Voices in Ruins: West German Radio across the 1945 Divide. By Alexander Badenoch. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2008. Pp. xi+289. Cloth $69.95. ISBN 978-0-230-00903-5

摘要

oices in Ruins begins with the observation that “in the years immediately following the unconditional surrender of Germany in May 1945, the radio was the best-preserved and most popular medium of mass communication” (p. 1). Alexander Badenoch's engaging study examines continuities and discontinuities in radio personnel and programming in the western zones of occupied Germany “across the 1945 divide.” It reveals a mass medium and a society striving uneasily for normality in troubled times.nThe book is organized into six thematic chapters, “extended individual essays” that investigate various aspects of the “embedding” of the radio in West German society during the postwar years (p. 9). The opening chapter provides a cultural and institutional overview of broadcasting developments during the Weimar, Nazi, and occupation eras, introducing one of the book's central concepts, the radio's role as “voice of the Heimat” (p. 26), a fluid notion of German identity that was at once regional and national, nostalgic and modern. The second and third chapters examine postwar radio from the perspectives of program scheduling and radio personalities, respectively. Subsequent chapters tackle the ambiguous roles assigned to women, as both radio presenters and listeners, during the occupation period, and the ways in which stations in the American, British, and French zones fostered Heimat-based regional identities “that related local spaces to the nation as a whole” (p. 216). The conclusion reflects on the radio's importance in creating a sense, however incomplete, of “normality” among Germans after 1945