The Watschenmann

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A Watschenmann figure in the Prater (1935)

The Watschenmann was a satirical radio broadcast on Austrian radio that targeted both politics and society. It was broadcast weekly on Sunday mornings. The name is chosen after the Watschenmann in the Vienna Prater .

layout

The jingle is sung to the melody by Heissa in a funny, carefree manner from Raimund's spendthrift : "To suppress any anger can only lead to complexes / and that is why it is extremely important to react quickly." The almost half-hour programs contain 15 to 20 scenes, which are usually also concluded with a slap in the face . Examples are the letters from “Poldi Huber” to dear Franzi in Urfahr , conversations between two Teiferln (devils) and the experiences of a caliph who walks incognito through Baghdad, which of course means Vienna.

history

The Watschenmann was developed during the occupation at the beginning of the 1950s at the American Red-White-Red broadcaster in Vienna , and it soon became popular. After the State Treaty in 1955, the program was broadcast several times by Austrian Radio, but it was finally stopped on January 1, 1956, despite violent protests. The Neue Kurier , the predecessor of today's Viennese daily Kurier , collected 130,000 signatures within two weeks for continuation. At the time, however, the state radio was viewed as an instrument of the black-red coalition government, which had nothing left for cabaret criticism.

The second series could only be produced under Gerd Bacher after the radio referendum from 1967 and was a sign of the new independence of the ORF . To understand the success and popularity of the show, one has to look at the time when investigative journalism and political criticism were either banned under the occupying powers or not wanted under the grand coalition of the time. Jörg Mauthe was responsible for the conception during the entire broadcasting period from 1950 to 1955 and from 1967 to 1974 . The texts were written by Walter Davy , Jörg Mauthe, Fritz Mauthe , Peter Weiser and Wolf Neuber . The following program was initially Aufguss Please and the program Der Guglhupf, which was broadcast on Ö1 from 1978 to 2009 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Elisabeth Mach: The joke in words: to the mocking comedy on Austrian radio. Analysis and comparison . University of Vienna, diploma thesis 2012, p. 61
  2. ↑ "It's a Pfutschijammer!" Article in the "Zeit Online" from June 12, 2008 about the exhibition "From distributing and plugging in". Accessed December 7, 2016
  3. ↑ Andreas Resch: The business with words and images. Economic history of the mass media and the advertising industry in Vienna (= creative industries in Vienna . Vol. 3). Lit, Vienna et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-7000-0909-2 , pp. 191–196 ( Google Books )

Web links