Hören Sie, die Stille

"Don’t you hear that horrifying voice that screams across the entire horizon and that man usually calls Silence". This line is taken from Georg Büchner’s novel ’Lenz’, about the life of the poet Jakob Lenz, and was quoted by Werner Herzog at the beginning of his 1974 film ’Jeder für sich und got gegen alle’ (Every man for himself and god against all) about the life of Kaspar Hauser, a boy who was apparently raised in a small cell without human contact in nineteenth-century Bavaria, before reaching Nuremberg and featuring in a freak show. The image is dark and hard to make out. All that can be seen here is a line of people travelling from one side of the screen to the other. This is a historical image of refugees fleeing the Armenian genocide towards the beginning of the twentieth century. The still image and silence are broken intermittently when white horizontal lines appear randomly, and an electronic noise can be heard. The impression conveyed is that of a damaged video cassette tape. The combination of stillness and disturbance prompts reflection on absence and presence, silence and screaming, and on the horrors endured in silence by individuals and communities throughout history.