The Art of Silence and Human Behaviour: Interdisciplinary Perspectives 9780367504878, 9780367503888, 9781003050148

Table of contents :
Cover
Endorsements
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Silentium
2. What we cannot speak about…
3. Communication
4. Enforced silence
5. Garrulous ignorance
6. Open secrets
7. The false floor
8. Silence in law
9. Cartels of silence
10. All the rest
Encore
Author index
Subject index

Citation preview

“The book examines the thoroughly contradictory concepts of speech and silence – depending on perspective and the demands of the situation – in a lively, always readable manner, and provides eloquent information on the essential nature of silence and its opposite.” —Prof. Dr. Volker Tschuschke “Theodor Itten has examined the subject, indeed the very concept of Silence, from so many different perspectives, in his thoughtful and intelligent rendering, it becomes an important antidote for the cacophony that surrounds us every day. The very stillness of the subject is a welcome antidote for the shrillness and hysteria of daily discourses that assault us on every level, from political, to the private and personal. That, in itself, is enough to make the book deserving of an international audience. A book that is desperately needed in the noisily empty times we live in today.” —Deirdre Bair, Ph.D., Author of Jung: A biography and, lately, Parisian Lives: Beckett, de Beauvoir and me “... is not a purely theoretical discourse, but a fluid reading experience. You don’t have to read it from cover to cover: the skilful use of headings allows you to dip in and pick up the thread in various different places. [It] offers a wealth of interesting facts, brought together in an entirely new way, about the history of silence – first and foremost, in the context of spiritual traditions [...] He has put together a lively compendium.” —Martin Preisser, in St. Galler Tagblatt “... This book really goes deep into the theme of silence. It sheds light on the topic from various angles, making it a book that enriches and inspires contemplation. You can learn a lot from it, and use it in your day-to-day life. It is very informative, but it also provides entertainment by way of its many examples. The writing style is pleasantly fluid. A very informative book that is a pleasure to read...” —kunstundliteratur

THE ART OF SILENCE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

This book examines the phenomenon of silence in relation to human behaviour from multiple perspectives, drawing on psychological and cultural-philosophical ideas to create new, surprising connections between silence, quiet, and rest. Silence and being quiet are present in everyday life and in politics, but why do we talk about them so rarely? Silence can be cathartic and peaceful but equally oppressive and unbearable. In the form of communication, we keep secrets to protect ourselves and others, but on the other hand, subjects can be silenced with dictatorial posturing – a communicative display of power – and something can be literally “hushed up” that needs to be disclosed. In unique and engaging style, Theodor Itten explores the multi-layered internal conversation on silence in relation to the self and emotions, demonstrating why it is sometimes necessary in our modern society. Describing and analyzing human behaviour in relation to silence, the book also draws on psychoanalytic ideas by outlining the power of silence in processing our emotions and relationships and hiding our innermost feelings. With rich narrative signposts providing thought-provoking and amusing insights, and interpersonal communication examined in relation to everyday life, this is fascinating reading for students and academics in psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, and related areas. Theodor Itten lives as a freelance psychotherapist, psychologist, and author in Sankt Gallen, Switzerland. He is the author of several books, including Rage: Managing an Explosive Emotion, The New Politics of Experience and the Bitter Herbst (with Ron Roberts), and Francis Huxley and the Human Condition: Anthropology, Ancestry and Knowledge (with Ron Roberts). Ruth Martin has a PhD in German literature and philosophy. She has translated a diverse range of fiction and non-fiction for UK and US publishers, including short stories by Joseph Roth and essays by Hannah Arendt.

THE ART OF SILENCE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Theodor Itten

TRANSLATED BY RUTH MARTIN

First published in English 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Theodor Itten Translated by Ruth Martin The right of Theodor Itten to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First published in German under the title Schweigen; Von der Kunst der Stille bis zur befohlenen Ruhe by Theodor Itten, edition: 1 Copyright © Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, ein Teil von Springer Nature, 2018 * This edition has been translated and published under licence from Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature. Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature takes no responsibility and shall not be made liable for the accuracy of the translation. *to be reproduced exactly as it appears in the original work British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-50487-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-50388-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-05014-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru & Chennai, India

For Deirdre Bair

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgements 1 Silentium

xi xv 1

2 What we cannot speak about…

19

3 Communication

45

4 Enforced silence

65

5 Garrulous ignorance

89

6 Open secrets

111

7 The false floor

131

8 Silence in law

151

9 Cartels of silence

161

10 All the rest

185

Encore Author index Subject index

195 199 201

PREFACE

“Quiet!” shouts an irritated reader. He is sitting in the large reading room of the old British Library inside the British Museum, which is flooded with light from the glass cupola. His outstretched left hand points to the clearly legible sign that reads: SILENCE PLEASE. All the other readers, alarmed by this noisy interruption, turn to look in his direction. What was the point of that paradoxical intervention? In the centre of silence, it isn’t just quiet; there is also a constant flow of noise. I may step out of the silence with my own voice; I can fill it like a candle flame fills the darkness that surrounds it. Our ruminations on the harmonious sound of silence, on schweigen – the intentional silence of words unspoken – and its many facets is an important tonic note that runs through this book. If another reader had then called out: “Oh shut up, you fool!” there might have been a brief commotion in the hallowed reading rooms. “It’s written there…” the first man might have replied angrily. “Please don’t forget that we cannot have silence without people being silent. The ancient Greek word for silence is sige.” And Sieg is the German word for victory. So what wins out: silence, noise, or maybe even peace and quiet? When we keep secrets, we are keeping something quiet. We might even go further and find that selfcensorship leaves us trapped, our tongues paralysed. But in our minds, the inner discourse goes on, and we have to numb the elemental noises so that the cry of pain welling up inside us, as painted by Edvard Munch (1863–1944), cannot burst out suddenly and uncontrollably like a crack of thunder from our souls. This dictatorial behaviour by the shouting reader, intended to make us fall silent – in other words, to mute us – is a domineering, communicative demonstration of power. Today’s astrophysicists posit that it was silent 13.82 billion years ago. Their assumption is that the universe was formed out of pure energy, whatever that might be. And after that, it didn’t take long, relative to this unimaginable stretch

xii Preface

of time, before stable atoms were formed (a mere 380,000 years, in fact). Millions more years passed before the first stars began to shine, the silent rays of which we can see today. What was that silence like? Outer space is a place without sound. To our earthly minds, the silence of space is eerie and fascinating at once. And yet, alas, we live in an age of tremendous noise, from various sources, at varying volumes, an almost continuous experience that frays our nerves, produced by ever more modern machines: car engines, buses, lorries, motorbikes, planes both large and small, helicopters, drones, leaf-blowers, lawnmowers, hedge trimmers, the endless building of structures that rise into the sky and burrow into the earth, and so on. Then there is the aural scenery of music everywhere, and the ubiquitous mobile phone conversations, even in the lavatories of airports and restaurants. And this depressing noise nuisance can breed annoyance, resentment, indignance – or even full-blown aggression. Our civilisation is not conducive to quiet, to silence. And yet the value of silence, stillness, peace, and the ability to say nothing remains uncontested. In our sociological, psychological, cultural, and philosophical study of this great harmonious phenomenon of silence, quietness, and schweigen – saying nothing – we will speak up and give voice to our experiences, thoughts, reading, research, conversations, and general knowledge. We will reflect critically on the psychological and socio-political misery that comes from the act of hushing up and keeping quiet about emotional, violent, and sexually traumatising abuses of power. Current examples, whether of a public or private nature, are a daily feature of the news. One of my aims is to make possible a new and perhaps surprising connection between silence, being silent, and letting something rest. There is a certain amusing circularity to the narrative thread that runs through and between the stories. We cannot escape the cultural power of silence. And I won’t remain silent about the facts an author must face; many books have already been penned on certain aspects of my subject in this study. Writers have often mentioned silence as a part of life, ever since the early days of humanity. The ancient religious rituals carried out all over the world (the rituals of all world religions) use silence, being silent, and the peace and quiet that come with them to create a numinous atmosphere. “Silence” by John Cage (1912–1992) was one of my principal inspirations. His music, his words, arranged and written up (Cage, 1961), led me to the book that you now have in your hands. Starting in summer 2016, I began to contemplate my own silence in a silent environment, to think about the act of “keeping quiet,” and the other variations of secret-keeping in a new, more conscious way. To feel the significance of people saying nothing to each other and enjoying silent moments. To be allowed to stand in the entrance hall of speech and listen to what had not yet been said. These human experiences form a broad spectrum, from the entirely positive experience of powerful silence in meditative quietness – both inward and outward – all the way to negative, brutal experiences, occasionally ending in a deathly silence. In silence lies an inner strength and the courage not to speak. There is the silence of old age (Haberl and Biolek 2017), into which we can recline appreciatively. “Do you cope well with silence? Can you draw strength

Preface  xiii

from it?” Mariam Schaghaghi asks the musician and actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. “Only if I know it isn’t going to last too long!” (loud laughter) (Schaghaghi and Gainsbourg 2017). The restful quietness of artfully constructed images can be (though is not always) transferred to the viewer. We may pass from the unquiet everyday world into silence, into the space of silence. Cathedrals of silence and peace. We can nourish and cherish a culture of silence. Without further ado, here are my linguistic points of reference, the three original German keywords used in this book. They are given here with translations and clues to their etymology and the first operative definitions of these concepts, to aid the analysis that follows. Schweigen: l at. silentium: “not speaking,” an intentional, human silence. Placating, calming, falling silent, silencing, switching off, being mute, clamming up, keeping quiet, keeping secrets, hushing up, keeping things to yourself, not responding, not telling tales, not talking, not objecting, keeping schtum. Ruhe: lat. quies: “peace/quiet,” a word that also means tranquillity, repose, stillness, and sleep. We hear this word in: motionlessness, the still of the night, rest and relaxation, noiselessness, doldrums, inner peace, an undisturbed state, peace of mind, sangfroid. Stille: l at. silere: “silence, stillness.” Not saying anything, being silent, wordless; gr. sige; quiet, peace, as silent as the grave, mute, deathly silent, to hold one’s tongue, to not breathe a word. These three words overlap in their meanings. Each is sometimes the container of the others and sometimes the content. Now the water pipe, and now the water flowing through it into the well of meaning. It is a unique warp and weft of meaning that will be unpicked and woven back together in the course of this book. The loose strands fanning out at the edges of this cloth – not speaking, quietness, silence, and the various experiences related to these terms – will be our focus in the nine arenas of experience that I will explore. My habit of citing the birth and death dates of people who are quoted or mentioned here serves the purpose of historical contextualisation. The conversations between Lou and Sam are fictitious. I like Martin Walser’s motto: “There is an autonomy to writing that one may put down to nothing more than the act of writing itself ” (Walser 2017). The map is not the land; the menu is not the meal. The ability to hear the silence and once a day – as Pope Francis I recommended on New Year’s Day 2018 – to devote oneself entirely to peace and silence allows us “to ‘keep’ our freedom from being corroded by the banality of consumerism, the blare of commercials, the stream of empty words and the overpowering waves of empty chatter and loud shouting.” At the end of our long conversation about this book, my friend Klaus Frost (b.1938) told me – and his words are a fitting summary of what I have laid out

xiv Preface

here – “When you look beyond the lives of individuals, then ultimately, writing about this incredible quantity of silence and secrecy, whatever purpose it serves, so that you see what a universally manipulated society we live in, will contribute to the enlightenment of future generations. The complexity of our heterogeneous society, this activity that is taking place everywhere – this everything-is-flowingand-nobody-knows-where-to – really encourages people to use secrecy as a tool for manipulation.” With this in mind, watchfulness is the order of the day.

Literature Cage J., (1961) Silence. Lectures and Writings. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT. Haberl T., Biolek A., (2017) “Den Tod finde ich nicht unangenehm,” Interview. Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine 22: 18–24. Schaghaghi M., Gainsbourg C., (2017) “Ich bin kein Genie, aber das ist doch egal,” NZZ am Sonntag Gesellschaft, 18.

Website Walser M., (2017) Zu träumen genügt. SWR 2. 7 http://www.swr.de/swr2/programm/ sendungen/literatur/swr2-literatur-zu-traeumen-genuegt/-/id=659892/did=​ 19245772/nid=659892/bqvrjl/index.htm. Accessed 21.03.2017

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

English Edition For their unfailing support in making this English translation a reality, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Alice and Rolf Vetterli, Barbara Fitzgerald, Courtenay Young, E.S. France, and E.T. Itten. I owe special thanks and deep appreciation to Ruth Martin for this translation. This is the second book of mine to which she has applied her linguistic art. Sadly, Deirdre died on 17 April 2020 and did not have the chance to hold this book in her hands. It was due to Deirdre Bair’s enthusiasm, friendship, and unwavering support for my venture into writing that this book began its journey towards an English edition. Merci beaucoup: I am deeply grateful for her friendship and the inspiring example she has set as a writer. In gratitude for twenty years of encouragement from a seasoned writer, I dedicate this book to her. At Routledge Psychology, I thank Eleanor Taylor, née Reedy, Editor, Social Psychology, for taking Schweigen onto her social psychology list, and Alex Howard, editorial assistant. Thanks also to Vaishnavi Ganesh, Project Manager and her team at Nova Techset, India.

German Edition The following people have played an essential part in the writing of this book, and for that I would like to thank them with all my heart: My wonderful wife, Evelyne Gottwalz Itten, for her loving support during the writing process and all the stimulating conversations about the book. Raphael Grischa Itten, Berlin, the artist in our family, who drew the cover illustration in Amsterdam and made a gift of it to me – and who also allowed me to use it for the English edition.

xvi Acknowledgements

The American author and biographer Deirdre Bair, whose many years of friendship mean a great deal to me, and who has encouraged and supported me in my writing. This book is dedicated to her, in deepest gratitude. My maternal grandmother Rosalie Scheurer-Flückiger (1893–1971), whom I would like to thank publicly and sincerely for taking my sisters and me in as children. Far-sighted and wise as she was, she spared us the fate of growing up in a Mission children’s home. She was also the first female author I knew, and whose book (Invisible Walls, 1941) I read. My long-standing, loyal friends Klaus Frost and Rolf Vetterli, to whom I am grateful for the interviews they gave me on their respective subject areas, which enriched this broad topic. Rolf also read the whole manuscript and suggested many helpful modifications. Joseph Gomes for his piece on Auschwitz, kindly written for this book at my request. To Peter Stamm, “merci” a thousand times for the text that appears at the end. Dörte Fuchs, an author and translator in Freiburg, who was good enough to read the manuscript and give me all kinds of suggestions for improvement in terms of both content and language, which have enriched the book. Peter Gross, sociologist and social philosopher, for the kind and goodhumoured prod towards writing this book, which he initially wanted to co-author, as well as for all his tips on content and form. The author and social psychologist Ron Roberts, friend and co-author in London, who encouraged me to be quiet, keep my head down, and write. Adolf Holl, my old friend and an experienced writer, who encouraged me with his usual kindness to write as clearly and plainly as I am able. Our neighbours Dorle and Heiner Forrer-Baumann, in whose classical Villa Haldenstein I found the leisure and silence in which to write. Only in a prolonged period of quiet and undisturbed peace can something new come into being. At Springer Verlag in Vienna, I would like to thank Renate Eichhorn, who accepted this, my second book, for her list and supported this endeavour with consideration and encouragement. I am grateful to Thomas Redl in Vienna and Volker Drüke in Münster for their clever, committed, and thorough editing. To Max Moennich of deblik Berlin for the cover design. And to Surendra Kumar Singh, project manager at SPI India, for his considerate supervision of the production process. Finally, my thanks to the composer Gustav Mahler, whose nine symphonies (unbeknownst to him) provided a moving, quiet, stirring, and exciting accompaniment to the writing of this book, which was begun in March 2017 and completed in May 2018.

1 SILENTIUM

The clock is ticking. Please, stop the pendulum. It’s quiet. The silent, primitive connection between mother and baby probably provides the oldest and most enduring iconography of silence and sensory peace in our European culture (shaped by Greek, Hebrew, Roman, and Germanic influences). A baby’s hunger is “stilled” and its crying “quieted” at its mother’s or wet-nurse’s breast. This act is praised by King David (as early as 1000 bc) in his 131st psalm: O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. Our mothers are our first gods – and here, the sound of praise and exultant words is extinguished in a nourishing silence.

The silence of the cosmos Silentium: we might see it as metaphors which “summon one another and are more coordinated than sensations, so much so that a poetic mind is purely and simply a syntax of metaphors” (Bachelard 1964, p.107). Thus, at the beginning of all things was silence, around 13.82 billion years ago. Astrophysicists think of

2 Silentium

the universe as “something” that was born out of pure energy. It wasn’t until nearly 400,000 years later that stable atoms were formed. Millions of years had to pass before the first stars began to shine in this cosmic silence. Modern cosmologists believe that it all started with a Big Bang. Where there is no sound, there is no silence. Everything is at peace. We currently have no more serviceable metaphor than that of this standardised Big Bang theory, from which astrophysicists have been able to calculate a model of time, with the aid of computers. In the year 1225, the English bishop Robert Grosseteste wrote down his basic theory of creation in his book De luce (on light). The metaphor of the Big Bang comes from the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle (1915–2001). The Belgian theologian and physicist Georges Lemaître (1894–1966) coined the term “primeval atom” in 1931, for what was assumed to be the hot original state of the universe. The Big Bang theory gained increasing traction from the 1960s onwards, as new telescopes and computers failed to disprove it with fresh astronomical observations. Why do we humans, living on this planet, in the middle of an unimaginably huge universe, need a point of origin? What difference does the origin of matter and space make to us? Astronomers observe the continual expansion of the universe. And it is interesting to work backwards and calculate, or rather to have the latest computers calculate for us, the moment when the cosmic silence came into being, when all matter and radiation was held in an inconceivably tiny space, all energy concentrated there. Since all the established theories of physics, such as quantum field theory and the general theory of relativity, presuppose the existence of space, time, and matter, they cannot describe the Big Bang. Outer space is aphonic. A place whose silence, in our earthly imagination, is at once eerie and fascinating. The “Big Bang” does not describe an explosion in a space that already exists, but the simultaneous creation of matter, space and time from an original singularity. More precisely, the Big Bang describes a formal point in the cosmological model of an expanding universe. You reach it by tracing the development back in time to the point at which the fundamental general theory of relativity ceases to hold true, because density becomes infinite. By this logic, shortly after the Big Bang, the density of the universe must have exceeded the Planck density, a state which may be described by an as yet unknown theory of quantum gravitation, but not by any existing physical theory. Physics therefore currently has no generally accepted theory that covers the universe in its very early stages (Martus 2017, p.39). No sound and fury; only silence. No clapping, for as yet there were no hands. The silent night dreamed on. There was no water yet, no forests, meadows, and paths. A state of rest, as emptiness passed the quiet time with stillness. Cries came before language, before speech, but after the silence. Noiseless lip-service.

Silentium  3

Hamlet In the final scenes of the tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (first performed in London in 1602), the actor and playwright William Shakespeare (1564–1616) included this brief exchange, which was to become world famous: Hamlet: O, I die, Horatio; The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit: I cannot live to hear the news from England; But I do prophesy the election lights On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice; So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less, Which have solicited. The rest is silence. Dies Horatio: Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! Why does the drum come hither? “The rest is silence” has been much quoted for more than 400 years and, pregnant with meaning, goes hand in hand with Roma locuta, causa finita (Rome has spoken, the case is closed). “But” is the word that begins each contradiction and erases what has been said before. To experience something in life that we can remain silent about is exciting, but our ultimate finale doesn’t have to be a deathly silence. If we quiet down, we can all listen to the great nothingness. Silent notes and rhythms mostly sound harmonious. We have the right to silence and retreat. We always need the option of retreating into redemptive silence. From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death—all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence (Huxley 1931, p.19). Aldous Huxley was a master of articulating what had been revealed to him behind the doors of perception. What cannot be described in words can best be expressed in music. In the expressive power of musicians and composers. Pauses are silent music, expressive moments that communicate what otherwise cannot be heard. Music, in my experience – which contains a dearth of silence – is of fundamental significance for us. By expressing what cannot be spoken, it touches our souls and awakens there, perfect in the moment of hearing, the feeling that our senses are connecting us to our true nature. When the inexpressible had to be expressed, Shakespeare laid down his pen and called for music. And if the music should also fail? Well, there was always silence to fall back on. For always, always and everywhere, the rest is silence (ibid p.22).

4 Silentium

Stimulating words from this wily cultural analyst. His fellow writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990) used silence to shield himself from the promise of revealing himself and his inner life.

Letting it rest Silence is drawn out when we keep quiet, and the echo fades away when we “let it rest.” Silentium has been encoded within religion. It characterises silent retreats and prayers in convents and monasteries. Enforced silence is a form of expression for someone who considers themselves close to the Eternal. The whispered address without an addressee. There are experiences of silence in which the inner pain of some horrific event – Srebrenica – can only be made slightly more bearable with a long, soundless scream. Noiseless weeping as a community embraces and gazes at each other without saying a word. The image to go with this: Munch’s Scream. I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. This is how the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch described the state of mind that he transposed into the famous painting The Scream (the text was written as a poem on the frame of the 1895 version). This is about much more for us than the harmonious echo-chamber in our own minds. In silence, images can, may, should, and must be laid to rest from time to time, as necessary. Much like the stirred-up silt at the bottom of a pond, which creates fresh clarity as it sinks. The Latin word silere means: to be silent; to stop speaking or making noise. A silentiarius or silentiary is a court official whose job is to maintain silence (Partridge 1979, p.622). Silence in court! The silentiary was also a Byzantine courtier, charged with keeping order and silence in Byzantium’s imperial court. “Quiet please!” says the umpire on Centre Court in Wimbledon, as they restart the match. The same rule of silence applies in snooker, in ice hockey at the start of play (no music), and in athletics before the start of a race. All quiet. On your marks… set… starting pistol. Being silent always plays its part in the context of a situation. And silere, schweigen, not speaking – the human expression of silence – is practised in different places and for different lengths of time depending on that context. The familiar minute’s silence in the arena for a sporting figure who has died. Or a national minute’s silence after great catastrophes, whether natural or man-made. “Ode quiet, quies” is, as it were, a response, an answer: be quiet and peaceful. Let something rest, lay it to rest. We can tune into our own wordlessness, listen

Silentium  5

to our inner silence and hear our inner voice there. Only if we listen in silence can we be attentive. If we follow an instruction to be silent, we are obedient. And yet I can also keep someone else’s secret by remaining silent. There are several professions that require this kind of silence: doctor, priest, lawyer, and psychotherapist. There is a guilty silence. The keeping of secrets. Silence as a way of avoiding conversations, and not resolving an existing conflict. Mediation is a fresh attempt at conversation with the help of an intermediary (Itten 2018), so that what separates us can be named, recognised, evaluated, and new bridges can be built to overcome it, instead of erecting walls of silence. This requires moral integrity, an open heart, an alert mind, and genuine commitment to a sense of community in the society we live in. And then we come to the practices of self-control, self-knowledge, selfawareness, which can lead us towards self-confidence and self-love. Selflessness and self-realisation. When we are silent, we can be immovable. Hesykhia, the daughter of Dike ( justice), is the goddess of peace, solitude, rest, and stillness in Greek mythology. She was also a servant to the god of sleep, Hypnos. Alongside this, in antiquity, Hesykhia signified the practice and art of saying nothing. Pythagoras of Samos (570–510 bc), the mathematical thinker, was a great master of this art. The sceptics were reticent with their judgements and practised quietude, and the stoics were able to wait in disputes until it was their turn to speak. In their solitude, desert monks achieved a state of inner and outer peace. On Mount Athos, the monks lay their chin on their chest, their gaze directed fully towards their heart. This contemplative exercise aids a mindset of carefreeness and, for most monks, of divinization, the guarding of the heart as a symbol of the eternal beat. Until the final hour strikes (Rotzetter 2008, p.238). Meditation: an exercise in contemplative silence and relaxation. In November 2012, in Morschach near Brunnen, where I was giving a lecture to Capuchin friars who were training in Franciscan mysticism, I shared a lunch table with the former prior of the order and prolific writer, Brother Anton Rotzetter (1939–2016). Beside me sat a brother wearing a friar’s habit; he had been a farmhand in Bern before joining the order. He listened to Anton and me as we talked about my lecture. When Rotzetter got up to fetch me a copy of his book on St Clare of Assisi from the library, Brother Hans began to speak. He worked in the monastery garden, he said, and found the commandment of St Francis of Assisi that was hardest to obey the one that said we could enjoy the work of other brothers, even though we would have liked to have done it ourselves – we just had to think that it pleased God for this task to be completed by others. A commandment against envy and also against jealousy. He told me a few anecdotes about the garden and about visitors who, although they were neither farmers nor gardeners, still felt entitled to play the expert. When Brother Anton came back

6 Silentium

and resumed his seat at the table, Brother Hans immediately fell silent. I was impressed by his humble willingness to let things rest so that Anton could speak. “Quiet, please,” our music teacher and organist at the Herzogenbuchsee church, Heinrich von Bergen, used to say as he entered the singing room with a smile on his face, to greet his class of chatting teenagers. We should have realised that the resultant brief silence was a crucial precondition for the music that we were to learn. The widely travelled organist, whom I liked to listen to on Sundays when he played a toccata as a voluntary at the end of the service, might speak rather louder if his call for quiet wasn’t obeyed. There would then be an instant silentium, and a slight air of embarrassment at having provoked the maestro. Von Bergen was our “stormy Beethoven.” Afterwards, when we saw him in the school corridors and the organ loft, we were usually awed and said nothing. A slight nod was greeting enough. Those of us who volunteered for the school orchestra or choir and took part in our first concerts at the end-of-year celebrations had a chance to get to know him in a new way – with greater musical depth. Outside class, as far as I recall fifty years later, he taught us that voluntary, communal music-making is impossible without discipline, and without periods of silence and listening to each other. This dedicated musician, music teacher, and now music therapist focused on cultivating our inner and outer voices, the playing of our chosen instruments, and the improvement of our general musical health. Later, he also published a book on the subject, for which he deserves gratitude (von Bergen 2000).

Speech, not speaking, and letting others speak It is seventy years since the Swiss doctor and cultural philosopher Max Picard (1888–1965) positioned schweigen – not speaking – as a phenomenon in its own right, in his existential and phenomenological exploration of the world of silence. “Silence belongs to the basic structure of man” (Picard 1952, p.xix). This sacred silence, according to his motto, is the fundament of speech. Silence is more than “not speaking”; it is an ancient phenomenon that cannot be related to anything behind, below, or beside it. He posits that “Silence is never more audible than when the last sound of music has died away” (ibid, p.11). Moving on to his philosophical creed, he writes with a gentle dogmatism: The word that is in the silence dwells in a world that transcends the world of sight – that is the world of silence. The word’s gleam of transparency comes from the gleam of that invisible world, the gleam that descends on the word when it is still enclosed in human silence (ibid, p.32). We children of the early 1950s sang the song “Der Mond ist aufgegangen” (the moon has risen) before bed, and in the fourth line of the first verse, we would come to the black and silent forest. Humans are silent in sleep, acclimatising ourselves to

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the great final silence of death. “Poetic is the life of man” on this earth: a quote attributed to Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843). Silence rests within us. It moves in the space between the outer and inner worlds. The “and” is the locus of quietness. Picard says elegantly that silence is “central in the man” (Picard 1952, p.49). In what solitude is possible for us, peace and quiet – Ruhe – is the place where we are silent. We don’t need to go off into the glorified desert, the former reality of which was a jungle. What is the speaking silence contained in the images that appear in our minds? These phenomena of silence are the poet’s blossoming meadows, which come from the very core of our inner being. The words of the songs protect the silence that follows. Emptiness is always there, in parallel to soundlessness. Picard was troubled by the noisy words that filled everyday life at the time he was writing, after the terrible screams of the war. The Second World War with its bombs, the millions of people murdered by a so-called master race, the dying screams of millions of Jews, make it impossible for us to stay silent and tolerate the monstrous, demonic reality of war. In this case, the rest is never silence. The sleep of reason is the sister to the sleep of the night, where we stop and rest a while in the general great silence (as at an inn). The noise of everyday life today, with all its electronic gadgets, its billions of cars, lorries, buses, motorbikes, tractors, and so on, has taken possession of many places and times – breaks from work, evenings, leisure hours, contemplation – which in a previous age, in the pre-industrial period of farming and crafts, were the preserve of peace and quiet. This noise upsets the harmony of the mind, disrupting the healthy lifestyle of our species and kind. Result: a lot of psychological disorders. Man who has lost silence has not merely lost one human quality, but his whole structure has been changed thereby (Picard 1952, p.221). For a long time now, we have referred to this as man’s alienation, brought about by the social and economic context on which he depends. Of course, this religious philosopher is also interested in the silence of his Christian God. In his conception, word and silence are united in God. This One God overflows in the words that are put into his or her or its mouth by human scribes. Adam and Eve hear Elohim and the prophets and Moses claim they have heard him, too; it is only to his own son Yeshu, who proclaims many things about his Abba, that he does not speak. “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani,” Yeshu is said to have cried, suffused with the spirit of the Torah. It translates as: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). He ended his life with a God-given quote, like many rabbis when they entered the gas chambers of Auschwitz – a frequent occurrence, according to eyewitnesses (Lapide 1996, p.90). A fitting echo of the silent Abba is sounded in the requiem with trumpets and timpani. Unfortunately, this divine son of man (as the writers of the sacred texts assumed) could not yet hear the rondo finale of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 7. The human silence in this music is deliberately

8 Silentium

and powerfully merged with the eternal silence of the silent Eternal. A harmonious medicine for being existentially “al-one.” Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

(whistles “The Birdcatcher’s Song”) As it is… that’s right. (says nothing) Your voice in the distance, and then suddenly nothing but silence. Memorable! The time of saying nothing and the time of silence and the time of the voice. My silence in your ear. I’m available for short scenes. That’s right. In every age, a thirst for knowledge that we hope won’t end in sadness. Mental peace in melancholy is a tempting kind of stasis. Come now… I’m already there.

Twittering Whistling is an entertaining kind of communication that hugs the silence with its various melodies. The birds have their own tunes, used to mark their territory and, for male birds, to announce their presence to females. Whistling to each other is a way of announcing yourself and what is inside you. Shepherds had a very sophisticated way of communicating with animals and people over long distances using different whistles. When we don’t know what to do, how to convey what is happening inside us to the outside world, to break through the silence with words, whistling is a pleasant non-verbal aid to communication. The story goes that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) once whistled a Schubert lied instead of giving a lecture. The reason he gave for this was his own frustration at being unable to express his ideas on the philosophy of language coherently (Lucas and Chatburn 2013). Putting our feelings into language is an attempt to name what manifests itself to our inner perception with the unique set of vocabulary that we each have available. The tongue moves, and ends the silence; we can stop being silent. We don’t have to keep quiet about these buzzing inner gadflies. The following chapter will provide a careful explanation of how the “talking cure” of psychoanalysis can be helpful. A theory on the mania for transparency will be developed and contrasted with silence in and as therapy. If we are to approach people’s silence with understanding, we must look at it from both inside and outside. There is a question of whether aphasia, a child’s reaction to disturbing social and cultural factors, influences this silence, this reluctance to speak. The development of language, the acquired ability to speak, to communicate, is hardwired into us all, in our cognitive structures. The inability to speak is often, but not only, a severe disorder affecting our inner language.

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Perhaps in the beginning was not the word, but the note, the rhythm, the revelation that we are listening creatures. Is there a particular way in which we can now understand the silence of not speaking? Luise Lutz, an expert in linguistics and neurolinguistics from Hamburg, thinks so. She says things are well when we hear with our hearts. Behind everything we say lies: a thought, a desire, a message (Lutz 2010, p.250). Our communication and our silence is goal oriented. Without us sensing it, the unconscious helps us to recognise our real intention in the silence behind the words. The gestures that accompany our silence serve as road signs that point the way to our meaning. This is the art that has been mastered by artists of language such as Harold Pinter (1930–2008), who was among the playwrights of the British New Wave in the 1960s. He wrote a play with the same title as this book. Silence was premiered in London on 2 July 1969. A woman, Ellen, in her mid-20 s, takes to the stage along with two men, Rumsey (40) and Bates (mid-30 s). They speak to each other and to themselves. They are silent and speculate about what it is the others aren’t saying, about each character’s silence. Here, the actors must have the courage to pause, and these pauses spread and merge together like clouds. These pauses, these silences, are the liminal state where the constant drive to press ahead can rest. Ellen wonders whether she thinks at all. And if so, then what is it she’s thinking, and where do her thoughts come from? Often when Bates wants to do something with her, she gives him the silent treatment. If she does say something, it’s usually this one word: no. “Silence” itself appears twenty-seven times in this short play. Ellen: “Around me sits the night. Such a silence” (Pinter 1978, p.211). Seventeen times in this play, there are pauses in which the silence is stretched taut into a dramatic tension. Pinter is revered as a master of silence and pauses. You never heard such silence is the title of an essay collection that focuses on Pinter’s innovative theatre work, in which things left unsaid, silence, and pauses gain a refreshing value on stage (Bold 1984). Pinter’s writing is dedicated to the present, in which we can talk about things that could not be spoken of in the past. For example, in The Tea Party (Pinter 1978, p.110), married couple Disson and Diana are given the following dialogue: Disson: Diana: Disson: Diana: Disson: Diana: Disson:

Are you happy? Yes. Very happy? Yes. Have you ever been happier? With any other man? Never. (Pause.) I make you happy, don’t I? Happier than you’ve ever been … with any other man? Diana: Yes. You do. (Pause.) Yes. (Silence.)

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For me, this kind of pausing, stopping off in silence is like a homecoming, an arrival in oneself. What I don’t know can’t hurt me. Another saying gives a gentle indication of how far the act of saying nothing can reach: there’s no tax on thoughts.

Noise, the enemy of silence Sibylle Berg has heard, as we all have, the main sources of general noise increasing for many years. The streets filled with cars, buses, and motorbikes, the busy railways, and air traffic – now with the addition of drones. Some areas of life are affected by permanent noise. Building sites everywhere. Our houses are filled with electronic gadgets that buzz and hum and vibrate. Our high-rises and industrial buildings are equipped with the most modern technology, and our open-plan offices are stockpots brewing noise and disquiet. With the advent of smartphones, telephone calls are made in almost all public spaces, and millions of young people stream music via earphones straight to their inner ears from hundreds of TV and radio stations. Noise, noise, noise. We don’t need any further growth in noise, which has doubled once again over the last twenty years, “but peace at last” (Berg 2015, p.9). Gérard Poffet, the deputy director of the Swiss Environment Agency (BAFU 2009), writes that “around 1.2 million people in Switzerland are subjected to harmful or annoying levels of traffic noise on a daily basis.” Unfortunately, noise is still regarded as a necessary evil for our standard of living. The effect of noise on our mental and social wellbeing is therefore still routinely trivialised. Increasing numbers of studies show that humans do not get used to noise. Excessive and chronic noise both cause physical illness. The consequences range from sleep disorders and high blood pressure all the way to heart attacks. The costs that come with noise also run into the billions. Alongside the healthcare costs, the most significant of these is a fall in property prices (www.bafu.admin.ch). Noise, even from sporting activities, impacts quality of life for all of us. We mostly experience it as an annoyance for body and soul. It has been proven that noise makes us ill and has long-term health consequences. At night, when we want and need rest, to restore the ability to work that is essential for our survival, we react to noise with extreme sensitivity and irritation. This leads to sleep disorders, which impact our biologically necessary rest and recovery. Another quote from the Swiss Environment Agency: Noise has high external costs. These include healthcare costs for medication, visits to the doctor and rest cures. In residential areas where there is excessive noise, property values drop. Rental incomes are less than in other areas. These external costs are not paid by those who create the noise, but those affected by it, and society as a whole (ibid).

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The costs ran to an estimated 1.2 billion Swiss francs in 2017, in Switzerland alone. When my nerves are overtaxed by these sounds, it makes me restless, angry, and stupid. A conversation requires quietness between the words; otherwise, it isn’t good. Talking without pause is crass. We speak quietly because whispering veils tiny secrets. Being silent doesn’t necessarily mean I am hiding something. All those years of seeing therapists, only to make your final exit and be buried with a perfect psyche: that is unbearable (Berg 2015, p.84). Keeping our silence is a last resort in our attempts to relieve pain. We will follow her thoughts a little further. She writes: The longing for simple structures and a world divisible into good and evil is so cute that you can even summon up a kind of love for religious militants. Which is, however, quickly transformed into anger, because behind every insistent claim that someone is in possession of a general truth lurks a tremendous stupidity (ibid). And herewith, this writer postulates mischievously: The highest law should actually be: leave everyone in peace! Live without patronising your fellow humans, without annoying, tormenting or using them! (ibid, p.115f ). All our righteous acts are not just like filthy rags; self-righteousness in its current form, as it is manifested worldwide, has become a plague: people joining forces in order to claim that they and their actions – in whoever’s name – represent the truth. What does the silent majority do then? Should they stick to the motto: speech is silver, but silence is golden? At what point do you finally blow a gasket?

Be careful In his crime novel The Judge and his Hangman (first published in German in 1950), Friedrich Dürrenmatt has his police officers – first and foremost the aging Inspector Barlach – deliberately maintain a cunning silence. Ugly scandals can be avoided by keeping quiet. Barlach likes officers who never speak a word when they’re driving the old man’s car. When a detective is murdered, Dürrenmatt has Barlach say to his new assistant Tschanz: “He had a clear mind, he knew what he wanted, and he kept it to himself. He spoke only when it was necessary. We have to emulate him, Tschanz, he was way ahead of us” (Dürrenmatt 2006, p.12). The ability to keep quiet and wait are useful qualities, and not just for fictional

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detectives. Dürrenmatt has his characters shoot into the darkness and unexpectedly hit the bullseye, because they wait a long time before breaking their silence and therefore don’t fulfil the expectations of others – the suspects, above all. Someone who has been stared at in silence is all the more keen to talk afterwards. And if attack is generally seen as the best form of defence, particularly from a defence lawyer, then the shocked silence of the investigating judge has a mildly confusing effect for someone who is presenting themselves as a victim before a possible perpetrator. The lance is turned 180° by keeping quiet about the facts: Barlach remains silent, again and again, because in his silence, he knows who committed the murder. He waits until he has all the necessary evidence. Leaves the murderer in peace so that he will fall into the silent man’s trap. Barlach often looks in silence at the man who doesn’t realise that he has already been caught out. “The writer lit himself a cigar. The room was silent. The child next door started crying again. The dog was barking downstairs” (p.80). Quiet scenes; the man asking the questions is confusing, because the people being questioned don’t want to say anything else. It’s the same, this writer thinks, with our dreams. “I have not succeeded in proving your guilt of the crimes you committed,” the old man says to his opponent, Gastmann, “So this time I’ll prove you guilty of something you didn’t do” (ibid, p.103). Gastmann, unruffled, goes on smoking his pipe, and says gratefully that he himself has not considered this possibility and will therefore be careful. As the suspect sizes him up, the inspector says nothing. He knows that Tschanz will kill this Gastmann, that very day. Gastmann flinches, all trace of that unruffled demeanour now gone. What happens when a laugh and a life fade away? Mysterious Dürrenmatt silences. Barlach takes a look at Gastmann’s corpse, allowing the entwined threads of their lives to spool out to the end. “… and once again he looked back at the labyrinthine paths of their mysteriously intertwined lives. Now there remained nothing between them but the immensity of death, a judge whose verdict is silence” (ibid, p.113). The silence of death is as conciliatory for the one as it is unsettling for the others. How many people take their secrets with them to the grave? Sometimes it’s better not to know. Not to answer straight away. To remain in quiet contemplation. At the end of this crime novel, the old man says to Schmied’s murderer, the young Tschanz, that he won’t betray him, but that he should go away somewhere. Anywhere, as long he leaves Bern. Lights out. Sam: T  o quote myself: “he has stopped I have made him stop suffered him to stop it’s one or the other not specified the thing stops and more or less long silence not specified more or less long rest…” (Beckett 1964) Lou: A humming sound that slips out into the silence. What a serene existence. Sam: “A voice back at last in my mouth… this voice these voices…” Lou: Your refreshing chorus of voices, above life.

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Leave me in peace In the literature of psychoanalysis, we find obscure essay titles that aim to represent unclear, hidden psychic ideas in a linguistically sophisticated and artistic way. In this vein, A. Suslick writes of the phallic representation of the voice (1963). This essay features an episode experienced by a 35-year-old actress who, during psychoanalysis, spoke of a fantasy that had been unconscious until that point, in which her voice had a phallic character. Along the same lines, there is the essay: “The voice as (female) phallus.” This piece by H.A. Bunker (1934) features a male case history, but it focuses first and foremost on women in mythology. In a child’s experience, the female voice often has a double nature: the nurturing, protective mother and the punishing, silent mother. In adult life, we might hear a voice whispering behind our back. We want to turn around, but we don’t. Does this voice come from inside or outside? – this is what we need to discover. No one can hear another person’s inner words as their mouth is preparing to speak them. Salman Akhtar has worked on the methods, the innovations, and the limits of listening in psychoanalytic treatment (Akhtar 2012). Silence is the memory of the echo of something that has been said. Our own experience is preserved within us as an isolated silence. What was done to me, to us all, in our childhood and youth, is there – as the accompaniment of the inner chorus (as is usual in Greek theatre) – until we realise, in the here and now, that all this is past and gone. With an imaginative leap out of childhood and over to the other bank of life in the present moment, our chorus of inner voices can be silenced. For what cannot be said, tautologically, can not be said. Where words end, mental and physical movements do not. The German actor Ulrich Tukur once described his nightmares. He was standing on stage before a large audience. He had forgotten his lines. He stood there in silence – until he was saved by waking up. There is a charming old anecdote along these lines from Vienna’s Burgtheater (diepresse.com): the great actor Raoul Aslan (1886–1958) came on stage and forgot his lines. The prompt tried to get him started again with a keyword, and then a whole line. Aslan, still baffled, whispered to her: “Not the details. Which play?” The prompt: “King Lear.” Aslan: “Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester.” He does, and Lear continues: “Meantime we shall express our darker purpose” (Shakespeare 1997, p.2321). In the “Sidelight” humour column of the Süddeutsche Zeitung (17/18 June 2017, p.1) there is a comment on such miniature dramatic pauses – whether on the dream stage or by actors treading the boards in real life. It suggests that when inspectors in the cult crime drama Tatort forget their lines, the resultant pauses “might enrich this genre: ‘What do you think, boss?’ Nothing. ‘When are we going to knock off for the day?’ Silence. ‘When are you going to murder someone?’ Quiet weeping. ‘Leave me in peace.’”

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Silence as a measure of humanity The New Orleans-based poet and novelist John Biguenet published his book Silence in 2015. For him, silence is a measure of human limitation. What we cannot hear is the unspoken. For him, it is quite clear that in present times, silence – the “quiet zones” in airports, for instance – has become a privilege for particular social groups or classes. Frequent fliers and wealthier people can buy silence in the lounges. Others have to put up with the noise in the rest of the terminal, the music blaring from shops, the loud drone of thousands of people conducting an endless stream of chitchat. The reflectionless room is a specially created acoustic laboratory, “the outer walls of which are constructed so that almost no echo reflects back from them.” This laboratory is also called an anechoic chamber (Wikipedia.org). When we spend time in one, we ourselves are the only source of sound we can perceive. Outside us is total silence. Within us, our living organs become audible. Where are we, if we can no longer hear anything? There is a roaring silence inside us: our heartbeat, our blood flowing, the echo in our ears. The topic of the isolation cell, solitary confinement, holds a great fascination for Biguenet. The loneliness of being cut off from other prisoners is the precondition for making people submissive. In such absolutist institutions, enforced silence suddenly becomes a henchman of evil, very close to torture. Most people who are made to endure something like this are left severely traumatised, not re-socialised – which is still cited as the aim of a custodial sentence. Have we not heard the warning bells here? Sshhh… a silent fear, the fear of silence. Biguenet describes how women are still silenced, in our own society and in others, sometimes even using violence. Silence in this case is the perfect weapon of the powerful (Biguenet 2015, p.96). It is a strategy for scorning and spurning others. In this silence lurk the secrets of sexism, which, although they have been exposed, continue to be turned into the nastiest weapons (using fists and other means) by men all over the world, to subjugate women both individually and as a group, a sex. This plague cannot be wiped out, even when it is something that so often happens in the silence of the family home. We are familiar with the non-disclosure agreement, a pact that compels people to remain silent. Esprit de l’escalier is the uncomfortable situation of recalling words left unsaid, carrying around with us something unexpressed, when someone abandons a discussion. You rejoice in breaking the silence when you manage to find the right words, or the right words find you. Voices without language, much language without silence. The last words before you exhale your final breath. The tune of your own life, fading away in the universe. In death, sounds are the last things to die away.

Expressive gestures The Benedictine monks, among other orders, developed a set of signs in order to communicate with each other despite their vow of silence. In her research, Susan

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Plann has traced the path of this silent form of communication as it developed into the sign language used to educate deaf children in Spain. These children, whose biology was a barrier to speech and hearing, Plann writes (1997, p.21), had always developed “home sign” using their hands. From the rich corpus of signs developed and widely used by the monks for daily life in the chapel, the kitchen, the library, the scriptorium, and so on, Pedro and Francisco Velasco (both deaf themselves) were able to develop a sign language in around 1540, which they used in their monastery school to establish the first formal education for the “deaf and dumb.” In addition, Benedictines from all nations were able to understand each other using this form of communication. The moral here: silence finds a new method of communication. Last year, a nine-year-old boy came to me for an initial consultation, accompanied by his mother. The woman and her three small children, all with different fathers, had been subjected to violence by her last husband and finally fled to a women’s refuge. The autistic boy was silent. I suspected that it wasn’t his autism but all the years of living with violence at home that had robbed him of his voice. Although I gave him a drawing pad and some coloured pencils so that, if he wanted to, he had another way of telling me what was on his mind, he took out his mobile phone and before my eyes, with a faint smile on his face, wrote his mother a WhatsApp message. He asked her to tell me that he did not intend to communicate with me. When his mother told me this, under her son’s watchful gaze, I said, with amusement and a little surprise: “Bravo, that’s a first!” He laughed mischievously. Saying nothing is an event, a happening. All the same, in his sixth rule for monks, Benedict of Nursia (480–547) emphasised the monastic virtue of silence. We are told that, in addition to obedience and humility, he wanted the monks to be capable of following his rules in silence. Jesus’ disciples would have had great difficulty adhering to these rules and becoming Benedictines. As royal fools of silence they, like their master rabbi, liked to have a story such as the wedding at Cana ready with a snigger. How do you make a fool wait? I’ll tell you later. Three months later, the boy was talking again, to me and others. How was this achieved? First: the mutual, silent communication through the drawings that we exchanged, and second: during several psychotherapy sessions, we put on red boxing gloves. He was allowed to lash out at me, as an adult, until he was exhausted. “There, I’m done,” were his first words. I was moved to hear them. The joy was all the more intense because it came from a fact that could not be understood and experienced in relation to currently accepted ideas in therapy (autistic) alone. The unease caused by his noisy life evaporates, giving way to a temporary, indifferent nonchalance. Psychotherapy can be a practice of silence. The Romans called it tranquillus (peaceful, quiet, and placid). But take care: there are many kinds of modern tranquilisers. Some are strong synthetic tranquilising chemicals, with all kinds of unwanted effects.

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Prelude Over a whole week of radio programmes, Uli Aumüller (2017) laid out her nuanced understanding and knowledge of the history of silence in opera. As part of a modern-day audience in an opera house or concert, we fall into a reverent silence as soon as the curtain goes up. We may applaud when the conductor strolls over to the podium, but as soon as the baton is raised, we are all silent. For a long time, that was not the case. Once, during a production of Parsifal at Wagner’s temple in Bayreuth, something made Aumüller laugh. (What it was isn’t important here.) And what happened then? She was immediately “shushed by everyone around me, and punished with angry looks.” Is this a tiresome expression of our modern mania for silence? She speaks of how, in the 17th century, performances of Caludio Monteverdi’s (1567–1643) Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria (Odysseus’ homecoming) included much musical improvisation. There was still no clear dividing line between the composers and the interpreters of music. It was quite natural for the composer to be sitting at the cembalo or the viol – and the musicians of the time (around 1640) had to respond to what was going on around them. They weren’t playing for a silent, well-disciplined audience, and the action on stage wasn’t directed and rehearsed for weeks; the singers acted spontaneously, as they saw fit. And the public demanded encores – not just repeats, or an aria da capo: if they liked a singer, then in the middle of an opera they might call out for completely different arias from different scenes, not even necessarily from the same opera. If there was any doubt, then the decision about what to sing and when lay with the singers. The audience was permitted to do much more than simply listen to the music in silence. They chatted, ate and drank, walked around, and indulged in other musical pleasures. The musicians often had to adjust their playing volume to the conversations happening in the auditorium, so as not to disrupt them. Silence had to be invented, as Aumüller says, “and it managed to become the norm from the middle of the 19th century. It took until the 1860s and 70s – in some countries earlier, in others later – until silence was maintained during the performance.” For this purpose, a new layout was introduced in specialist buildings where concerts and operas took place. This process of dividing music-listening into a room for the audience where the lights were extinguished at the start of the performance, and other areas for eating, drinking, and talking, took a long time. Then, performances were interrupted – as they still are today – by an interval to allow for eating and drinking in the foyer. It is still exciting even now. Aumüller recalls a production of the opera Sonntag aus Licht (Sunday from Light) by Karlheinz Stockhausen at the Cologne exhibition centre in 2011, which was arranged so that “you could and were encouraged to wander around during the performance, while the notes floated everywhere around you. It’s surprising that at the start of the 21st century, directors are drawing on forms of audience

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behaviour that were actually the norm 300–400 years ago. Only you weren’t allowed to eat and drink during the Stockhausen performance, to say nothing of other forms of physical pleasure.” In the end, the rest is silence, always and everywhere, as banal as it is meaningless, as long as the billions of galaxies are moving away from us at a great speed.

The ability to fall silent As we develop our human self-awareness, our aim is to be able to live out what we know. And because we always know more than we can live and experience, this temptation to act can be an impertinence. We are quick to answer back. Only natural, when self-understanding is self-reliance. Herewith, our praise for the ability to be silent. “Shhh” is the sound that calls for silence. Silence, singing, and speaking are subject to social and cultural rules, tied to a particular period, and they all have their time. “Only art broadcasts the real condition of our consciousness” (Walser 1994, p.82). Ironically, these acts of speaking are fascinating. “Seen in isolation, silence has one form, but many functions or meanings” (Zimmermann 1983, p.37). When we recognise our own self-censorship, what we allow ourselves to say and what we do not – this avoidance of saying what we sense is our inner truth – we say nothing, we keep things quiet, we are silent. We can say or not say something, if we want, and often that wanting is forced on us by political correctness. We do genuinely experience the typologies of human silence that Zimmerman (ibid, p.40) lays out, differentiated by theme and who we are interacting with, and determined by speech and power. The principle on which the CIA works (never complain, never explain, never excuse) allows agents not to get themselves into difficulties through these speech acts. Once in our lives, we may experience something it is worth keeping quiet about. Silence and isolation support each other; sometimes one is even the precondition for the other. Many physical forces are silent or at least inaudible to us: gravity, electricity, light. Since the end of the last century, numerous factories in the Western world have stood in silence. It has grown quieter. Let us hold onto this silence. When we are silent, we hear better and more precisely. We can feel comfortable – free, even – in silence and voluntary retreat. Lou: (says nothing) Sam: (says nothing for a long time) Lou: You’re hurting me with your silence. Sam: (says nothing) Lou: You keep giving me the silent treatment. Sam: You inundate my mind. Lou: Come, now. Sam: In silence, stilled by silence. Lou: The fullness of a silent experience of silence. (They embrace)

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Literature Akhtar S., (2012) Psychoanalytic Listening: Methods, Limits, and Innovations. Karnac, London. Aumüller U., (2017) Die Geschichte des Schweigens in der Oper (1–5). SWR 2, Musikstunde 14.–18. August, Redaktion: Dr. Bettina Winkler, Baden-Baden. Bachelard G., (1964) The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Tr. Alan C.M. Ross. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Beckett S., (1964) How It Is. John Calder, London. Berg S., (2015) Wie halte ich das nur alles aus? dtv, Munich. Biguenet J., (2015) Silence. Bloomsbury Academic, New York. Bold A., (ed.) (1984) Harold Pinter: You Never Heard Such Silence. Vision and Barnes & Noble, London/ Totowa. Bundesamt für Umwelt (2009) Lärmbelastung in der Schweiz. BAF, Bern. Bunker HA., (1934) “The voice as female phallus,” Psychoanalytic Review 3(3): 391–429. Dürrenmatt F., (2006) The Inspector Barlach Mysteries: The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion. Tr. Joel Agee. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Huxley A., (1931) Music at Night and Other Essays. Chatto and Windus, London. Itten AV., (2018) Overcoming Social Division: Conflict Resolution in Times of Polarization and Democratic Disconnection. Routledge, Oxford. Lapide P., (1996) Er wandelte nicht auf dem Meer. Ein jüdischer Theologe liest die Evangelien. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh. Lucas J., Chatburn A., (2013) A Brief History of Whistling. Five Leaves Publications, Nottingham. Lutz L., (2010) Das Schweigen verstehen, 4th ed. Springer, Heidelberg. Martus S., (2017) “Wir stehen alle im selben wind,” Die Zeit 6: 39. Partridge E., (1979) Origins – A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Picard M., (1952) The World of Silence. Tr. Stanley Godman. Harvill Press, London. Pinter H., (1978) Plays 3. Methuen Drama, London. Plann S., (1997) A Silent Minority: Deaf Education in Spain 1550–1835. University of California Press, Berkeley. Rotzetter A., (2008) Lexikon Christlicher Spiritualität. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt. Shakespeare W., (1997) “The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” in: Greenblatt S. et al. (ed.) The Norton Shakespeare. Norton & Company, New York and London, pp. 1659–1756. Suslick A., (1963) “The phallic representation of the voice” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 11(2): 345–359. von Bergen H., (2000) Unsere Stimme – ihre Funktion und Pflege I & II. Musikverlag Müller & Schade AG, Bern. Walser M., (1994) Vormittag eines Schriftstellers. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Zimmermann K., (1983) “Überlegungen zu einer Theorie des Schweigens,” in: Rosengren I. (ed.) Sprache und Pragmatik. Almqvist & Wikseel International, Stockholm, pp. 37–45.

Websites https://diepresse.com/home/kultur/news/496145/Souffleusen_Keine-Details-WelchesStueck. Accessed on 01.08.2018. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexionsarmer_Raum. Accessed on 01.08.2018.

