Eichmann on the Air: Radio and the Making of a Historic Trial

stark contrast to common perception—which is often reiterated by
historians and commentators—that live broadcasts were an almost
daily occurrence and that many court sessions were brought and
listened to in real time on the radio.
The question of how a series of sporadic events has been
registered in both history and memory of the trial as a daily
practice deserves a separate discussion, which we undertake
elsewhere. 48 To give a taste of one possible explanation, which
obviously has to do with the complex mechanism of collective
memory, we propose that the false memory of liveness might
nevertheless bear a hidden truth: the involvement enlisted by the
event, the sense of momentousness it evoked for those who listed
to it on the radio. Rather than a strict sense of temporality,
liveness in this case signals the overwhelming effect of the
(broadcast) event, looming over the everyday and compelling
everyone. Thus while live broadcasts were sporadic, public
perception was of an ongoing event, of a continuously unfolding
reality, and this perception may have inflated the status of live
broadcasts in Israeli collective memory. Thus the assumption in
retrospect is that an event of such magnitude must have been
broadcast live on a daily basis, which might also explain the
consensus among historians on the role of radio during the trial.
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