Hans-Ulrich Wagner spent five years researching in archives and now presents in three volumes everything the famous author Siegfried Lenz wrote for radio, mostly for NDR, between the 1950s and 1970s.
Siegfried Lenz is one of the most prolific “media workers” in Germany. For a long time, his income as a novelist was exceeded by the fees he received for his radio dramas and features, improvised stories, radio plays and night programmes, book reviews, essays and commentaries: Radio enabled Lenz to make a living as a freelance writer.
From Lenz’s estate and from the archives of the broadcasting companies in Hamburg, Bremen, Baden-Baden, Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart and Munich, Hans-Ulrich Wagner has made 164 programs available, most of which are appearing in print for the first time. They show a young writer searching for new forms of expression in the media, and an attentive journalist dealing with political, social and scientific issues. Lenz found the radio format of debate and dialogue useful for his work and used it in numerous pieces. But even as a successful writer, Lenz always acknowledged his medium: radio.
Hans-Ulrich Wagner, Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, reports in the extensive commentary section on the radio plays, audio episodes, features, impromptu narrations, commentaries and radio essays identified in the Siegfried Lenz estate at the German Literature Archive and in the various broadcasting archives.
The research and programme-historical studies were supported by the Historical Commission of the ARD and the North German Broadcasting Corporation (NDR). The three-volume edition has been published by Hoffmann und Campe as volumes 23, 24 and 25 of the major “Hamburger Ausgabe der Werke” [Hamburg Edition of His Work] supported by the Siegfried Lenz Foundation.
Siegfried Lenz as “Media Worker”
Immediately after the end of the Second World War, Siegfried Lenz comes into contact with radio. In 1947, as a student, he works in the radio play department of the Northwest German Broadcasting Corporation (NWDR) in Hamburg. His first radio contributions come into being for the radio even before he begins a traineeship at the zonal newspaper Die Welt [The World]in August 1948. The British-controlled NWDR becomes the first public broadcasting company in which German editors are responsible for a wide range of information, entertainment, cultural and educational programs. Lenz quickly becomes one of the regular contributors and develops an astonishing level of productivity in radio journalism and radio literature.
The 1950s are the “heyday” of cultural radio. The literary programs of the public broadcasting companies in Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Saarbrücken, Baden-Baden, Stuttgart and Munich have a decisive influence on literary developments and intellectual debates in the young Federal Republic. Many authors – not only those of Group 47 – work for the radio and sometimes also as editors in broadcasting. “We all made a living from broadcasting,” they will later say in retrospect. Siegfried Lenz is one of the most prolific radio employees of these years: he works intermittently as an editor for the ambitious attempts of a “third program” in Hamburg; he writes stories for children’s radio, succeeds as a radio playwright, appears as a narrator of impromptu stories, and shows his mastery in the form of literary reportage.
The topics of his radio work are wide-ranging: Lenz is an entertaining storyteller, but at the same time, in these years, he becomes a media intellectual critical of society. He deals with the loss of his home in East Prussia not only in literary but also in political terms. Through commentaries and essays, he comments on current issues. He critically analyzes the West German consumer society of the economic miracle period, traces the production of trivial literature in a media-critical way and, in large historical overviews, sheds light on the developments that run counter to the general “longing for a better society” in the post-war years.
Contact
Dr. Hans-Ulrich Wagner, Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut, h.u.wagner@leibniz-hbi.de