Chapter Five—
Radio

In May 1945 workers at the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) in Bad Homburg responsible for monitoring foreign radio stations came across a station in Berlin whose programming, in light of the most recent military and political developments, puzzled them. On the frequency of the former Reichsrundfunk could be heard not only announcers familiar from years past, concerts of classical and folk (especially Slavic) music, and readings and radio plays by German authors, but also political commentaries that—as an internal PWD communication sheet stated on May 31 under the heading "The Bear Purrs"—gave the impression that "the Soviet Union is presented as a friend, and almost a defender, of all good Germans."^[1] Surveys of the population in the American zone revealed that these broadcasts from Berlin did not fail to leave their mark:

Although these reports are the result of limited investigation and do not contain much detailed evidence, they do indicate the beginnings of a sharp change in German attitude toward the Russians and the possibility that this new attitude may be regarded as a political weapon by the Germans. The difference between U.S. policy announcements and the conditions in the American zone contrast sharply with the announcements that have emanated from Soviet sources. The contrast of tone is even sharper: no Allied station has ever entitled its early-morning concert program "Let's Start the Day with a Gay Heart" or advised listeners that for greater pleasure "you should listen on your balcony amid flowers." It is quite natural that the

Germans should attempt to use these contrasts as a lever for manipulating their relationships with occupying authorities in the U.S. zone.^[2]

American worries about on-air fraternization were not unfounded. A radio program, German and Russian in content and personnel, had been created a few days after the German capitulation in the former Reichsrundfunk building on Masurenallee in the north of Charlottenburg. This development had much to do with the building complex itself: designed by Hans Poelzig and built in the early 1930s, the largest and most modern facility of its kind in Europe, it had survived the final battle almost completely intact—for several reasons. The station was located outside the heavily shelled city center; the German staff had sabotaged the order to destroy it; and the Russians were careful to spare the complex in their artillery fire.^[3] The building also housed a large part of the original staff. Only a few days lapsed before broadcasting resumed and soon began disconcerting the Americans in Bad Homburg. The Russians laid a temporary cable to provide a connection to the transmitter in Tegel and provided technical assistance, but limited themselves to the control of German-produced programs. The actual broadcasting work, the programming, and the organization of the staff were in the hands of two members of the Ulbricht Group.^[4] Matthäus Klein, a former pastor and soldier in the Wehrmacht, had become a member of the National Committee for Free Germany while in a Russian POW camp; in this capacity he had been brought to Berlin to win over bourgeois popular-front sympathizers. The man responsible for the broadcasting was Hans Mahle. At thirty-four, he was the second-youngest member (after Wolfgang Leonhard) of the Ulbricht Group and in no way the functionary type to Ulbricht's liking, as Leonhard attested even after his break with the party: "He could still laugh, be happy, enjoy the company of 'average people' and, apart from the party jargon, found words that testified to his own thoughts and feelings.... He always reacted to events and people spontaneously, and that's why he remained—within the given sphere, of course—capable of his own initiative and ideas."^[5] According to Mahle's later account, the first phase of the rebuilding of Radio Berlin was pure improvisation. There was no preparatory planning for the station; the responsibility fell to Mahle when the existence of the undamaged broadcast center was discovered. The Russians simply provided technical assistance and secured the building with a military guard. Supposedly only several weeks after broadcasting resumed did Western inquiries alert the political command in Karlshorst to the fact that a

German radio station was in operation, and only then did Russian control officers appear in the building.^[6] The version offered from the American side based on interrogations of former employees at Radio Berlin and other "fairly reliable sources" seems more plausible. Apparently the station's management initially consisted of ten Russian officers ana seven German communists. Leading positions "were filled from the German resistance movement." The Russians did not permit live broadcasts; even news reports had to be recorded beforehand. "All texts were subject to strict Soviet censorship."^[7]

However strict or lenient Russian censorship might have been, the German communists seem to have been in charge of programming but not—with the exception of political news and commentaries—production. Twenty-year-old Markus Wolf (later the chief of the East German secret service), sent back to Berlin as a soldier in the Red Army and now a reporter at Mahle's station, was one of the exceptions. Fritz Erpenbeck, also in the station's management, involved himself in so many other activities that he had little time for any real work there. In May and June of 1945, Radio Berlin was not, as Mahle recalled years later, a completely new broadcasting creation conjured up by resistance fighters and communists. In fact, it was remarkably familiar, for not only the building but also its old staff had been taken over intact. "There are six of our men and one officer, and 600 of 'them,'" Markus Wolf reported to his parents in Moscow on June 4, regretting that "sifting out the chaff is possible only to a small degree, since many, really most, are needed."^[8] However, it was not only a lack of the Russians' "own" suitable radio people that necessitated recourse to the old personnel. It is more likely that the station's programming was meant to find a middle path between the previous broadcasting patterns and established audience habits, and political and programmatic reforms. In their work with German war prisoners for the National Committee for Free Germany, Mahle and Klein had had sufficient opportunity to acquaint themselves with the psyche of the average German in the Third Reich and to develop adequate propagandistic techniques. They could now apply their experience directly at Radio Berlin, and the furrowed brows in the Psychological Warfare Division in Bad Homburg confirmed their success. The continuity of listener habits depended on popular programming and, above all, on voices grown long familiar to the radio audience. Only announcers directly identifiable with the Nazi system—like those who had announced military victories—were silenced. The rest—in fact, the entire station—now followed the new motto: Reeducate but Don't Intimidate.^[9]

"In international relations possession—physical possession—is no less important than in common law. It was on this basis that the first round of the contest for control of Radio Berlin was concluded in favor of the Soviets."^[10] Radio Berlin's fate after the Western Allies arrived in the summer of 1945 could not be stated more accurately and succinctly than in these two sentences from an internal study conducted by the American military government (OMGUS) five years later.

