Murke's Collected Silences by Heinrich Böll

First published: "Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen," 1958 (English translation, 1966)

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: 1955

Locale: An unnamed city in West Germany

Principal Characters:

• Dr. Murke, an employee of a radio station
• Bur-Malottke, a frequent speaker on cultural matters
• Director of the Broadcasting House, his friend
• Humkoke, Murke's boss

The Story

Dr. Murke is introduced as a man who performs an existential exercise every morning on entering the radio station and riding the elevator to his office on the second floor. The elevator is the kind known as a paternoster—a continuous belt with open cages that remain upright like cars on a Ferris wheel as they pass the points where their direction of travel changes from up to down or vice versa. Normally, Murke feels the need to remain on the elevator and submit himself to his daily "anxiety breakfast" as it passes through the top housing with its greasy chains and groaning machinery.

For the past two days, however, Murke has been obliged to forgo this exercise. The Director has ordered him to edit two talks on The Nature of Art, which the great Bur-Malottke has taped for broadcast later in the week, and Murke has had to come in at eight in the morning on these two days and begin work right away. Bur-Malottke, who converted to Catholicism only in the religious fervor of 1945, has suddenly felt religious qualms and wants to omit the word God, which occurs frequently in each of the two half-hour tapes, and replace it with a more neutral formulation.

Murke has spent Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning performing the excruciatingly painful task of listening to the two talks three times each day and cutting out the word God. Now it is Wednesday morning, and Bur-Malottke arrives at the broadcast house to tape the substitutions under Murke's supervision. A complication that Bur-Malottke has not counted on, however, is that the case reference has to be made clear. Wherever God appears in the genitive, as in "God's will," for example, Bur-Malottke must say the noun in question followed by "of that higher Being Whom we revere." Of the twenty-seven occurrences of the word "God" on the two tapes, there are seven genitives and one vocative. Instead of "O God," he has to substitute "O Thou higher Being Whom we revere." Moreover, because the new formulation is much longer, the two programs will now require a total of one minute more airtime, so each of them will have to be cut by thirty seconds.

Bur-Malottke is greatly annoyed by these complications and begins to sweat profusely. Murke thoroughly enjoys the discomfort of the pompous windbag and revenges himself on him by purposely sabotaging the session. For example, Murke is able at one point to force his adversary to start again from the beginning by claiming that the tape is defective. He further aggravates him by suggesting that several of the takes are unsuitable for use—and they are, largely because Bur-Malottke is unable to mask his growing agitation. Later, Murke and a technical assistant splice the snippets of tape containing Bur-Malottke's "higher Being Whom we revere" twenty-seven times into the two talks on The Nature of Art. The technician has divided the snippets into individual small boxes according to grammatical case. A box marked "Pure Chocolate" contains two vocatives, a terribly botched version and a retake. "Now," says Murke, "comes the vocative; we'll take the bad one, of course." Humkoke advises Murke to go home and relax but cautions him to remain by the phone until it has been determined that the Bur-Malottke tapes are in acceptable form.

Murke's collected silences are the snippets of tape he saves when he has to edit periods of silence from program tapes. He splices them together and listens to them at home. Up to this point, he has been able to collect only about three minutes of silence, and the Bur-Malottke tapes did not yield a single second.

At home, Murke entertains his beautiful young girlfriend, Rina. Neither of them says a word, and a tape recorder is running on the coffee table. Finally, Rina breaks the silence by saying that Murke's request is indecent. She would be happy to put words on the tape, but "putting silence" on it strikes her as almost immoral. Murke begs her to continue. Rina agrees, but the silence is soon broken by a telephone call from Humkoke. The Bur-Malottke tapes are fine.

In the basement coffee shop of the radio station freelance contributors are overheard planning to do features on every conceivable topic, no matter how banal. One of them, Wanderburn, enters the room mouthing a hypocritical warning against the radio business, hypocritical because he has just picked up a check for a quick adaptation of the Book of Job into a radio program. It is because of the disparity between pretension and reality in the radio station that Murke feels compelled to put up a tacky picture in the hallway. It is a religious postcard that his mother sent him with the inscription: "I prayed for you at St. James' Church."

In the final scene of the story, the assistant drama producer and the same technician who worked with Murke on the Bur-Malottke tapes are editing a radio drama. In the radio play, an atheist poses a series of questions, such as: "Who will remember me when I have become the prey of worms?" Each of the questions is followed by a long silence, a weakness in the play. The assistant producer decides that what is needed is a voice speaking the word "God" after each question. He is amazed when the technician produces a small tin with the snippets Murke has saved from the Bur-Malottke tapes. The assistant producer remarks that it is, indeed, strange what one can find in this place, and produces from his pocket a crumpled picture he has found stuck in his door. The inscription reads: "I prayed for you in St. James' Church."