Prodromos Tsinikoris: The sound of past resistance

At the end of November 2022 I have been invited by the Münchner Kammerspiele and its dramaturg Martin Valdes Stauber to participate in their Festival “Memory as work on the present”.

I will work on a lecture-performance titled "We called for guest workers, and dissidents came", an alteration of Max Frisch's famous quote "We called for work forces, and humans came", describing the invitation process of workers mostly from Southern Europe to Germany in the 1960s and 70s.

In my piece I will focus on the political dissidents who left Greece during the period of the military junta in Greece from 1967-1974 and found shelter in Germany. The largest anti-junta rallies took place in Germany, because most Greek immigrants on European soil lived there and because the German unions were powerful in mobilizing their members to a large extent. In those years the Bavarian Radio station was a strong unifying factor for Greek immigrants via its program "Η ελληνική εκπομπή [The Greek broadcast]" and played a key role by becoming the pillar through which the messages of political prisoners in Greece and dissidents in exile were passed to the audience.

During the months of September-October 2022 I will research at Οnassis AiR on the topic of dissidents and exile and improve my skills on editing programs for sound and video in order to make my own sound clips, podcasts, videos for the aforementioned project, but hopefully for other ones in the future as well.

Prodromos Tsinikoris, September 2022

Photo: Aristotelis Chaitidis

Creator's note

During the two-month research I conducted within the framework of the Tailor-made Fellοwships program of Οnassis AiR in Fall 2022, I delved further into a relatively unknown piece of the country's recent history, the resistance of dissidents from the city of Munich through the (radio) "Greek broadcast" against the military junta. Through meetings as well as through research into articles and audio-visual on the topic, different aspects came to light, such as the fact that the establishment of a Greek-language daily broadcast for the Greek men and women of Munich was related to their integration into German society, but also to efforts of avoiding the risk of information transmitted from corresponding communist programs broadcasted from Prague and Budapest; the anti-junta activity of the broadcast and its founder and director Pavlos Bakoyannis; the threats made by the military junta and the attempts to silence independent journalism; and finally, the continuity of the economic and commercial dialogues between Germany and Greece during the seven years of dictatorship and so on.

This research became the basis of a new lecture performance that was presented for a unique time on November 19, 2022 at the Werkraum stage of the Kammerspiele in the Bavarian capital. It started with the "working case" that today, 20 years after the end of the broadcasts, the "Hellenic Broadcast" is returning to the airwaves and included a.d. audio clips of the radio show from the 1960s and 1970s, statements by politicians and journalists of the time, German lessons for immigrants, songs that marked those years, listener calls and my personal relationship with the radio show, which I listened to growing up in Wuppertal, Germany. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of the dictatorship, in 2024, discussions have begun to enrich, extend and present this important chapter of resistance in modern Greek history to other cities in Germany, perhaps in Greece as well.