When the Americans and British arrived in Berlin in early July to take possession of their sectors, they had specific ideas about the rebuilding, organization, and control of Berlin's future mass media. The city ruled jointly by the victorious powers was supposed to have a harmonious publicized opinion, in order to prevent the Germans from judging their victors.^[11] The situation that confronted them soon prompted a revision of their strategy; in the two preceding months the Russians had established three daily papers, and the other Allies now began to plan their own newspapers. But as far as radio was concerned, they held to their original idea: this was a medium that cut across all sector borders. The very logic of its technology not only predestined it for joint operation but actually demanded it. Immediately after their arrival in Berlin none of the Allied radio officers thought of making the Russians surrender the broadcast center to the English, in whose sector it lay. Even less so since the Russians, as they assured their allies in one of their first meetings,^[12] also favored quadripartite control of this medium. To be sure, their motives in offering such cooperation were different than the Americans and English suspected. As the Russian radio officer formulated it a year later, the Russians knew full well that they "had no legal claim whatsoever on this broadcast center except that they were the first to march into Berlin."^[13] Thoughtful tacticians that they were, they nevertheless tried to get the best out of the situation. Anticipating that the English would carry through with their claim, and ready to comply with it, the Russians had made preparations to set up a new station in their own sector, and to this end had already disassembled and removed technical equipment from the building on Masurenallee. But at the first sign that the opposing side had no thoughts of insisting on its legal right, they jumped at the chance. Their willingness to operate the station jointly followed the old Russian wisdom according to which exchanging an apple for a fruit garden benefits the owner of the apple.

Several months would pass before this dawned on the Western military governments. Assuming that a quadripartite station was only a matter of time, they declared themselves in agreement with a temporary

preservation of the status quo—that is, the Russians' control. Their only demand was that the Americans, the English, and (after their arrival in Berlin) the French each had the right to one hour of airtime every day.^[14] The tables had been turned within two weeks. The presence of the Western powers, legally the masters of the broadcast center, was now merely tolerated, and their involvement, in terms of airtime, was peripheral. The Russians had been confirmed and recognized as the actual masters, and they did not hesitate to strike again while the iron was hot. Two weeks after the agreement over airtime was reached, the Russians interpreted it to the effect that all three Western powers received one joint hour of airtime daily. Once again the Western powers conceded, keeping their eyes on the larger goal. ("The subject of a quadripartite zonal station was considered more important and the chances of success in this direction might be prejudiced by simultaneous pressure for time on Radio Berlin.")^[15] When the Russians finally pulled the bottom out from all Western expectations by declaring the building on Ma-surenallee the station for the entire Russian zone (just as Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Baden-Baden were the stations for the Western zones), accountable only to SMAD and not subordinate to headquarters in Berlin, it was too late for any Western intervention. Even hinting that the broadcast center lay in the British sector no longer had any effect. When in the first half of 1946 a British representative presented this argument in one of their fruitless discussions, his Russian counterpart reacted indignantly. The protocol noted: "Such an attitude, the Soviet delegate interjected, radically changed the substance of the question under discussion. One could draw the conclusion that the British authorities' intention was to force the Soviet Administration to abandon use of the studios. Such a decision would be just as rash and unbelievable as if, by decision of any commanding officer, entry to Berlin, situated in his zone, were prohibited!"^[16]

For a year and a half, until late 1946, negotiations continued. After Leipzig Radio was set up, the Western powers thought they saw another opportunity. Indicating that the Russian zone now had use of a station comparable to those in the Western zones, they again claimed Berlin Radio for quadripartite control. The Russians were unmoved by this reminder. The Western powers were left to face what the English officer responsible for radio affairs (confirming what his Russian colleague had before presumed with well-acted indignation) stated at the end of the year: "Fact is that unless the Russians move out voluntarily ... nothing short of violence will eject them."^[17]

As hopeless as it seemed, the English and Americans were not quite at the mercy of the Russians' refusal. While negotiations were in progress, they tended to their own interests. An American station went on the air in February 1946 and an English station (an extension of the NWDR zonal Radio in Hamburg) in August. The technical capacity of the American DIAS (Drahtfunk in the American Sector) was of lesser quality. It reached households only by telephone connections (hence the name Drahtfunk, meaning "wired"), and this was only a fraction of the 170,000 radios registered in the American sector. Its seven hours of daily programming was modest in comparison to Radio Berlin's nineteen hours of airtime. Yet DIAS fulfilled its purpose, really a double one. The first round lost, the station was supposed to strengthen (or simply generate) the Americans' negotiating position. DIAS was originally intended to cease its operation as soon as a quadripartite radio was created. At the same time, in the event that no agreement was reached, DIAS could be developed into a permanent broadcasting alternative. From the very beginning, especially among the English, there were skeptics who considered the idea of a quadripartite control of radio unrealizable.^[18] They saw as a goal what the advocates of quadripartite radio took to be the means to an end. The Russians had now resolved not to trade back their unexpected booty for uncertain compensation, and the attempt at a unified and jointly operated Radio Berlin did end in three Berlin radio stations. The Americans began to develop their station into one of equal capacity. Half a year after DIAS was set up, all-day programming was established, broadcasting converted from wired to wireless, and the name changed to RIAS (Radio in the American Sector).

