Today marks eighty years since the outbreak of the Second World War. Since the war acted as a significant catalyst for the development of the BBC’s foreign language services, it is only fitting that BBC Radio 4 should mark this anniversary with an episode of ‘Archive on 4’ on the BBC German Service. ‘Beating Hitler with Humour’ focuses on the German Service’s comedy programmes and the role these played in Britain’s political warfare effort. Featuring researchers Vike Plock, Kristina Moorehead, and myself, as well as IMLR archivist Claire George and Magnus Brechtgen from the Institute of Contemporary History (Munich), the programme gives an insight into the Service’s three main satirical programmes (‘Frau Wernicke’, ‘Kurt and Willi’, and ‘The Letters of Corporal Hirnschal’). It also mentions some of the ways in which the BBC used music to transport criticism of the Nazi regime. As you may gather from listening to the programme, my favourite of the comedy programmes is Robert Lucas’s ‘The Letters of Corporal Hirnschal’, as I don’t think it’s lost any of its freshness and absurd yet endearing humour. When publishing Hirnschal’s collected letters after the war, Lucas himself reflected on just what had made them so popular with German listeners during the Second World War: ‘Like any other tyranny, national socialism was utterly devoid of humour; it was a matter of beastly seriousness. To laugh at it – in the midst of the war machine’s infernal noise and the Nazi propaganda's hysterical screaming – was, as I believe and hope, a liberating experience.’ In other news, I have recently published an article on how the BBC German Service developed its ‘East Zone Programme’ during the 1950s as part of its Cold War propaganda effort. Anyone wanting to know more about the German Service during the Second World War may also be interested in a chapter I wrote on how the Service reported news of the Munich-based resistance group known as the White Rose, which is available in an excellent volume edited by Alex Lloyd as part of the whiteroseproject.org
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It’s been a good week for BBC-related content. I was delighted to see the German Service front and centre in a news story about an East German schoolboy who was jailed for writing to the BBC’s East Zone programme “Letters without Signatures”. First broadcast in 1949, “Letters without Signatures” ran until 1975, providing a voice to listeners from East Germany, who had been silenced by their government. Susanne Schädlich’s recent book on the programme shows just how relentlessly the Stasi investigated anyone connected with the German Service, or suspected of corresponding with the presenters in London. East German listeners were told to address their letters to a variety of changing addresses in West Berlin (usually linked to bomb sites), which the West Berlin postal service knew to divert to the BBC’s Berlin office. However, there was still a significant risk of the Stasi intercepting letters and tracing the author, who could then face a long jail term. The other notable and slightly more lighthearted BBC-related story this week is that Monday finally saw the return of W1A to our screens. To anyone who has not watched the series so far: go and do it right now. Particularly if you work in the sort of job where you spend a lot of time in meetings. If corporate Newspeak drives you up the wall, I can guarantee you will soon come to love every single one of its characters, even the ones that make you cringe. Watching the show once again reminded me that it had been far too long since Jessica Hynes had graced my TV screen. W1A’s third season kicks off with Hynes’s character, the gloriously irritating PR wonk Siobhan Sharpe, trying to convince a sceptical room full of BBC execs that the next big thing for the corporation is “BBC Me”, essentially a glorified version of YouTube. Her argument is simple: “So I’ve got three words for you guys: U. G. and C.” While the rest of the room gradually decodes this as “user-generated content”, Siobhan tells them to “Forget any other words. Because you’re not gonna need them anymore.” Hugh Bonneville’s Ian Fletcher tries in vain to interject: “Is it just me, or is there perhaps an argument for us making content for our audience, rather than them just making content for us?” But the conversation has moved on. Everyone agrees that BBC Me is the future. We tend to think of user-generated content as something very recent, perhaps linked to the advent of YouTube, Twitter, the ubiquity of mobile phones, and other easy ways of instantly broadcasting our opinions and connecting with TV shows. However, UGC arguably goes back much further than that, if we think of letters-to-the-editor or radio phone-ins. Even before “Letters without Signatures”, very shortly after the end of the Second World War, the BBC German Service introduced a letterbox programme (the “Funkbriefkasten”), which quickly became one of its most popular shows. The BBC Written Archives hold a wealth of material on listener correspondence, and going through this recently has reminded me what an astonishing phenomenon the letterbox programme must have seemed to German listeners emerging from twelve years of Nazi rule in 1945. The letters are full of praise for a programme which freely broadcasts a huge range of views – including those of unreconstructed Nazis (these usually wrote in under pseudonyms for fear of repercussions from the Allied occupation forces in Germany). Not only did the letterbox programme encourage lively debate among Germans, it also kept the BBC informed of listener reaction and preferences regarding its programme offerings. Moreover, some of the letters were used in a more structured feature called “Was wollen Sie wissen?” (“What would you like to know?”), which answered pressing questions about the Allies’ plans for Germany’s future, about issues which Nazi propaganda had obscured, about war guilt, and about British current affairs and everyday life. In this context, the letters also enabled the BBC to combat rumours, which were rife in occupied Germany (due to an initial ban on all German news publications, and paper and electricity shortages following the war). Massive food shortages in postwar Germany proved a fertile ground for all sorts of rumours: with daily rations falling below 1,500 calories