The history of a medium
Radio Around The World

It is more than 100 years since the radio began to conquer the world. We have listened to the first sentences transmitted by wireless telegraphy: a journey back in time to the earliest beginnings of radio technology and radio entertainment.

Don’t radios all look more or less the same? Quite the contrary, as the history of the radio goes to show: a look back at its many past permutations reveals some remarkable contraptions whose designs were often way ahead of their time.

When radio in Germany celebrates its one hundredth anniversary, there is one guest who definitely deserves to be invited to the party: Bertolt Brecht. Andreas Ströhl has written about the role that Brecht played in shaping radio as we know it today.
 

Eva Sudrow worked in the DDR Rundfunk radio drama editing room in East Berlin, and later for Deutschlandfunk. She did radio for half the country, and subsequently for the whole country. Verena Hütter interviewed her.

We’re celebrating radio. But what existed before radio came along? The théâtrophone! Users had to sign up with the telephone company – just as we subscribe to a streaming service provider today – and music and operatic performances were broadcast over the phone. Lev Bratishenko tells us the story of the théâtrophone.
 

During the pandemic, dance enthusiasts took to the Internet. Resourceful club owners, DJs and radio producers established a new, multimedia radio format without further ado. 

Playing some different music for a change, broadcasting alternative political content or fooling around on the airwaves – why were there so many pirate radio stations in East Frisia, of all places?
 

What influenced you? The radio! Hamburg music journalist Jürgen Ziemer talks about growing up with the radio in the 1970s and 1980s: with the Beatles, Karlheinz Stockhausen, krautrock and “Anti-hits”.

Creaking doors, singing swords and and the crunch of snow underfoot – sounds bring stories to life. Foley artist Max Bauer speaks in an interview about his profession. 

This is a tale of nothing less than war, and of love in times of war. It is a tale of the radio operator Corello and the officer Emile, and about the code of their love that Casares attempted to decipher.

I am or I am not a nurse, a sailor on a submarine, a schoolgirl − Marius Goldhorn’s story is about a voice on all frequencies and a little boy with a fondness for currant buns.
 

Leonhard Hieronymi writes about the year 1997, when the radio station Planet Radio went on air and had such a momentous impact on the author – who, then aged 10, used to listen to the station in his mother’s Mercedes.
 

Enis Maci tells the story of three radio stations at three different points in time at three different locations. Radio memories from the Vatican, the Ruhr region and the Dollart.