In the Cold War period, RIAS would become a landmark in Western anticommunist propaganda. In the first two years of operation, though, there were no signs of such tendencies. Whoever assumed that the American station, created as a counterpoint to Russian-controlled Radio Berlin, would now exclusively represent the American position was mistaken. Until 1947–48, RIAS kept above the increasing political polarization. In distinction to the Western-licensed newspapers (Tagesspiegel, Telegraf ), which offered themselves as a journalistic forum for the anticommunist movement developing under the leadership of the SPD, RIAS consistently, almost fussily, pursued the "old" policy of Allied harmony—which the new pro-Western stance might easily perceive as communist-friendly, procommunist, or communist. As adherents of the old and new policies were equally represented in American Information Control, it

is not surprising that RIAS became the battleground and object of their confrontation.

DIAS had barely begun operating when the first clash occurred. It was the winter and spring of 1946, the weeks when the controversy over the merger of the SPD and KPD arose. Anti-merger circles within the SPD issued the demand that DIAS provide a journalistic venue for their cause as the dissident voice to procommunist Radio Berlin.^[*] Some members of OMGUS with ties to the SPD, like Ralph Brown in the Political Division, supported such partisanship. ("His opinion was that the radio odds are so terrifically weighted against the SPD by Radio Berlin that, if the Drahtfunk were to be fair and provide equal time for both parties, the anti-merger position in the campaign would not be advanced. He suggested that the Drahtfunk indicate in its handling of speeches that since Radio Berlin projects the case for the merger, the Drahtfunk presents the anti-merger case.")^[19] Information Control and RIAS decided to remain impartial: "Such handling would be detrimental to our long term aims, that it is not worth the risk of a short term fight on this issue ... for the Drahtfunk to depart from its announced intention of factual, fair, and objective treatment of the news." Thus Ulbricht, Pieck, and Grotewohl—like their less prominent opponents in the independent SPD—all had their say in RIAS. After the forced merger, the nonpartisan policy was maintained, as in the regular discussion program "Parties at the Round Table." Debates in the Municipal Council, which Radio Berlin carried only in excerpts, were broadcast live by RIAS. Its cultural programming was as open as that of the early Kulturbund, with which RIAS frequently collaborated. Concerts of contemporary music organized by Hans-Heinz Stuckenschmidt, an employee

[*] There were few doubts about Radio Berlin's pro-KPD/SED tendencies in the spring of 1946. The connection was only all too apparent once the station was made subordinate to the KPD-dominated Central Administration for Popular Culture in the fall of 1945. The speed and rigor with which the KPD used the station for its own ends is evident in a document ("strictly confidential") from the head of the radio division in the Central Administration, Wilhelm Girnus, addressed to a Dr. Weigt at Radio Berlin and dated February 1, 1946, which reads: "I had a very important discussion with those in charge concerning the Tagesspiegel . The destructive activity of this mouthpiece must be forcefully and strongly repelled. I therefore ask you to arrange it that, in a daily program, the station take a position on this issue in the most pointed way. We will protect you in every regard, and the stance to be immediately adopted is this." What follows is a characterization of the American-licensed newspaper as "reactionary," "fascist," "an unjustified existence," and so forth. The letter closes with the line: "We ask the editorial staff of the press division at the station to carry out this order as expediently as possible and establish an ongoing campaign in this matter." Bundesarchiv Potsdam, R2/629.

at RIAS and member of the Kulturbund, were broadcast and in part financed by the station. Studio discussions like the live "Round Table" series brought together intellectuals who no longer shared space in Berlin's other media, from Walther Karsch and Erik Reger to Johannes R. Becher and Friedrich Wolf. There were programs on modern and contemporary literature and art, and shows commemorating historical events, like the anniversary of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Compared with Radio Berlin, the programming at RIAS was not only politically more neutral, open, and independent, but also culturally more innovative and demanding—in other words, more elite and intellectual.^[20]

The Indendant at RIAS in charge of programming was Franz Wallner-Basté. Forty-two years old at the end of the war, he had headed the Council of the Arts in Zehlendorf and had made his mark by organizing open-air concerts by the Berlin Philharmonic before the Americans engaged him in December 1945 for this new assignment. On the American "white" list—that is, among the group of "uncompromised" Germans qualified for responsible positions—he had arrived on the recommendation of a former Berlin colleague, the screenwriter John Kafka, whom he had helped emigrate to America. In the 1920s, Wallner-Basté had been a music, theater, and literature critic for several Berlin newspapers and, in the last years before the Third Reich, head of the literature division for Southwest German Radio in Frankfurt am Main. After he lost his position in the summer of 1933, he earned his keep as a translator and screenwriter. His colleagues at RIAS remember him as an aesthete, liberal minded and highly educated, but without much talent in organization and leadership.^[21] Wallner-Basté was also a passionate amateur photographer, and the albums he left behind are notable for the number of attractive young women who always seemed to surround him. Was it a coincidence that even at RIAS the circle of his closest collaborators consisted mostly of women? RIAS was called "Frauenfunk" (women's radio) in the jargon of Berlin's radio trade because women assumed a disproportionate number of the leading positions there: Ruth Gambke (Director of Programming), Elsa Schiller (Music Division), von Gleis (Literature Division), Engelbrecht (Women's Programs), Regler-Bahr (Youth Programs), and the most important of all: Ruth Norden, the American director ("Chief of Station"). Some of them were certainly more bluestockings than the "sweet girls" of Wallner-Basté's private circle in the 1920s. Ruth Gambke, who had been in charge of programming at Central German Radio in Leipzig before

