116 | Mass Media and Historical Change
the record industry experienced a development complementary to that of
radio. After the sale of gramophones and records had taken off in 1900 or
thereabouts, it reached an initial high point in the 1920s. Records fostered
a nationalisation of taste, too, although they were far less prevalent than the
mass media of radio and cinema. Since they were still very expensive, only 3
per cent of all working-class households spent money on records or musical
instruments, according to a 1937 study (Ross 2008: 45–50, 130).
Initially, politics and political debates were seldom broadcast on radio –
either in solid democracies like Great Britain and Switzerland, or in countries
with authoritarian traditions like Germany and Japan (on the BBC: Scannell
and Cardiff 1991 Vol. 1: 28–38; on Japan: White 2005: 81f.; cf. Lersch, in
Lersch and Schanze 2004: 39). Even news reports were rare on German radio
during the 1920s, and were never aired at prime time. Moreover, they were
produced by a central, state-controlled station, the later ‘Drahtlose Dienst AG’
(called Dradag, ‘Wireless Service plc’), although not every regional channel
took them over without alterations (acc. to Heitger 2003: 254f.). This omis-
sion of politics aimed to achieve non-partisan unity. In point of fact, the
Weimar Republic thus succeeded in keeping extremist parties out of radio.
Yet a culture of political debate and a more open information policy would
probably have been better able to stabilise the republic – especially since radio
could more easily address people with disparate backgrounds.
In the industrialised countries of the West, radio had developed into a mass
medium by the end of the 1920s. In 1929 there were about three million regis-
tered listeners in Germany, as well as numerous ‘illegal listeners’. Nevertheless
recent studies have discovered that radio surmounted class divisions to only a
small extent in Germany. High purchase costs, high radio fees and culture-ori-
ented content resulted in disproportionate radio use by middle and upper
income groups (Führer 1996: 724; Dussel 1999: 72). By the same token,
many countries strove to unite city and country by means of radio, which
nevertheless remained city based, at least initially. The fact that electrification
still left much to be desired goes far towards explaining this. In Germany only
half of all households had electricity.
Around 1930, state control of radio rose internationally, going hand in
hand with politicisation. The radio historian Edgar Lersch has come to the
conclusion that Germany did not go a separate way in respect of state radio
control, but rather that radio had been everywhere ‘instrumentalised as an
element of national integration’ in the wake of the world economic crisis
(Lersch, in Lersch and Schanze 2004: 44). One can recognise at least some
tendencies in this direction, even though radio cultures remained diverse.
Thus in the United States the Federal Radio Commission, founded in 1927
under the Radio Act, promoted nationwide stations and curtailed the licens-
ing of smaller stations; in France the state took over the commercial channel