On the impossibility of archiving the radio and its virtues

The article discusses the general history of the radio archive in Germany. Such archives were established since radio broadcasts were pre-produced. Firstly, this was the case in 1928 and led to the set-up of appropriate departments, deliberated to deliver the pre-recorded sound carriers right on time for the transmission. This is the beginning of the radio archive, which therefore at no time followed an archival idea. For this reason, even today, there are no radio archives that meet archival principles. In this respect, we propose to make the contents of the ­existing – so-called – radio archives available on the World Wide Web according to the model of UbuWeb that by now holds successful important artistic audio-visual documents for two decades.