1933^[22] and possessed greater organizational and leadership talent than Wallner-Basté, displayed a managerlike severity even in the most courteous interaction and would be "the ideal of a program director even today" (Wolfgang Geiseler). She was apparently accepted and respected on all fronts as an emancipated professional in her field. Not only had she the full trust of Ruth Norden, but she was, at least in the eyes of Franz Wallner-Basté, her confidante.

Ruth Norden was thirty-nine years old when she arrived in Berlin in late 1945. Of German descent but born in London, she was not one of the émigrés in the American military administration. She knew Berlin from the pre-Nazi period, when she worked as an assistant to Hans Rothe, dramaturge at the Deutsches Theater, and later at S. Fischer Verlag under the direction of Peter Suhrkamp. Her friendship with the writer Hermann Broch dates from this period. She helped him obtain his travel visa to America in 1938 by winning over Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein as sponsors. "Some days your thinking borders on missionary work," Broch wrote to her on July 30, 1938, from London. After Broch's arrival in America, where Ruth Norden had worked on the editorial staff of various magazines since her return from Germany in 1935, their platonic relationship turned into an affair. Her role as a practical-minded savior in a foreign country remained unchanged. She wrote a grant proposal for Broch to the Guggenheim Foundation for his Death of Virgil . The relationship lasted for several years. In the fall Of 1945, disagreements began. Broch wrote on September 14: "I no longer have the energy for an extramarital relationship, and for a marital one (which, in and of itself, I would urgently need) I lack the emotional strength." They agreed to let the matter be decided by geographical distance. Norden, who had last worked for the government radio station Voice of America, entered the service of the OMGUS and traveled to Germany in December 1945. Broch began psychoanalytic treatment.^[23] Letters passed between Princeton and Berlin over the next two years, but in ever-decreasing intervals. There was never a reconciliation.

Ruth Norden's subordinates in Berlin remember her as cool and distanced in her dealings, a judgment she confirmed. ("I am not chummy with anyone.")^[24] Broch noted her tendency "to respond to emotional impulses from her rational side, that is, from the place which always produces false images,"^[25] and explained her masculine behavior as her unconscious wish, born of envy and competition with her brother Heinz,^[26] to be a man.

Initially, relations between Norden and Wallner-Basté were as friendly and collegial as they had been between Wallner-Basté and Norden's predecessor, Edmund Schechter, with whom he had been on the best of terms both personally and politically. Wallner-Basté saw Norden privately, as he had Schechter, often inviting her to join his family. In Wallner's notebook from 1946 she appears throughout as "Ruth." This changed in 1947. "Ruth" became "Miss Norden" and "RN," and their friendly and familiar dealings turned to cool, written business interactions within the radio station on Winterfeldstrasse.

Both parties gave the same reason for the cooling off. the professional inability and dilettantism of the other. Even while relations were still friendly, Norden referred to Wallner-Basté as "a cultured man, a musician, but he gets on my nerves because he ... is incapable of really getting anything done."^[27] Wallner-Basté for his part held Norden responsible for the chaotic situation that had developed at RIAS in 1946–47 after a reorganization (a complete bureaucratization in Wallner-Basté's eyes) carried out by the Americans. Bills went unpaid because the most necessary funds were not authorized; contractors ceased their deliveries; important supplies were lacking; work morale at the station plummeted. "Ask myself whether continuing on at this station can be justified," Wallner-Basté noted in his diary on June 4, 1947. His answer? "Hardly."^[28] Of course Wallner-Basté knew that the American military bureaucracy, which had finally submitted RIAS to its regulations after an initial period of autonomy, was to blame, not Ruth Norden.^[29] He considered her incompetent because she did not try to solve the station's problems by conferring with him, instead going behind his back and over his head. He felt she had outmaneuvered him in his position in favor of his subordinate Ruth Gambke, whom he openly declared the ringleader of "a foolish office bohème" responsible for the "increasing unruliness" at the station. "Those who speak of RIASs' programming dismissively as 'women's radio' and 'a gossip atmosphere' must not be proven right," Wallner-Basté told Norden in a detailed memorandum, continuing:

You have—excuse me if I say bluntly what is an open secret here—you have fallen under the influence of your program director to an excessive degree, of which you yourself are probably not aware. The program director finds my dutiful supervision, the relief measures executed and announced against the aforementioned troubles, an encroachment on her excessive totalitarian efforts. She is therefore systematically trying to keep from me being informed of important operational matters, to cut off my direct contact

to colleagues, to declare joint programming discussions unfeasible and prevent them. The impression that the program director had your support in such matters must have been widespread.^[30]

