The battle on the radio waves: the new media of the 1930s and the Sudeten crisis

International diplomacy stopped working.  A new breed of authoritarian ruler emerged, contemptuous of the rules of diplomacy and collective security, and willing to lie and bully to build power and influence.  Europe’s democracies were confused and defensive.  It is 1938 and Germany is putting pressure on Czechoslovakia. Join David Vaughan and Michael Tate in a discussion of the use and abuse of radio, the new media of the 1930s.

David Vaughan is a writer and broadcaster. His second book, Hear My Voice is set in the tense atmosphere of Central Europe on the eve of WWII.  A former BBC Prague correspondent, David Vaughan was editor-in-chief of the international service of Czech Radio for eight years. He studied Modern Languages (French and German) at Balliol College, Oxford and is also fluent in Czech, having lived in Prague since 1991.  Hear My Voice was originally commissioned as a play for Czech Radio, and was then turned into a book which was awarded the Czech Book readers’ prize in 2015.

Michael Tate is the Founder of Jantar Publishing, an independent publisher of European fiction and poetry based in London. Michael has a degree in Czech with Slovak from UCL SSEES and worked and travelled extensively around central Europe for most of the 1990s. Michael occasionally reviews fiction and poetry for the LA Review of Books and has participated in a number of public literary discussions, radio interviews and podcasts.