Literature and radio
Literature and radio is a speech by the writer Alfred Döblin . The author gave it on September 30, 1929 at the workshop "Poetry and Radio" in Kassel- Wilhelmshöhe . In it Döblin clarified the possible points of contact between broadcasting and literature and their mutual benefits.
background
Alfred Döblin had been involved in the Berliner Funkstunde transmitter , broadcast by the Haus des Rundfunks , since 1925 .
content
Döblin stated that a large number of his colleagues are apparently not affected by the radio because they still regard this medium as "something vulgar, for entertainment and instruction in a clumsy manner". Strangely enough, Döblin fears that the writers' passivity towards the new medium will not worsen literature but that of broadcasting. So he draws a comparison to the film, which is precisely because of that, so "completely slipped off to industry". Since broadcasting, like literature, is based on language, writers can no longer distance themselves from it, according to Döblin. On the one hand, literature, which is primarily distributed through theaters and books, is "tremendously inferior" to radio within the radius of the audience. In addition, the radio primarily contributes to the distribution of music, not literature, as well as news and journalism . On the other hand, the rate of dissemination is also a disadvantage for the literature. As a result, for Döblin, literature takes third place at best, behind music and news, on the radio.
In the second part, which deals with the possible changes, Döblin is certain: “For music and journalism, radio is essentially nothing new, it is just a new technical means of dissemination. For literature, however, radio is a changing medium. ”He sees the greatest renewal in the strengthening of orality, which would partially emancipate literature from books as a printed product, as well as in a possible rapprochement between high literature and the mass audience. In a genre-specific way, the essay , due to its proximity to science and journalism, can benefit from it, as can poetry . On the other hand, apart from short stories , he condemns the reproduction of novels and dramas on the radio, because the stylized language of the epic cannot go along with an oral language and restricts the reader's imagination. Even the theater as a “collective experience” could hardly be replaced by radio, since it is always aimed at individual listeners. Finally, he refers to the radio play as a stand-alone genre, which can manage the balancing act between literature and radio.
reception
The speech was not broadcast and was therefore only accessible to the invited fellow writers and radio managers. Hans Bredow first published a transcript of the speech in his work From my archive, printed in 1950 . Broadcasting Problems . Stefan Bodo Würffel sees the speeches given in Döblin's contribution as the “most important approach to the theoretical justification of the radio play”
literature
Text output
- Alfred Döblin: literature and radio. In: Writings on Aesthetics, Politics and Literature. Walter Verlag, Freiburg 1989, pp. 251-261, ISBN 3-530-16697-9 .
- Alfred Döblin: literature and radio. In: Writings on Aesthetics, Politics and Literature. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 252-261, ISBN 978-3-596-90462-4 .
Secondary literature
- Friederike Hermann: Theories of radio . In: Joachim-Felix Leonhard (Ed.): Media Studies . Gruyter, ISBN 3-11-013961-8 , Berlin 1999, p. 177.
- Günter Peters: Voices in the dark. Snapshots of the history and theory of the radio play . In: Bernd Kiefer, Werner Nell (Ed.): The memory of writing. Perspectives of comparative literature . DUV, Wiesbaden 2005, ISBN 978-3-8244-4409-0 , pp. 183-232.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cf. Günter Peters Voices in the Dark. Snapshots of the history and theory of the radio play . In: Bernd Kiefer, Werner Nell (ed.) The memory of writing. Perspectives of comparative literature. DUV, Wiesbaden 2005, p. 202.
- ^ Stefan Bodo Würffel: The German radio play . Metzler, Stuttgart 1978, p. 46.