2 WHAT WE CANNOT SPEAK ABOUT…

Must we pass over in silence? One of the most famous pronouncements on silence was made by a 32-year-old former mechanical engineering student, who for some time had been focusing on mathematics and philosophy: the Viennese-born Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889– 1951), who at this point was living in England. We find it at the end of the only one of his books published during his lifetime, the seventh and final proposition he makes there: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (Wittgenstein 1974, p.74). The fact that this proposition can be expressed in song is demonstrated by the artist M.A. Numminen. Before this imperative to silence, Wittgenstein says rather more loosely: The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?) (ibid, p.73) The stubborn question about the meaning of life, which persists from one generation to the next, is meaningless. It aims towards an answer that comes to seem insignificant in the process of understanding. Here is the young philosopher again: “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (ibid). Wittgenstein first summarises the meaning of his book in the preface: “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence” (ibid, p.3). What we cannot talk about, or what we can’t say that we cannot talk about – what we must therefore pass over in silence – is my subject here. How the language available to us quietly gathers the free-floating feelings within us into its net. How we express

20  What we cannot speak about…

what we have experienced in language. As we have already seen, Martin Walser articulates this well when he says that only art gives public voice to the real state of our consciousness (Walser 1994, p.82). That might be the art of silence, or of speech, of writing, singing, and poetry. The biography of the Wittgenstein family by Alexander Waugh (2008), which is tellingly subtitled “A family at war,” takes an original approach. We see Ludwig as the youngest in the family, with four brothers and four sisters. Two of his elder brothers, Kurt (1878–1918) and Rudi (1881–1904), took their own lives; a third, Hans (1877–1902), disappeared at the age of 24. His sister Dora (1876) lived less than a year. The eldest sister, Hermine (1874–1950), and the middle sister, Margaret (1882–1958), came to rule the family, alongside their two famous brothers Paul, the pianist (1887–1961), and Ludwig, the linguistic philosopher. So much misery, so many incomprehensible events to hush up. The family residence was a mansion in Vienna, and they socialised with people from the highest political and cultural circles of the time. Brahms, Schönberg, and Liszt played in the music room of their grand house and listened to the pianist Paul. He had lost his right arm in the First World War. Composers including Ravel wrote piano concertos for the left hand for him (on commission, and for money). Although they were born into the upper classes, several of the Wittgenstein siblings suffered from an inferiority complex. The characters in this tribe were a mix of free thinking and good humour on the one hand and the strict, unbending, tight-fisted, and stolid behaviour of the upper classes on the other. Much was passed over in silence and simply not addressed. The adults wouldn’t respond to anything the children came out with. They were required to be silent. The family’s huge wealth had been amassed by their forebears, who had been steel magnates and made good marriages into families with old money. The pressure of expectation exerted by the patriarch, Karl (1847–1913), on his four sons in particular, to carry on the family business and deal in steel, iron, weapons, and money in such a way as to create a true dynasty, was in retrospect self-destructive, a mental burden, and a constriction. The chorus fell silent. Their mother Leopoldine, née Kalmus (1850–1926), was a highly introverted, nervous woman. She was remote but still fulfilled her familial duties, conscious of her responsibility. Despite her frequent migraines and physical ailments (including phlebitis), she tried to run a tight ship. Little Ludwig “inherited” her nervousness and psychological stresses. This was manifested in the adult Ludwig’s agitated, excitable, and forceful behaviour. An emotional emptiness had often been felt in this family. It was a rare blessing for the children, as they were growing up, when their mother sat down at the piano and played chamber music with guests. This music-making created an emotional warmth without words which, so the surviving children said, was filled with a gentle beauty and a sense of emotional security. Ludwig Wittgenstein went to the University of Manchester to do research on propellers. He patented a small technical improvement to the propellers of the time. But even so, he didn’t think he had the talent to become a successful

What we cannot speak about…  21

engineer, as his father so fervently desired. A brooding, contemplative young man, as is usual at this age, he decided to speak to Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), a famous philosopher based at the University of Cambridge. He told Russell he had a desire to study philosophy. Wittgenstein was hoping philosophy would give him an anchor in the storm of his erratic life. He reportedly always suffered from feelings of self-hatred, loneliness, and the longing to kill himself as his older brothers had done. The fact that he did not do this was thanks to his meticulous thinking (etymologically, “think” and “thank” come from the same protoGermanic root). The outer silence soothed his inner turmoil. Later he would say laconically that the First World War saved his life. His last reported words were: “Tell them I have had a wonderful life” (see E. Leinfellner on www.alws.at).

Freed from chatter Wittgenstein wrote in one of his many notebooks about “a nightmare in which people failed to get his meaning, and yet he remained incapable of explaining his thoughts clearly to others” (Waugh 2008, p.153). His principal endeavour was, using a language freed from chatter, to describe the limits of language – be it in philosophy and science, or everyday life and dreams – breaking through the inadequacy of language that we experience so frequently. At the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein gives us a remarkable tip: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) (Wittgenstein 1974, p.74) For this young man, the value of being in the world lay in the area of the inexpressible. His solution-oriented idealism made space for realism. The limitation of silence was a source of happiness for Wittgenstein and, alongside his friendship with Bertrand Russell, it gave his life meaning (McGuinness 1988, p.191). The aim of his philosophising lay in narrowing the philosopher’s risk of error. In the memoir he wrote about his professor, Theodore Redpath (1990, p.13) said that he found the metaphor of the ladder and how it worked in a philosophical context fascinating. It was a warning against all the linguistic wrestling over deep, precise thoughts. This “must pass over in silence” might, of course, be taken as a prohibition on speech. On the other hand, it saves us from having to speak about something we want to keep to ourselves. Wittgenstein’s “silence” proposition has influenced a great many authors over the years, a few of whom I would like to mention here. Katalin Neumer focused on the influence of this credo in conceptual terms; in the area of communicative behaviour, it promotes self-knowledge. She also calls this a “meaning experience” that helps us to understand another person and his self. Jürgen Koller (2017) brings together various ways of reading what can be said and shown with this Wittgensteinian call for silence.

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What springs to my own mind is Eliza in the musical My Fair Lady, whose suitor Freddy sings to her: “Words! Words! Words! Sing me no song! Read me no rhyme! Don’t waste time, show me!” This ability to communicate by showing, which Wittgenstein himself exercised in many and various ways in and with his philosophy, is easily set to music. Chon (2015) goes back to Wittgenstein’s clarification of sentences and thoughts in order to guard against the possibility of spouting nonsense. Saying nothing and being silent show a respectful attitude to oneself and one’s own secrets. We don’t have to say everything we know. We can let what cannot be expressed exist in the space of silence, although we may try to explain why we are keeping quiet about something. A metalogue on the absence of a dialogue which it is not meaningful to express. The Finnish mathematician, philosopher, and language theorist Erik Stenius points to another path for us to follow. For Wittgenstein, the inexpressible could be the expression of an escape. Whenever he chose to be silent, he had turned away from philosophy – his passion – and towards active life. The aim of his philosophy was to find the way out of it. Being silent was thus his tip for entering into life. The obvious confrontation with the real. And in so doing, he managed to leave its inexpressibility in that silent internal space, as a meaningful selfreference, as an instruction for a particular action. Two years after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s death, the young doctor of philosophy Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) wrote a radio essay on the sayable and the unsayable in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It is impossible to speak of the “meaning” of existence, she said, and so we can only be silent: it is impossible for us to make statements about the world from outside it while we are stuck within it (Bachmann 1978b, p.114). Language is the vehicle of those who love to think. It allows us to write down insights regarding what we feel towards something we cannot yet speak about. Conclusion: saying nothing is a conscious action, performed on the basis of a decision I have made for myself.

Enigma Carried over to that which is now the case in the area of the inexpressible, we see that in “silentio,” which is an argument that comes out of silence, the lack of evidence itself constitutes the evidence (Michell et al. 2016, p.407). This is an echo of what Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) says in his essay on The Enigma of Health (Gadamer 1996). For those of us who fear getting and being healthy, his siren song regarding “the miraculous character which attaches to being healthy” (ibid, p.110) is encouraging. The silence of “nothing helps” can be altered if I just think: “nothing: help!” This is the approach of “being with others” in medical and psychotherapeutic treatment, not “doing for others.” The Greek word therapeia means “to serve.” But it is the change, the transformation, that we serve. The mental distress that cannot yet be expressed in words is manifested physically in illness as a kind of

What we cannot speak about…  23

“body language.” Health is a condition of being-in-the-world, says Gadamer, “of being together with one’s fellow human beings, of active and rewarding engagement in one’s everyday tasks” (ibid, p.113). What lies hidden in silence is concealed by the curtain of resistance. Health means discovering, exposing, talking about your inner world, where at the right moment, the consistent trust within the therapeutic relationship can help us to escape the storm of our desire to conceal. On and in still waters, we can speak more calmly. Thousands of years ago, Heraclitus said: “the harmony which remains hidden is mightier than the harmony which is revealed” (quoted in Gadamer, p.131). Silence conveys comfortably what cannot be explained. Silence and solitude are like the most delicate veils around our minds. The outer silence is what makes the inner silence possible – the positive silence we should practise. We can find ourselves in silence. Find the ability to live at peace with ourselves. This placid behaviour, if it is to be quietly successful, is embedded in a great inner organisation. As well as practice, we need courage if we are going to be silent, to refrain from telling those stories we can’t yet tell. Some individual elements of our life experience can’t yet be visibly integrated into the whole of our being. And yet they are always still a part of it. The lethargy of heart and spirit is a negative effect of silence. It makes possible the popular, naïve view of the world. For us to come into being at all, the cosmic silence has to be broken. Out of the darkness of silence, which can seem like a black hole, where there is no sound, no light, no time, no activity to create any difficulties, we can spread a gentle quietness and a languorous melancholy, like a blanket on the scented grass of a secluded woodland clearing. We can seek out silent places, quiet forests, mountains, moorland, or, if necessary, the desert. Within us there is a steadiness of mind that gives the moving changes of everyday life their quiet undercurrent. An invisible something that we perceive as an increasingly archetypal, comprehensive unity.

Resonant silence It is the other way around in music: disharmonic tension builds as we anticipate a final release, in which the notes will resolve into a stimulating, fulfilling tonal harmony once more. In summer 1975, at a jazz concert in Rome lasting several hours, the musicians in a big band came very close to a resolution of the dissonance that characterised their piece. But the harmonic resonance refused to arrive. It was almost there, but never happened. This experience of unfulfillment is often hidden in a silence that we can savour. The complete silence that followed the piece, before the applause, was a blessed moment of listening and had an effect that lasted much longer. Psychotherapy is similar to a symphony orchestra, in which all participants try to breathe simultaneously, in order to arrive at their next encounter at the same time. The conductor – Seiji Ozawa (b.1935), for example – signals the empty interval to the orchestra he is conducting with the help of his facial expression and body language (Murakami 2016, p.66). After a breath-taking, miraculous

24  What we cannot speak about…

moment of silence, the music glides back into the audible realm. The conductor’s job is to create long phrases of music in your mind, Herbert von Karajan (1908– 1989) told his one-time assistant Ozawa. Composers such as Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) and, before him, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), wrote their music in a mental expanse that existed within them like a kind of memory of things to come. The understanding between what was written, as a composer conveys their music from inside to outside, and the way in which this music is then made audible for us by an orchestra and its conductor is what is so deeply satisfying to the soul. Peter Roth, a musician and composer from eastern Switzerland, writes in the introduction to his concerto cycle “Silence – Ein Lob der Stille” (2017): Where does the sound go when it fades away? This question from the zen masters points towards silence. Sound arises out of silence and fades back into silence. Silence lasts; sound is temporary. Thus sound and silence become the experience of transition between apparent opposites: life and death; day and night; form and potential! Sound can only arise out of silence within the rhythm of life, which, as we all know, falls within a larger, poly-rhythmical, communal life. Sam: P  ersephone has to stay silent in hell if she wants to get back to the light. What does silence test? Lou: Perfection. The outer silence is what makes the inner silence possible, the silence we should practise. A freedom from yourself and a peace with yourself, to be the person you have become. Sam: Ah, to find myself in silence. Sometimes there are moments of revelation (the clouds disperse), in which something we thought we understood until that moment suddenly becomes a mystery. It’s easy to lose yourself in music. To slip into the melody of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) so that the musicians merge into the music. (The pianist Mitsuko Uchida observes the moments of silence in Beethoven’s piano concerto No.3 perfectly.) It is generally known that Mahler and Sigmund Freud (1856– 1939) lived in Vienna at the same time. Mahler went to see Freud a few times to talk about his moments of inner silence with the great artist of psychiatry. In Germany, the Nazi elite banned performances of Mahler’s music for twelve years, starting in 1933. He was silenced; it was as if he’d never existed. The echo of a performance ringing in your ears touches every fibre of your being, says Ozawa, and the spirit of the music unfurls in you like a flower. Junko Onishi makes her inner voice clearly and distinctly heard via the 88 keys of her grand piano. Silence is not the absence of sound. There is a sound that is called silence, the writer Murakami says (2016, p.307). Psychologically, silence is a sound, although in physics silence is defined as the absence of sound. A sound

What we cannot speak about…  25

is a vibration, moving in waves of pressure through air and water, received by the skin and the ear, and transformed into music by the brain. Psychotherapy, the “talking cure,” values silence in many different ways. The mind can then be heard, as in the Doors song “Riders on the Storm” and still more in “Summertime,” as sung by Ella Fitzgerald.

The mind can be heard Some colleagues are in favour of those of us who practise psychiatry showing patients how we deal with our own mental difficulties from time to time. It is well known that some psychotherapists refuse to talk about the analysis and/or psychotherapy they undertook in training – their own experience as patients. This produces a lack of transparency in their own practice and makes them incautious when it comes to the dangers of assuming power within the therapeutic relationship (Guggenbühl-Craig 1971). When I practise the healing art of psychotherapy, I offer both space and time to someone who comes to see me. They can start to talk, to unburden themselves in safety, as they grow more confident that in this place, they will come to no further harm. In a therapeutic conversation, the therapist projects a silent sympathy. The treatment session is filled with the music of words. On a paralinguistic level, the psychotherapist needs to listen to the rhythm, the tempo, the timbre, and the chosen pitch of those words. There is also the concentrated movement of arm, hand, finger, legs – the whole attitude of our bodies. My leading light in psychotherapy was R.D. Laing (1927–1989), whose dream as a young man was to become a concert pianist (he was elected a licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music in London at the age of 16). That dream had to be buried following a rugby accident in which he broke his left wrist, but he often used musical metaphors. In one lecture, he expressed the following succinctly: The paralinguistic and kinesics – the music and the dance – were much empathized … but most “professionals” are amazingly impervious to all that. It is a question of the complete opera, with singers, costumes, sets, backdrops, and orchestra, versus mere libretto. You are publishing the libretto (the verbal content) without the music (the pitch, timbre, rhythm, tempos, the paralinguistic) and without the choreography (two symmetrical chairs placed precisely as intended), and the ballet (kinesics). … There is a lot of technique there. Many people like Christy do not connect with “content” alone, if the sound and movements of the therapist are, in effect, autistic. That is, if the therapist in his/her presence as manifested through sight and sound is effectively selectively inattentive to 99 percent of the sight and sound of the patient/client (quoted in Amantea 1989, p.142). Christy, the patient, later said that Laing had found the place where her spirit was at that moment. He confirmed her perception of reality.

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A brief vignette: here is someone who cautiously holds back what he longs to say in my consulting room. The inner tonality created by sensing things within a shared moment. “I’m sick of silencing myself again and again. Not sharing anything with my supervisor in the apprentices’ hostel, who is open and available. Keeping everything locked in my heart, even though I do feel a need to talk. I don’t say anything, although I do nod when you speak to me; I want to keep this silence, as a positive force.” This young man is talking about the silent connection to himself and his inner voice. His experience of truthfulness creates a zebra crossing to the other side of the street, where his silence ends and he can feel at peace in himself. On the other hand, this silence, about which he says nothing, triggers a nagging unrest and anxiety about giving himself away in this talking cure. In psychotherapy, that imperative “must” is taken away from the things we can’t and won’t speak about yet. I don’t have to discuss everything – and it would be impossible to, anyway. Psychotherapy, although recognised as an heir to the priest’s pastoral role, is not confession. In his dissertation “Silence in psychotherapy” (1998), Res Wepfer undertook a thorough investigation of how psychoanalysis deals with problematic silent behaviour, from both patients and analysts. Silence first promotes resistance. The healing effect of this behaviour is usually only recognised after the fact. Silence can be a source of power for the patient and a gentle preparation for the stories we have to tell from our childhood and youth, experiences shaped by the family and the society we were born into. Context determines consciousness. Meeting a wall of silence is just as healing as when we experience psychoanalysis as a wailing wall. Being silent and keeping quiet about things is, in itself, like a container that might be empty, full, or at any intermediate level. It is the content that must be spoken so that its emotional significance, the emotional affect connected within it, can be recognised and seen. Realising our emotions, which are absolutely necessary to progress through life, is a very difficult matter. One cannot therefore claim or hope that these experiences will point clearly towards a goal ( Jung 1999, p.24). On the path of psychotherapy, we repeatedly find ourselves at a crossroads, with various possible directions to choose from. Quietness is where we find the conscious and unconscious power to decide which way to go next. There are many theoretical reflections on not speaking, holding things back, being silent, and so on by early psychoanalysts. Res Wepfer has taken the trouble to examine most of them. Silence in psychoanalytic psychotherapy has been a focus for researchers for around a hundred years. […] The current status of research in respect of consistent approaches to interpretation is by no means advanced. Silence, even with increasing theoretical differentiation, is often regarded as an “exotic nothing”, as an “unpleasant curiosity” that has always been located on the fringes of academic research (Wepfer 1998, p.81).

What we cannot speak about…  27

As a psychoanalytic and body-oriented psychotherapist, I am less surprised about this than he is – even though silence is just as integral a part of treatment as talking and various forms of non-verbal communication in body-oriented psychotherapy and in other forms of therapy that use the humanistic model (such as Gestalt therapy). Wepfer goes on to conduct an empirical study, which proves that the tolerance of silence and preferences around silence in psychotherapy vary between cultures. This leads us on to sociological considerations.

Silence within communication Research on interactions conducted in the areas of sociology and social psychology has developed empirical measures for looking at silence in interpersonal interactions. Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke only to a small circle of friends about his love of, and desire for, men. But if other philosophers such as Karl Popper (1902–1994) should annoy him, he could talk in brash words that left others no choice but to hold their tongues (Edmonds and Eidinow 2002). Wepfer and others link pauses in speech to variables including fear, stress, and claims to power. The resolve with which silence is maintained, and the sense of duty about keeping silent, are subject to cultural norms and habits. Tolerance of silence is linked to social class, level of education and awareness, and to the readiness to recognise conflicts and to either avoid or argue them out. Our use of language determines, in context, the social interactions we are formally capable of. The system of speech we use and our individual manner of speaking, formed in childhood by stereotypical encoding – class, code type, control – of our parents’ way of speaking, also determines our behaviour around silence. General, public language, in which we usually rely on assumed knowledge and common understanding, stands in contrast to a formal language (that of psychoanalysis, for example), which we must learn to use in order to attain a common understanding. Basil Bernstein (1924–2000) was a brilliant professor who worked on the sociology of education at the University of London’s Institute of Education. He focused on the influence of social class on living conditions and the forms and uses of the language that came out of them. Just as there is a general, public language and a private group language, there are also public and private behaviours when it comes to silence. According to Bernstein’s theory, a patient who can only use a public linguistic form “will be under a different kind of stress to a patient using a formal language because the latter is able to cope better with a situation where the social relationship is mediated through verbally explicit individual qualifications” (Bernstein 2010, p.63). In other words: when people undergoing psychotherapeutic treatment are able to adopt concepts and operative definitions used in the formal language of psychotherapy, they can express themselves more freely and consistently. If we are not to keep tender feelings quiet in psychotherapy, it is necessary to find our own individual form of expression, so that we no longer have to stay

28  What we cannot speak about…

silent about the things adults told us we mustn’t talk about as children, teenagers, or young adults. Once we have found the language of the mind, this new experience can help us to use our verbal symbols as bridges to span the river of silence. In the early days of individual therapy, if someone was silent, it was assumed that they were resistant to saying anything that came into their heads. Speaking in a stream of consciousness, on and on as far as they could go. Analytic patients then find themselves in situations where some truth that comes up from the unconscious (as the metaphor of depth psychology would have it) is spontaneously blocked before it can be expressed. That is where things get interesting. The fact that I now need to keep quiet reveals the presence of something that cannot be said yet. At the start of my own psychoanalysis, I would sometimes talk about something on a Friday that I had kept quiet about on the Wednesday. A hopeless delaying tactic, which as the process of therapy continued exposed defiant personality traits. Sometimes I would remain silent for a whole hour, to punish the silent analyst for being silent when I made confessions. Like the patient already mentioned, I myself experienced this stalemate originating in resistance, in an attempt not to engage in transference – imposing things that came from the nursery onto my psychotherapist. And, curiously, this not-engaging was in itself a transference of what I experienced from adults as a child. This is the productive side of psychoanalytic treatment – and the way that I have been and am being treated is productive: expressing something previously forbidden (it’s just the two of us here, I say to my patients, no one else is listening), saying exactly what is on my mind, in plain German. Hearing those things said aloud in the presence of an analyst can be fulfilling. We can share memories in the presence of one other person who has been trained to mitigate these human torments of past events, if not to heal them, if only we can produce sounds from our unsound minds. Being able to say the unsayable, and discuss it, is a blissful, liberating aspect of the psychotherapy experience. John Heaton (1925–2017), an existentialist analyst inspired by Wittgenstein’s work, argues that the opportunity to show and suggest things is important in psychotherapy, in order for patients to be able to talk about old secrets in the safe space of the consulting room. This can help them overcome the overpowering sense that they cannot (or are not permitted to) express what they saw and experienced in their childhood. In addition, according to Heaton (2010 and 2014), they recognise (and we of course also recognise) that the world is not as fixed as we have been led to believe. Heaton, incidentally, had a languid habit: at the start of our seminars (1976–1981) at his house in Hampstead, London, there would be a leisurely silence as he stirred sugar into a freshly poured cup of tea. We students just had to wait without saying a word. Silence is integral to the talking cure, because life is a somatic experience. The source of the unspeakable, at the edge of the abyss of the unconscious, is also

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where we find the insight that we are being looked through by the therapist who has progressed further in their journey inward. The countertransference from me to the patient is mostly stimulated by a moment of silence. In it, I could lay the emotion and ideas this person has called forth from me on them. I can bring these things out into the open and acknowledge them, in the inner silence of what I am not (yet) addressing. You sense when the right moment has arrived, intuitively, unconsciously (Itten 2011). The sensual silence, the careful silence, the thoughtful silence in psychotherapy gives wings to interpretive words. Are pauses really moments of silence, or not? In group therapy, the situation is different again. Small and large groups deal differently with silence and not speaking. If speaking isn’t compulsory, there are always several participants who don’t want to say anything. They listen actively, reflect, and use their own silence for introspection. Is not speaking in group therapy an effective form of silence? Do we talk about it, or stay quiet? In my opinion, it is important to allow people not to speak – although, as a therapist, after a while, I will always enquire about how someone is feeling inside. No answer is expected. But when patients ask what my silence signifies, they do expect an answer. They don’t want me to keep anything from them, to keep quiet about anything. Being allowed to speak is an unparalleled bliss.

Talk to me Sandor Ferenczi (1873–1933) was one of the most virtuosic thinkers and empaths in the first generation of psychoanalysts when it came to the language of the unconscious and how it tends to be expressed. He advises us as psychotherapists to wait, say nothing and listen – to what is often shown “non-verbally.” Consonants play on the lips of the analysand before forming themselves into a disclosure. In his note on the “technique of silence,” he considered the “disadvantages of ‘going on talking’” (Ferenczi 1955, p.258). An analyst who is silent for a longer period and able to wait before giving an interpretation which has sprung to mind is more effective in promoting relaxation. And we need to relax in order for the voice of the unconscious to reveal itself, in images which we can then express. Both people involved are also able to reflect. This way, the associations remain on a thin surface layer tethered to reality. Staying silent until further free associations are employed is to be recommended. Ferenczi calls this “silence (and switching off of conscious thinking) until the next association” (ibid). In his or her silence, the patient can forget something, or empathise with themselves, without being interrupted by psychoanalytic signs of understanding. Our analytic “Hmm, yes… of course”: perhaps we might think of silence as being like a swing, swinging between past and present. The Freudian idea of silence as resistance doesn’t work when we consider that the reality of what is to be said comes out of what is still to be carried inside. We make our peace with those things from the past that unsettle us and make us fall silent. The boat of

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silence is laden with essential cargo, about which we can now speak, for the first time, or again. Silence itself may already be part of this new language. This is another reason for listening intently to people who are silent (von Sass 2013, p.29). Deirdre Bair tells an engaging and instructive story in her unique biography of the old master of psychotherapy, Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). In this case, psychotherapy was largely conducted in mutual silence from the analyst and the analysand: Jung had a patient who was an older woman of great wealth. Her life had been privileged and protected, but she suffered from a physical affliction that kept her in constant pain. Even so, she had married, had children and grandchildren, and remained the bedrock on which her entire family depended. She came to Jung because her daughter, approaching middle age and suffering from the same inherited physical condition, did not possess her mother’s indomitable spirit and chose to blame her for a multitude of real or imagined wrongs. When this daughter’s adolescent child was killed in an accident, she became depressed and committed suicide in a ghastly way, leaving behind a series of documents that blamed her mother. Jung’s patient accepted her daughter’s accusations and became deeply depressed (Bair 2003, pp.380–381). In her notes on Jung, this patient mostly describes the routine of sessions in a similar way to the extract here: I had nothing to say this day. I took my seat [in the library]. He pulled his chair close to mine. I did not want to meet his eyes, so we both stared ahead at the books on the wall. I could not speak, so neither did he. Occasionally he reached to stroke my arm or pat my hand. The hour passed and I became tranquil. I wish that peace would come with me when I leave, but it disappears without his presence (ibid, p.381). This story shows how important it is for a psychotherapist to be there, to be present with a patient, so that the analysand can integrate the pain she has suffered in the past into her present life. This is a necessary process. What she has had to keep secret is no longer separated off and can now be newly accepted as part of the totality of her own being, making it an easier burden to bear. Darkness of the soul and scars on the heart are just as much a part of life as brightness, infatuation, and happiness. And so we ask Melancholia to take a seat at our table. What does she have to tell us? Why has she come? What will we learn if we linger here together? The gloom that clouds our senses may be investigated if we are willing and able. We know that the voice of melancholy is all but silenced by antidepressants. The silence in me is stifled once again.

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After several years in which the patient attended sessions with Jung three times a week, which, according to Bair, “mostly seemed to pass by in mutual silence,” she confided to her diary that “a great cloud had dispersed.” She moved away from Zurich and spent the final decade of her life in prayer, fasting, and meditation. From time to time she wrote to Jung and let him know that she was well. Her friends remembered her as someone who was “‘beatific’ and ‘at peace’” until the end of her life (Bair 2003, p.381). This courage to say nothing and wait for what arises out of the unconscious is a good thing.

Example One morning, during a therapy session, a patient of mine told me that something had recently begun to dawn on her. For a long time, she’d been thinking that she needed to stop having therapy with me – and now she had figured out where this thought came from: it was because of that “thing” that was buried deep within her, the thing she mustn’t speak about. She had learnt to say nothing. And now that she was permitted – but not compelled – to express this secret thing, it felt like a risk, a threat, which made her want to run away. Men who had discovered her wound were kept at arm’s length. And out of habit, she was doing the same with me. She was caught in the contradiction of wanting to show herself and at the same time staying hidden. The voice of the soul calls out in the distance. It says: I have fallen into the same pattern with you as with the very few good men in my life. Send them away or hurt them, so that I’ll be left alone and have “my peace and quiet.” Don’t anyone in, because then it would come out. She recognised this as a pattern of unconscious protective behaviour. Ever since I was little, I’ve wished so desperately for someone to come along who recognises my inner suffering, my desperation, my pain; who sees into me, so to speak, and then rescues me. My deepest wish is for you to be able to recognise my problems without my having to talk about them. For you just to see what happened to me as a child. Rescue me from the silent misery and from the miserable silence within me. With you, for the first time I felt this person was finally sitting opposite me. And yet my inner being, whatever that is, used every trick in the book to make sure that this truth didn’t come out. You see, this is my metalogue. I don’t know exactly what this truth is. She knows and feels what is there. All the symptoms she describes point to this “thing.” What could it be? But here, I have a professional duty to remain silent.

Question and answer A little anthropological anecdote from communist China in 1949. Twentynine-year-old Ernst Traugott Itten shows that an obstinate silence can trigger

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strong emotions in another person in cultures other than our own. A proud commander of a similar age to Itten, in the communist troops that had just staged Mao’s revolution, had him arrested along with other Christians in the front yard of the Basel mission in Honyen, Guangdong province. At the time, Itten was the head of the mission. A communist people’s assembly was convened in order to stage an immediate trial. The European missionaries (foreign devils) were to be shot in public. But the captain of the troop had not yet found any compelling reason to carry out this death penalty before the assembled crowd. And so, provocatively, he asked for Itten’s thoughts on the shooting of the first rank of Chiang Kai-shek’s (1887–1975) Kuomintang followers, who lay dead in front of him. Had it been right to shoot them, or not? He must only answer yes or no. The young missionary, hunched over in a demeaning posture and paraded before the large audience, said nothing at first. He was therefore covered in the captain’s yellow, tobacco-enriched spittle. In China, this was the ultimate humiliation, but the accused endured it in stoic silence. The captain began to shout louder and louder. Like a barking dog. Trying to force an answer from this stupid, mute, impertinent white man. And then Itten spoke. “If you could make a corpse into a better man, then you should be allowed to shoot him.” He had no idea where these words came from. More spittle in the face. Twenty minutes later, it was all over. Ernst Traugott was not executed; if he had been, he would never have become my father. As a 98-year-old, when he tells this story, he still feels the hand of Jesus holding his own right hand, giving him the strength to bear this torture. He was incredibly fortunate not to become one of around 72 million people who were silenced forever by Mao’s terrorism and idealistic tyranny. And so I, as one of 7,748,848,278 people in the world at this moment in 2019, spend a while in silent contemplation (www.worldometers.info).

Full blast Keeping quiet about mental disorders or illnesses is normal. Sometimes, it’s easier to write about them. One person who did so frequently, following a painful separation, was the writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Her world and the whole structure of her life collapsed. In her biographical fragments, Ina Hartwig gives a few fascinating pieces of background information on Bachmann’s various unusual behaviours. Her alcohol consumption, her addiction to prescription drugs, her childhood growing up in a family of teachers. Her father joined the Nazi Party as early as 1932 – something that no one was permitted to mention after the war. This reaction, this retreat into life-long secrecy, lacerated the edges of her mind. Beneath the surface, something wasn’t right. She was once described as a woman without walls, although one of her greatest gifts was the ability to talk her way around things, thereby preserving the space of her silence.

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“Silence was her noble weapon,” Hartwig writes (2017, p.222). There was a darkness within her that was connected to her father. A publisher and friend told her biographer: “Her parents came out of the war mute and they stayed mute, that was the provocation, that was the needle” (ibid, p.198). Bachmann didn’t want to stay silent about her mental suffering, like her parents whose minds had been damaged by the war. She noted down her dreams, wrote to her psychotherapist and friends, bravely undertook a trip to Egypt with her lover Adolf Opel (b.1935), who was nine years her junior. She wrote to her psychotherapist about experiences “that do not lie without, but build up in layers within us – a process that began early on” (Bachmann 2017, p.11). The “inner” ex-lover, Max Frisch (1911–1981), made frequent appearances in her dreams. Sometimes with his new girlfriend, Marianne Oellers (b.1934), whom the 51-year-old Frisch met and fell in love with after separating from Bachmann. “The hate I feel is so strong,” Bachmann wrote, honestly – the feeling had come as a surprise to her (Bachmann 2017, p.62). And at the root of such extreme emotions: “everything that is behind it, indescribably real, because it is not yet recognised” (ibid, p.65). She puts it all into language and senses her jealous obsession, driven by madness and her great suffering. Beneath the things she knows how to articulate, something lurks inside her for which, although she is a writer, she has no words. Perhaps it doesn’t even exist, however hard she looks. “Only in music is something there for me, something of what I think, and nowhere else” (ibid, p.69). What is real is monstrous, and so she does not get at reality. Separated and yet remembering their love, they both endure the unhappiness of this sudden parting by putting their relationship into their next books. Frisch: Gantenbein (1964). Bachmann: the “Ways of Dying” cycle and Malina (1971). The two authors both created artistic escape routes from the frightening and horrifying idea of staying silent about everything intimate, both hurtful and happy, that had happened during their life together. In her carefully researched book on Frisch and Bachmann, Ingeborg Gleichauf speculates on whether an abortion might have come at the same time as Bachmann’s mental breakdown (Gleichauf 2013, p.185). But: “If Herr F. were my only unhappiness, I could bear it” (Bachmann 2017, p.72). Silence lies at the other end of “tutto volume.”

Il male oscuro The draft of Bachmann’s lecture for psychotherapists (2017, p.82ff ) echoes her reading of the book Il male oscuro by the Italian writer Giuseppe Berto (1914– 1978). As a patient, her initial concern is not inner truth, but talking her way around the resistance. Is she lying? Is she dissembling? Is she keeping secrets? With this secrecy, Bachmann says, she is digging a pit for herself full of irrelevancies. Her and her silence.

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When does she begin to speak out of the eye of the psychological storm? She pleads for therapists to be hard on their patients: “you will have to face them with your hardness, revoke your sympathy.” I don’t say hardness without good reason. Mistrust us, we who are sick. We are very sly, very deceitful, very ingenious. Don’t take that for cynicism; it’s the only thing I could still cry about: when you have left everything behind, you are no longer even able to cry about the foolishness of this world (Bachmann 2017, p.91). We wait to be pulled out from underneath the avalanche of lies on the rope of truth, which can be tolerated when spoken by someone who is a companion to our mind. The right perspective is a joyous release. There will be no breach of trust, since the professional obligation to secrecy is sacrosanct. Only friends can betray us. The patient has a voice, and speaks. Being silent doesn’t mean she is stupid or dull, but often that she is numbed with alcohol, medication, or other drugs. As a writer, it was Bachmann’s goal (a goal she could not be sure she would reach) that her texts should be harmonised through and with her own experience. Only in this way could she remain faithful, genuine, and consistent. But as we all know, inner conflicts open up cracks in our present selves, wherever they come from. Our corporeal nature then produces somatic symptoms – like road signs pointing to the mind – the oppressive cause of which no one except the patient themselves can really name. Sometimes we might feel an impulse to scream, to suddenly start shouting as never before. “Take this pill/to help you not to shout/it takes away the life/you’re better off without” (Laing 1976, p.46). This is not meant sarcastically; it is a reflection of general psychiatry, which is caught in the grip of the pharmaceutical industry. Peter G. Gøtzsche spent many years working for this industry as a doctor specialising in internal medicine. Thinking about the dark, hidden side of pharmaceuticals, he describes how scientists falsify their research data in his book Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime (2013). Caroline Walter and Alexander Kobylinski (2011) open our eyes to how we are subtly courted as customers for pharmaceutical substances. Bachmann (2017, p.140), however, feels a pain for which “no scream would be long enough.” Viewed psychosomatically, any kind of illness has something to say. And because it can’t speak, it expresses itself through the body. Patients are heard, not just seen and smelled. Dreams tell of prohibitions on speaking; these night-time messengers give pictorial expression to whatever can be expressed. Talking to the unconscious. “The dream speaks of a self-image in which my own voice remains mute” (ibid, p.177). And when something has robbed you of your voice, you might scream silently. Voiceless screams of grief. If I fill this empty voice with words, it might sound like this:

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Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam:

“I’m screaming,” I scream. A screaming I. Sordid, secret, buried by unscreamed screams. Your self, I scream, screams like never before… …because the scream frees us!

Can we be an advocate for the inner mute? Focus on what is fleeting and ephemeral, eyes open, mouth open, “all the way down to the simple lyricism of wilting” (Frisch 2017, p.89). Courage then, and let’s go. Where? Into the eternal here and now, because there is nothing but the moment, except memories and our hopes and fears for the future. Equanimity is one possible response to the unsayable. The 26-year-old Frisch titled his second story “An answer from the silence” (1937). The writer hopes for answers to the existential questions that oppress him. First and foremost on the meaning of our existence. As young adults, we are initiated into the human possibilities of everyday life. What we can and cannot experience. The question What for? is oriented towards the future, while the question Why? stimulates thought about what is dead and gone, and regression back to it. I have very strong emotions, but I don’t like describing them. There are other ways to show them – body language or silence – which can be very expressive. And perhaps there is some mistrust of words there, too. One is afraid of them being incorrectly interpreted. It is very difficult to describe an emotion and not lie a little in the process, to elevate it or to deceive yourself (Frisch 2017, p.138). Frisch said this after fifty years as an author, in which he managed to show himself emotionally and yet still hide; in which he distilled experiences into language so that they could go beyond the individual and into others’ reading minds. Spread out there like musical notes, silent and yet audible answers to the What for? Were they designed as tracts to allow us to make sense of the world? Certainly not – they are good literature; they counsel you to give yourself up to your own inspirational insights. To question yourself and to sense where the descriptions of your own feelings are not right. Where am I lying, exaggerating, or playing things down? Wisdom means understanding my own nature and not being ashamed (ceasing to be ashamed) of what I am, was, and will be. Silence and peace encourage me to experience myself without any pretences, and to be that self. I will come to “Stiller” (I’m not Stiller, 1954) shortly; I don’t want to deny him his appearance here.

Eloquent The words and linguistic machinations of those who have power can be exposed in the wind and storms of reality (or realities). Quiet now! The moral issue lurks

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before each new effort. Question: can we also see things differently in each case, since, in synthesis, nothing is true without its opposite? Dominant cultures determine what is heard in the public realm. But all the same, we are emboldened to try other things. These experiences, once caught in a net of words, cannot be silenced, because they proclaim their own adventurous truths. In his book I’m not Stiller, Max Frisch remarks that those who write have the language to become silent. Sigh. “Then Barbara blew out the candles, and the whole hut lay in darkness” (Frisch 1937, p.129). Do we have an obligation to be silent in the dark? No: in the dark, we often manage to speak from the heart, expressing our emotions and listening to what others are feeling. Using our words sparingly, as introverts can or must, when they are not linguistic acrobats. “‘Oh,’ sighed my lady, ‘you’re still the same, one can’t get a word of sense out of you, nothing but freaks of fancy’” (Frisch 1994, p.48). In the beginning, it was love – and how could it be otherwise? In this love there was, self-evidently, a new beginning and new meaning. Taking refuge in the arms of the other was the order of the day. In love, justice is done when we are prepared not simply to accept the glimpsed-at happiness of this way of life in silence. In this fateful moment, both were wishful-thinking word seekers and word conjurers. In her dream chapter, Bachmann noted this dilemma with great irony: “and Siegfried the Great calls me, at first quietly, then loudly, impatiently I listen to his voice: What are you looking for, what kind of book are you seeking? And I am voiceless. What does the great Siegfried want? He calls from above more and more clearly: What kind of book will it be, what will your book be?” (Bachmann 2019, p.167). Several people have written that Bachmann was often terribly shy and read too quietly at public readings. “No one understood a word” (Stoll 2013, p.155). Pulling and pushing away, gathering courage and being helplessly silent. What about Frisch? Only in his imagination – as a writer, that is – did the man believe he could live at least a part of the life he’d been offered. Accordingly, he writes in many different keys: comical, then sombre again; poetic and tender; deep, complicated – yes, even stubbornly cryptic or hard, with no illusions (von Matt 2011, p.146). In Frisch’s book, which partly reflects his relationship with Bachmann, there is a stimulating passage of dialogue. Lila, so experts on Frisch and Bachmann suspect, is like Ingeborg here (Frisch 2004, p.195). I don’t know what really happened… We’re still sitting by the fire together, midnight has been and gone, I haven’t said anything for a long time. Lila behind the newspaper stretched taut between her hands. I’m glad to still be holding my whisky glass, even if it’s empty. Lila yawns, and the log on the glowing embers goes out again. Time for bed. I remember exactly the last things we said:

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“Have you read this?” “Yes,” I say, “I’ve read it.” Pause. “No,” she says, “how is that possible?” She means the murder. “Can you imagine,” she asks, “how someone could do that? I think it’s horrific.” “Yes,” I said, “I read it.” “Hey, is there any whisky left?” she asked. “Lila,” I said, “I said something.” “I’m sorry,” she said, and I saw her face as she asked: “What did you say?” “I said… I said I read it.” “Don’t you find it horrific?” “Yes” – We haven’t spoken since then. “Yes,” Lila says now, “let’s go to bed.” I remain Gantenbein. Are we familiar with these conversations that develop after midnight? Is this the slow fade-out of self-expression, of a well-balanced exchange of thoughts with another person? The subdued rhythm of speech, the sense of being taken seriously, being heard, is reproduced elegantly here. It is and is not how it really was, but an echo of what might have been. Night music. Contradiction, and above all self-contradiction, is part of Ingeborg Bachmann, part of her communication with people, in particular men. It is also a characteristic of her work as a whole (Gleichauf 2013, p.42).

Magic words In Bachmann, Frisch encounters an independent, language-focused writer, who faces up to reality through her writing, as a poet and storyteller. The pair are communicators and sounding boards for each other. Bachmann is a conjurer with words, who opens up in her readers and listeners a lyrical, musical world where the reality of love and the enslavement to memory intertwine. The impossible becomes possible – and often quick, colourful and fresh, in the imagined present. Inwardly, of course. A figure like Echo from the realms of Greek myth is a mindlinking idea transformed into words. These figures appear in great stories that give a cosmological overlay to individual experiences of the world. And the real aftermath: is it not every bit as exciting as the relationship that was really experienced? Or perhaps it is only the aftermath that shows why this love was a “necessary” one? Could “Malina”, “The Book of Franza”, “Man in the Holocene”, “Triptych”, have been written without the experiences that Bachmann and Frisch shared? (ibid, p.189)

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The answer, the final word, has not yet been spoken and/or written. Talking at cross purposes is just as common as not speaking to each other, communicating, confessing their deepest secrets to each other, sharing their existential isolation. They were at home in the language of love, many-faced, multifaceted, various, dreaming of many things. When Bachmann’s fascinating, literary life was over, her colleague Uwe Johnson (1934–1984) wrote in her obituary about the emergence of Bachmann’s silence, saying that it had its origins in the fear of death she had experienced in the Second World War. The high-explosive and cluster bombs that the Allies rained down on the Nazi city in 1944–1945, turning it into a hellscape of broken shards and rubble, shook the young Bachmann’s mind to its foundations ( Johnson 2004). So much noise, and then finally emerging from the battle to be “at rest.” Sounds of the everyday world return, along with the noises of the clean-up as the arrogance and poison of National Socialism are swept away. What to do? Hold a large shell to your ear, so that you can hear the whisper of the ear’s inner silence. For this reason: pro-silentium. When Bachmann, who was living temporarily in Berlin, fell in love with the theatre critic and filmmaker Adolf Opel – he sought her out on 5 January 1964, and that spring she travelled to Egypt with the man nine years her junior – the 38-year-old was able to laugh again, as she later wrote. “I rang the bell. She opened the door. Her first words were: Come in!” (Opel 2001, p.18). The fact that they approach each other in this way, as Opel later describes it, opens up a place of togetherness within the silence, where she is no longer aloof. She could even be exuberant, silly, and tell funny stories, as Opel writes in his account of their travels and their love (ibid, p.167). When an unpleasant subject was broached, Bachmann, like many of us, could pass over it in silence. If it was insisted upon, there would be resentment and annoyance. Her eyes would become the bringers of coded messages. When names, concepts, formulas, rules, issues no longer play any role, a wordless aversion of the eyes shuts down the conversation. “And then I mention the name Frisch: no reaction, and icy silence” (ibid, p.137). That changes in Egypt: there, his name is just casually dropped into conversation. Inconsequential chat drowns out the story of their passion, and the end to their love that partly devastated both their minds. Silence as a retreat. It’s as if over the entire time that lies sunken in darkness a spotlight now shines. Everything there lies naked, grisly, unfathomable, full of evidence that can’t be overlooked, and yet how willingly I believed them to be dumb, ignorant, at fault – worthless creatures who through their departure into silence condemned themselves to their own failure in the face of a higher morality, a higher authority, a standard that I wanted for myself alone (Bachmann 1999, p.62). Franza, one of the central characters in Bachmann’s “Ways of Dying” project, is silent. She says nothing again and again, looking past her new lover into the vast desert. In her mistaken belief that she can keep everything that had happened

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with Frisch from Martin permanently. “Silence was the custom, nothing needed to be said” (ibid, p.115). In this novel, which remained unfinished, Bachmann tried to document the search that followed the failed relationship. When Bachmann had committed a few lines to paper, she leaned back into silence and wept, sending a gentle greeting to her inner self. To remind ourselves: what we cannot speak about can and may still be written about. We can all get ourselves a journal, at any time (Itten 2013). The mind leaps, irresistibly. When she writes about her silence, the unusual harshness with which her past relationship with Frisch assaults her mind begins to falter. Silence as a lantern in the loneliest of all worlds. A quicksand beach of our own conceit. We can stop being so full of ourselves and let emotion bend the stiff mask into a smile.

A blanket of silence Insisting there is nothing that can be said is also a refusal to recognise what we have experienced as the representation of our own existence. The “outside” or the world is represented, in essence, using an archaic and negative equivalence, which says that outside = not-inside. Based on this definition, the autistic child manages to withdraw himself once and for all from the requirement and the speech of another human and, conversely, to silence every outward-directed impulse (Leiser 2007, p.227). Secrecy goes hand in hand with repression, and the necessary act of forgetting that I have repressed something. Not speaking is the absence of the will and the ability to talk. Bittner (2012) focuses on the assumption that we all live under a particular blanket of silence without realising it. In our innermost core, there may be a mental space where the inexpressible is permitted to reside. This is passed on down the generations (as in the Wittgenstein family) on various levels. In the family, in the nation, in the church or other houses of prayer, in history and transcendence. Bittner explores the way in which these various elements interact in a former Nazi city, Tübingen. “If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out” (Luke 19:40). As soon as the blanket of silence is peeled away, the truth is revealed to the light. An unwillingness to talk about the atrocities, on the part of both victims and perpetrators, means that those who carry their subjective truth within them are subjugating and bending their true selves. In Chapter 4, we will evaluate this mental burden in greater depth as we explore enforced silence. Families are “contaminated” over several generations, at least to the grandchildren’s generation (Bittner 2012, p.101). Bittner encourages us to pause and think about what we keep quiet in our own lives, in order to unburden ourselves of it if need be. Our own imagination can allow the pattern of transfer to end. Freed from onerous projections, our minds achieve peace effortlessly. Serenity – that feeling of coming to rest, which we experience while sitting in the garden

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when work is over for the day – allows us to be at peace with ourselves and content with those around us. They nod in confirmation; this is a good thing.

Hold your tongue Obedience admits no objections. The dictum of an English upbringing (“Do as I say, not as I do,”) is a serious provocation to childhood innocence, which is wedded to truth. Groan! But you have to hold your tongue if you want to escape this delicate situation in the power-quarantine of the family. It is better not to express your reservations about your parents’ child-rearing ideology for the time being. Keep quiet and learn to obey, because the experience of everyday life is different to what we are instructed to do. Even if we learn to keep quiet as children, awareness of these power relations, this everyday operative psychology, gradually dawns on us. It is “The first hole in the vacuum” (Hoffmann 2012, p.54), in which one can hide, rather than having to hang oneself. As ever: order, obedience, and subordination; principles that for a generation of Stasi collaborators were embedded in a rigorous, wonderfully simple division of people into enemies and friends. It was a philosophy quietly handed down to them by the old Nazis. Like so much else, it was purely a matter of getting used to the situation. In the end, there is my false self, and within me, hidden by it, my true self. Something is always kept secret, and I only give away as much as is strictly necessary through my actions and behaviour. Life is ruled by an inner obligation to secrecy. In a closed society where one wave of fear swells into the next, everyone ensures that everyone else conforms and keeps quiet. Even Erich Mielke, the undisputed mastermind at the head of the Stasi, knows that it might come for him one day, too, and keeps a dark red fauxleather suitcase in his armoured safe in case he should fall into disfavour. Inside: incendiary Nazi documents incriminating the head of state, Erich Honecker (Hoffmann 2012, p.92). Yesterday’s snow leaves behind streaks of dirt. The wildest plans for escaping this double life are hatched, but: gardez silence. The perpetual lying, everyone’s mistrust of everyone else, the silent, reflexive caution are the nightmarish spices in this broth of life. Silence and secrecy on both an internal and a social level can grind down our sense of self-worth. Only having the courage to talk about it can stop the feeling that is rumbling and spreading inside me, gaining the upper hand as it tries to smother my true self. Letting it win would mean a crushing disintegration of the mind. We can get closer to ourselves in silence. One positive kind of betrayal is the restless search for what is hidden in our past, in our childhood, which is often imprinted on us. I betray the secret, I give away what has happened – and in so doing, I give away something that has had to stay hidden until this point: the truth. In this betrayal, I, the betrayer, manage to speak the truth.

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The cult of secret-keeping is familiar to many families, like a political, religious atmosphere. We are initiated into something we may not speak about, because it has been forbidden by those in power, frequently under the most extreme of all threats: otherwise I’ll kill you – you, the one who has been abused. Thus the wall of silence remains intact, and Wittgenstein’s “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” becomes an order not to speak. Inside, demoralisation is a fertile soil where the germ of rage begins to grow. How can abuse be kept secret, when doubting the sense in that secrecy has a corrosive effect? We are required to conform, which, as with the Stasi spies, causes a special social and intellectual isolation. Our own world is ruled by tyrants, whether father, mother, or the servants of the ultimate power. We will be forced to lie and to defend this lie with other lies. Grand delusions involve a terrible, systematic violence. Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

The tone is exasperated. Fear, like a hand around your throat. Woe to the voice that tries to come then. The sheer horror at wanting to speak. The emptiness that opens up here can be pierced with a human sound.

Every pretence of omnipotence crumbles into dust when we cut ourselves loose from our silence and dare to speak, to say what it was like. In so doing, we become innocently credible. And we can recognise the parallels in how dictatorships, whatever their superstructure and justificatory claptrap, make use of silence and secrecy. The curtain falls. It will be raised again for the blue hours of the night, in which the loose tongue enriches non-verbal communication – body language that comes from the unconscious.

Literature Amantea C., (1989) The Lourdes of Arizona. Mho & Mho Works, San Diego. Bachmann I., (1978b) Sagbares und Unsagbares – Die Philosophie Ludwig Wittgensteins. RadioEssays. Collected Works vol 4. Piper, Munich, pp. 103–127. Bachmann I., (1999) The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldman. Tr. Peter Filkins. Hydra Books, Evanston, IL. Bachmann I., (2017) “Male Oscuro,” in: Schiffermüller I., and Pelloni G., (ed.) Aufzeichnungen aus der Zeit der Krankheit. Piper/Suhrkamp, Munich. Bachmann I., (2019) Malina. Tr. Philip Boehm. Penguin, London. Bair D., (2003) Jung: A Biography. Little, Brown, London. Bernstein B., (2010) “A public language: some sociological implications of a linguistic form,” The British Journal of Sociology 61(s1): 53–69. Bittner J., (2012) Die Decke des Schweigens. TOS Verlag, Tübingen. Chon T., (2015) The Early Wittgenstein on Metaphysics, Natural Science, Language and Value. Routledge, New York/London. Edmonds DJ., Eidinow JA., (2002) Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument between Two Great Philosophers. HarperCollins, London.

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Ferenczi S., (1955) “Once Again on the Technique of Silence” in: Michael Balint, (ed.)  Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis. Basic Books, New York. Frisch M., (1937) Antwort aus der Stille. Eine Erzählung aus den Bergen. DVA, Stuttgart. Frisch M., (1994) I’m not Stiller, trans. Michael Bullock. Harcourt, Brace, San Diego. Frisch M., (2004) Mein Name sei Gantenbein. Süddeutsche Zeitung/Bibliothek, Munich. Frisch M., (2017) Wie Sie mir auf den Leib rücken. Interviews und Gespräche. Suhrkamp, Berlin. Gadamer H-G., (1996) The Enigma of Health: The art of healing in a scientific age. Trans. Jason Gaiger, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Gleichauf I., (2013) Ingeborg Bachmann und Max Frisch – Eine Liebe zwischen Intimität und Öffentlichkeit. Piper, Munich. Gøtzsche PC., (2013) Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: how big pharma has corrupted healthcare. CRC Press, FL, USA. Guggenbühl-Craig A., (1971) Macht als Gefahr beim Helfer. Karger Verlag, Basel. Hartwig I., (2017) Wer war Ingeborg Bachmann? Eine Biographie in Bruchstücken. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main. Heaton JM., (2010) The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein’s Therapeutic Method for Psychotherapy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. Heaton JM., (2014) Wittgenstein and Psychotherapy: From Paradox to Wonder. Palgrave Macmillan, London. Hoffmann R., (2012) Stasi Kinder – Aufwachsen im Überwachungsstaat. Propyläen, Berlin. Itten T., (2011) “Intuition und Wissenschaft in der Psychotherapie.” Z Psychotraumatol Psychotherapiewiss Psychol Med 4: 31–42. Itten T., (2013) “Tagebuch des Lebens. Interview mit Nicole Tabanyi.” Schweizer Fam 8: 50–52. Johnson U., (2004) A Trip to Klagenfurt. In the footsteps of Ingeborg Bachmann. Tr. Damion Searls. Northwestern Univeristy Press, Evanston, IL. Jung CG., (1999) Über Gefühle und den Schatten. Winterthurer Fragestunden. Walter Verlag, Zürich. Koller J., (2017) Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. Zu den unterschiedlichen Lesarten von Sagen und Zeigen. Philosophia Verlag, Munich. Laing RD., (1976) Do you love me? An entertainment in conversation and verse. Pantheon, New York. Leiser E., (2007) Das Schweigen der Seele. Das Sprechen des Körpers. Psychosozial-Verlag, Gießen. McGuinness B., (1988) Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Ludwig 1889–1921. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Michell J., Holley R. et al. (2016) Trivium. The classical liberal arts of grammar, logic & rhetoric. Wooden Books, Glastonbury. Murakami H., (2016) Absolutely on music – conversations with Seiji Ozawa. Harvill Secker, London. Opel A., (2001) ‘Wo mir das Lachen zurückgekommen ist …’ Auf Reisen mit Ingeborg Bachmann. Langen Müller, Munich. Redpath T., (1990) Ludwig Wittgenstein. A student’s memoir. Duckworth, London. Stoll A., (2013) Ingeborg Bachmann – Der dunkle Glanz der Freiheit. Bertelsmann, Munich. von Matt B., (2011) Mein Name ist Frisch. Begegnungen mit dem Autor und seinem Werk. Nagel & Kimche, Munich. von Sass H., (ed.) (2013) “Topographien des Schweigens.” in: Stille Tropen. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg/Munich, pp. 9–29.

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Walser M., (1994) Vormittag eines Schriftstellers. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Walter C., Kobylinski A., (2011) Patient im Visier – Die neue Strategie der Pharmakonzerne. Suhrkamp, Berlin. Waugh A., (2008) The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War. Bloomsbury, London. Wepfer R., (1998) Schweigen in der Psychotherapie – Zum Umgang der Psychoanalyse mit dem Widerspenstigen. VAS, Frankfurt am Main. Wittgenstein L., (1974) Tractatus logico-philosophicus. Tr. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. Routledge, London.

Websites http://alws.at/de/index.php/lwittgenstein/view/sein_leben_sein_werk/ (Elisabeth Leinfellner).

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The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence (Sontag 2013, p.20) When silence blossoms, we usually calm down. Silence, silence, and more silence leads to contemplation. When your teeth rest together, so a Zen saying goes, your tongue is at home. We notice what then happens through this silence, and we can describe the experience afterwards. And once we have described these experiences, we can interpret and communicate them in order to know what’s going on. In a Münster-based episode of the cult German TV crime series Tatort, the medical examiner Professor Boerne says: “There are some things you won’t understand.” Detective Inspector Thiel replies: “Yes, thank God.” A lively example of direct communication from an arrogant standpoint to a humble one, which contains an indirect insinuation. In direct communication, I say what I think and mean as clearly and straightforwardly as I can. The aim of this form of communication is to make myself understood to whomever I am talking to, with no obstructions. When I communicate indirectly, I employ various allusions, and possibly ironic messages, which don’t straightforwardly express what I think and mean. The room for interpretation has no precise limits. When the other person is silent and I ask what they are thinking, it’s a friendly invitation for them to communicate to me what is happening inside them. But they don’t have to answer. Then, I am inclined to listen to the silence. “For I find that with a character, you can express things as if you’re writing about yourself. You have the characters in order to hide yourself. But then you can reveal yourself,” says Martin Walser in an interview with Ilka Scheidgen (2017, p.29). This allows things that a person has never spoken about to come out and be heard, in and through indirect communication. When I read a novel by Martin Walser or Doris Lessing, I stop noticing that I am reading. The other life, the one I’m reading

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about, plays out inside me, affecting my own emotional life. This is the great artistic talent that writers display in the area of direct and indirect communication.

Kierkegaard The Danish philosopher and theological writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a very wily user and an original cultivator of indirect communication. It was his stated intention that his multifaceted writings, many of which were first published under a pseudonym, should allow him to be an authentic witness to his own lived experience. He was one of the founders of existentialism, which took statements about and from the lived experience of the body into the space of ethics. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756–1838), was already 57 when Søren was born and has been described as sanctimonious and tyrannical. His mother, Ane Sørensdatter Lund Kierkegaard (1768–1834), was the housemaid before she became Michael Pedersen’s second wife. Søren had six older siblings, including his famous brother, Peter Christian Kierkegaard (1805–1888), another political theologian who became Bishop of Aalborg. It is well known that Søren was engaged for two years to the beautiful and loyal-hearted Regine Olsen (1822– 1904). When the 24-year-old Kierkegaard saw his future fiancée for the first time, she was a 15-year-old girl. The quiet infatuation that spread through them both ushered in a love that, although Søren broke off the engagement out of a fear of erotic commitment, occupied a locked chamber in both their hearts for the rest of their lives. It was the subject of much indirect communication between the two of them in numerous letters, notebooks, and satirical publications. The philosopher’s glittering subjectivity is held up and turned this way and that so that it can be described, experienced, and understood from all sides. Søren explores the suffering of and in an individual’s life – the part he plays in relation to the eternal – in search of the mindset that determines it. In Kierkegaard’s view, the greatest challenge that life presents to an individual is to cope with and endure himself as he is, was, and will be. This existential experience of our own selves can only be communicated indirectly. Kierkegaard doesn’t try to explain in direct terms and bring philosophical clarity to the existing thought patterns that lie before him; instead, he mixes them up to produce new constellations. He uses concepts such as anxiety, fear, trembling, either/or, and so on, which he represents through rousing metaphors. His texts demand to be heard – which was his intention in writing them. He resisted the repression of suffering that was directed inward, and this resistance allowed him to fish a generally valid statement out from the depths of an anguish that was barely perceptible on a physical level but wanted to be expressed. His communicative brilliance lay in his use of indirect communication to thwart the speechlessness caused by the terrible mystification of inner life, which had been enforced down through the generations. This technique helped him to shed light on our schweigen, the silence of not speaking. He saw the writer’s life as a training programme in existential survival.

