AD-M/GS: Since 1988 you have been broadcasting your own arts magazine, Ten to Eleven and Prime Time, on the private channels RTL and Sati. What do you hope to achieve with these programmes?

AK: In 1972, Oskar Negt and I wrote a book on ‘The Public Sphere and Experience’ in which we tried to analyse the forms of the public sphere. The independent public sphere - as opposed to the direct public sphere of monarchies - is a landmark achievement of the last three hundred years. Negt and I tried to anchor the concept of ‘public sphere’ in human experience, in life stories. We proceeded from the assumption that a public sphere will be all the richer the more human experiences, the kind of experiences we deal with every day, enter into this public sphere. The political is an intensity of real feelings. That remains my fundamental position.

Today, the big abstract media form organisations that can only be maintained by corporations capable of producing and paying for at least nine thousand hours of programming each year. The television public sphere thus belongs to an oligarchy of big concerns, and this transforms the public sphere into a bureaucratic organisation. That's the opposite of a truly vital public sphere, however. We told ourselves that to criticise this by writing texts would be totally futile. This massive production must be criticised in a different way. That's why I decided, together with friends from musical theatre, publishing and film-making, to create a forum. At first with RTL and Sati. We broadcast there in direct sound, in very short segments of fifteen or twenty-four minutes each, and we draw from the areas of music, theatre, literature and film - film always understood as the hundred years or so of film history, not the cinema releases of a given year. We don't report on the arts at all. The term ‘arts magazine’ is misleading to the extent that, by using direct sound, we are drawing attention to a kind of public sphere that has a significant impact, namely, the expressive form of these three media. We want to strain the muscles that are already there in people's perception.

AD-M/GS: Have you achieved what you set out to achieve in the six years since you began broadcasting?