Music - in the narrow sense - does without words, gestures, images; silent movies did it without language, black-and-white pictures without colour, dance and pantomime without the spoken word, cartoons on paper without motion ... and over all literature: just letters, symbolizing something you can't neither hear, smell nor touch.

Abstraction has been used by story tellers of all times and cultures. And "radio" - says Orson Welles - "is about the best story teller that is". Generalizing we might say: abstraction means a loss of direct perceptions but a plus, a gain of active imagination, of fantasy.

I always have been a fan of black-and-white-photography. The black-and-white-picture of a small town, for example, does not pretend factually to be this town; it represents the idea of it and - if well done - it becomes the image of any small town in the world.

When films became coloured ("bunt"), they lost a major part of their initial charm and magic. Suddenly, the colour of the evening dress of the leading actress became important. The poetic realism of Chaplin's films was replaced by naturalism - though in the words of Orson Welles, "colour looks like trick work anyway" -- which is quite a funny paradox. Filmmakers had to add more and more effects, tricks, superficialities, to achieve the impact, the "punch" of silent black-and-white pictures: wide screen, multi screen, Multiplex, Imax 3 D, dolby surround - 20 000 Watts ...

For me sometimes it's rather moving to observe the efforts and expenses of the visual media in order to obtain comparable emotional reactions, which radio makers create by using a few words and some single, simple sounds. Actually, they have to work really hard to compensate their structural handicaps: being too definite, distinct, superficial, one-dimensional ... Everything is visible.