Reader's Digest: August 26, 2023
Before he was an iconic cultural critic, Walter Benjamin made radio broadcasts for stations in Frankfurt and Berlin. His first, March 23, 1927, was about young Russian writers. The last, in early 1933—as the Nazis seized power in Germany—was a psychedelic radio play about moon aliens who make a study of human misery. In between, Benjamin spoke about market halls in Berlin, reading E.T.A Hoffman as a child, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and more. Hannah Arendt “once likened her late friend to a pearl diver who possessed a gift for diving into the wreckage of bourgeois civilization and emerging into the sunlight with the rarest of treasures.”
Benjamin made around ninety radio broadcasts, but no recordings of his voice—“described as beautiful, even melodious”—now survive. Thankfully, many of the transcripts do, published by Verso as Radio Benjamin, and reviewed by Peter E. Gordon in The Nation.
“Like a man climbing to his roof,” Gordon writes, “Benjamin reports on the flood that threatens to engulf him.” His play about the aliens—“Lichtenberg: A Cross-Section”—is one of his reports:
Beings who live on the moon are charged with the task of investigating the career of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, a prominent physicist of the German Enlightenment. The moon beings have uncanny names—Labu, Quikko, Sofanti, and Peka—and they convene as the Moon Committee for Earth Research, which deploys odd contraptions for its work, each of them “easier to use than a coffee grinder.” There is a “Spectrophone,” which permits them to hear and see everything that happens on Earth; a “Parlamonium” that translates human speech into music; and an “Oneiroscope” that allows the researchers to observe human dreams. With the aid of these devices, the moon beings seek to understand why humans are so afflicted with misery. Their investigations finally reach the tentative conclusion that even if humans are unhappy, “perhaps it is their unhappiness that allows them to advance.” To honor the scientific achievements of Herr Lichtenberg, they conclude by naming a crater in his honor, a crater from which shines a “magical light that illumines the millennium.”