When Walter Benjamin was a radio host

Theodor Adorno said about Walter Benjamin (Berlin, 1892–Portbou, 1940) that “everything that fell under the scrutiny of his words was transformed, as though it had become radioactive.” And although it may have been a cheap joke, Benjamin’s hypnotic ability as a storyteller also applied to his radio broadcasts. From 1927 to 1933, Benjamin helped write, broadcast and sometimes also produce 80 programs for Radio Frankfurt and Radio Berlin.

The Berlin writer was a kind of cultural detective, and so his foray into radio comes as no surprise. He was a freelance author, outside the academic circles, in need of money, a thinker in love with the popular, and a writer interested in a channel as strange and innovative as radio was at the time (regional stations arrived in Germany in 1923).

The paucity of information on this facet of such a fundamental figure of 20th-century thought is somewhat more surprising. Fortunately, in 2014, the Akal publishing house released Radio Benjamin, a compilation of his broadcasts edited by Lecia Rosenthal. And more recently, a Spanish edition also titled Radio Benjamin hit the bookstores. It is aimed at a younger audience and includes a selection of 13 scripts — many of them from the Radio Berlin program “Enlightenment for Children” — with illustrations by Judy Kaufmann.

If Benjamin’s life was full of coincidences, twists and turns, so too was his radio work: the scripts were confiscated by the Gestapo and were about to be destroyed, but the Nazis mistakenly sent them to the Pariser Tageszeitung (a German anti-Hitler publication), and in 1945 they were saved in an act of sabotage. From there they went to the USSR, and in 1960 they were transferred to the General Archives in Potsdam, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In 1972, they landed at the literary archives of the Academy of Arts in East Berlin. Until 1983, consulting them was very difficult.

Sellers and smugglers

A keen student of reality — a kind of enormous text to be deciphered, in his own words — Benjamin knew firsthand the danger of the rise of fascism. Therefore, in his programs, he “urged his listeners to develop their powers of observation, to be critical, to have clarity about their daily reality, relying both on history and on their own acumen; to be in the here and now, to not allow human deterioration to spread,” writes Lorena Cervantes, author of A Revolutionary Pedagogy for Awakening: Walter Benjamin on the Radio (2025).

In fact, many of his speeches are a kind of gentle, subversive pedagogy. “Benjamin’s entire work, seen today, can be read as a ‘fire warning,’ paraphrasing an idea the author uses in some of his books,” says Diana Hernández, editor at Libros del Zorro Rojo, the publisher of the Spanish edition. “Benjamin recognized the potential of radio as a tool for raising awareness, and for moving, through praxis, from being a spectator to ‘actively intervening,’ not only as a creator, but as a historical subject,” explains Cervantes, a philosophy professor at the National University of Mexico.

Some of his broadcasts are also clues about his works, such as A Berlin Rascal, broadcast on Radio Berlin on March 7, 1930, related to the book Berlin Childhood around 1900. The memory of his childhood helped him create a clear complicity with his youngest radio listeners, establishing “an authentic space of encounter with them, which went beyond shared interests in books, toys, or prints, and which we could define as the possibility of a crack, a fold in reality in which another experience becomes possible,” according to Cervantes.

His radio works, like the rest of his writings, show a special interest in the unpredictable twists and turns of history and the transgressive lives that unfold on the margins. In half-hour programs, the author explores, for example, the history of the concept of witchcraft and the dangers of mental rigidity. Or he explains the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the cartographic shifts in power, emphasizing that “it was then what for us today would be the destruction of Chicago or London.”

Between the intellectual, the alternative, and the popular, Benjamin follows the trail of Berlin culture and speech, noting that these were not born “from writers and professors, but rather developed in the locker rooms, the gaming tables, the bus, the pension fund, the sports hall, and the factories.”

His interest in the city and its citizens is evident in the broadcast titled Beehives, where he describes the architectural birth of beehive buildings for soldiers and their families, as a way of avoiding the drain of desertions in the face of tyrannical Prussian discipline (many soldiers asked for permission to return to their homes in the village to see their wives and children and never returned).

In another broadcast, he explains the story of the storming of the Bastille — the cruel Parisian prison — in 1789, but with an emphasis on the persecution of writers, booksellers, and bookbinders accused of conspiring against the security of the all-powerful French state.

It also chronicles the implementation of Prohibition in the United States in 1920 and businessman Henry Ford’s support for it, incorporating the famous American car salesman’s reflections in the script: “If I can sell my cars cheaper, it’s because we have Prohibition. Why? Before, the average worker spent a large part of his weekly wages at the bar. Now that he can’t drink his money away, he has the opportunity to save. And once he starts saving, he realizes he’ll soon have enough to buy a car.”

At the same time, it details the enormous business of liquor smugglers, who trafficked alcohol disguised as police officers, undertakers, or doll merchants.

These are almost century-old speeches, yet they highlight current issues, such as the dangers of unbridled ultra-capitalism or the need to find escape routes in the face of the rise of the far right.

The radio programs of the author of Illuminations are also an allegory of the rise of Nazism. The first broadcast was on March 23, 1927, on Radio Frankfurt, and the last, on January 29, 1933, on Radio Berlin. A day later, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor, and on those same airwaves, the Torchlight Parade was broadcast live and nationwide for the first time. 20,000 members of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary organization, staged the seizure of power. It was the exact moment when fire replaced speech on the radio, too, and Benjamin’s voice fell silent.

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