What Wallner-Basté viewed as an intrigue against him and what Ruth Norden presumably saw as an outburst of offended masculine self-confidence was probably both. And given the background of the Berlin political scene in 1947, something else influenced their perceptions and behavior. In his first year at DIAS/RIAS, Wallner-Basté had become an opponent of the SED and an adherent—possibly also a member—of the SPD.^[31] After the SPD's attempts in the spring of 1946 to gain RIAS's support in the merger dispute had failed because of the Americans' insistence on neutrality, the party reappeared with self-confidence after its victory at the polls in the fall of 1946. Hans Werner Kersten, editor in chief at RIAS and close to the SPD, was given "a list of comrades ... who are in a position to offer commentary on the most diverse political issues." The SPD wanted to begin delivering a weekly commentary that would "represent the perspective of the party leadership on political events ... but be aired by the American station as its own commentary."^[32] According to Kersten, the SPD systematically collected "material against Mr. Mathieu [an American control officer at RIAS] and Miss Norden" and repeatedly demanded that Kersten provide "a judgment of Mr. Mathieu's political views and the political work of RIAS, in order to invite intervention from a higher American level and change RIAS's political line in favor of the three democratic parties in Berlin."^[33] Kersten was dismissed in March 1947 when it came out that he had hushed up his membership in the Nazi party. Ernst Reuter later complained about the (in his opinion) excessively pro-SED stance in newscasts, calling RIAS "the second Communist station in Berlin" and noting: "We have been gathering evidence in this direction now for some time in order to present it to the American Military Government."^[34] By 1947, SPD sympathizers in the American military government had already grown in number. But the neutrality that the year before had prompted a refusal of the SPD's request for political support still mattered to the Americans responsible at RIAS—namely, Ruth Norden and three other control officers. They refuted criticism like Reuter's as "a broadside attack in order to get some kind of control over RIAS.... The SPD objects to our objectivity and seems to be aiming at making the station one-sidedly SPD."^[35]

Wallner-Basté, whose political sympathies and connections must have

been known to Ruth Norden, did not exactly recommend himself as a confidant in the delicate matter of the station's political neutrality and objectivity. It seemed logical, though certainly not conducive to her personal relationship with Wallner-Basté, to seek more support from the politically uncommitted program director, Ruth Gambke, than from the pro-SPD Intendant . Wallner-Basté's notes from the spring and summer of 1947 reveal how rapidly their relationship worsened. In a separate notebook that he began keeping alongside his diary, he recorded all the changes that Ruth Norden proposed on political radio manuscripts—which passages critical of the Soviets were stricken and which pro-Soviet additions were made.^[36]

In August 1947, barely half a year after Kersten's dismissal, Wallner-Basté suffered the same fate. Officially, "personal reasons"^[37] were cited. The real explanation for his dismissal was that "a stricter political leadership" would be attempted at RIAS than he had offered and had promised to deliver.^[38] To Wallner-Basté this was the successful conclusion to an intrigue by the opposing side that in his view now no longer stemmed from the personal motives of Gambke and Norden but had a clear political background. He saw himself as a victim of the procommunist clique of American control officers at RIAS. Among the members of this group he numbered, in addition to Ruth Norden, Gustave Mathieu and Harry Frohman, both former German émigrés.^[39] In discussion with an American of a politically more sympathetic standpoint, Wallner-Basté described the political line followed by Norden, Frohman, and Mathieu like this:

They wanted commentaries to have a Soviet-friendly tint, news to be either falsified as pro-Soviet or suppressed. They wanted investigations into their news policy immediately suspended and those responsible to continue on unhindered. They wanted elaborate celebrations for communists returning from America. They wanted a communist American woman with three years of training in Moscow at the RIAS microphone to describe the political activities of communist film stars in Hollywood [i.e., Chaplin and Katherine Hepburn] with enthusiasm. They wanted RIAS control officers to give speeches on Radio Berlin. They wanted the top communist at Radio Berlin to pay house calls on RIAS control officers. They wanted a smug engineer from the Red Army to thoroughly inspect the wretched facilities of the newly completed American station.^[40]

An investigation into RIASs' programming policies three years later—carried out in the middle of the Cold War and hardly to be suspected of communist sympathies—presented another image of RIAS in 1946–47. RIAS was never one-sided in its coverage, but always presented the

counter position as well. Precisely for this reason, according to Western standards of objectivity, RIAS distinguished itself positively from Radio Berlin.^[41] In 1984, the historian Harold Hurwitz, also unsuspected of procommunist tendencies, judged RIAS's news policy in the election battle of 1946 "objective, balanced, and very successful." He offered an explanation for the impression of RIAS's procommunist attitude so frequent in those years: "This impression ... could arise among politically restless and active Berliners in the year after the October elections even when an American station reported impartially on Berlin's struggle for self-determination."^[42] Norden, Frohman, and Mathieu adhered to the conciliatory policy toward the Soviet Union. Ruth Norden's letters from Berlin to Hermann Broch mention the increasing difficulties, inconveniences, irritations, and dangers that arose for the adherents of this increasingly untimely stance.^[43] The jungle of personal intrigues in which RIAS operated during 1947 was the result of the transition from the old policy of alliance to a new one of confrontation. The political transition was also a generational shift. Those already active in Information Control in 1945 and perhaps even earlier in the Psychological Warfare Division (from whose personnel Information Control was formed) were mostly aligned with the older line. As a rule, whoever had joined on since 1946 already spoke the new language—officially condoned back in the States much earlier than in Berlin—of anticommunism. Of course, this generational shift did not happen overnight. The pace slackened as it moved eastward. The new policy was first established in Washington, where representatives of the old policy were the first shown the door. The process was slower in the American-occupied zone, but compared with the American sector in Berlin, moved along quickly: in 1946—after several voluntary resignations and involuntary dismissals of German collaborators and American control officers—Radio Frankfurt and Radio Munich were already toeing the new line.^[44] And yet in 1947 representatives of the old policy at RIAS still had so much influence that they could dismiss leading German employees like Wallner-Basté and Kersten. But here, too, "reform" stood at the door or, more correctly, slowly crept in as the symptomatic intrigues and reorganizations increasingly prevalent at RIAS.

