Die Maus streams commercial-free children's radio from WDR, the German public broadcaster behind one of the country's most enduring media brands. Songs, stories, and short explainer segments run all day, built for young listeners rather than background noise for adults. Tune in on Radio Shuffle and it plays instantly, free, with no account needed.
A brand built to dodge a law against children's television
The Maus name goes back to March 7, 1971, when WDR first aired Die Sendung mit der Maus, a children's television program conceived by Armin Maiwald together with Dieter Saldecki and Gert Kaspar Müntefering. According to the program's own history, it originally aired under the deliberately roundabout title "Lach- und Sachgeschichten für Fernsehanfänger," or funny and factual stories for television beginners, a name chosen partly because West German broadcasting rules at the time restricted television programming aimed directly at children under six. Teachers and childcare professionals condemned it early on as bad for child development. It has since won more than 75 awards for exactly the opposite reason, prized for how clearly it explains the world to children without talking down to them.
From Saturday morning television to a radio channel of its own
The audio version streaming here has a much more recent history. WDR launched a dedicated Maus radio offering on December 1, 2019, initially called "Die Sendung mit der Maus zum Hören," replacing the broadcaster's earlier children's radio channel KiRaKa, according to WDR's own program records. In 2022, WDR folded that radio channel, its evening children's program on WDR 5, and its podcasts under one umbrella brand simply called Die Maus, with the radio stream renamed WDR Maus and the evening broadcast becoming MausLive.
The channel now carries the same mix that made the television show a fixture of German childhoods: short Sachgeschichten, the plain-language explainer segments the brand is best known for, alongside music, listener questions, and audio spinoffs like the MausHörspiel podcast and the Gute Nacht mit der Maus bedtime segment.
Listen free on Radio Shuffle
Die Maus streams live throughout the day, and Radio Shuffle carries the feed with no app to install and nothing to sign up for. Press play for commercial-free German children's radio from the broadcaster that has been explaining the world to kids, one funny and factual story at a time, for more than fifty years.