‘Psyche among Friends’: Michael Hamburger’s BBC Radio Broadcasts

Abstract

Unlike other German and Austrian emigres who worked for the BBC German Service during the Second World War, Michael Hamburger only came to the BBC in 1949. Nearly all his broadcasts have been in English, on the Third Programme. For over thirty years, his talks on German writers and translations of German poetry and drama helped change British attitudes towards German literature. Radio work, by nature ephemeral, has been neglected in accounts of Hamburger?s life and work. Struck by Apollo, a dramatised biography of Holderlin broadcast in 1965, shares central concerns with Hamburger?s poetry, criticism and autobiography.