By 1947 power relations at RIAS and in the division of Information Control responsible for its management had produced a situation of dual sovereignty. On one side were Norden, Frohman, Mathieu, and the officers in the Radio Control Office of the central OMGUS who supported them, Charles Lewis and Hans B. Mayer. On the other side, of

ever increasing number and influence, were the anticommunist Information Control officers, none of whom was actually responsible for RIAS according to their function at OMGUS. This group included Bert Fielden (control officer for the Tagesspiegel ), Fred Bleistein (Publishing Division), and Nicholas Nabokov and Ralph Brown (Political Division). When the forced merger of the SPD and KPD took place in early 1946, Brown had, it is recalled, undertaken the futile attempt (warded off by Lewis and Meyer) to bring RIAS in line with the SPD. The group around Brown operating in close contact with the SPD leadership tried to make their influence at RIAS prevail in various ways. Nabokov suggested a political investigation into Norden's relationship to the Communist Party. The officer in charge rejected this as inappropriate, explaining: "My impression is that at least some of those accused have simply not caught up to August 1947 where four-power developments are concerned. They are floundering in an effort to reconcile what many had hoped might be possible under four-power government of Germany, with some of the harder realities."^[45] Brown got right to work. With no word beforehand to Norden, Frohman, or Mathieu, indeed apparently deliberately in their absence, he appeared at RIAS on October 6, 1946, and held a talk with Kersten and other German employees close to the SPD. Kersten later described this in a memo to OMGUS:

Mr. Brown was thoroughly informed of the nature of the political programs up to now and had brought with him written records on the basis of which he criticized the so-called "parity" and "objectivity" of the political and election broadcasts.... Mr. Brown explained that while we were talking, discussions were underway in Buggestrasse as to whether these three control officers would remain here. He instructed me to take orders on our work only from him in the future; he would provide me with more specific instructions later that day. However, in the afternoon Miss Norden, Mr. Mathieu and Mr. Frohman returned and questioned me exhaustively about Mr. Brown's visit to the station, reproaching me for discussing the internal situation at RIAS with someone else without their express permission. I had to relate the conversation with Mr. Brown in a lengthy protocol, but I did not consider it opportune to report on this in complete detail to Miss Norden and Mr. Mathieu. For their part, the control officers avoided discussing this incident with me; Mr. Mathieu simply told me that it was a "cowardly surprise attack by Mr. Fielden, Mr. Bleistein and Mr. Brown" on them, but they—Miss Norden, Mr. Mathieu—would nonetheless never abandon their political convictions.^[46]

With Wallner-Basté's dismissal in August 1947, the old RIAS leadership stood its ground for the last time against the new policy. A month

later the Brown-Bleistein-Fielden-Nabokov group could chalk up its first conquest with the appointment of one of their own (Charles Leven) as control officer at RIAS. The final victory came a quarter of a year later. In December 1947, Norden and Frohman left RIAS and returned to America. Technically, it was not a dismissal, since in both cases their contracts had expired. An extension, which would have been a matter of routine in other circumstances, was no longer in question.^[47] The conditions already prevailing in the West a year before had finally caught up to RIAS. What was said about the retreat of the old New Deal guard at the Munich and Frankfurt stations also applied to Frohman and Norden: "Because of their political stance, in the short or long run they could no longer have held on to their positions of responsibility."^[48]

Appointed in February 1948, Ruth Norden's successor was William Heimlich, the man who a few months earlier, as the ban of the Kul-turbund loomed, had encouraged Western members of the Kulturbund to found an alternative, American-oriented Kulturbund. Before the appointment to his new post, Heimlich had held a leading position in the military intelligence service. In civil life the manager of a radio station in the Midwest, he undoubtedly possessed more experience in radio than Norden, Frohman, and Mathieu. On the other hand, he lacked any sense for the oddities and sensitivities of European artists and intellectuals. According to the memoirs of German employees at RIAS and Heimlich's own account, it was a Captain America style takeover of RIAS's leadership. Heimlich dismissed Wilhelm Ehlers, the provisional Intendant ("You were Intendant, Dr. Ehlers. As of this moment, I am in charge"); drove Ruth Gambke from her office (441 looked around for the very best office in the building ... and that belonged to Frau Dr. Gambke, so I took her office. This was immediately establishing my turf "); and fired RIAS employees he suspected of spying for the Eastern side or who simply lived in the Russian sector of Berlin ("I had long since had a list of those who were Soviet agents in RIAS ... so I had no hesitancy in immediately chopping off all people that we knew, or almost all of them, who were working for the Soviets, or who were living in the Soviet sector"). When these measures met with resistance from the staff, Heimlich dismissed the protesters. ("Before they could open their mouths I told them once more they were fired, now, on the spot, that was it, out, and I didn't want them back in RIAS under any circumstances.")^[49]

