One evening in Büdingen, during a recording, columns of figures come through. Hans Otto König writes them down without understanding them. It will take time before he grasps what he has been given: six wavelengths, in nanometres, accurate to the decimal.
“Hör zu: 935,5 937,8 927,2 948,1 934,2 928,3 nm”
He adopted them. They improved communication, he says, and lengthened the time the bridge held. That is the strangest idea in the whole book, and it is not an anecdote, it is structural: König’s devices were tuned by those they serve to hear. The back cover says it plainly, “Guided by these voices from the beyond, Hans Otto König goes on to develop several new devices for making contact”. A whole chapter of the book is titled “an investigation carried out in collaboration with the spirit world”, and another “Six significant frequencies”.
What the book contains
Three parts, framed by a foreword and a prologue, closed by an epilogue and acknowledgements.
The first (pp. 18 to 69) is a portrait, “the path of an extraordinary researcher”. Fifty-two pages, almost a quarter of the volume, broken into sub-chapters that are not stages of work but virtues: the strength of the inner bond, the strength of a free mind, the strength of inner vision, love and respect for nature, love of music, a passion for technology and physics, a thirst for knowledge. Then come eleven sections on “the time of research”, among them a fundamental ethical question and great doubts, several attacks, a solitary path, the encounter with the world of the media, the encounter with the world of science. This is hagiography, in the neutral sense. A reader who comes for the machines should know that before opening it.
The second (pp. 70 to 145) is the technical heart. It tells of the first voices received through conventional methods, the question of who or what imprints the tape, then the move to what König calls fundamental research, the search for “other vibrational worlds”, and finally the catalogue of devices. Eight chapters, in this order: the two fundamental principles of the contact bridge (p. 106), the invention of the multi-oscillation system (p. 109), the six significant frequencies (p. 111), the infrared system (p. 118), the ruby laser system (p. 122), the TV generator (p. 124), the HRS system based on crystals (p. 132), the UDS system, called the universal direction system (p. 138). The TV generator, the HRS and the UDS get the most pages, eight, six and eight. The book therefore leans toward the later, visual devices, and not toward the historic acoustic generator.
The third (pp. 146 to 205) gives the messages. Two strands. First “so who is speaking?”, with the dead, the animal world, extraterrestrial beings, and the question of whether one can make contact with any living being from invisible universes. Then “what are they telling us?”, eleven sections whose titles are themselves received messages.
The machines, and how they work
I am not going to reconstruct here, from memory, the detail of pages 106 to 145. What I can give with certainty comes from elsewhere, from the schematics König published himself in his journal Die Parastimme, taken up and annotated by Hildegard Schaefer.
The ultrasound generator comes in two halves. On the transmitting side, three base generators each produce a square signal, a deliberate choice since it is the waveform richest in harmonics. A mixer marks out a band, three sweep generators run through it in absolute synchronisation, a high-frequency amplifier sends the whole thing into a resonant circuit that radiates into the room. On the receiving side, a preamplifier, a demodulator, a parametric filter, a stereo tape recorder. An oscilloscope and a chart recorder follow both channels in parallel.
The claimed principle is elegant and simple. Two vibrational fields meet, the one from the device and the one that comes from elsewhere, and from their beating a third frequency is born, the interference frequency, held to be the real carrier of the information. The demodulator goes looking for it. The whole apparatus therefore serves only to offer a synthetic field for another field to beat against. That is exactly what the phrase “contact bridge” means.
The infrared system is in the same spirit. A transmitter radiates six frequencies toward a receiver placed two or three metres away, the received values are stepped down in seven stages, the difference signal is demodulated then sent back to a small 37.5 MHz transmitter, a tuned receiver picks it up, and the demodulated voice is fed back into the infrared transmitter. This loop is presented as what gives the device its stability.
There is also all the small gear, and that is where you see the man who actually builds. A field generator with rectangular pulses covering 2.5 kHz to 1700 kHz. A mini generator the size of a lighter, a modified off-the-shelf ultrasonic repeller, which he advises setting up in several units at uneven distances since each one whistles slightly differently. A three-knob parametric filter, 30 Hz to 18 kHz, plus or minus 15 dB, bandwidth adjustable from quality 1 to quality 20. A two-stage microphone preamplifier, gain of 126, signal-to-hum ratio above 70 dB. Published values, open schematics.
One condition, finally, that König sets down in black and white: the operator’s inner disposition counts, their thought structure must come into resonance with the plane being addressed, and the alpha state is required by name. The human being is not outside the setup, they are one of its parts.
On 6 November 1982, at the VTF symposium in Fulda, the device is presented in public. On 15 January 1983, it goes out live on Rainer Holbe’s show on Radio Luxembourg. The answers from that evening have remained: “Versuch!” (try), “Wir hören Deine Stimme” (we hear your voice), and finally “Otto König macht Totenfunk”, literally Otto König makes radio of the dead. The word was a coinage. That is what made the noise.
The messages, and a discovery in reading them
Eleven chapter titles are put in quotation marks by the book itself, which makes them the sentences the authors chose to put forward. Five of the seven I have in front of me start with the same imperative, Höre zu, listen.
“Listen! Tell all people that we live.” (p. 165) “Listen: everything is One. Understand!” (p. 172) “Listen: the bond is important!” (p. 174) “Love is life forever!” (p. 181) “Listen! Death is the birth of a new life!” (p. 184) “Listen! Your incarnation is not bound to your planet.” (p. 196)
Then come “representation dominates”, a world with several vibrational planes, the human being who is not the crown of creation, and a warning coupled with a message of hope.
Cross-checking these titles against the ITC literature of the 1980s turns something up. Several of them are messages already published thirty years earlier, sometimes word for word. “Liebe ist Leben für immer” was received at the Boppard symposium in the autumn of 1985. “Sagt allen Menschen, dass wir leben” comes from a television broadcast, Luxembourg 1987. “Eure Inkarnation ist nicht an euren Planeten gebunden” appears in identical form. So the third part is not a recent collection, it is the shaping of a body of material assembled between 1982 and 1989, taken up here as the framework. This is neither a reproach nor a revelation, it is something a reader is better off knowing before going into the book.
Two voices, not in equal measure
On the title page the order is Wauters, then König, and that is how the BnF records it. Almost every mention of the book reverses the two names. Anna Maria Wauters is a literature teacher and a therapist, and had been working with König for eight years at the time of publication. So a woman of letters holds the pen over a technician she works alongside, which explains the opening portrait, the lyricism of the sub-headings, and the room given to the messages over the room given to the schematics.
The tone belongs as much to consolation as to exposition. The publisher puts it this way: “Luminous messages of hope, but also warnings sent by the spirit world, reminding us that life is an adventure of consciousness far vaster than we imagine.” The book speaks first of all to people who have lost someone. It was published by an esoteric publisher and the BnF files it under 133.9. You know which aisle you are walking into.
There is a bibliographic oddity I have not been able to settle. The BnF records “translated from the German” on the 2016 French edition, while the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek codes exactly the opposite on the 2018 German edition, and gives as the title of the work Nouvelles découvertes sur l’au-delà, which has no known English edition, so the French title stands here. The two records contradict each other, and the chronology backs the Germans.
What I kept from it fits in one sentence. A man spent decades building, all by himself, instruments able to pick up what no ordinary microphone picks up, and he accepted that the object of his research would come and tune the instrument itself. I never managed to interest him in what I do with plants and with stones. That is my greatest regret.
Read in February 2018. Review written in 2026.