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Kierkegaard referred to simultaneous self-examination and consideration of external life as “double reflection.” The pseudonym under which he published Fear and Trembling was Johannes de silentio (Kierkegaard 2013, p.viii). Does this playful, ironic choice alert us to anything? Søren took the same walk at the same time every day in Copenhagen. Alongside his ability to be silent, this routine was important for his wellbeing – it was another way in which he cultivated his inner peace. The satirical Danish magazine Corsair often made fun of him in its cartoons as an eccentric, an outsider, and something of a joke. He wrote in his diary of the pain that having to bear this ignominy caused him. Writing was a way of escaping the trap of prejudices and silent repression. Everything he said in public from then (1846) onwards was reframed so reductively by critics that it was turned into what the critics were accusing him of being as an author. What he gave as his personal opinion thus became incomprehensible, and he effectively silenced himself. For Kierkegaard, according to the literary scholar Roger Poole (1939–2003), “Copenhagen became a desert” (Poole 1993, p.216). Socio-political and psychological “levelling down” is a strategy undertaken covertly to remove the individuality and uniqueness from a person’s voice. Although nothing is true without its opposite, Kierkegaard could sense that no matter whether he did or said something, or refrained from saying or doing anything, it would still make waves with the newspaper columnists. His strategy of silence, by contrast, saw him continue to be a dialectical witness to the existential truth of the individual, with the aid of his indirect communication. In deep subjectivity, we can survive, brooding, if we are able to fill the philosophical space opened up by Kierkegaard for those who came after him with our subjective experiences and our own critical objectivity. These strategies of indirect communication continue to animate the cathedrals of silence. Roger Poole (1972) has given us an encouraging picture of how this can happen. More thoughtful, calm devotion to the process of communicating subjective, personal values. In his book Kierkegaard’s Muse (2019), Søren’s eloquent Danish biographer Joakim Garff focuses on the mysterious Regine Olsen and says a great deal about the silence between her and Kierkegaard. Their mutual reticence developed, he says, into “erotic rituals of silence” (ibid, p.7). After the engagement was ended when Kierkegaard pulled away, it was fourteen years before Regine broke the more permanent silence that then existed between the pair – outside of their indirect communication. She went looking for her former fiancé in the streets of their home city, found him, and whispered as she passed: “God bless you – may all go well with you!” (ibid, p.9) She had married her former teacher and Kierkegaard’s colleague, the lawyer Johan Frederik Schlegel (1817–1896), and was about to set off for the West Indies, where she would be the wife of the new Governor General. She remained the only woman in Kierkegaard’s heart, and he understood and treasured her silence. After the broken engagement, they returned each other’s love letters and from then on only communicated indirectly: he through his books and writings, she

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through letters to her sister Carolina. Each time she reached a point in a letter where she felt compelled to unlock the depths of her heart, she withdrew into silence, shocked at herself. She confided what lay hidden there to her sister, who understood without Regine having to say “it” (ibid, p.115). This almost overwhelming, erotic-lustful feeling of silence fuels a kind of nostalgia for the future. Were we to return to each other, then… But this silent door into wedded bliss remains closed. Earlier, the pair still had their silent encounters on the street and in the church, where moments of socially appropriate and necessary silence were elevated into flirtation, tipping the dilemma of either/or into the both/and of those who suffer: I’m gone; keep my love. Søren was afraid of her passion, for which he nevertheless yearned as an all-encompassing thing. Before his death, he found his true, sincere self by managing to embrace both his melancholy characters, behind whose masks he hid himself, and his ironic mastery and authorship. In matters of the heart, however, he remained inwardly fundamentally hidden. This was, at the same time, his (dark, invisible) reason for being quiet and still. What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence. It is like the sight of a quiet little Alpine lake, the mysterious aura of which gives us a sense of peace in our hearts. In her 1967 essay “The Aesthetics of Silence,” the cultural philosopher and writer Susan Sontag (1933–2004) endeavoured to think of silence and the desire not to speak as a “perceptual and cultural clean slate.” And, in its most hortatory and ambitious version, the advocacy of silence expresses a mythic project of total liberation. What’s envisaged is nothing less than the liberation of the artist from himself, of art from the particular artwork, of art from history, of spirit from matter, of the mind from its perceptual and intellectual limitations (Sontag 2013, p.27). Laid on very thick. That was also a tendency of Sigmund Freud’s, when, for example, he claimed that as the analysand went deep into their past, “even the symptoms of illness are silent” (Freud 1975, p.211). Lou: W  hat crazy generosity, when Regine nods and Søren shakes his head twice. Sam: Pure, abstract thought gets caught up in the reality of existential suffering. What remains is the expression of silence. Lou: There is no sensual, erotic happiness without language. Sam: Everything we don’t need to keep quiet about is meaningless.

Tranquil contemplation If you want to know why I was silent, you just need to find what forced me into it. The circumstances of this particular event and the reaction of those around me contribute to my not speaking about it. Because if I tell you what happened to me, you won’t believe me (Cyrulnik 2011, p.9).

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The psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik focuses on keeping quiet about things as a way of protecting your own mind from exposure. Shame is a factor in interpersonal relationships, which can often become uncomfortable when the unsayable is said out loud. Shame prevents and protects us from saying the unsayable. Unshared emotions create a space of silence in the victim’s mind that speaks without pause; a kind of inaudible murmur, whispering incredible things inside this person. It is difficult to be silent, but it is possible not to say anything (ibid, p.10). In the confessional box, as in psychotherapy, we can make a confession from the heart about what we have experienced. Do I control my fate with my silence, or am I silently controlled by fate? People whose psyche has been injured, who have become victims, feel the suffering they have experienced (which has often been triggered by a crime against humanity – rape, assault, torture, imprisonment) coiled like a boa constrictor around their mind. Silence offers protection from the urge to express yourself. Strong emotions can be kept in check by a silence born out of shame. Denial is not turned inwards (any longer); the pretence is directed only at the outside world. The false life takes its course. Disgusting. But the mind’s desire to transform is there, all the same. Pain floods into every chamber of the body. The mental scars in the tissue of existence ensure that what has been experienced can never be forgotten. We can learn to live with these scars, as we can with a limp. Never uttering a word about the pain. Cultivating a defensive resilience so that we never have to say out loud that we are imprisoned in the shameful emotions of our own innocence. Dissembling? No. Indirect communication. Primo Levi, who was ashamed of having survived Auschwitz, took the path of the witness, which kept his wounds open until the denial of the genocide turned his pain into senselessness (ibid, p.150). Changing reality – the change that happens when I recognise what I myself am projecting onto that reality – frees me in my attitude towards life, so that I no longer have to feel ashamed of what I have become.

Lou “My” Lou, who features in the dialogues inserted into this book, is Lou AndreasSalomé (1861–1937). In her novel Ruth, she gives us a triumphant fairy-tale in which a writer describes unique, miraculous occurrences in such a way that everything is included in this one story. “But not with words” (Andreas-Salomé, p.114). How is this possible? The storyteller and the listener sat together in silence. This deliberate quietness enabled each of them to dwell mutely on their own thoughts, ideas, and ingenuity.

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The communal silence, kept in a spirit of heartfelt affection, allowed them to realise that at the same time, they had grown worlds apart – and that “neither of them was privy to the silent world of the other” (ibid, p.158). The aim of this transformative practice of deliberate silence is to enable Ruth to turn away from her former beloved Erik. This silence, longed for and sometimes practised in an anarchic fashion, is celebrated by creative writers like Martin Walser and Angela Carter (1940–1992). People’s thirst for life is slaked by blissful wordlessness. What happens when someone is better at keeping quiet than his or her competition? In this contemplative silence, fresh and free, they can make bold new decisions. The silence of each person thinking their own thoughts is a re-collection of one’s own self. Klingenstein (2016, p.55) says, positively: “The writer’s essence would be the difference between the real world and the one he represents.” Is that a bearable assumption? Writers often say that their writing and the strength to do it come from a place beyond language. This writerly quietness, which is a tool not easily available in the way that a shovel is, allows me to dig down into my own mind and recover whatever phenomena can be lifted out. I can only write what I think, feel, perceive, and imagine. Writing is thinking. Silence can only be understood via what it produces indirectly through its mute communication. The application of silence through writing, as in this book, plays with the mirror of words. Your style is your own standpoint, from which reality, if you wish, can be hushed up in the name of art. What happens if we don’t want to be silent about what occurs to us in silence? Martin Walser’s moral theory on this is: “He who says more than he does is preaching. He who says less than he does is lying. He who says what he is doing is vain. He who does what he says is good” (ibid, p.95).

The path She enters the temple of Tao. As a Chinese woman, she is familiar with the signs that direct her along the path inwards. Seven days without speaking, she tells me, a week without saying a single word. The master of the temple is the only one who speaks, quietly, teaching from Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching. As he does so, everyone else walks in a meditative circle, heads down so that their eyes see only their own toes on the floor. Aware of the people around them, but not allowing themselves to be drawn closer to them. Concentrating fully on themselves, on the here and now. Tao as a path. Practising zazen meditation, in the silence of a room where everyone’s breath is transformed into a silent wind, filling the sails of each person’s sutra and kōan. Relaxation, she says; “no big deal.” Nothing is so important that you can’t keep quiet about it. She has her kōan, which she turns over in her mind, taking up this rhythm, enjoying the repetition. Those seven days produce great results. Following this experience, she is more focused on her life. She enjoys the moment. Faces what is to come in the morning and the evening without worrying. She finds herself less impulse driven now and has been released from the weighty issues that

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were oppressing her. A “silent night” with no will-o’-the-wisps. A spring burbles out of the ground at the foot of the mountain. The silent mountain and the lively spring, its water flowing into every crack and corner. Filling the void (Legge 1963). Silence is dissolved by the sound of language, in which nothing is left unnoticed. It is only when I take myself out of my silence, in song and language, that I recognise what is going on there. Sir John Taverner’s piece “Towards silence” (2009) was written as a description of his near-death experience. Eternal peace is a reflective inner contemplation of the silence of the eternal consciousness that lies beneath it. The Hindus called this activity turiya. Paul Robertson, co-founder and leader of the Medici String Quartet, studied this piece and, through it, expanded his notion of what music could be. Is it possible to show something new? Only if I don’t stay locked in my own world. Stories are the envoys for the silence of what cannot be spoken about in the real world. Can the spoken word be shifted back into silence? At the end of his life, my friend Kalman (1953–2013) was prevented from speaking by lung cancer. The pain was too much for him, and for us. All that was left were gestures, looks, words written on white paper. The despair felt by a person who has become mute. “Loneliness knows only elliptical sentences” reads a note by the Swiss philosopher Hans Saner (1934–2017) in his little book Die Anarchie der Stille (The Anarchy of Silence, 2014, p.10). The You and I, the Me and You, are left out, suppressed in the answer, in the absent response, the silence is in vain. What language cannot yet achieve, I can learn to perceive differently in the meantime. Quietness is good for us. Here is Walser again, whose artistic medium is indirect communication, quoted by Klingenstein, who accompanied him on his reading tour: With everything I say, I am concealing something. And I am contained far more in what I conceal than in what I say. What I say always falls into the category of what one can say without seeming too unpleasant. What I say is an attempt to make myself popular. What I conceal would make me instantly unpopular (Klingenstein 2016, p.210). Lou:

S aying nothing and being silent is Walser’s way of counterbalancing the value of his speech. Sam: Speaking lights up the darkness of being. To speak is to act, and to be silent is to conceal. Lou: But a wordless silence keeps open the space of what is concealed. Sam: In which direction does silence point? Lou: Towards lingering in language, at the end of which lies silence. When I obey my inner voice, I can be who I am, and who I am becoming. Thus, in future, I can intuitively trust myself. To exist for myself, to be the self that emerges from my own sentiency. What is kept quiet in conversation, when we speak without saying anything? Silence may be a fundamental mode of existence for each one of us. Silence is often the hard shell around a soft, tender inner core,

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to which only good friends are given access. Some people can travel in silence, quiet people who can keep something to themselves. Here, they experience their unlimited freedom to be authentically themselves. This true self is elevated in its silence. The self-preservation of silence. We all know there are problems that must be lived through. Life presents us with some complex tasks that require us to deal with them in silence.

Not heard from each other in a while? Ah, what famous people were like when they were young. The philosopher JeanPaul Sartre (1905–1980) tried to make his on-off partner Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) into an accomplice who would validate his voyeurism during the affairs he made no secret of. “Beauvoir bore them all in shamed silence, as if she were somehow responsible” (Bair 1991, p.210). All the same, de Beauvoir did have a voyeuristic side of her own. She shared this with Olga, Sartre’s young lover, with whom she herself spent many hours in cafés. They would sit and watch strangers for the length of a cigarette, trying to improve their understanding of people. Sartre became jealous of this female friendship. Fuelled by open secrets, the three of them entered into “games of passion” with each other, “which no one enjoyed playing” (ibid, p.200). It is never completely silent in Paris. The hum of the global metropolis never quite dies away. Towards morning there is even a rooster crowing, and that is an infinite pleasure. Then suddenly I fall asleep. These are the noises. But there is something here that is more dreadful: the silence. I imagine that during great fires such a moment of extreme tension must sometimes occur: the jets of water fall back, the firemen stop climbing the ladders, no one moves. Soundlessly a black cornice pushes forward overhead, and a high wall, with flames shooting up behind it, leans forward, soundlessly. Everyone stands and waits, with raised shoulders and faces contracted above their eyes, for the terrifying crash. The silence here is like that (Rilke 1982, p.5). What for? What kind of life was this that Simone and Jean-Paul made for themselves, in which they directed the action so that everything that happened between fiction and reality made existential sense? Throughout her life, Simone de Beauvoir kept her emotions under constant, rigid control until the strain became so great that some release was necessary. Despite her quiet, almost solitary existence during the past year or so, these episodes usually occurred in a public place, generally a café. She would drink silently and steadily, consuming remarkable quantities of liquor which seemed to have little effect on her sobriety until she started to cry, silent tears at first, then audible sobs that grew in strength and volume until

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they racked her body. Suddenly, as if some inner safety valve warned her that she had vented quite enough for the moment, everything stopped. She would dry her tears, powder her face, straighten her clothes and rejoin the conversation as if nothing had happened (Bair 1991, p.169). When these striking episodes occurred, the young teacher of philosophy was 23 years old. When the 26-year-old Sartre saw her in this state, he panicked and proposed marriage (though not seriously), which quietened her down. They both had things about which they kept quiet, and the secrecy was a heavy burden on this young couple. Often when he made an effort at intimate transparency and told her about his affairs, “she pretended not to care, that the encounters meant nothing to her personally” (ibid, p.171). Sartre’s volubility versus de Beauvoir’s taciturnity. Who scored the match point? A parallel drawn by the Dutch philosopher and novelist Connie Palmen reveals the winner. What we keep quiet about, we may still explore through parallels and analogies. Palmen gave the poet laureate Ted Hughes (1930–1998), who died at the age of 68, a fictional, swashbuckling, loving, clear voice after his death. She has him speak to us as the hero of a novel, out of the silence of his past and his philosophical, poetic, myth-obsessed world. You say it is the title of her 2016 novel, which comes across as his unwritten autobiography. He and his wife Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), who committed suicide at 31, became one of modern literature’s most famous couples, much like de Beauvoir and Sartre. We writers more or less enjoy communicating. Bringing out what is going on inside us, be it relating our dreams, whispering secrets to friends, or writing a poem – it is an insatiable need. In biographies and secondary literature, and in the financially lucrative exploitation of Hughes and Plath’s life together, and of Hughes’ life afterwards, the old character roles are clearly defined. She is the victim, he the perpetrator. She is the “fragile saint and I the brutal traitor. I have stayed silent. Until now” (Palmen 2016, p.7). And what a story he has to tell, about this relationship between two people in their twenties. Palmen has skilfully turned everything she could read and hear into the words of a novel about this period. Like most of us at this stage in our lives, Ted and Sylvia are still growing up, making the transition to adulthood, trying on a life together for size, inexperienced and daring to dream. Ted loves silence, the secrets of words revealed in an oscillating multiplicity of meanings in the great stories of humanity (myths). Without the key of “Love, and be silent,” it is impossible to unlock the gate to a sincere and genuine voice of one’s own. Otherwise, the true self knows no bounds. Sadness, clouded senses, songs of lament that are brought to silence as to a sacrificial altar. Our disintegration in the here and now is the confusing consequence of what we saw and experienced as children. Everything you don’t want to see, and repress, every conflict that is denied and not addressed openly – both in a culture and in the life of every

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individual – seeks an outlet, and finally turns against life, in devilish disguise, mighty and devastating (ibid, p.102). I have no wish to disturb the contemplation that is unfolding in you as a reader. Poets like to write odes to silence. Someone like Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) tried to take his words to himself and direct them to Salomé, and in so doing, he was delighted to release the silence from his pen. Do you hear, my love, I raise my hands – do you hear: there is a whispering sound… What gestures of lonely men are not listened to by many things? Do you hear, my love, I close my eyes and even that is a sound that reaches you. Do you hear, my love, I raise them again… but why are you not here. (Rilke 1994, p.8)

Dare to be silent Give yourself over to your own silence. Trust your own inner voice intuitively, when it tells you there is no more need for silence. Our courage to speak, like the courage to be silent, feels like wading through the quicksand of the mind. Why was there so much aggressive silence between Plath and Hughes? Because revealing the differences in how each of us thinks and sees the world can sometimes mean that the villas of the past have to be torn down, to make way for new building plots. If the desire for one’s own independent existence arises, it is never wrong. It can be followed without pride. Otherwise we are betraying ourselves, entering into a life of concealment from which we seldom escape without doing harm. We need to make the existential leap from one bank of life to the other, according to the existentialists around Sartre. The longer Silvia Plath was dead, the more she was held up and/or decried by radical feminists as an icon of pitilessness, and a martyr. Laying out the cloth of truth gives us access to our own emotions and the mind that lies beneath them. We need the ability to maintain an attentive silence. Just as long as we don’t let ourselves be forced back into silence. “During the final months of her life, she was ruled by the tyrants of a fundamentalism in which only the absolutist extremes were valid, black or white, everything or nothing. Life or death” (Palmen 2016, p.271). Ted Hughes came to realise, much too late in life, that his silence, along with any writing that didn’t come from an inner truth, the words of myths that didn’t dare enter the “I” and protected his secret inner world, were detrimental to his mental health and his sense of being at peace with his own life. He had to be heard as what he was and was becoming, to affirm his existence, and stay loyal to his own true feelings. As unashamedly unique as each of us is. And at the same time, so banal in our teeming global population of nearly eight billion people, plus all those who have already lived and died. We long in our human way to be closer to the unintentional; let us learn from the rose, what you are and what I am… (Rilke 1994, p.13).

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Wall of silence The silence of not speaking can and should be criticised. Sometimes we can reverse the saying: silence is silver and speech is golden. The powerful keep many things quiet from the population at large. In a democracy that is genuine rather than a mere pretence, the people’s representatives must serve the individual people within their nation. In some places, keeping the peace is seen as a priority when it comes to the relationship between the people and their representatives. The government always invokes the need to keep matters of state secret when talking about power and discussing their own authority, so that the people’s understanding remains limited. This is a deliberate diminishing of the public sphere. Walls of silence – which differ, incidentally, in their height and effects – are a frequently-occurring phenomenon. What is taboo today can be discussed tomorrow under certain circumstances – and what we may speak freely about today might be proscribed tomorrow (Bellebaum 1992, p.157). It is a decision made not only by criminal organisations of every stripe, with their strict policy of silence towards the outside world (which the Mafia terms omertá), but by dictators right across the political spectrum, popes, cardinals, ayatollahs, mullahs, rabbis, and other powerful people (invoking a god of some kind), who profit from deliberately and repeatedly muting the masses. In his essay on the life of mafias, Misha Glenny (2018) describes the inevitable war between a state’s legal power and the power of mafia organisations that operate all over the modern world, as soon as a state’s previously reliable social and economic structures start to break down. The state’s monopoly on authority is directly and/or indirectly broken by the hidden, coded, and indirect communications between the people all over the world who are running the finance, drug, human-trafficking, and sex-trade mafias. On top of this, we now have cybercrime, with its seemingly endless ingenuity and cunning in communications. It is vitally important that we be responsible enough to speak out about how inappropriate silence is in such situations. We cannot allow our language to be broken and suppressed. The absence of words to express the inexpressible hints at big emotions searching for an optimal form of expression. We can come to know the inexpressible through telling our own stories, the stories of ourselves.

4′33″ John Cage’s piano sonata 4′33″ is unique. It is written in sonata form, with three sections of differing lengths, all composed of silence. The timings were set out at the piece’s premiere on 29 August 1952. The pianist David Tudor (1926–1996) sat down at the piano on the small stage of the Maverick Concert Hall in

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Woodstock, closed the keyboard lid and looked at his stopwatch. 33 seconds. He repeated this action twice more: 2′23″ and 1′40″, down to the second, for the other sections of the sonata, always being careful not to make a sound. He also turned the pages of the music, on which no notes were written. After 4 minutes and 33 seconds, Tudor got up and received his applause. The premiere was over. You can see and hear various versions of this piece by John Cage on YouTube. The music professor and composer Kyle Gann wrote a whole book about this silent concert: No such thing as silence (Gann 2010). The audience was able to hear the silent piece, which was made audible by various incidental noises, sounds from outside, and raindrops falling. In addition, according to reports about this concert, a few people made their own noises as they left the auditorium during the third section. This small concert hall was suffused with a faint breath of zen as the performance of silence reached the ears of those in the audience, who were listening to what was around them. They heard their world anew. Silence in music sets in motion the process of testing other sounds for their musical potential, allowing us to hear these sounds in a new way. It was a kind of meta-music, expressing something about music through silence; music as the art of perception. If you haven’t yet heard the piece, you can find versions by Frank Zappa, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, or a heavy metal band, on YouTube. Our inner monologue is stopped, and the noisy sounds from outside fill up the auditory space that is left. In other words: the silence is articulated so that it can be understood. Silence is filled with silence. “Silence,” said Cage, “cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: It is heard in terms of time length” (Gann 2010, p.80). His piece structures the audible silence into three periods of various lengths. Emptiness as form; the form of emptiness. Absolute. Question: why does this piece last for 4 minutes and 33 seconds? Answer: Cage was fascinated by the rise of background music in shops, known as Muzak after the company Muzak Holdings, which was the first to produce background music and the devices to play it on. George Owen Squier (1865–1934) invented this racket and followed the example of Kodak in naming his invention. He took the “muz” from music and the “ak” from Kodak. That gave him the new word for his company. And the name has since become a generic term for this type of background music, which usually lasts around four and a half minutes. At the same time, Muzak became a “noise nuisance” in shops, an enemy to quiet shopping. The trivial was overwritten, as on many prefabricated radio stations that popped up at the same time and can still be heard anywhere and everywhere, twenty-four hours a day. Today, music streaming services also exist to make sure there is never any silence. Straight to your ears, and into the auditory cortex. The illusion of plenty subdues feelings of emptiness. Gann once played 4′33″ to freshman music students, and “…a young woman exclaimed afterwards with surprised delight, ‘I never realised there was so much to listen to!’ Perhaps that’s exactly the kind of musical satori Cage hoped to bring about” (Gann 2010, p.145).

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We know, in a purely theoretical sense, that absolute silence lies outside the possible realm of human experience, since our own bodies produce sounds and vocal expressions. Cage’s Sonata 4′33″ could therefore be renamed the “Unintentional Noises Sonata.” There are several different recordings on which you can “hear” this piece. A melodious wildness. What we cannot speak about, we can hum lustily. In a group – the audience for a concert, play, ballet, or film – it takes every person present to create the silence for what is about to be performed. For that reason – Thomas Redl from Vienna alerted me to this fact – many composers have given their pieces a loud opening. Aha, the music has started. Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam:

Do you like my new red blouse? (doesn’t look at her immediately, and so at first says nothing.) Oh yes, very nice. Oh, so you don’t like it? (hesitates) No, no, I do… You don’t have to like it. It’s unutterably beautiful.

Gardez silence When we respect quietness, it opens up an inner safe place where it becomes almost impossible to lie. In public, a person who doesn’t speak is noticed. A shaman usually withdraws to a hut or a tent for three days of silence, fasting, and calm. These activities help to cleanse their own soul. The same applies when they have “spent” their power in healing rituals (Narby and Huxley 2001). The shamanic ritual is performed in collaboration with the watchers as a collective act of healing and communion with the eternal powers. The spirits can only be spoken with indirectly. The gods or spirits use the shaman’s body in such rituals, occupying it and using it to communicate with the tribe. There can be no communication without the person who is initiated into the secrets of an inner cosmological affirmation. Silence, and the peace and quiet before and after a ritual, are necessary in order for new deeds to be done. Francis Huxley (1923–2016) wrote about this in his accounts of Haitian voodoo ceremonies (Huxley 1966). When the notes have died away, and silence descends on the room, then you can negotiate with the silence. Every silence allows people to reflect on things that can (and sometimes must) be freely decided. The process of weighing up the real and the true world brings visions, which open up images that can be made accessible with the help of language. Like the shamans, writers need a place of their own where they are fully at one with themselves. One’s own style as expression of one’s individuation. Our silence can understand what it brings forth. It proves the agency that asserts itself as a humanistic good in a person and can be experienced by others in his enlightened actions. The silence is ended by the sound of language, in which nothing is missed. It is only when I venture out of silence, in song and in language, that I recognise what is going on there.

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Only those who take heart and enjoy fleeting happiness can find in it the freedom from worry that they seek. They can feel they are woven into the greatest possible agreement with what was once called trust in God and is now called trust in the cosmos. Here, quiet becomes a way to begin calming the self. The transient sense of unease we each feel about our own cultural contingency doesn’t prevent us, as the creatures of nature that we are, from fulfilling our physical need for peace and quiet. Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

Do what I preach, and preach what I do. It is more bearable to do what I am afraid of, restlessly. I want more silence. I, your place of refuge.

Soho Chitchat One of Sigmund Freud’s many grandchildren, Lucien Freud (1922–2011), who would go on to achieve great fame and respect as a portrait artist in his later life, had an argument about money in 1955 with his brother Clement (1924–2009). The latter was a well-known television and radio personality in the United Kingdom and an MP for many years, who received a knighthood when he stepped down. For fifty years after that argument, the pair didn’t speak a single word to each other. Lucian didn’t even go to his brother’s funeral. He had done the same with his grandfather (Hoban 2014, p.71). When Lucian was offered a CBE, he turned it down, saying: “my younger brother has one of those.” His second wife, Lady Caroline Blackwood (1931–1996), was known as a very taciturn woman. Her silent tongue was usually only loosened by alcohol. In the company of the painter’s legendary Soho circle, she liked to stay silent or to laugh, together with Francis Bacon and Freud, who had left his first wife and his daughter for this new muse. She was young, beautiful, fascinating, clever. And she wrote. She was able to communicate that way, without speaking too much. Lucian Freud liked to gamble, and this activity wasn’t confined to the pub but extended to betting shops and secret gambling parties in which Freud and his old friend Francis Bacon (1909–1992) took part. Lucian lost huge sums of money on the horses. And then had to go begging to his brother Clement. Restless spirit that he was, whenever he found himself unable to paint through the night, he made the traditional tour of the pubs, which eventually got on Caroline’s nerves. Their still-young marriage began to unravel, fraying around the edges of their drunken afternoons. The way they both let themselves go exposed their human fragility. Caroline, a deeply damaged soul, resorted to more and stronger alcoholic drinks – like her father, who had died prematurely when she was just 13. Drunkenness took her out of her long phases of silence. When tipsy, she liked to tell dramatic stories, which she later did an excellent job of monetising in the ten books she wrote. At the end of her marriage to Freud, Blackwood had become an alcoholic (Schoenberger 2001, p.113). As a 26-year-old, this aristocratic beauty married the American composer Israel Citkowitz (1909–1974), 20 years her senior, and had two children with him. She left her silence, and he stopped

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composing. After the birth of their first daughter, Natalya, in 1962, Caroline sank into severe postnatal depression. She began to fall silent for longer periods, even when she’d had a few drinks. Meanwhile, Israel became more passive. He was a loving father to their children – their second daughter, Evgenia, was born in 1964. Tragically, his wife drank herself out of this marriage, too. Blackwood could no longer do anything without the fire of alcohol: she couldn’t write, couldn’t speak, sleep, or have sex. She was cruel to herself and to others. Her chronic, long-lasting periods of silence were a torment to her. She and Israel (whom she divorced in order to make the poet Robert Lowell [1917–1977] her third husband) moved into a shared house in London. Israel lived on the ground floor. Blackwood and their daughters lived on the upper floors. With Lowell, she found herself in even deeper waters. The poet spent forty years of his life suffering from severe manic-depressive phases, and these phases were emotionally gruelling for Caroline and the children, who were on the receiving end of his harsh words. “Setting the river on fire” is one of the metaphors that the psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison used to describe Lowell’s state of mind. When the prize-winning poet’s inner voice was caught up in the manic storm, it became dictatorial, loud, overbearing, hurtful, insolent, heart-breaking. A good example of how the truth that is suppressed by indirect communication can burst into the light of reality. These floods of words served to conceal his inferiority complex. Both he and his wife drank so excessively that in the end, the taut threads of their shared artistic life and love-life snapped. Ian Hamilton (1982) describes these loud and partly hushed-up stories of suffering in his biography of the strife-and-quarrel-addicted poet. This wordsmith seemed not even to trust the power of what he was capable of expressing poetically. His complex about other poets kept creeping unnoticed into his consciousness, burrowing and gnawing away at it. And then suddenly he would throw a thundering fit of megalomania, working himself up into rambling monologues that went on for hours, in which he described himself as the sole eminent American poet of his generation, much to the amusement of the colleagues he was vilifying. As soon as he came back down to the hard, slippery ground of reality, he abhorred his own maniacal identification with tyrants and conquerors. In the depression that followed, the manic things he had said and done were denied, repressed, and forgotten. His inner wall of silence went up (Jamison 2017, p.350). From this emotional rubble, Lowell gathered up words to redecorate the silence that was necessary for his survival. Heartache in a burning river. His own pain, and the pain he had caused to others, had to be borne in this silence. The tragedy of Odysseus from the world of ancient Greece sings soberingly of these stormy inner journeys. Caroline Blackwood’s chronic silence became more of a torment again after she fled this seven-year, mostly destructive relationship. Her formerly enchanting beauty was beginning to fade. The longing for love evaporated. She drank and drank and drank. Her life became darker and darker. Lowell died of a heart attack. Her 18-year-old daughter Natalya passed into nirvana with an overdose of heroin. Caroline sank into shame, guilt, and silence. The family secret about who had fathered her youngest daughter Ivana became unbearable for her, but there could

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be no thought of confessing. At 61, she got cancer. Caroline wrote, kept her silence, and took pleasure in the favourable reviews her new books were attracting. On the day after her mother’s death, Ivana (b.1966) met an old friend of Caroline’s in the Mayfair hotel where her mother had spent the last weeks of her life. The lady said to Ivana: “Of course, you do know who your real father was. Don’t you?” Surprised, she answered: “It was Dad. Wasn’t it?” The lady shrugged and, with an indulgent expression on her face, said no more. After this lunch, Ivana phoned her grandmother in the hope that she would reassure her. Her grandmother just giggled and said: “Oh darling, that’s such good news. Perhaps that means you are not Jewish after all!” (Lowell 2010, p.4). She then called her older sister Evgenia in desperation and told her in detail what had happened. There was a long silence. Ivana was expecting a horrified gasp of laughter from her sister. Instead, she said: “Oh sweetie, I think she may be telling the truth” (ibid). Her father, as she later discovered, was the British screenwriter Ivan Moffat (1918–2002), with whom her mother had had an affair when she was married to Lowell. The suspicion is that the name Caroline gave her daughter was an indirect attempt on her part to reveal an open secret. An important reason for Ivana, by then aged 43, to write down what really happened. The silence and secrecy was broken. Although now there was something else to keep quiet about within the family, who felt themselves to be under a curse. The transgenerational consumption of alcohol, probably beginning as a form of self-medication, was passed down to Caroline from her father, and from Caroline to her daughter Ivana. They all drank in the hope of deadening various kinds of mental pain. Despite the wealth, the aristocratic connection and enchanting natural beauty, their fragile sense of self-worth still had to be boosted. Ivana describes the moment after Caroline’s death as silent and peaceful. It gave her great hope that the veil of lies would now be drawn aside and the truth behind it revealed.

Never breathe a word This is the title of one of Caroline Blackwood’s stories, and of the collection in which it appears (Blackwood 2010a). This dictum silences the voices of those who are instructed to observe it, mostly after some kind of abuse has been committed. “You’re just dreaming. Never tell anyone about these dreams!” a patient’s father tells her when she is 8 years old and he gets her out of bed and sexually abuses her in his room. Millions of boys and girls are familiar with such scenarios. “Never breathe a word!” Blackwood also wrote a funny, ironic story entitled “The Answering Machine,” in which a widow calls herself from the payphone in the pub, so that when she goes back slightly tipsy to her silent, empty flat, she can listen to her voice on the answering machine (Blackwood 2010b). Over time, she speaks her innermost secrets onto the tape, and then enjoys listening to them. All the same, according to Francis Huxley (1976, p.46): “The description of a circle does not explain the point it is drawn from.”

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His uncle, the writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), wrote a book called The Perennial Philosophy, which was published a year before the end of the Second World War, and includes a chapter containing quotations and his own thoughts on silence – cunningly sandwiched between immortality and life after death, and prayer. This thinker, who silenced himself on a verbal level when he found himself among other authors, but who was only able to silence his thoughts and will in meditation, ruminated on the increasing emptiness of talk and postulated that the 20th century was the “Age of Noise” (Huxley 1994, p.218). He doesn’t just mean the noise of the streets and train travel, but also the intellectual, speculative, scientific noise. For Huxley, the desire and demand for economic, technical, and scientific growth are a general attack on taciturnity, calm, and the will to be silent. The noise that surrounds us all, including (then as now) the noise of wars and the millions of howls and screams of the wounded, the dying, the relatives of “the fallen,” this drama of noise pounding on our eardrums never lets up. How can we defend ourselves emotionally when these waves of noise wash into us, via our auditory nerve, into our minds and souls? (“My nerves!” we used to say in Bern.) It is as if there is a deliberate strategy to prevent silence, supported by the modern media: radio, TV, YouTube, streaming, and the like. All these idle words, the silly no less than the self-regarding and the uncharitable, are impediments in the way of the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, a dance of dust and flies obscuring the inward and the outward Light (Huxley 1994, p.259). This is difficult advice to follow. But now and then, a pause is useful when it comes to our own inner life (team talks with ourselves), and cooperation with others. A quiet pause while we listen to someone else’s word. Harmonious, mutual communication alternates between people, ebbing and flowing like the tide. According to linguists, our language has existed for at least 40,000 years ( Janson 2006, p.17). How can we talk about something that isn’t visible, but can only be experienced – like silence, peace, not speaking, and keeping quiet about things? It will have taken thousands of years to develop the conceptual ability to express thoughts in words, in order to talk about what is, was, and might yet be. Janson suspects that the point at which our ancestors began to use stone tools, between one and two million years ago (what a margin for error!) was when the first isolated words came into use. Strings of several words, and the development of full language systems of the kind we use today, only developed in all their complexity around 10,000 years ago. The multifaceted meanings inherent in these concepts could then be fed into valuable thought about various realities. Rituals of silence could be conceived as people sat around a blazing campfire. Lou: Hours of silence are inexpressibly restful. Sam: Here, consider me on standby; I lay this state of readiness at your feet. Lou: I like to keep my wordless desires on a long leash.

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Sam: Wordless existence with you is like the vanishing of the clouds. Lou: Silently, you and I endure what the two of us are hushing up together. Sam: Comment c’est. Then let us go to bed: the night is usually a place of longing, while our waking consciousness is paused. Today, sleep disorders are on the rise (which increases healthcare costs), and so is the pressure to achieve in the workplace. Constant availability, overuse of computers, mobile phones, and television. The risk factors for sleep disorders are numerous – and the number of people affected by them is growing. In Germany, according to a study by the DAK-Gesundheit health insurance company, 80% of the 44 million Germans currently in employment find it hard to fall asleep and to sleep through the night (DAKGesundheit 2017). This results in extreme tiredness, an inability to concentrate at work, and a huge increase in the number of sick days taken. Sleep, to put it bluntly, is petrol for the brain. And we know that all this is leading to a rise in drug abuse, especially stimulants and sleeping pills. In the past seven years, sleep disorders reported by working people between the ages of 35 and 65 have risen by a huge 66% (ibid). Every evening of our childhoods, many people in my own generation and the one before would sing, perhaps with moist, tired eyes, several verses of what is probably the best-known German lullaby, written in the year 1779. We have encountered this song already, in Chapter 1: “Der Mond ist aufgegangen” (the moon has risen) by Matthias Claudius (1740–1815). The moon has risen, the little golden stars are shining in the heavens bright and clear; the woods are black and silent, and from the meadow rises a wonderful white mist. How still the world is, wrapped in twilight, as cosy and as lovely as a silent chamber, where you will sleep away the cares of day, and forget them all. Who has stolen our night’s rest from us? Night-time noise continues to grow steadily. Dim prospects of getting a little more silence from the outside world. We need not only the delicious sleep of reason. Our animal nature also requires the nourishing hearth of the Greek goddess Hestia, as in the ancient world. She stands for the glowing embers in the fireplace of each person’s sense of home. A night’s rest remains a sacred thing – in other words, essential for survival. “I need to sleep on it” is a significant piece of common sense. We go tired into dreamland. And at sunrise we are fresh again for the new day. Sam: Are you asleep? Lou: Yes.

Literature Andreas-Salomé L., (2016) Ruth. Holzinger Nachdruck von 1895, Berlin. Bair D., (1991) Simone de Beauvoir – A Biography. Simon and Schuster, New York.

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Bellebaum A., (1992) Schweigen und Verschweigen – Bedeutungen und Erscheinungsvielfalt einer Kommunikationsform. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen. Blackwood C., (2010a) “Never breathe a word.” in: The Collected Stories. Counterpoint, Berkeley. Blackwood C., (2010b) “The answering machine.” in: The Collected Stories. Counterpoint, Berkeley, pp.273–292. Cyrulnik B., (2011) Scham – Im Bann des Schweigens. Präsenz Kunst & Buch, Hünfelden. Freud S., (1975) Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik. Studienausgabe. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main. Gann K., (2010) No Such Thing as Silence – John Cage’s 4′33″. Yale University Press, New Haven. Garff, J., (2019) Kierkegaard’s Muse: The Mystery of Regine Olsen. Tr. Alastair Hannay. Princeton University Press, Pinceton, NJ. Glenny M., (2018) “In the name of the Godfather. The global survival of mafias.” TLS No. 5989: 25. Hamilton I., (1982) Robert Lowell: A Biography. Random House, New York. Hoban P., (2014) Lucian Freud – Eyes Wide Open. New Harvest, Boston. Huxley A., (1994) The Perennial Philosophy. Flamingo, London. Huxley F., (1966) The Invisibles: Voodoo gods in Haiti. McGraw-Hill, New York. Huxley F., (1976) The Raven and the Writing Desk. Thames & Hudson, London. Jamison KR., (2017) Robert Lowell – Setting the River on Fire. A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Janson T., (2006) Eine Kurze Geschichte der Sprachen. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Wiesbaden. Kierkegaard S., (2013) Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Gordon Marino. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Klingenstein S., (2016) Wege mit Martin Walser. Zauber und Wirklichkeit eines Schriftstellers. Weiss- books, Frankfurt am Main. Legge, (1963) The I Ching: The Book of Changes. Tr. James Legge. Dover Publications, New York, NY. Lowell I., (2010) Why Not Say What Happened. A Memoir. Bloomsbury, London. Narby J., Huxley F., (Hrsg) (2001) Shamans Through Time. 500 Years on the Path of Knowledge. Thames & Hudson, London. Palmen C., (2016) Du sagst es. Diogenes, Zürich. Poole R., (1972) Towards Deep Subjectivity. Allan Lane, London. Poole R., (1993) Kierkegaard – The Indirect Communication. University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville/ London. Rilke RM., (1982) The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Tr. Stephen Mitchell. Vintage Books, New York. Rilke RM., (1994) Wie soll ich meine Seele halten – Liebesgedichte. Insel, Frankfurt am Main. Saner H., (2014) Die Anarchie der Stille. Lenos Verlag, Basel. Scheidgen I (2017) Martin Walser – der Weise Mann vom Bodensee. Twentysix BoD, Norderstedt. Schoenberger N., (2001) Dangerous Muse – The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood. Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA. Sontag S., (2013) “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in: Styles of Radical Will. Penguin, London.

Websites DAK-Gesundheit, (2017) Müdes Deutschland: Schlafstörungen steigen deutlich an. DAKGesundheit, Hamburg. www.dak.de/dak/bundesthemen/gesundheitsreport-1319196. html. Zugegriffen am 01.08.2018.

4 ENFORCED SILENCE

I first met Klaus Frost 30 years ago. At that time, he was running his advertising and management consultancy company, which had branches in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and he was a guest lecturer at technical colleges and associations. He was born in 1938 in Halle an der Saale, and as a child and young man, he experienced a silence that was enforced both generally within the country and specifically by his father. He encountered this silence when he asked about his father’s career and attitudes, until it occurred to him to circumvent it instead of running up against it. From this he drew the lesson that detours and diversions were things to be anticipated, not shunned. Klaus Frost, who is married with two grown-up children, now lives in Teufen, in the Swiss canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden. In the conversation that follows, he talks about his childhood and youth, and how he emerged from it as a talkative, communicative person, before finally finding his way to quiet contemplation and retreat among the paradoxical harmonies of his garden. “Silence is sometimes very eloquent,” says Klaus Frost, reflectively. Silence has many faces. Schweigen is the silence of not speaking. Prescribed silence is the instruction to keep your mouth shut. But Ruhe – quiet – also has connotations of peacefulness. What is your personal view of these terms? Alright. Let’s try not to hush anything up. Not speaking and keeping quiet about things played a fundamental role in my childhood. And some of the consequences of that really shaped my life. There was a lot that I only realised later on. Silence as a healing self-medication only took on increasing significance for me as I got older. It became the opposing pole to my hectic life as an advertising executive. Positive silence, I mean. It is a wonderful path to inner calm and ease. Anyone can discover these places of silence for themselves. And they are desperately needed, I think, especially in times of ever-present noise and din and garishness and shouting, the chaotic accompaniment to the stress of modern life. But as a

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child and a young man, quietness was a kind of horror to me. Not something I sought out; quite the opposite. The silence around me was the response to my curiosity and my questions, and for me, that was horribly unsettling. Why…why? Your constant questions. Why is a banana bent? I was more likely to get a clip round the ear than an explanation in response to that. I did not grow up in peaceful times, to put it very mildly. You have to understand, these were the war years and the post-war years in Germany. It was a state of emergency: the social order was collapsing, right down to the level of individual families. And everyone, every man and woman in their own way, was at breaking point. There was a general sense of: “What now?” The question of how it could have come to this, let alone the question of people’s collective guilt, was never asked. But those were the questions that interested me! When I was a young child – I was born in 1938 – general ruin seemed to be the new reality for the nation that had lost the war. What are you supposed to tell a snot-nosed kid when he comes to you saying: “Tell me what happened!”? Speech is silver, silence is golden! As a child, I got on the grown-ups’ nerves. And I learned the effect of their silence early on. It left me and a proportion of my generation in the lurch, to a greater or lesser degree. It took me until the age of 21 to come to terms with my relationship to my father. And it took almost a whole lifetime after that to smooth out the cracked legacy it left me with. My relationship with my father is at the centre of my story of enforced silence. Before we get on to the father-son-relationship in general, I’m interested in how much awareness you had of the process of capitulation in 1945 and the years that followed. Do you have any memories of the war years at all? When it comes to my own memories of the war, I recall the Christmas of 1943 very fondly, when my father was given special leave from the Eastern front. My mother, my brother and I had been evacuated from Halle/Saale because of the air raids, and we went to stay with relatives in Lusatia, where my parents were from. The family was all there on Christmas Eve. I can still feel the joy of it today. I had my photograph taken with a corporal’s cap and rifle. Aunt Hilde, my mother’s sister, spoke of her firm belief that I, little Klausi, would marry Edda Göring after the final victory. The wireless was playing marching music and/or Christmas carols. The women were so moved, they could hardly conceal their tears. They dripped onto the roast goose as they were basting it, and into the boiling water for the Thüringer dumplings. Family! Father showed Uncle Paul his medal and strangely, as I recall, one or two Russian medals as well. I assume that the war, and experiences of the front lines, were the main topic of conversation “among men.” And as I sat in front of a grey castle, which had been passed down to me as my Christmas present, shooting peas out of toy cannons at tin soldiers, there was no sense of fear. “Juch-hei and hurrah!” Not a trace of a suspicion that we might lose the war. That was how things were on 24.12.43. It was many months since the end of the decisive Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943. Today I think: “Beautiful, blissful Christmas. In nebela nebulosa propaganda!”

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That’s the way you remember it? Yes, that’s how it was for me. I can’t remember any negative feelings. It was how it was. I was happy, I assume. I was five at the time, nearly six, and my brother was two. And Father and Mother were the best people in the world! That’s what you think as a child. Did that change in the years that followed? This is the point I would like to make: you can only comprehend the radical change in behaviour two years after that, and with it the aggressive silence about the Nazi period towards my generation, if you acknowledge that this sudden emptiness caused a rupture in the heads of the young generation. Not infrequently an hour when bastards are born, to quote Peter Sloterdijk. So I believe, at least. This period in my early childhood when that eloquent, elevated sense of togetherness and greatness as a nation, a spirit to which the adults had unconsciously subordinated themselves, particularly my parents – they had listened to it and followed it, like children do – turned into its opposite. You saw your loved ones in a whole new light. The new behaviour was one thing; the silence about the reasons behind it was even worse. The adults didn’t talk about it: their generation had become faint-hearted creatures, they were ashamed, they wanted nothing more to do with it all. Their reaction was purely a defence against their own culpability. And we were growing up in the shadow of their self-imposed silence. Hitler’s rabble-rousing “obliteration” had done an about-face. No time to worry about children’s concerns. I was in a state of total confusion. Before, I had been at the centre of the family, and afterwards I had the sense of being left in the lurch for many years. The adults around me now simply refused to tell me anything. My father, incidentally, wasn’t at home with the family at this point, immediately after the war. I had high hopes for him: “He’s not like the rest of them!” I told myself. And there you are as a child, trying to get closer to the adults. Did you ask questions? Children do question everything. Exactly! But suddenly, there was this wall of silence. The German wall of silence about … After 1945. Invisible, but real to me. I can’t guarantee that the Christmas of 1943 happened exactly as I remember it. But what stayed in my memory is the German drama of the final victory. “Do you want total war?” “Ye-e-es!” And before you know it – such a quintessentially German word, this “total” – fate turned 180°, and there was the other side at your front door. Assuming your front door was even still there. It must have been a shock in spring 1945, when the catastrophe became a brutal reality. Especially for the proponents of the “thousandyear Reich.” And although it was clearly on its way, many people had refused to see it coming. Everyone stumbled and fell, and more than a few never got up again. Remained silent forever. It was a horrified silence. The petit-bourgeois Christian world of the family was trying to suffocate a part of itself. Together with the fear that was growing out of it. That meant that a lot of people blocked

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out the very idea of addressing their own guilt. Today I can see that the total collapse was more than a physical heap of rubble. People themselves collapsed. And those who were truly guilty mingled with the general population, seeking cover. Lifetime investments evaporated into nothing. In my family, too. Yes: and then there are no words. It takes your breath away, as people say. The economy, the culture was on its knees. Silence is the language of powerlessness. “From the spring’s dreams of blossom, jam is made in autumn.” A truly wise quotation from Peter Bamm [real name: Curt Emmrich, 1897–1975]. He was a German ship’s doctor, surgeon and writer. A whole generation who had really wanted to embody the nation’s greatness was now in a vale of tears. “On top of the world, or in the depths of despair.” And speechless. We can wage war against other countries and try to tell them that it’s in their best interests, but woe … woe … What I couldn’t see as a boy, as I made three attempts to start school in 44, 45 and 46, were the ruins in people’s heads. But the inner turmoil that people felt, including my family, was manifested in a kind of escape into the future, a silent march straight ahead. “They” simply didn’t tell us about the war. Let alone give us explanations. In this time when everyone was speechless and overwhelmed, there was no place for a curious little boy’s questions. And so, like many of my generation, I inherited the mess of the Nazi period, without any explanation of what had happened. Many people my age had a similar experience. You still hear that even today, when old people get together. Can any kind of trust be built up this way? Both within the family, and in society? Not at first. People had no time to work through the relationship conflicts. I, too, was a little bit damaged in this respect. And that was something I didn’t understand for a long time. It took me years to discover the roles that my parents and relatives had played. To question them, in order to understand. And to combat the general mistrust of people that was growing within me. I wanted to resist, and break through the wall of silence. I wasn’t looking for continuity. What tradition would I have looked for? At that time, we boys didn’t know what tradition was. The rupture – the rubble of the war – that was my familiar territory, surrounded by the wall of silence that characterised that period. I didn’t give up. I poked about “in the fog,” but I kept going all the same. I was trying to make contact. Looking for connections, relations and relationships. I am now convinced that, because I was curious and strong, I did the right thing. My instinct was not to resign myself to it. I wanted to know: the enforced silence made me curious. I was greedy for life; I never had any real material greed. But at that time – I was just a nuisance. And where was your father? Father wasn’t there. And because he wasn’t there, I expected answers from him …  …which he couldn’t give you. Then, when he came back, he was silent just like the rest of them. And that hurt.

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You were left on your own? When you’re young, you live by asking questions. And if you don’t get answers, then God knows, your thoughts quickly go off in the wrong direction. Blaming yourself is one of those directions. And if you’re lucky, then you’re gripped by a stubborn anger. What do the grown-ups want? What are they expecting? What should we believe? When Father came back from West Germany for a few days, the ritual was over. Mother: “I can’t control the boy any longer!” Father: “Come here!” And hey presto, I got a beating. That was how the question-and-answer game went. But I hadn’t learned anything. Silence can be doubly hurtful. The silent person denies themselves the interaction, and it hurts the person to whom it is addressed. It’s like sending out enquiries and getting only blank sheets of paper through the post in response. On the one hand this is a terrible, violent act towards you as a young person, and on the other, you’re given no help to understand it. And the children, the children are always caught up in it. You can see these legacies every day on the news. Silence can be deeply antisocial. Silence divides: it creates resignation, disinterest, brokenness. But also action: I’ve got to get out of here! You stand at a kind of fork in the road with yourself. You have to make a decision about how you’re going to escape. Look at the immigrant children who are crossing the sea every day. “There’s something in them …” Right, I see. The capitulation was like a kind of salto mortale in your family between 1943 and 1945. That’s understandable. It seemed important for me to place the father-son story in context; it makes what shaped my later behaviour more obvious, I think. Now that I’m older, I say things like: “We all need to re-learn how to be silent.” And I’m sure that now, you will find that surprising. I’m convinced that not speaking, being silent at the right moment can prevent many things. Silence is such a subtle thing. Silence – a negative experience first, but also always the opportunity to sharpen your senses in the empty space that results. “Let silence make you a little more solitary.” That emptiness ultimately mutates into the ability to mature in silence. Incidentally, my teachers often told me off by saying: “Frost, you will never mature, just rot.” From my point of view, that was wrong. I was simply interested in other things. The fact is that the ever-present wall of silence and, embedded within it, my father’s silence, triggered in me an intense preoccupation with him and his life. In a way that went much deeper than glib answers about wartime heroics, superficial nonsense. My father never said anything about his experiences in the army during the Second World War. And above all, he never passed any comment on what had happened. I didn’t know what he thought about it all! That was the problem for a long time. He was drafted in 1942, and apart from very brief periods, I only got to know him in 1953, ten days after 17 June 1953 when, as a 15-year-old schoolboy, I went over to the West from Halle/Saale on my own after the East German uprising. He was a stranger, really, who suddenly wanted to control the fate of our little family, now we were finally together – my mother and brother followed four months later.