and a flourishing black market, it is understandable that Germans would start making up fantastical explanations as to where the food was actually going. Several outraged letters report the rumour that German butter was being packaged in English wrappers, shipped off, and subsequently sold in British shops. The BBC refuted these claims by reporting on the global postwar food shortage, and by explaining the difficulties of transporting perishable goods to occupied Germany. The big difference between these older forms of listener engagement and current user-generated content is of course the intervention of gatekeepers, who selected, curated, and edited the material provided to them by users. Of course, one could object that this made the programmes less democratic than they pretended to be. On the other hand, it did serve to filter out contributions ranging from the defamatory to the obscene, to the downright mad (such as the 1946 letter informing the BBC that Hitler was a woman purchased by Satan). Goodness knows, I would occasionally appreciate a curator’s intervention in my various social media feeds these days… In other news... … I attended the Association for German Studies conference in Warwick at the beginning of September, which was a delightful chance to reconnect with colleagues and find out about all the recent research in our field. As part of the lead panel on “Sound and Sense” I gave a paper examining how the BBC German Service used music as part of its propaganda mission during World War II. Examples ranged from jazz to traditional German folk songs, to parodic version of Lili Marleen. … My book is out at the end of this month! It has nothing to do with the BBC or with radio (you have been warned). However, it has everything to do with Germany – more specifically with German performances of Shakespeare surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. If that’s your cup of tea, make my day: order a copy and turn Shakespeare and German Reunification into this year’s Christmas bestseller! The first few months on this project have been filled with archive work, with teaching, and with writing, during which I’ve benefited from some excellent advice from my research mentor, Professor Anne Fuchs. In February I attended a conference on the ‘BBC and the World Service’ at King’s College London, involving fascinating contributions which engendered great discussions on radio’s impact and how it might be studied. It’s been a great joy to discover the wealth of material available at the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, which is a wonderful research environment, as they assign you one of their brilliant researchers, who kindly remains at your beck and call all day. I’ve also been able to consult the Robert Lucas papers, newly-acquired by the Institute for Modern Languages Research at Senate House (London). Robert Lucas, an Austrian-Jewish émigré in London, was one of the German Service’s long-standing staff members, leaving behind a huge range of materials relating to his work there. So far, in both archives I have sifted through materials relating to the early years of the BBC German Service, which has enabled me to write a chapter on its role during the Second World War. For this first piece of work, I decided to focus on the question of listenership. Since listening to the BBC from within Nazi Germany was necessarily a clandestine activity (for which punishment could range from fines to imprisonment or even the death penalty), it is almost impossible to give an accurate estimate of listenership. In the absence of this data, it makes sense to figure out whom the BBC thought it was addressing in its broadcasts. A number of documents in the archives provide insights into the German Service’s target audience, and how it should be addressed. A recurring idea in policy statements and staff interviews, particularly with the Head of the German Service, Hugh Carleton Greene, is that the BBC addressed itself to the widest possible audience of ‘ordinary Germans’. The aim was explicitly not to target only the tiny minority of political opponents to the Nazi regime, but instead to persuade Germans of all backgrounds, classes, and political persuasions that the Nazi leadership did not have their best interests at heart. By judiciously distinguishing between Germans and Nazis, the BBC hoped to convince the population that the Allies were on their side, that support for the Nazis would only prolong the war and exacerbate German suffering. I became particularly interested in the later war years, when the tide had turned in the Allies’ favour, but when the destructive effects of warfare were being experienced within Germany for the first time. How did the BBC manage to maintain the message that the Allies had Germany’s best interests at heart while their forces were carpet bombing German cities? In order to answer this question, I examined a run of almost 1,000 features scripts from January 1943 to December 1944 (unfortunately, the scripts for January-June 1945 have been lost, meaning that reactions to incidents such as the Dresden bombing remain unavailable). The German Service by no means shied away from the air war as a topic. Far from it, in fact: a large number of the scripts I examined deal wholly or in part with this very topic. These ranged from factual information about which cities had been targeted, how many air craft the Allies were producing, and how many bombs they had dropped, to more sophisticated features dealing with the emotional impact of war on people’s lives. The features pursued a number of different strategies to shift focus away from the fact that British bombs were claiming German (civilian) lives. One was to show that it had been the Nazis who first started the air war with the blitz in London and devastating attacks on other cities. Another was to highlight the different responses of the British and Nazi leadership to civilian casualties: several scripts describe visits by the Royal Family or by Churchill to sites of recent attacks, which contrasted sharply with Hitler’s casual disdain for German casualties. The key strategy for reporting on the bombing war, however, was to emphasise again and again that Britain was specifically and exclusively aiming at industrial targets, and that it was doing this with great precision, in order to wipe out