Abstract
Radio is magic. In the early twentieth century, this magic was new, revolutionary, and poorly understood. It was the object of scientific investigation, but more importantly, it was also the domain of tinkerers, “hackers”, citizen scientists, and hobbyists. Radio was not only a symbol of modernity, it was also a site where individuals wrestled with and ultimately came to terms with the new and often frightening wave of new technologies and mass medias, which came in the early twentieth century. We need to look back at the time when radio was new to understand how we got to the internet age. This book shows how radio was appropriated and mediated by ordinary individuals in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century as a hobby or leisure-time activity. In particular, it looks at how private associations, clubs, became the locus of this process. Within these clubs, technology, in the form of radio, intersected with the public sphere. This is a much wider process, but the book uses Germany as a case study. Our engagement with technology is always rooted in social structures, institutions, and frameworks. The radio clubs in Germany provided much of the social context within which individuals could come to grips with radio. Without all of this human “packaging” around the basic technology, there could have been no human interaction with it. The introduction sets the stage and discusses some of the eclectic theoretical underpinnings of the book. It also thanks all those who helped.
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Notes
- 1.
My thinking is fundamentally influenced by scholars within the History of Technology community who follow the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) paradigm, such as Wiebe E. Bijker and Thomas P. Hughes. Hughes’ notion of the technical and the social imbedded in a “seamless web” is particularly important. See the end of this introduction for more on the theoretical underpinnings of my analysis.
- 2.
Or, as McLuhan puts it, media (such as communications technology) extend the reach of humans. See: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).
- 3.
See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
- 4.
The contribution of amateurs and hobbyists to the development of radio as both science and technology has been widely touted not least by the hobbyists themselves, who in this way participate and shape directly the trajectory of the technology. See, for example, Clinton B. Desoto, 200 Meters and Down: The Story of Amateur Radio (Newington CT: American Radio Relay League, 1985). I am also arguing that hobbies or leisure-time activities are a particular component of modernity itself.
- 5.
I understand that this is a rather idiosyncratic and certainly incomplete definition of modernity. I see it linked with more conventionally understood notions of the modern autonomous self. It is also linked to “modern” economic conditions, which at least in developed countries produce a surplus of resources and free time which allows hobbies or free-time activities not only to take place but to become part of the definition of what being modern means. Benjamin’s flâneur needs free time and a certain economic well-being in order to flâner. See Walter Benjamin, Das Passagenwerk, in: Gesammelte Schriften, vols. V, 1–2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991). For a critical view of Benjamin, see: Martina Lauster, “Walter Benjamin’s Myth of the ‘Flâneur’ ”, The Modern Language Review 102, no. 1 (January 2007):139–156.
- 6.
This process is beautifully described by Steve Jobs, in an interview with Daniel Morrow of the Smithsonian Institution in 1995: “There was a man who moved in down the street, maybe about six or seven houses down the block who was new in the neighborhood with his wife, and it turned out that he was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard and a ham radio operator and really into electronics. (…) I got to know this man, whose name was Larry Lang, and he taught me a lot of electronics. He was great. He used to build Heathkits. Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that ‘I haven’t built one of those but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I’ve built two other Heathkits so I could build that’. Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way”. Oral History interview with Steve Jobs, 1995. Accessed July 24, 2017. http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html
- 7.
In 1930, there were between 62 million and 65 million inhabitants in Germany.
- 8.
See Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger, Fire in the Valley: the Birth and Death of the Personal Computer (Raleigh, NC: Pragmatic Bookshelf, Third Edition 2014), chapter 7 and Andy Herzfeld, Revolution in the Valley: the Insanely Great Story of How the Mac was Made (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2004).
- 9.
This is, of course, not the full story, even if it corresponds to our understanding of the history of both radio technology and radio pioneers, and to our romantic image of the Promethean inventor. The history of radio is more complex, and Marconi was certainly not alone. See particularly Marc Raboy Marconi: The Man Who Networked the World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
- 10.
There were, of course, other iconic technologies at the time, such as the airplane, the luxury liner, the automobile, and the zeppelin. See, for example, Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
- 11.
For example, AEG and Siemens formed a joint venture, Telefunken, to produce radios for the German government. See: Michael Friedewald, Die “Tönenden Funken”. Geschichte eines frühen drahtlosen Kommunikationssystems, 1905–1914 (Aachener Beitrage zur Wissenschafts- und Technikgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts 2) (Berlin: Diepholz/GNT Verlag, 1999).
- 12.
“Gesetz über das Telegrafenwesen des Deutschen Reiches” of April 6, 1892, RGBl p. 467 and the “Gesetz zur Abänderung des Telegrafengesetzes” of March 7, 1908, RGBL, p. 79.
