Birth of the Radio Play: Hans Flesch’s Enchanted Radio 

Broadcast in October 1924, just a year after the start of regular radio operation in Germany, Enchanted Radio (Zauberei auf dem Sender) was the creation of Hans Flesch (1896-1945?).  Flesch was a pioneer of radio art in 1920s Germany.  From 1924 he was the artistic director at Southwest German Radio in Frankfurt.  In 1929 he became the director of Berlin Radio, where he commissioned the famous “blind film” Weekend from filmmaker Walter Ruttmann.  After being imprisoned in a concentration camp in 1933 and working later as a doctor in German military hospitals, Flesch disappeared in the vicinity of Berlin in 1945.

Anticipating the realistic premise of Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds, Enchanted Radio depicts a broadcast gone horribly wrong.  A disgruntled magician wreaks havoc on the station: the regular program breaks down into confusion and noise.  The supervisor, attempting to restore order, is tormented with an auditory illusion: he hears a distorted rendition of the song “Hab’ ein blaues Himmelbett,” and is incredulous that no-one else in the studio claims to have heard it.  Flesch puts in the mouth of the deranged supervisor the question at the heart of the new medium: “Is it possible that music could fill the air, although no one plays it?”  A technical malfunction prevents the technician from stopping the broadcast, casting an allure of auditory voyeurism over all these bizarre happenings: we are “listening in” behind radio’s invisible curtain.

At a time when radio was an untested technology, Flesch challenged the implicit conventions of the medium and confronted listeners with the fascinating and disturbing implications of radiophonic listening.  Although the original broadcast is lost to the ether, Flesch’s radio play was produced and recorded in 1962 by the radio station of the German state Hesse.  

Photo reproduced from Daniel Gilfillan’s book Pieces of Sound, p. 47.

September 10, 2010, 2:25pm