The journal, whose title means "The Row" or "The Series", owes its genesis to the founding of the electronic music studio of the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) in Cologne (later WDR) under the influence of Werner Meyer-Eppler, and the realisation that technology was becoming an important element in the work of younger composers (Grant 2001, 55).
Thus, NWDR, set up in the British occupation zone, reflected the attitudes of the BBC; the four services set up in the American zone (BR, HR, SDR and Radio Bremen) adopted American-style practices from the Armed Forces Network; and Südwestfunk, in the French zone, tended to be more French than German in its practices.
In 1949, Meyer-Eppler published a book promoting the idea of producing music by purely electronic means (Meyer-Eppler 1949), and in 1951 joined the sound engineer/composer Robert Beyer and the composer/musicologist/journalist Herbert Eimert in a successful proposal to the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk (NWDR) for the establishment of an electronic-music studio in Cologne.