented form of "reappropriating" politics is condensed into a collage, which emphasizes the reiteration of the speech, usually distorting the meaning, as the staging of an authentic confiscation of elected voices by the electors.

A year earlier, Wetzel and Kaegi had become known to a wider audience with "Sitzgymnastik Boxenstopp" (Autorenproduktion 2001), also the radio play adaptation of a theater play (conceived for the Mousonturm in Frankfurt). Constantly at the boundary to "ageism", but also interpretable as a criticism of the "total institution" of the senior citizens residence, Wetzel and Kaegi staged four (real) residents of a senior citizens' home as formerly well known race car drivers, who could only remember their fake past very differently, due to the effects of a fading memory potential. They nevertheless accepted this past as something actually experienced and "played along" to varying degrees, becoming "victims" or "accomplices" to this induction.

In addition to the technically elaborate production of these kinds of radio plays, it is conspicuous that there are also radio play ideas that delineate the framework for a critique of media and social constructions of reality either through monologue or using the techniques of original soundtrack collages ¹⁴. Eran Schaerf's radio play "Die Stimme des Hörers" ("The Voice of the Listener", BR/ZKM/inermedium2, 2002), for instance, purports to be an interactive radio broadcast that addresses the needs of its listeners as long as they continue to actively listen. In fact, however, the supposed broadcast has a purely monological character and conveys nothing other than itself and the illusion of possible participation. In the installation, in which the radio play is embedded, the gaze is consequently attracted to a test picture as one listens, which remains empty.¹⁵

What was previously a disruptive element, is now an integral factor of the subject matter; the radio play thus completes a movement that is manifested in the same way or similarly in pop music, video clips or fine art - as it has always done structurally. The fact that it is mostly the media themselves, media effects, media productions and media realities that are made the subject of the kind of radio plays described here is only logical, to the extent that the technical means available to the listeners increasingly resemble those of the producers.

Friedrich Kittler once maintained: "No one listens to radio. What loudspeakers or headphones supply to their users is always merely a program, never radio itself. It is only in exceptional cases, when broadcasts are interrupted, the voice of the announcer chokes, or the broadcast drifts away from the receiver frequency, that it is possible to hear for a moment what listening to the radio would be." ¹⁶ However, the tendencies described also show that something else is possible: radio itself also takes place in the program, because the radio play has long since made the "exceptional case" part of the program. Should the frequency really drift away, all that is revealed is a different, thoroughly authentic radio play experience, because "we are our own radio play!" (Schlingensief).

 

Translated by Aileen Dering

 

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