Maisie Hitchcock was just 47 years old when she died in August 2023 of ovarian cancer. A co-founder and longtime host of Radio Spätkauf, Berlin’s capo dei capi current affairs podcast, Hitchcock’s was the first voice on air when she and fellow Berliner Joel Dullroy tentatively launched their pilot back in 2011. Fittingly, the tribute to Hitchcock, released by Radio Spätkauf this summer, is titled simply Maisie’s Voice.
The episode starts with a chunk of audio recorded just weeks before Hitchcock’s death. A native of England, Hitchcock had returned home for treatment, so Dullroy took a train to London from Berlin, and he and Hitchcock spent two days sitting opposite each other in her hospital room, talking and recording. “I knew it was going to be the last time I saw her, and she knew it too,” Dullroy says. “That gave this additional space for honesty and reflection. I was able to ask the kinds of questions that we often avoid because they’re uncomfortable, questions about death.”
Warm, authoritative and melodic, Maisie’s voice is instantly recognisable to listeners of Radio Spätkauf and its associated series, How to Fuck Up an Airport and Rent Freeze. As she talks about a photo taken on her last trip to Berlin, she sounds vital, composed even, as she delivers news of her own death sentence: “I’ve decided to stop treatment … It’s no life being stuck in hospital. I can barely eat and I’m dependent on [intravenous] feeds.”
I was able to ask the kinds of questions that we often avoid because they’re uncomfortable.
What follows is a stunning piece of audio, at once deeply intimate and expansively philosophical. These are the dispatches we so rarely hear, the contemplations of someone facing an unwelcome, too-early ending in a manner shorn of truisms and trite conclusions. It’s also funny, informative and entertaining, a never-flagging two-hour-long portrait of not just Maisie and her work, but also the changes wrought upon Berlin in the last two decades.
“I can’t take the credit for any of it,” says Dullroy, who spent nearly a year slowly stitching together the episode. “It was all Maisie. I just filled in the gaps between what she had to say, using our archive, and that last conversation we had in hospital. I saw my role as kind of getting out of the way to let her tell as much as possible.”
Hitchcock moved to Berlin in 2005 and fell hard for the city, quickly accumulating a bank of knowledge and obsessions which later informed Radio Spätkauf. Whether describing the taste of Club Maté (“burnt water”) or the smell of the DDR (lignite, or brown coal, according to Hitchcock’s research), Maisie’s passions often shaped the show’s aural aesthetic. She was an early defender of East German architecture and design, an aficionado of Berlin’s lakes, and deeply knowledgeable about German music, be it “Kraut-rocky-type synthy noodlings” or that most maligned of genres, Deutschrap.
After she was diagnosed with cancer during the 2020 lockdown, Hitchcock moved back to England, but occasionally popped back to Berlin, and to Radio Spätkauf, to talk with startling honesty about her diagnosis, in the hopes of alerting others to the often subtle symptoms of ovarian cancer (Hitchcock only suffered mild bloating and indigestion). That honesty continued right up to her death; if the bulk of Maisie’s Voice is a celebration of her life, the last 30 minutes is a profoundly eloquent portrait of her approaching death. A rationalist to her core, Hitchcock made sense of her own end with great courage, and the last minutes of the show are devoted to a numinous description of existential joy in the form of a day trip to Schlachtensee.
“The last three minutes of the podcast are the most incredible piece of audio I’ve ever recorded,” says Dullroy. “She’s just talking about taking the U-Bahn to the lake, and yet it seems like this moment of absolute enlightenment and illumination. She did everything in those few minutes that she did in her whole life. Her career [outside of podcasting] was being a tour guide, describing and revealing the wonders of Europe to foreign tourists. Radio Spätkauf was her way of encouraging Berliners to appreciate and get involved in their city. Everything she did was about sharing her enthusiasm for the world.”
Hitchcock’s last words to Dullroy, from her hospital bed, were “Give me a good eulogy, Joel!” Maisie’s Voice is certainly that. For Dullroy, who now describes himself as “a part-time Berliner”, it’s also something of a personal eulogy to Berlin and to the time he and Hitchcock spent here together.
“One of the things Maisie has inspired me to do is to pursue my dreams, which is to be a roving video journalist, and to spend more time in Australia where my family’s from. She showed me that we can’t wait for the perfect moment to do these things. We have to do them now.”
