Relational Technologies: Materialities of Connection at Radio Frankfurt, 1929–1933

Dissertation project by Frederike Maas

The dissertation examines early broadcasting as an experimental field for new forms of mediated communication and participation. At its center is the Frankfurt broadcasting station Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk, which, under the artistic direction of Ernst Schoen 1929 and 1933, was an important center of innovative media practice in the Weimar Republic. Schoen recruited, among others, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to work in radio. All three shared the conviction that radio should enable forms of active participation by its audience. As Brecht famously formulated it, radio should transform itself from a “distribution apparatus” into a “communication apparatus.” Rather than accepting the unidirectional logic of broadcasting, experiments were conducted in Frankfurt with new formats and aesthetic techniques designed to enable reciprocal address and the active participation of listeners.

The study does not understand “radio” as an isolated medium, but rather as an intermedial ensemble consisting of loudspeakers, voices, magazines, postal networks, audience responses, broadcasting buildings, and embodied practices of listening. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials—including program scripts, photographs, and radio magazines such as the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunkzeitung—the dissertation shows how different media and practices were interconnected and thereby formed an intermedial arrangement in which listeners were not only addressed but positioned as relational actors.

Taking this historical case as its point of departure, the study asks the more fundamental question of how technical media generate particular modes of experience and relations. It builds on approaches in media studies and the philosophy of technology that demonstrate how technical media organize environments or milieus in which experience, perception, and relations are structured. Through the empirical reconstruction of the intermedial arrangement of Frankfurt broadcasting, the dissertation investigates how this arrangement, as an institutionally, materially, and aesthetically designed infrastructure, organizes a specific media milieu. At the same time, it asks what this arrangement enables and what it constrains. It shows that the architecture of this infrastructure organizes relations in which subject positions, possibilities for action, and modes of perception are structurally differentiated and related to one another. Against this background, “participation” is reconceptualized: it appears not as the involvement of individual users in the program but as an effect of the media arrangement itself. This makes clear that questions of participation and inclusion are not decided solely at the level of user activity but depend fundamentally on the design of media infrastructures.

The dissertation thus contributes to media history by showing how early radio practices functioned as an experimental field for conceptions of mediated relations and participation that continue to shape ideas of networked communication today. At the same time, it develops an understanding of media as operative conditions of experience: From the intermedial constellation emerge infrastructures that organize specific milieus in which forms of experience, relations, and action take shape. From this perspective, media history appears not merely as a history of technologies or institutions, but as a history of changing orders of experience and relations.