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We, father and son, just never got started. And there was certainly no catching-up or working through things in conversation. First the radio silence during his long absences, then the silence in response to my eager questions the few times I saw him after the war. Having moved about a lot between 1948 and 1953, Father ended up in the West. All in all, he was largely absent for ten years. I suffered a lot. As a result of his insistence that silence was golden, I had no father I could turn to with complete trust. I had no anchor. If your parents are silent and don’t explain the past to you, you can’t learn from it, and so you have no helpful guide for the future. Without the past, there is no future, as they say. Silence is stony ground, you can’t plant seeds there. Where silence reigns, the wrong words can easily come out. Words that can precipitate you into the next catastrophe. Those same words would be said in a noisy environment – but you would scarcely be able to hear them. All the schoolteachers in my primary, middle and high schools – first in the East, then in the West – had a problem with me: I was at odds with myself. For me personally, there was an additional aspect of confusion on top of this: the Eastern Sector, later the GDR, started systematically producing anti-fascist propaganda, coupled with anti-capitalism (“Yanks go home”) right at the start of the Cold War. The West, meanwhile, which became the Federal Republic of Germany after 1948, latched on to the new advantages of the USA’s Marshall Plan with its “available at last!” attitude towards consumption. There was no process of digesting what had gone before; the country just embraced the “economic miracle.” It was pure repression. For me, those were bipolar years of constantly going back and forth between the West with Father and the East with my family. It tore me apart. “What should I think?” I smuggled things over the border a few times, accompanying my father. Jewellery and furs going one way. Coffee beans coming back. That seemed like a good metaphor to me. East and West seemed to speak different languages. The gates of knowledge: the story of how we had got to this point remained a closed door to me. A few crumbs of overheard information snapped up crossing the Harz border East-West, West-East. The adults were all too keen to set themselves new goals, and so the old questions about the Nazi period and the war and the kinds of experiences that individuals carried within them mostly went unanswered. At least for me. If people did say anything, they tended to glorify the war and make people out to be heroes. Or sometimes what they said would be plaintive and self-pitying. Or hypocritical denials. And there were the perennial dwellers in the past, mostly crazed drunkards, who refused to let go: “We will pull out the Russian wolf ’s teeth and cut its claws and drive it back to the Russian taiga.” Yes, I heard that, too. “I didn’t know about any of that.” This sentence was the post-war slogan. The events of that time, in my childhood and youth, had a lasting influence on my life. I went abroad at 21. I didn’t take any part in the 1968 student movement. And so I was released into society, and the mighty, violent events of the past slumbered on through a general, barely mentioned conspiracy of silence. So much for the 1950s and 60 s. The opportunity for us to work through the war and the post-war period in a systematic way only came – from my point of

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view – after the Berlin Wall fell. Too late for many people. And too soon for others. For many years, I personally could find no peace. Didn’t know where I fitted in. I was still affected by the turmoil of having been left in the lurch – until I learned to accept my father’s unresponsiveness, and became open to other potential ways of questioning things. Silent time – decision time: those were the years after the war. You’ve described the social phenomenon of the wall of silence, and how it is perpetuated, from your own point of view. Did your relationship with your father become more open after the Frost family was reunited? When we lived together, from 1953 until I was 21 in 1959, I had an opportunity to quietly observe my father. I still have a very clear memory of one key event. It was Christmas again. The television was on. Black and white. A boys’ choir, it was, though my memory of that is a bit vague: the Regensburg Cathedral Sparrows, that boys’ choir that everyone felt so sorry for decades later when the paedophile scandal broke, they were singing carols. Standing in perfect rows. Very prim and proper, I think they were even wearing short trousers. The Christmas service had just begun, the bright, clear voices rang out, and then Father started howling his head off. My father, sobbing like a sissy! It was extremely disconcerting, and I was surprised at how deeply it affected me. He was overflowing; his memories had won. In his weakness at that moment, looking at the tears running down his face, I learned to love my father. It made a lot of things better: “My father! My dear, human father.” I sat down beside him on the sofa. Christmas. Silent night … Intimacy. After a long time: silence. A silence I was aware we were experiencing. Not speaking prevents intimacy. But simply being together in silence creates a bond. That was the end of the year, sometime between 1955 and 1958. We had broken open that generative taboo of not being able to speak. He still didn’t speak, however, and – now I was older – I had no interest in pseudo-heroic stories. But I suddenly wanted to know everything about his life! I wanted to mend that rift. It still wasn’t over, for me. That was it: I wanted to know the person my father was. And that was extreme, then. Born in the lignite mining area of Lusatia. 1909. Small merchant family. Kaiser Wilhelm on the throne. The legacy of the glorified Franco-Prussian war still making itself felt. Outbreak of war in 1914. Father’s father – my grandfather – was shot and killed in the First World War, in 1917. An accident. Father was seven or eight. Grandmother was left with three small children in the turbulence of the post-war years. The 1920s. Inflation, global economic crisis, etc, etc, … He went to a state grammar school housed in what had been the main cadet school in Berlin, a former Prussian officers’ academy, which had to be repurposed under pressure from the WW1 reparation costs, and which upheld the old German values as well as it could. That’s what I believe, at any rate. I would like to have discovered more. Physical education was a priority. Civil obedience in place of civil courage. He sang in a boys’ choir. In 1930, he was 21 years old. In 1933, when Hitler took power, he was studying political

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economics in Halle/Saale. Qualified as an economist. Doctorate. The start of his professional life. The year was 1937: the time when Nazi propaganda triumphed. And Father – aged 28 – was in the midst of it. Then: conscription. Corporal. Eastern Front. The start of his personal descent into crisis. And his self-imposed silence. Even to his son. The circle closes slowly. It caught him completely unawares, I think now. Coming from a modest background, he got involved with the Nazis in a fateful way. He had his own plans, but he became part of theirs. He worked things out for himself, wanted to realise his dreams, but the demonic demagogues of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party were writing their own story. One goosestep at a time. And then you’re caught up in it. And sometimes strung up by it – see the Nuremberg Trials. Immanuel Kant would have fulminated: “Educated, but still too easily led.” Father’s experience was the opposite of being free. “Daring to think”: is it a risk? Credulity and temptation are strange colleagues! What is striking, looking back, is the lack of trust he had in his son – it was the same for my brother. Was he afraid of failing as a father? But he could still have told me about his life, couldn’t he? For instance, how he felt as a young man from Lusatia in the Berlin of the late 20 s and early 30 s, before Hitler took power. What was his position then? Was Father a Nazi? He could have explained the situation to me, to us. So why did he refuse to? I’m not an army slave-driver; he didn’t have to present himself as a hero to me! Being silent makes you lonely. After the capitulation, there was the long trek back from the Eastern Front to Halle. Being denounced as a Nazi. But he wasn’t: amends were only made much later. When the occupied zones/Berlin sectors were handed over to the four victorious powers, the Americans took him to the West. He was a prisoner. And then he chose his own form of exile, working on the land in some one-horse town near Duderstadt. Years of being afraid – of keeping quiet? A long search for a job, etc, etc.… He found his first position working for a bank. Munich. He was 45 by then. A broken life. Trauma. Or did he actually have something to hide? It’s possible. Despite it all: I slowly came to understand why his silence towards me was a kind of answer in itself. It was clever! But also risky. This was his offer to me, which ultimately gave me the opportunity to find my way to him, and thereby also to myself, during these years. This experience taught me to fill the gaps left by my father’s silence, and my own fruitless waiting, using my own initiative. He gave me the opportunity to enlighten myself. To develop the courage to work out for myself what Father could never have conveyed to me through his own life story. Father’s silence led me decisively to a self-determined life – at least, it led me to consider what that might look like. Relaxation techniques came into vogue; I called it finding silence. Things turn around. Silence has changed key. What do you mean by “key”? Let me give you a sentence that might sound strange at first; it came to me after a long period of contemplation in the silence of my relatively large “garden of retreat,” which I’ve been tending for 20 years: We should re-learn how to keep

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quiet about things. Learn what else not speaking can mean. And I’ll tell you why. Imagine a silent majority. People who have lost their voices after a powerful experience. The quiet of consternation. A standstill, at long last. The world comes to a halt. In their silence, they all become equal. No one presumes to raise his voice now and say how things should be for everyone in future. Collective silence. Even those who are just waiting to get going again have to stay silent. For once! What power in that nothingness! Like the silence before the Big Bang. And within them, the collective consciousness: an opportunity for collective healing. That’s my dream. A utopia?! God rested on the seventh day. Self-imposed silence. And I venture to add: in order to see if everything had gone well – and perhaps to see if anything stood out as requiring improvement amid all that was good. Unfortunately, he then fell into a deep, dreamless sleep over the long night before the next day – the eighth – and forgot what needed improving. Ha, ha, ha! No, I’m sorry: to be serious again, in 1945 everyone had heard enough of the rabble-rousing shouts and the thunder of cannon in this overly loud attempt at dominance. In such times, silence can be insightful, creating the space that drives powerful, totalitarian, false idols out of people’s heads. Silence is anti-hierarchical. Silence is part of developing democratic processes, just as revolt is. But this requires a lot of people, a majority acting under their own free will, to first keep their mouths shut, and think, and then act, in that order. I would have liked that, at the time. I used to like the escape into imagination a lot. Is there a difference in your mind between schweigen – not speaking – and verschweigen – hushing something up? Can you say something about that, too? Yes. In fact, I can illustrate the difference using another episode with my father. I’ve told you about not speaking out of a sense of helplessness. And I’ve tried to explain why that can also be an opportunity for something genuinely new. But there is also a calculated kind of silence, in which you deliberately don’t say anything. The person maintaining this silence has something they don’t want to reveal. And it’s quite easy to do: you just keep your lips firmly sealed. It often takes years to discover. The ball is other people’s court. I learned from my father here, too. And my image of him flipped 180° again. This important experience of verschweigen, if I can put it that way, came when I was 21, and again it related to my relationship with my father. A year previously, I’d been assessed by the army. I should have done my national service when I finished my apprenticeship. But before I got called up, I was given a contract as a process engraver – colour engraving on copper – in Rotterdam. Getting out of national service was quite a problematic undertaking back then. The argument that I would be a soldier in West Germany, and my cousins were soldiers in the so-called Eastern Zone, fell on deaf ears. I think Strauß was the defence minister at the time. In 1959/1960, the German attack on the Netherlands was still fresh in people’s memories there. 1940: the first blanket-bombing of Rotterdam. Göring was

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commanding the Luftwaffe. I had a colleague whose father had died in the war defending the bridges of Rotterdam. He sat next to me. I was the “Rott mof” – snot muff – a term from the First World War applied to German soldiers whose noses ran so much in the ice-cold north wind of the Dutch winters that they seemed to be wearing warming muffs. I was, to put it mildly, not too welcome at the end of the 50 s. In my two years in Rotterdam, I tried to come to grips with what the Germans had done there in the Second World War. Self-enlightenment: Second World War. During that time, I wrote a few letters home. These letters are still in my possession today. Mother kept them. Here is an extract from one of them. Word for word: “The last few days have been a holiday for the Dutch. A commemoration of their liberation from the Germans. It’s sensible to keep a low profile then. There are flowers everywhere on the streets, where Germans shot people. It’s a funny feeling to observe people’s memorial ceremonies. But I’m still very glad to be doing a season of work here, rather than serving in the army.” No reply. And with that, my need for harmony was at an end. Father still couldn’t tell his own son that he approved of my taking a “different” path, going my own way. At first, I found his reaction shockingly callous. It seemed to me that he’d learned nothing in all the years since the war. He hadn’t made use of his self-imposed silence and the introspection that can grow out of it. He still didn’t recognise the value of asking questions. “Help me, by giving me answers.” He could have guided me towards the right path in life. “Giving help means creating love. Father. Doesn’t it?” That was my first reaction. “He hasn’t found peace for himself,” I thought, “and this time, it’s his own fault.” To me, his silence was a non-verbal rejection of my attitude and what I was doing. He embodied what was happening in the country as a whole: he had got past the true-German fascist mindset, and yet at the same time, he hadn’t. He had become a cold warrior in the Cold War. There was no third way. John Foster Dulles and Stalin both rejoiced: with their For or Against, they had him doubly in their grasp. He kept his true attitude under wraps, I was sure about that. Setting things right was his perennial theme. It had been since 1917, in fact. He must never have got over the loss of “his” father in “his” childhood. For him, there was only the either/or society. To the very end. Or so I thought, angrily. I, by contrast, was on my way to developing an attitude of both/and. He hadn’t made use of the quieter years, either. He lived like he was a relic from the past, even though he still had a strong physical presence. But he had kept quiet about his story. In our family, the ability to pass things down from one generation to the next had been lost. The old order had shrouded itself in silence. Our family regarded the two wars, the First and the Second World War, as the kind of monstrous events that the children, at least, should be spared. This now seems to be the justification for his behaviour. His thinking was: “Do not burden the boys. Keep them out of my life. You can’t give good advice with the Nazi period breathing down your neck, let them go their own way.” He would grow old adhering to this, his self-reliant tradition, while my future and that of my brother was only just getting on the right track. There had to be

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a new start. And it hit me like a bolt of lightning: “My new start. My radical new start. With no past behind me.” He couldn’t say anything more to me now. And he didn’t want to, either. He had missed the opportunity for it. Was that his intention? Today, I would say: “Yes, for my – for our – sake.” Had he released me, in his own way, with his enforced silence? Had it been his intention right from the start that I would take this radical step? Those were my thoughts at the time. At that moment, my own life began. His silence had always given me the space I was now going to make use of. Silence can break traditions; I know that today. And when those traditions are so dreadful, no good will come from keeping them alive. There’s nothing to inherit there but a non-material legacy. Father had greatness! How painful the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s must have been for him. At first his reaction seemed shockingly callous, but in the end I understood. The hostile atmosphere between us changed. Mother’s sentence, spoken every six months: “I can’t control that boy any longer,” the beatings that he then dished out, no longer bothered me. “First they don’t explain anything and won’t speak to me, and then they wonder why I refuse to listen any more… well, it’s too late now!” It was over. The close ties were gone. His life was not an example for me. And he knew it. Is that what he wanted? There is this carousel of silence in history, which first stands still and then begins to turn, fuelled by a sophisticated power struggle, again and again, slowly at first, almost imperceptibly. Until it spins so fast it throws some people off. In the last part of his life, Father’s deepest wish was reunification. A victory-in-spiteof-everything? Against the East? He didn’t live to see it happen. Illness, cancer. He fell into a coma a few days before the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. 80 years old. In the period that followed, the archives and document safes were gradually opened up, and what came out brought light into the dark corners of history. But I was still left with the memory of the silent period after the war. My history grew out of my father’s, just as his did out of his own father’s. The Germany of the 19th and 20th centuries is reflected in it, and the enforced silence about that history played a fateful role in it. It is the mini saga of my family, on my father’s side, not exactly laudable, but for me a very well-worn, run-of-themill, not uncommon story. And of course also typically German, I think. On that topic, I’m reminded of an episode from my schooldays at the August Hermann Francke Foundation in Halle/Saale. My German teacher, an older academic linguist, explained the name Frost to me: “Frost doesn’t come from ‘frost’. And it doesn’t come from ‘forest’, either. It comes from Frondienst – compulsory labour. Your forefathers were indentured labourers – Fronstler – Frostler.” Well then! That’s what we always were – the silent masses. Taking orders from above! My family! My tradition! The Frosts! Ultimately, it took almost a century – grandfather, father, son – to reveal the spirit of servitude. That exemplary mission-conscious attitude, which was subsumed into the obedient pride of subjects living in small, independent states prior to German unification. And not infrequently, of course, also because there was no other option. But being oppressed and being subservient is not the same thing. With his silence, Father taught me to break with the false

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role models of this tradition. Was it a conscious aim? Unconscious? One thing is certain: there were no longer any points of connection for me. “Don’t let anyone tell you right is left, boy. Don’t make the same mistakes.” He taught me, without lecturing me at all, to find self-confident answers in my then newly discovered silent space of reflection – and there are many of those, in many places in the world. At least, that was how I understood it. I keep this legacy with me to this day: it is a treasure. These are places of retreat, which allow you to develop your sensitivity, sharpen your awareness and let your intuition show you what to do next. This was the first paradigm shift of my life. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but the idea of being like them … no, never. This kind of protest shaped me for many years. It was the beginning of my self-determined life. I was now responsible for myself. And no one else. I was conscious of that. That’s how I would put it. I first met you in 1986. At that time, you were running your advertising agency in the three German-speaking countries. You were 48 years old. From the starting point that you’ve described, how did you end up in advertising communications? And how does your work relate to the topic of this interview, enforced silence? In the market, are some things kept quiet from consumers through manipulated information? Can you say something about that? You are an expert on silence, after all. It might be a little unfair to you, but I’m going to start by giving you something of a lateral answer. Take it as a statement: There is competition. It’s part of our economic system. And there is dishonest competition: attempts to distort things in order to give one side an advantage. Often these are borderline things that are hard to spot. Again and again, we see these scandalous provocateurs, in politics, society, culture, sport, etc. No question: that’s how it is. But we also see the reverse, in people who try to enlighten us. The key words here are: voluntary controls. The commissions for consumer protection; nature and environmental protection labels; purchase contracts with guarantee clauses and consumer rights. Legal constraints that mean companies have to tell the truth, including in the small print. Sanctions. The right to complain, the right to cancel, fair dealing promises. There are price monitors. And not least, the consumer himself, who is responsible for his purchase. He can just refuse to buy! It’s a powerful weapon: “Yes to this; no to that.” Without buying, there is no selling. Without selling, no revenue. Without revenue, no returns. Which is easy to say, of course, but then you find yourself rushing willy-nilly around the supermarket aisles. There is always the threat of discovery, lurking in the background. A lot remains in the dark for the time being. As I like to say: no smoke without fire. But proving something is always a difficult undertaking. Disingenuousness, even deliberate manipulation with harmful consequences, means you have to work very hard to get justice. And punishments for economic crimes are often quite trivial. Some people can afford to commit misdemeanours; they just accept the possibility of getting caught. Here, the formation of both my opinions and yours

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relies upon well-researched news from the media landscape. Everyone has the right to protest. As a rule – when we read about something in the press – this has already happened. I don’t want to join the ranks of the conspiracy theorists. But I think I know what you’re aiming at when you, as a consumer, ask an advertising specialist – what a terrible thing to do! – about what is kept quiet in advertising. It’s the general feeling of many people: a latent sense of unease. Just read the Club of Rome. And here, too, I can give you no answer but: ultimately everyone who buys something, with the money he has earned by fair means or foul, has a high degree of responsibility for what he is doing. Supply and demand are partners, which doesn’t mean they can’t sometimes be found in a clinch. But that has nothing to do with advertising directly. We don’t have any obligation to buy. The market offers a huge variety of products and services for all areas of life. Anyone who fails to do his research and convince himself he’s buying the right thing is contributing to the miraculous multiplication of the negative. I say: “No one buys crap, even if it’s the greatest crap on earth.” But other people always say that. The buyer is sure of himself. And of course, I’m aware that excessive shopping, as a way of investing in your life and the lives of the people you love, is socially conformist. The best advertisement for cigars is a cigar smoker in a smoking room. The mainstream is motivated by examples, by role models. Advertising space that companies purchase and decorate for their customers is a space for representing their interests. Manipulative by nature. “Someone’s paying for this.” Advertising can’t be value-free. Advertising is the hymn of self-praise, and everyone knows the tune. “People don’t read advertising; they read what interests them, and sometimes that’s advertising.” And every seducer needs someone who can be seduced! The rules of play in our free market aren’t perfect, but for me they’re the best solution we’ve come up with so far. But there is a terrible danger inherent in it for consumers who don’t have a sense of responsibility. And it’s clear: help is then needed. Of course, I know about the tip of the iceberg of this consumerism: the roughly 350,000 people in Switzerland alone who are addicted to shopping. And the trend is on the rise. My answer to your question is hardly going to be satisfactory, that’s clear to me. What I can do is throw a spotlight onto the complex world of advertising, and how it works. Of course, only insofar as you want me to. Perhaps it will shed some indirect light on the social system that we are all tied into. And on my second personal paradigm shift, from frenetic noise to insightful silence. “Silence is the non-verbal side of communication,” is what you said right at the start of our conversation. You didn’t grow up to be silent! As I see it, your work in advertising suddenly put you on the loud side of society. You were an ad man. A professional propaganda specialist, if you’ll allow me to express it that way. Commercially oriented. I’d like to go back to the year 1953, when I packed my most essential clothes and books into a cardboard box and went to the West. A few days later, Father picked

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me up from the Bahnhofsmission charity centre in Munich. Our first flat was small and nearly empty. My attempt to integrate myself into the local high school failed miserably. I had to catch up on Latin and English from a standing start. And I had a year to do it. In tests – in history, for example – I would get the highest grade or the lowest, a 1 or a 6. Peasants’ Wars: 1. The Wittelsbachs: 6. Result: I completely lost it. Secondary school leaving certificate with grades missing: “It would be best for him to do an apprenticeship.” The one top grade I got was in art. My place of refuge was going to be the art academy, that’s where I wanted to go. Father said: “Out of the question, learn a respectable trade.” “Father, what does respectable mean in your world?” “That’s enough! I’ll find a place for you in reproduction.” So I trained as a process engraver, black and white, then colour lithographs for art catalogues, the “prescribed” art of the recognised elites. Oh, Father! “Free art for me…” Completely overwhelmed by the transition from the East German school system to the West, more or less shunted out of school, I started my career as a reproduction technician: process engraving for book printing, first black and white lines, then colour etching, in Holland on copper for the USA, then lithographs for offset in St. Gallen. Retraining in various things was my professional normality. You have to understand that in the 50s and 60s, daily newspapers, for instance, were only printed in black and white. Then came the excitement of colour inserts, colour brochures were used to attract customers, and colour television wasn’t far off. It was the transition to the world of colour, and with it the introduction of entirely new technologies. All my years of travelling and learning were for the birds, when it came to my future prospects. The business I was originally supposed to go into, and the pride that my amateurish, naïve father took in having taught junior a proper trade after all, this loose cannon – that’s what was in the back of his mind – well, that quickly went out the window. The sensory colour measuring devices came in, and with them the age of automation in the reprographics and printing trade. Machines were increasingly doing the work that once required highly skilled people. The robot twilight of the gods! I woke up and smelled the coffee pretty soon, I could see where this was going. Father said nothing again, and from a distance. “The full facts are yet to be established.” So, time to rethink. My colleagues in St. Gallen laughed at me… This is the way with crises: in the beginning, they’re easy to remedy, but hard to discern. Later, the crisis is obvious to everyone, but is usually very difficult to deal with. I had internalised the memory of Christmas 1943 – as macabre as that comparison may be – and of the “never!” from back then. And the silence that soon followed in an attempt to ignore the realities. At that time, I had sleepless nights; later on, my colleagues did. And more than a few ended up in defeated silence! And so I swapped reproduction for creation at the right time, though with heavy financial losses. Two years of earning 150 or 200 deutschmarks a month. As a former reproduction expert, I was faced with a choice: either learn to serve the machines, or become a shoe salesman. What options! My brain turned a salto mortale. Here it is again: intuition, that sense that can grow out of enforced silence.

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And so I retrained and learned everything I could about advertising art: advert graphics, packaging design, evening classes and correspondence courses in copywriting. I became an art director with various agencies. Concept designer. Consultant. I was entirely mobile and very flexible. Independent at 32. I quickly set up three little agencies in Switzerland, Austria and Germany, with a team of 24 people at the peak of their success. Did further training in marketing, later became a management consultant, with a holistic approach, specialising in social design. Small and medium-sized business clients at home and abroad. Lectures, guest lecturing at technical universities, etc., etc.… It was a crazy time, in the best sense of the word. To my father, I say: thank you. Your enforced silence was an indirect prompt to look more closely and read between the lines; it helped me. I’m not completely sure it was actually meant that way, but I can’t ask now. No matter: I thank you. I didn’t want to be like you, so I had to learn responsibility for myself. But with that came a growing desire to play with my own freedom. Was that part of your decree? Thanks to your behaviour, which I so hated at first, you made me alert. Questioning. Not a follower, not obedient. Unconventional. Progressive. A nonconformist. Unrest is a citizen’s first duty! I was different. An autodidact. Being well-behaved and tame, always ready to follow orders, makes you dependent on others. Quite simply. In the advertising industry, these guys were the doormen. I was someone who thought differently, who liked to communicate, who talked a lot. I did the opposite of being silent. “Right in the middle of things. Full throttle!” And I made no secret of the fact that in turning all these somersaults, I made some mistakes. That’s my position to this day. I often polarise. If only to scout out people’s interests. To test boundaries. Unfair competition constantly brings problem areas to the surface. They need our answers. Loud times are good times. Being present is everything! Tested and assertive. No silence there! From the very start, I wanted to be an enlightening mediator between supply and demand. Father was part of a generation of either-or men; I was more on the side of both-and. Today, this cooperative system of both-and is omnipresent, though not everyone, whether on the left or the right of the political spectrum, can get to grips with it. I used to love the lively debate of competition. If you’re going to achieve cooperation between different interests, you need to make things as fair as possible. No bogeymen, please! Good communication sheds light on things. And enlightenment – in my view – is one of the foundations of consumer democracy. Keeping things quiet, drawing a veil over things, keeping people in the dark – I don’t like that. That was how I saw my job; it was a role I created for myself, and I was very disciplined about it; the middle way is the one I’ve stuck to, between the fronts, to this day. I’ve done my best never to be co-opted. My view differs from that of my father, who allied himself to a supposed ideal. Today, if ten people are shouting the same thing, it rings alarm bells for me, and I start wondering what their true motivation is. Achieving harmony between contradictory things; cooperation in a diverse, fractalised world: that’s an idea of mine.

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My “garden of retreat” helps me to put things in order, in silence. It is a fractal itself: a harmony of contradictions produced by the most diverse plant types. It’s an excellent starting point for developing innovations of all kinds. It’s easier to be creative in the chaos of contradictions. The dominant voices are the ones that cause trouble – just like the weeds in my garden. Silence was completely off the cards at the start of my career, and even years later. I was right in the middle of the dynamic, progressive, chaotic years of the post-war boom, which was later termed West Germany’s “economic miracle.” It lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall and reunification. I was always inquisitive, and propaganda strategies of every stripe fascinated me. And advertising is the great show pony of seduction and attempts to influence people. There was a bestseller at the time called The Great Seducer. I was in the midst of it all, in the age of Now! Here! At once! Completely! I didn’t feel tied to climbing the career ladder, wanted to be as independent as possible. An entrepreneur who loved swimming against the tide. I was lucky. Despite very limited start-up capital, I had the right mindset, and it was a good time to start a career. “The markets are in the mind,” is what I told people in my lectures. Acquisition was fashionable. The objective was to acquire consumer goods, services, investments. Can you give an example of what you mean by that? I was often right to think outside the box. I remember flying Munich to Berlin, Berlin to Munich, there and back on the same day. My agency in Munich, FrostBerner and Partners GmbH, had been invited to tender alongside four other agencies: we were supposed to present our ideas for the market launch of a newlyfounded purchasing company in the optical business. They weren’t offering much money for it. I can’t remember why now, but our agency was totally unprepared when we got on the plane. We’d produced a “short,” a one-page summary, but otherwise we had nothing. But we wanted the business, no, we desperately needed it. The merry-go-round of presentations started at about 11am in a conference room at a Grand Hotel in Berlin. One of the other people tendering left the meeting looking stressed, with a thick presentation folder full of documents under his arm. We had an hour to win over these potential clients. And then there we stood: the art director, me, relaxed and smiling. Who sitting opposite us could judge the emotional message given out by a branded jacket combined with faded jeans? Then there was Schlö, one of our copywriters: 190 cm tall and weighing 110 kilos, with wild hair, red corduroy trousers and a wide leather belt with a gigantic buckle 20 cm across, created by the horror artist H.R. Giger (Zurich) depicting a death’s head with an erect penis in high-grade steel. Our junior account executive at FBP Munich, perfectly styled in a massproduced suit and a fancy tie. Across from us, about 25 or 30 people, mostly men, just a few women. Most sitting in dignified positions, deliberately giving off vibes of staid, solid dependability. They were representatives of a select guild of well-known regional opticians with several branches. Mostly family businesses. Altogether a strong national network of opticians with good coverage. I already

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knew from my contacts that they disagreed about the situation in which they found themselves: the structural change in the optical market had consequences for their firms. But what consequences? They had to distance themselves from the white-coat image, from presenting themselves as eye doctors when what people wanted was simply to be able to see, and to buy glasses. They had real concerns about losing their good margins. The discounters, who were focusing on the price of glasses – particularly the frames – and advertising that aggressively, were putting the traditionalists under pressure. Glasses had become a commercial product, and there was no putting that genie back in the bottle. Farewell, seeingaids! And the role of the insurance companies, including additional charges, reinforced the issue. They were playing it safe, saying “not with us,” and then not saying anything else. Unable to agree on how they should react to market pressure, they had a few advertising agencies come and dance for them, to glean information. But of course, they kept quiet about that to begin with. Let’s just wait and see. Among these people sat the young CEO of the newly founded purchasing company, which was supposed to create the conditions in which they could implement the new price policy for glasses frames and services. He was smart, very smart. In simple terms, his business model was: buy as cheaply as possible, which meant from abroad, from Asia. And then make as much profit as possible. Sell with an eye to a healthy margin to reduce risk, ideally from the start. And of course, with as small an advertising budget as possible. His CEO salary was another matter. And now these people here! These mustered troops! The eyes of these opticians were filled with horror. There was an explosion of prejudgement: these guys? No, never! We had their full attention. Silence. A brief greeting – silence – a short introduction to FBP’s client list, which included two opticians: a Swiss top dog and a smaller, German chain. Silence. I made my first statement, loud and clear. “We are here to present a rejection.” “I’ll give this to you in writing.” With that, our off-the-peg junior account executive distributed a mini-mini-blurb to everyone, so that at least they could remember the name and address of the agency. You could have heard a fly fart. Time taken: five minutes. “FBP is only here in Berlin because you made available to us an honorarium for concept design and strategy, which allowed us to finance our flight costs and travel expenses. That’s why we are able to be here today and look you in the eye, like an optician.” An exchange of glances. “You are Germany’s best-positioned opticians in your respective cities and regions. You are family businesses, often going back generations. The overall quality of your companies’ marketing is high, and well-balanced. It is clear to us that there is a structural change coming to your industry, triggered by a discounting policy from companies offering cheap products. And opticians, too! You want to react to that. But at any price? Think about your customer base, the people who come to you because you seem to offer more than just low prices – don’t they? It took years to win these customers. It will only take minutes to lose them. Don’t go in for any experiments! Separate your strategy into

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customers, potential target groups, and non-customers. Your briefing to us for this presentation was, to put it mildly, weak. Fundamentally, you don’t know what you really want as a cooperative. Neither in terms of positioning nor of distribution. Are you prepared to risk your successful presence as a service-provider in your regional markets by starting from this position? Don’t make strategic errors today, out of a fear of missing out, which you will come to regret later on… Proceed with caution! Solve the problem before entering the market with your new cooperative branding. And fit the solution you develop into each of your own strong service-provider structures. A little bit of advertising and – hocus pocus – the sales figures will rise: in your case, this entrepreneurial initiative amounts to throwing money away. Ladies and gentlemen, you have not done your homework! I repeat: we are presenting a rejection. As an agency, we want to act seriously and responsibly. Let other people try and convince you with their pretty pictures and slogans. What you need is a business platform, a matrix for your joint representation. And we would be glad to help you with that.” Time taken: seven minutes. Those faces! All of a sudden, we were the golden boys! Schlö got up and gave a short presentation about image. “Image is what your customers think of you. Good advertising (which you rightly want) for poor services spells the end for a company: a lot of people will feel that something speaks to them, but if they’re disappointed in those products, they’ll turn away from you and you won’t get them back. It is a consumer’s right to look elsewhere. That is the moment for competition! Customer disappointment is the mother of ruin.” Schlö sat down. Time taken: three minutes. My conclusion: “If you are convinced that you can successfully combat the approaching structural change in the optical industry with a pin-the-tail-on-thedonkey strategy, then you can go ahead without us.” End of presentation. Total duration: a good 15 minutes. A fortnight later, the written commission came fluttering through our letterbox. A marketing and advertising offer, and – the thing that pleased me most – a separate consultancy contract for me. In those times, when advertising budgets were constantly being loaded with additional demands and inclusive services, which had squeezed our agency’s profitability to the limit despite strict calculations, that was a particular joy for me. The relationship between FBP and the opticians’ cooperative, during the time we worked together, was a good one, characterised by openness and fairness. We worked hard. Our solutions were oriented towards client problems. Towards turnover, towards profit. New investment was required to keep up with the client’s growing requirements. It had to be earned. The family-led small and medium-sized businesses needed it. I can give you another case in which silence played a role. For many years, Frost-Berner and Partners had a contract with an annual budget of 10 million, spread across the three agencies. A big client for us. Although we were under contract, out of nowhere this client wanted an interim tender presentation. Operating successfully in the market, we pulled together the trans-national concept, realigning everything, the entire image. We included everything we

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were doing to encourage sales, and added some new innovations. A Trojan effort. As we already had this contract, from our point of view it was a kind of preinvestment, which would later be balanced out financially. As a rule, a presentation would be given to senior management and heads of department, five people plus the big boss. Suddenly, there were five more faces – or maybe I should say pokerfaces – staring attentively at me. I was surprised. The next morning, I got a phone call. Frost: the big boss wants to speak to you. A short monologue: “Five were in favour of you, five were against. You’re the budget holder, the other agency is new to the business: I have no option but to take the budget away from you.” “Contract or no!” to my question about the length of the contract: “Just try it.” 10 million gross revenue – gone in the space of five minutes. It was like after the war, only this time I learned the silence of being gagged. Three weeks later I got the offer: they wanted to buy our whole presentation, including the right for third parties to use it. “Never mind the legal situation!” As a meagre recompense, a few scrappy special commissions of an unprofitable kind. That’s the way it goes, sometimes. What am I saying here? The silence of the five gentlemen during the presentation should have made me suspicious. The deal had already been done behind the scenes: it had nothing to do with our performance. Big political business. This incident, which almost ruined my agencies, is a good example of the incredible amount of manipulative secrecy that exists in the world, for the benefit of whatever interests. Now, this happened decades ago. And you’re really only asking me about internal matters. But you did want to hear about my career as a mediator in the “living” market of communication – and enforced silence is always there, whether at a macro or a micro level. One thing is certain: I didn’t need to practise silence, let alone keeping quiet about things. “Do good and talk about it” is the advertiser’s motto. With regard to my process of changing track at the start of my career, my wild “best years”: it started very well. Although I was an outsider and an autodidact, the reprographics training I described moved seamlessly into advertising, marketing, management consultancy. Until I got old. And I began to practise the art of reflection in places of retreat, wherever there was an opportunity, in minutes of Autogenic Training. There were places like Maria Laach, the Benedictine monastery which at the time had 80 priests and brothers, which I advised “gastronomically” over the years. Or people who gave me silence, like my wife Silvia. When things began to feel “precarious” for you; does that have something to do with silence? You might well assume that. The lateral approach to things that I already mentioned, which has been a part of me since I was a young man, also helped me here. Reflection is a good word, and silence is the place to find it. And straight off the bat I will tell you a story, if you’ll allow me, about a “meditative” experience in my garden. Another personal paradigm shift: the “garden of retreat.” It was in the 1990s. I’d just got back from a trip abroad for various meetings – every year

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I did 50–60,000 km on the motorways, with my advertising materials in the boot – and I sat down on a soft, padded garden chair, kicked off my shoes, threw my socks in a high arc and stretched my legs out into the cool green of the lawn. It must have rained: the grass was dripping wet. I was surrounded by peace. But my brain kept whirring – it takes a while to wind down. My car has it much easier; take your foot off the gas, the key out of the ignition, and there you go. What is the point of our eternal longing? Isn’t the only aim for people to get their boots on to go and buy more boots, and then, all the more enthusiastically, to run around in those boots buying and buying? And then maybe to be trapped in a cycle of having to make money to keep up with that consumption? And I saw that vividly! Questions upon questions. Why? Why is a banana bent? Once again, I was the one asking questions, but this time I also had to be the one giving answers, in order to save myself. I suddenly realised that the questions were directed at me, and that I was expecting an answer from myself. Give people work, seduce them into buying things, and in so doing take their hard-earned money straight back out of their pockets? Surely that wasn’t right? Being is better than having. That was the second paradigm shift in my life. Ever since then, I have taken time to claim moments of retreat for myself in silent contemplation. I learned to say nothing. And incidentally, as I have already mentioned: I started to train myself in meditation and laid off the nervous smoking before it was too late. As a non-conformist, I took the lateral approach I learned after the war, thanks to Father. You were then able to take a step back and look at your advertising work from a distance. And what have you now discovered? Over the decades, the emphasis in marketing and advertising has shifted from presenting persuasive information about companies to creating complete emotional, visual worlds in consumers’ minds. They have become and are becoming phenomena of a kind of ownership culture. “If you have something, you are someone.” Forwards! Standing still means going backwards! Growth is the only option. My garden is smarter than that. It takes a break to gather its strength. Massification on the one hand – everything to everyone, more, more! And on the other hand, individualism, the active construction of the self through consumption. These are two destinations that people are rushing towards, in opposite directions. No one wants to put the brakes on. Everyone wants to get going. Manipulation is a part of daily life. That’s logical; getting an advantage is very much in vogue. Silence becomes strategic. Keeping things quiet helps to make them disappear. Thoroughly up to date strategy and business practice. Not in every case, and not in every place, but: the full facts are yet to be established. Quite. But there are people issuing warnings about these trends. Rome, 1 January 2018, the Pope’s new year address. I quote: anyone who takes a moment every day to be silent with God, protects his freedom from the “banality

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of consumerism, the blare of commercials, the stream of empty words and the overpowering waves of empty chatter and loud shouting.” I listened to the Pope, too. Silence is really brought to bear within him. Enforced silence, in my experience, is to be recommended, as you’ve heard from my story. Let’s hope that the powerful project developers of this world heard the Pope. Not me. The advertisers were the people who delivered the message: the good news. There were cases where you departed a little from the absolute truth to paint a rosy picture: exaggeration creates an even better profile. In other words: you learned not to run the weaknesses of something up the flagpole straight away. It wasn’t uncommon for companies to keep quiet about these things when they were trying to launch a product. Too much information would have weakened the message, that was the idea. Strictly speaking, that’s manipulation. Or is it just normality? “The trees in the garden grow towards the light, and no one likes to sit in the shade, do they?” The end user didn’t have the complete picture, and he, too, got used to the short, snappy pitches from the messengers. At the same time, the arguments presented by both word and image gradually got more aggressive, in a way that only insiders could really see. Advertising could no longer replace what the product lacked. The whole environment, the product’s aura, became completely crucial. Another image: the production warehouses of industry were full, the wholesale warehouses, the intermediary warehouses, the shelves in the shops, and not least, household storage space, including the deep freeze – everything was full. A second parking space for a second car was a must. “If you want to hang a new suit in your wardrobe, you need to throw an old one out. Or recycle and take it to a charity shop!” The market was suffering from congestion. Everyone had symptoms of constipation, nothing was moving any more (to exaggerate the situation a little). The great age of sales seminars was about to arrive. Courses. Professional development for staff. Sometimes recycling became an issue. Most companies rushed into the future: innovation. The magic formula was planned and controlled renewal of the business system to increase productivity. No standstill, please! Stillness – what’s that? On top of that came the percentage increase in boredom among broad sections of society; the general drive to consume was lost. There was one piece of analysis that shocked me: over 60% of the population was bored, and didn’t know what to do with their free time. So the communications business discovered the show. “It’s showtime, folks!” Pure emotion. No more fact-based arguments. Consumption splintered. On the one hand, sensationalism came into play. Discounts. The companies offering cheap products advertised aggressively on price. And the priceto-value relationship wasn’t always correct. People kept quiet about that. A grey area of manipulation! Those who couldn’t keep up tried having sales. Everything must go! On the other hand, those selling consumer goods at normal or high prices tried to sell feelings. Emotions and experiences. My agency recognised the power of emotionality early on. “The kitchen stays cold today” was one of our slogans.

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It wasn’t about ordering food and beverages in a restaurant; it was about women with young families being fed up of constantly playing the mother role, standing over a hot stove; they wanted someone to serve them for a change. That was legitimate; there was an understandable social change behind it. Later, we advertised for a hotel in a really remote location, a destination near the Czech border only reachable by little country roads, with the slogan: “A sense of freedom.” It was a total reversal of the place being “at the arse-end of nowhere” – without which it would never have stood the slightest chance of hosting congresses, conferences and seminars. Genuine values are topped up with constructed emotions. The idea of freedom always works. People discovered the youth market. Claims were made without any way of controlling them. Unhealthy things were falsely promoted as healthy. Things of average quality were praised to the skies. Emotions were coupled to brands. A box of Mon chéri chocolates on Mother’s Day had to replace a loving embrace. Everyone knows how temptation works: paint a rosy picture, a colourful picture, promise everything under the sun. And then go one better: good, better, different; that was it: incomparably different. If your product was unrivalled, it gave you freedom. Being different turned the arguments made by adverts, including what was left unsaid, into a battle of creative ideas. “Different admits every possibility.” “Nothing is impossible!” You can interpret that however you want. Things are always absolutely unique; not like anything else on the market. Even secrecy, keeping things quiet, becomes a brand: the secret of Appenzell cheese! Not being informed induces you to buy something. The consumer world has been turned upside down. The critical eye that I developed out of that enforced silence helped me in this industry, that’s for sure! Today, I’m out of it. That’s the way it is. Everyone can become a propagandist to sell himself. Or allow himself to be manipulated. The old-school advertisers, the middle men who informed people, mediating between value and money and money and value, are dinosaurs now. I’ve finished contributing to the expertly created delusion of the fun society; the dream of good advertising as an important regulating factor between producer and consumer within the economic order is over, too. We all profited from it, and we changed some things for the worse in the process. I beg forgiveness. The enforced silence had its effect on me. Since then, silence has meant a lot to me. An advertiser who has now also learned how to be silent is the best advertiser of all time. Thinking laterally, of course! Silent contemplation in a silent, restful place with the stars out in the night sky allows us to gain new insights. Silence then rules the world and gives us back that language that comes from it. Not speaking obstructs us. But silence teaches the brain to think again. The garden of retreat Is the portentous, silent garden of perception. A place I found only Because a long time ago I climbed over the wall of silence.

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That gifted boy would otherwise Have become a wayward old man. Is that what my father knew? And with that, we come to the end of our conversation. Would you like to add anything in summary? This is what it came down to for me: it isn’t the economic transgressions that keep on happening. The unlawful actions. In society, politics, culture, sport, etc. The scandals great and small that are not infrequently sensationalised, to which many people then point, silent, distracting you with their: “Look at these other people who…” I’d like to see an immediate increase in advertising for the values of humanity that can’t be bought. Let’s build a monument to pausing for thought. When do we reach the point at which we have done so much damage that we become those people who have to stay silent towards their children out of shame? Just like it was back then? Don’t we miss the silence that we have taken away from ourselves? The conversation has been a long one. That’s how it is with enforced silence; when it has thrown off its constraints, there’s no stopping it. I will give the final word to Schlö, from the story about the opticians in Berlin. When he left advertising in the 1980s, his resignation letter came in the form of a long poem, and he signed off with these final lines: There was a priest who preached until The desert was deserted. He came back a deserter, and To silence he’s reverted.

5 GARRULOUS IGNORANCE

In August 2017, I had a brief correspondence with the sociologist Isacco Turina, a professor of social sciences in Bologna, about his 2005 study on the new phenomenon of city-dwelling hermits. In the course of this correspondence, he told me about a comical episode that relates to the topic of my book. Years ago, he had seen the Latin motto sine sole sileo (without the sun I am silent) used to advertise sunglasses. The summery charms of modern worldly life are delightfully advertised. More than 2600 years ago, Lao-tse said: He who knows does not speak. Does it then follow that he who, like me, speaks through writing, does not know? Should we believe the claim that there is no truth except in lies? And in any case, why should we regard our human ability to lie as negative, when it is frequently an advantage in terms of evolutionary psychology, which helps us to survive? Keeping quiet about things is not quite lying, though it can be a strategy we use to mislead someone.

Talk a lot; say nothing Being silent is not helpful to me at this moment, as I contemplate and write down my views on this matter of garrulous ignorance. He/she talks a lot, but says nothing: this is something we hear quite often, a popular saying frequently used with regard to politicians. How can we talk about things that are difficult to express because they are secret and attached to mental scars? The truth, which (as they say) has at least two sides, like so much in life, is still primarily a subjective experience. In expressing and communicating what I, as part of a community, feel is the truth about what has happened and what was done, I am bringing my opinion into the conversation. Say we are talking about a couple: when the other person now communicates their truth, as he or she feels and sees it, the two sides come together as a whole (in this example, the couple). What was not previously

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expressed becomes sayable when it leaves the contemplative, protective zone of silence, the place of inner certainty. In his book of aphorisms Verbotene Frucht (Forbidden Fruit), the German philosopher Hermann Schweppenhäuser (1928–2015) noted down some astute observations about the “higher nonsense” in the invented theories of his mostly male contemporaries in the field of philosophy. It is not just the innocence and the accident of our birth that shape our speech, thought, silence, consciousness, and class (or caste) – our learned speech behaviour is also shaped as we are manipulated by the advertising strategy of whoever is currently in power. Schweppenhäuser (1966, p.108) writes: “There is no better way to make people dependent on you than by convincing them that they are independent.” I have to read such a sentence at least twice in order to grasp the enlightening statement it contains, a criticism of the power of definition and an encouragement towards emancipatory action.

Silence them Every kind of terrorism – rule by violence, with the aim of intimidation – is an attempt to silence cooperation through conversation and the development of political strategy (what is done, how, why, and in whose name). Individual or collective dictatorships subjugate people and constrain them in how they live their lives, using politically stupid and ignorant, often religiously encoded ideologies. The brave Turkish journalist and author Asli Erdogan, whose essay collection is entitled Nicht einmal die Stille gehört noch uns (Not even the silence still belongs to us), won the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize in 2017. It was only with the help of the German book-trade association Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels and members of the prize jury that she was able to get her passport back and attend the ceremony in Osnabrück in person. She was arrested by the eager servants of the Turkish president’s despotic regime in August 2016, along with 22 other journalists from the Kurdish newspaper Özgür Gündem, following the failed military coup on 15 July that year. Five months later, she was released from the Istanbul women’s prison, and her ban on leaving the country was lifted by the court, but her passport was initially withheld. She has the language and now the opportunity to acknowledge and name the reality that she is experiencing, and she wants to stand up in no uncertain terms to the despotism that has led to the oppression of so many in Turkey. There is “a word that is never silent” (Erdogan 2016, p.69). And that word is “freedom”. At the beginning of “First Text, First Silence,” she quotes Franz Kaf ka: “Beyond a certain point there is no going back. This point must be reached” (ibid, p.175). Does this point that she cites – gaining an insight into the political reality inside a dictatorship – already put you in danger, leaving you with no option but to stand up bravely for free speech and risk being arrested and removed from your community and the closed society that surrounds it? Undaunted, Asli Erdogan writes:

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Exile throws a person out of his own story, when not even reality comes to that story’s defence. When I said that it was the greatest cruelty for someone to steal even a person’s trauma from them, I was speaking from personal experience (ibid, p.177). She wanted to listen to those people telling individual stories that come from a larger story. Listening helps, when the people who are conveying the message of political oppression or even destruction (in this case, the Kurds) are otherwise being shouted down and slandered in an attempt to bring them back under control and restore order. As is so often the case, this situation is the result of a crucial error. Almost 100 years ago, the treaty of Sèvres was enacted by the victorious Allied powers after the First World War. This treaty envisaged that the Kurdish people would be given their own state. Since then, we have seen a permanent civil war between Kurds in their homeland and the foreigners (Turks, Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians) who dispute the legitimacy of their promised state. Under the banner of free speech, those with power in this world are smashing words to pieces. And those pieces are then cobbled together into new, beautified truths. Anyone who is in the business of putting out “fake news,” which has a somewhat tenuous relationship with reality, brazenly denounces news that actually does correspond to reality as “fake.” Dictatorships may try to control language – “toujours en parler, jamais y penser” – but they can never completely silence people like Asli Erdogan. When considered ethically and morally from an outside perspective, this obvious abuse of power by individual tyrants and their clique is always a deliberately intimidating, aggressive reality, which does not shy away from taking things to extremes. Many modern tyrants originally came to power through democratic elections. And when they and their party cliques were able to take over the state apparatus, the democratic processes that first legitimised them as rulers were stripped away. Dictators gradually fall prey to the creeping fear experienced by all tyrants – though at first, it remains unspoken. Early one morning, they might just find themselves suffering the same fate as many other people who didn’t play exactly by their rule book; people who were arrested and then usually killed. The history of dictators contains many whose lives came to a sudden end, from Caesar to Ceauşescu.

Shut your mouth Gardens offer a space where silence can flourish. In his book In Pursuit of Silence (2010), George Prochnik describes the world of silence in Zen Buddhism. This silence is a constant rebuff to the overtones of suffering and misery in the world. At the same time, silence and being silent trigger unease and fear in many people. Distractions are everywhere. Never be quiet or let silence set in. It could be dangerous. It’s just possible I might reflect on my own life. What remains is the disquiet of this world, which is manifested in feelings of insecurity. In the denial of silence, in expressing our own truths, our cup of

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self-soothing runs over. A person has to have a stubborn stance if they are not going to let others shut them up. And this reminds me of the following story. In the religious community founded by the Irish monk Columba in the 6th century on Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland, there lived a brother by the name of Odhran (a Gaelic name meaning “silence”). Columba realised that demons were haunting the site he had chosen to build a chapel on. And it was revealed to him that only by burying one of the monks could the demons be driven out for all time. Odhran volunteered for this human sacrifice. Three days later, Columba decided to exhume Odhran, hoping to receive news of heaven. Once he was uncovered, Odhran (instead of giving them some subtle and clever message), said: “There is no miracle in death, and hell is not what we are told it is.” At that, Columba cried angrily: “Earth! Pile earth into Odhran’s mouth, to stop him blurting out anything else!” And so he was reburied. The chapel is still called St Odhran’s. This story is contained in the study Ten Thousand Saints by Herbert Butler (1972). Francis Huxley recounted it on a few occasions: he regarded his colleague R.D. Laing, the Scottish-born psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, as a modern Odhran who had pointed out how un-miraculous psychiatry was in its effects, and that schizophrenia (the disunity of the mind and heart) is not what science pretends it is. When Laing happened to be present at one of Huxley’s dramatic retellings, he smiled mischievously (Huxley 2005). But speaking is a human right. A verbal crisis often leads into stuttering and embarrassed silence, to stop us losing our heads. In court, when a defendant makes use of his right to refuse to testify – to remain silent, in other words – his silence has a ringing note of secrecy within it. For a long time, polite society invoked the “silence is golden” rule, because it could and would not speak about its sexual escapades, the original secret. Sublimation leads to gold, under this rule. It allows the world of the upper classes to keep turning, carousel-like. To “shut someone up” is to silence them. Do we say what we mean, and mean what we say? Do these amount to the same thing, or are they different – or are both of these propositions true? Mental deception likewise means keeping the truth quiet, so that it can easily be bent into its opposite, the lie. If we know about these cunning machinations, we can talk about them. Let us unwrap these inner words that are never silent. Sometimes the monstrosities we discover behind lies are so extreme that they leave us completely speechless. What then?

Psychoanalytic silencers One man who liked to shroud himself in silence and massage the facts of his biography was the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), much celebrated by his followers. He serves as an example here – and what he is an example of will become clear in the course of my story. Psychoanalysis is an activity in the human sciences that explores the life of the mind and its sufferings.

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In the form of psychiatry, it is curative, and as psychology it is emancipatory. Which means that if, through psychoanalysis, which is the classic talking cure, I recognise myself for who I am as a whole – in the context and process of my life, which is influenced by transgenerational socio-psychological factors as well as by my somatic and cultural inheritance – I am not only whole but freed from constraints that were previously unknown and often repressed. Psychoanalysis is a vocation, in that it is all about truth, truthfulness, and one’s own honesty. It is not an easy undertaking. And so this work requires a great deal of self-awareness and guided practice. Although there are a few virtuosos of this activity and technique, they still live in the shadow realm of their drives and the will to power over others. Lacan separated from his first wife, Marie-Louise Blondin, in 1941, after seven years of marriage, leaving her and their three children Caroline (b. 1937), Thibaut (b. 1939), and Sibylle (b. 1940). He was already living with his new lover Sylvia Bataille, who was pregnant at the same time Blondin was (with Sibylle). The fact that the three children had a half-sister, Judith (b. 1941) was kept absolutely secret from them. Their famous father’s private and intimate life was well concealed from them by both Lacan and his wives. The three Blondin children sensed intuitively that something was being kept from them in their daily lives, while the adults played happy families. In 1949, Thibaut and Sibylle got an eye-opening shock. They were walking home from an outing to the zoo when a car stopped at a pedestrian crossing. Both children immediately recognised their father at the wheel, with a woman beside him and a little girl in the back seat. Ten-year-old Thibaut and his sister Sibylle, who was a year younger, ran straight to the stationary car and shouted “Papa! Papa!” Lacan looked at his children in surprise, but then turned away again and pretended not to have seen them. He started the car and disappeared into the heavy traffic (Roudinesco 1997). At home, they told their mother that they’d seen their father with another woman and a child. Their mother didn’t comfort the children as they’d hoped. She defended Lacan’s behaviour, saying he probably hadn’t seen them. The abandoned wife denied this reality in an effort to maintain her own ideal image of her ex-husband. In other words, the mother silenced her two children’s experience (Kapitelman 2018). Drawing a veil over the facts like this was a terrible thing to do and had serious consequences in the lives of both children. As adolescents, they had great difficulty finding their own identity, developing into psychosocial personalities, and later, they found social life difficult as adults. Sibylle committed her memories to paper in the short biography A Father (2019). “My life was hell,” she writes. As a 23-year-old, she had a profound desire to do nothing but sleep. And so she asked her father to prescribe her a “sleep cure” (p.40). She imagined that she would stay in dreamland until she woke up healed, something like Sleeping Beauty. Papa advised against it. Such cures, like much else in life, can create dependency. He recommended that she undergo a psychoanalytic talking cure with Madame A. When this didn’t improve Sibylle’s state of mind, Lacan chose Madame P. for her, which his desperate daughter believed was a kind and well-intentioned move.

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At the same time, she met her first real lover. Love is healing. He was the first person who really listened to her, took her seriously, and had faith in her. But another shock awaited her. “Unfortunately, as the years passed, the clues piled up, and one day I became convinced she [Madame P.] was my father’s mistress” (Lacan 2019, p.41). Having come to this realisation, she stopped having therapy immediately. Flouting her legal duty of confidentiality, Madame P. chatted about Sibylle’s love life to her own lover and the entire Parisian psychoanalytic scene. As a psychoanalyst, I find this outrageous. What a betrayal of a soul in distress! An absolutely reprehensible act of stupidity. The renewed emptiness that this produced, a time of pain in which she was retraumatised, stayed with Sibylle until her mid-thirties. A small detail: in the 1971 Who’s Who, Jacques Lacan is described as father to just one daughter: Judith. Absurdly, he kept quiet about his other children. According to his biographer, this psychoanalyst and psychiatrist succumbed to hypocrisy and greed. My own diagnosis: a hidden inferiority complex, manifested in megalomania (Itten 2016). On the occasion of a discussion about Heidegger’s philosophy and his Nazi past, Lacan was silent on the question of the philosopher’s support for fascism. Later, he sent Heidegger a dedicated copy of his Écrits. The man from Freiburg didn’t read the Parisian’s book; instead, he wrote to his friend, the Daseins-analyst Medard Boss: “It seems to me that the psychiatrist needs a psychiatrist” (quoted in Roudinesco 1997, p.165). This statement, which Lacan never got to hear, shows the extent to which he had deceived himself about philosophers, as thinkers and people. A rock-bottom moment in the history of “higher nonsense.” Incidentally, staying silent about scandals that cropped up in Lacan’s practice was also an experience shared by many of the master’s students, when he reduced his analytic teaching sessions to just a few minutes. Catherine Millot was 30 years old when she responded to the 70-year-old Lacan’s courtship of her. Forty years later, when she reached the age her great love had been at that time, she wrote a memoir about part of their relationship. She saw Lacan as someone who was looking for “a way out of what kept gnawing at him in psychoanalysis, in the shape of that real that the knots now embodied. But is there any way out on the side of the real? That is to say, the impossible, as he had said himself?” (Millot 2018, p.113). I remember only that I realized that Lacan had on some occasion or other lied to his interlocutors, and I asked him why. He had not denied this and contented himself with a facetious smile. I picked up the message: he was not a man to prostrate himself before the truth (ibid, p.64). She saw Lacan in many different situations. If he couldn’t work his questions about issues in which he had a burning interest into a conversation, he was silent. And he would then suddenly break this silence when he had a stroke of inspiration. Then he spoke curiously to the group, disrupting everyone else.

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Eloquent seducer “[Lacan] was a charmer, not a dictator; he ruled through words and voluntary devotion” (Roudinesco 1997, p.387). He analysed women with whom he had “physical relationships,” and tried to seduce female patients. Nothing was said about this for a long time. It was his life, and he could do what he wanted. But the point at which he overstepped psychiatry’s effective boundaries of abstinence was when he stopped being a psychoanalyst and started following his own drives. That is his own responsibility. As a psychoanalyst, that was the end of his practice. Whatever he did after that, it was not healing. Lacan was avaricious, and therefore often received patients while still in his dressing gown, in one of two consulting rooms which were both occupied. He didn’t want to waste any time (money). Eventually he started to lose his hearing, have absence seizures, and make his outbursts of anger plain by raising his fists – and this was when the phases of silence began. Roudinesco (1997, p.394) quotes a statement from a female patient, who says Lacan pulled her hair when she was lying on the couch, silently collecting her thoughts – and because he could not bear her silence, he shouted at her: “‘Say something!’ he would order. I would be shocked and feel I had to defend myself against such behaviour.” This patient described the climate as one of a madness which had become general, where the image that people had projected onto Lacan had to be withdrawn because he was no longer the man he had once purported to be. His female pupils stopped treating him like a god. At 77, his tiredness and his silent phases became apparent in his seminars. It is a fascinating synchronicity that Lacan was addressing the topic “Topology and Time” when “he found himself unable to speak. His audience was as silent and taken aback as he” (ibid, p.399). Neither he nor his followers wanted to accept that this old man could be ill, and that his voice was failing for that reason. They fantasised that the master was intentionally silent so that he could listen more acutely; he was sharpening and refining his senses. Lacan became completely silent, saying nothing. His legend was so inflated that a few people claimed they could hear him speak in and through his silence. And what happened? His present became darker than the glorified past, which was hushed up in order to sow confusion. How can a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist drive other people mad in this way? Gardez silence. In his autobiographical work (mentioned here already), Il Made Oscuro (1964), Guiseppe Berto (1914–1978) wrote himself free from the roots of a mental torment that had lasted ten years. He followed Freud’s psychoanalytic invitation to swim in the stream of consciousness and express everything that you encounter there. To reveal your inner thoughts and most intimate secrets. And as such, this talking cure is initially swathed in feelings of guilt. When our inner world is expressed, we can listen to the mental space of silence and experience a stabilising equilibrium between speaking and not speaking. We can talk freely, lying on a couch, kneeling in the confessional or writing on a sheet of white paper

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(Muschg 1981) and, albeit less frequently than we used to, while sitting around a camp fire. Gazing silently into the flames. The new sayability is us enabling ourselves to name the roots of all the evil we have experienced. Let’s make a start. Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam:

What is happening right now did not happen. Eh? (says nothing) Typical, you’re silent about hushing things up.

