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• The Radio Hobby, Private Associations, and the Challenge of Modernity in Germany by Bruce B. Campbell
• Christian Henrich-Franke (bio)

The Radio Hobby, Private Associations, and the Challenge of Modernity in Germany By Bruce B. Campbell. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Pp. 370.

In the technical modernity of the twentieth and twenty-first century, we are used to mass media, which in our private and professional lives enables us to experience events and people around the globe directly and in real-time. Technologies to communicate electronically and individually are an unquestioned part of human life. Yet at the turn of the twentieth century, such a connectivity was unimaginable. Guglielmo Marconi had just presented the possibilities of wireless communications to the public without fully understanding the physical and technical characteristics of his transmissions.

In The Radio Hobby, Private Associations, and the Challenge of Modernity in Germany, Bruce B. Campbell invites us on a journey to the early history of radio communication, or "radio telegraphy," as it was called by contemporaries in the beginning. Campbell zooms in on radio (not broadcasting) as a hobby, along with private associations for it, like the Deutsche Funktechnische Verband founded in 1925. He tells the story of the often-neglected social structures that grew around mass media like radio, television, and the home computer, and which helped people use and understand new technologies. In contrast to other works on radio hobbyists—or radio amateurs as they are officially called—which are mostly interested in technical development or institutional aspects, Campbell places German hobbyists within the broader picture of societal change.

Campbell emphasizes three factors in describing the challenge of technical modernity. First, he zooms in on Germany and German radio associations between the 1920s and the 1950s. The German case is particularly interesting because of the strong German tradition of associations and the very different political and social regimes that shaped the ways people were able to use, understand, and develop radio technology. Of course, he references other countries and places as well because radio hobbyists were (and still are) an international community. Second, radio was the first transnational mass medium that directly, in real-time and without a state operator, connected the private household with places far away. Third, hobbyists, who were a comparatively small community, played a key role as inventors and scientists for the development and adoption of other media technologies.

The book is structured strictly chronologically. It starts with the beginning of radio at the turn of the twentieth century and the German radio before the start of regular broadcast transmissions in the early 1920s. Next, [End Page 648] Campbell describes the history of the "Radio Hobby" in Germany against the background of a changing political and social history of Germany, from the Republic of Weimar, over the national socialist times, to the Cold War and the coming into being of the Federal Republic of Germany up to the 1950s, when radio was reborn as a hobby.

Campbell's book fills a gap in the history of science and technology, as it emphasizes the crucial role of hobbyists for technical progress, instead of focusing solely on the well-researched companies, standard-setting committees, engineers, or the military. In the case of radio, this applies to aspects like receiver equipment, field strength measurement, or propagation characteristics. Representatives of the hobbyists' international association, the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU), participated in conferences of global standard-setting bodies like the International Telecommunication Union throughout the twentieth century. It reminds us of shifting our attention to non-professional driving forces behind industrialized countries' transition to technical modernity. Amateur radio is an outstanding and rewarding example, as the private associations offer a broad range of journals and archives, useful in uncovering the social dynamics of (semi-)private associations.

In this book, Campbell demonstrates in a very convincing way how people in Germany integrated new technologies in their daily lives and thus came to terms with a technical modernity between the 1920s and the 1950s. Radio hobbyists founded numerous and complex organizations, subdivided into national...