- 13.
Henry Sauermann and Chiara Franzoni, “Crowd Science User Contribution Patterns and Their Implications”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 112, no. 3 (January 20, 2015): 679–684. My own university, the College of William and Mary, now has several maker spaces. Carly Martin, “Building the BioMaker Space”, The Flat Hat, October 12, 2016. Accessed May 4, 2018. (http://flathatnews.com/2016/10/12/building-the-biomakerspace/
- 14.
On the science of radio propagation, see: Henry L. Bertoni, Radio propagation for Modern Wireless Systems (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000) or Eric P. Nichols, Propagation and Radio Science (Newington, CT: American Radio Relay League, 2015).
- 15.
The travel or propagation of radio waves is influenced by (among other factors), the frequency of the wave, the height and shape of the antenna, the quality of the electrical ground of both the antenna and transmitter, the immediate surrounding geography (hills, buildings), meteorological conditions, external electromagnetic radiation (from the sun, etc.), and the configuration of one or more of the earth’s atmospheric layers. See footnote 14 above.
- 16.
For a good example of the enthusiasm for scientific expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s, think of the iconic movie “King Kong” (RKO Pictures, 1933), or the vogue for ancient Egypt after the discovery of the tomb of “King Tut” in 1922 by the archaeologist Howard Carter. See Chap. 3 below.
- 17.
On the Sonderweg, see: Helga Grebing, Der “deutsche Sonderweg” in Europa 1806–1945: Eine Kritik (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1986) and David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
- 18.
For basic works on German history in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, see: Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (The Oxford History of Modern Europe) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) or Dietrich Orlow, A History of Modern Germany, 1871 to the Present (7th. ed.) (New York: Routledge, 2016). See also, with a slightly different focus, Hans Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1700–1990 (C.H. Beck, 2008).
- 19.
Bruce Campbell and Arthur Brenner, eds., Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability (New York: St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 2000, 2002).
- 20.
Bruce B. Campbell, The SA Generals and the Rise of Nazism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998, 2004). See also: Bruce B. Campbell, “The SA in the Gleichschaltung: Stress, Organization and Violence”, in From Weimar to Hitler: Studies on the Dissolution of Weimar Democracy and the Establishment of the Third Reich, 1932–34, ed. Larry Eugene Jones and Hermann Beck (New York: Berghahn, 2018) 194–221; Bruce B. Campbell, “Autobiographies of Violence: The SA in its own Words”, in: Central European History, special issue on the SA, 46, No. 2 (June 2013), 217–237; Bruce B. Campbell, “Gewalt bis in die obersten Ränge. Die Höheren SA-Führer der SA-Gruppe Berlin-Brandenburg”, in: Der SA-Terror als Herrschaftssicherung. “Köpinecker Blutwoche” und Öffentliche Gewalt im frühen Nationalsozialismus ed. Stefan Hördler (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2013), 62–82; Bruce B. Campbell, “The SA After the Röhm Purge and the Institutionalized State of Emergency in the Third Reich”, in: Journal of Contemporary History 28, No. 4 (October 1993), 659–674.
- 21.
Bruce B. Campbell, “ ‘Kein schöner Land’: The Spielschar Ekkehard and the Struggle to Define German National identity in the Weimar Republic”, in Music and German National Identity, ed. Pamela Potter and Celia Applegate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 128–139; Bruce B. Campbell, “Gerhard Roßbach, the Spielschar Ekkehard, and the Cultural Attack on the Weimar Republic”, in Weimar 1930. Politik und Kultur im Vorfeld der NS-Diktatur, ed. Lothar Ehrlich and Juergen John (Weimar, Böhlau, 1997), 243–259; Bruce B. Campbell, “The Schilljugend from Wehrjugend to Luftschutz: Bündisch Youth in the Weimar Republic in Search of a Political Voice”, in Politische Jugend in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Wolfgang R. Krabbe (Bochum, Universitätsverlag Dr. Brockmeyer, 1993), 183–201.
- 22.
Bruce B. Campbell, Alison Guenther-Pal and Vibeke Petersen (eds.) Detectives, Dystopias and Poplit: Studies in Modern German Genre Fiction (Elizabethtown, NY: Camden House, 2013). See especially my essay in this volume: “The Detective Was the Killer: the Memory of the Nazi Past in Modern German Detective Fiction” pp. 133–151.
- 23.
“The Radio Hobby, Government, and the Discourse of Catastrophe”, in Susan Merrill Squier, (ed.) Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 63–75.
- 24.
Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (eds.), The Social Construction of Technological Systems. New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology Anniversary Edition (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2012, 1987).
