Out of Time?

Dr. Kita’s presentation will examine the political environment of post-war occupied Austria through the lens of radio drama. Focusing on Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1952 radio play, Ein Geschäft mit Träumen, produced for the American sponsored radio network Rot-Weiß-Rot, she will discuss how a central theme of American radio drama, the obsession with time running out, is reimagined in Bachmann’s drama as the search for lost time. In Bachmann’s soundscape, acoustic leitmotifs transform the motif of “a race against time” into time standing still, a vortex in which the characters are continually caught in a traumatic reliving of the past. This comparative look at 1950s radio drama reveals how attempts to reeducate and promote American democratic ideals in Austria in the post-war period were challenged and called into question through this popular medium. Such inquiries offer insight into how the ability to realize dynamic relationships between the temporal and spatial, the real and imaginary, the past and the present in the acoustic realm allows the radio to function as a unique mode of cultural critique and political commentary.

Dr. Caroline Kita is Assistant Professor of German at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in German Studies from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in 2011. Her scholarship focuses on German and Austrian culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aesthetic philosophy, music and literature, sound studies, and performance culture. A recipient of a Fulbright Student Grant (2004-2005) and an Ernst Mach Grant from the OeAD (2012), Dr. Kita is current working on a book project, Border Territories: The Emancipatory Soundscapes of Post-War German and Austrian Radio, with the support of a Franz Werfel Grant.