Drahtfunk

Drahtfunk (pronounced draat-fuenk)

The broadcasting of audio signals through wire or cable connections rather than airwaves.  Drahtfunk translates from the German as “wired radio”, the collective noun being Drahtfunkeinrichtungen (wired radio equipment).

1937: A German compound noun, the construct being draht (wired) + funk (radio).  The German Funk can also be translated as "wireless" so Drahtfunk can be understood as "wired wireless" so that's good.   Draht was from the Middle High German drāt (wire, thread), from the Old High German drāt or thrāt, from the Proto-Germanic þrēduz, from the primitive Indo-European treh- from terh- (rub, twist).  It was related to drehen (to turn, twist), with which it was still associated in early modern German (evidence for which is the insertion of the lengthening -h-, used only before sonorants or stem-finally).  It was cognate with the Dutch draad, the Low German Draat, the English thread, the Danish, Norwegian & Swedish trad and the Icelandic þráður.  The genitive is Drahtes, the plural Drähte and the diminutive, Drähtchen.  In Modern German, the sense of wire (thread of metal; conductor) remains but is obsolete for threads made from other materials.  Funk was from the Proto-Germanic funkô or fankô (spark), from the primitive Indo-European speng- or spheng- (to shine).  It was cognate with the Middle Low German funke & fanke (spark), the Middle Dutch vonke (spark), the Old High German funcho & funko (spark) and the German Funke (spark).  In the Middle English it existed as funke & fonke (spark) from the Old English funca & fanca (spark), from the same roots as the Germanic although some other meanings in English evolved independently.

Funk, stemming from funken (spark), came to mean “radio” in German, because some of the earliest wireless telegraphs used spark gap transmitters, thus creating the association with radio, and many compounds have been formed, added both at beginning (Funkspruch, Funkbearbeitung) and end (Mobilfunk, Bordfunk).  Drahtfunk is a masculine noun; in German, both the spelling of the word and the article preceding the word can change depending on whether it is in the nominative, accusative, genitive, or dative case.  Given the meaning, it exists as a masculine singular only; no plural form.  The nominative is der Drahtfunk, the accusative den Drahtfunk, the genitive des Drahtfunks and the dative dem Drahtfunk.

Radio technology under the Third Reich

Developed during the 1930s in Germany, wired radio was analogous with the technological dualism of ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line), the DSL technology which, beginning in 1998, was the first convenient and widely adopted domestic internet broadband.  Like ADSL, Drahtfunk ran (at a higher frequency than telephony) over the analogue copper pairs used for fixed line telephones, the attraction for both systems being the copper wires were usually existing infrastructure, thus making it faster and cheaper to deploy the new technology.  The mechanism of the physical connection would also be familiar to anyone who used an ADSL service: a crossover with two outputs (often called the "splitter box) connected to the telephone socket, one (input/output) feed connected to the handset, the (input only) to the radio's antenna socket.  Although Drahtfunk was first implemented at scale during the Third Reich (1933-1945), it was actually developed by the postal service (responsible for telephony) during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933).  Had it earlier been available there's little doubt the Nazis would have sought to use the medium because they understood the power of voice, part of their campaign material in the (many) elections they contested under the republic including gramophone records containing edited highlights of Adolf Hitler's (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) speeches.  Because the technology of the time permitted at most around 15 minutes per side of a disk, some editing was required.  Whether the authorities would have permitted the Nazis to broadcast in this way isn't known and the low take-up rate of phone-lines into homes would anyway have limited the value.         

