Mrs. Wernicke
Mrs. Wernicke was a fictional character in the German service of the BBC , who played an important role in the radio propaganda of the Second World War .
Bruno Adler and Annemarie Hase
Mrs Wernicke represented a Berlin allotment citizen who, with her simple mind loose tone and common sense sharp-tongued about the Nazis made fun. The historian, publisher and Bauhaus expert Bruno Adler , who fled the Nazis to London via Prague , developed the character for the German-language program of the BBC. In the summer of 1940, the series of four- to seven-minute monologues began on the BBC's women's radio, spoken by the then 44-year-old Berlin actress Annemarie Hase, who also emigrated to London . Hase had been famous in cabaret in the 1920s; Authors like Erich Kästner and Kurt Tucholsky also wrote for them.
Enemy transmitter
Gertrud Wernicke - her first name was rarely mentioned in the broadcasts - lived in the fictional Große Frankfurter Allee in Berlin-Mitte and embodied the typical “people's hero” who simply tells what goes into her head. She spoke at a fast pace about the food shortage, fallen soldiers, jokingly attacked “Nazi bigwigs”, jumped from politics to gossip, told indiscretions about her neighbors or about experiences as a servant at a radio editor in the Propaganda Ministry, who was out of his ideal world reported that he was in the middle of a battle in a trench. In the following transcript of a broadcast from March 11, 1941, Ms. Wernicke addresses the punishable bugging of " enemy transmitters ":
“No, no, I don’t want to know anything about children, I don’t turn on the radio! No, nothing to do, how easily you turn a bit too far and you haven't seen it, you're a pest. But what, what? You know, our jute little doctor is not interested in that. Now just don't worry about sun things ... What is allowed for the English is it still can’t hurt us? The doctor followed us apart, why it doesn't matter to them when they listen to the foreign stations. Because they are each united nationally. We have an empire, a people, a leader, but not just for national unity, so just rely on Joebbels, who is better. It's a matter of fact: as long as we haven't recently been, we are not allowed to hear, because we are not ever. And if we're ever not, then we don't need to hear anymore, because we're all right. It’s like dumpling broth, right? "
Position within the BBC
The series enjoyed great popularity in Germany despite the ban on listening to so-called enemy channels. The BBC's deputy chief Stephen Tallents wrote in a letter to the editor on September 14, 1941, to the London Times : “I invite anyone who accuses the BBC that the propaganda against the Germans is 'too intellectual and literary', yes to listen once, for example to the program of Mrs. Wernicke, a fictional housewife in Berlin, whom some in Germany today know better than some British statesmen. "
In January 1944, the BBC stopped the series.
literature
- Bruno Adler (alias Urban Roedl): Mrs. Wernicke. Comments from a “People's Yenossess”. Persona Verlag, Mannheim 1990, ISBN 3-924652-16-3 .
- Katharina Kullmer: "This is England!" - The BBC's German service in the Third Reich. GRIN Verlag, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-640-36071-0 .
- Joanne McNally, Peter Sprengel (Ed.): Hundred Years of Cabaret. For staging social identity between protest and propaganda. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2488-5 .
- Carl Brinitzer : This is London speaking. From someone who was there ; Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg 1969
Web links
- BBC close-up. Calling Germany - contemporary representation of the German service of the BBC from the Home Service , first broadcast on June 23, 1943. Ms. Wernicke appears from minute 11:20.
Individual evidence
- ↑ What is meant is Reich Propaganda Minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels
- ↑ Quoted from Adler: Frau Wernicke , to be heard in the original sound (Real Audio; 0 kB) at the German Broadcasting Archive (recording from March 1, 1943).