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THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AND RADIO
foundly changed this state of affairs. Thanks to the technological possibility it opened up-that of addressing countless numbers of people simultaneously-the practice of popularizing developed beyond a wellintentioned philanthropic effort and became a task with its own types of formal and generic laws, a task as different from the older practices as modern advertising is from the attempts of the nineteenth century. This has the following consequences for experience: the older type of popularization simply took for granted the time-tested and well-established inventory of science, which it propounded in the same way the sciences themselves had developed it, but stripped of the more difficult conceptual lines of thought. What was essential to this form of popularization was omission: its layout always to some extent remained that of the textbook, with its main sections in large type and elaborations in slnall print. The much broader but also much more intensive popularity [VolkstUmlichkeit], which radio has set as its task, cannot remain satisfied with this procedure. It requires a thorough refashioning and reconstellation of the material from the perspective of popularity [Popularitat]. It is thus not enough to use some contemporary occasion to effectively stimulate interest, in order to offer to the now expectantly attentive listener nothing more than what he can hear in the first year of school. Rather, everything depends on conveying to him the certainty that his own interest has a substantive value for the material itself-that his inquiries, even if not spoken into the microphone, require new scientific findings. In the process, the prevailing superficial relationship between science and the popular [Volkstumlichkeit] is replaced by a procedure which science itself can hardly avoid. For what is at stake here is a popularity that not only orients knowledge toward the public sphere, but also simultaneously orients the public sphere toward knowledge. In a word: the truly popular interest is always active. It transforms the material of science and penetrates that science. The more liveliness demanded by the form in which such pedagogical work takes place, the more indispensable is the demand that it develop really lively knowledge and not only an abstract, unverifiable, general liveliness. This is why what has been said here is especially true of the radio play, to the extent that it has a didactic character. Now, as regards the literary radio play in particular, it is no better served by so-called conversations culled in an arts-and-crafts manner from the fruits of reading and from quotations of books and letters than it is by the dubious arrogance of having Goethe or Kleist adopting the language of whoever wrote the manuscript and speaking it into the microphone. And because the former