The Nazis never explored the possibility of mass-market television as a platform for propaganda, simply because there were so few sets in the country.  Although in 1935, Berlin had been the site of the world's first electronically scanned television service which had conducted nation-wide live broadcasts of some events at the 1936 Summer Olympic Games, the regime understood that with industry and armaments production being a higher priority than consumer goods, it would be at least a decade before the take-up rate of televisions in the home would achieve the critical mass required for the medium to be an effective propaganda tool.  The  Nazis were though enthusiastic about the use of radio for political indoctrination and Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897-1975; Nazi propaganda minister 1933-1945), who while evil, was a fair judge of such things, thought the success of the regime “…would have been impossible” without radio.  However, in the early 1930s, receiver sets were expensive, even when subsidized by the state so Drahtfunk was developed in the hope sets cheaply would be mass-produced and use existing phone lines.  Unexpectedly, advances in electronics made conventional radios cheaper and the installation of home telephone connections was slower than expected so Drahtfunk was barely used by households, adopted mostly by the military, the army and navy each (independently) running literally thousands of kilometres of telephone wires to ensure a independent means of communications between bases and to headquarters staff, the other attraction being that unlike any implementation of RF (radio frequency) transmission which passes through the air, wired messaging inherently was secret unless physically tapped.  Today, although regarded as archaic by many (women in particular seem to find tangles of cables inexplicable in the age of WiFi), true nerds will always plug-in given the choice.

Had the institution survived, the Wehrmacht (the German armed forces 1935-1945) would with hindsight have plugged-in more and broadcast less, such was the success of allied decryption of the German RF traffic.  Not until 1974 when former RAF (Royal Air Force) officer, FW Winterbotham (1897-1990) published The Ultra Secret was the extent of the "eavesdropping" documented and its role in the war effort better understood.  Although the book was at times misleading and details were criticised, what was revealed did compel a re-evaluation of some of the conclusions drawn by historians about political and military matters during the war.  The British actually had a long history in the ungentlemanly business of reading other chaps' mail.  During the 1898 Crise de Fachoda (Fashoda Crisis, an imperialist territorial squabble between Paris and London over control of the Upper Nile), the British Foreign Office had the priceless advantage of controlling the undersea cables through which French diplomatic traffic passed.  Not only was London able to read the French messages, they could, as desired, delay their passage or simply not pass them on.      

Pamphlet issued by the Allied Control Commission explaining the operation of Drahtfunk, Berlin, January 1946.

Interest in Drahtfunk was revived in 1943 when it was realized allied bomber fleets were using radio transmissions to hone in on targets, something especially significant at night when urban areas were subject to blackouts, thus depriving aircrew of easy reference points for visual navigation and bomb-aiming.  As a counter-measure, conventional radio signals were switched off when enemy aircraft were approaching, listeners advised to switch to the Drahtfunk by plugging their set into a splitter-box wired to the telephone cable, the process the same principle as an ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) connection which plugs two lines (voice & data) into a line-splitter (or filter.)  In the post-war years, US occupation forces continued to use the system in their Berlin occupation zone after being unable to reach agreement with the Russians to share the conventional broadcast system, all the infrastructure physically in the Soviet zone.  Thus, after it was estimated the installation of medium and long wave transmitters in the American sector would take months, beginning in December 1945, Drahtfunk services were resumed under the name DIAS (wire radio in the American sector (later renamed RIAS)).  Other German radio programming was available through the system in other parts of the country including the BFN (British Forces Network) program and it wasn't until 1963 the use in most of the FRG (the Federal Republic of Germany, the old West Germany) was discontinued, the service maintained in West Berlin for a further three years.  Elsewhere in Europe, wired radio was adopted because because it was simple, reliable and delivered fine reception unaffected by atmospheric conditions, Switzerland ceasing transmission only in the 1990s because of incompatibilities when ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) lines were introduced for telephony.  In Sweden, the system proved especially useful because of (1) the peculiarities in the behavior of radio waves at the more northern latitudes and (2) the demands in terms of physical broadcast infrastructure (towers & transmitters) required to service a narrow, elongated landmass.  Because of the high penetration of telephone lines in Sweden by the late 1940s, wired radio was able to provide a high-quality service to the sparsely populated north and it was extensively deployed until advances in technology in the 1960s rendered it redundant.