Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. - L. Wittgenstein
Heinrich Böll was one of the most important postwar German writers and the winner of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature. His 1955 satirical short story Dr. Murke’s Collected Silence (original title: Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen) mocks the dishonesty of some of the post-war German intellectuals in the setting of a radio station, an important medium at the time. Germany needed quite some time to come to terms with what happened in the Second World War, so this satire can be understood in that context.
Murke has a doctorate in psychology and works as an editor at the cultural section of this radio station. He has an unusual ritual which he performs each morning when he comes to work: he enters the paternoster elevator, but instead of exiting on the second flor where his office is, he lets the elevator take him all the way up to the fifth floor, after which it enters a closed compartment, goes to the side and then starts descending. In this compartment, he feels dread looking at its bare brick wall and listening to the clinging mechanism of the elevator, as if for a moment he exited a made-up world and had a glimpse at the unsettling reality. After descending to the second floor, he would feel content and work happily. Whenever he failed to perform the ritual, he would feel grumpy all day.
An esteemed professor Bur-Malotke had recorded a two-part lecture about the importance of art, but he had a change of hart regarding one particular word he used 27 times in the lecture: ‘God’. He felt he was accused of contributing to the religious saturation of radio in the post-war “religious fever”, during which he had converted into a believer. Now he wants the word God edited out and replaced with the expression “that higher being whom we worship”, which is more in the pre-1945 spirit he was in line with. The radio director cannot say no to the great Bur-Malotke, and since he refuses to read the whole lectures again, it is decided that he pronounces this expression 27 times, in five cases (he uses vocative case one time: “Oh, God”), after which the word God would be cut out from the tape and replaced with these expressions, in correct cases. The director decides to give the job to Murke; who hasn’t gone all the way up with the paternoster for two days.
Of course, what ensues is a hilarious maltreatment of the great professor Bur-Malotke during the recording session. Murke detests the radio’s impeccably and tastefully arranged building which he sabotages by sticking a kitschy religious picture his mother gave him into a door frame in the hallway; the beautifully styled ashtrays in the hallways, which look so nice that no one wants to use them and instead everyone throws cigarette butts on the floor beside them. He had to listen through the lengthy Bur-Malotke’s lectures, in which he mentions the word ‘art’ over a hundred times. In the cafeteria, he listens to some freelancers talking and drinking while they wait to collect their fees. Each time one of them passionately exclaims the word ‘art’, he flinches as though being whipped. This sort of work environment seems to have made Murke develop an unusual hobby: he collects pieces of recording tape that’s been cut-out in editing, which contain nothing but silence. Then, he splices them together and listens to the silence when he gets home.
The satire’s keen humor evokes the atmosphere of inauthenticity that hangs about the public medium which aspires to produce quality program, but in reality fails because it lacks critical attitude and integrity. The air space is easily given to intellectual dishonesty—the lectures which have no real substance produced by a famous professor who keeps converting his convictions in whichever direction the wind blows in any given moment. People coming in, doing their bit, and collecting their fees, reveals a pure commercial side to it. There are moments where own standards are abandoned, and instead of creating programs that enrich public’s taste, the radio rather shapes the program to accommodate the public’s wishes—as when the director succumbs to an old lady’s request to make a show about dogs. I think that one of the most poignant points that the satire makes is the easiness with which the people are ready to let themselves go with the flow. The physical space of the radio building is arranged to reflect the aspiration to be an institution of culture, but given how things really work, it seems more like a painted mask: one can see where it ends if one goes all the way round with the paternoster; nicely painted walls between the floors at some point transition into bare bricks. For a worker who longs for authenticity, but sees this pretense every day, the building only amplifies the discontent. And not to mention the effect that the everyday clamor of radio program production, on- and off-air, must have on poor Dr. Murke. It is then no wonder that he longs for silence, collecting and stringing together every piece of it he can find.