Werner destroys the shortwave radio

Werner destroys his six-year-old shortwave radio in the alley behind Frau Elena’s house, crushing with a brick a device he had discovered with Jutta and continually rebuilt. The act is private and deliberate: after repairing the set, he waits for the household to fall silent, counts to one hundred, and then destroys it. The novel does not state his motive, leaving the gesture suspended between the radio’s imaginative promise and the troubling world into which Werner’s technical gifts have carried him.

The Radio and Its History

The set began as a find in refuse behind a storage shed. Werner, eight years old, discovered what looked like a large spool of thread: a wire-wrapped cylinder between two pinewood discs, with frayed electrical leads and an earphone dangling from one. Six-year-old Jutta crouched beside him as he recognized it as a radio. The moment gives the later destruction its force: the device had entered their lives as something salvaged, mysterious, and full of possibility.

Werner spent the following six years altering it. By the night he destroys it, the shortwave set has replacement wires, a new solenoid, and Jutta’s notations arranged around its tuning coil. It is not simply an old object taken from storage; it bears the marks of their shared attention and of Werner’s sustained technical work. Earlier that evening, he says that he has fixed it, confirming that he has restored its function shortly before choosing to wreck it.

The Night of Destruction

The action follows a quiet domestic scene. Frau Elena tells Werner that supper has been saved for him, but the cramped kitchen offers only a boiled potato cut in two. He eats despite not being hungry and gives Frau Elena seventy-five marks; she returns fifty. The account places the destruction amid the modest household routine without explaining the money or making the meal a direct cause of what follows.

After hearing Frau Elena go to the toilet and climb into bed, Werner waits until the house is utterly quiet. He counts to one hundred, gets up from his cot, removes the radio from a first-aid box, and carries it into the alley. There, he crushes it with a brick. The counted pause makes the act feel considered rather than accidental, while its secrecy leaves its intended meaning unstated. The account records what he does, not an explicit confession of why.

What the Radio Had Made Possible

The set had connected Werner’s childhood to a world beyond the household and its immediate hardship. A French voice on the radio had urged listeners to open their eyes and see what they could before they closed forever. Werner’s thoughts also move through the technical subjects he associates with that wider world, from light, electricity, and ether to space, time, mass, code breaking, and rocket propulsion. Destroying the radio therefore means breaking with an object that had served both as a working instrument and as a channel for knowledge and imagined futures.

Its place in Werner’s life does not end with this act. Later, trapped beneath the ruins of Saint-Malo with Frank Volkheimer, he makes a crude radio from salvaged materials: wire wound a hundred times around a pipe, a diode, a battery, and the leads of an earphone. He also encounters military radio equipment in a truck, including transceivers he had designed with Dr. Hauptmann. These later episodes do not establish that he regrets destroying the childhood set or explain his earlier motive. They do show that the act is not a simple rejection of radio engineering: Werner’s skill persists, while the technology around him has acquired new purposes and consequences.