Silence collector “Murke’s Collected Silences” is one of the greatest jokes in post-war German literature, written after a war that destroyed almost everything. Its author is Heinrich Böll (1917–1985). Dr Murke, who works for a radio station, edits tape recordings. Part of his job is to cut out sections of lectures or interviews where nothing is said. He joins these cuttings together into his own tape of silence. He likes to listen to it at home, reverently, paying homage to the silence. This tape doesn’t have to be wiped in order for peace and quiet to descend. I collect silences. […] When I have to cut tapes, in the places where the speakers sometimes pause for a moment – or sigh, or take a breath, or there is absolute silence – I don’t throw that away, I collect it (Böll 1986, p.510). There are tapes, he remarks to his colleague Humkoke, that don’t contain “a single second of silence.” He asks his girlfriend, Rina, for a five-minute silence, which he gleefully records, so that when she isn’t there he can still listen to his beloved’s silence. Rina is delighted to be allowed to speak again after the effort of staying silent. “Come on,” Dr Murke says to her, “we can go to the movies” (ibid, p.513). The technician at the radio station is glad when he is able to give Dr Murke a whole minute of silence. And anyone amused by Murke’s eccentricity might like to know that the BBC has recorded and created an archive of various different moments of silence. Night-time stillness, morning silence, silence in living rooms, in a garage or a bunker, and so on. These recordings wait in the sound archive to be used in radio plays and other programmes (Maitland 2009, p.176).

Veiled Shostakovich As an author, Julian Barnes is incapable of being silent, and in his biographical novel The Noise of Time, about the Russian composer Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906–1975), he describes Shostakovich’s irony and deep musical sincerity. He knew how to make good use of these things. In meetings with other composers during Stalin’s life-threatening tyranny, musical notes were sometimes exchanged in place of words. They were less dangerous. That was the reluctant

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silence in which an artist had to live: natural risk-takers were reduced to making subtle hints, so that Stalin’s regime didn’t get wise to them. As we know today, once it had dealt with the words of the writers, the regime had plans to purify and re-educate music, too. Stalin and his gang determined that Russian music belonged to the people, or more precisely the pure proletariat, purified by the spearhead of the Revolution. The human soul needed to be edited, restructured, reengineered. In this great Marxist Communist revolution, leaders like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin knew exactly what was right and wrong. They thought that with this knowledge, they could set people on the long march towards becoming the New Man. But, as Barnes’s narrator remarks soberly: “who engineers the engineers?” (Barnes 2016, p.41). Hymns to so-called freedom were really dictatorial pronouncements that sought to enforce a dismal, mechanised idea of life, in the shadow of which hid naked, existential fear. The novel recalls the story of the dreaded tyrant visiting Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. Stalin came to hear and judge Shostakovich’s musical drama Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which premiered in 1934 and ran successfully until January 1936. Stalin’s dislike of the opera – he and his entourage left at the interval – led to the composer’s immediate artistic and personal banishment. In some cases, such a public announcement of displeasure by the dictator was a certain death sentence. And Shostakovich, who was now publicly ostracised, feared the same would happen to him. His opera disappeared from the programmes of every theatre in the Soviet Union. His music was publicly reviled. But he went on composing in the key of ironic silence. Again and again, the musician was deliberately unsettled by those in power, who refused to leave him in peace. Shostakovich had to learn to protect his music with cunning and irony. Let Power have the words, because words cannot stain music. Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty (Barnes 2016, pp.57–58). The political noise, the marching and martial music, angered more people than just musicians like Shostakovich. The coarseness and stupidity of power and the falseness of its words render many people speechless. Sarcasm, as a troubling by-product of this falseness, is a kind of noise nuisance from this time. For the so-called communist avant-garde of the Party leadership in this brutal age, proletarian purity had the same value as the “Aryan race” did for the Nazis. When truth-speaking became impossible – because it led to immediate death – it had to be disguised. In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth’s disguise was irony. Because the tyrant’s ear is rarely tuned to hear it (ibid, p.85). Shostakovich simply wanted the Party elite, who portrayed themselves as allknowing, to leave him in peace with his music and his loved ones. Lenin’s claim that art belonged only to the people, and not to the artists who made it, stole

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many artists’ lives. The stupidity and ignorance of these rulers, at the same time moral apostles for “nothing but them,” is so great it can be seen from space (and everywhere else). In any country ruled by tyrants, it is impossible to speak the truth without losing your freedom or even your life. Thus every intimidating power that can decide whether someone lives or dies silences the people within its sphere of influence. Absolute rulers rule absolutely, and can erase the voice of anyone they choose. This kind of behaviour sometimes goes on for a long time, but certainly (and thankfully) not forever. And so silence stretches out, spreading across the horizon of the heart. Unison, harmony; things are brought into accord without deafening the world of emotions. Allow yourself to be alone with whatever comes in the whispering of time. Music like that of Shostakovich defends itself against the deliberate destruction of souls. Dead minds enslaved to power love to kill minds that shine and illuminate. Envious and greedy as they are, they cannot bear these shining minds. Tyrants are satanic producers of hell. The right answer, under these living and production conditions, is not to meet the demands of power. Musical notes are free. In a foreword to Anton Webern’s Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Arnold Schönberg wrote: “May this silence ring out!” (Berg 2013, p.76). The sound of silence, the silence in the sound, resonance and reverberation – a new incitement to listen. When what is still audible fades away, it passes into a musically rich silence that moves us. These sounds in the silence, silent passages that seem to resolve themselves in their own echo. Anyone who has experienced this knows that it is no common-or-garden ritual of silence. It is satisfying, soundless, blessed fulfilment, mysterium tremendum. We let ourselves fall into this silence until listening reality makes us smile.

Out with it Late in life, Günter Grass (1927–2015) spoke up about his military activities. As a 17-year-old, like so many of his generation, he went off to the “total war.” And for many years afterwards, the story he told did not quite conform to the facts of this wartime generation’s lost childhood. In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Günter Grass finally admitted that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS. He revealed something he had managed to keep quiet for many years. Up to that point, biographies of the author and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature had said that he was conscripted as an anti-aircraft auxiliary in 1944 and then served as a regular soldier. Sixty-one years after the end of the war, Grass said: “It had to come out, at last.” He was talking about his membership of the Waffen-SS. Anyone who, like Grass, ventures out from behind the protective shield of such a long silence should reckon with fierce reactions from the newspapers. The nation’s know-alls and self-righteous journalists were all too quick to attack an old man who finally wanted to make peace with himself. The crime novel Silence (2015) by Mechtild Borrmann deals with the inner and outer confusion of six young people who, in 1939, promised to always be there for each other during the horrors of the Nazi period. A betrayal of this

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promise of friendship is punished with death. Sixty years after having sworn each other to secrecy, one of their descendants discovers an unknown man’s SS identity card among his father’s belongings. On his search for the truth about this man, he encounters a journalist who takes up the historical research. The silence of the past is broken open – and what comes to light is darker than dark. The worst thing imaginable, as represented in this novel, is that the memory and the idea of what appears to have happened does not correspond to reality. Once something has been brought into the world, it can be kept quiet, but can never be undone. A forensic investigation by sonar. When we stop talking to each other, the absence of audible truth makes way for a lie. When did we get so lost in the thicket of lying words? The answer lies in silence. A silent nod is a sign that we admit what cannot or must not be said out loud. We must learn to be silent so that something can be said when we speak. There is so much chatter, claptrap, prattle – without any kind of content. This certain emptiness is like a dying fire. Heard, of course – we have come this far in our contemplation of silentium, but the inability to say what cannot be said takes us into the convenient realm of secrecy. Even so, we all carry within us the burning desire to make full use of our own voice, the voice we can find within ourselves. There is an inner living strength that allows a few of us humans to focus the creative self (with enough practice) on words and language. Working freely, trusting that our instinct for language will allow us to transform our own material into something legible, with a clear literary style of our own. This is how we turn our own view of the world into reality. Most successful writers, like Alice Munro, V.S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing, and J.M. Coetzee, trust in this and have the courage to take this path of discovery in the language each of them has at their disposal (Sampson 2016, p.146).

Silent sun From the art world, where there is a tradition of keeping quiet about experiences for a whole variety of reasons, comes a story told by Marina Picasso, whose grandmother Olga Kokhlova (1891–1955) married Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) in 1918 and lived with him until 1935. Marina’s father Paulo (1921–1975) was the great artist’s first son. Her book Picasso: My Grandfather tells the story of her life as a child, teenager, and adult, living in the traumatic darkness of Picasso’s shadow, a story that had been kept quiet until that point. Her father was a professional son, made dependent on his father’s goodwill. Her brother took his own life two days after their grandfather’s death. In an interview with a Spiegel editor (1 October 2015), she finally said something she’d had to remain silent about for decades: Picasso wouldn’t tolerate strong characters around him. He wanted everyone else to be weaker than he was. That’s why he squeezed us all out – like his tubes of paint. My brother and I were used regularly. We were supposed to be available and close at hand, but only so that we could then be rejected on a regular basis. He was greedy for that kind of power.

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All the people around Picasso were at the mercy of this power to humiliate that bordered on megalomania – wives, lovers, children, and grandchildren. He took a real enjoyment in exercising it. Marina describes her parents as being mere pawns in his power game. The short-statured Pablo Ruiz from Málaga was a grandmaster in painting and in setting relationship traps. His son, Marina’s father, was deliberately brought up to be a good-for-nothing. His courtiers called the old man “Sun,” and he was not to be disturbed. The boy became a lumpen satellite of this sun, left out in the cold but not permitted to go any further away, hollow-eyed, in despair at not receiving the paternal love he was still seeking. He then became an unreliable, absent father to his own children. “You can’t even bring up children properly, they need a responsible father,” Pablo told his son, in front of his son’s children (Picasso 2010, p.79). Woe! And there could be no answering back, or the painter would be offended, angry, and wouldn’t open his wallet. His son’s silence became a reflexive response. The silent sobbing of little Marina and her brother Pablito followed. The children, like many thousands of others placed in such social situations, felt guilty merely for existing. Their drunken mother was no comfort or help to them; she complained that Maestro Pablo was trying to buy her silence with the money he slipped to the father of her children (from whom she was divorced after three years of marriage) when he went begging. Every week, the same ritual humiliation. Marina Picasso describes the 14 years of psychoanalysis she underwent. On the couch, she relived her childhood memories once again, along with the multifaceted emotions that influence and shape all our young lives. Lying on the couch during this ingenious talking cure, we who undergo it visit our internal sites of helplessness, suffering, and secrecy. And when we reach them, we feel the urge to speak from the innermost parts of our minds. She was no longer the little girl who had to make sure she always did the right thing, so that her parents and grandfather would forget that the two children were a burden to them. Grandma Olga alone was, in her own way, a pure bringer of joy. I find it interesting that, unlike the maestro’s later grandchildren (the offspring of Maya, Claude, and Paloma), Marina and Pablito never appeared in Picasso’s paintings. Artistic silence. Sometimes, even on the couch and in the protected environment of the consulting room, Marina still didn’t manage to utter a single word. Duvanel respects my silence, a silence full of stifled cries and unshed, suffocating tears. Then, far away, behind me, I hear his voice. ‘That will be all for today, Madame.’ The conversation has lasted twenty minutes – a silent conversation. I start to sob (Picasso 2010, p.37). We cannot listen in to the sound of the mind. She says nothing, choking down the feelings of regret, of missed love, of longing to be seen. Inside her, all of this condenses into an explosive knot of hatred and revenge. It hurts. Her worldweariness makes her silent. She becomes quieter, more taciturn, until the last

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words drip away and speech becomes meaningless in the solitude of silence. As we watch over what might still be heard inwardly, a quietness breaks out that overwhelms everything. Deathly silence. There is so much secrecy, so many things unspoken, knotted into this web of relationships, along with the patriarchal order to maintain a strict silence about it all. Picasso imposed rules that serve as walls of silence to keep anyone from recognising his rules. Within a family or tribe, these walls of silence become the collective structures of secret-keeping. In his book Knots, the psychoanalyst R.D. Laing describes such operative strategies as follows: They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game (Laing 1970, p.1). When Marina’s brother is on his death bed, after six weeks of agony as a result of a suicide attempt, his absent father finally comes to visit. Marina is with Pablito. She whispers in his ear: “‘Pablito, he’d like to see you.’” Pablito finds speaking exhausting. “He smiles sadly and whispers: ‘Tell him it’s too late. I have nothing to say to him.’” (Picasso 2010, p.105). For a long time, Maria thought that her grandfather was to blame for all the misery in her family. But: “Isolated inside in his work, he had lost all contact with reality and withdrawn into an impenetrable inner world” (ibid, p.123). Grandfather himself was trapped in a bull ring inaccessible to others. More than all the various styles and modes of expression that he had mastered, Picasso wanted to create his own style that would outshine all others. His egotism was his motivation and his doom. He couldn’t open up to any of his friends in Paris at that time. He had to be silent until he had a brush in his hand. Painting unsettled him, and made some of his doomed relationships clearer in his mind. It was as if he was being compelled to debase or destroy what he admired and valued in other people, such as Dora Maar. “He tormented her at the same time that he was proud of her intelligence, her talents and her strength” (Stassinopoulos Huffington 1988, p.238). Marie Françoise Gilot, the successful French painter, designer and author, first met Picasso when she was 21; he was 40 years her senior, and at the time still in a relationship with Dora Maar. Six years later, she moved in with him in Vallauris in the south of France. Many of us are familiar with the beach photo in which the maestro shades Gilot with a parasol as she walks ahead of him, laughing happily. She had two children with her beloved Pablo: Claude and Paloma. And when one fine day she confronted Picasso with his latest affair, he denied everything. As she saw it: He denied that there was a third person, and whichever way she asked the question, he denied it again and again. “That,” Françoise said, “was the mistake. There are always mistakes from both sides in a relationship, but

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that was the unacceptable mistake. I had accepted his long and eventful past and all the ways in which it infringed on our lives, and I might even have accepted the present if he had been open about it, but to go on refusing to admit what everybody else was talking about, to go on treating me like a fool was to attempt to deprive me of whatever self-esteem I had left” (ibid, p.372). After ten years with Picasso, she did something no other woman had ever done to him: she left him and moved back to Paris. It is not only women who occasionally stood up for themselves against Picasso; men did it, too. Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) refused to be manipulated by his so-called friend. The 70-year-old Picasso was angry: “I can’t stand people who say no to me,” he shouted. “And I’m not interested in having a relationship with you if I cannot say yes or no as I please,” replied Giacometti. “I have reached a point in my life,” Picasso continued, “where I don’t want criticism from anyone.” Giacometti had the last word: “Then you have reached the point when I go and do not return.” That was the end of their friendship (ibid, pp.374–375). When Gilot published her Life with Picasso (Gilot and Lake 1964), which was initially serialised in Paris Match, Picasso tried to get a legal injunction to have it stopped. He lost the case on 22 March. Three days later, he launched a legal case against the publisher; he couldn’t and wouldn’t rest until he had silenced the life story of his former lover and the mother of two of his children. The court send him packing in mid-April 1965. He appealed. He wanted to have this book by his former partner seized and destroyed. More than 40 figures in culture and academia, who were otherwise advocates of free speech, signed a declaration supporting Picasso’s cause and calling for this “Trompe l’Oeil,” as they termed it, to be banned. The assistant public prosecutor in the Court of Appeal is quoted as saying: “He had portrayed her, as he saw her, in his paintings; she had portrayed him, as she saw him, in her book” (Stassinopoulos Huffington 1988, p.447). The day after Gilot won this appeal case, her phone rang. It was Picasso. It was the first time she’d heard his voice in ten years. He congratulated her on her victory, since he really only liked winners. He hadn’t managed to silence Gilot’s voice or destroy her credibility. His past reality with her was not obliterated. What does all this tell us about Picasso, and people who behave in a similar way? They are playing at not playing a game. Picasso himself said that when he shouted at Françoise, saying unpleasant, humiliating things to her, he was only doing it to toughen her up emotionally. At the same time, he admitted, he wanted to make her angry. He wanted her to shout at him. But she held back. Françoise always held her tongue when he tried to provoke her. She didn’t lose her composure.

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Now Sam and Lou act out a brief scene from the story of Pablo and Françoise: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

Everything you are, you owe to me. That is a monstrously stupid thing to say. You’re an ungrateful creature. Your present moment is no longer mine. Go away. Alright, I’ll go away, and never see you again. No one leaves me. I’m the one who leaves. (gets up without saying another word and walks out of the restaurant) You make me sick – you’re killing me. (leaves in silence; doesn’t look back)

Speak or be silent? Other countries, other customs, we say. The same goes for other situational forms of silence and culturally determined speech. When we are confronted with a kind of silence that is alien to our culture or class, it can be interpreted as a correct and/or an incorrect pattern of behaviour. In his anthropological study of communication within the Apache tribe, Keith H. Basso describes six types of situation which call for a culturally determined silence. These rules on remaining silent are signposts that help someone find their way in the linguistic ambiguity, interpretive uncertainty and the unpredictability of social relationships (kinship) (Basso 1972). At these moments, silence can be both an expression of inner dignity and insurance against the possibility of disgracing yourself. Reticence and secrecy, we recognise, are universal phenomena. All societies have cultural norms that are brought to bear in ritual, religious, economic, social, and political views. We are all familiar with rituals and taboos. We know the rituals of secrecy; as we grow up, we learn what topics are not to be discussed in our extended family, our tribe, or our society. In her extensive list of cultural behaviour, Astrid Stedje calls this “roledetermined silence” (Stedje 1983, p.16). It applies particularly between the sexes. We all know this from our own experience. She didn’t dare utter a word. He hung on her every word, and what she said rendered him speechless. We learn that being sparing with our words is a sign of cleverness and wisdom. We have to practise being silent. But sometimes we just can’t remain silent, and that’s a good thing. In some disagreements, between couples and friends, in business relationships, and among colleagues, it is advisable to weigh up in each case when to retreat into silence and when to speak up. Silence is communication without words. Where words fail, sounds take over. It might be that our voices are choked by tears. We know that pain can render us mute. There is the stricken silence when we are told that a loved one has died. For a few of us, the shock triggered by such news leaves us literally speechless. Then you sit there, turned inward on yourself, saying nothing, temporarily

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silenced. Perhaps you hear the high-pitched hum of tinnitus. At the same time, we know what disdainful, humiliating, cold, and haughty silence feels like, as illustrated by the Picasso stories. Those close to him felt much that was unsayable, about which they were able to speak and write only much later. In this interpersonal situation, they were usually incapable of doing anything more than staring at the maestro in silence. If he chanced to look into their speaking eyes, he saw the unspeaking straits in which he kept them trapped with his silent rejection, for the pleasure of exercising his power. The filmmaker Thomas Mitscherlich, the son of the once-famous psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich (1908–1982), gave some thought to his father and his relationship with him. “It wasn’t easy for us to talk about each other; there was always a danger that we would offend each other or even leave something out, which neither of us could stand in other people” (Mitscherlich 1988, p.151). In his memoirs, Ein Leben für die Psychoanalyse (A life for psychoanalysis, 1980), his father did not write a single word about any of his seven children. The great speech-maker, who addressed many unfortunate situations of his age without shame – such as the inability of many Germans to grieve after the lost war – erased them from his life with this silence. It came as a shock to Thomas and his siblings. Their father’s slight cut deep. Mitscherlich junior then made the film Vater und Sohn (Father and Son). He wondered why he was so offended at not being mentioned in his father’s memoir. For Thomas, it was “like not being sired by your own father.” And: “First he brings you into the world, and then you’re not important to him” (ibid, p.152). The fact that he didn’t speak, didn’t write about his son was all the more insulting because Alexander Mitscherlich left Thomas and his mother for another woman when the boy was 11. Another man who has reflected on the silence between father and son is the author Lars Brandt. He had no contact with his father for a period of seven years. This episode in his life is of real interest to me, since I myself had to go through an involuntary five-year period of silence with my father (a painful and deeply confusing period), while he was in China with my mother. In his book Andenken (Keepsake), Brandt gives a perceptive description of the effect this had on family life for him, his sister and two brothers. There was rarely a time when public life didn’t come first for their father, the politician and former social democratic German Chancellor Willy Brandt (1913–1992). The bridge between us existed, and it remained passable – until a betrayal of loyalty that for a long time, I couldn’t forgive him for (Brandt 2006, p.136). In an interview given when his reflections about his father, himself, and their relationship were published, Lars Brandt was asked how he and father reconnected, after seven years of not speaking, when the latter was terminally ill with bowel cancer. Brandt replied: “To be honest, not every emotional situation between people can be resolved, and then it’s better to have a question mark at the end of a sentence than an exclamation mark.” He was also asked why he broke off contact

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with Willy Brandt for so long. Lars Brandt said that his father and he always had to work to understand each other. I was never in a party. I’ve always led a private existence. And he was always someone who was in public life and held public office. Everything was fine as long as we were aware that this placed certain demands on us. And this interview, which he sent me a copy of himself, made it clear to me that he’d forgotten that. He wasn’t clear about what it demanded from both of us. I was horrified at this betrayal of loyalty, and didn’t want anything more to do with him (Steinleitner and Brandt 2014). Neither man ever spoke about the incident that triggered this seven-year silence. And so, unfortunately, we don’t know how exactly the father had betrayed his son’s loyalty. Brandt (2006, p.136) writes: Absurdities left their stamp on his life, and rubbed off on everyone who had anything to do with him, because nothing was spoken about. For years, Brandt only saw his father on television, although he lived just a few kilometres away. No more contact during that long silence. The wires had been cut. The terminal illness made it possible to lay a new line of communication between them. God the Father, as he is called, sacrificed his divine son. This symbol continues to hang in many churches. In the little mountain church of Fex Crasta, above Sils Maria, I saw in the middle of the heavily fresco-ed quire an image of God the Father holding upright the cross on which his tortured son was hanging. The Holy Ghost floated above the corpse’s head. Silence. The eyes of God depicted in this image stared fixedly ahead. Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam:

Why don’t we talk about the things that are kept quiet in our family? Please don’t ask, you don’t want to know the answer to that. I’m asking you. In our family, we don’t talk about such things. This secrecy is an attempt to hide the shame that settles over us like a fog.

MeToo Ceremonial, dignified silence has long been on the wane in our society. Being silent, silence and pausing. The linguistics researcher Klaus Zimmermann looked at intentional and unintentional silence as part of his theory of communicative behaviour, in which he included being silent: “Not every form of not speaking is silence” (Zimmermann 1983, p.38). It can be a careful preparation for expressing the truth of what we have experienced. His colleague Eviatar Zerubavel (2006), professor of cognitive sociology at Rutgers University, produced a dense study

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on silence and collective reticence, in which he pointed out the often courageous way in which people address the truth of what is really happening. The fairy tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” functions as a kind of background music here. It is a child who speaks the whole truth that the adults around him are trying to avoid. “The emperor is naked!” In Hebrew, the words for “being silent” and “being lame” have the same root. We don’t talk about what we can’t discuss. And we don’t talk about the fact that we are keeping quiet about these things. The following recent story demonstrates that it is possible to break through this double silence. Since mid-October 2017, women have been calling out sexist, harassing, powerabusing figures in the film industry. This is what happened in the case of Harvey Weinstein. Naming and shaming the perpetrators is still a tricky business, as many people who have been victims of this criminal behaviour have discovered. In the first three days after #MeToo started, 1.2 million tweets used the hashtag. Many people who had known about the abuse had kept quiet and looked the other way. But now the system of male power over young women in the world of theatre and film was being exposed with absolute clarity. It was time to speak out; not to let yourself be seduced by powerful men, megalomaniacal but still harbouring a sense of inferiority. It was time to stop being complicit in the secrecy. Ahr et al. (2017, p.13) wondered why so many of the witnesses to these incidents “stayed silent for so long, rather than revealing his [Weinstein’s] true self,” after it became public knowledge that this abuse had been going on in the inner circles of Hollywood and New York (where Weinstein lived) for many years. In addition to the women affected, who’d had their own individual reasons of self-preservation for not going public as victims, many famous and influential directors and male actors are now asking themselves why they stayed silent for so long about Weinstein’s criminal power games. In their article, Ahr et al. (2017) list Quentin Tarantino, Jeff Vespa, Brad Pitt, and Scott Rosenberg, among others. These men all felt dependent on Weinstein’s contracts. They were silent out of cowardice, repression, and shame at not having informed the public as soon as they noticed these abuses of power. The strategy that Weinstein followed in his power game was: I’ll help you, make you a star, rich and famous – and in return, you’ll keep quiet about what you know. Hollywood’s mafia-like rule of omertà. All these men who had a more than collegial involvement with Weinstein are at least ten years younger than him. The weekly paper Die Zeit reported on an incident at a press conference, when a male journalist backed up a female colleague who had asked Weinstein a critical question about a film project. That didn’t happen to the producer very often. His insulting answer was a derogatory sexual swearword. Weinstein, in his usual megalomaniacal mode of operating, flipped out. He pushed the journalist down the hotel stairs and beat him up in front of the assembled throng of reporters and photographers. At the time, no image or report of this appeared in the newspapers. And why? Pressure, power, influence. If he had to, the unpleasant Weinstein could go right into the editor’s office and tell him what was what. These men could be brought on side with book commissions and similar tempting offers.

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That was how the system of silence worked, with “threats, bribery, blackmail, lies, intimidation” (Ahr et al. 2017, p.14). The women who had been sexually abused were victims of behaviour that overstepped boundaries, and they stayed silent out of fear, shame, uncertainty, selfcensorship (along with inward self-recriminations), and, because they were mostly left on their own, they started to rationalise what had happened to them. But the first of them to bravely raise her voice, the actress Ashley Judd, whose statements were printed in the New York Times on 5 October 2017, was enough – because they were backed up by dozens of other women – to bring this monstrous, megalomaniacal man’s system of power (maintained through humiliation and protected by the friends and colleagues he bought off with money and success) tumbling down. The author and journalist Alev Scott wrote an essay about the Weinstein type in the publishing industry and how she, as a 27-year-old, received praise for her first book from a famous author (Scott 2017). He invited her to lunch once, and then a second time, at the end of which he propositioned her. She managed to extricate herself “as tactfully as possible.” Luckily for her. He told her he would like to see her again, but only if “things” developed between them. Scott has been angry with this man ever since. She was treated like an object. It was, as she writes, her “Weinstein moment.” She felt guilty for a long time, because her silence was enabling him to behave just as inappropriately and contemptuously towards other young women. Today, she says, she would go to the press at once, in order to bring this disgusting business to an end. She recommends that we all do the same. Weinstein was able to harass and sexually abuse more than 50 women because in their pain, the need to remain silent was stronger than the first impulse to start shouting. Victims feel ashamed that boundaries have been crossed by the person who has behaved abusively towards them. Do they flee, or stand their ground and defend themselves using the strength that the physical stimulus of anger lends us? Lash out as hard as they can with their own hand or foot. This response is better for our mental wellbeing. In this case, speech, not silence, is golden. It reinforces our own self-assurance and self-confidence. It addresses the unpleasant truths of this reckless and harassing behaviour, which the Weinsteins of this world display far beyond Hollywood, so that everyone can hear. Twenty-nine-year-old Ronan Farrow set off this avalanche of exposure with an article in the New Yorker, following ten months of painstaking research on Weinstein. He is the son of Mia Farrow and, so some people suspect, Frank Sinatra. Earlier, when he was still fully convinced that his father was Woody Allen, who married Mia Farrow some time after her divorce from Sinatra, Ronan spoke about Allen’s abuse of his adopted sister Dylan. When Allen married another of his adoptive sisters, Ronan was outraged. In 2014, his sister Dylan explained in an open letter to the New York Times how society “fails the survivors of sexual assault and abuse” (Farrow 2014), while perpetrators like her father dominate the public space, defending themselves loudly through PR organisations and silencing journalists with threats of legal action.

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Baumgärtner et al. (2017) report on how, when the silence is broken – mostly by women, but also a few men, who are talking about the sexual harassment they have experienced in their everyday lives – it creates a tidal wave of information. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences subsequently shut Weinstein out, as did the film production company he ran. It was the norm, of course, to sexually harass and exploit young women in the entertainment industry. The perpetrators live off the silence of the masses. The silence has been ended for the time being (ibid, p.17). Many women, worldwide, are now seeing how healthy it is to have the courage to talk about what has previously been hushed up. The four pillars of status, power, money, and sex, which symbolise success in the world of men, lure us into assuming that the successful men who have these things are somehow greater and more important than the average person, who is shut out and must keep quiet about their activities. Most media are now starting to analyse this culturally and sociologically patriarchal structure and its effects. In 2018, the weekly paper Die Zeit published a three-page article entitled “Der Schattenmann” (The Shadow-man,” Simon et al. 2018), which was a significant analysis of the power and bullying within the German film industry. The director Dieter Wedel is now trying to lie his way out of all the incidents of the past 38 years that he initiated in pursuit of power. But the journalists spoke to many victims of his misdemeanours, which ranged from bullying and humiliation in front of the assembled crew, physical assault and sexual attacks, all the way to rape. The victims, mostly pretty young actresses, became witnesses to appalling, tyrannical machinations about which everyone involved kept quiet for many years afterwards. Although many people repeatedly witnessed Wedel exercising his power and behaving badly in hotels, on set, or at parties, none of them spoke to him about it, let alone remonstrating with the hot-tempered, sadistic bully or reporting him to the police. The reflections of these women today are important to our topic. Everyone the reporters spoke to as they were researching their article said that if this happened now, when they were 30 or 40 years older, they would go to the police and make an official complaint against him straight away. But at the time they had been afraid, and that was why they stayed silent for so long. They tried to erect a wall of silence around themselves, their maltreated minds, and their injured bodies, to help them repress what they had experienced. There was also the fear that they would lose all future acting work, since Wedel, who wielded the power on set, threatened to denounce each of the abused women in public as perpetrators, liars, and guilty parties. He often employed this strategy and is still using it today. The women were frightened, and as a result: “it all stayed buried in my mind for decades” (cf Simon et al. 2018, p.15). Now these women can breathe freely again and are receiving support and solidarity from their families, friends, and the “MeToo” movement that seeks to

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expose the truth in these cases. The walls of silence are being torn down, and the sun shines anew on these memories, which people are now able to own. That was once me. That happened to me. I am not a bad person; I didn’t do anything wrong. Now, as the person I am today, I can move far enough away from this tragedy that it ceases to determine my life as it did during that phase of repression, secrecy, and life-sapping silence. I can accept the great scar as part of what was done to me, which now determines my liberated politics of experience. Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

I hear the noise of my own voice through the waves of the sea. Tell me how it is and was, this clamouring and raging. Hopeless, desperate stuttering. Creation and repression strike against each other like bells. Intimate things… Things that have died away… The folly of a spectacular life.

Let us finish with a traditional saying that is often attributed to the pastor Martin Luther King Jr (1929–1968). “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Literature Ahr N., Buchter H. et al. (2017) “Die Macht des Dinosauriers.” Die Zeit 44: 13–15. Barnes J., (2016) The noise of time. Jonathan Cape, London. Basso KH., (1972) “To give up words – silence in Western Apache culture.” in: Gglioli PP., (ed) Language and Social Context. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, pp. 67–86. Baumgärtner M., Beier L-O. et al. (2017) “Macht ist wie Alkohol”. Der Spiegel 43:14–17. Berg S., (2013) “Silentium. Das Schweigen in der Musik.” in: von Sass H., (ed.) Stille Tropen – Zur Rhetorik und Grammatik des Schweigens. Verlag Karl Albers, Munich, pp. 65–103. Berto G., (1964) Il Male Oscuro – Romanzo. Rizzoli, Milano. Böll H., (1986) “Murke’s collected silences” in: The stories of Heinrich Böll. Tr. Leila Vennewitz. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL. Borrmann M., (2015) Silence. Tr. Aubrey Botsford.Amazon Crossing, Seattle, WA. Brandt L., (2006). Andenken. Hanser, Munich Butler HM., (1972) Ten thousand saints: A study in Irish and European origins. Wellbrook Press, Dublin. Erdogan A., (2016) Nicht einmal das Schweigen gehört uns. Knaus, Munich. Farrow D., (2014) “An open letter from Dylan Farrow”, New York Times 1/2/2014 Gilot F., Lake C., (1964) Life with Picasso, New York Review Books, New York, NY. Huxley F., (2005) “Shamanism, Healing and R. D. Laing.” in: Raschid S., (ed.) R. D. Laing – Contemporary perspectives. Free Association Books, London, pp. 185–203. Itten T., (2016) Größenwahn. Die Psychologie der Selbstüberschätzung. orell füssli, Zürich. Kapitelman D., (2018) Das Lächeln meines unsichtbaren Vaters. dtv, München. Lacan S., (2019) A father – Puzzle. Tr. Adrian Nathan West. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Laing RD., (1970) Knots. Tavistock Publications, London. Maitland S., (2009) A book of silence – a journey in search of the pleasures and powers of silence. Granta Publications, London. Millot C., (2018) Life with Lacan. Tr. Andrew Brown. Polity Press, Cambridge.

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Mitscherlich T., (1988) “Vergangene Zeiten – Variationen von Erinnerungen.” in: Feigel S., Pablé E., (eds) Väter unser. Edition S, Vienna, pp. 147–156. Muschg A., (1981) Literatur als Therapie? Ein Exkurs über das Heilsame und das Unheilbare. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Picasso M., (2010) Picasso: My grandfather. Tr. Catherine Temerson. Vintage, London. Prochnik G., (2010) In pursuit of silence, listening for meaning in a world of noise. Anchor Books, New York. Roudinesco E., (1997) Jacques Lacan. Polity Press, Cambridge. Sampson D., (2016) The found voice – writers’ beginnings. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Schweppenhäuser H., (1966) Verbotene Frucht – Aphorismen und Fragmente. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Scott A., (2017) “Weinsteins in publishing.” The Times Literary Supplement 5978: 21. Simon J., Wahab A., Fuchs C., Pham K., Ahr N., (2018) “Der Schattenmann.” Die Zeit 5: 13–15. Stassinopoulos Huffington A., (1988) Picasso – creator and destroyer. Simon and Shuster, New York. Steinleitner J., Brandt L., (2014) “28 April 2014 Interview: Jörg Steinleitner Lars Brandt im Interview über sein Buch Andenken”. Buchszene, München. https://buchszene. de/interview-lars-brandt-buch-andenken/ Stedje A., (1983) “Brechen wir dieses rätselhafte Schweigen – Über kulturbedingtes, kommunikatives und strategisches Schweigen.” In: Rosengren I., (ed.) Sprache und Pragmatik. Lunder Symposium 1982. Alqvist & Wiskell International, Stockholm, pp. 7–35. Turina I., (2005) “Catholic eremitism in contemporary Italy.” In: Joszefciakova ZS., (ed.) Moderné Nabozenstvo – modern religion. Vydal Ustav, Bratislava, pp. 336–344. Zerubavel E., (2006). The elephant in the room. Silence and denial in everyday life. Oxford University Press, Oxford Zimmermann K., (1983) “Überlegungen zu einer Theorie des Schweigens”. In: Rosengren I., (ed.): Sprache und Pragmatik. Lunder Symposium 1982. Alquist &Wiskell International, Stockholm, pp. 37–45.

6 OPEN SECRETS

Wisdom rests in the heart of a man of understanding, but it makes itself known even in the midst of fools (Proverbs 14:33) There are many factors that contribute to the silencing of tongues in the quiet space of religion, where the hidden secret of the Word can spread silently. The external disquiet of the age is hushed as we pause for contemplation. The world inside each one of us, as we can all see and feel, is huge and unfathomable. It is healthy to fall and stay silent for a while, now and then. On the evening of 14 March 2013, when the Jesuit priest and cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio had been elected Pope Francis I, this first Latin American pontifex stepped out onto the Benediction Loggia. He was wearing a simple white cassock, without the red papal stole. He looked shy, his eyes scanning the large crowd gathered below him in St Peter’s Square as he lingered in his own thoughts. He listened to the Vatican hymn welcoming him, along with everyone else. Then he spoke his first words: “Brothers and sisters, good evening.” The crowd cheers, whistles, and applauds. “You all know that the duty of the Conclave was to give a bishop to Rome. It seems that my brother Cardinals have come almost to the ends of the Earth to get him [thunderous applause] but here we are. I thank you for the welcome that has come from the diocesan community of Rome.” He then leads everyone in saying an “Our Father” for the retired Pope Benedict XVI, so that the Virgin Mary will protect him and he will be eternally blessed. After that, turning his attention entirely to the present, he says: “And now let us begin this journey, the Bishop and people, this journey of the Church of Rome, which presides in charity over all the Churches, a journey of brotherhood in love, of mutual trust. Let us always pray for one another. Let us pray for the whole world that there might be a great sense of brotherhood.” (Hearty applause.) “And now I would like to give the

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blessing, but first I want to ask you a favour. Before the bishop blesses the people, I ask that you would pray to the Lord to bless me—the prayer of the people for their Bishop.” ( Joyful shouts and applause.) Now comes the moment on account of which I am reminding us all of this brief episode, which shows that there is an alternative way to exercise the power of religious rituals: “Let us say this prayer—your prayer for me—in silence.” He bows his head. Thousands of people quieten down. After 25 seconds, he stands upright again, to thunderous applause and cheering, as the red stole is placed around his shoulders. Only now is he Francis I, who gives his blessing to them all. There are tears in my eyes. This kind of communal silence is deeply moving.

Forced to lie I recall the anti-religious story of the silent Messiah, returned to us in the second coming, who walked beside the Grand Inquisitor and had to listen to the weak logic of his hastily composed speech, excusing and explaining why they, the leaders of the Christian religion, have taught people who believe in Him, the son of God, to be obedient and submissive. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) has the speaker say: They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them – so awful will it seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them that we are thy servants and rule them in thy name (Dostoyevsky 2005, p.229). And now there follows, for me at least, one of the most insightful, demonic statements on any system of power: We will deceive them again, for we will not let thee come to us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie (ibid). He openly declares the mysterious and mostly unspoken secret of tyrannical power. This passage reveals the destructive manipulation of a human longing for security and meaning, and it is one of the most wonderful exposures of the secret of power and European modernity that I know. The sociologist and linguist Elisabeth Wehling, among others, has outlined in clear terms how the game of modern politics is played. The use of slightly misleading metaphors – something that priests and prophetic writers have practised for thousands of years – has been skilfully continued by the political manipulators, who use them to sell their skewed interpretations of the world to the people they lead as healthy human reason (Wehling 2016, p.191). The following miraculous story demonstrates how an immoral secrecy can be used to mask subtle abuses of power, and how it can be dissolved through a passionate determination to stay silent.

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Hidden words The Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale about the six swans is not one of their most frequently read. At its heart, it has the story of a young woman’s great effort to remain silent in order to reverse the spell put on her six brothers. A young king whose late wife, the queen, has given him seven children, six boys and a girl, gets lost in the forest. His salvation comes in the form of a witch, who is willing to show him the way out of the thicket, with one condition: he must take her only daughter as his wife. The king agrees. The daughter, mounted on his horse, leads them both out of the forest. After this, the new queen, who has learned something of the magic arts from her mother, changes the king’s six sons into swans. The secret of the whole story is readily available for anyone who wants to read on (Grimm 1997, p.275ff ). What concerns us here is the sister’s great achievement in remaining silent. In order to release her enchanted brothers, she is not allowed to speak or laugh for six years. In this time, she must sew six little shirts for them out of starwort. Her decision is quickly made. Come what may, she is determined to release her brothers. Despite all the hostility and public slander to which she is subjected over that time, as a mother and a queen, she remains “mute as a fish.” Just before she is due to be burned at the stake as a child-murderer – her wicked mother-in-law has stolen away each of her newborn babies, and the queen has kept her silence when accused and interrogated over the disappearances – the six years are finally up. The six swans fly down to the bonfire and the queen is able to throw the six shirts over their feathers. And hey presto, there stand six handsome young men before her. She is allowed to speak again, to reveal and explain herself to her husband the king. The bonfire is lit all the same – but it is the wicked motherin-law who is burned to death. The power of ritual is illuminated through this story. The hidden word needs time before it can take its powerful, enlightening effect. Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

I long for a conversation with you. (stays resolutely silent) Blessed are the silent, the erotic, in their life force. One and the same, as you know. Don’t speak; act.

Interpretation The pattern of most religious and spiritual forms of faith can be explained as follows: the first generation of people experienced a disaster. One of the group declared themselves a seer, who knew what had caused the disaster, though this information remained hidden to the other people involved. What they had to do now was invent a suitable healing process. These three steps gave a comforting meaning to their pain. This was repeated each time through the telling of the same story (also called a creation story). The ritual of healing was always the same,

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led by the seer, whose authority was conferred by their contact with the so-called higher, invisible powers that showed themselves only to them. It created a collective sense of security. In this way, the people who made up the extended family or tribe were given a fictional oracle, created by the seer or priest. It allowed indirect communication with a numinous experience of the invisible divine. The mediator – also called a prophet – was able to use this “communio of the living” (religion) to steer individual fear, panic, and feelings of existential abandonment towards new individual and collective stability. The ancient form of the mass unites all these elements (Itten 2011). Why be silent? It is often a way to help us temporarily overcome, repress, or forget the disaster we have experienced, the inexplicable thing that has rendered us powerless. Walter Burkert (1931–2015) was a long-serving professor of classical philology at the University of Zurich as well as a scholar of ancient religions, mystery cults, and systems for coping with catastrophe. He worked on the assumption that the basic forms of religious behaviour to be found in all the world’s religions might have developed from biological phenomena (Burkert 1996). The cry of fear, suffocated in a silent attempt to immunise people against the emotional pain caused by our inability to know what is truly going on around us in this universe. Making everyday life bearable is an important task for all religions. He quotes Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion: (1) a system of symbols which act to (2) establish powerful, persuasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic (Burkert, p.5). In “behaving as if,” an accepted fantasy is turned into something concrete, which, by logical inference, is defined as “super-human.” Thus religion, despite being unprovable and unclear, is shaped by cultures into an ultimate authority. In the humanities and social sciences, we call this process with the highest power of social significance a false, invented concretisation. The ingenious deception is not kept quiet. The language and iconography of this trickery, which is practised in its systematic form in temples, churches, mosques, and sacred groves, serves our need for simplicity in a complex world. The human fear of catastrophe is a somatoform experience, and so whatever serves to calm this agitation can be found within the biological sphere. In addition, there are the huge variety of promises made by religions. One extremely effective promise is that of eternal life. A few years before he died, when he was diagnosed with cancer, the anthropologist and biologist Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) was asked if he believed in reincarnation. “No thanks,” he replied, “once is enough.” This charming response caused a great roar of laughter in a packed London auditorium. Religion is a system that produces a mental map of natural and social phenomena and helps us humans come to terms with the inexplicable nature of dying and

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being dead. The humans of the late stone age, 50,000 years ago, provide the earliest archaeological evidence of grave goods: items given to the dead. They believed in supernatural beings and life after death (Mithen 1998). This belief in higher beings that are not embodied here on earth is regarded by anthropologists as the start of religious practice. Since the human race learned to use language, we can either silently accept this, or think and talk about it, if we want and are permitted to.

Be watchful Mary is silent and listens. In this story, she is sitting at the feet of a wandering rabbi, who has come to visit her and her sister Martha. Her brother Lazarus is out tending the sheep. Later he will die, and be brought back to life by the miraculous rabbi. According to various stories, Lazarus finds this extremely upsetting: he is forced to return from the eternal silence to his everyday cares. Martha offers Yeshu and his disciples a bed for the night at their house in Bethany. They accept gratefully. Martha is a servant of the eternal. She prepares a soup with fresh matza for its emissaries. But, in silent sisterly understanding, she still hopes that Mary will help her. The latter, however, is sitting at Yeshu’s feet, listening to his teachings. Martha comes out of the kitchen and addresses the rabbi with a hint of reproach in her voice: “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” Yeshu, according to the author Luke, said the following – in Aramaic, of course: “Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38–42). Martha takes charge, organises and arranges. Mary is still on the floor, silent and listening. Yeshu takes a positive view of this. A plus point for Mary, who is his pupil. Meanwhile Martha, as the host, has already fought for an independent position: that of deaconess. When time is limited, silent listening excludes active housework. But in the kitchen, Martha can still think about Yeshu’s theological conversation. Mary, of course, was not the one who issued the invitation. The two sisters like each other, as we can see from the story about the mortally ill Lazarus and his two sisters told by John ( John 11:1–44). Martha reproaches Yeshu for arriving late, allowing Lazarus to die. But she has faith in his abilities as a miracle healer, and Yeshu, according to the story we all know, brings Lazarus back to life. Mary is silent and marvels at this deed, and at Martha’s trust in God that things will be fine and they will somehow carry on. Shortly before Yeshu’s longed-for passion – to fulfil the Word – he and his troop return to Martha’s house in Bethany, 2.7 km east of Jerusalem. Once more, Martha organises the food, and Mary sits in silence. This time, she has Yeshu’s feet in her lap. Once she has washed away the dust, she anoints them with precious perfumed oil. Her silent action can be regarded as a sign of her faith; she senses what is to come for her 33-year-old wandering rabbi. Out of silence, for silence. The ancient tradition of humble foot-washing is in itself a direct non-verbal communication with the world beyond.

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When the eternal silence was put into writing, more than 5000 years ago, it cut across mysticism and lived ecstasy. The so-called prophets presented themselves as people who heard the voice of the eternal. This preparation and processing of information created an influential system of dogmatic dependencies. The class, code, and consciousness of being “chosen” created conflicts between people who each claimed their interpretation was correct and stifled others. The effect of the three monotheistic religions has always been at once to unsettle and to provide meaning, to define reality and to silence other views. The silence of the great beyond, the universe that surrounds us, fosters quick, impromptu prayers of intentio pura. We humans often linger in silent prayer, in silent rooms set up specially for this purpose, in order to connect with the eternal. The silence of the cosmos accepts this human communication without providing the necessary answers.

Breaking the silence “That was the first time that I admitted to myself that I was hurting, while beside me a long silence was being broken” (Holl 1992, p.141). This admission in September 1976 came six months after Adolf Holl (b. 1930) was suspended from the priesthood. He was travelling with his partner Inge Santer, who at the time was the Eastern Europe correspondent for Weltwoche and the Spiegel magazine, and the Croatian writer Peter Šegedin (1909–1998), who had been thrown out of the Communist Party after 20 years of membership. Holl was behind the wheel. It was getting dark outside. Šegedin was telling them about how he had been ostracised, and at the end of his story, he used a quote from Rilke: “Oh nameless shame.” Those were bitter years, “in which he had fallen from grace, when many a fellow writer would cross the street to avoid having to speak to him” (Holl 1992, p.141). Holl, the Viennese man of God, spent ten years at the start of his theological career studying Saint Augustine, a “marvellous neurotic, who cast his shadow over the West” (Holl, in conversation). After that, the saint began to get on his nerves. Holl composed his dissertation and doctoral thesis in philosophy (1960, 1961) on aspects of Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) of Hippo. Bishop Ambrose of Milan (337–397) was a one-time Roman politician who later became a friend of St Augustine and an important Doctor of the Church. Augustine gives us a surprising view of his friend, which was important for the further development of his silence, as he strengthened his mind through reading: But when he was reading, his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were at rest. Ofttimes when we had come (for no man was forbidden to enter, nor was it his wont that any who came should be announced to him), we saw him thus reading to himself, and never otherwise; and having long sat silent (for who durst intrude on one so intent?) we were fain to depart, conjecturing that in the small interval which he obtained, free from the din of others’ business, for the recruiting of his mind, he was loth to be taken off; and perchance he

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dreaded lest if the author he read should deliver any thing obscurely, some attentive or perplexed hearer should desire him to expound it, or to discuss some of the harder questions (St Augustine 1999, pp.69–70). I use this elegantly written quotation to point out that, in ancient times, reading was usually done out loud, as the practice is today in the first year of school (if not before), when we are learning to read and write (www.rhm.uni-koeln.de). Augustine thought that his friend was reading silently to spare his voice, to penetrate deeper into the text and afford himself some leisure time. Holl also sees in this image the “great awe of the text” that accompanies the bishop’s reading (Holl 1960, p.23). A dignified, independent attitude that the young theologian Holl shared with Augustine at that time. From time to time, open questions may be answered with and in quietness. “All that is said has a necessarily fragmentary character” (Holl 1961, p.62). The gulf between what can be said by empirical science, and what speculative philosophical argumentation may do, is bridged by the meaningful silence that brings peace and quiet. No playing fate. No meddling in God’s work. When he moved on from Augustine, Holl looked at Jesus in Bad Company (Holl 1972). Cardinal König (1905–2004) withdrew the missio canonica from him in 1973. After that, the 43-year-old, who had been promised a lectureship at the university in Vienna, was no longer permitted to teach. He was supposed to hold his tongue. But after he said some quite playful things about death and the devil, the old gentlemen in black (not quite a black bloc, but similar in their forcefulness) reached the end of their tether. They suspended the dissident priest and forbade him from performing any function within the Church (Nagy 2015, p.246). He was silenced even before Leonardo Boff (from 1985), Hans Küng (from 1979), and other liberal theologians. Holl’s theses were not refuted but stifled by a nervous cardinal and pope. They did not counsel themselves to be silent and contemplate how to relativise or even disprove Holl’s theses. No: on the contrary, it was suggested to Holl that he should either relativise his own theses, apologise, or – absurdly – found his own church. Holl’s book presents the de-legitimisation of the Church when it invokes Jesus. Jesus didn’t want a church. Why should Holl, the first priest to painstakingly evidence this truth in an academic way, pointing out that Jesus was only made a god after his death, do something so absurd? The aim was for us to free ourselves from our own projections onto the “divine.” To recognise how the omnipresent patterns of speech and thought imprinted in us all draw a veil over real life; we can no longer recognise the truthfulness of the world through them. The thoughts we have about Jesus are dependent on the language we speak and this means that we are not entitled to consider them definitive. In a different set of linguistic circumstances, different things could be thought about Jesus, things that because of the limitations of our own grammatical system would never occur to us (Holl 1972, p.122)

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It is well known that Jesus spoke Aramaic, hence his name – Yeshu – a Semitic name that is as distant from German as Persian or Chinese is. We therefore struggle to translate thoughts, feelings, and visions. In Western Aramaic, silence is (shalyutho) and quietness . The older we all get, then, the more conscious we can become of how Sundayschool errors, fed by the fantasies of male priests, have anchored themselves to the bottom of our mental pond. Many people get tangled up linguistically in the various systems of interpretation, glorification, and manufactured conflict. Do not let it devalue you, like the followers who suffer under the rule of one of the three monotheistic gods, despots now and forever. There are alternatives. “Polytheism leaves empty the throne of the one almighty” (Holl 2015, p.63). This heaven is furnished in a more Hindu or Buddhist style.

Speak and let speak The wireless radio-wave receiver – radio, for short – with which we are all familiar was first used for test broadcasts in 1920 and then during the Christmas period in 1922. In its early days, it was as unaffordable for most people as a trip to the moon is today. In 1933, when the political propaganda issued by the German National Socialist dictatorship became increasingly important, Nazi supporters began producing a cheaper Volksempfänger – a people’s radio (in today’s money, €325) so that the quiet of the German people’s front rooms could be filled with the caustic and hysterical voice of the Führer. What a business, selling the political voice that ultimately created a fatal fervour. Radio Vatican kept broadcasting, although the voice of God couldn’t be received in the fascist dictatorships. This God kept his silence. And how should it be otherwise? Never breathe a word. If you’re going to speak, you need at least one lung and some vocal cords. Without human embodiment, the Eternal is as quiet as a mouse. We, his community, can sing, cheer, speak, and confess our sins. From the 11th century, the confessional box was made “private,” and in the baroque period, from 1575 onwards, it became an obligatory piece of church furniture. Before this, the priest used to sit at the front on the confession seat, and the Christian penitent would sit in front of or beside his feet to confess their sins, in the presence of the assembled congregation. We can confess our sins in a similarly public way today, on Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and so on. Thank God. There is inner silence, at least once a year, on Easter Saturday, when we are invited to contemplate our own mental remains, “the fact that we all must die” (Holl 1972, p.80), without having taken so much as a single step into an inner paradise. On Easter Saturday, the church bells are silent. The Son of God is dead. It is written that, on the cross, he said: “Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Can it be, wondered the religious studies scholar Pinchas Lapide (1922–1997), who advocated for Jewish-Christian interfaith dialogue and pointed to the fact that in Jesus’s mother tongue, it was not “why” (Lapide 1996, p.88) – can it be,

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then, that at the end of his life, Jesus begged for a divine afflatus? Psalm 22 begins in the same way and ends with an inward sense that: “You have heard my prayer” (Psalm 22:21). In the old Jewish tradition, these are ascension prayers. The one day a year when Jesus rests in his grave; when, ritually speaking, he is not among us. This pleasant, one-time silence. No organ, no halleluiahs, no promises to inspire confidence. Nothing of all that. Continuous, soothing peace and quiet. Religious silence is at the heart of Shusaku Endos’s (1923–1996) most important novel. It was published in 1966 and made into a film 40 years later by Martin Scorsese. Silence (2016) tells the story of Peter Sebastião Rodrigues, who set sail for Japan in 1638 to visit the small Christian community there, which had been forced to endure oppression and martyrdom. He also meant to track down his famous teacher, Ferreira (who had renounced his faith in his God under pressure from the authorities) and to protect the newly-baptised Japanese Christians, who were being murdered like the Son of God to whom they prayed, one after another. Silence considers the continuing silence of this monotheistic God. Scorsese, as he explained in various interviews, found his emotional elixir of life in this dilemma of silence. The voice of experience, which tells the story of conflict between the Christian faith and the Buddhist-inf luenced sociocultural structure of 17th-century Japan, is both forceful and unsettling. The divinity invoked by neo-Christian believers, this fictive figure of our human imagination, is stubbornly silent. How could he be otherwise? Real life is not a theatre with a dress rehearsal. It is always, in this analogy, the performance. The No-God of Zen Buddhism is just as silent as the One God of Christianity. On this point they are united. These god concepts are rooted in Holl’s own mysticism, of which he paints a rich picture in his most recent book, Braunau am Ganges (2015). It is Christian mysticism that, according to the handbook of religions by Mircea Eliade (Eliade, Couliano and Weisner 1991, p.85): “can be envisaged as a form of Platonic, contemplative asceticism integrated with devotional and often liturgical activities.” In its multifarious historical occurrences, Christian mysticism embraces almost all available mystical phenomenology, emphasising to almost the same extent both ecstasy and introspection (ibid). There are ways to step off the carousel of Christian faith, which can be dangerous in foreign countries. One is now considered en detail.

Keep your own counsel Catharina of Siena (1347–1380), one of the many anorexic women of her time who were later canonised, is reported to have said that the whole length of the path to heaven is already heaven. In one of his many notes on St Augustine’s Confessions, Holl says something similar (1964, p.495). “The temporal distance between creation and salvation becomes zero” when the great eternal silence

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arrives, in the presence of what is past and what is to come. Is it not wonderful to be a part of it oneself, at last? To enter, dying, into the all-connecting (religious) tranquillity of the Eternal? There are various skills that a mystic must cultivate, and one of these is the ability to remain silent. In their quiet exercises during retreats, when they retreat from yesterday and tomorrow into the here and now, they may not discuss anything. “Mysticism” comes from an ancient Greek root meaning: I conceal. Keep your own counsel. A “mystic” is an initiate who has learned something and is able to keep quiet about what they have learned. The ability to sink into the great silence, the conscientious will to keep moving in quietness, and the physical desire to fast are advantageous. A mystic also needs a profound knowledge of the necessary liturgy, with all its songs and murmured articles of faith. A practised ritual and ascetic agility is required. The shamans, Shiva and Kali priests, and ancient Egyptian monks of history are the predecessors of the modern city hermits, like Antonella Lumini (b.1952). She writes: I feel like an empty channel, through which both light and darkness can flow. I am just a simple baptised woman, at most a guardian of the silence (Lumini and Rodari 2016, p.17). The people who keep quiet mostly oppose the dominant religious institutional power wherever they are, which determines and defines what is seen as normal and proper. We depth psychologists label the unthinkable, the unnameable, the unconscious, secret-keeping and other types of behaviour. Before we began to analyse the psyche, there were people like the rabbi Yeshu. According to one chronicler of the early Christian community, he said something like: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you” (Gospel of Thomas, 70). In other words, that is: if you cultivate and bring out what is inside you, then what is inside you will save you, heal you, and even make you blessed. If you don’t bring out what is inside you, then what you do not bring out will make you sick and ultimately kill you. C.G. Jung called it the individual’s attempt at individuation, within the security of the transgenerational family-community. We mortals are desperate to put this thing into words, this hidden thing that can be experienced in the practice of the mystics, the thing that the Hindus call “Brahman,” the Om, the breathy sound of “Amen.” In his reflection on the Vedic doctrine and on silence, A. K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) explained many kinds of texts and ritual instructions. We will see what we cannot express, because the knowledge of it is nothing less than deep silence. Our earth-bound senses can perceive the void that exists in quietness and its connection to the cosmic world of silence. There are rituals that are performed in silence (Coomaraswamy 1977). They allow people to see a symbolic depiction of what is identical in the inner and outer worlds (usually labelled with an anagram

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for that which cannot be spoken). Either and Or are practised here. Sometimes voices are raised, and then silent gestures are repeated again, for the Eternal is endlessly secretive: it shows only silence. People have no more urgent questions, since the content of the silence is clearly kept quiet. What remains is the contemplation of one’s own rumination on silence. The Buddhists say that anyone who has learned something through his mythic practice doesn’t talk about what cannot be expressed. Someone who breaks that silence with words doesn’t really understand the fabric of truth. Spoken words of this kind divulge the all-important silence. In the Vedas, silence is sacred, because it is both at once: with and without words and sound, inner and outer, eternal and time-bound, empty and full, natural and cosmic, and, ultimately, the silent voice and the harmonious silence.

