HAUNTED MEDIA: MOBILIZING RADIO DURING THE NOVEMBER REVOLUTION

Abstract

Media technologies constitute an integral part of social events and play a significant role in modeling political and cultural transformations and interventions. The implementation of new mass media, such as the development of radio technology in the late 1910s, fundamentally changed modes and methods of mobilization of the public sphere. Radio was the first technological device that enabled live transmission of acoustic material and was able to simultaneously reach multiple recipients in different places. Thus it profoundly modified knowledge production and forms of protest. The emergence of new forms of media protests and mobilization strategies will be traced by focusing on one specific event of revolutionary unrest in the German Empire which used radio technology years before public broadcasting officially began: The so-called Funkerspuk (Haunting of Broadcasting). This ‘haunting’ event occurred in 1918 during the November Revolution, a period of drastic social, political and economic upheaval, when former soldiers, now organized as revolutionary Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils, occupied the central news bureau of the German Empire and made use of the former military radio systems to proclaim the victory of the socialist revolution and to coordinate further political actions. From November 1918 to February 1919, they appropriated the state’s means of communication technology and were able to effectively challenge the state’s news monopoly by transmitting their own messages as well as alternative reports on current events. The revolutionaries used multiple media (broadcasts, telegrams, magazines, street rallies) as tools and techniques for socio-political agitation and extended the previous frameworks for mass mobilization both in practice and in theory. The presentation aims to shed light on a heterogeneous discursive network highly interconnecting media activism and governmental critique of power. Centering Funkerspuk as a media event allows the reconstruction of early media usage and ideological history of German radio during the interwar period — and beyond.