An icy wind whistles. It almost drowns out this constantly repeated radio message, which is a desperate cry for help from the Arctic. 1928 was the airship Italy wrecked on the island of Foynøya, which is part of the Spitsbergen archipelago, and the crew hoped for rescue. It succeeded in the course of an unprecedented international relief operation.
A year later, Friedrich Wolf made this catastrophe, which was mitigated with great effort, the subject of his radio play SOS…rao rao…Foyn made – it is the oldest surviving one in German broadcasting history. The medium, which was young at the time, played a role in it, acoustically and figuratively. Without radio operators and radio stations, the crew of the Italy not draw attention to their plight and the rescue operation cannot be coordinated.
Adapted by Heiko Michels and the ensemble Limited Blindness SOS…rao rao…Foyn now in her radio play sparks of love. Your play is far more than a mere remake. Although it follows Wolf’s manuscript, it supplements it with a number of aspects in terms of content and acoustics. The atmosphere of noise is far more complex, sparks of love also cites other radio milestones, including a speech by Albert Einstein at the opening of the Berlin Radio Exhibition in 1930, the Funkoper The Ocean Flight by Bertolt Brecht and an early radio advertisement. In this way, the media context becomes larger.
The utopia of radio as a grassroots democratic medium
In his piece, Heiko Michels continues to think about the acceleration of media communication, which began with the use of radio waves, right up to the present. Especially the aspect of who controls this communication, who has the means and the ability to do it; and what about those who (want to) remain excluded. Michels also built in a number of background noises, not just the technical ones from 1928.
sparks of love contains a number of barbs. Nevertheless, the radio play sticks to the utopian promise that radio is a medium with great democratic, even grassroots, potential, despite experiences to the contrary in the “Third Reich”. And that’s why RBB Kultur is now broadcasting it, as planned for a long time, at the risk of offending: It was a Russian amateur radio operator who made the emergency call Italy and the young Soviet Navy was instrumental in carrying out the rescue operation. They take on corresponding heroic roles. sparks of love The ensemble Limited Blindness argues that it would be “short-sighted” to dismiss it because of the Russian attack on Ukraine: the drama “demonstrates the value of life and mutual help against all forms of ideology, abstraction and media blindness”. The radio play is about solidarity.
sparks of loveRBB Kultur, Friday, 7 p.m.