Articles of faith These exist to give us a sense of inner and outer security. Everyone has them, handed down through the generations and passed down through cultures. Sometimes in adult life, we have to take a step back, over the boundaries, in order to recognise the system that necessitates these articles of faith. One man who dared to do this at the age of 27 was Hermann Hesse (1877– 1962). His novel Peter Camenzind (first published in 1904) was written at a time when he was also describing his admiration and love for St Francis of Assisi. This early work shows him breaking with the belief system and articles of faith of his pietistic, missionary parents and grandparents; in its language and subject matter, his book outlines his journey inward, in search of a new meaning in life, freed from this missionary fug. Hesse is a good example of how the experience of the past can be described in a present that forces itself upon us and cannot be escaped. Our forefathers in the old world (and in some places, this still holds true today) were caught in the “sociological triangle” (farmer-hunter; priest-healer; chief-king), which it was almost impossible to get away from. The power of royalty and the holiness of priests were only validated and permitted to function by the hard work of the rural, farming population. From this need arose the essential options for making society feel emotionally secure: firstly, the cosmologies and the great stories/ myths. Secondly, the rituals and connections to cosmology. Thirdly, the ability of the priests or priestesses to experience a state of rapture, which in turn legitimated the kings. The latter protected the priesthood for that reason. This game went on for a long time, on and on. The commercialisation and industrialisation of everyday life encouraged people to question this closed social system. When what is now known as the Enlightenment arrived (circa 1650– 1815), people began to question this triangular power structure and system of validation. The structures of thought and faith were no longer silently accepted, just “because it’s always been that way.” One modern movement that has lasted into the 21st century is that of existentialist humanism, mostly connected with its principal spokesman,

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Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). This maverick philosopher and writer emphasised our individual responsibility as humans. In his words, existentialism is “a doctrine of action.” At the end of the Second World War, Sartre published his groundbreaking essay “L’existentialisme est un humanisme” (1946). Sartre outlined a version of humanism in modern dress. Existence precedes essence. Psychological facts are the subjective facts that matter today. A person enters the world when they are born. After that, they design or invent themselves. A person is nothing other than what they make of themselves, in their total freedom. Therefore, they are also responsible for what they are. This gives them a dignity. Life has no a priori meaning. A person chooses their own morality; it is their creation. A person becomes their own role model and is nothing other than their life: the sum of their actions, their relationships, and undertakings. They exist only to the extent that they realise themselves. There is no universe other than a human one, the universe of human subjectivity. The German philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) criticised this position, saying that life had been narrowed to produce a “one-dimensional man” (Marcuse 2013). The connection between a man-made notion of transcendence – not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense of exceeding or crossing borders – and subjectivity as we experience it, in the sense that a person is not locked inside themselves but is always present in a limited human universe – means that this is a humanism without salvation from evil. Hell, according to Sartre, is always other people. In a continent where everything had been bombed into dust, this rebellious humanism looks like a real utopia, like a phoenix rising from the ashes. Alienation from one’s own human essence is the greatest mental illness of modern man. With Sartre and other existentialists, we once again become idolaters of the self. What we pray to is the work of our own hands. And material goods become idols of the universal salvation provided by consumption. This is what we are urged to venerate. While those who manipulate the “free” market keep their silence, most of us work in order to buy these idolized consumer goods. Now that we have learned these articles of faith, we must continually throw things away so that little or no backlog of goods can build up, if we are to survive. This capitalist addiction to the pleasure of fleeting ownership suppresses love, friendships, and joy in an existence that is not merely superficial and transient. After the greatest human catastrophe of the 20th century, humanism was like a temporary lighthouse in the storm of nonsense that is normality. Our unconscious – that inner cathedral of silence – keeps us in silent contact with the life-sustaining context and connectedness of all things. Sartre managed very well without the unconscious – and not just theoretically. This, luckily, is not the end of the story.

Cracking the whip If we don’t want to fall silent yet, then a sermon by the master and mystic Eckhart (1260–1328) on the cleansing of the temple (Matthew 21:12) is appropriate here:

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“We read in the sacred gospel that Our Lord went into the temple and threw out those who were buying and selling there, and the others who were keeping doves and similar things there to be sold, and he spoke, saying: Take these things hence!” ( John 2:16). Why did Jesus throw out those who were buying and selling and tell the people who were selling doves to take them away? He meant that he wanted the temple empty, as if he was trying to say: this temple is mine by rights, and I want no one but me to have command of it. What does this tell us? The temple, which God wants to rule with his might, according to his will – this temple is the human soul, which he created and shaped in his own image, as we read: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness!” (Moses 1:26). The central task of the Jewish temple is to serve as a space of emptiness. At its centre is the sanctum, which may only be entered by the high priest once a year, for the purpose of breaking the silence by naming the unutterable Eternal, just once: “I Am that I Am.” In the psalms, the wanderers said of the eternal: “But thou art always the selfsame, and thy years shall not fail” (Psalm 101:26). We might interpret this as the eternal always happening in the here and now, and nowhere else. In ancient Greek, the soul is psyche (breath, blow, life). Psyche is therefore the original name for our breath of life, the life-breath of the poets. As a psychotherapist (therápon = servant/companion) I help people, patients who come to me in distress, to free their life-breath – stubborn, and often shallow – through a course of treatment. When I ask patients about their state of mind and the emotions they sense in their body, they frequently tell me that they feel incredibly empty. This emptiness can be broad, quiet, and pleasant, at their very core. This is experienced as inner emotional security. But a feeling of emptiness inside can also be unpleasant, disturbing, and unsettling. The echo from the eternal here and now is: “But Thou wert more inward to me than my most inward part; and higher than my highest” (St Augustine). What takes place there, in the “most inward part”? Our breath presides over this space, keeping us in motion. The space of emptiness and rest helps to keep us healthy. This is the place in which our own true selves originate. The empty space of the psyche must be protected and cultivated. This space is often perceived as an inner cell that we can breathe through, the opening of which is hidden in the cell’s membrane. When we meditate, and immerse ourselves in what is happening in and through our bodies, we experience a sense of being suddenly lifted up into a seeming nothingness. Then, nothing is important.

Serene emptiness It is this silence in us that true pastoral care and modern psychotherapy helps to nurture. When we physically sense this emptiness in the quiet space that shelters it, we can protect it. We no longer have to try to fill it up. Many people spend long hours of meditation working their way towards this emptiness. To have peace at last from everything that streams into us from outside in the form of

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information and consumption. Psychotherapy, the art of healing the mind, doesn’t just work to alleviate illnesses, but to promote health – it has an emancipatory effect. In psychotherapy, we can learn to recognise that this space is good, that this emptiness is necessary if we are going to get better and stay healthy. Contemporary research in neuroscience on the conscious and unconscious in humans shows that the brain cannot cope with gaps in its internal communication and always tries to close them. What does this mean for self-reflection on our inner emptiness? “I am empty.” “There’s nothing inside.” These are things that patients frequently tell me during psychotherapy when I ask what they are sensing in their bodies right now. Some people experience this emptiness as unpleasant, especially following a period of grief and separation. Others tell me that they feel this inner emptiness as a kind of peace and quiet inside them and often experience it as pleasant and comforting. We must recognise the primary importance of perceiving this emptiness as an “I” space, to be cherished and protected. This emptiness, as I have mentioned, can be broad, quiet, and pleasant. It makes us feel emotionally secure. In a course of psychotherapy, we attempt to free the stubborn and often shallow breath of life (psyche or Ψυχή). On the one hand, psychotherapy involves a lived, inner, intuitive knowledge. On the other, psychotherapy is an independent science that encompasses an outer, academic knowledge and a prescriptive doctrine of health. But these two aspects are complementary, and together they enrich reality rather than creating a dilemma within it. Anyone who understands psychotherapy in this way will realise it has always been a discipline that brings people’s bodies and lives into the equation, making it possible to maintain their own integrated inner and outer wholeness. It promotes the diversity and richness of people’s life experiences and behaviours. As a science, psychotherapy sees through the longing for a homogenised consumer society that regulates and controls social relations. It doesn’t offer to simplify what is inherently complex. And to everyone whose point of departure lies within themselves, it provides practical instructions for finding their own way of living and their own wisdom. When someone is truthful and authentic, so says a Chinese proverb, they are ten thousand times as strong. Again and again, the naïve hope of a fulfilled religious life – religio imagined as a connection to something permanent – is quietly disappointed. And so it must be, for this redeeming deception lies in one’s own hopeful expectation, which is transferred to “saints.” Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you (Nietzsche 2002, p.146). This revelation, which came to Nietzsche on a silent walk in the Engadin, helps me to let go of any illusion of perfect saints. Did you know that Abraham’s lover,

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Hagar, was punished by Yahweh for not denying herself as a lover to the head of the tribe? Yahweh sent her out into the desert, where she was made to pay for Abraham’s unfaithfulness, and so was their child, who died in her arms. She was one of the few people to hear an otherwise silent God. And one of the few people in Hebrew history who saw and heard God and went on living (Moses 16–21). Though without the fruit of her womb.

Words spoken into silence One of my former consulting rooms was in the first parsonage of the Church of St Mangen, built in 1508 during the Reformation. What was fascinating about this space was the echo it held of the story of a noblewoman, Wiborada (880–926), who came from Thurgau and was walled into a little cell on the north side of the church (around 2 × 5 m, with an altar and a cot bed) in 916 (Schifferli 1998). There was a small hole in the wall between the cell and the church, through which whispered tips and pieces of wisdom could be passed on to those who sought her out. A cook also passed meagre meals in through this hole, and a maid took away her natural waste in a pot (hopefully with a lid). After ten successful years, the 46-year-old recluse was murdered during the Magyar raids, which her second sight had allowed her to predict, on 1 May 926. Her final resting place, the precise location of which in the grounds of St Mangen’s is no longer known, was a destination for pilgrims for several centuries. Wiborada was the first woman to be canonised, in 1047, by Pope Clement II (1005–1047). She became the patron saint of vicarage housekeepers, cooks, libraries, and book-lovers. Her feast day is celebrated on 2 May in the diocese of St Gallen. Here, religious mysticism meets humanism without any epiphany. “The heaven that is on its way greets the earth that’s here today, when love changes life,” sang Kurt Marti (1921–2016). In his meditations Worte ins Schweigen (Words into the Silence, Rahner and Rahner 1973, p.54), Karl Rahner (1904–1984) tries to speak with the God of the living. “But how shall I ask you? You are just as silent as the dead.” Rahner wonders whether the silence of his God is his answer to the silence of the dead. “In order that I might reveal my love in faith, you conceal your love in silence. In order that I might find you, you have abandoned me.” For him, God’s silence is the loudest clarion call into life that we could imagine. We have here not just a monotheistic god but a silent god. A One God of eternal silence. Lovingly, as Rahner says, enfolding his creatures in his silence while they pray. The answer to the eternal is silence. The mystics who close themselves off from the outside world are seen as a religious phenomenon as old as religion itself, whether they appear in Persia, India, China, Palestine, Europe, or Africa. They strive for a direct and immediate contact with the divine, whether that means no god, one god, or many gods. Bellebaum describes mysticism as “silence inscribed with religion” (Bellebaum 1992, p.47). The cult of not speaking ensures that a ritual – whatever the religion in question – can be performed in a numinous silence. No performance unless there is silence from the audience. The same principle applies in concert halls

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and theatres today. Silence, language, dance, and song, and silence again, is how most cult activities proceed. “It is not speaking that is the foundation of silence, but silence that is the precondition for religious talk” (ibid, p.55). Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam:

My mind and my thoughts are unquiet. Time for the secret of silence? Why not? I can always learn. Staying silent is one thing you can do, so you will like the free silence. Hmm… (laughs) The muse comes and dissolves your complacency. Stimulating. I’ll stay silent so that something will occur to me.

The Almighty is mute, within an all-encompassing silence. Does such an understanding of silence, projected onto the divine, the eternal, have any meaning? The Silent Ones (Egyptian priests) take a corpse and display it. And there they have a silent god. Put a mask on it, whether of an animal or some hybrid creature, and it is “Amun,” lord of the Silent Ones. Since time immemorial, children all over the world have been put under the spell of the order of “divine” things, which are told in a story that becomes tradition. From the beginning of religion to its fulfilment. Those people, wherever they are active – be it in a Native American tribe, in Polynesia, on the Siberian taiga, in a synagogue, church, mosque, or temple – are initiated into the esoteric secret at an early age, as novices. They rehearse behind the curtain of secrecy, so that when they step out in front of it, they can inspire enthusiasm with wise pronouncements and silent contortions. The liturgy is quoted judiciously, again and again, with the aim of securing the order of things, the order of power, the order of intimidation (awe), and the order of secretive silence. Secrets and secrecy for ever and ever. This cultivated self and group-control are patterns of behaviour meant to suggest higher powers. “There are things greater than us,” Buddhists like to whisper. In the tradition of arrheta (ά΄ρρητα), these sacred things must not be named and are classed as unsayable until further notice. And this is a good thing; we mortals would otherwise just be deluding ourselves once again. With his thoughts on Job’s silence, Žižek addresses something fundamental. That fundamental thing is God’s powerlessness. In this story, Job is a pawn who suffers during a competition between the forces of good and evil. According to the God character, his suffering is meaningless. Jesus, Žižek goes on to say, suffers just as senselessly as Job, because in his last words as God’s dying son (“Abba, why have YOU forsaken me?”), he reveals the entire powerlessness of the divine. “Why was Job silent after God appeared to him?” Because when Job asked God why he had allowed him to suffer meaninglessly, God had no answer. He was silent “because, in a gesture of silent solidarity, he perceived God’s impotence” (Žižek 2018, p.29). The figure of God, created by the authors of the Job story, is neither just nor unjust, but impotent. And that means having no further way to influence the course of events.

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Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

Are you still pulling on my silence? Only on the veil. The wind is loosening the knots. A silent concert of peace and quiet. I’d rather gaze into the emptiness. I beg you. For what? (says nothing)

Inner teachers Looking back over his life, the successful Dutch crime writer Janwillem van de Wetering (1931–2008) described himself as a disrespectful student of Zen, who successfully turned away from the outer Zen masters and would-be gurus in order to focus on his own Sadhguru, his inner master or mistress. This figure does not seek the path. He or she is the path, the Tao, the essence of existence, or whatever we want to call this life force. This emptiness, according to van de Wetering, is where happiness lies. The endless inner and outer palaver runs itself out, meaninglessly, into emptiness. “The shattered mirror, the empty mirror, the mirror that shows true images, no mirror at all, no handle, no frame, free passage through into the now, into the here” (van de Wetering 1999, p.224). Today’s guardians of silence, the city-dwelling hermits who excel in practising and appreciating silence, occasionally speak and write about their experiences of being silent. Those members of this new hermit movement who do speak and write have developed a sense of mission to tell others about how they feel God (however they interpret this name) has made them silent. Psalm 62:1 describes it thus: “Truly my soul finds rest in God. My salvation comes from him.” Zollinger (2017, p.17) claims that there are more than 1200 urban hermits in Italy alone. The professor of sociology at Bologna University Isacco Turina has studied this extreme movement in rural and urban areas (2014). He was able to speak to 37 people who otherwise prefer to shroud themselves in silence. Those who are immersed in silence quietly devote themselves to solitary communion with God. This is the only way for them to hear what their Eternal reveals. Everything they do is attuned to this most inward form of listening. Their actions are always aimed towards true knowledge, which these hermits regard as divine (Turina 2004, p.5). This reclusive worldview was one shared by Gallus (approx. 565–640) 1400 years ago, who for a quarter of a century lived in a cave near the whirlpool basin of a woodland stream in modern-day St Gallen (now known as the Mühletobel). Not a path for hesitant softies – but a good choice for the naturally taciturn. When the 45-year-old Gallus tripped over a root and fell on his face, he took this as his God telling him to stop crusading. Enough, no more travelling. Rest. Be silent. He decided to change direction and take responsibility for his own life. This place in what was then a forest, where Gallus’s stumble created a patch of sacred ground,

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is probably the modern site of the entrance to the Gallus Chapel. The area was “deliberately not built upon until well into the 10th century” (Schär 2011, p.119). Our ancestors knew how important emptiness is: fallow land in the soul. Doing nothing is an important prerequisite if we are going to allow something to come into being. Today’s hermits are mostly around 50 years old, with an intellectual bent and a history of active involvement with their churches. The desire and the inner need for silenzio are growing again, as they do in all ages. This religious silence has a true power, which practitioners like Lumini are able to feel. Wiborada and her kind would have approved. Old ideas come around again: something old and something new. People have been taking this approach to life for thousands of years, allowing their time on earth to tick by quietly. They are cultivating silent beauty and beautiful silence. The theologian Karl Rahner laid out a fundamentally different approach to entering into silence in his book Hörer des Wortes (Hearer of the Word, Rahner 1997). If I listen, I might come so close to the essence of existence that my own restless spirit can listen to itself, fully aware of its existence, as the bearer of the Word. A new utopia? A distant reality? Forget it, writes Bevilacqua (2013). Hermitage is a justified paradox in our individualist, self-obsessed service society – a society that is alienating us from our own, human, nature. Modern recluses, whom he has visited and photographed, voluntarily commit themselves to this blessed isolation. Their fervent hope is that isolation will help them take the numinous into themselves completely. Most of these hermits are drawn from the middle classes and have already trodden their own path of meditative prayer, silence, and divine rest. They want to refine the inner rhythm of their physical nature, as well as their individual mood. Solve et coagula, the famous alchemical mantra: dissolve and coagulate. The image of the uroboros is often used as an amulet. It is a piece of ancient Egyptian iconography: the hieroglyph of a snake biting its own tail, and thus forming its body into a circle. The eternal return of the same.

Silent and mute On Easter Saturday, the bells fall silent. The end of the long period of fasting is at hand. “In this silence between fearfulness and confidence, while outside the birds sing and the Redeemer lies in his grave, a decision is being made. What its outcome will be, no one can know” (Holl 1992, p.147). We move without speaking, guarding the silence. Here, I recall the well-known story in which Yeshu calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee. He suggested to his tired troop that they sail across to the other shore, near Gergesa, where they could rest. The herald of Christianity needed a break from speaking. No sooner said than done. Yeshu allowed himself a little nap in the stern of the boat, his head resting on a soft pillow. The storm didn’t disturb his sleep. But his experienced fishermendisciples were afraid. What do you when you don’t know what to do? Wake

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Yeshu, according to the narrator of this story, with the words: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” I imagine him waking, surprised, yawning and displeased. His rest interrupted. Shaking his head at the frightened fishermen, who no longer trusted their own professional competence. According to the story, he shouted at them and at the storm, to stop it at once! Be quiet! The storm and the fear were quieted in an instant. Everything fell silent (Mark 4:35–41; Matthew 8:23–27). Sometimes we need to shout in order to achieve the quiet we need. This is one way to get people to listen to you in reality. Reality is only an exception to the rule of possibility, and can therefore be thought of quite differently too. From which follows that we must rethink reality in order to forge ahead into possibility (Dürrenmatt 2018, p.50). Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

The cave of nothingness. The house of darkness. Keep the inner light burning… ( falls silent) (hesitates): …to make complete silence quietly visible. Free from nothingness, free from silence, free from quiet and from not speaking. Ah, Sam… (a long silence)

Literature Augustine S., (1999) The confessions of Saint Augustine. Tr. Edward B. Pusey, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, Grand Rapids, MI. Bellebaum A., (1992) Schweigen und Verschweigen. Westdeutscher Verlag, Opladen Burkert W., (1996) Creation of the sacred: Tracks of biology in early religions. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Coomaraswamy AK., (1977) The vedic doctrine of “silence,” in: Edited by Lipsey R (ed.) 2: Selected papers – Metaphysics. Bollingen Series. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp. 198–208. Dostoyevsky F., (2005) The Brothers Karamazov. Tr. Constance Garnett, Dover Giant Thrift Editions, Mineola, NY. Dürrenmatt F., (2018) The execution of justice. Tr. John E. Mann, Pushkin Press, London. Eliade M., Couliano IP., Weisner H., (1991) The Eliade guide to world religions. HarperSanFrancisco, New York, NY. Endo S., (2016) Silence. Introduction by Martin Scorsese. Peter Owen Publishers, London. Grimm B., (1997) Kinder und Hausmärchen. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf/Zürich. Holl A., (1960) Augustinus Bergpredigtexegese. Herder, Vienna. Holl A., (1961) Seminalis Ratio – Ein Beitrag zur Begegnung der Philosophie mit den Naturwissenschaften. Herder, Vienna Holl A., (1964) Anmerkungen zu den Dreizehn Bücher Bekenntnisse. Deutsche Augustinusausgabe. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, pp.402–496. Holl A., (1972) Jesus in bad company. Holt, New York, NY.

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Holl A., (1992) Wie ich ein Priester wurde, warum Jesus dagegen war, und was dabei herausgekommen ist. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg. Holl A., (2015) Braunau am Ganges. Residenz Verlag, Salzburg. Itten T., (2011) “Ohne Rituale können unsere Herzen nicht sprechen. P. J. Merthé im Gespräch mit Theodor Itten,” in: Marthé PJ., (ed.) Die Heilige Messe, kultisch, szenisch, magisch, mystisch. Echter Verlag, Würzburg, pp.149–168. Lapide P., (1996) Er wandelte nicht auf dem Meer – Ein jüdischer Theologe liest die Evangelien. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh. Lumini A., Rodari P., (2016) La custode del silenzio. Io, Antonella, eremita di città. Einaudi, Torino. Marcuse H., (2013) One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Routledge, London and New York. Mithen S., (1998) The Prehistory of the Mind. A Search for the Origin of Art, Religion and Science. Thames & Hudson, London. Nagy TJ., (2015) König, Kaiser, Kardinal – Auf den Spuren von Kardinal Franz König. Styria premium, Wien. Nietzsche F., (2002) in: Ed. Horstmann R-P., and Norman J., (ed.) Tr. Judith Norman. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rahner K., (1997) Hörer des Wortes. Collected works 4. Benziger Herder, Solothurn/ Düsseldorf. Rahner K., Rahner H., (1973) Worte ins Schweigen. Herderbücherei, Freiburg. Sartre JP., (1946) [1989]. L’existentialisme est un humanisme. Editions Nagel, Paris. Schär M., (2011) Gallus – Der Heilige in seiner Zeit. Schwabe Verlag, Basel. Schifferli D., (1998) Wiborada. Pendo Verlag, Zürich/Munich. Turina I., (2004) “The Hermit’s Knowledge”. Conference paper, University of Padua. Turina I., (2014) I nuovi eremiti. La fuga mundi nell’Italia di oggi. Medusa Edizioni, Milan. van de Wetering J., (1999) Reine Leere. Erfahrungen eines respektlosen Zen-Schülers. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg. Wehling E., (2016) Politisches Framing – Wie eine Nation sich ihr Denken einredet – und daraus Politik macht. Edition Medienpraxis, Cologne. Žižek S., (2018) “Hiobs Schweigen. In der Versuchung des gottesfürchtigen Menschen liegt das tiefste Paradox des Christentums”. NZZ-Feuilleton, 03.01.2018, p.29. Zollinger M., (2017) “Nichts als Stille”. NZZ am Sonntag, Gesellschaft, 30.07.2017, pp. 16–19.

Websites Bevilacqua C., (2013) “Into the silence – Hermits of the third millennium”. http:// carlobevilacqua.photos- helter.com/gallery/Into-The-Silence-Hermits-Of-TheThird-Millennium/G0000tpKX_Udfrqg Busch S., “Lautes und leises Lesen in der Antike”. http://www.rhm.uni-koeln.de/145/ Busch.pdf

7 THE FALSE FLOOR

The metaphor of the “double” or “false” floor describes protective behaviour that can be used both within a family and to draw a boundary between them and the outside world. It is most often lived out quietly and slowly. In times that were financially poorer than the present (and such things can change again quite quickly), reserves that were necessary for survival could be hidden in the space beneath this false floor. This self-serving precaution was taken mostly by farming families (which 200 years ago consisted of at least three generations and 15–20 people), and had to be kept secret from outsiders. Hunger, poverty, and social degradation were everywhere. This reserve was a material necessity. Later, this attempt to ward off hardship became a metaphor for keeping family secrets from the outside world. Of course, this metaphor and the behaviour it describes are also actively used in other interpersonal situations, in politics, sport, and economics.

Silent change The Swedish writer Linda Boström Knausgård wrote a family novella narrated from the point of view of an 11-year-old girl. Following the death of the girl’s father, who has alcoholic tendencies and no longer lives with the family, she decides to follow a path of radical silence. She and her brother live with their mother, a successful actress, in a generously proportioned house. Her mother gives acting lessons there. Her brother is a typical teenager, who seldom leaves his bedroom. And Ellen, who takes refuge in silence, senses that her intriguing behaviour is like a veil of power thrown over the two other members of her family, her teacher, and her absent friends. In a dream, her father cries out to her: “Welcome to America!” This exclamation is also the book’s title.

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In search of that thing that can make her silence possible, she often dreams that her father – whose death she used to wish for in fervent prayers to the Almighty – speaks to her. He enquires about her voice and her mood. Words are so difficult, she thinks. It’s hard to fling them around. There is a tacit agreement between brother and sister. When he has left the kitchen and disappeared back into his room, she can go into the kitchen without encountering and being teased by him. She still needs this place in order to still her hunger. Sometimes I’m afraid I might talk in my sleep. Someone might hear me, and then it could be used against me. I can see my mother’s triumphant face. It wouldn’t be fair (Knausgård 2019, p.19). It has become impossible for Ellen to write words down. At first she finds it easy to stop playing her word games. The songs she sings in her head put her in a happy mood. She forgets what her own speaking voice sounds like. For her mother, the celebrated actress, her daughter’s long-term speechlessness is mildly confusing at first. In the theatre, an experienced actress usually wants silence only from members of the audience. But for Ellen, it is an inner bliss. Her young mind is able to develop, unspeaking. Silent space and the space for silence protect her, and provide an immediate comfort for her heart. Her refusal to speak begins to seep out into the rest of the family. The silence crept into my mother’s mouth and changed her words. She became increasingly monosyllabic (ibid, p.45). If she hadn’t already been silent, then her mother’s harsh looks, and her despair at Ellen’s wayward and obstinate refusal to speak would have silenced her at once. This silence blocks sensible mother-daughter communication on both sides. The mother speaks, and the daughter doesn’t utter a word. Night is the best time for Ellen, the time of broad, breathing silence. Then her own silence becomes pleasant and soothing once again, quieting her longings. She doesn’t need to lock herself up in silence, the way she has to during the day, around other people. In the school therapist’s room, she trusts in herself and her silence, and doesn’t let any sound slip out. She only starts screaming once – at home, severely provoked by her brother, who throws a knife at her. To her utter horror, her brother and mother smile, and calmly go on eating. Ellen, however, flees to her bedroom. Alone again, she cries silently into her pillow. She comforts herself inwardly. The angry, scolding words flow unhindered through her mind, just as her lonely tears are flowing – until emotional silence returns. She wonders to herself whether she should sing again. Go back to writing down her stormy thoughts? That would be guaranteed to change her life. And other people’s, too. When children regain their ability and their desire to speak, this new voice brings colour and shine back to the whole family’s mood. When a brother and

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sister are able to talk about mutually hurtful arguments and incidents, then a situation that has hardened can soften again. The accumulated difficulties in any family (whatever their make-up in social, economic, emotional, and cultural terms) can be worked through if parents and children want and allow each other to. They need to start by telling each other their stories – how each of them experienced an incident (truth begins with two or three people). In this way, they can acknowledge their collective responsibility for each other, and problems that have previously been kept quiet can be resolved. And together, as families and groups of friends, we see how each of us is once more heard, seen, respected, and acknowledged by the others. The false floor is then reopened inside the family or friendship group, strengthening cohesion and a sense of identity.

Opened secret What must it be like for a 40-year-old man to learn who his biological father is? A father who went behind his good friend and fellow writer’s back to impregnate the latter’s wife? Both the social and the biological father have a voice. The one looking in the mirror of time, the other laying down deposits of truth in his novels and novellas. This son, whose story I am telling here as a colourful example, is the journalist Jakob Augstein (b.1967). It was only after the death of Rudolf Augstein (1923–2002) that Jakob’s mother told him his biological father was not Rudolf but Martin Walser. In autumn 2009, Jakob Augstein, the publisher of the left-wing weekly paper Freitag, broke his silence and turned rumours into a matter of public record. Jakob’s mother Maria Carlsson (b.1937), who had been married to Rudolf from 1968 until 1970, explained: “I never deceived Rudolf. He knew right from the beginning, and was never jealous in the slightest.” Perhaps it was the same for Walser’s wife Käthe, who usually typed up his diaries. There, he admitted on 20 April 1967: “I would like to sleep with a woman again. But it’s impossible for me. Quite impossible with Käthe. She knows everything” (Zeit online, 03.10.09). At this point, Käthe was pregnant with their fourth daughter, Theresia Walser (b.1967). When this story left the shelter of silence, it attracted a great deal of media interest in the German-speaking countries; Martin Walser, after all, is a great writer who explores the human mind with depth and precision. His son is a publisher and editor-in-chief, as well as a columnist for Der Spiegel, in which he also owns shares. In an interview with Spiegel, Augstein said that many of the people involved in this silence would have preferred him not to make the fact that Walser was his father public. “There was a general interest on all sides in not talking about it. Not acknowledging it. The stakes were too high, so to speak” (Weidermann 2017, p.124). But this false floor survived the public stress test admirably well. The other factor in play on this delicate gaming table of Psyche and Eros was infidelity and the potential autonomy of any invented “truth” to live by. Those who love are not automatically in the right. The knowledge of one’s own heritage,

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the convoluted connections between our ancestors, is what allows us all a hopeful understanding of our individual socio-psychological structural order. And now this previously unheard fact comes out from its hiding place under the false floor and into the light of publicity. As in madness, we feel we are walking down lonely paths into the forest of life. A path emerges as we go our own way, independently. “For ‘madness’ is to be found in all places where there exists no universally shared word for a lived reality,” writes the literary scholar Peter von Matt. He continues: Madness is not un-reality, but reality for one person alone; it is not delusion, but a kind of knowledge that cannot be coordinated with the general consciousness (von Matt 1989, p.396). As a long-serving psychologist and psychotherapist, approaching retirement, I find this operative definition by a scholar of language refreshingly accurate. The reality that Martin Walser is father to a son, Jakob Augstein, has been revealed. Of course, rumours were already quietly circulating in Hamburg’s middle classes. Knowing that you are an initiate in the secrets of a group (whether that be a family, clan, or gang) can boost your self-confidence. Silence excludes others – under certain circumstances, it can even be deadly, and can lock someone in (in a double sense). When Augstein and Walser’s emotional book of conversations, Das Leben wortwörtlich (Life, word for word, 2017) was published, their decade of belated acquaintance with one another finally became fully accessible to the knowledge-hungry reading public. What does all this have to do with me, with us? Martin Walser has been publishing his diaries since 2005 (four volumes have appeared so far). He is laying himself bare – in evasive, coded words. Where your own communication fails, there is an embarrassing silence. Still, the mutual experience of betrayal by father and son, in this specific example, has a healing resolution. What thoughts about this situation must Jakob’s sisters be keeping quiet?

Caution, shame, discretion When we say, “I can’t remember what it was like,” this is not a direct repression of what happened but a confession. Our reality may have been shaken by something, but over time, that feeling gradually fades. And in this respect, nothing has been hushed up. Not in the song of the night, either. Writers like Martin Walser and Franz Kaf ka – to dwell for a moment on these two kindred spirits – use their characters to tell stories about and from a perspective that allows them to see through the elements of their world that are revealed to them in their present state of existence. Truths and lies are made equal there; what is important is how the truth serves our life and our experiences. Writing itself means making things public! Committing your innermost emotions to language! Language is public. Whether you then publish what

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you’ve written is actually less important than the act of writing itself. […] A writer isn’t someone who can say everything, but someone who experiences very clearly what he can’t say. Yes, because the unsaid is always a part of what is said (Walser and Augstein 2017, p.103 and p.121). Lou: I am keeping quiet about something I’ve had to conceal since I was five years old. Sam: And that’s fine, if you can and you want to, you don’t have to keep… Lou: Thank you, Sam. I will call a family meeting and tell everyone, with one condition: after that, we never speak about it again. Sam: It’s just the two of us here. What’s this about? Lou: I was sexually abused by my grandfather. And I’ve kept quiet about it until today to protect my grandmother. Sam: In concealment lies your coming exposure. Enough silence. Lou: This false floor business is a genteel thing, which exposes more than it conceals. Not doing anything wrong is the risky in-between stance left open by dogmatism and self-justification about having no opinion. Whatever lies outside a man or woman’s experience, they must pass over in silence. Is that a ban on speaking? Certainly. Who is permitted to impose this ban? Who oversees it, and oversees the people who impose it? Any one of us can free ourselves from such dictatorial instructions. In such circumstances, a deed may speak just as loudly as words. Our actions come from inside us in the same way that writing does. Our style is our guiding principle. The false floor helps us achieve the freedom of seeing another viewpoint. We can choose to take up various positions without having to cling dogmatically to one – if we don’t want to, can’t, or mustn’t. We can be accepted just as we are, secrets and all. In this way we can bear what and who we have become. Feigned speechlessness leads us into a silence that could not be more personal. This is revealed by the various emotions that become visible in our faces. In his study Emotions Revealed: Understanding Faces and Feelings (2003), the American psychologist Paul Ekman lays out the ways in which our faces express emotions and how we read these emotions unconsciously in other people. It is fascinating. The things we keep quiet about are presented visually, physically, and communicated to other people who can take their cues from them. Speaking freely is more daring. My unconscious might cause me to make a silly error (a Freudian slip), and I will blurt out something I had been intending to keep to myself. I suspect that everyone is familiar with this. A very busy professor who was invited to give an opening address at a conference ended his brief introduction with: “I hereby declare this congress closed.” Once something has been said, it is like spilled milk: you can’t take it back. And when I say, “Sorry, I take those words back, that’s not what I meant to say,” it isn’t a truly performative ritual of exculpation. A pure false floor.

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We hear and read these things every day. We talk, whether consciously and/ or led by the unconscious, about what we are. The 90-year-old word-artist Walser says firmly: A person is closest to someone else when talking about themselves. I’m only responsible for myself. I just want to see if I’m alone with my thoughts. And when I discover that I’m not alone, it’s reassuring: I don’t want to be alone. This is quite a modest aspiration that I have (Walser and Augstein 2017, p.278).

Silence is increasingly glorified In this book of conversations, Jakob Augstein has made the 12th chapter a fictional episode. He reminds us that there are always some things we say to cover up others: shields of words to keep quiet what we want to hide. It’s a false-floor deception, keeping secret what oppresses us. Sometimes this behaviour isn’t strictly intentional: what cannot yet be said remains impotently at rest, outside of language. Like the land surveyor K. in Kaf ka’s unfinished novel The Castle, which Marianne Gruber has ventured to continue where Kaf ka left off. Frieda expresses her justified suspicion that K. may be hiding something. And he replies: “I am trying to find words for something that has no name. To you, it might look like a secret, which you think I mean to keep from you, but to me it is a puzzle” (Gruber 2004, p.111). Puzzles, unlike secrets and things left unsaid, cannot be solved just like that. When we deceive others, we expect them to be timid. The silence of every generation of parents is rooted in the generation before. I once asked our family researcher, my mother’s eldest brother Hans-Rudolf Scheurer, whether he could let me see a document from the Basel mission that spoke critically of his father (my grandfather), Hans Scheurer (1893-1946), who was a missionary in China. He told me to my face: “It’s of no concern to your generation” – I was 50 at the time. It was a shame, because I already knew quite a lot about my grandfather and his time in China. Above all, I was aware of the direct and unvarnished way in which he expressed his opinions. The senior staff of the mission in Basel, the Almighty’s administrators, were extremely displeased to hear such things, which often sounded uncouth to their ears. Luckily, I was later able to ask his youngest brother Markus (b.1934) about it. The document was an unexpected letter of dismissal from the mission, he told me, without blushing. We are all influenced – in terms of our behaviour, our ontogenesis, our social and emotional patterns, our disposition – by at least three or four previous generations. It is usually left to the new generation of children to “clean up” transgenerational truths and the emotional worlds associated with them. That’s the way things are. The buck of annoying indifference is passed down and affects us deeply, wherever we happen to be in the ancestral line. In his Spiegel interview (Weidermann 2017, p.126), Augstein spoke about the opportunity he was given to write a book of conversations with his biological father. He was at once able to take on the role of chronicler and documenter. The 50-year-old’s journalistic

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flair is in part attributable to his courage to leave things out. He was able to weave a few things that the conversations didn’t cover, things deliberately left unsaid, into the tapestry of their two lives in a sensitively written final, literary chapter. He wanted to take things that affected both of them and reveal them in an elegant false-floor style in the fiction he produced. He reveals himself as a master of playing this game of not playing a game, in writing that is fantastically, playfully discreet. On 31 December 2017, the culture show aspekte featured a reading by the two men from their book in the Stuttgart Literaturhaus, which had taken place on 26 December. Alongside the theme of keeping things quiet, and the way this silence had been suddenly brought to an end, I noticed a touching, silent gesture. At the end of their joint reading, Jakob’s father Martin extends his right hand as a gesture of thanks, and Jakob takes it. He holds it tightly, bends forward a little to bring his father’s hand to his lips, and kisses it. They then look lovingly into each other’s eyes. Walser slowly brings his hand down from his son’s lips. He smiles happily at Jakob. An intimate, quiet scene, which is at the same time entirely public. The son goes on to say that he has enjoyed the feeling of being enveloped in a cloak of his father’s words. The pleasant surprise of the evening was that Maria Carlsson, Jakob’s mother, was in the audience, even though she had been against opening this false floor eight years previously. Now, thanks to the revelation, a subtle story can be told about these relationships. It would have been a great benefit to my mother if she could have answered the paternity question at the time. Rudolf fought a terrible battle with her over the divorce. She could have withdrawn herself from that. It would have made things much less difficult. I couldn’t understand why she was silent – which made me think there was something to be hushed up (Walser and Augstein 2017, p.316). One of Jakob’s main reasons for making the story of his true paternity public, even though his mother thought it would be better for the two of them to remain silent about it, was that he didn’t want to lie to his own children. With this courageous act, he was able to bring a transgenerational pattern to an end. This tragedy tells a story of someone ducking their own truth in a seemingly responsible way, before being motivated to articulate their true answer. This was an act of liberation in these two families, which gave wings to poetry and prose stories alike. Johanna Walser (b.1957), Martin’s second daughter, is a writer and translator herself. Lisa, the protagonist of her story “Submission,” talks about how her father often seemed only to be half-listening to her and would suddenly change the subject completely from what Lisa was talking about. She felt that in doing this, he was putting up a “hedge of reassuring stories” (Walser 1993, p.31) to protect her from sad or catastrophic world events. He was laying down a false floor, the solidity of which could be relied upon in the most doubtful and mistaken moments

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of their life together. This reminds me of some Scottish advice for Hogmanay: In the morning, please don’t get up until the floor has stopped moving. Until then, just sit still and keep sipping your whisky. These silent and solitary moments between the old and the new allow us to listen – with or without a dose of Scottish medicine – to life’s urgent questions in and around us. What answers can we perceive from within? Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

(after a short pause): What is it? W hat a question. I’d rather shroud myself in my veil of silence. Tell me the truth about your feelings, please… Do you know anything about the law of silence? You’re not working for the mafia, or in public office. So talk to me, please… Sam: Being as silent as the grave, to yourself and others, especially strangers, is just as exciting as being open. Lou: I am wordless. Sam: Someone who is already wet isn’t afraid of the rain. Lou: I’m worrying about you, wordlessly. Sam: (looks at Lou in silence): I am opening up new life within me.

The silence of abandonment What a shock, when two brothers suddenly stop speaking to each other. Take the brothers from Manchester, for example, who fell out after so many years of being family and making music together. It happens everywhere. But these two musicians – rock stars, even – played together for years, and today now only talk about, rather than to, each other. This very publicly (and cannily) staged scenario landed them an appearance on the cover of Zeit magazine. And since this magazine has for some time been producing two covers for each issue, mostly for promotional purposes, one featured Liam (b.1971), the lead singer, and the other Noel Gallagher (b.1967), the main songwriter, lead guitarist, and second singer in the former band Oasis, striking identical poses in front of a curtain. In separate interviews, both men talked about what happens behind that curtain, in their fraternal feud (which is not quite as deadly as that between Cain and Abel). But after Christmas 2017, Noel extended a hand of friendship to Liam, in order to make peace between the brothers. Their mother Peggy (b.1943) said afterwards that she was very relieved this bitter eight-year battle between her sons was over, and they had stopped arguing about why they weren’t speaking to each other. The communications researcher Bettina Seifried has undertaken an extensive investigation into situations of this type. The silence in conversations that are not just chats between people, but also contain true dialogues, and, I suspect, silent internal conversations. She warns us to be cautious in our judgements, because not speaking is not always significant and meaningful per se. She differentiates between not speaking and being silent during a conversation. Her theory is:

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We can only talk about not speaking in communicative situations if it stands in opposition to talking, and in a linguistic context (Seifried 1990, p.6). Among all the enlightening examples that support her theory, she chooses a quote from Franz Kaf ka’s The Castle to open her book. The land surveyor K. is sitting by the sick landlady’s couch as she lies on her back in the dimly lit room. She tells him about her nightly conversations with her husband and how he twists her words. K. listens in silence, and when the landlady pauses to draw breath, he takes the opportunity to ask a question. The landlady says nothing. ‘So I see you will not permit me [to ask],’ said K. ‘Very well, that is enough for me.’ ‘Indeed it is, said the landlady, ‘that in particular. You take everything the wrong way, even silence. You can’t help it. I’ll allow you to ask.’ (Kaf ka 2000, p.73) At this, K. thinks that perhaps he himself has misinterpreted his question. He asks how the landlady and her husband met, and how they came into possession of the inn. Kaf ka (1883–1924) was a master of writing and thinking about the false floor. On this, Seifried remarks insightfully: The landlady falls silent, she has said nothing, no sound has reached K.’s ears, but all the same K. takes a very specific statement from this silence. His interpretation of her silence appears in what he says next (Seifried 1990, p.6). As a reader, I don’t find this surprising. On the contrary, I do the same thing on a daily basis. Schweigen, the silence of not speaking, usually means something to us. We are communicating with ourselves, in our own silence, underneath the false floor. Meanwhile, we assume that the person we are with has their own ability to interpret, which can cover a broad spectrum. In addition to the form (silence) there can be many aspects to the content of the silence – what is not being said, and the contextual function of this noiseless communication. In his short story “The Silence of the Sirens,” Franz Kaf ka wrote about how, in order to save himself from the fatally seductive singing of the sirens, Odysseus stuffed his ears with wax. He also chained himself to the ship’s mast. “The song of the sirens could pierce through everything, and the longing of those they seduced would have broken far stronger bonds than chains and masts” (Kaf ka 1993, p.398). But in addition to their singing, the sirens have an even more terrible temptation: their silence. They are silent, then, as Odysseus sails by. And he doesn’t hear their silence. We cannot say for certain, Kaf ka’s narrator tells us, whether our cunning hero did notice the sirens’ silence after all. If he did, then the wax in his ears and the chains around his body were just a show put on to deceive the goddess of fate.

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Silence is related to Zero. Nothing can be done in modern, Arabic-influenced mathematics without this number. In his biography of the figure zero (2002) Charles Seife describes the dance performed by this number on the border between nothing and something. Zero, like silence, is the empty space below the false floor. A modern life without silence is as impossible as mathematics or computer science without zero. Zero came into use around 300 BC in Babylon. As the capital of Babylonia, Babylon was one of the most important cities in the ancient world. It lay on the Euphrates, around 90 km south of Baghdad in modern-day Iraq. By around 300BC the Babylonians had started using two slanted wedges to represent an empty space, an empty column on the abacus. This placeholder mark made it easy to tell which position a symbol was in (Seife 2000, p.15). What does this teach us? Zero is still as useful as it always was. And therefore, I will permit myself to say that the false floor is useful, too. Our qualitative ability to be silent becomes a pattern of behaviour towards others, from childhood onwards. Seen from outside, being cunning, shrewd, and streetwise are verbal patterns of interaction that belong to the communication system of a particular society. Knowing when to keep quiet is part of a practical common sense that the ancient Greeks called phronesis. Today, we tend to use the word more in the sense of mindfulness, cautious attentiveness. All the same, this wise behaviour is led by practical ethics, which enables us to act virtuously. The former Swiss Benedictine monk Martin Werlen, who was the 58th Abbot of Einsiedeln Abbey from 2001 to 2013, made a witty remark regarding conversations with oneself. When some sections of the media criticised him for allowing predatory bankers to manage the monastery’s wealth, and even talking to them about a sensible financial policy for the monastery and its 200 employees, Werlen said that if he was only permitted to speak to people who were morally and ethically flawless, he would have to stop talking to himself as well. What then?

The silence of solidarity This was the title of an article that Der Spiegel published in 2017 on the question of whether parents had to report their children for downloading songs from the internet illegally and for offering these illegal downloads themselves. The story reminded me of the terrible spying that takes place within families and circles of friends under dictatorial regimes – the Nazi period and the GDR, for example. According to the German Federal Constitutional Court, when one family member is guilty of an offence, the whole family is responsible. As if the sublime openness of the communication media (and those who manage them), praised throughout the world, were not using this grey area to hide their true intentions of continual self-enrichment and spying. Our communication and consumer

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behaviour is silently, constantly observed, thanks to the digital information given out by every device we use. But, I think, we are still free in the false-floor system. There is a growing danger that the Zuckerbergs (Facebook) and Bezos (Amazon) of this world will soon know our thoughts, desires, preferences, and what we are keeping quiet about, without us being able to protect ourselves amid this mania for transparency. What if staying silent is the only remedy? It does no good to deny the existence of all those who operate in a communicative liminal space. Two people who ventured to the furthest limits of their ability to relate to someone else, long before Facebook existed, were Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) and Arthur Miller (1915–2005). The actress and the writer were married from 1956 until 1961. They had plenty of trivial arguments, but there was also real strife during that period. And when that happened, Marilyn withdrew and positioned herself as the victim, mostly in silence. When Arthur had had enough of it all, he moved out of their house and into New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel. For some peace and quiet. Marilyn didn’t go home after she had finished filming Let’s Make Love (1960). There followed a year without any communication between the couple. One day, Marilyn called Arthur at the hotel and asked him: “Won’t you come home?” (Miller 2012, p.483). The silence was over. She had fulfilled her contract to appear in the feature film The Misfits, the screenplay for which had been written by her husband Arthur. Miller thought it was important not to deceive themselves about the reality of this period. He wondered whether Marilyn’s anger at him had dissipated while they’d been apart. On the telephone, her voice had its old, familiar gentleness. An image came to him: a colour photograph of their past, the two of them in the sunshine, on the lawn outside their house. Now yellowed with age. He felt that the truth of what they had each been through, as well as what they’d been through together, was as sacred as life itself. Miller did not hold with entering into a false-floor pretence of wanting to reform himself just because he wanted to save his partner. He recognised that his own patterns of behaviour had led to the breakdown of his marriage. We are all – so he thought, based on his own experience – humiliated prisoners in the dock. But this is reassuring, as the end of a new beginning. The following story reveals how a mental storm of silence can be calmed.

Nothing is ever over Lizzie Doron is a writer who lives in Tel Aviv and has published a novel which came out in German as “My Mother’s Silence.” Like many Israelis of her generation, she was the child of a Holocaust survivor. When she was growing up, many of her neighbours in Tel Aviv had survived the Nazis’ attempt to completely annihilate her people in Germany. It was only when her mother entered into eternal silence that Doron, who was then a 37-year-old linguist, could begin to publish novels. She was motivated by questions about the false floor in her own daughter, similar to those that Jakob Augstein has written about.

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In the novel, Alisa, the central protagonist, is pained by her father’s absence. Again and again she asks her mother, “Why don’t I have a father?” – although the latter has always met her questions with silence. Her mother responds, coldly: “There is no one in the whole world who doesn’t have a father” (Doron 2010, p.25). It becomes clear to Alisa that she is better off not asking this question. She knows from experience that afterwards, her mother won’t say another word all day. Her mother is silent, whether she’s sad, angry, or tongue-tied. In her accustomed solitude, Alisa thinks up various scenarios. Maybe her father died in the Holocaust. When she asks that question, her mother remains stubbornly silent. This sad maternal silence, the unbearable refusal to speak, spreads through the whole apartment. The gloomy mood, her mother’s nostalgia for Poland, the brutal experience of the past and the silent present are swirled together by the wind of the future. How often the silent night lies over their home. Her daughter’s questions, which simply won’t be silenced, drive the nurse and single mother Helena Roża to the verge of madness. For she, as we learn in the novel, is a survivor of Auschwitz. Talking to herself, murmuring in Yiddish about her daughter’s vexing, unceasing questions, she says: “What did God want from me, that he gave me her?” She only talks about this paternity issue when she is gripped by anger. In such moments, her words fly into her daughter’s soul like poison darts. She feels all the more vehemently that she can no longer avoid these injuries. It was clear to me that I had to know, that I couldn’t stand the emptiness any longer. What I wanted to say stuck in my throat; I felt like I was sitting in a furnace (ibid, p.125). Luckily, the telephone rings now and again. This noise tears open the silent morning. But the mother still says nothing. Carries on living with all the old secrets, holding them inside her. The false floor protects this woman who once lived in Theresienstadt. The past life of her mother and her other forebears, marked by mass murder, plunges Alisa into such turmoil that she feels her head is about to burst. She can’t be silent like her mother – nor does she want to be. It is simply impossible. She wants to run towards the truth of her life. To where the wind blows her hair loose. And so Alisa moves into a kibbutz. “For three years my mother didn’t come to visit. When I came home, she said shalom; when I left, she said shalom, and in the time between, she was silent” (ibid, p.138). So it happens that on her deathbed, Alisa’s mother reminds her grown-up daughter one last time that she has already told her everything she wanted to say, as a mother. And that’s that! It becomes horrifyingly clear to Alisa that she will never be able to find out the things her dying mother can’t and won’t talk about. Later, Alisa learns from another source that her father was a man called Jakob, who was suffering from tuberculosis and withdrew to a sanitorium so that he wouldn’t infect Helena, who was pregnant with Alisa. The doctors predicted that the disease would kill him. Like his biblical namesake, he struggled for eight

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years with the approaching darkness. When she hears this, Alisa is stunned. She learns of the strict morality that has influenced her fatherless life. How her mother, as a young woman, was faced with an insanely difficult decision. Husband or daughter? This is the origin of her mother’s silence. And this truth makes Alisa tremble all over. Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

In the jungle of life, we see with our ears. My soul dances. This is how I protect my silence. The firewall is today’s false floor. Protect yourself from the monitoring of the observers… …whom we observe and whose words we both see, without hearing them. Loneliness is our natural state, we who are able to be silent.

What else can I add? At the Anatolian national university in Eskişehir, Turkey, Seyyare Duman, a professor of German linguistics, has researched the communicative behaviour of Turkish women in families and groups. We can draw a parallel between her work and the story of Alisa and her mother that might aid our understanding of the latter. The central thesis of her book Schweigen (1999) is linked to the Turkish concept of susmak, which sees silence as a decision not to act. She differentiates between this and the pausing of speech that is usual in Germany, in which a person breaks off something they have begun to articulate. In many interviews with Turkish women, both in Turkey and Germany, conducted individually and in groups, she discovered that Turkish women’s silence is shaped by the internalised norms of patriarchal Turkish society. These determine the basic dynamics of communication within families, into which the women are culturally bound. Their individual, personal predisposition towards silence is less highly developed than it is for German women. The individual differences between the Turkish women and the German control group show how these norms have been internalised in each case. In her exploration of these constellations of silence in the context of family conversations and debates, Duman came across a link between the concepts of silence (susmak) and the limiting, stifling concept of honour (namus or onur). It was the women who were burdened with the task of upholding this onur. Honour is always part of a duet, where the other voice is the threat of shame. And according to Duman, this is one of the main reasons the free speech of these Turkish women was hampered on an internal, mental level. Even so, the professor acknowledged that in all-female groups, talking in a way that met their needs and was suited to their social and psychological circumstances, these women were able to take turns voicing their opinions about silence within the family. Here, they could breathe freely and exchange their inner secrets safely. This was the case even for those women who couldn’t see the ideological false floor of this restriction on how they communicated. These conversations in all-female groups helped them to master the difficulties with silence in their families, which they wouldn’t have had if they’d been born elsewhere in the world. Ethnologically, it is difficult to get to

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the bottom of these facts of people’s lives. Cultural gender differences exist in other places, too: in Japan, for instance, boys learn to respect their fathers, but girls learn only to show their fathers respect. What is the difference that makes a difference? It lies in tolerating and observing what children get up to among themselves, behind the screen of silence. Then something is created in their own silent rooms that can be contemplated quietly in future. The sculptor Camille Claudel (1864–1943) grew up in France, not Japan. As an 18-year-old student of sculpture, she devoted herself to her teacher August Rodin (1840–1917) in a mutual frenzy of love and creation. Camille was the maestro’s model for the famous statue “The Kiss” (sculpted between 1882 and 1889). Camille later stopped speaking and was placed in a psychiatric hospital. Her love for Rodin took her through the gates of hell. To a certain extent, Anne Delbée (1992) created a new admiration for Claudel, this time in words. Although Rodin admired his Camille, he could silence her and make her cry without the least effort. From her parents’ point of view, their daughter’s and their family’s honour had to be preserved: Rodin was married. Their daughter’s artistic passion took its course. She was desperately in love with the famous sculptor, “with the obsession of madness” (Delbée 1992, p.203). When Camille left the studio and went out into the street, she was once again wearing a high-necked dress, demurely and properly covering the lustful naked state in which she had recently been. The social pretence of a false-floor lie was preserved, equilibrium restored. Her future, as yet unknown to her, was one of exile in silence. Lou: Why aren’t you saying anything? Sam: These cultural rules, expressed in language, are my Alpha and Omega. Lou: This Japanese gendered mentality is very elegant. These girls learn how important it is, when they become women, to master this “behaving as if ” that is the preserve of their gender. Sam: So what?

My Lou Lou Andreas Salomé knew how you dissect a person’s life – and she resisted it, baulking at the process of psychoanalytic recognition. These learned habits of hers are extremely emotional, and her stubbornness outlasted every other emotion in her life. She wrote: When man, this thing that has become conscious, simultaneously presents himself in his thoughts as something other, all he is doing is turning the situation around in an imitative way: he turns outward, allegorically, that which is the secret of his own existence (1995). One essential aim in using the modus of the false floor is to remain steadfastly true to ourselves. Thinking about ourselves is something that happens inside our

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world of perception, where our passive vocabulary – enriched by plenty of reading – helps us to prepare the language to deal with the matter at hand, which may trigger various emotions. Only in this way can other people who speak and understand the same language really perceive what we want to tell them. Maj Popken’s study on silence in speech (2011) investigates the extent to which linguistic terms are shaped by culture. Everyday language seems like an entirely self-evident phenomenon to us. If we are going to analyse this language scientifically, we need to pause our speech. This is the only way to deal with the culturally and socially determined system of rules in a particular language. Popken puts the functional-normative question of whether someone who appears to speak correctly also thinks correctly – and vice versa. She argues that the concepts of “correct” and “incorrect” speech are merely an illusion that we cling to; in structural and formal terms, we don’t hesitate to fill the terms “correct” and “incorrect” with new meaning, again and again. This is the art of linguistic interaction among people. By now, I’m sure it has become clear to us all that our language is infinitely richer and more mysterious than the sum and character of its grammatical rules. Silence is a meaningful part of speech. It is only out of silence that speech is possible. We are each responsible for ourselves as silent and speaking individuals; we have the ability to answer the question of how and what we can say to convey meaning – and why we do this. Silent linguistic signs are particularly important carriers of meaning in interpersonal communication. Everything that has to do with language is always already present in the realm of emotions, since we are emotion-led animals. This ambivalent language behaviour can allow us to do a whole range of things: to protect, unsettle, reject, agree, doubt, and more besides. In such moments of linguistic ambivalence, we always perceive much more than we are prepared and able to express. First, we perceive, feel, contemplate, evaluate, and understand in silence. And then we follow what is being signalled to us in terms of linguistic meaning, through the system of the false floor. We hear nuances and ironic messages coming out of a speaking silence – which could potentially be a pretence designed to distract us from the truth by pointing to a parallel route of meaning. How can we escape from someone in the snow? Put our shoes on back-tofront. Withdrawing into silence in this way could be playfully described as the “Hamlet strategy” (the rest is silence). Here, the false floor finds a clever pedant, who gives this silent means of self-preservation an archetypal drama. Here, this arrangement of being silent, keeping still, and letting things rest becomes a strategy of self-empowerment designed to safeguard one’s own lifeforce.