Such were Heimlich's memories thirty-three years later in an interview. In fact, he did not proceed with such fury. He did try to dismiss the Intendant in office, Ehlers, but had to reappoint him again soon

afterward. And as far as the mass firing of the rebellious personnel was concerned, in reality a larger group of RIAS employees threatened with their own resignations. Offered in solidarity with Ehlers, the gesture did not fail in its effect, since Heimlich could not afford the sudden departure of so many workers necessary for the station's operation. Hence Ehlers, Gambke, and the other "troublemakers," "malcontents," and "ringleaders," as Heimlich's assistant Charles Leven called them, remained in their positions.^[50] The iron broom with which Helmlich had entered soon softened up. On the whole, and above all at the level of division heads, there were no essential changes in the personnel. The German employees who had followed the policy of objectivity and reconciliation toward the East under Ruth Norden—if at times grudgingly—wheeled around to the new line effortlessly and, in some cases, enthusiastically.

Heimlich was not in charge of the actual political reorganization of RIAS; detailed for this responsibility was Boris Shub, a member of the Political Division of OMGUS. Like Brown, Bleistein, Fielden, and Nabokov, he belonged to those who had sought out connections to the anticommunist SPD early on and supported it in its struggle against the SED. Shub claimed he could smell a communist "100 miles away."^[51] In the following months he made sure that the principles of anticommunist propaganda announced by General Clay on October 28, 1947, under the name Operation Back-Talk were carried out at RIAS. The last traces of the old policy of objectivity were stamped out. The cleanup extended not only to everything suspected of being communist or fellow-traveling, but also to noncommunists who did not declare themselves decidedly pro-Western. In September 1948, Shub thwarted the broadcast of a speech by Ferdinand Friedensburg.^[52] The literature editor, Annemarie Auer, was asked to introduce a program on John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath with the comment that this kind of social criticism was possible only in the free West. She declared herself unwilling to do so, and the broadcast was not permitted. Auer resigned and moved to Radio Berlin, along with a few of her other younger colleagues with leftist tendencies.^[53]

Long overdue, political battle lines now established themselves quickly. As polarization had already taken place in the Berlin press and many other cultural institutions, the old RIAS remained like a piece of old scenery on Berlin's already cleared stage. Heimlich and Shub simply cleared away the remains.

The general changes in programming, beyond the explicitly political reforms RIAS experienced under Heimlich, present another picture. Heimlich obviously had in mind the kind of station with which he had grown up and was familiar: commercial, profitable, and popular, an entertainment station unlike the original RIAS with its emphasis on programming of education and higher culture. Profitability calculations were drawn up in which RIAS fared miserably against the American stations: the music division of the New York station NBC with its ten employees produced 70 percent more airtime than the corresponding division in RIAS with 51 employees. Even more flagrant was the disproportion of revenues: "Our last symphony concert took 6,000 RM, whereas our last revue took 45,000!"^[54] On the basis of these numbers Heimlich decided to reduce cultural programming and expand entertainment, including advertising.^[55] The model was unmistakably American radio, and the success of the reorganization—in audience shares—undoubted and impressive. In late 1948 the station, which had always been second in comparison to Radio Berlin, became the most listened to station in Berlin.^[56] To be sure, the enormous increase was largely due to the dramatically increasing gravity of the situation in Berlin during the blockade period, but the shift from elite to mass programming did its part; RIAS would have had difficulty in fulfilling its new propagandistic leading role with a program of atonal music and readings of highbrow literature. Heimlich's strategy of propaganda by entertainment ("Make this whole propaganda effort totally plausible through laughter and fun")^[57] was apparently the right one.

However, it met with resistance as soon as it began to threaten the cultural niveau . This included the music division. Led by one of the RIAS women, Elsa Schiller, and developed with colleagues along Hans-Heinz Stuckenschmidt's format, RIAS had achieved a respectable position in Berlin's musical life in the first two years of its existence. It provided not only the typical classical-music fare, but high musical culture and active musical politics. Berlin's elite musical world therefore took it as a slap in the face when, a few weeks after his move to the RIAS building, Heimlich appointed as head of the musical division a man who in all respects embodied the opposite of this kind of musical taste. Friedrich Schröder, thirty-seven years old, had made himself a popular name in the entertainment industry of the Third Reich as a composer of operettas with titles like Wedding Night in Paradise, Shanghai Nights, and Chanel no. 5 . His appointment to RIAS was initially viewed as a

"belated April fool's joke,"^[58] then noted with sarcasm and finally with indignant outrage. Both American-licensed newspapers, which had always shown reserve toward RIAS's political line under Ruth Norden, now found the loss of quality in programming under the new (and politically much more sympathetic) RIAS leadership considerable. Under the title "Music or Musique?" the Tagesspiegel examined the status of artistic and intellectual quality under the new conditions of the Cold War. Though RIAS's new position as a political counterweight to Radio Berlin was welcomed, the article continued:

