The interactive radio play 15:14 tells the story of 15 former resistance fighters and 14 former Gestapo officers who, after 1945, suddenly found themselves as colleagues in the newly created Stuttgart Criminal Investigation Department and then worked together in the Hotel Silber, the former Stuttgart Gestapo headquarters.
In 2021, the web application “15:14 Nachklänge - Ein interaktives Radio” (15:14 Echoes – an interactive radio) was developed based on the radio play (www.15zu14.de). It was important to us to create a mediation format in which the user concentrates on listening and gains an innovative, multi-perspective and engaging access to the historical content through language and sound. To achieve this, we chose a participatory approach. In guided tours and workshops, artists, trainees and students explored the history of the persecuted and the persecutors, looking for points of reference with the present and the police of today. They then used their impressions and findings to create six artistic language pieces and fifteen sound pieces.
In their pieces, the participants address historical issues such as the relationship between the persecuted and the persecutors, and the way in which Nazi crimes were dealt with after 1945, as well as current issues such as far-right tendencies in society and the police, structural discrimination and racial profiling.
The app not only allows users to listen to the artistic language and music pieces, but also to combine them with each other, so that users can get creative themselves and try out how language and sound interact and how music can affect our own emotions and perceptions, as well as rediscovering familiar content and challenging previous interpretations.
To extend the reach and sustainability of the project, the app also provides downloadable teaching materials, including a guide to writing lyrics, beats and sounds. The artistic interpretation of historical content in poems, spoken word pieces, film music and hip-hop songs in the app provides an opportunity to gain new perspectives and connections to the radio play and the Hotel Silver Place of Remembrance through the sense of hearing by focusing on language and sound.
By incorporating points of reference to the present into their work, the project participants demonstrate how engagement with the past can provide guidance for action in the present and the future.
In collaboration with media artists, musicians, students and young people, a new digital format for artistically engaging with and communicating historical content has been developed. This can be used online at www.15zu14.de and in Hotel Silber itself.
The project was supported by the dive in. Programme for Digital Interaction of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM).
Contact
Natalia Kot
Email: natalia.kot@hdgbw.de
