Listening in Public: An Alternative History of Radio Listening. Politiken der Medien is a collection of essays that engages with political effects beyond parties and state institutions. Ranging across a variety of philosophical, historical, and national case studies, the common theme is an exploration of how specific media technologies, forms and practices are implicated in forms of political authority. This chapter - the only one in the collection by a UK academic - appears in a section about strategies of control. It uncovers the potential for alternative publics behind dominant historical narratives of a controlled and domesticated broadcast audience. It draws on archival research to interrogate the public contestation of the listener in the fractious political climate of late Weimar Germany that saw the infant radio culture as one of the grounds on which the battle for ascendancy between the communists, social democrats, conservatives and fascists was fought out. In particular, it identifies ways in which listening was organised as a collective activity in this period. What is striking about the this 'struggle' for the radio on all sides of this intense ideological confrontation is the way in which listeners were regarded in no way as passive members of a mass audience but as potentially active and critical publics.