Hitler’s war machinery. I will present part of this research at a conference at Senate House in July on the topic ‘Information and Its Communication in Wartime’. A slightly different aspect of my work on the German Service will feature in my paper for the annual Association for German Studies conference at Warwick University in September: My contribution to the lead panel on ‘The Relationship between Language and Music in German Culture’ will explore the role played by music in the German Service’s output: ‘Turning Hearers into Listeners: Music on the BBC German Service during the Second World War’. My next challenge will be to examine the BBC’s involvement in Germany immediately after the Second World War, during the Allied occupation. Having previously worked as part of a research project on this period, I recently had a chance to revisit some of my research at a conference in Berlin. Entitled ‘Competitors & Companions: Britons and Germans in the World’, this two-day workshop was jointly organised by the German Association for the Study of British History and Politics (ADEF) and the German Historical Institute London, and kindly hosted by the Humboldt University’s Centre for British Studies. My paper focused on reactions to the British film Oliver Twist (dir. David Lean) at its first screening in Berlin in 1949, when it caused riots among the Jewish population due to its depiction of Fagin. Those interested in the topic can find a longer version of my presentation here, which I gave as a research seminar for Birmingham University in 2016. My fascination with Anglo-German relations during the occupation period shows no signs of abating, and I look forward to exploring it through the lens of radio for the next part of my project. It's always exciting to start new research, and I'm particularly thrilled to be running my own project this time as Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. The idea to research the BBC German Service grew out of my previous work as part of the Beyond Enemy Lines team at King's College London. Whilst researching cultural life in Germany under British and American occupation during the immediate postwar years, I repeatedly came across references to the BBC German Service, but was surprised to discover that very little scholarly work had been undertaken in this field. There exists to date no detailed history of the BBC German Service. Scholars have mainly focused on its role during the Second World War, but research on the Cold War and subsequent periods is sparse. Working across the disciplines of German, media studies, memory studies, and cultural history, I will seek to fill this gap over the next three years.
Here's why I think the BBC German Service is such a fascinating topic: Voice of Truth or Propaganda Tool? During the Second World War, the BBC German Service offered its clandestine listeners in the Third Reich a supposedly impartial ‘voice of truth’ and objective information on the war. Created hastily during the Munich crisis in 1938, and operating as part of the Political Warfare Executive during World War II, the BBC German Service continued to rely on funding from the Foreign Office after 1945 – a structural dependence which was at odds with its claims to impartiality. One of the project’s recurring concerns is to investigate to what extent the German Service avoided becoming a propaganda tool. Stringent control over broadcasting material lasted well into the 1960s and ‘70s with British subjects checking every script before it could go on air. Moreover, financial dependence on the Foreign Office also meant that from the 1950s onwards the BBC German Service repeatedly came under pressure through government-imposed cuts. This dependence ultimately caused its closure in 1999, when it was proposed that funding should no longer be drawn from the Foreign Office but from the licence fee. The BBC as Role Model and Employer In postwar Germany, the German Service became key to the Allies’ re-education project, with its former head, Hugh Carleton Greene establishing the BBC-inspired North-West German public broadcaster (NWDR) in the British Zone of occupation. The project traces the ways in which the BBC shaped the media of the Federal Republic – both as a role model for public service broadcasters such as NDR, WDR and ARD, and through training future leaders in the West German media landscape, such as Peter von Zahn and Gerd Ruge. Moreover, the study also examines how early employment in the BBC German Service shaped the careers of important émigré writers including Austrian poet Erich Fried, and Martin Esslin, who went on to become Head of Radio Drama at the BBC. Information, Education, Entertainment Another key focus of the project is the BBC German Service’s coverage of and commentary on important historical events in both Germany and Britain (e.g. the Normandy landings, the Berlin Blockade, the building and fall of the Berlin Wall, Winston Churchill’s death, the Falklands War, the British miners’ strike). In this context, it will be particularly instructive to compare programmes from the Service’s different subdivisions, including the Austrian Service (1943-1957) and the East Zone Service (1950-1975), to analyse how they tailored their outputs for specific local audiences, and what this tells us about the Service’s larger political aims. In addition to the BBC’s news and information remit, the project will also consider its entertainment and educational functions, examining the balance in broadcasting content between creative scripted content (plays, features, satires), music (e.g. the programme ‘Eine kleine Beatmusik’ introduced to attract younger listeners in the 1960s), language learning and tourism, and listener-generated content (e.g. the feature ‘Letters without Signatures’ of the East Zone Service). Seeking Interviewees In order to build up an accurate picture of the BBC German Service, I hope to interview former producers, and generally anyone who remembers working for (or even listening to) it. If any of the above applies to you, or you know someone who might be able to help out with this kind of information, please get in touch - I would be delighted to hear from you. |
Emily OliverResearcher at Warwick University. Interested in all things Anglo-German. Archives
September 2017
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