Happy Birthday Heikedine Körting, Queen of the German Audio Drama

Heikedine Körting, audio drama director, producer, voice actress and lawyer, celebrates her eightieth birthday today.

If you’re not German, you’re likely thinking “Heikedine Who?” But if you grew up in Germany in the past fifty years, Heikedine Körting probably influenced a big part of your childhood, whether you know her name or not. Because Heikedine Körting is the producer and director of the popular Europa audio dramas.

If you grew up in (West) Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, audio dramas on cassette tape were an integral part of your childhood. They were ubiquitous, sold in supermarkets, drugstores, toy stores, department stores, book stores, magazine and tobacco stores all over West Germany, often in bright yellow displays directly by the cash register. They were also cheap, costing 5 or 6 Deutschmarks per tape. In short, these audio dramas on cassette were the ideal quick gift, to reward a kid after being dragged through the shops by their Mom or Grandma all day or for birthday parties of schoolmates.

They were an excellent value, too, for those 5 or 6 Deutschmarks per tape gave you roughly 45 minutes of entertainment. The production values were amazing – a full cast of excellent voice actors, often veteran stage actors, sound effects, music, often full orchestral scores – all for audio dramas aimed at children. The stories were usually well written by authors who specialised such this sort of thing such as horror and science fiction author H.G. Francis. There were dozens of audio drama series available for every age range and gender and in every genre, including lots of licensed properties.

A selection of audio dramas on tape for sale at the Marché Noir retro fair in Dorsten. The series include Gruselserie (The Spooky Series), Jan Tenner (a Flash Gordon style science fiction series), Masters of the Universe, Princess of Power, both Filmation and the Real Ghostbusters, Asterix, James Bond, Knight Rider, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The A-Team and The Simpsons.

Audio dramas aimed at children were not without controversy, particularly in the early years. There were disparaging comments about “electronic grandmothers”, since the first audio dramas were usually fairy tale based and the usual pedagogogic busybodies complained that listening to audio dramas would harm children’s reading abilities. However, those busybodies also said the same thing about comics, television, movies and dime novels to the point that it’s a miracle that we can read at all. Though there were parents who listened to that nonsense (like mine) and when confronted about it, would say that “But we only wanted the best for you and the experts said…” or “But your cousins read Donald Duck comics and listened to audio dramas and look at their school performance.” The cousins in question BTW happened to be undiagnosed dyslexics growing up in a toxic home.

Nonetheless, every West German kid had at least a few of those audio dramas on cassette (including me) and they also found their way to East Germany in parcels or as gifts. We would pop the tape into the player before falling asleep or as entertainment during long road trips o as background noise while doing homework. When you were on a school trip, the bus driver would usually pop an audio drama into the player (or sometimes a mixtape) to keep his passengers quiet and happy. The tapes were also swapped around and shared and they were so ubiquitous to the point that it never even occurred to me that audio dramas on cassette were mainly a West German thing and not nearly as prevalent elsewhere. I know the US had Kid Stuff records and I even owned a few – since my parents’ worries about comics and audio dramas harming my reading abilities miraculously vanished when the media in question was in English or another foreign language – but with regard to production quality there’s really no comparison.

There were four companies producing these audio dramas, Karussell, Kiosk, Maritim and Europa, but as a kid you didn’t pay attention to the label, only to the series and story. And you certainly had no idea who the people behind those cassettes were. Of these companies, Europa very much pioneered the form. Europa was founded in 1966 as the audio drama focussed imprint of the record company Miller International by record producer and music scholar Andreas E. Beurmann. The initial offerings was on fairy tales on vinyl records, still narrated rather than full cast dramas.

In 1971, Andreas Beurmann met a young law student named Heikedine Körting at a party. The two became friends and eventually fell in love, though Beurmann was 17 years older than Heikedine Körting. They married in 1979 and stayed together until Beurmann’s death in 2016.