What possibilities would be wasted if only the news is of interest in RIAS, and Radio Berlin had to be tuned in for musical offerings.... A misunderstood effort at "loosening up" has already produced a preponderance of entertainment music, which seems to go hand in hand with the decreasing number and quality of serious concerts.... This is the risk taken with Schröder's appointment. If the new head of the music division sees his first goal as ascertaining Berlin's best dance bands, that might satisfy part of the audience, but it does not satisfy a station's musical obligations.^[59]

People like Karsch and Reger now realized that for consistent and effective anticommunist propaganda, high cultural standards would have to be abandoned. Educated bourgeois anticommunists, as Reger's and Karsch's experience with the Tagesspiegel had already shown, did not have it easy in this matter: since a considerable portion of the intelligentsia stood on the other side of the political trench, the basis for an elite anticommunist culture was small. RIASs' drop in quality made painfully clear to anticommunist intellectuals the dilemma of developing a popular propaganda campaign that was also of some artistic and intellectual distinction. It was no consolation—if the fact was registered at all—that colleagues on the other side were faced with the same dilemma.

To everyone's relief, RIAS's evolution rendered such concerns at least in this case unfounded. Their duties discharged, Heimlich and Shub were recalled and replaced by less outspoken successors. Because of the political reparceling already carried out, they could operate in a more liberal, familiar, and cultivated way, fostering what Heimlich had threatened to cut away. The contract with Schröder was silently annulled, and Elsa Schiller—who had de facto but never formally been responsible for music programming until Heimlich and Schröder appeared—was officially appointed head of the music division. A certain balance was struck between elitist and popular programming. The concerns of

Karsch, Reger, and a few intellectuals in the American military government and elsewhere had not fallen on deaf ears. This was evident in the founding of a journalistic mouthpiece that raised the connection between anticommunism and intellectual, artistic standing to a programmatic level like no other. The first edition of a cultural monthly, Monat, appeared as the struggle, and then the compromise, between culture and entertainment ensued at RIAS. In the hands of the anticommunist intellectual Melvin Lasky, the magazine became the organ for winning over and cultivating an intelligentsia both anticommunist in its political views and concerned with cultural quality.

And as for Radio Berlin? The sponsorship and supervision of the communists did not guarantee it a smooth transition from the "anti-fascist democratic order" to the Cold War without resistance or changes in the personnel. By 1946 it was obvious that the station's entanglement with the SED did not please everyone who had taken part in its founding. According to statements by colleagues, Hans Mahle, the pragmatic, unorthodox boss of the first hour, was fairly reserved and conciliatory in political matters. ("Please proceed such that I am kept clear of political inconveniences.")^[60] The same was true of his successor Max Seydewitz (1946–47), a former SPD politician who had joined the KPD in Swedish exile and for whom the position in Berlin was only a stop on his way toward the office of the prime minister of Saxony. The political line was pushed through by Wilhelm Girnus, something of a Boris Shub for Radio Berlin. He did not work at the station itself but in the Central Administration for Popular Education on Wilhelmstrasse, where he led the "Cultural Enlightenment" division. Already in the winter of 1946, when political discourse in Berlin still moved along a relatively civilized path, he used a vocabulary that would not become standard until 1948.^[61]

The situation changed in the late summer of 1947 when Heinz Schmidt returned to Berlin from English exile to succeed Seydewitz. Girnus lost his influence; the programming at Radio Berlin underwent notable changes. Obligatory political programs like the reading out of lengthy Moscow declarations were broadcast after midnight and no longer during prime airtime. Representatives of noncommunist views had their say; the station even invited an unabashed anticommunist like Erik Reger, coeditor of the Tagesspiegel, to speak. (He declined for the reason that his participation "would encourage the false impression you hope to create, that Radio Berlin is an unobjectionable instrument in

informing the public.")^[62] Reports, interviews, and live broadcasts suddenly sounded more "Western"—not in their political content, but certainly in their journalistic form. In fact, under Heinz Schmidt the building on Masurenallee became a reservoir for two generations of Western émigrés: emigrants who had fled the Nazis and returned from exile in the West (in addition to Heinz Schmidt, they included Maximilian Scheer and Leo Bauer), and a number of intellectuals from the Western zones who because of leftist—certainly not always communist—views had lost their posts in the media there or voluntarily given them up. These included Herbert Gessner and Karl-Georg Egel from Radio Munich, Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler and Max Burghardt from NWDR in Cologne, and Stefan Hermlin from Radio Frankfurt. Their Western "style" made Radio Berlin more appealing and successful in the competition for Berlin's radio audience than it had been under Girnus's severe management. It is one of the ironies of the late 1940S that this reaction to RIAS's liberalism and pluralism took place precisely at the moment when RIAS abandoned this stance. Given the advancing East-West freeze, the impending blockade, and the division of the municipal government, the opening up Schmidt attempted was short-lived. A year and a half after Ruth Norden's departure, he shared the same fate. Unlike both of his predecessors, who were called up to higher positions, his activity in radio ended in political degradation and internal exile. Not that he had stood for politically neutral programming like Ruth Norden: Schmidt was a communist who thought to serve his cause most effectively by leading it to the field openly and rationally in the tradition of Western Marxism. It was his misfortune that when the Berlin scene closed and the curtain fell, there was as little need for this kind of political journalism in his camp as there was for Ruth Norden on the Western side. The future of the following decades belonged to the Heimlichs, Shubs, and Girnuses.