Audio book “Voices of the Century 1945-2000” from Hörverlag – Kultur

German post-war history, reduced to 40 hours of audio documents. A foolhardy undertaking. Where do you start, what do you leave out? Who is speaking and in whose name? If you listen to the second part of the “Voices of the Century”, which covers the period from 1945 to 2000, you will hardly miss how presumptuous some of the things that have been collected as historically significant in more than 400 lectures, speeches, interviews and statements are is. Many of the many speakers pretend to speak for a crowd, even a majority – yes, sometimes even for everyone. Often this is just wishful thinking bordering on a fantasy of omnipotence.

The fact that Germany was divided until 1989 led to absurd rhetorical contortions for decades, especially among politicians here and there: people were hostile to the other system, but always acted as if the relevant population actually had a problem with this system not to create anything, but to be critical or even negative about it. The political elites in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic deceived themselves and their respective sections of the population into believing that the others would also like to belong – depending on their point of view, the citizens of the GDR belong to the free West or the residents of the Federal Republic of Germany belong to the peace-making East.

German contemporary history is not just a series of political decisions

In his acceptance speech for being awarded the Büchner Prize in 1963, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, in his acceptance speech for the Büchner Prize in 1963, demonstrated how similar the West and East were in their means of agitation, despite all their opposition. Just as he harshly criticized the language of the news magazine in his famous essay six years earlier The mirror, he decoded political terms in his Büchner Prize speech, which he called ghostly vocabulary: “The political language that is spoken in Germany today defies all reason. You can talk about it. Not in it,” said Enzensberger, and then translated embellishments, embellishments and clauses into plain text. Or as he said: into German. He found his examples on both sides of the Berlin Wall, which had been built two years earlier.

As a rule, things are not as simple as politicians have repeatedly made them out to be. It is the work of the editors of the “Century Voices” to work this out. After the first part of the ” Voices of the Century” (1900-1945) also demonstrated a good instinct in the subsequent edition when selecting these voices – i.e. speeches, addresses, lectures, interviews – in order to give a heterogeneous and coherent picture of this half of the German century.

The central decision of this quintet is not to present contemporary German history primarily as a mere series of political decisions. But above all to present a cultural and intellectual history of Germany in the second half of the 20th century. “Voices of the Century” is a collection of audio documents that form a complex, contentious debate about social, cultural and moral questions – in some cases with consequences for politics and business. Even in the chapters that deal very explicitly with political processes – such as the dispute over the rearmament of the Federal Republic, the workers’ uprising on June 17, 1953 in the GDR or the building of the Wall – it is not just about the matter itself, but always also about the underlying mentality of individual protagonists and larger social trends.

Alfred Hitchcock explains how to create suspense. Let’s listen

One after the other you can hear Kurt Schumacher, the chairman of the SPD, who spoke out vehemently against a merger of his party with the Communist Party of Germany at the beginning of 1946, and Otto Grotewohl, chairman of the central committee of the SPD in the Soviet occupation zone, which was in the area of ​​what later became the GDR took exactly this step and merged the SPD with the KPD to form the SED, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. It’s not (just) about questions of political power and strategies, but about a groundbreaking social plan. And when the later Federal President Gustav Heinemann is heard explaining why he resigned as Interior Minister from the first Adenauer cabinet, then it is about much more than the dissent on a political issue, namely about the fundamental decision with which level of power the office of the Federal Chancellor should and must be equipped.

A large part of this opulent collection of documents is occupied by the voices of intellectuals and artists who deal with the intellectual state of Germany. You can hear Thomas Mann, who returned to Germany for the first time in 1949, among other things, to be honored with the Goethe Prize, to the dismay of many. Theodor W. Adorno and Erika Mann describe their respective rapprochement with Europe and Germany in a conversation. Carl Zuckmayer talks about the potential of intellectual renewal, and Erich Kästner reflects on the lack of heroism during the Nazi era.

The “Voices of the Century” compare people and positions that at first glance do not necessarily relate to one another. And yet exist in the same intellectual climate. In this way, the listener’s horizons expand, especially into those decades that they do not know from their own experience. Where necessary, the editors use their respective expertise to classify, contextualize the audio documents – and build intellectual bridges. They proceed chronologically, but not in a very strict sense – within the course of time they focus primarily on themes in order to better illustrate connections.

The apparently light and entertaining aspects are also not neglected. But even from that you could learn lessons if you wanted. Alfred Hitchcock explains in an interview how to create tension in films. German crime novels would be better if his advice were taken to heart.