“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
Silentium 7
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:
(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.
Sam: My silence in your ear.
Lou: I’m available for short scenes.
Sam: That’s right. In every age, a thirst for knowledge that we hope won’t end
in sadness.
Lou: Mental peace in melancholy is a tempting kind of stasis.
Sam: Come now…
Lou: 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.
Silentium 9
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:
Diana:
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?
Yes. You do. (Pause.) Yes. (Silence.)
10
Silentium
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).
Silentium 11
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
12
Silentium
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.
Silentium 13
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.’”
14 Silentium
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
Silentium 15
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.
16 Silentium
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
Silentium 17
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)
18
Silentium
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.
22
What we cannot speak about…
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.
26 What we cannot speak about…
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
What we cannot speak about… 29
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
30
What we cannot speak about…
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.
What we cannot speak about… 31
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
32 What we cannot speak about…
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.
What we cannot speak about… 33
“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.
34 What we cannot speak about…
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:
What we cannot speak about… 35
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
36 What we cannot speak about…
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:
What we cannot speak about… 37
“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)
38 What we cannot speak about…
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
What we cannot speak about… 39
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
40 What we cannot speak about…
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.
What we cannot speak about… 41
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.
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Leinfellner).
3
COMMUNICATION
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
46 Communication
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.
Communication 47
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
48
Communication
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).
Communication 49
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.
50 Communication
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
Communication 51
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:
Sam:
Lou:
Sam:
Lou:
S aying nothing and being silent is Walser’s way of counterbalancing the
value of his speech.
Speaking lights up the darkness of being. To speak is to act, and to be
silent is to conceal.
But a wordless silence keeps open the space of what is concealed.
In which direction does silence point?
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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Communication
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
Communication 53
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
54 Communication
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).
Communication 55
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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Communication
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).
Communication 57
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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Communication
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
Communication 59
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
60 Communication
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.”
Communication 61
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.
62 Communication
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.
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Communication 63
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Blackwood C., (2010a) “Never breathe a word.” in: The Collected Stories. Counterpoint,
Berkeley.
Blackwood C., (2010b) “The answering machine.” in: The Collected Stories. Counterpoint,
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No. 5989: 25.
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Character. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Janson T., (2006) Eine Kurze Geschichte der Sprachen. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag,
Wiesbaden.
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Marino. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
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Weiss- books, Frankfurt am Main.
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New York, NY.
Lowell I., (2010) Why Not Say What Happened. A Memoir. Bloomsbury, London.
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Knowledge. Thames & Hudson, London.
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Saner H., (2014) Die Anarchie der Stille. Lenos Verlag, Basel.
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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
66 Enforced silence
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!”
Enforced silence 67
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
68 Enforced silence
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.
Enforced silence 69
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.
70
Enforced silence
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
Enforced silence 71
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
72 Enforced silence
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
Enforced silence 73
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
74 Enforced silence
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
Enforced silence 75
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
76 Enforced silence
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
Enforced silence 77
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
78 Enforced silence
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.
Enforced silence 79
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.
80 Enforced silence
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
Enforced silence 81
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
82 Enforced silence
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
Enforced silence 83
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
84 Enforced silence
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
Enforced silence 85
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.
86
Enforced silence
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.
Enforced silence 87
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
90 Garrulous ignorance
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:
Garrulous ignorance 91
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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Garrulous ignorance
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.
Garrulous ignorance 103
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
104
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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
Garrulous ignorance 105
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
106
Garrulous ignorance
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.
Garrulous ignorance 107
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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Garrulous ignorance
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
Garrulous ignorance 109
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.”
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PP., (ed) Language and Social Context. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, pp. 67–86.
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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.
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Laing – Contemporary perspectives. Free Association Books, London, pp. 185–203.
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Mitscherlich T., (1988) “Vergangene Zeiten – Variationen von Erinnerungen.” in: Feigel
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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
112 Open secrets
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.
Open secrets 113
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,
114 Open secrets
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
Open secrets 115
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.
116 Open secrets
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
Open secrets 117
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)
118 Open secrets
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,
Open secrets 119
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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Open secrets
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
Open secrets 121
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:
Open secrets 123
“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,
Open secrets 125
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.
Open secrets 127
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
Open secrets 129
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.
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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.
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Torino.
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Society. Routledge, London and New York.
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Nagy TJ., (2015) König, Kaiser, Kardinal – Auf den Spuren von Kardinal Franz König. Styria
premium, Wien.
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Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.
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Düsseldorf.
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Sartre JP., (1946) [1989]. L’existentialisme est un humanisme. Editions Nagel, Paris.
Schär M., (2011) Gallus – Der Heilige in seiner Zeit. Schwabe Verlag, Basel.
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van de Wetering J., (1999) Reine Leere. Erfahrungen eines respektlosen Zen-Schülers. Rowohlt,
Reinbek bei Hamburg.
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Politik macht. Edition Medienpraxis, Cologne.
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liegt das tiefste Paradox des Christentums”. NZZ-Feuilleton, 03.01.2018, p.29.
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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
The false floor
133
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.
136
The false floor
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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137
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
138
The false floor
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:
Sam:
Lou:
Sam:
Lou:
Sam:
(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…
Being as silent as the grave, to yourself and others, especially strangers, is
just as exciting as being open.
I am wordless.
Someone who is already wet isn’t afraid of the rain.
I’m worrying about you, wordlessly.
(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.
140 The false floor
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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141
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.
142 The false floor
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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143
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
144 The false floor
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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145
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
146 The false floor
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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147
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.
148 The false floor
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:
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…
Lou: …and quiet, being completely at home with myself.
Sam: 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.
Lou: Reticent and slow, like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
Lou: A great moment, and I have nothing to say.
Sam: What can be more eloquent than silence?
Lou: 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.
The false floor
149
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,
Silence in law 153
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
Silence in law 155
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
Silence in law 157
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
158
Silence in law
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
Silence in law 159
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
162 Cartels of silence
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
Cartels of silence 163
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.
164 Cartels of silence
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
Cartels of silence 165
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
166 Cartels of silence
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
Cartels of silence 167
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.
168 Cartels of silence
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?
Cartels of silence 169
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
Cartels of silence 171
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.
Cartels of silence 173
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
174 Cartels of silence
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.”
Cartels of silence 175
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
Cartels of silence 177
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
Cartels of silence 179
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).
Cartels of silence 181
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)
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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.
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Zusammenhalt und den Kalten Krieg. Ullstein, Berlin.
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und reden lassen. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart, pp. 312–338.
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und Politikgestaltung.” in: Kriegel-Schmidt K., (ed.) Mediation als Wissenschaftszweig.
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Kofman S., (1998) Smothered Words. Tr. Madeleine Dobie. Northwestern University Press,
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https://www.dw.com/en/germany-new-accusations-of-police-vio ​ l ence-in- ​ d eath​
-of-asylum-seeker/a-51067499
10
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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.
All the rest 193
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Berlin.
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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.
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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
196 Encore
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
Encore
197
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
198 Encore
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