As for Heikedine Körting, she had a difficult childhood like many Germans born during or immediately after WWII. She was born on June 18, 1945, in the village of Thalbürgel in Thuringia, barely a month after the end of WWII. According to this profile, Heikedine Körting was literally born in a blueberry field, while her mother was picking blueberries to support the family. The newborn was then put into a manger and licked by curious cows. The family soon relocated to Lübeck in West Germany, where Heikedine Körting grew up as a dreamy kid and natural entertainer who put on puppet shows for her friends. At the age of nine, she contracted polio and had to spend months in bed with only her imagination to entertain her, though she eventually made a full recovery. Public service announcement: Polio is a terrible disease that has thankfully been almost completely eradicated by vaccination, so please vaccinate your children and yourself, because this is one scourge we don’t want to come back.

Heikedine Körting attended the gymnasium (academic focussed 13-year grammar school in Germany) when this was still highly unusual for girls, since “they only would get married anyway” (Someone honestly said that to my parents, where I could hear it, as late as 1985. Joke’s on them that I never married). She got in trouble for writing essays that were too imaginative (I can sympathise). After graduation, she attended law school and became Germany’s youngest independent lawyer, though her true calling lay elsewhere.

Shortly after she met Andreas Beurmann, he invited Heikedine Körting to his recording studio. She taught herself how to use the mixing console and started directing and producing audio dramas. In 1973, Heikedine Körting became the head producer and director for Europa‘s extensive line of audio dramas, a position she retains to this day.

Heikedine Körting was largely responsible for Europa‘s shift away from narrated fairy tales to full cast audio dramas and also for the expansion into adventure, mystery, science fiction, fantasy and horror series aimed at older kids. She recruited well-known stage and voice actors for Europa – people like Hans Paetsch, who voiced Hui Buh the castle ghost from the eponymous series and narrated many of the fairy tales, Peter Pasetti, who was the German voice of Humphrey Bogart and voiced Alfred Hitchcock in The Three Investigators and Skeletor in Masters of the Universe, Norbert Langer, the German voice of Tom Selleck and John Nettles of Midsomer Murders fame as Prince Adam/He-Man in Masters of the Universe, German film and TV star Horst Frank as Inspector Reynolds in The Three Investigators, acting legends Hans Clarin and Günther Pfitzmann as Asterix and Obelix respectively or Jürgen Thormann, the German voice of Michael Caine as Ram-Man and Zodac in Masters of the Universe. Listening to these audio dramas, especially as an adult, can be a weird experience, because of all the famous voices. Part of the reason why Heikedine Körting was able to recruit such high calibre actors for audio dramas aimed at children was that many stage actors, particularly older ones, were frustrated by the direction that German theatre was heading in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where directors were more interested in making political points that may or may not be related to the play in question rather than in putting on reasonably faithful productions (also see this post at Galactic Journey about an early example of that trend). In retrospect, it’s funny that the much criticised “Regietheater” of the 1970s and 1980s is indirectly responsible for my generation being exposed to excellently acted audio dramas as kids.

The range of audio dramas produced by Europa under the auspices of Heikedine Körting is stunning. The most famous are probably the teen mystery series The Three Investigators, in nigh continuous production since 1979 and still with the same voice actors who are now gentlemen in their 50s and 60s rather than teens, and TKKG, which started in 1981. Also still in production to this day are Hui Buh, the Castle Ghost (started in 1973), The Famous Five (started in 1978), based on Enid Blyton’s eponymous kids adventure series, and Hanni and Nanni (started in 1972), based on Enid Blyton’s St. Clare’s boarding school novels. Past series include the SF series Commander Perkins (1976 to 1982) and Perry Rhodan, based on the eponymous dime novel series, the horror series Gruselserie (literally Spooky Series), Castle Schreckenstein, Larry Brent and Macabros, which were controversial due to being bloodier and scarier than the usually terminally bland West German kids’ entertainment, because audio dramas could get away with more than visual media. In the 1980s, Europa also produced a lot of audio dramas based on licensed properties such as The A-Team, Knight Rider, A Nightmare on Elm Street, James Bond 007, Asterix, both the Filmation and the Real Ghostbusters (cause double busting makes you feel twice as good), Bravestarr, Rainbow Brite and of course both Masters of the Universe and Princess of Power.

