Voices in Ruins begins with the observation that “in the years immediately following the unconditional surrender of Germany in May 1945, the radio was the best-preserved and most popular medium of mass communication” (p. 1). Alexander Badenoch's engaging study examines continuities and discontinuities in radio personnel and programming in the western zones of occupied Germany “across the 1945 divide.” It reveals a mass medium and a society striving uneasily for normality in troubled times.

The book is organized into six thematic chapters, “extended individual essays” that investigate various aspects of the “embedding” of the radio in West German society during the postwar years (p. 9). The opening chapter provides a cultural and institutional overview of broadcasting developments during the Weimar, Nazi, and occupation eras, introducing one of the book's central concepts, the radio's role as “voice of the Heimat” (p. 26), a fluid notion of German identity that was at once regional and national, nostalgic and modern. The second and third chapters examine postwar radio from the perspectives of program scheduling and radio personalities, respectively. Subsequent chapters tackle the ambiguous roles assigned to women, as both radio presenters and listeners, during the occupation period, and the ways in which stations in the American, British, and French zones fostered Heimat-based regional identities “that related local spaces to the nation as a whole” (p. 216). The conclusion reflects on the radio's importance in creating a sense, however incomplete, of “normality” among Germans after 1945.

There is much to commend in Badenoch's study. It draws upon a wide range of archival sources, making effective use of material from Heimatsender (local stations) in all three occupied zones. Listeners' letters to stations and to program guides such as Hör Zu grumbling about scheduling decisions colorfully corroborate Badenoch's arguments about radio's “everyday” significance. Though focused on West German radio, Badenoch is mindful of broadcasting developments in the Soviet-occupied zone. He highlights the series of Soviet-initiated national holiday broadcasts for children, Auf dem glücklichen Stern (“On the Happy Star”), to which all German radio stations contributed as late as 1947 and 1948 (pp. 183–5)—a reminder that the Cold-War partition of Germany did not close all avenues of cultural exchange and cooperation.

Echoing recent historiography on the postwar years in East and West Germany, Badenoch refutes the idea of 1945 as any sort of Stunde null (“zero hour”) in German history. There was no sudden break with the past. Nor, necessarily, did Germans want there to be. The book highlights the awkward, largely unresolved tensions between past and present in the western zones, tensions that were mediated and shaped by the popular medium of radio. Badenoch emphasizes the “substantial continuities” (p. 84) in radio personnel from the Nazi era. Prior experience and the comfort to listeners of hearing “familiar voices” generally outweighed past political affiliations in the hiring process. A desire for familiarity also underpinned the popular return to the airwaves of numerous light entertainment programs that had been suspended during the war. Such nostalgia for “narratives of a common past” that had been interrupted in 1939, rather than in 1933 (p. 54), was illustrated by listeners' responses to the more jarring “foreign” influences on postwar scheduling. While Badenoch cautions that complaints about the preponderance of jazz in entertainment programs were not simply a “hold-over” from Nazi racial propaganda (pp. 71–5), the conflation of “national” and Nazi discourses in discussions on popular music is glaringly apparent.

This type of troubling, if unsurprising, affinity with the past existed alongside a sometimes grudging recognition of the need for change in West German radio and society. Badenoch illuminates this complex process in his examination of postwar Frauenfunk (women's radio). Radio was vital in giving voice to what had become—in the words of the head of women's programs at Radio Frankfurt—“a country of women” (p. 123). This was partly a reaction against the authoritarian, unfeeling, and inauthentic male voices that were seen as characteristic of wartime broadcasts. It also reflected the gradual reorientation of postwar West German “national” identity around the predominantly feminized notion of a peaceful consumer society (pp. 125–6). Women became a more frequent, more influential presence on the airwaves in this “new” Germany. But their advancement was often still confined to tropes of women's programming established during the Weimar and Nazi eras (p. 140), while male commentators expressed unease about how to square the consumer-driven choices of the “new” woman with “universal” feminine goals such as marriage and family (pp. 153–5).

Badenoch's study is not without problems. Its fluency is disrupted by numerous proofreading errors that were not picked up before the manuscript went to press. His critique of the “myth” of postwar German “silence” about the past—while valid—stretches credulity in suggesting that “commemorative noise” about light music or modes of radio address was “more honest” than “progressive” debates that might have attempted to hold Germans accountable for the crimes of Nazism (pp. 231–2). Amid the nostalgic chatter of West German radio after 1945, the silence surrounding mass German complicity in genocide remains deeply disturbing. Finally, the absence of sports from discussion about the radio's mass appeal—it is only mentioned on three occasions in the entire book—is puzzling. It has often been argued that the true founding of the Federal Republic took place not in 1949 but in 1954, when the underdog West Germans sensationally defeated the “golden team” from Hungary in the World Cup final in Switzerland—a collective moment of “national” celebration that was delivered to the vast majority of West Germans by Herbert Zimmermann's famous radio commentary. Greater insight into the place and popularity of sports, and soccer in particular, in postwar radio programming would thus have been welcome.

These are, however, relatively small points of concern. Alexander Badenoch has produced a fine study of West German radio in the transition years from Nazism to liberal democracy. For anyone interested in this fascinating and complex period of modern German history, it is essential reading.