Just the truth In her play Herzzeitlose (lit: the heart-time-less), Margit Koemeda goes straight to the heart of our contemplation of silence. What happens when Jenny, the daughter, suddenly stops talking to her family about her life? We may recall our own

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youthful efforts to detach ourselves from our families. Jenny says nothing. But she doesn’t keep quiet about the fact that Christian, her mother’s brother, used to hit her when she was a child. Jenny, to her mother Sabine: You didn’t protect me. You’re unhappy yourself, but you don’t do anything about it. I don’t want to live like you. And don’t look at me like that! You can’t make my pain go away. You’ll have to manage without my support from now on. You’re on your own, Mum! (Koemeda 2017, p.13). Sabine articulates how this rejection makes her feel. It “burns like a slap in the face.” Jenny turns tail and leaves. After that, she remains obstinately silent. This silence makes Sabine angry, sad, and quiet herself. “I would like […] to sink my eyes into an unknown face” (ibid, p.31). She is gripped by a longing for Jenny’s words. One fine day, Jenny drops in on Sabine unexpectedly. The old wall of silence is swept away. What is the moral of this play? The silence of the next generation as they leave home is bearable. It is a way for someone to silently protect that in-between space, on the cusp of young adulthood, and achieve their own psychosocial identity before a new conversation can take place, between two people who are now both adults. The asymmetrical dependence of childhood can give way to the emerging self-empowerment of adulthood, born out of a young person’s own silence. In this way, we can help one another when something that has happened to someone inside or outside the family needs to be heard. The space beneath the false floor, where speech and silence merge into one another, can be aired together. People usually want to be seen and heard, as well as listening to what the other person has experienced. Without hating what has been done to them, without the strength that releasing anger brings, there can be no reconciliation. Without indignation, we cannot try to find the meaning of transgressive behaviour (whether violent, sexual, psychological, or neglectful). In all of this, from distancing ourselves from what has made us into victims, to making active assertions about our experience, we show the courage to acknowledge our own feelings. And then, in a protected space, we can say clearly what is oppressing us, and others may speak out. Active listening makes it easier to see that each of us is in fact a community. When I recognise myself, see myself reflected in another person, I am no longer alone. Systematic inequality in the areas of power, sexuality, male dominance, and patriarchal violence constantly fuels a culture of silence. In his book Adieu Marx (1990), V.E. Pilgrim reveals how this bourgeois man, who like many men of his time was prone to overstepping boundaries with his domestic staff, lived on an elegant false floor, contradicting his own theories and his advocacy of freedom for all. At home, Marx produced the kind of social misery that he claimed his doctrine would alleviate. Victims, perpetrators, observers, and voyeurs are all trapped inside a social need to stay silent about past abuse. Talking about it together changes the

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perception of our here and now. In so doing, we expose the past that weighs on us and saps our energy. We can stop repressing, denying, and lying about it. We can distance ourselves from what happened and who we were at that time and stop identifying with it. Whatever the story was – it can be brought to an end and placed in the museum of our own life. What we have experienced exists there like a figurine. I no longer need to carry it around with me, hidden in my rucksack. Dusting that experience off from time to time will suffice. The rest is not silence; there are alternatives.

Defiant retort There is a humorous anecdote about the Scottish poet and novelist Muriel Spark (1918–2006). Her son Robin (1938–2016) was a painter who focused thematically on his Jewish Lithuanian heritage (his father Sydney, born in 1905, had come to the UK with his parents as a child). When Muriel Spark was publicly asked what she thought of her son’s paintings, she didn’t take the diplomatic way out offered by the false floor. She could have said either nothing at all or something placatory. But no: she told the Telegraph reporter that Robin would like her to tell him his paintings were good. But as an artist, she didn’t think they were. Art was important to her, she said. And so she wouldn’t perjure herself, even for her grown-up son. If he wanted to play the victim of his mother and his family history, then as far as she was concerned, he was welcome to (cf. Lopate 2017, p.10). Many years previously, the false floor of this little family of artists had been smashed open by Sydney, who was a violent husband and father. He would frequently hit Muriel, who was just 20 years old at the time – only to then slide quickly back into his depressive perpetrator-as-victim pose. After two years, Muriel had finally had enough of this pattern of violence in her young family and left her teacher husband, whom she believed was a psychopath. In the period that followed, her son Robin turned against his mother. Until the very end of her life, she believed that the boy’s father had brainwashed him in some way. In an attempt at self-preservation, she became tremendously cold towards her son. It was like something that a twisted, vengeful character in one of her novels might have done. Spark revealed herself in the Telegraph interview as if before an open curtain; she didn’t hide her true self behind concealing platitudes but said what she felt, opening herself up to further attacks from her son and his admirers. Of course she was suffering, as any estranged mother would when being badmouthed in public by her son. Both sometimes tried to stay quiet – but very soon they would return to trading verbal insults (Taylor 2017). We parents suffer at our children’s hands, just as we make them suffer. This is a fact, and will not come as news to anyone. And so the false-floor strategy, as with so much in life, can be seen from different sides. First, there are those who protect themselves and their loved ones from the outside world. Then there are those who mercilessly reject strangers, who can be regarded as heartless and cruel.

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When we protect ourselves with this false floor, we achieve peace and would like to be left in peace. It means never having to say everything we know about others. Being pro-us doesn’t necessarily mean being anti-others. Being able to separate ourselves off from others is the necessary precondition for me, or for us, to be able to exist. This is an important option in the politics of experience (Itten and Roberts 2014). We reach the other side of silence by singing a song to life, to its beauty and mysterious happiness. As long as the music can be kept up, with dancing and clowning, new, cheerful notes will pass our lips, which otherwise might have stayed held in our mouths. Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou: Lou: Sam: Lou:

If we’re sitting in the dark, then all we have to do is light a candle. It’s unsayable, letting this become conscious. I walk unceasingly towards you. The same for me. By the way, you were weeping quite silently in your sleep… …and quiet, being completely at home with myself. With our tentative notes, we are both trying to take hold of the veil that covers the whole meaning of our lives and pull it, gently. Reticent and slow, like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. A great moment, and I have nothing to say. What can be more eloquent than silence? Naturalness.

Literature Andreas-Salomé L., (1995) Looking Back: Memoirs. Tr. Breon Mitchell. Marlowe and Company, New York. Boström Knausgård L., (2019) Welcome to America. Tr. Martin Aitken, World Editions LLC, New York. Delbée A., (1992) Camille Claudell: Une Femme. Tr. Carol Cosman. Mercury House, San Francisco. Doron L., (2010) Das Schweigen Meiner Mutter. Tr. Mirjam Pressler. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich. Duman S., (1999) Schweigen. Zum kommunikativen Handeln türkischer Frauen in Familie und Gruppe. Waxmann, Münster. Ekman P., (2003) Emotions Revealed: Understanding Faces and Feelings. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London. Gruber M., (2004) Ins Schloss. Roman. Haymon, Innsbruck. Itten T., Roberts R., (2014) The New Politics of Experience and the Bitter Herbs. PCCS Books, Monmouth. Kaf ka F., (1993) “The Silence of the Sirens,” in: Collected Stories. Tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, A.A. Knopf, New York. Kaf ka F., (2000) The Castle. Tr. Anthea Bell. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Koemeda M., (2017) Herzzeitlose. Sammlung Isele. BoD, Norderstedt. Lopate P., (2017) “Happy passenger: Being friends with Muriel Spark,” TLS 1: 10.

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Miller A., (2012) Timebends: A Life. Bloomsbury, London. Pilgrim VE., (1990) Adieu Marx – Gewalt und Ausbeutung im Hause des Wortführers. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg. Popken M., (2011) Warum Sagst Du Nichts? Über Das Schweigen in der Rede. BoD, Norderstedt. Seife C., (2000) Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. Viking Press, New York. Seifried B., (1990) Kommunikative und Interaktive Funktionen von Schweigen in Konversationen. Diplomica Verlag, Norderstedt. Taylor A., (2017) Appointment in Arezzo. A friendship with Muriel Spark. Polygon, Edinburgh. von Matt P., (1989) Liebesverrat. Die Treulosen in der Literatur. Hanser, Munich. Walser J., (1993) Die Unterwerfung. Erzählung. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main. Walser M., Augstein J., (2017) Das Leben wortwörtlich. Ein Gespräch. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg. Weidermann V., (2017) “Vorwurf ist das falsche Wort,” Der Spiegel 48: 124–129.

8 SILENCE IN LAW

Laws shape our existence. They regulate in considerable detail what a person is and is not permitted to do. They also determine whether you are allowed to be silent during a trial or have to speak, and explain what conclusions can be drawn from someone remaining silent during a legal process. We usually draw our knowledge of the law from crime novels and court reports – but I wanted to know more. And so I turned to my friend Rolf Vetterli, who first worked as a lawyer and then as a regional court judge in Switzerland, and has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of St Gallen. He has written a divorce handbook and contributed to an introduction to family law in Switzerland. He writes a monthly column for the St Galler Tagblatt featuring stories from the courts. Following the leitmotif of this book, I conducted a silent conversation with him, over email. What is the significance of silence in law? The first thing that comes to mind here is the criminal trial. It has a long history, which begins with the accused being rigidly compelled to confess, and ends with his absolute right to remain silent. In the Inquisition trials of the Middle Ages, the confession was regarded as the ultimate piece of evidence, and it had to be extracted by any means, including torture. In the 16th century, under Charles V’s dreadful German “Procedure for the Judgement of Capital Crimes,” other evidence was admitted, but a suspicion was all that was necessary for a milder punishment to imposed – and that suspicion could be drawn from the silence of the person being prosecuted. In the 17th century, English Common Law introduced the defendant’s right not to make a statement, and this right was subsequently taken into the USA’s constitution. The Swiss cantons, however, were oriented more towards France or Germany and rather hesitantly followed their example by introducing a two-party

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trial. From then on, criminal cases were seen as a kind of battle for truth and justice, in which prosecution and defence could carry swords of equal length. The idea that one shouldn’t have to bear witness against oneself was part of that. Admittedly, this proposition didn’t have the same significance it is given today. Silence could still be regarded as incriminating evidence. The European Court of Human Rights was the first to consistently apply the precept that no one is required to testify against themselves. Of course, this is expressed in the most elegant legal Latin, so it sounds like this: “Nemo tenetur se ipsum accusare.” In shorter and even less comprehensible terms, people refer to the “Nemo-tenetur principle.” Not all authorities, however, have been prepared to inform defendants openly and honestly about their right to remain silent. For a few years now, the Swiss code of criminal procedure has contained a “Miranda warning”: when they are brought in for questioning, the person being prosecuted has to be told, in plain and simple language, that they can refuse to give a statement and that they can ask for a solicitor. Unlike in the American TV shows, though, they don’t have to be made aware that any statement given voluntarily can be used against them. A confession cannot be extracted using promises or threats, and certainly not by placing a snitch in a prisoner’s cell. There are, however, certain compulsory measures that can amount to a perpetrator incriminating themselves, such as having to provide a DNA sample which can then be compared with the evidence from the crime scene to yield a clear identification. With the power to deploy undercover investigators in serious cases, to tap phones, bug private rooms, and, more recently, to smuggle trojan programmes onto computers, criminal investigators have a toolkit for almost total surveillance of suspects. Occasionally, they don’t even have to rely on suspects to cooperate; their silence is irrelevant. On top of this, there is a certain tendency among the Swiss judiciary to take into account information that hasn’t been obtained by legal means. A court convicted the members of a burglary gang even though they had only been caught in the act because of an illegal tracking device attached to their car. Their right to remain silent was no good to them then, either. The proverb that silence is golden seems to apply in criminal trials, as well. A defence lawyer should explain to a defendant that there are two alternatives: either say nothing or tell the truth. Resorting to lies is never to be recommended, in any case, because sooner or later they’ll be exposed. The court has learned from psychologists how to tell the difference between invented reports and stories about things that someone really experienced. And remaining silent can be a wise move at the start of a criminal investigation. A suspect is allowed to wait until the prosecutor has laid their cards on the table, so that they don’t accidentally give away anything the investigating authorities don’t already know. But eventually a defendant will have a natural need to justify themselves, and the court quite properly mistrusts them if at that point, they still aren’t prepared to talk. Secretly,

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you are always also guided by the thought that only people who have something to hide will stay silent. But officially, that thought can no longer have any effect on a guilty verdict or the length of a sentence. By contrast, however, a confession can be taken into account as an expression of regret, which may reduce a sentence. That’s problematic, because it means there is considerable pressure to plead guilty and negotiate a lesser sentence. How does a defence lawyer deal with a situation in which a client doesn’t want to admit anything before the court? The lawyer can still plead for an acquittal all the same. He’s neither a servant of the law, nor of the court; he’s the client’s representative and advocate. He should, of course, avoid explaining that he is personally convinced of his client’s innocence and stick to raising objective doubts about the validity of the charges. Now, the defendant is not the only person who has the right to remain silent; certain witnesses can refuse to give evidence, too. The point of witnesses’ right not to testify is to protect people from a conflict of loyalties. There are two principal reasons for refusing to give evidence: being closely related to the defendant and protecting professional secrecy. Under the first of these, spouses, parents, children, siblings, and so on are exempt from having to testify, because it would threaten their personal relationship to the defendant. The second case covers priests, doctors, lawyers, and so on, who would have to break the trust placed in them as professionals. This law, like most other freedoms, is admittedly abused from time to time. That used to happen in traffic offence cases, where the owner of a car caught by a speed camera just had to say they weren’t driving and didn’t want to incriminate one of their relatives, and the speeding offence would go unpunished. Today, the injunction is issued to the vehicle’s owner in cases where there is any doubt, and he can choose whether he pays the fine or reveals the name of the driver. It seems like a lot of crimes aren’t even reported. In some areas, the “dark figure,” the estimated difference between the number of offences actually committed and the number officially recorded, is incredibly high. Often the victims don’t come forward because they’re ashamed and have the feeling that they are somehow partly responsible. That is particularly the case for domestic violence. The authorities are making an effort to break the cycle of violence, by forcing the perpetrator to leave the shared home and giving the person who has been abused some breathing space, so that they can decide whether they want to stay with their partner or end the relationship. Men are most often the aggressors – and this is not to be made light of by saying that it takes two to argue. But when a man is being hit by his female partner, he’s very unlikely to talk about it, because then he risks being seen as weak. The man as victim is always a social paradox: it seems you can only be one or the other. When it comes to sexual harassment, women themselves have found a way to give each

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other courage. They are speaking up publicly about having been the victims of abuse. Hopefully, this will contribute to more respectful conduct between the sexes. Although the campaign has two serious disadvantages: first, everything is being tarred with the same brush. An ill-advised compliment or a clumsy grope is being treated the same as a horrific rape, and this diminishes our sense of the relative severity of these crimes, which should in turn determine the level of punishment. Secondly, anyone who is accused is being treated as guilty. It’s enough to name and shame someone in the media for his whole life to be destroyed, and then the presumption of innocence – which is probably the most important maxim of the rule of law – is lost. Sometimes the people who have been wronged also seek their own justice. That is what happens with theft from shops. Retailers often don’t report the crime and instead claim compensation. That’s fine, if the sum just covers the specific cost. But when, for example, a supermarket claims compensation of 500 Swiss francs from the parents of a schoolboy who has stolen a DVD, that is an inadmissible private punitive action, and could be grounds for a criminal prosecution. Transport companies usually only report fare-dodgers when they’ve been caught several times. But sometimes they conduct their own investigation and make an arbitrary judgement. For example, the Swiss national railway company accused an apprentice of fare evasion: his multi-journey ticket had been stamped, but not punched at the edge. Now the young man has a criminal record for falsifying documents and avoiding payment of a fare, because (apparently) a ticket-stamping machine wasn’t working properly. In sport, I suspect you can do almost anything without being prosecuted. Sport is effectively a law-free space. In the heat of a football match, if a defender breaks the leg of a striker on the other team, that is, by definition, causing bodily harm. But it’s excused on the principle of a risk willingly taken, as long as the aggressor was playing by the rules of the game and was aiming for the ball, not the man. That behaviour would be prosecutable, of course, if he was acting recklessly and didn’t care if he caused an injury in the process – in which case the referee would give him a red card for a serious foul. All the same, I’m not aware of a single case in recent years where a footballer has had a legal verdict passed against him. It’s seen as unsporting to report an opponent to the police. In place of criminal punishment, there is at worst a club punishment: the offending player is banned for a few months, and that’s an end to the matter. There is fundamentally little objection to be made to a decriminalisation of relatively harmless breaches of norms and the easing of the burden on the criminal justice system that comes with such decriminalisation. This goes in particular for traffic violations – otherwise we would have to prosecute half the population. Trivial matters – and, generously speaking, that would include inherently dishonest actions like the manipulation of a parking disc or dangerous things like running a red light – are still dealt with through fines, issued on the spot and

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handled anonymously. You just silently open your wallet rather than having to face the disruption of acquiring a criminal record. It sounds like minor offenders are being let go more than they used to be. That depends on whether breaking a particular rule is tolerated socially or if it has negative connotations. When someone who should be paying taxes hoards undeclared money, it’s regarded as a misdemeanour that can be redressed administratively by paying a sum equivalent to the tax that was due. But when an immigrant works illegally, that’s a crime, which attracts a fine or a custodial sentence of up to a year. The difference between the consumption of alcohol and cannabis is even more stark. If a wine-lover has two or three glasses, he can happily drive home that evening, even though his willingness to take risks is now much greater and his reaction time is increased. But if an occasional smoker has a single joint and only gets behind the wheel again the following day, to be on the safe side, he risks being prosecuted for driving in an unsafe condition even though he stopped feeling the effects of the drug long ago. The Swiss Federal Supreme Court says, soberly, that this disparity is not a legal issue but a political decision. In individual instances, the state prosecutor can choose not to pursue a case, according to the principle of expediency, if the perpetrator’s guilt and the consequences of his actions are relatively minor. So occasionally, yes, they do let the small fry go. But unfortunately, huge pike sometimes slip through the net as well. On the management floors of Swiss companies, some people are cheating like there’s no tomorrow – stealing data, misappropriating funds, giving away commercial secrets, fiddling the books. On average, it causes losses of several hundred thousand francs. But only one in every three cases that are discovered ends in a legal sanction. The companies are afraid it will damage their reputation if it comes out that their internal checks have failed. At the same time, they hope they’ll get financial reparations if the perpetrator isn’t exposed. So they draw up a non-disclosure agreement with him – they will keep his misdeeds quiet, if he pays back the money in instalments. The firm’s egotism triumphs, here – the most important thing is that the books balance. And evidently no one cares that they haven’t prevented future fraud; in fact, this behaviour even creates an incentive for other white-collar criminals. So, how are people treated when they uncover abuses in their workplace? Telling tales is not the done thing – you learn that at school here, and people take that attitude into their professional lives. Whistleblowers are by no means hailed as heroes; they’re reviled as traitors and shut out of the job market. The most famous case in Switzerland is a good example of this: two controllers at the Zurich social welfare office passed documents about abuse of the benefits system to a weekly newspaper, after their concerns had apparently been waived off with a shrug by the head of their department. Although it led to the politicians rethinking some things, they were sacked and ultimately found guilty of breaking professional confidentiality by the Federal Supreme Court. One of these two women wasn’t

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able to find a permanent job for ten years. On the other hand, we also don’t want a culture of denunciation like that in the USA, where whistleblowers sometimes receive part of any compensation that wrongdoers are ordered to pay as a result of their revelations. But people should be able to turn to an independent authority when they see irregularities being tolerated by people in senior positions, and if that doesn’t do any good, they should be able to go public if they have to. There was a legislative project, which has now failed, to force large companies to set up an office to which these things could be reported but at the same time prohibit employees from informing the media. At the moment, a whistleblower still has to live with the risk of being sacked as soon as he raises the alarm. And if a court later confirms that he was acting in the common interest, it won’t be much use to him. He won’t get his job back; the dismissal remains valid. In some regional governments today, employees can at least point out failings without expecting to be disadvantaged as a result. But even there, it isn’t always easy to report these failings. In my canton, the person to whom complaints should be directed was a regional councillor who had just stepped down, which prompted one consumer magazine to run the headline: “Please report misdemeanours to the old boss!” One gets the impression that lawyers are the guardians of silence. The famous sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, who was at the centre of power for a while as EU commissioner, didn’t think much of lawyers. He described them as the result of a double process of elimination: the only people who study law are the ones who aren’t interested in anything else, and the only ones who complete a law degree are those who have withstood the boredom of it. Because lawyers never have to commit themselves to a particular speciality, he said, they can become “general experts” and make a career anywhere they choose. But once they reach the top of the profession, their need for security is always stronger than the desire for change. The brilliant journalist Margrit Sprecher, who worked as a court reporter, among other things, had no love for lawyers, either. In a questionnaire on ideas for a better Switzerland, she recommended electing fewer people from this profession to parliaments and national government. Jurists, she said, are not creators; they just oversee the existing order. They don’t act; they just react. While others have to develop their own survival strategies in the “jungle of everyday life,” they just consult the law book. But now I would like to stop the blanket badmouthing of colleagues and turn back to the craft of the legal profession. Well then, back to the legal questions: are judicial hearings always open to the public? In Roman times, jury trials were held in the marketplace, and in Germania, Things gathered under the court linden tree. But in later times, judges interrogated defendants in secret, in their official rooms. It was only in the French Revolution that people once again began to call for trials to be oral and public. Today, this tenet has constitutional status. Everyone is entitled to have a valid civil claim

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made by them or a criminal charge made against them heard in a public court. There are a few exceptions to this rule, however. Family cases and criminal cases against young people aren’t public. And the victim of a violent crime can request that the public be excluded. Generally speaking, the public benches only fill up when a sensational murder or a spectacular robbery is being tried. And journalists then have to wait outside the doors with their cameras, because they aren’t allowed to take pictures in the courtroom. In contrast to justice, government is traditionally kept hidden. Only people who can demonstrate that they are acting in the public interest are given access to official documents. It’s only recently that the federal government and the administrative bodies of several Swiss cantons have replaced the principle of secrecy with the principle of openness. Anyone can now request access to official files, with no preconditions attached, and a request can only be denied for a few specific reasons, first and foremost if making something public endangers freedom of expression within an authority, poses a safety risk, or infringes on a person’s privacy. Many administrative authorities are admittedly resisting this change using delaying tactics. They ignore enquiries, invent excuses, or demand prohibitively high fees for providing responses. The supreme court has recently rebuked this reluctance to be open in no uncertain terms: the freedom of information ruling is intended to make public discussion about the government’s work possible. Popular oversight must be possible even where “government bodies find it uncomfortable.” In this way, a nuclear power plant was made to provide awkward information about radioactive substances in the air it pumped out, and the department for transport was instructed to give out damning data about the increasing number of breakdowns on the rail network. What status does silence have in a civil court case? A proper civil trial is governed by the principle of “party prosecution.” Anyone who is making a legal claim based on facts has to state those facts right at the start, in detail. That means that if a building contractor is suing for damages to make up for a loss, he has to say that a contract was signed in which the builders agreed to carry out specific work, that they did this work badly, that he complained about the quality in good time, demanded they rectify it to no avail, and that he then had to pay a third party the sum he is claiming. If he forgets to mention any part of this, the case is dismissed then and there. This is what is called the burden of proof. The counterpart to this is the defending party’s burden to contest alleged facts. He has to refute every single allegation made by the plaintiff. If he doesn’t, it means he has acknowledged the alleged facts as true and risks the claim being approved without the submission of evidence. The parties decide themselves what they want to bring to trial, but they also bear the consequences of their silence. So they have a kind of duty to speak. Occasionally, you also get the opposite, when people are forbidden from speaking. The only things that the court can consider are relevant facts. Anything that is personally significant but not relevant to the case is inadmissible. Emotions, in particular, are disregarded. Divorce cases

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used to be judged according to fault. In a reversal of their former feelings, married couples could make hate-filled accusations, which earned them financial rewards. The new divorce law dispenses with the principle of fault. Now a spouse isn’t allowed to so much as hint at how offended and hurt they were by their partner’s behaviour – even though that might help them work through the shock of separation. The court would soon caution them to “come to the point.” And what are the consequences of being silent in business? As a rule, no assumptions are made when someone is silent. It is, in stilted legal terminology, a “nullum.” Occasionally, private law will place a certain meaning on silence, in the sense of a denial or an acceptance. If the parents don’t explicitly agree to a contract entered into by a child who is still a minor, it isn’t upheld. But if a businessman doesn’t respond to a confirmatory email from another salesman, the business discussed in it is regarded as agreed. The ordinary consumer, however, has other problems. If you react to a tradesman’s verbal cost estimate by nodding your head, you are indicating your agreement, even if you haven’t given the matter sufficient consideration. And if you make an online purchase and tick the box to say you’ve read the terms and conditions, you’re accepting the small print even if you haven’t actually read it at all. This is not purely passive behaviour; it’s wordless, but still positive and therefore “eloquent” action. As a judge, how have you coped with the silence in the courtroom? As a judge, I have of course encountered both completely silent and extremely voluble parties. But you have to be able to deal with them calmly. The real difficulty lies in the fact that trials are aimed not at free communication but at rapid resolution. The ritualised process of a trial consists of a series of monologues. It begins with the statement of case and the reply from the defence. Then there are responses from both sides. After that, the court withdraws to consider and finally reads the judgement. The parties are not permitted to utter another word at this point; all they can do is appeal to a higher authority. The reading of the judgement, a mocking observer once remarked, is a more of less solemn occasion at which “they call for silence in court, and wrongdoers are caught in silence.” A trial of this sort is basically nothing but an institutionalised form of refusing conversation. In my area, however – family law – this way of doing things has fateful consequences. A family argument, at its core, is not a matter for the courts; when a relationship conflict is transformed into a legal conflict, the outcome has an effect on the family relationship – which is not ended by the legal decision. In family matters, the best thing is certainly not to reach a verdict as swiftly as possible; in fact, it’s the opposite: to avoid a verdict if we possibly can and encourage the parties to find a fair solution on their own. This is especially true when there are children involved. But sometimes, in a crisis, parents’ personal concerns take up so much room that it suppresses their adult ability to empathise with their children. This adult self needs to be shaken awake, so to speak, and in order to do that, you first have

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to break through the wall of silence. That doesn’t always work, but it is still always worth making an energetic attempt and perhaps even provoking them slightly. On that subject, I’m reminded of a little story that a German colleague once told me. He’d had to take on a case in which an adult daughter was demanding a substantial sum from her father, whom she otherwise completely ignored, to support her university degree. During the hearing, the lawyer leant over to the respondent and said: “You’re probably going to win this. But do you really want to win a court case against your own daughter?” When the father said indignantly that that was why he’d come here, the lawyer sat upright again and did his job in good conscience.

9 CARTELS OF SILENCE

In the landscape of knowledge, the field in which the pattern of silence, deception, and hushing things up is truly legendary is that of politics. Plato was an early observer of this masquerade by people who were charged with law-making in the polis and commented on it in his writings on politics. These were elected representatives of the people, whose job was to debate among themselves what was right and just – and to pass laws, when necessary, for everyone to observe and orient themselves by in order to lead a good moral and ethical life. In order for politicians’ talk to make sense, they require the trust of the electorate. Those who now form the “silent majority,” the people who have stopped voting, have lost their trust in those “at the top” because (so the man in the street believes), “they just do what they want anyway.” Unfortunately, it is a fact of life that politicians lie. Sometimes, it seems, lies are perceived as more human than telling the truth. And for this reason, these people and their profession are not seen as trustworthy. On the current scale of trustworthiness for different professions in Germany, politicians don’t even appear in the top 30. Only 14%–20% of the population trusts them. Hans-Christian Ströbele (b.1939), who was an MP in the German Green Party for 20 years and a member of the parliamentary commission that oversaw the secret service, said as much on television (aspekte, 01/12/2017): “I have never been lied to so often as by representatives of the government or the services when there were scandals to be exposed.” People in positions of power who protect themselves by keeping things quiet promote this dangerous emotional apathy. The politicians are a long way down the scale of popularity and trustworthiness. Personal mistrust is the politician’s most useful strategy. How can we trust them, as democrats, when each side tells lies about the other? Ströbele advises us to listen carefully and allow trust to grow when we see that a person is consistent in what they say. This is how to build basic trust from scratch. It means that

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politicians have a duty to their voters to do what they say and say what they are doing. The following elegant bon mot is attributed to Richard Freiherr von Weizsäcker (1920–2015): “A good politician is someone whose denial doesn’t contradict his own statement.” And he should know: he was a CDU politician and president of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1984–1994. Weizsäcker’s father was secretary of state in Hitler’s foreign office and as such a top diplomat. It is no surprise that his son acted as his lawyer when Ernst von Weizsäcker (1882–1951) was tried in Nuremburg for war crimes. As a brigade leader in the general SS, he assisted in the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz and was sentenced to five years in prison. His son, despite all the incriminating evidence against his father, maintained his innocence until his dying day. This is one of many thousands of similar cases: politicians, judges, and elite members of the police force in Nazi Germany helped to bring about the total collapse of German culture and society through a war that their regime started – but when that war was over, they managed to keep quiet about all this and return elegantly to positions of power in the so-called new democracy. Mostly with the blessing of the victorious allies, who at the start of the Cold War immediately began to build up institutions using these Nazi elites. This masquerade was hushed up for almost twenty years, until the student unrest of the 1960s and 70s broke open and exposed the cover-ups and arrogance of the older generation who were still in power. Nothing true can be born out of a false life. Every time things are hushed up in politics, by elected politicians, something is revealed: namely an arrogant and contemptuous attitude towards the population. This tactic of keeping things quiet is also used by many officials, in order – so I suspect – to secure, if not strengthen, their power. The secrecy in politics, which is important to the system even though it is certainly not practised by everyone at all times, seems to be taken for granted. Silence is used as a strategic instrument here. Without this form of government, the representatives of power say, it would be impossible to build trust between states or different interest groups and the parties representing them using diplomacy. This one-sided, authoritarian attitude from the ruling elites in our democracies is something that we as voters are forced to realise again and again and to try to offset with our votes. I often wonder at the meaningless formulaic soundbites we hear from politicians and their spokespeople, which allow them to keep quiet about what is really at stake. Are we supposed to learn something from this? Yes: not to ignore the fact that these people, who are temporarily charged with an office of state, are usually only telling us that they don’t intend to tell us anything. There is a double act of silence and secrecy happening here. Those of us – mostly journalists – who try to find out what we are not being told (and what we are not told that we’re not being told) then become a thorn in the side of those who are trying to keep these things quiet. These powerful people project their own unacknowledged dark side onto those who are trying to enlighten the public, painting themselves as victims. The longer we remain silent about

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something we are not permitted or inclined to talk about, the more difficult it becomes to start talking about it again one day. Politicians like Angela Merkel or the Swiss billionaire Christoph Blocher might even prefer disenfranchised voters, to whom they could say: don’t worry about that, I’ll do it for you, I’ll sacrifice myself. My view of things is the truth. Just follow me, and don’t ask stupid questions. Sometimes within a family or a state, the taboo on speaking about a taboo act is stronger than the content and the act of the taboo. One example of how something can be kept quiet in this way for a long period is the former West German Chancellor Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer (1876–1967). According to a lead article in Der Spiegel headlined “Adenauer’s Secret File” (08/04/2017, p.17), he was not only once an active Nazi; he also spoke contemptuously of his subjects as “terribly stupid.” The article reveals how he abused his power, ordered bribes, and had the later Chancellor Willy Brandt spied on. Working for Adenauer, Lothar Weirauch (1908–1983) not only spied on members of Adenauer’s own party but was also an agent for East Germany. His boss, a former admirer of Hitler, made “dictatorial moves that could not be reconciled with the German constitution” (ibid, p.17). His authoritarian stance also prompted him to enlist the secret service to manipulate the media, just as the Putins and Erdogans of the world do today. As early as 1932, Adenauer was already requesting that “the National Socialist Party be brought into the government” (ibid, p.14). Like President Trump today, he had people spread fake news – and all of this was kept quiet for decades. The files reveal that this proud patriot was able to violate justice and laws without facing the consequences. He also used the German secret service, the BND, as his own private spy network. The army general Reinhard Gehlen (1902–1979) was his willing enforcer. In 1946, Gehlen had set up the new German foreign intelligence service under the leadership of the USA, using old cadres. He didn’t leave the service until 1968. It has been proved that old Nazi networkers were operating within the BND. The years of silence about this fact show how old Nazis were able quietly to rise to the top of the new Federal Republic of Germany. In his collection of essays, Hitlers Eliten nach 1945 (“Hitler’s elites after 1945,” 2003), Norbert Frei, professor of modern history in Jena, reveals how those who profited from Nazi rule were able to establish themselves in the silent chambers of power after the country’s defeat in the Second World War. The saying goes that a man who changes his public intentions against his own will still holds the same opinion. In summary: we can see the great silence in politics wherever we are, whether in our own countries or the EU’s economy and politics. And in the horrified silence from NATO, which serves as an excellent example here, when it failed to speak out against policies pursued by the dictator Erdogan that, in moral and democratic terms, were no longer compatible with European values. I ask myself whether all these people who have been elected by us have forgotten that dictatorship means abolishing democracy, always and everywhere. A dictatorship is also loud, hideous, and full of shouted lies from its Führer.

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Fascist dictatorships facilitated the Second World War (1939–1945), which we must regard as a consequence of the First World War (1914–1918), all of which originated in Europe. The destruction of human life in these most dreadful of human catastrophes in 20th-century Europe left a terrible legacy. Ellen N. La Motte (1873–1961) was a nurse in a field hospital behind the front lines in France (1914–1915), where she cared for young, injured soldiers as they died all too soon, and from time to time was able to help heal their physical injuries. She wrote a series of documents that were published in 1916. Two years later, the book was banned by the American government. In it, La Motte described the soldiers whose lives had been destroyed: human wrecks. The government thought it would ruin morale among its troops. French women were forbidden from visiting their injured soldiers, since wartime governments fear nothing more than a lowering of morale in their fighting men. But prostitution was encouraged, because it apparently kept the soldiers’ spirits up. This book (La Motte 2014) about what the war left in its wake does not hush up any of the brutal and devastating facts of this most terrible of all human activities. After everything she had witnessed, La Motte saw a bleak future for this war, the very darkest side of our civilisation. Ever since I was born, there has been a war raging somewhere in the world. Barbara Ehrenreich is an author and political activist. She wrote a book called Blood Rites on the origins of war (Ehrenreich 2011). Her central thesis is that, as human animals, we were once prey for predatory carnivores before we were able to defend ourselves against them with weapons and fences. Every horde and tribe developed the ability to hunt. When individual weak or ill members of a tribe could no longer run away, they were left to the predators as a kind of sacrifice, so that the others could get to safety. This natural tribal behaviour was subsequently incorporated into a ritual of human sacrifice. When most of the predators that hunted us had been slain and had died out, the hunters became warriors who fought other tribes. The bloodlust that followed, created through this predatorlike killing, put the warriors on the same level as the predatory beasts. Fighting in this way – humans hunting each other – brought into being the man-eating monster of war, from which we have never been able to escape. Over time, the warrior elite achieved the status of knights, a position that placed them alongside rulers and religious leaders. Ehrenreich’s theory seems very plausible.

Spirals of silence Winfried Schulz, a professor of political communications who worked most recently at the Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen, developed the theory of spirals of silence in politics. The mass media spreads an inaccurate picture of public opinion, garnered from surveys. Schulz writes: In the pattern of a self-fulfilling prophecy, situations wrongly defined (sometimes deliberately so, for political reasons) can lead to a shift in opinion

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among the general public – with some far-reaching consequences for political elections and the balance of power between parties (Schulz 2011, p.64). The spiral metaphor shows how it is possible to manipulate public opinion by strategically keeping some things quiet. The relevant arguments are prepared for the media, so that the politicians’ behaviour cannot possibly be disrupted by the lack of a truthful transfer of information. According to Schulz, the situative and social context plays an important role in the success of this manipulation of public opinion. A knowledge gap has to be created between those in power and the general population, and then the weight behind the punch of the spiral of silence can no longer be recognised for what it is or for the purpose it is designed to serve. The theory of the spiral of silence assumes that the population’s opinions adapt and conform to what the climate of opinion is perceived to be, and that this perception is – at least in part – shaped by the mass media (ibid, p.123). In the age of fake news, this assumption is very insightful. It therefore follows that our reality is being replaced by a constructed idea of reality, which, aided by the spiral of silence, we are unable to recognise as false. This manipulative lie is styled as factual truth. The relevant empirical investigations on this subject, which Schulz quotes and elaborates upon, help to show how successful these spirals of silence have been in German elections, as well as in the USA and Spain, among other places. A slightly pessimistic attitude towards the media and its political influence seems justified here. The political rulers send the mass media off down the path of structural lies they have laid out (e.g., Italy, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Turkey, and, in part, Switzerland) and in this way turn their false picture of things into the single valid truth to be told. In my view, this is a disgrace for reality. Anyone who points to this manipulation, calls it out, and criticises it, risks an extreme reaction (depending on which nation they are in). Among the dictatorial governments in Europe and elsewhere, it is boom time once again for the practice of silencing people who reveal what is really happening and potentially even dare to criticise it. Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

Silencing voices means seeing the tracks of your own life obliterated. What are you trying to say? There, she will enter into the secret of forgotten anger. So entirely invisible, the beautiful miracles, the silence that conceals so much. This silence plants the seeds of doubt and misgivings.

Horizon lines of silent domination Things were no better in ages gone by. The Dutch Prince Willem van Oranje (1533–1584) was also known as “Willem de Zwijger” – William the Silent. He was one of the important noblemen involved in the eighty-year War of

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Independence (1568–1648) against the Spanish occupiers. In 1581, the territories that make up today’s Netherlands declared their independence from Spain, just as the Catalonians are doing today. William the Silent became their governor. The Spanish King Philip II issued an immediate call for his murder, placing a bounty on his head. After several failed assassination attempts, William the Silent was finally silenced forever by a Jesuit. The murderer, however, was himself caught and killed four days later by friends of the silent prince. This moved Philip II to ennoble the assassin’s entire family. Communication in modern politics says little about the internal, operationalised forms of silence practised by influential figures in this field. What great times those were, when people called for democracy as a way of institutionalising the discourse within a population, within an environment, within a nation. The concept of power is a central category in political science (Greven 1994). Who orders what, who does – and of course fails to do – what, when, where, and why, in whose service and to what end: these central questions of power and influence are important if we are to understand power relations. We must not let ourselves be deceived. Most politicians are not extraordinarily skilled, sensible, and in touch with reality. Helmut Schmidt and Valéry Giscard d’Estang (2012) once discussed their shared vision of Europe. In this conversation, the two former statesmen give us a view of their political thought and actions that wasn’t possible while they were in power. They offer us a glimpse behind the scenes on the “secret stage” of world politics. They talk about their regular phone calls, in which these close allies agreed between them on what were, from their point of view, clever political moves. What we can hear as they look back is how a functioning friendship between men, shaped by politics, can be used for the good of both their countries and the EU. Both men admitted their blind spots to themselves and each other. They said how necessary the other’s critical response had been in order for genuine political change to be realised. Giscard d’Estang also confessed that politicians are no cleverer or more competent than the average citizen. On that subject, Greven says, fittingly: In the enlightened agreement between the members of a society lies an autonomous source of power and basis for future rule – which would only be “democracy” if enlightenment and agreement were not simply the legitimating semblance of a formal process of representative absolutism, but were practically adopted by subjects (1994, p.241). To this extent, the uncertainty of silence in politics, and secrecy as a tool used by the ruling party in a state, are incontrovertible facts. The majority of the minority determines who comes to power through elections. The fact remains that the social denial of reality is a subtle form of exercising political power. The principle of hope, as an attitude of real socio-psychological and cultural change, is beginning to wither. Individual self-determination for all, to ensure the democratic protection of our wants and needs, is an idealised notion completely locked in itself, which no

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longer corresponds to the reality of today’s power structures. People with political power are doing their best to keep quiet about this, by convincing us that they are taking a burden on our behalf. The tightly woven political web of powerful elites, business leaders, lobbying organisations, and wealthy people is using this strategy with the intention of gaining absolute power to define what happens and what doesn’t. Silence in politics is the integral norm in our nation states – as we have seen from the “Panama” and “Paradise” papers revealed by journalists. The political scientist Wolf Linder put forward six theories on silence in politics. The second of these is relevant here: Silence in politics is significant first and foremost as the “second face of power”. From a system-logic point of view, it leads to certain topics not even appearing on the political agenda. In the form of “non-issues”, silence can be understood as an efficient technique of exercising power, or as the result of structural rule (Linder 2013, p.139). The question of whether an individual politician remains silent or lets something slip isn’t relevant in this power structure. Linder points out that the special interests of the powerful and the long-term general interests of the population that they govern form a dynamic constellation of interests, but through a strategy of keeping this constellation quiet, the interests of the rich and powerful usually win out. Our political system is based on short-term agreements made behind closed doors between the powerful and the so-called representatives of the people, who usually represent their party’s own interests. Linder makes no bones about the fact that it is essential to break out of this strategic silence in order to achieve a radical change for the benefit of the population at large. A current example illustrates this theory perfectly. A memorial to the twelve people from six nations killed on Breitscheidplatz in Berlin was unveiled on the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack near the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The names of the dead are written on the steps, which are linked to the pavement below by a crack filled with bronze. Above the names, on the church, are the words (written in German): “To the memory of the victims of the terrorist attack on 19 December 2016. Let all people come together in peace.” Unfortunately, this mass murder was not declared to be what it was: an Islamist terrorist attack on German civil society. Why was this fact not mentioned? Who ordered this silence? An example of political correctness used to sanitise every situation. On 2 December 2017, the relatives of the twelve victims wrote an open letter to the German chancellor, which was published in Der Spiegel (49/2017, p.36). It criticised the silence from this politician, who had not given them her condolences either in writing or in person. The Islamist attack, they said, had been directed against Germany, and not against them as private individuals. They wrote to Merkel: “We are of the opinion that, in this, you are not doing justice to your office.” They didn’t feel she was respecting them in their pain, suffering, and misery.

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Merkel’s behaviour showed what silence from government can express. On this first anniversary of the attack, Germany’s president and justice minister said how sorry they were that psychological and financial assistance, and legal support both for the victims’ relatives and for more than a hundred people who were injured, had been insufficient and much too long in coming. The day before, Chancellor Merkel had received 80 of the injured and the relatives in her official residence. This meeting allowed some kind of reconciliation between these two worlds to begin. She intends to invite people to more of these meetings so that a new relationship of mutual acceptance can be achieved. The sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa (b.1965) at the University of Jena has been working on this topic for a long time. His major work Resonance looks at these everyday relationships between politicians and members of the public. He analyses the inability of both groups to find direct resonance in and through each other. Our human nature is alienated by the circumstances in which our social and political life is embedded – and this alienation is reinforced by our tremendous drivenness as human beings, by the computerised, systemic acceleration of production and private consumption. This is how such dissonances as that between a head of government and ordinary citizens are created. In the frantic rush of day-to-day life, where everything has to happen faster and faster, to be done instantly, people are increasingly overtaxed and overwhelmed. We often try and fail to keep ourselves up to date, which only adds to our stress. Rosa’s research on inequality (2016, p.17) assumes that the political classes “are better-resourced and therefore have a better life than others.” This is true. When we consider that a member of the German Bundestag today (in autumn 2019) is paid €10,083 a month, and that this salary is raised by 2.3% a year, we mere mortals can only marvel. Our salaries have dropped by up to 21% in real terms over the past 15 years, instead of rising by a fat €215 per month. The fact is that the real income of a typical worker, whether in Germany or Switzerland, is lower today than it was 60 years ago. In Switzerland, the salaries of family doctors have been falling for years. Since the introduction of the TarMed medical tariff system for outpatient services in 2004, they earn an average of 140,000 CHF before tax, which is 21% lower than it was 13 years ago. Rosa’s conclusion is that many people do not feel heard, respected, and seen by the people they elected to represent them. Human communication – and this particularly includes the field of politics at the moment – is a reciprocal relationship of answers and reactions, which can very quickly be disturbed by negative resonance. The Rohingya population in Myanmar are currently feeling this very acutely. Sam: Realms of shades out of control are very hard to expose. Lou: Untrustworthy backroom politicians muffle their voices in a hidden game of intrigues. This silence is dangerous. Sam: Dangerous for whom? Lou: For the agitators, in their chumminess, because they have forfeited our trust. Sam: Openness causes damage. The question is: to whom?

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Silence from the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Since August 2017, members of the Rohingya population in Myanmar – specifically in the northwestern state of Rakhine – have been violently driven out of their villages by the military and the police. Their villages have been burnt to the ground, and the crops in their fields and their fishing boats have been destroyed. Many people have been murdered, and over half a million forced to flee to Bangladesh. There, refugees are forced to survive in the most appalling conditions. The UN Human Rights Council has described the army’s actions as ethnic cleansing. This terrorism against a Muslim minority in a so-called Buddhist state, which has long suffered under a brutal military dictatorship, throws a long shadow back to the colonial period under English rule. The racist thinking of the western oppressors informed their methods of “divide and rule,” which were taken up by the new indigenous elites in the postcolonial age (Prasse-Freeman 2017). Myanmar’s current government, led by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi (b.1945), stokes fears among the population by speaking of a fight against Islamist terrorists. This murderous campaign against the Rohingya by the long-hated military is making those at the top of the dictatorship popular again. The Burmese people’s support for these actions allows General Min Aung Hlaing to discreetly silence Aung San Suu Kyi. And this places him in a better position as her rival in the 2020 presidential election. He has managed to intimidate the Nobel Prize laureate into remaining silent and tacitly condoning a cruel campaign of expulsion and discrimination. The fourteenth Dalai Lama (born in 1935 as Tenzin Gyatso), the spiritual and political leader of the Tibetan Buddhists, has expressed his deep sadness at the violence being perpetrated by Buddhists against this religious minority. He urged the people who were persecuting Muslims to think of the Buddha. In a situation like this, the Buddha would not have remained silent; he would have made a clear announcement. Ten days after this cue, president Aung San Suu Kyi finally broke her silence. But she took care not to attack the military and the generals for the ethnic cleansing they had ordered. Like Pope Francis I after her, she didn’t mention the Rohingyas by name even once. We see that keeping quiet about this ethnic group is a sign of how limited Suu Kyi’s presidential power in her country is. She is not permitted to deviate from the line taken by those who are really in power, whose political cartel of silence works; if she did, she would lose what little shopwindow power she possesses. I suspect that she overcomes the shock of this reality in silence. As in the former East Germany, the following is practised here: The lie inherent in the command system is not so much that there supposedly is no command system. One could live with that; it’s a direct lie. A proposition is negated – so what? But the lie is much more complex than this. It is a whole knot of lies. Dictatorship of the proletariat. It means that the subjects are the rulers and those in power are their servants. Supposedly (Reich 1992, p.64).

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In 1956, Dietrich Garstka’s East German high school class held a minute’s silence during a history lesson, in solidarity with the uprising in Hungary and to commemorate the recent death of a famous footballer. Fifty years later, he wrote about this dramatic experience in his book Das schweigende Klassenzimmer (The Silent Classroom, 2018). This story of collective courage, class cohesion, and the class war instigated by the powerful elites of the GDR and the USSR was turned into a film of the same name by Lars Kraume, which was shown at the Berlinale in 2018. It gives an emotional portrayal of the drama contained in a minute’s silence. This collective silence by a mixed-sex high-school class was a demonstration of empathy for their brothers and sisters in another so-called socialist country. The rulers, in their systematic deception, turned it into a hostile act, if not the kernel of a counter-revolution. To the ruling classes, nothing seems more dangerous than a new collective and a class acting together; it exposes the subtle exercising of power by the comrade-elite in a visible act of class warfare. The teenagers were turned into enemies of the system and interrogated in isolation. By threatening that these young people would not be allowed to take university entrance exams anywhere in the GDR, the powerful tried to wear each individual down, with help from their parents, who feared guilt by association. Since at this time the Berlin Wall did not yet exist, most fled to the West and escaped from these political conformity fanatics. What can we learn from this? That in a dictatorship, young people who are able to think and feel can be made into enemies of the state. That fearful, narcissistic teachers can feel personally attacked by a minute’s silence, even though it has nothing to do with them. That systematically intimidated parents worry about the Stasi when their underage children dare to take part in a collective silence – instead of praising and encouraging their bravery. It was only a minute’s silence. One brief silence, in the highly regulated school day, to allow them to think about their own beliefs. This communal act of solidarity was badmouthed by fearful, broken, conformist adults. First be silent, consider, then speak. This is what young people want all over the world, in each new generation!

Word of mouth: Auschwitz, the killing machine Smothered Words is the title of a volume of notes on this man-made hell on earth by the French philosopher Sarah Kofman (1934–1994). Kofman, who saw her father go to his death in Auschwitz, writes: About Auschwitz and after Auschwitz no story is possible, if by a story one means: to tell a story of events which makes sense (Kofman 1998, p.14). She asks us all how it would be possible to talk about something “in the face of which every possibility of speaking fades away” (ibid, p.9). Her own experiences and those of people who, like her, had to battle mortal hunger and constant

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humiliation every day, and who ultimately survived, prove for Kofman that the ethical and moral values of humanity can be defended even in extremis. The allpowerful Nazis in their SS uniforms choked the life out of every day and night, in those places where, so the author tells us, even death was not a human death. And how can one not speak of it, when the wish of all those who returned […] has been to tell, to tell endlessly, as if only an “infinite conversation” could match the infinite privation? (ibid, p.10) Withdrawing into inner language serves to protect the outer language, which remains unspoken. This is how language falls silent, says Hans Günther Adler (1910–1988), who survived thirty-two months in Theresienstadt and six in Auschwitz. After the initial shock of internment, he decided, having taken six weeks to compose himself to some extent, that he would bear witness academically and artistically to the horrifically cruel treatment meted out to Jewish people, mostly by German men. Shouted orders from the SS immediately extinguished all murmuring from the prisoners. Adler lived through this indescribable misery by walling himself up inside his own mind. Later, when he became a writer, he dedicated himself to recalling this hell on earth. Adler quotes the words of Salmen Lewental, who was originally from Poland. He was made to serve in a Sonderkommando from 1942 and was murdered two years later along with all his comrades. Lewental wrote a diary, which he hastily buried before his death, and some pages were found in the winter of 1962. Lewental describes how one day, 600 Jewish boys aged between 12 and 18 were brought into the camp and made to undress in preparation for their murder in the gas chamber. In frantic horror, they began to run around the square, tearing their hair out, not knowing how to save themselves. Many broke down and wept terribly, a dismal wail went up (quoted in Adler 2014, p.245). The SS leader of the Kommando and his fellow officers beat the boys, hitting their heads and naked bodies. The wail rose and became a howl – and the people in the Sonderkommando froze, never having heard human voices wailing so fiercely and so loud. “Without the least shred of pity, the SS men stood there wearing proud, triumphant expressions and drove the lads into the gas chamber bunker with terrible blows.” The murderers laughed, and their “joy was indescribable.” This politics of cruelty is still at work. It brings us stumbling to the edge of the end of civilisation. The rest is the breakdown of language, if we are silent. One person who has handed the words that were smothered during the Holocaust back to his people is Joseph A. Gomes, chef cuisinier and author of English short stories. He described, especially for this chapter, his personal experience of the deathly silence that arose out of the Holocaust. In summer 2017, when he steps meditatively through the gate of Birkenau for the first time in the

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60 years of his well-travelled life, he sees the monstrous extent of the camp, which is beyond anything he has previously imagined. To the language that has fallen silent he now adds his inner, lived truth loud and clear: The foundations of buildings long gone, in row upon row behind tall barbed fences, right and left, stretching out before you. Chimneys like sentinels, standing guard over unspeaking ruins. The tracks running down the middle, to a point far in the distance; a focal point on a horizon no one hears. As he walks, he feels a gentle breath of air, as if spirits are flocking around him. In it, he can hear the whisper “of voices, screaming, whimpering, even laughing.” As you walk the breeze blows like a ghost hovering, whispering, the sound of voices, cries, whimpers and even laughter. Feet shuffling en masse on the hard, rocky earth, kicking up dust or splashing in mud, dripping with rain or earth-stained sweat. Murmurs of fear, barking dogs, cruel shouts and cowering screams. It is here that you hear them. In this graveyard of millions. The caress of death. A rush of wind upon your ears and a low rumble, deep and long, seemingly endless in its drone. The emptiness of this place cries aloud: “I was here!! Do not forget me!” But there are no voices here, there are no cries, there are no people; there is only a breeze, which rustles through the grass growing amidst the rubble and ruins.   In another building not far away, the hallways are hung with hundreds of framed faces. They stare into an unknown camera, their faces are muted, expressionless, vacuous, fearful, proud. Their names are written there, their nationality, internment and death, which for most came within the first year if not the first month or week. Meczyslaw Zielinski 6765, Karol Plaszczyk 11108, Stanislawa Malicka 18975 … and on and on and on… They no longer speak, but their voices are carried in the wind that blows over this place. The buildings are dead. There is no life here. There is only the wind.   As I walked in silence along the paths through these places, I heard their voices, I heard their cries; in the groves of trees, whose shade must have seemed almost benevolent, they waited as families and friends for the final time, with children newly aware of a world they regarded with curiosity and humour; the fate they could never have imagined. Only the trees remain … and a breeze blowing continually, carrying their reminder out into the world: “Never forget…” Sarah Kofman, like other witnesses before her, freed herself from the echoes of this hell by taking her own life in October 1994. But her life had already been lost in Auschwitz. She was attempting the impossible, living on, trying to remain realistic. The intense expression of emotions with the help of gesture, facial expression, and tone of voice is what is so special about communicating what we feel.

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As soon as emotions are cultivated for their own sake and isolated from their context in life and created artificially, islands of happiness and cooperation may be reached in a different way – but perhaps to the detriment of everyday life, which then appears in a sadder light (Gross 1975, p.61f ). When politicians masquerade as decent, forthright, and authentic speakers, while at the same time keeping things quiet, they are playing to the emotions of their audience, who don’t realise that this fake show of authenticity is precisely what restricts genuine free speech. Speech of this kind indirectly produces a compulsory form of domineering silence, which feels like unspoken thoughts being locked away inside. While silence can be – and is – broken again and again in speech, fatal silence involves the breakdown of language and leads to a person ceasing to speak (Geissner 1975, p.317). Lou: Sam: Lou: Sam: Lou:

The world inside… …can be lived… …only in words, which we incorporate… …into our contemplation secretly, so that we can say something meaningful… …from the depths of our soul.

