I. The Subject of Media

The inevitable aging of aesthetic modernity (also a theme of chapters 8 and 9, in the context of music) has been particularly unkind to radio art, specifically radio art of the 1950s. Despite the hopes voiced in the 1960s for a renaissance of McLuhan's “nonliterate modes” (or what Ong would later call “secondary orality”), radio genres such as the Hörspiel have continued to be treated as a redheaded stepchild, always taking a back seat to film or more recent questions of information and digitalization. Laments over the neglected or even ill-defined status of the radio play extend from Rudolf Arnheim's work in the 1920s up to now. The present essay will look at some of the reasons for this neglect, as at possibilities for its revision. The work of Ingeborg Bachmann, in whose oeuvre the radio drama occupies a pivotal position between early poetry and later prose, offers an exemplary object for this revision. After a brief discussion of media- and cultural-theoretical approaches, Bachmann's peculiar mix of postwar mediated modernity and a nostalgia for high modernism will be discussed; the conclusion will show how the play hides gender problems beneath its appearance of modernist negation.

In her 1999 Bachmann monograph, Sigrid Weigel pointed out that Malina entails something like an implicit media theory. It would then seem logical to look more closely at Bachmann's Hörspiele in their specific media-historical context.