Elegies in war years script wartime as endurance of the fraught experience of mass killing on battlefields, in concentration camps and in bombed cities—and, for the post-Freudian mind experiencing the Second World War, they ignite feelings informed by insinuations of the death drive, its curious repressive and recollective effects.

© 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Foreign-language broadcasting projects in the United Kingdom and the United States faced momentous challenges during World War II, a time when totalitarian regimes had successfully appropriated wireless technology for propaganda purposes. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer would argue, countries such as Nazi Germany had turned radio into an agent of political repression by creating passively receptive audiences who uncritically absorbed fascist doctrines....