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!
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Emily OliverResearcher at Warwick University. Interested in all things Anglo-German. Archives
September 2017
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