ABSTRACT
In West Germany in the 1950s, radio acted as a major sponsor of the literary world. This benefitted travel literature in particular, as many travelogues were commissioned by and broadcast on radio before being published in book form. This chapter examines the tension between mass media dissemination and the auratisation of the author based on two important writers, Ernst Schnabel and Wolfgang Koeppen. Special attention is paid to the question of how and to what extent the radio context influenced the shape of their texts. Against persistent assumptions of the decline of the travelogue in times of mass media, this chapter shows how the very competition between different media in the 1950s promoted the popularity of the genre. As a medium of decided contemporaneity, the travelogue, both in its aural and written form, occupied a central place in the literary scene of the young Federal Republic – and radio reports were still measured against the standard of the literary text.
