An investigation of the cultures and technologies of early radio and
how a generation of cultural operators--with Schoen at the
center--addressed crisis and adversity.
Dials, knobs, microphones, clocks; heads, hands, breath, voices. Ernst
Schoen joined Frankfurt Radio in the 1920s as programmer and accelerated
the potentials of this collision of bodies and technologies. As with
others of his generation, Schoen experienced crisis after crisis, from
the violence of war, the suicide of friends, economic collapse, and a
brief episode of permitted experimentalism under the Weimar Republic for
those who would foster aesthetic, technical, and political revolution.
The counterreaction was Nazism--and Schoen and his milieux fell victim
to it, found ways out of it, or hit against it with all their might.
Dissonant Waves tracks the life of Ernst Schoen--poet, composer, radio
programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from
childhood--as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. It
casts radio history and practice into concrete spaces, into networks of
friends and institutions, into political exigencies and domestic
plights, and into broader aesthetic discussions of the politicization of
art and the aestheticization of politics. Through friendship and
comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile,
networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect,
Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises.
An exploration of the ripples of radio waves, the circuits of
experimentation and friendship, and the proposals that half-found a
route into the world--and might yet spark political-technical
experimentation.
