The invention of a listening public: radio and its audiences

This chapter appears in the first collection in the English language to address the development of the mass media in Germany from a social and cultural-historical perspective. Appearing in the Palgrave series 'New Perspectives in German Studies', the contributions, drawn from scholars working in Germany, the UK, the US and Denmark represent new research in the field, and while the ambition is not to provide comprehensive coverage, the collection is unique in attending to critical transformative moments across the entire range of political systems during the twentieth century in Germany (from imperialism to fascism, communism and liberal democracy), and across a broad range of media (from phonography to pulp fiction as well as broadcasting and the press). This particular chapter on radio audiences in the 1920s and 30s draws on original archival research and engages with an eclectic range of historical and theoretical work in German and English to rethink the construction of the listening public in the early twentieth century. The section on collective listening was included - in an extended and reworked form - as the only contribution from a UK researcher in Politiken der Medien, (Zurich: diaphanes, 2005) a collection of essays published in German that seeks to reconceptualise the relationship between politics and media by exploring how specific media technologies, forms and practices are implicated in the formation of varieties of political authority.