Concealing the facts In February 2012, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel promised the relatives of the people who were murdered by the National Socialist Underground (NSU) that she would do everything in her power to ensure that the murders were solved. She also wanted to catch the people who had assisted in any way with these crimes and make sure all the perpetrators who were still alive were brought to justice. After more than 400 hours of court time and €50 million in costs (as of 2017) in a criminal trial that has been taking place before the Higher Regional Court in Munich, Mrs Merkel’s promise has not yet been made good. In a paradoxical way, the chancellor’s statement served her strategy of keeping things quiet, in that it was a red herring. It was never the government’s intention to uncover these neo-Nazi machinations fully and truly, according to Hajo Funke, a professor emeritus at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute of Political Sciences (Funke 2015). The point is that we can no longer believe her when she says something as the head of her cabinet. By announcing something and then not really following through on what she promised, she has gambled away her own credibility, the most important commodity for a politician in her position of power. Hajo Funke also complains about the silence of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and those in politics who systematically protect them. Anyone with an interest in the questions of secrecy and concealment

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and behaviour of the NSU troops from Jena, which are hotly contested issues within politics, would be well advised to read his book Staatsaffäre NSU (Affair of State NSU, 2015). He conducts an open and critical investigation into a matter that is difficult to penetrate analytically amid the state-sponsored obfuscation. Although the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bf V) is constitutionally dedicated to the wellbeing and protection of the German people, its employees (up to the highest level) have blocked any attempt by the courts and state prosecutors to investigate the activities of its undercover agents who have infiltrated the NSU. Bf V employees have also shredded files, ensuring that the potentially incriminating truth they contain never sees the light of day. This is painfully reminiscent of the Stasi’s actions during the collapse of the GDR. The Bf V deliberately portrays people like Funke in the media as conspiracy theorists. But Funke and many lawyers acting for the victims refuse to give up. They are keeping a historical perspective in mind as they look at the background of the violent, murdering neo-Nazi movement (from 1990), the young members of which were brought up and socialised in the GDR. This fateful entanglement of the state security services and right-wing radicals means that the Bf V is making people in Germany – particularly those with an immigrant background – less safe. They are hushing up the active involvement by their undercover agents in the NSU’s ideological war on our open, culturally diverse civil society. Instead of halting the dangers of violent far-right extremism and its ideologies, the Bf V has supported them. The fact that the intelligence services are permitted to act outside the law is also being hushed up. The chancellor and her government are keeping this from the public, too. The various parliamentary commissions investigating these murders and the involvement of the Bf V have been systematically hampered in carrying out their work. Elected parliamentarians are receiving only the cold shoulder of silence from those who are legally obliged to provide information to them. This behaviour has destroyed much of the trust between German citizens and the state security services, with the result that: “ultimately, parliament – and thereby also the public – has lost the power struggle with the government” (Funke 2014, p.226). Parliament’s constitutional authority has been, and is still being, undermined and weakened by Merkel’s government. The fact is that the NSU trio were known to the intelligence service. Without this skeleton in the closet, there would be nothing for the leaders of the Bf V and the German government to keep quiet about. The Bf V’s leading officers were able to find out at any time “what the neo-Nazis associated with the NSU were planning” (ibid, p.237). An old joke from 1933, when the Nazis came to power through elections and then seized the German state, helps me to bear these sad truths. Hitler is visiting a psychiatric hospital. Everyone stands by their beds and says “Heil Hitler” as he passes through the ward – except one man. When Hitler gets cross and asks him why, he says: “I’m a doctor, not a crazy person.”

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There is another justice scandal in Germany’s post-war history. It concerns the murder of Oury Jalloh, a 36-year-old refugee from Sierra Leone, living in Dessau, who was arrested for being drunk and disorderly at dawn on the morning of 7 January 2005. According to the police report, Jalloh, who was bound hand and foot, had been placed on a fire-resistant mattress. At midday, the same day he was arrested, he died as a result of a fire in his cell. For twelve years, the justice authorities in Sachsen-Anhalt said that the prisoner must have set fire to himself. Then confidential investigation files were passed to investigative journalists working on the television programme Monitor. Things that had been kept quiet, as so often, found a way into the open. The files contained a letter from a leading state prosecutor which spoke of a probable manslaughter or possibly a murder case. It is partly thanks to Monitor that we now know a secret meeting took place between medical examiners and chemists, fire experts, and investigating authorities. The previous evaluations and findings were reconsidered from a different perspective. This panel of experts in Würzburg conducted some experiments and refuted the theory of self-immolation put forward by police. Despite all this, the Halle state prosecution service suspended all further investigations in October 2017. Silence, so it seems, is their duty. This was where the journalists stepped in. On their programme, which aired on 30 November 2017, they presented the new findings, which disproved the theory of selfimmolation beyond all reasonable doubt. “This result rests first and foremost on an attempt to start a fire in August 2016 in Schmiedeberg, Saxony. The fire experts built a recreation of the Dessau police cell in order to establish what really happened. The conclusion by almost all experts leaves scarcely any doubt that a second person started the fire. Small amounts of accelerant, such as fluid from a cigarette lighter, must have been used – this is the only way to explain the pattern in which the fire spread. Oury Jalloh was in all likelihood incapacitated or already dead when the fire was lit. This is suggested by the low level of adrenalin found in his body at autopsy. If Oury Jalloh had been conscious, this level would have been much higher. Being burned alive causes maximum stress and a huge rush of adrenalin.” This was the conclusion drawn by the forensic toxicologist Gerold Kauert, when he was interviewed on Monitor. This positive conclusion from the various experts who evaluated the case allowed Dessau’s chief prosecutor Folker Bittmann to free himself from the cartel of silence that had dominated for twelve years. He is now talking about a suspected murder. But this omertá was only broken open for a short while. Bittmann was subsequently taken off the case, effectively silencing him again. It was then passed over to the Halle state prosecutor’s office, which halted the investigation once again – on whose instructions, we don’t know. No one else has been listened to – not even the activist group who commissioned a medical report on Jalloh’s body in October 2019. The report found that serious injuries were inflicted on him before his death, but the court refused to admit it as evidence. Silentium. How can this be? Thomas Feltes, a professor of criminology, gives his answer to this question in an interview: “To speak openly, it’s political influence. For me, there is no other

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reason why the state prosecutor in Halle has halted this case. They have obviously either received a formal instruction or an informal suggestion, which amounts to the same thing: there is a political desire not to see this case go any further.” Those responsible in the justice authority react indignantly to this expert response. Then they fall silent again. No more interviews are given. One after another is declined. There is only silence, and no one is saying what this authority is keeping quiet about. All the same, they have not reckoned with the responsible tenacity of investigative journalists. The Monitor film includes a surprise question from journalist Najima El Moussaoui to the justice minister Anne-Marie Keding, on the fringes of a debate in the state parliament: “Why aren’t you prepared to give us an interview on the case of Oury Jalloh?” The justice minister of SachsenAnhalt answers frostily: “Because that’s a matter for the state prosecutor.” She steps aside, looking annoyed, and walks off down the stairs. El Moussaoui and the camera stay on her heels. From behind, she asks: “But you’re the superior authority. So why aren’t the investigations being continued?” Keding, now angry, stops for a moment and says with suppressed fury: “The state prosecutor’s office, the justice authority sui generis, is the one carrying out this investigation.” Then she descends the rest of the stairs and turns away completely. “But,” the journalist persists from a distance: “there’s talk of a justice scandal now, which would be your area. What are you going to do about that?” No response. Nothing. Apart from more silence on this suspected murder and the attendant scandal. The justice minister has had plenty of opportunities to be courageous and end this secrecy, which has now become public knowledge. Professor Feltes again: “Unlike the courts, the state prosecution service isn’t independent; it receives instructions and answers to the justice ministry, which means the justice minister can issue instructions at any time. She has oversight, she has some degree of influence.” Thanks to ARD’s enlightening political magazine programme, and the activist group known as the Initiative in Remembrance of Oury Jalloh that has been set up since it aired, in future it will be almost impossible for the responsible authorities and politicians in Germany to continue finagling their way through this situation with secrecy, lies, and deception before the eyes of the public. The fact is that Oury Jalloh was, in all likelihood, murdered by the people who were supposed to be protecting him while he was in the care of the state. The manner in which elected members of the government, who often mistake the office they have been elected to for their own, have refused to provide information is in my view a wicked political act and a disgrace to our democracy. Politicians’ use of silence as a weapon against their own population is not a phenomenon peculiar to Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and so on; it is also integral to the world’s great old dictatorships. Let us cast our minds back to the death of the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 2010, Liu Xiaobo (1954–2017). The Nobel committee honoured him for his long, wise and nonviolent fight for human rights in China. The prize provoked a furious reaction from the Chinese government, which prevented Liu Xiaobo from speaking. At

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the prizegiving ceremony, the certificate was placed on his empty chair. A silent message to anyone who wanted to see it. There was no way for us in Europe to know how he was, in his final days. Everyone who went to visit him in hospital was monitored by the police, clearly working on behalf of the powerful elite. Foreign journalists were not admitted. The country’s blanket domestic censorship ensured that no news of him was spread within China. A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry warned dissidents to respect China’s justice, sovereignty, and domestic affairs. Be silent! This reminds me of a joke from Turkey: during an official visit to Switzerland, the Turkish president is introduced to the members of the Federal Council. One of them is introduced as the minister for maritime affairs. The Turkish president smiles rather condescendingly and remarks in headmaster-like tones that Switzerland doesn’t have any seas, so why does it need a minister of them? To which the president of the Swiss Federal Council replies: That’s true, but then Turkey still has a ministry of justice… Liu Xiaobo’s wife, the artist Liu Xia, was kept under house arrest in Beijing with no legal grounds the whole time her husband was in prison (13 years). The situation continued even after his death, until she was permitted to travel to Germany for medical treatment in July 2018. Her eyes must surely be weary of weeping. For me, this is a clear strategy of exercising power by silencing people. The aim has been to wear Liu Xia down, to corrode her mind until she can no longer speak. “The beautiful thing about the written word is that it shines like a light of truth in the darkness,” her husband remarked in a letter to her. The new, undaunted generation of young Chinese women has arrived. They are the focus of the work “Girls” by the Chinese photographer Luo Yang. Just like the models in her photographs, she was born in the 1980s, a time when China was in the midst of political and economic change. Today these women are confidently taking their own path to self-empowerment, despite the adverse circumstances they face. The members of this subculture, who have learned to take a stand against the regime by shaping their lives just as they please, also want to understand what is happening to them. These women don’t hide how vulnerable, often defenceless and unsettled, their lives make them. But despite the uncertainties and ambivalence about their future plans, these young women exude an inner life force. This is what the photographer Luo shows in her portraits. The traditional roles of women in China are being gently, bravely, and sensitively opened up by these young women. Luo’s “Girls” dares to give a bold view of the lives of women in China today.

Closing power off from the outside world In his study Pragmatik des Schweigens (The pragmatics of silence, 2010), Wolfgang Stadler explores acts of silence in Russian communication, looking at the context of these acts. What does it mean to keep quiet about something as opposed to speaking? This author’s fascinating exploration of three different forms of

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communicative silence provides a good theoretical slant on the examples discussed so far in this chapter. The first, he calls the silent phase. Then come actions that accompany this silence. Third, there is the act of being silent itself, which is important independently of what is being kept quiet. What functional and structural effects do these three aspects of silence have on the whole? According to Stadler’s theory, every politically oriented silence is intentional. He shows how a country’s mass media helps its politicians by not bringing to public attention certain unpleasant truths that the latter would rather keep quiet. Within these media, which collaborate with those in power, journalists are not supposed to conduct any dialogue about why they are performing this service. This is one of the fundamental elements in the pragmatics of silence: the silent complicity which allows things to be successfully hushed up. There is a duet of cooperative and non-cooperative silence, which, according to this research, runs through every known political system. One illustration of this is an anecdote told by a Turkish journalist who, like more than 150 of her colleagues, is behind bars in Turkey. She asked for a particular book from the prison library. We’re not allowed to stock that book, the librarian told her. But the author is here, in the last cell on your landing.

The insiders On the stage of politics, there are the insiders and the outsiders, who take it upon themselves to speak their version of the truth freely. And when they do, the insiders treat them with contempt, shutting them out of important decisions made behind closed doors and leaving them in ignorance. In the normal course of things, insiders seldom speak to outsiders about what they are doing. We should be grateful to Yanis Varoufakis, professor of economic theory and, for five months, the Greek finance minister, for providing us with an enlightening commentary on the power of the insiders. They use exclusion and lack of transparency as the preconditions for their power. Varoufakis writes: As for me, the political upstart, my credibility depended on accepting these policies, which insiders knew would fail, and helping to sell them to the outsiders who had elected me on the precise basis that I would break with these same failed policies (2017, p.32). This sounds very much like a double bind. Old insiders gave him secret tips; one of them was the president of the European Union, Jean-Claude Juncker, who told him that when it came to the crunch in political disputes with outsiders, he would have to lie. According to the insiders, Christine Lagarde (the former French finance minister and head of the IMF) and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel lied to nineteen European parliaments with regard to the huge Euro bailout for Greece. The sums declared as aid for Greece were destined for the German and

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French banks that had lent to Greece and were now facing bankruptcy. The Greek government, ruling over a bankrupt country, had to send the money straight back to these ailing banks. Varoufakis writes, rather sadly: “But having lied once and on such a grand scale, they were soon forced to compound the deceit in an attempt to hide it beneath fresh layers of subterfuge” (ibid, p.41). This collective lying was a false game, which was always kept from outsiders. It was impossible for the Eurozone’s nineteen finance ministers to have an open exchange on the politics and economics of the situation, because the insiders (like the German finance minister at the time, Wolfgang Schäuble) didn’t want them to. If they said anything, it wasn’t an answer to this deceitful, failed game – all that was said was that nothing was being said. Varoufakis found it difficult to judge whether this was a result of intellectual failings or an unwillingness to engage with the real facts he had laid on the table. The people with the power couldn’t admit their error when it came to Greece’s bankruptcy, which was caused by the bailout of their own banks. When Varoufakis refused to give up, interpersonal traps were laid for him, in which he was promised things in quiet dialogues that were then represented quite differently in public, sometimes even as the opposite of what had been promised. Aggressive libel was directed against him, and the media were tipped off. In various other places, I have analysed the various possible ways in which a social discourse and the policy-making that follows it can be shaped through communal, frank participation in mediation to the benefit of society as a whole (Itten 2017, 2018). The powerful elite, in collaboration with international companies, have no desire to make time for such frank exchange. They are locked into their own worldview and busy dealing with their own economic uncertainties. Conflicts in the public sphere – and this is something Varoufakis makes clear – are not simply a horror; they can be resolved with the help of everyone involved, if the will is there to resolve them. This claim is backed up with empirical research, which gives us hope for a general turn away from the often dysfunctional democratic processes that we can see everywhere. Varoufakis imagines a Richter scale of cowardice, on which the kind of undemocratic behaviour he witnessed in the Eurogroup would be too extreme to measure. When he, an economist, laid out well-prepared suggestions in the Eurogroup conference, the reaction in the room was a sheepish silence. Schäuble might leave the room in annoyance in order to emotionally blackmail the others should they engage with the Greek suggestions. The attempt to unmask the man of few words was cynically deflected by Schäuble’s methods of twisting the truth. As a professor, Varoufakis writes, he had never been frozen out in such a way, never encountered such a refusal to engage with facts and scientific truths. It was a tactic, he writes, the purpose of which is “to nullify anything that is inimical to the troika’s power” (Varoufakis 2017, p.380). In this way, it was impossible to do what was right, economically speaking, for Greece and the EU. What Varoufakis describes are epidemics of political behaviour that spread in waves from the arrogance of those at the top all the way down the hierarchical

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pyramid. People are objectified and treated as commodities. This bad behaviour by people in power, which is usually recognised for what it is by a few people living at the bottom end of the social scale, can never be corrected in the short term. It is a long, drawn-out power game. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote a number of plays about it: Hamlet, King Lear, and Richard III, for example. As individuals, we are generally powerless in the face of these various cartels of silence (the political, the criminal, the super-capitalist). If it weren’t for the fourth estate, the free press, the independent media, and the investigators of an independent justice system, we would hear even less about what is being kept from us in our name and for our own good. In politics, under certain circumstances, politicians will join together across party lines and unconditionally in order to secure their system of silence. One difference between politics and the mafia-style behaviour of criminal gangs is that politicians are happy to talk in front of cameras and microphones and do it frequently – often, as we know, without actually saying anything. Gang members, by contrast, are strictly forbidden from engaging in an exchange of words with the police or the media. An exchange of fire, on the other hand, is permitted. The structures of gangs and governments are surprisingly similar. It is mostly just the content that is fundamentally different. Unfortunately, we cannot stay silent about the worldwide trend of gangs getting mixed up in power and capturing states through political cliques. With the spread of fake news masquerading as truth, which we know as propaganda, it is getting ever more difficult for us to investigate the truthfulness of persuasive content through news and other channels of communication. It comes as no shock when I learn from the Paradise Papers how super-capitalism and its servants in power want to keep their profit maximisation and tax evasion secret. The truth will out, as they say; everything comes to light in the end. In her investigation into “political framing” (2016), Elisabeth Wehling arrives at the insight of how important it is for democratically organised societies not just to leave the interpretation of facts to those who work in politics. These people, she says, try to reshape a state of affairs through language that deliberately creates a miserable vacuum around the truth. The tactic of hushing things up in politics hinders the analysis of facts and truths. A few examples illustrate what this looks like. According to the World Bank, in Russia, 21 million people live below the official poverty line of 169 USD per month. It is hardly surprising, then, that in her book Putin’s Kleptocracy, Karen Dawisha (1949–2018), professor of political science, says that the Russian president and the people around him are getting rich at the expense of the population and former state property. There is as yet no German translation of this enlightening book (Dawisha 2014). We can only speculate on what collaboration, largely kept secret from the public, exists here between industry and politics. German publishers were afraid of being sued immediately for libel by the Kremlin. A former German chancellor, of course, has a direct line to Russian headquarters (Plamper 2016).

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As soon as a state can be captured entirely by a group or party, it needs good lies that can be spread as truths if it is going to live an undisturbed life at the population’s expense, with the help of this campaign of secrecy. Politicians like Putin disguise themselves and use the state-directed mass media to produce an ideological distraction for ordinary people. They say for example: We Russians are a unique culture and we have our own Russian values. At the same time, this chokes off any protest from civil society (Dawisha 2014). This kind of manipulation is necessary in such state systems. The tyrants, disguised as strong leaders and father figures, are also afraid for their lives. A few dictators manage to retire; others are executed. The former Spiegel editor Siegfried Kogelfranz wrote a book on the subject (Diktatoren im Ruhestand – “Retired dictators” – 1997). He interviewed one-time heads of Eastern Bloc countries. Someone who oppresses the nation entrusted to their care will eventually reach a point where silence can no longer save them – except the ultimate silence of death through suicide, the path taken by the supposed saviour of the German people in April 1945. The fact that the leading Nazis were a drug syndicate whose leaders can in good conscience be described as “ junkies” is explored in Norman Ohler’s book Der totale Rausch: Drogen im Dritten Reich (2017). Hitler was addicted to Eukodol, an opiate stronger than heroin. Other substances were given to soldiers on the front lines so that they wouldn’t hesitate to commit state-ordered murder. This illuminating research has made “the perverted world of the Third Reich, which lost all contact with a reality worth living in and created so much suffering, a little easier to imagine” (Ohler 2017, p.303). Konrad Heiden (1901–1966) was a journalist and author who, as an eyewitness to the rise of Hitler and his elite, reported exactly what was going on and did not stay silent about their aims (cf Aust 2016). The personal lies within the larger systematic web of lies are now very well documented. When political criminals are taken into custody and confronted with their crimes during interrogation, they often cunningly claim ignorance (Less 2012). Everything they did, every order they gave is denied. When it can be proved to them that they do remember, then they feign naivety. Power over the life and death of subjects corrupts honesty from the ground up. The Hamburg-based philosopher and historian Bettina Stangneth has investigated the unexamined life of the mass murderer and organiser of the Holocaust Adolf Eichmann (1906– 1962) after the end of the war. How was a war criminal of this magnitude able to escape? And to live under a new name in Argentina, while elements within Reinhard Gehlen’s new secret service turned a blind eye or covered up this fact? Eichmann, according to Stangneth, was still looking for “evidence he could use to prove his lies.” She points to the “Sassen Interviews,” which “give us a glimpse of Eichmann without his mask – tired, disappointed, perturbed, and wounded” (2014, p.285). After the fact, someone like this will try to wash himself clean with a constant stream of new lies. His old demagogical rhetoric is proclaimed like a gospel. These obsessive liars and betrayers of a nation, desperate for validation, go on fighting for their version of their criminal deeds to be accepted as the truth.

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This travesty of reality, an imagined parallel world into which their minds can escape, hushes up their own inner insecurity. Lying, including to oneself, and keeping things quiet, is helpful – so people sometimes say. But that isn’t the whole truth. What remains? The final words of this chapter come from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). On the evening of 6 September 1780, he took a pencil and, with the eternal silence in his mind, wrote on the wooden wall of a gamekeeper’s hut: O’er all the hilltops Is quiet now, In all the treetops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees: Wait, soon like these Thou too shalt rest. Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1879)

Literature Adler HG., (2014) Orthodoxie des Herzens. Ausgewählte Essays zu Literatur, Judentum und Politik. Konstanz University Press, Paderborn. Aust S., (2016) Hitlers erster Feind. Der Kampf des Konrad Heiden. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg. Dawisha K., (2014) Putin’s Kleptocracy. Simon & Schuster, New York. Ehrenreich B., (2011) Blood Rites. Origins and History of the Passions of War. Granta, London. Frei N., (Hrsg) (2003) Hitlers Eliten nach 1945, 8th ed. dtv, München. Funke H., (2014) “Der Sieg der Geheimdienste über Parlament und Öffentlichkeit, Brandstifter mit Staatsauftrag und die Blockade der Auf klärung: Kritische Bestandsaufnahme eines Politikwissenschaftlers.” in: Förster A., (ed.) Geheimsache NSU. Zehn Morde, von Aufklärung keine Spur. Klöpfer & Meyer, Tübingen, pp. 225–242. Funke H., (2015) Staatsaffäre NSU. Kontur-Verlag, Münster. Garstka D., (2018) Das schweigende Klassenzimmer: Eine wahre Geschichte über Mut, Zusammenhalt und den Kalten Krieg. Ullstein, Berlin. Geissner H., (1975) “Ist Schweigen Gold?” in: Füting M., Görg E., Henss J., (eds.) Reden und reden lassen. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart, pp. 312–338. Greven MT., (1994) Kritische Theorie und historische Politik. Leske + Budrich, Opladen. Gross P., (1975) “Gefühle äußern.” in: Füting M., Görg E., Henss J. ,(eds.) Reden und reden lassen. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, pp. 37–64. Itten A., (2017) “Öffentliche Mediationsverfahren. Zwischen gesellschaftlichem Diskurs und Politikgestaltung.” in: Kriegel-Schmidt K., (ed.) Mediation als Wissenschaftszweig. Springer VS, Wiesbaden, pp. 287–297. Itten A., (2018) Overcoming social division: conflict resolution in times of polarization and democratic disconnection. Routledge, Oxford.

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Kofman S., (1998) Smothered Words. Tr. Madeleine Dobie. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL. Kogelfranz S., (1997) Diktatoren im Ruhestand. Die einstigen Ostblockchefs im Gespräch. Brandenburgisches Verlagshaus, Berlin. La Motte EN., (2014) The backwash of war. The human wreckage of the battlefield as witnessed by an American nurse. Conway Publishing, London. Less AW., (2012) Lüge! Alles Lüge! Aufzeichnungen des Eichmann-Verhörers. Rekonstruiert von Bettina Stangneth. Arche, Zürich. Linder W., (2013) “Schweigen in der Politik. Versuch einer Herrschaftskritik.” in: von Sass H., (ed.) Stille Tropen. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg, pp. 126–140. Longfellow HW., (1879), ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes. Germany: Vols. XVII–XVIII. James R. Osgood & Co., Boston. Ohler N., (2017) Der totale Rausch: Drogen im Dritten Reich. Kiepenheuer und Witsch, Cologne. Plamper J., (2016) “Putin-Verstehen für Fortgeschrittene.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 March, p. 11 Prasse-Freeman E., (2017) “The Rohingya crisis.” Anthropology Today 33(6): 1–2. Reich J., (1992) Abschied von den Lebenslügen – Die Intelligenz und die Macht. Rowohlt, Berlin. Rosa H., (2016) Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Suhrkamp, Berlin. Schulz W., (2011) Politische Kommunikation – Theoretische Ansätze und Ergebnisse empirischer Forschung, 3rd revised ed. VS Verlag, Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden. Stadler W., (2010) Pragmatik des Schweigens: Schweigeakte, Schweigephasen und handlungsbegleitendes Schweigen im Russischen. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main. Stangneth B., (2014) Eichmann Before Jerusalem. The unexamined life of a mass murderer. Tr. Ruth Martin. A.A. Knopf, New York. Varoufakis Y., (2017) Adults in the Room. My battle with Europe’s deep establishment. The Bodley Head, London. Wehling E., (2016) Politisches Framing. edition medienpraxis, Cologne.

Website https://www.dw.com/en/germany-new-accusations-of-police-vio ​ l ence-in- ​ d eath​ -of-asylum-seeker/a-51067499

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May I be silent now? Yes. But that would be too abrupt an end to this study of silence. All the way through this book, we have seen behaviours involving silence, being silent, and letting things rest that we might also, to some extent, practise ourselves. We are silent out of politeness, fear, consideration for others, distress, arrogance, cowardice, despair, strategically, and for many other reasons. The various stories, examples, and theoretical reflections presented here are a collection of experiences. It would have been impossible for me to give a comprehensive description of this phenomenon. My attempt to circle around the three related behaviours of being silent, being still, and letting things rest, taking in a variety of standpoints along the way, has yielded a few insights. From my sociopsychological, cultural-historical, and philosophical perspective, I have considered human behaviour relating to the three terms defined in the introduction: Stille, Ruhe, and Schweigen. In two interviews with experts, we covered silence in the family, in advertising, and in law and the justice system. It was only possible to recognise the sometimes surprising connections between our three key terms by talking about them. The title of this book considers silence as an art, and as human behaviour. The latter encompasses both peaceful silence and ordering others to be quiet, to hold their tongues, or perhaps even banning them from speaking. I have shed some light on positive silence, negative silence, and the nuances that exist in between these poles, including the question of why we often can’t cope with silence. There are some people who find moments of silence in a conversation uncomfortable. They have to say something to dispel it. Quiet reflection allows us to occupy ourselves with our own thoughts. The five major religions, and other variations of religiously motivated silence, emerge as an emotional blessing for many people. At the same time, meditation, silent prayer, lingering in quiet contemplation of eternal symbols, form a thread that can help guide us through the noise of our

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days and (for those who live in cities) our nights, too. But there are also nonreligious motivations for quietness, such as Autogenic Training or secular forms of meditation. Many people describe their experiences of Schweigen – not speaking – as positive: being silent helps them to clear their minds and gives them renewed strength. It is a chance to consider what we are doing (and allowing others to do) in this one life that we are given and where we are in our lives. We can simply accept the situations we find ourselves in – but we don’t have to. We can be silent if we choose. But there are moments when each of us, in the face of demeaning experiences, is unable to stay quiet. It is important to know when it’s appropriate to be silent, to hold our tongues, and when it is necessary to raise our voices in order to remain true to ourselves, to say what has to be said. Sometimes we raise our voices in a chorus, at demonstrations, for instance, reinforcing a sense of cohesion and common cause. We want to use our voices to speak out against injustices; we won’t let others shut us up. In a democratic system, we can say the things that move us. We all know that once something has been said, it can’t be taken back. This falls into the category of “common sense.” The minute’s silence, practised as a collective, is usually very moving: minutes of quiet remembrance, whether we are present ourselves or can only observe them on television or in films. There are also the famous silent marches, which call for the preservation of creation and peace on earth.

The seven things that are certain Silence is a constant presence is everyday life and in politics. Most of us love silence; we appreciate peace and quiet when we need it. Keeping quiet about our secrets is a way of protecting something that helps us to live. But many things are permanently hushed up when they should be put into words so that people can heal. Subjects are silenced by dictatorial behaviour – a communicative demonstration of power by people who can decide whether someone lives or dies. Where there is no noise, no sound, there is peace and quiet. When silence is not possible, it is mostly due to disruptive noise. What is the sound of one hand clapping? This old Zen kōan is easy to solve: try it! The question of the meaning that silence, being silent, and letting things rest have in our human lives remains open, even after writing this book. Each one of us has an individual perspective on this question – even though we are inducted into the art of silence in different ways as children, depending on our culture, economic situation, and religious affiliation. These guidelines shape the way we fit our own lives into the world as it reveals itself to us in its true form. The hidden side of gentle silence is revealed in the intimate relationship between sound and silence. Music and the pauses in a composition belong together; each is woven into the other.

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Turns of phrase “Speech is silver, but silence is golden.” This, perhaps the most well known of all sayings on silence, may be an echo of Psalm 12:6: “And the words of the LORD are flawless, like silver purified in a crucible, purified seven times.” There are many stories about the eternal monotheistic God. A few of them I have told here. One important characteristic of this God is that he (the Hindus have a “she” among their many gods, as do the ancient Greeks; the Romans; and the Germanic, Celtic, and animist religions) is mostly silent. In other words: the word of God that the prophets claim to have “heard” is silver, but the divine being himself is silent – and therefore golden. As another, more contemporary saying goes: “Any man is a philosopher until he opens his mouth.” Or: “still waters run deep.” Some of us may recall what we were told in school: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” There are plenty more.

Silence in music The examples taken from music, the composers and music-listeners that are scattered through the book, confirm that silence, quietness, and music exist in harmony with one another. Music, as we humans are able to practise and experience it, is to my mind the ultimate union of notes, silence, rhythm, pitch, beat, modulation, phrasing, articulation, duration, and dynamics. Notes ring out, fade away, and gradually fall silent. At the end of his poem “Die Gebüsche” (the bushes), Friedrich Schlegel wrote an epigraph: Through all the sounds In the motley dream of earthly life There sounds a soft, drawn-out sound, For he who overhears in secret. (Schlegel 1877) The composer Robert Schumann used this for his Fantasie in C major for piano, op.17, which was published in 1839. This composition, so the story goes, expressed Schumann’s deep appreciation of Beethoven’s music, which in turn expressed emotions that could not be spoken about. It is an advantage, according to Martin Geck (2017, p.212) to be familiar with Beethoven’s music, in order to “be able to hear the soft note.” The reality of hearing the silence is much more complex and exciting than we can imagine. Be that as it may: we hearing beings drink in the harmonic musical compositions of the comédie humaine. There is no limit to the unexpected things we may find in silence. In each quiet transition to the communality of language and music, which harmonises the dimensions of our human ability to communicate, we experience the miracle of communication, of things moving from inside to outside. The almost impenetrable mystery of what can be turned into sound, and how, is articulated

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by the roughly 6500 languages and language families spoken by our species across the world. Thanks to the grammatical structures of each, we are able to translate, to shift content from one language into the others. Music, by contrast, is a kind of natural language, which can be understood and felt (silently) all over the world. This is the conclusion of the ethnologist and researcher of myths Claude LéviStrauss. He reasons that: Musical language has its own structure – a structure that both brings it near to articulate speech (sounds, like phonemes, do not have any intrinsic meaning) and distances it from that same speech (the language of music does not have a level of articulation corresponding to words) (Lévi-Strauss 1997, p.114). The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt published his sublime piece Silentium in 1977. He once said that in the silence of an inner pause, he felt closer to the eternal. He liked to listen to the final note play out and fade away, absorbing the silence into itself. This structural universality doesn’t mean that the same music, the same melody, will touch us wherever we are. I have felt something similar on this writerly journey, this contemplative walk through the realms of silence, being still, and letting things rest. We can hone our various abilities to be silent if we recognise how necessary quietness and silence are for our mental and physical health. Moments of silence arise in conversations between people, words that remain unsaid. As I observe what is going on in and through a conversation and the things that might touch my inner self, I can keep quiet about this watchfulness (assuming I can articulate it in the first place). In my view, this intermittent peace and rest aid the interpretation of what is being communicated. This is one aspect of active listening, which I experience as a retreat from our shared, outer life into my own, inner life.

Tread softly Throughout various chapters, as a psychologist and psychotherapist, I have tried to fathom and explain a broad range of behaviours around silence as exhibited by different people. As a practising psychotherapist, I have a duty of confidentiality to my patients. An important possession. All the same, I am permitted to tell stories from my practice as long as no real people can be identified from them. When we feel like our inner self is walking on sore feet, we may, paradoxically, find ourselves entering a place intended to provide asylum, a quiet, protective place. Except that in these centres for mental suffering, the term “asylum” has for decades been something of a misnomer. Instead of rest and healing for the mind, there is a kind of activism in these places that has the opposite effect of that intended. What helps is being there for people in mental anguish, not doing things for them. “You can’t even be mad in peace here,” said a patient in Hamburg; the buildings of Eppendorf University Hospital were being renovated during

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his stay there. All day long, the whole place was filled with the noise of hammering, drilling, and the tradesmen listening to the radio. Almost impossible to bear for someone undergoing his own, internal storm. This is not an isolated case. Here, the urgently necessary peace and silence were cut off – in a place of protection set up for this very purpose and to the disadvantage of the people whose recovery depended on these things. Using a simple experiment, a group of academic psychologists has proved that people who don’t have regular practice and experience of being still are reluctant to occupy themselves with their own thoughts about God and the world. The experimental task that the researchers set their test subjects was, seen from the outside, relatively easy. Participants were invited to sit on a chair for 15 minutes. The chair was placed in a quiet, soberly furnished room, conducive to reflection. They were given completely free rein to think about a topic of their choice. Whatever sprung to mind. The only things they weren’t allowed to do were fall asleep, or get up and walk around (Wilson et al. 2014). The results show that most test subjects were unable to fulfil this simple instruction to be still and quiet. Many of them became restless after just a few minutes. Most just wanted something to do. The psychologists concluded that, without practice in being still and at rest, these people had not only lost their ability to reflect in silence but were unable to cultivate it again. These findings come as no surprise to me. They reflect the often hectic pace of modern life in the West. The habit of occupying yourself with your own inner thoughts, feelings, memories, images, fantasies, and the gradual appearance of an enjoyable feeling of emptiness can easily be lost in this rush. If we want to strengthen our own experience of freely chosen silence, we can get into the habit of practising for 5–10 minutes a day. It is helpful if you’re able to set up your own quiet room or place for this purpose. In order for something new to begin, we need a period of “doing nothing.” In this kind of meditative silence, the inexpressible secrets that each of us hold sacred in our own way (depending on our particular cosmology) reveal themselves. As stipulated by our collective ritual and spiritual community and its chapels of silence, the insights gained in this way are never, in and of themselves, permitted to be said aloud. We can thus carry this inexpressible entity within us, enriching our inner life. In his little book Weihrauch und Schwefel (Incense and sulphur), Adolf Holl describes a visit that he and I took to a church he attended as a young man, where we both found our eyes drawn to the “eternal light” – which serves not just as a symbolic expression of the present in the eternal but at the same time as an invitation to silent contemplation. Since we grew up in different Christian denominations, we each live in and with different memories. Holl ends his story with the following words: Do nothing, I thought to myself; the main thing is that we could both relate to a necessary transpersonal connection. Without doubt, there are different paths by which you can find such a relationship. Anyone who thinks his

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own path is the best one for the whole of mankind is mistaken. Not all roads have to lead to Rome – or to Mecca. And so we stood there, my friend and I, each occupied with our own thoughts and yet not quite foreign to one another. There is nothing more to be desired (Holl 2003, p.102). Lou: Holding your breath in outrage, before it makes you speechless. Sam: I can understand that. It’s just a little dream, after all, to enter into a love affair with silence. Lou: Never daring to say anything else that can hurt you. Sam: It’s impossible to be completely open. It bursts open the nucleus of any relationship. Lou: You are an inventive producer of wishful words. Sam: The spirits love the silence.

The ashes of burned words In memoriam: On 10 May 1933, students at German universities under National Socialist control did as they had been instructed and, on public squares all over Germany, burned literary and academic books by the tonne. Erich Kästner’s books for children and young people became fuel for this ideological fire. Kästner stood with a friend and watched the apocalyptic Nazi festival on the Opernplatz in Berlin. The famous author was spotted there by another observer in the crowd. At that moment, he decided not to do anything to combat Goebbels’ shouting. What, he wondered later, would shouting back have achieved? It would probably just have got him instantly arrested. He set off for home in silence. Kästner recalls: We sat in the garden outside a restaurant in the West, neither of us saying anything. What could we have said? That evening had choked us. Was it really this easy to snuff out literature? Could malice and stupidity triumph through actions as clumsy and mean as these? Could the human spirit give up the ghost this quickly? (Kästner 2012, p.10f.) Ninety-five years later, these questions have been answered. Books can be burned, but not destroyed. The books and their authors could not be silenced forever. All the same, something does happen to you, as an author. “You’re a living corpse,” Kästner remarked, for the span of twelve Christmases (Bienert 2014, p.102). After that, it wasn’t just books that had been turned to ashes. The silence of millions of deaths made the survivors shudder and hold their tongues.

Wordless pause In February 2018, I contracted a bacterial infection in the right-hand side of my face and ended up in the outpatient depart of the hospital in St Gallen. The registrar diagnosed it as a phlegmon. He ran the backs of his index and middle

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fingers gently over my swollen face, without saying anything. “You’ve got an infection spreading under the skin here. Someone will take you up to the ear, nose, and throat clinic on the fourth floor right away.” There, the consultant looked at me with great concern. I told him what I, as a layman, suspected was going on with my inflamed face. He asked me to stop talking at once. Any speech would activate my facial muscles and help the staphylococcus bacteria to spread more quickly. In my present state, that was incredibly dangerous. The bacteria could move across and start spreading behind my eyes. And from there, it could move into the bloodstream, which would inevitably lead to blood poisoning… With moist eyes, I kept quiet. The eternal silence hummed within me. I spent three days and three nights almost without speaking, taking penicillin every eight hours, and the life-threatening infection was cleared up in five days. The experience of losing those features of my face so familiar to me from the mirror and from photos through this severe swelling was horrifying; it touched the place in my soul where my silence came to rest. I dreamed I was lying on the damp grass outside my great-grandfather Flückiger’s farm in Wangen an der Aare, a small town in the Swiss canton of Bern. He fell to his death in the orchard on his large farm when an old rung on his wooden ladder broke while he was picking cherries. One of his daughters, Rosalie (1893–1971) became my grandmother; she took me and my two older sisters in when I was a little boy and looked after us in her cottage right next to the farm. We were thus fortunate enough to be spared the Basel mission children’s home. I thought about this, and many other aspects of the life I have lived so far. How all-pervasive a silent inward search for the meaning of a sudden illness can be. This quiet, invisible task, given to me as a psychologist. If I were lying on the couch, there would be nothing pleasanter than to talk to the listening psychoanalyst about this experience forced on me by illness and the stories from my life it had brought back to me. Joan Baez describes something similar. The spirit of optimism in the 1960s was a genuine challenge for a protest singer. She has been seeing psychotherapists ever since she was 15. In one interview, she says: “I still can’t talk about where my problems started. I know what caused them now – but that took me until I was 50. Up to that point, I kept having terrible anxiety attacks” (Baez 2018, p.120). After half a century on this planet, she was able to interrogate these dark experiences herself. But talking about them in public is something she can’t do yet. We don’t need to run our lives up the flagpole for all to see, either. The price she paid for exploring her trauma was that she lost the ability to write songs. Now, at the age of 78, she is singing again. Her latest album is called Whistle Down the Wind. Musical encouragement for all those of us whose silence about what they have suffered and can’t talk about is growing into the silent confidence that we can break that silence, in the presence of a fair-minded, listening observer. The truth of what we’ve had to keep quiet for days, months, years, when spoken aloud, is a wake-up call for self-empowerment. “Quietness: seeping into the rocks, the cicada’s voice” (Basho 1996, p.95).

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Summary What can you take away from the nine stages of this exploration of silence, quiet, and not speaking, in all their multi-layered connections? Here are my suggestions: As a phenomenon we can all experience, silence is universal. We have looked at various ways in which silence can manifest itself, and we can all add to these from our own politics of experience. We can enter into silence of our own volition. But we may also be ordered, instructed, or forced to be silent. Torture is an attempt to break the silence of the person being interrogated. Broken people are silent, at the limit of their pain, to ensure their survival. What we cannot speak about (yet, or at all), we can write, hum, and dream about. We can speak from the heart in ways that are clear, equivocal, or ambiguous. Psychiatry is one way of allowing what our hearts want to say to become audible, in a protected environment. This kind of speaking becomes our own mental cure. Then we no longer have to be ashamed of what once made us victims – usually aggressive, frightening, cruel things done by people who brought suffering into our childhoods. We also become witnesses to the rest of our life story and take the first courageous steps towards self-actualisation and self-empowerment. Man lives poetically, as Hölderlin once said. We might take this as our motto, as we become aware of our own options for starting to communicate, for breaking our own silence immediately. Talking without saying anything, chatting so that we don’t have to endure the silence. A noise with nothing at its heart, made in order to avoid facing those things we aren’t saying. The insights into the huge variety of religious practices involving silence from all over the world, as potential guidance for communing with the great eternal silence, enable us not just to see the circumstances of our own lives for what they are but also to pluck up the courage to change the course of our lives. The cunning and art of the false floor has shown us a way to protect the unity of the self. It is a good enough means of separating ourselves from the outside world, and from those around us. Protecting our secrets through our silence is part of protecting our own integrity. Law and justice, as laid out in national constitutions, repeatedly find a voice that is dedicated to morality and ethics. In this area, we will not allow ourselves to be silenced. Politicians often keep essential things quiet from us. They mystify us with their empty linguistic conjuring tricks. Fake news is deliberately presented as an “alternative” truth. It is almost impossible to describe how dangerous this epidemic of falsehoods is to our freedom, justice, and sense of truth. There are many visions of silence in stillness, in music, in freely chosen peace and quiet, where the wind blows words away.

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Literature Baez J., (2018) “Ich war sehr verwirrt,” Interview. Der Spiegel 9: 116–120. Basho M., (1996) Basho’s Narrow Road. Spring and Autumn Passages. Tr. Hiroaki Sato, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA. Bienert M., (2014) Kästners Berlin – Literarische Schauplätze. Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin. Geck M., (2017) Beethoven: Der Schöpfer und sein Universum. Siedler, Munich. Holl A., (2003) Weihrauch und Schwefel. Ein Monolog. Verlag Styra, Graz. Kästner E., (2012) Über das Verbrennen von Büchern. Atrium, Zürich. Lévi-Strauss C., (1997) Look, Listen, Read. Basic Books. New York. Schlegel F., (1877) Gedichte. Matthias Lempers, Bonn. Wilson TD., Reinhard DA., Westgate EC., Gilbert DT., Ellerbeck N. et al. (2014) “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind,” Science 345(6192): 75–77.

ENCORE

After I had submitted my manuscript to the publisher, I read the Swiss author Peter Stamm’s acceptance speech for the 2018 Solothurner Literaturpreis. My editor, Renate Eichhorn, and I decided to ask him if he would like to publish his speech on silence from a writer’s perspective in my book. I am very grateful that he said yes. Dear readers, When people tell me they couldn’t live without books, it always feels to me as if they’re confessing a weakness. Which is not to say that I would like to live without books, but perhaps my aim would be for books to become increasingly superfluous to me, until eventually I no longer needed them, and merely looked at them sitting on their shelves from time to time, as witnesses to the path I had trodden. It might sound strange for a writer to say this, but over the years I have become more and more convinced that nothing truly important – none of the most fundamental things – can be put into words. As a young author I noted down a quote from Thomas Bernhard’s Ritter, Dene, Voss: We spend our whole lives just striving to write two or three pages of deathless prose that’s all we want but at the same time it is the highest thing As uplifting as the pathos of these words was for a young writer, I seem to have doubted them even then; to have doubted literature’s power and its immortality. My own literature first and foremost, of course. The first version of my novel

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Agnes, which I wrote in 1993 as a 30-year-old, ends – also not without pathos – in the following words: I don’t want to use my books to say: ‘Someone was here; a person, people, lived here.’ All I want is to remember Agnes. Not because she was better than the rest of us, but because it’s the only way for me not to forget her so quickly, to keep her with me for a little longer, before she vanishes completely into the distance. Since then, the protagonists of my stories and novels have doubted literature again and again, and turned away from it. Agnes owns hardly any books; in Unformed Landscape, Kathrine’s husband is said to have made fun of her books for so long that eventually “she gave away or just threw away her library.” When Andreas in On a Day Like This is preparing to sell his apartment, his small library doesn’t fare any better: “He had taken the books off the shelves and made two piles on the floor. He looked through them one more time and selected a book by Jack London and the one by the au pair girl. All the others he threw away.” The first-person narrator of “The Hurt,” a short story from the collection We’re Flying, burns his entire library for no obvious reason: “The next day I carried on. I was more methodical now, I stacked my books next to the stove and burned them one by one. It took all morning. Then I pulled my notes out of my desk drawers, my diaries, newspaper clippings I’d never gotten around to reading. I burned the lot.” In the story “In the Forest,” the bookseller Anja is said to have “had enough of books. Ever since they’ve been living out here, most of life strikes her as a waste of time, especially television. Only music is an occasional exception.” Thomas in To the Back of Beyond even goes a step further: He had given up reading too, even the paper. He didn’t switch on the portable radio that was in his room, even music struck him as basically a distraction. And when Christoph, the hero of my most recent novel, leaves the manuscript of his novel in a restaurant, he doesn’t even take the trouble to go back and get it. I wondered if I should look for the bar where I’d forgotten my rucksack, but I doubted whether I’d be able to find the place, I didn’t even feel convinced that it actually existed. Writing is a minor matter. Reading is a minor matter. Literature needs life more than life needs literature. It is always less, sometimes much less; it is never enough. A writer who doesn’t write is not a writer. But one who no longer writes, no longer reads – that’s a plausible idea. Christoph, the photographer and travelling lecturer from my story “A Foreign Body,” dreams of his slide shows about the

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Hellhole caves consisting of nothing but silence and darkness: “If he’d been very concentrated and managed to focus his attention on the group, then surely it would be possible to get by without slides, and finally even without words, and just be in the dark and allow time to elapse for an hour or two.” That could be the end of this speech, or the beginning. I would stand here saying nothing, we would all take in the space, the other people in it, and ourselves. Maybe we would hear distant noises from the city, a suppressed cough from someone in another row, the footsteps of a guest leaving the room in disappointment, the door closing. Maybe we’d pick up a scent we hadn’t noticed before, a perfume that reminds us of someone, or cooking smells from a nearby restaurant. We would think about what brought us here, and whether it had been a good decision to come, or a bad one. We would whisper to the woman sitting next to us, who is the real reason we’re here: “Shall we go?” “Wait,” she’d say, “something else might happen.” We would be tense, alert, full of expectation. But after a little while our concentration would lapse – yours and mine – and we’d start to feel bored. The first of you would get up and leave, others would follow, then more and more, until there were only a few people left, the very tenacious ones, or those who’d fallen asleep. I wonder how long it would take until I was standing here all by myself. “When you don’t speak, people won’t maintain the silence,” says Peter Handke in an interview with Herbert Gamper. “But when you pull silence and not speaking and emptiness into a shape, people do maintain that silence and emptiness.” And so I don’t have the same privilege my characters do: to stop reading, to stop writing, to fall silent, fictional characters who refuse fiction and thus in a sense escape it. For some years now, I’ve been preoccupied with the idea of writing a story that has no characters in it at all. But even if my characters eventually leave me, and all I’m left with are deserted places, I will have to keep writing to represent their vanishing. Maybe my texts will be a little quieter then, a little shorter, the language more simple still. It was never my intention to create worlds through writing. It was never my intention to escape reality through writing; on the contrary, I meant to confront it. My texts always related to a world that lay outside them. I once called them descriptions of routes through unknown landscapes. Literature can’t replace reality, but – for me as an author, and for my readers – it can be an instrument, an aid to help us see reality more clearly. But literature can’t take seeing away from us. And only now does it make sense that my characters turn away from literature, that my literature tries to make itself superfluous. If it is an aid that helps us see the world more clearly, then we must aim to do without this aid eventually. Then the text will become increasingly transparent, until it vanishes completely. When an author falls silent, it can only be the end of a long development that wouldn’t have been possible without reading and writing. The silence of a young

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man is ridiculous; an old man’s silence is his destiny. I don’t mean a ponderous silence, but a breezy one, in the spirit of Wittgenstein: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” And so I go on writing, until eventually I will arrive at complete silence, and falling silent becomes my final work. Perhaps then the old man will be reconciled with the young man, as at the end of my last novel, when they go for a walk together and it seems to the young man that “there’s something linking us, as though we were a single being, a quadruped, both old and young, half-beginning, half-ending.” And while I go home, I imagine ending up like him, slipping away freed of all obligations, leaving no traces. Falling down on an icy path and, unable to get up, eventually giving in. The rhythm of my breathing settles, I no longer feel the cold. I think of my life which hasn’t happened yet, fuzzy scenes, dark cutout figures against the light, distant voices. The strange thing is that there was never anything mournful about this fantasy, not even then, it was something to be wished for, it had a clarity and correctness, like this long-ago winter morning itself.

AUTHOR INDEX

Adenauer, Konrad 163 Adler, Hans Günther 171 Akhtar, Salman 13 Andreas-Salomé, Lou 49, 144 Assisi, Saint Francis of 5 Assisi, Saint Clare of 5 Augstein, Jakob 133–134 Augustine, Saint 116 Aumüller, Uli 16 Bachelard, Gaston 1 Bachmann, Ingeborg 22, 32 Bacon, Francis 58 Baez, Joan 191 Bair, Deirdre 30–31, 52 Barnes, Julian 96 Basso, Keith H. 103 Bateson, Gregory 114 Beauvoir, Simone de 52–53 Beethoven, Ludwig van 24 Berg, Sibylle 10–11 Berto, Giuseppe 33, 95 Bittner, Jobst 39 Blackwood, Caroline 58 Böll, Heinrich 96 Borrmann, Mechthild 98 Boström-Knausgård, Linda 131 Brahms, Johannes 20 Brandt, Lars 104 Brandt, Willy 104 Brothers Grimm 113 Burkert, Walter 114

Cage, John xii, 55–56 Carlsson, Maria 133 Claudel, Camille 144 Claudius, Matthias 62 Coomaraswamy, A.K. 120 Dalai Lama 169 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 112 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 4, 11–12, 129 Ehrenreich, Barbara 164 Ekman, Paul 135 Eliade, Mircea 119 Erdogan, Asil 90–91 Ferenczi, Sandor 29 Freud, Lucian 58 Freud, Sigmund 24, 48, 58 Frisch, Max 33, 35–37 Frost, Klaus 65 Funke, Hajo 173 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 22 Gann, Kyle 56 Giacometti, Alberto 102 Gilot, Marie Françoise 102 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 182 Gomes, Joseph A. 171–172 Grass, Günter 98 Gruber, Marianne 136

200  Author index

Hamilton, Ian 59 Hitler, Adolf 67, 162, 163, 174, 181 Hoffmann, Ruth 40 Holl, Adolf 116–119, 128, 189 Hughes, Ted 53–54 Huxley, Aldous 3, 61 Huxley, Francis 57, 61, 92 Itten, Anatol Valerian 5 Itten, Ernst Traugott 31–32 Johnson, Uwe 38 Jung, Carl Gustav 26, 30–31, 120 Kästner, Erich 190 Kaf ka, Franz 90, 134 Kierkegaard, Søren 46–47 Koemeda, Margit 145 Kofman, Sarah 170 Kogelfranz, Siegfried 181 La Motte, Ellen 164 Lacan, Jacques 92–95 Lacan, Sibylle 93 Laing, Ronald David 25, 34, 92, 101 Lapide, Pinchas 118 Lessing, Doris 45, 99 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 188 Linder, Wolf 167 Lowell, Ivana 60 Lowell, Robert 59 Lutz, Luise 9 Mahler, Gustav 24 Mao Tse Tung 32 Marcuse, Herbert 122 Matt, Peter von 134 Marx, Karl 146 Miller, Arthur 141 Millot, Catherine 94 Mitscherlich, Alexander 104 Mitscherlich, Thomas 104 Monroe, Marilyn 141 Munch, Edvard xi, 4

Murakami, Haruki 23 Muschg, Adolf 96 Nietzsche, Friedrich 124 Pärt, Arvo 188 Palmen, Connie 53 Picard, Max 6 Picasso, Pablo 99–102 Pinter, Harold 9 Pope Francis I xiii, 84, 111, 169 Popper, Karl 27 Rahner, Karl 125 Rilke, Rainer Maria 52, 54 Rotzetter, Anton 5 Roudinesco, Élisabeth 93–95 Saner, Hans 51 Sartre, Jean-Paul 52–53, 122 Schönberg, Arnold 98 Shostakovich, Dmitri Dimitrijevic 96–97 Schweppenhäuser, Hermann 90 Shakespeare, William 3, 13, 180 Sontag, Susan 45, 48 Tukur, Ulrich 13 Turina, Isacco 89, 127 Vetterli, Rolf 151 Walser, Johanna 137 Walser, Martin xiii, 17, 20, 45, 50–51, 133–134, 136–137 Webern, Anton 98 Wehling, Elisabeth 112, 180 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 19–22 Wittgenstein, Paul 20 Yang, Luo 177 Zimmermann, Klaus 17, 105 Žižek, Slavoj 126

SUBJECT INDEX

Abuse: of power 91, 112, 155, 163; domestic violence 15, 147, 153; sexual abuse 60, 106–108, 135 Advertising 65, 76–85 Alienation 7, 122, 168 Autism 15, 39 Behavioural patterns 27 Betrayal 40, 94, 98, 104, 134 Breastfeeding 1 Communication 27, 51, 83, 105, 140, 168, 180; indirect 45–47, 114; nonverbal 8, 15, 27, 41, 77, 103, 115 Confession 49, 134, 151–153 Confessional box 49, 118 Consciousness 17, 51, 95; and the unconscious 28; collective consciousness 73; stream of consciousness 28 Consumerism 76–77, 85–86, 122 Contemplation 12, 45, 48, 51, 72, 86, 118, 189 Cosmology 121, 189 Deafness 15 Deception 92, 112, 114, 136, 161–163, 170, 176 Depression 30, 59 Dialogue 22, 36 Dictatorship 90, 118, 163, 169, 170; dictators and tyrants 55, 91, 181

Dreams 34, 36, 60, 131; nightmares 13, 21 Duty of confidentiality 34, 94, 155, 188 Duty to testify 157 Emotions 26, 33, 49, 86, 100, 145, 173, 187 Emptiness 123 Enforced silence 14, 65–75 Fake news 91, 163, 165, 180 False floor 130–148 Family 59, 66–68, 74, 101, 131–133, 140; brothers 20, 138; family law 158; fathers 60, 93, 107, 131, 142; father-son relationships 66–75, 99–100, 104–105, 136–137, 162; mothers 1, 30, 60, 93, 141–142, 146–147 Fear 91, 97, 107, 114, 170 Friendship 52, 102, 166 Gardens 5, 72, 80, 83, 86 Gestures 9, 14, 51, 137, 172 Here and now 13, 50, 120, 123, 147 Hermits 89, 120, 127–128 Humanism 121–122 The inexpressible 3, 21–22, 189 Insiders 85, 178–179 Intelligence services 163, 174, 181

202  Subject index

King Lear 13 Kōan 50 Language systems 61, 188 Linguistics 9, 105, 143 Love 36, 38, 46, 48, 71, 94, 125 Madness 33, 95, 134 Media 77, 108, 140, 164–165, 178 Meditation 5, 50, 61, 84, 123, 186 MeToo 105–108 Music 20, 24–25, 96–98, 187–188, 191; in education 6 Muteness 51 Mysticism 119–120, 125 Mythology 5, 13 Nazi period 24, 38, 66–67, 72, 118, 162–163; book-burning 190 Neuroscience 124 Nobel Peace Prize 169 Noise 7, 61 NSU 174 Omnipotent behaviour 41 Pain: physical 30, 51, 192; mental suffering 34, 47, 94, 107, 146, 167 Paralinguistics 25 Pastoral care 26, 123 Peace xiii, 1, 4–5, 124, 148, 186 Piano Sonata 4′33″ 56–57

Power 55, 173–174; powerful elites 24, 162–163, 177 Private sphere 27, 105, 118 Projection 39, 49, 117, 162 Psychoanalysis 13, 28, 92–93, 100, 104 Psychotherapy 15, 27–29, 31, 94, 123 Religions: Buddhism 119, 121, 126, 169; Christianity 14–15, 92, 112, 118–120, 128, 189; Judaism 119, 123; Islam 169 Repression 39, 46, 134 Right to remain silent 92, 152–153 Rituals 57, 113, 120, 164 Secrecy 12, 28, 60, 126, 131, 134, 142 Shamanism 57 Silentium 188 Sleep disorders 10, 62 Speech therapy 15 Talking cure 25–26, 93, 95, 100 Tao 50, 127 Terrorism 32, 90, 167, 169 Theory of relativity 2 Tolerance of silence 189 Voices 13, 34, 81, 99, 132 Vow of silence 14 Wall of silence 26, 41, 55, 67, 108 Whistleblowers 155–156