There are two different versions about how the Masters of the Universe audio dramas came to be. One is that Heikedine Körting was strolling through the Nuremberg Toy Fair when she saw Masters of the Universe figures on display at the Mattel booth and asked the Mattel rep whether there was any media to go with these toys and whether she could licence them to produce audio dramas. The other version is that Heikedine Körting saw her young nephews playing with Masters of the Universe toys and when she asked, if there was a story to go with these toys, she was told, “No, there isn’t” (which was true in the early 1980s). So Heikedine Körting contacted Mattel and licenced Masters of the Universe to produce audio dramas. But whichever version of the story is the true one, the Masters of the Universe audio dramas were huge successes and continue to the be the canonical version of Masters of the Universe for many German fans. The German Masters of the Universe audio dramas, penned by the prolific H.G. Francis, also introduced Anti-Eternia He-Man, the evil parallel universe counterpart of He-Man who has since made his way into the wider Masters of the Universe cosmos.

“Happy Anti-Birthday to you, Ms. Körting. Have some anti-cake!”

“Get lost, imposter. I want to wish Ms. Körting a happy birthday.” – “Imposter? It’s you who’s the imposter, you goody two-shoes.”

Part of the reason why Masters of the Universe and the other licenced audio dramas were so successful in West Germany is that while we got most of the toylines of the 1980s, we didn’t get the cartoons that went with them, because in the three TV-channel world of early 1980s West Germany, the public channels would not broadcast those terrible violent American cartoons (where no one ever got seriously hurt and He-Man and friends delivered moral messages at the end of every episode). So unless you were lucky enough to have cable TV early or had access to foreign TV, the audio dramas were the only story you got to go with your toys. And they were good and usually a little harder edged, more violent and more grown-up than the cartoons, even if the Filmation cartoon was a stronger influence on me personally than the audio dramas.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Europa audio dramas were huge success. Heikedine Körting was awarded a staggering 180 golden and platinum records for the audio dramas she directed and produced, making her one of the most successful female recording artists of all time, outselling the likes of Madonna or Taylor Swift.

But difficult times were coming for Europa, because the sales of audio dramas on cassette starting dwindling in the late 1980s and fell off a cliff in the early 1990s. The reasons were the increasing shift away from audio tapes towards CDs, the proliferation of private TV, which brought a huge expansion of cartoons and other shows popular with young viewers and also the proliferation of video games. By the early 1990s, all of Europa‘s many series had been cancelled except for the blockbusters The Three Investigators and TKKG.

However, the fortunes of Europa reversed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as more and more of the now grown-up listeners of yesteryear got on the internet, rediscovered the audio dramas of their childhood and also connected with other fans. The prices for vintage audio dramas on cassette tape or vinyl skyrocketed – a cassette that cost 5 or 6 Deutschmark in the 1980s now goes for twenty times that. In response, Europa reissued many of their popular series starting in 1999, though in some cases series could not be reissued because of rights issues involving the music. The licensed series were mostly also not reissued, because the original licence didn’t allow for it and the property would have to be relincensed, often from new owners who were not exactly sympathetic. The Three Investigators even tours as a live stage show with the original voice actors. Europa also began producing new instalments of popular series such as The Three Investigators, TKKG or Gruselserie as well as brand-new series such as Teufelskicker (Devil Players) about a football team. Oddly enough, I remember winning a football themed audio drama on cassette at the Bürgerpark Tombola (a local charity tombola to finance a park) sometime in the 1980s. Since I didn’t care for a football themed story about boys, I swapped it with my cousins (the undiagnosed dyslexics whose school performance caused my parents to believe so much nonsense) for something more to my taste.

Amazingly, Europa only stopped offering audio dramas on cassette tape in 2011, largely because audio tape was nigh impossible to source by then. You can still buy their offerings on CD or as MP3 and you can also stream them. Heikedine Körting still produces and directs Europa‘s audio dramas and the various sound effects are still sourced from analogue tapes and not digital.

The legacy of Heikedine Körting also continues to bear fruit elsewhere, because Germany still has a rich environment of new companies producing audio dramas inspired by the cassette tapes of yore. The vintage horror dramas have inspired productions like Blutige Zeche in Bottrop (Bloody Mine in Bottrop). The science fiction series Jan Tenner (which was not produced by Europa, but by rival Karussell) has just made a comeback with brand-new stories and even Masters of the Universe has a new series of audio dramas.

So a happy 80th birthday to Heikedine Körting and thank you for all the wonderful stories that kept generations of kids entertained.