No discussion – the first real radio program in Germany was broadcast 1923 from the Vox house in Berlin . But before regular operation, it was necessary to try whether everything worked as desired and hoped for. So it happened on 22. December 1920 at 14 Watch the first radio broadcast Christmas concert in Germany – which the Germans were not officially allowed to hear.

Southeast of Berlin The transmitter was on the Funkerberg (formerly: Windmühlenberg) near Königs Wusterhausen in Brandenburg, on the As the crow flies around 27 kilometers southeast of central Berlin. From the year 1911 the telegraph force of the German Army built transmission systems and antenna towers there – initially for wireless telegraphy, i.e. the transmission of Morse code.

For this most primitive form of binary code the possibilities of the then brand new and little researched radio technology were already sufficient. Because only 1886 had Heinrich Hertz even discovered that electromagnetic waves are transmitted and sparks flash over at a distant point to let. The Italian autodidact and inventor Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated the first radio telegraph devices in Great Britain shortly before the turn of the century – but he did not yet understand the technology in detail. Regardless of this, the pioneer 1900 began building a transatlantic transmitter in Poldhu on The Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, which 1902 first confirmed signals across the Atlantic.

Birth of the Telefunken company Through personal acquaintance with the head of the British telegraph administration, William Henry Preece, the German Adolf Slaby succeeded 1897 to study Marconi’s experiments on British soil – Professor Wolfgang König from the TU Berlin calls it “industrial espionage”. Slaby saw the value of the discovery; shortly after the turn of the century 1902 he was one of the founding fathers of the Telefunken company, which then built broadcasting technology for decades, not only for Germany – also for the Funkerberg.

Funkerberg-Museum (7 pictures) You can see the arc transmitter with which the 14. December 1920 the Christmas concert was broadcast as the first radio broadcast in Germany. The back of the two men is Erich Schwarzkopf, who was significantly involved in this concert. (Image: Funkerberg Museum) The military used it until the end of the First World War. 1919 took over the Deutsche Reichspost building, transmitter and operation. In the same year, Hans von Bredow moved from the chairman of the Telefunken board of directors as a ministerial director to the Reich Ministry of Post. In the same year he sketched the effect of the “entertainment broadcast” that he had postulated – and was laughed at. The nucleus of the radio operation near König Wusterhausen was the transmitter house 1, which today houses the Funkerberg Museum.