On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of French-language radio in North America, The duty explores this medium in transformation.
Would Plato tweet? Would Aristotle have a Facebook page, Kant a TikTok account, Wittgenstein a podcast? Can we imagine Hannah Arendt on Instagram? Would Descartes say: I twitter therefore I am?
In any case, the cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), considered “one of the most important theoreticians of the 20e century”, did not hesitate to become a radio presenter as soon as the new and fabulous mass medium was born. We owe him a hundred programs, including a good number aimed specifically at teenagers and children.
“Walter Benjamin brought to an unfamiliar audience, that of young listeners, a knowledge of the world, of culture, of life, extremely relevant for the time, when the Nazis were about to take over. power in Germany. He practiced a very important act of resistance on the radio”, summarizes in an interview Philippe Baudouin, author of Walter Benjamin at the microphone. A philosopher on the airwaves (1927-1933), just reissued in France in an expanded version.
It is the only work of its kind in French, although theses, articles and book chapters have cleared the ground for several decades, including here in Quebec. The French specialist pronounces the name of his famous subject in the German way while recalling that, when Benjamin lived in Paris, he liked to hear his name said in French.
Trained in philosophy of art, Philippe Baudouin is a lecturer in media theory at the University of Paris-Saclay. He is also the director of a short weekly information podcast broadcast by France Info, which is aimed at 7-12 year olds by bringing children into the microphones, so to speak in the footsteps of his master.
“Like many students, I started by reading Benjamin’s text on the technical reproducibility of works and the one on photography, the best known,” he says. By taking an interest in his career, I saw that he had practiced radio for several years, but that in general specialists gave little place to this work. Looking into it, I understood on the contrary that his radio texts were extremely rich from the point of view of philosophy and that they came from a very particular practice of the microphone. »
cultural theorist
Germany — the country of physicist Heinrich Hertz, after whom the radio waves are named — went on the radio with the transmission of a Christmas concert in December 1920. The Weimar Republic had 100,000 listeners in 1924 and more than 4 million in 1932. The documents of the European Radioelectric Conference of 1929 list then about thirty German transmitting stations, but the double in the USSR.
Walter Benjamin intervenes there to popularize cultural subjects at the invitation of his friend Ernst Schoen, director of literary programs at the Frankfurt station. Mr. Baudouin offers a parallel with the France Culture channel, reputed to be of high intellectual standing. The theoretician of strolling is also under contract with an antenna in Berlin, where he holds a section for young people on the history of the districts and streets of the capital.
In his correspondence, the kulturkritiker speaks of his radio experience as a minor activity, a livelihood. His avant-garde epistemological method, which places art and literature at the center of the study of history, blocked his path to university habilitation. Walter Benjamin is a precarious intellectual of his time.
Connoisseurs have shown that radio also offers him a laboratory to test some of his political and aesthetic concepts, which do not necessarily constitute a philosophy of radio. “What he criticized for the radio of his time, that of the pioneers, was that it tended too much to separate the speaker from the listener, with, on the one hand, the speaker and, on the other, the listener, says M. Baudouin. Benjamin’s extremely modern idea is to create an interaction, almost an interactivity, as we would say today, between the two poles, transmitter and receiver. »
He does this by appealing to the critical spirit and relying on the mail of the listeners, whether it is filled with praise or protest. He also tries to make it intervene at the microphone, but the direction of the radios of Frankfurt and Berlin where he works refuses him this audacity.
Opening the airwaves to ordinary citizens in spontaneity and improvisation seems inconceivable. The State controls the programs produced with an educational aim. They are all scrupulously scripted by professionals.
The invention of models
Mr. Baudouin also published the Radio writings (Éditions Allia) by Walter Benjamin, in 2014, by translating the original archives saved from destruction and found in Potsdam forty years after the Second World War. The compendium makes it possible to measure the breadth and depth of the interventions. The radio scripts, most often with dialogue and played by actors, borrow from the theater of his friend Bertolt Brecht.
“When he takes the microphone, he becomes a modern storyteller,” says Philippe Baudouin. He also writes tales instead of reading old ones. He is betting that this ancient art of storytelling can continue within the framework of technical reproducibility from an acoustic point of view. With Benjamin, there is therefore a whole radio writing, which becomes an artistic work. He does not remain in the simple posture of the journalist: he becomes a narrator and radiophonic storyteller. In this sense, his radio practice is also an artistic practice. »
Until then, the speakers contented themselves with reading old tales to young people, and that was all. Benjamin, on the other hand, creates a radiophonic form around the tale that has never existed before. It is a way of clearing. He also invents radiophonic models, where he suggests ways of behaving in such and such a daily situation.
It shows, for example, how to negotiate a salary increase or how to prevent a dispute between a couple from leading to divorce. Benjamin devotes episodes to the marginalized, witches, Gypsies, brigands and traffickers. He explains why the elephant is called elephant and the boat, boat.
He transposes tales featuring wonderful characters, including Peter Munk the Charbonnier, Monsieur Forgengueul, Lipsuslapus and even a king of the dance floor. In Radau um Kasperl (Ruckus around Kasperlbroadcast on March 10, 1932), one of his great successes of the time, he introduced young people to the operation of the radio, a microphone, a studio, an antenna.
The language register remains accessible in this radio tale, but certain Benjaminian productions for teenagers defend a level that is frankly very (even too) demanding a century later. “For him, popularizing never means simplifying,” says Mr. Baudouin.
Only two excerpts from Ruckus around Kasperl (totaling about fifteen minutes) survived out of the 80 to 100 hours written by the radio philosopher. The German Archive (Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv) included them on a 2003 CD. There are contemporary cover recordings.
Philippe Baudouin played the original tapes to Stéphane Hessel, son of Franz Hessel, a very good friend of the philosopher, who recognized “without any doubt” the voice of Walter Benjamin behind that of the character of Kasperl. The claim is criticized, but, if so, it is the only touching trace of the master’s voice at the time of its technical reproducibility…
The radio adventure ended as soon as the Nazis took power in 1933, replacing on-air education with propaganda. Walter Benjamin committed suicide on September 26, 1940, at the age of 48, while fleeing the German army, which had just invaded France.