43 Conversation with Ernst Schoen
"Just as an upright piano might appear in a poem by Laforgue, in a scene from Proust, or in an by Rousseau, the scraggly figure of the loudspeaker, or of headphones bulging on ears like tumors with the hanging entrails of the cord, is suited to the poetry of Aragon or Cocteau, to a painting by Beckmann or, better, de Chirico." I This is an incisive and compelling observation. It is taken from an essay in the journal Anbruch entitled "Musical Entertainment by Means of Radio."2 The author is Ernst Schoen.) Which makes the compelling also surprising: it is the director of a radio station who is here speaking about his instrument in such an apposite, cultivated, yet unpretentious way. To listen to the plans and goals of such a man struck me as all the more interesting beca use the station in question is Radio Frankfurt, which had acquired a reputation throughout Europe even before its former program director, Hans Flesch,4 focused attention on Frankfurt when he was hired away by Berlin and left his colleague behind as his successor. "To understand something historically," Schoen begins, "means to grasp it as a reaction, as an engagement. OUf Frankfurt enterprise thus must also be grasped as a response to an inadequacy, indeed as an opposition to that which originally determined the shape of the radio station's programming. This was, in short, Culture with a massive capital C. People thought that radio had put into their hands the instrument of a vast public-education enterprise; lecture series, instructional courses, largescale didactic events of all sorts were introduced-and ended in fiasco. What did this reveal? That the listener wants entertainment. And radio had nothing of the sort to offer: the shabbiness and inferiority of its "col-
397