ABSTRACT
Weimar Germany, Eric Weitz (2007, 247) tells us, underwent the “greatest transformation of media culture” since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press in the late 15th century. Prominent in this transformation was the appearance of the radio. As early as 1922, Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg (1995, 594) note, in order to maintain the new medium in the public interest, radio in Germany became state controlled, housed in the postal ministry. Public ownership was to provide protection of German culture from the threat of its trivialization by commercialization, so obviously underway in the United States. There were Germans who worried that the new technological medium would violate the private sphere and that it would result in the collectivization of experience, that it would in fact destroy the individual. As decades later Pierre Lévy imagined for the Internet (see Pinar 2004, 152-154), many Germans during the 1920s regarded radio as a “great force for democratization,” certain that it would break down the barriers between classes and even between nations, or, among members of the Communist Party of Germany (KDP), that it would turn out to be a medium that would construct an “alternative”to bourgeois culture, that is, a proudly proletarian culture (Weitz 2007, 241).