- 25.
Note that this school of thought is not at all the same as the “post-modern” “Social Construction of Science”, which caused such heated discussions in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
- 26.
David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2007).
- 27.
Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Translated, with an Introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Jochen Hörisch, Eine Geschichte der Medien. Von der Oblate zum Internet. (Frankfurt a/M.: Suhrkamp, 2001, 2004).
- 28.
Kristen Haring, Ham Radio’s Technical Culture (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 2007).
- 29.
Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
- 30.
Kate Lacey, Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923–1945 (Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). See also Kate Lacey, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Cambridge, Oxford, Boston: Polity Press, 2013).
- 31.
Pamela Potter and Celia Applegate (eds.) Music and German National Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
- 32.
Susan Merrill Squier (ed.) Communities of the Air: Introducing the Radio World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003).
- 33.
Habermas, Public Sphere.
- 34.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
- 35.
Particularly the notion of habitus. Pierre Bordieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 16) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977 (1972)).
- 36.
Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the Saint Matthew Passion (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2014). See also Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (University of California Press, 1990) and Celia Applegate, The Necessity of Music: Variations on a German Theme (German and European Studies) (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2017).
- 37.
Particularly Lorenz Pfeiffer, “ ‘unser Verein ist judenfrei’—Die Rolle der deutschen Turn—und Sportbewegung in dem politischen und gesellschaftlichen Wandlungsprozess nach dem 30. Januar 1933”, in Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 32, no. 1 (119) 2007, Sport und Diktatur: Zur politischen und sozialen Rolle des Sports in den deutschen Diktaturen des 20. Jahrhunderts/Sports and Dictatorship: On the Political and Social Role of Sports in the German Dictatorships of the 20th Century, 92–109. Hajo Bernett, “Der deutsche Sport im Jahre 1933”, in Stadion 7 (1981) 225–283; Hajo Bernett, Weg des Sports in die nationalsozialistische Diktitur. Die Entstehung des deutschen (nationalszialistischen) Reichsbundes für Leibesübungen (Schondorf: Hoffman,1983) 44–47; Hajo Bernett, “die Zerschlagung des deutschen Arbeitersports durch die nationalsozialistische Revolution”, in:Sportwissenschaft 13 (1983) 349–373.
- 38.
Peter Sturm et al (eds.), 100 Jahre Ruderklub am Wannsee. Festschrift, 13. September 1906–2006 (Berlin: Ruderklub am Wannsee, 2006).
- 39.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2009).
- 40.
Above all, Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).
- 41.
Karl Dietrich Bracher, Wolfgang Sauer and Gerhard Schulz, Die Nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung. Studien zur Errichtung des Totalitären Herrschaftssystem in Deutschland 1933/1934 (Wiesbaden: Springer, 1960).
- 42.
Stefan Hördler (ed.), SA-Terror als Herrschaftssicherung: “Köpenicker Blutwoche” und öffentliche Gewalt im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2013).
- 43.
Sven Reichardt, Faschistische Kampfbünde. Gewalt und Gemeinschaft im italienischen Squadrismus und in der deutschen SA (Industrielle Welt/Schriftenreihe des Arbeitskreises für moderne Sozialgeschichte) (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2009).
- 44.
Richard Bessel, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism. The Storm Troopers in Eastern Germany 1925–1934 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984).
- 45.
Mathilde Jamin, Zwischen den Klassen. Zur Sozialstruktur der SA-Führerschaft (Wuppertal, Peter Hammer Verlag, 1984).
- 46.
Robert H. Frank, “Hitler and the National Socialist Coalition 1924–1932”, PhD. Diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1969.
- 47.
Eleanor Hancock, Ernst Röhm: Hitler’s SA Chief of Staff (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
- 48.
Andreas Werner, “SA: ‘Wehrverband’, ‘Parteitruppe’, oder ‘Revolutionsarmee’? Studien zur Geschichte der SA und der NSDAP 1920–1933”, PhD. Diss., Friedrich-Alexander-Universität zu Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1964.
- 49.
Daniel Siemens, Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler’s Brownshirts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017); Daniel Siemens, Horst Wessel: Tod und Verklaerung eines Nationalsozialisten (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2009).
- 50.
Hagen Schulze, Freikorps und Republik 1918–1920 (Militärgeschichtliche Studien 8), (Boppard a/R., Harald Boldt Verlag, 1969).
- 51.
Robert L. Koehl, “Feudal Aspects of National Socialism”, in American Political Science Review 54, no. 4 (December 1960), 921–933.
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Campbell, B.B. (2019). Introduction. In: The Radio Hobby, Private Associations, and the Challenge of Modernity in Germany. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26534-2_1
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