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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Emily OliverResearcher at Warwick University. Interested in all things Anglo-German. Archives
September 2017
CategoriesThis research is funded by
|