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Tim Schmidt

(Binghamton, NY)

The Expression of Silence in Franz Schubert’s «Mein Traum»

abstract. Silence is commonly understood as a void – in this sense, there is no silence. The figure of thought – silence, calibrates meaning within relationships. I argue that the meaning of several writings in Franz Schubert’s diary has a much larger impact than is commonly understood to this day. Specific tones and ‘beep’ sequences evoke emotions and a deep layer of melancholy, all of which serve as the guiding force in Schubert’s music. In contrast, silence – the moment in which meaning becomes elusive – impoverishes that moment within the lines of the diary note Mein Traum.

Franz Peter Schubert, wrote in his last letter «Ich bin krank», and asked his friend Schober to lend him a book that he had never read in those winter days in Vienna (December 1828) (Deutsch, Franz Schubert, 209). Schubert’s music is world-famous, whereas his writing has attracted very little attention. Scholars like Otto Friedrich Deutsch thought he could not handle words as they to him seemed too explicit, and his writings – except for the letters – appear as if they were not written to be understood. The particular piece of writing, Mein Traum, an allegorical narrative, sparked interest and polarized various scholars throughout the sciences and arts. Deutsch, the first publisher, took upon himself the role of guardian of their intangibility and rejected all kinds of speculations, whether autobiographical or psychoanalytical. In the last 50 years innovative ideas have been brought into research on the Mein Traum.

As a first step, I start with a general introduction to silence as a literary category. I intend to outline several forms of silence as a tool of social communication. The analyses focus on the works of Schubert scholars as well as the text itself and will attempt to uncover thoughts and expressions that have been left unnoticed.

What is silence? I want to highlight this topic through an interdisciplinary approach, considering literary theory and philosophical history. Silence is one of those terms that everyone seems to know, but, much as with language, to quote Jacques Derrida, «no one has ever encountered it (Derrida and Blanchot, Instant / Demeure, 20)».

I hypothesize that the importance of silence as a tool in literature is more significant than commonly articulated. There are manifold ways of evoking silence in storytelling, a phenomenon that should not be confounded with the absence of content. It can substitute for any expression and play an essential role in communication and social interaction, e.g., it is possible to semantically charge silence to the extent that it can be perceived in the same manner of excess as noise. In the words of John Cage, «There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound (Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence, 1967)». What is silence then? Is there a concept that could convince someone to say that is silence? The problem involved is that we only have a very vague idea of the absence of sounds. Susan Sontag refers to John Cage when she points out that there is no silence in a literary sense. Cage realized the absence of silence in an anechoic chamber where background noises are minimized up to 95% and further elaborated that even in this kind of environment, no one can experience silence, as the absence of sound forces the sense of hearing inwards, into the body – listening to the heartbeat and even to discover the rush of blood in your head in the same way as if one put a shell to one’s ear. Following the Oxford Learners Dictionary, silence contains mainly three meanings – a complete lack of noise or sound, a situation when no one speaks, or someone who refuses to talk about something or answer questions. Several interesting idioms invoke the idea of silence, such as a ‘heavy silence/atmosphere’, a ‘pregnant pause/silence’. Those idioms reveal that silence has its own content and is semantically charged. I already indicated that the first proposed meaning is philosophically complicated.

No one can be silent without resorting to some kind of stimulus – as Paul Watzlawick suggests, «one cannot not communicate», thus, it is impossible to abstain from interaction (Watzlawick, Pragmatics of Human Communication, 49). This article sets out from the assumption that silence is not devoid of content but receives its form through language. Language seems to contain infinite possibilities, even though it is impossible to conceive without a definite framework that exists and does not exist at the same time (Levinson, The Possibility of the Unicorn in Borges and Kafka, 47). Neither the use of language nor silence is neutral or uniform across speakers and contexts. Essentially, silence cannot be understood other than as having social implications. Speakers and addressees are attentive to the interplay of social and situational attributions, and their language reflects the content of their anxieties, thus also their silence. Language is like a coat, a membrane that filters the world of non-linguistic forms and is the tool to gain access to that world. «To perceive, understand, and interpret all circumstances, situations, and stimuli, one first needs a definitive orientation (Gardt, Interpretation, 488)». Hans-Georg Gadamer points out that the importance of language lies in its similarities to the thinking process. He thus named the process of understanding the fusion of horizons: ‘Horizontverschmelzung’ (Gadamer, Ästhetik und Poetik 2, 267).

According to Gadamer, every speaker or reader in a conversation brings a unique horizon of experiences to the table – everything that pertains to the person, his peculiar form of remembering, and all his memories. In a way, conversation takes the form of a collision between one distinct heredity and another. Understanding means that these two formations fuse into one that both speakers can accept as the common provisional framework. It does not necessarily imply the need to articulate other’s utterances. The process of thinking, in this case, relies on the structures defined by language and its conventions[1]. Again, Gadamer argues that even if language is involved, the process of thinking does not need to be articulated (Gadamer, Hermeneutik 2, 6). Therefore, when the speaker remains silent, the other tends to the task of interpreting the silence. When a speaker says, ‘Be quiet!’ and the other does so, the ensuing silence is not devoid of psychological and social content; indeed, this silence is full of emotions such as aggression and disappointment. This content is, therefore, not dissimilar to the content of the spoken word. Alternatively, when it is said: ‘I have nothing to say to this’, the other understands everything that the sentence ideally refers to, i.e., the speaker himself already addresses the meaning of his silence. There are further opportunities for escalation when silence is abruptly introduced because many opportunities are provided to reduce the accumulated anxiety by leaving ambiguous the underlying cause: for instance, the cause of silence might be mental illness, shock, physical injuries, aggression, blame, or disrespect.

If, following Paul Watzlawick, it is proposed that there is no opposite of communication, then everything is communication. The perception itself is never left unanswered, and there is an underlying dialectic between the question and the answer (Gadamer, Hermeneutik 2, 205). The question of perception is always ‘What?’ (is/happens/happened), and the response corresponding to the stimulus is ‘That’. This interplay itself represents communication. A mental state without stimuli is inconceivable. The radical constructivist approach helps one understand the value of silence, which is not the absence of content but requires interpretation.

Silence also has a profound effect on the environment, especially regarding love. What is not explicitly articulated may cause antithetical sentiments, as in the proverb: ‘The answer to every question which is not asked is always no’. In the chain of signifiers, silence is an interchangeable signifier containing the meaning of what is not said and its opposite. Regarding the experience of silence and apperception, Susan Sontag adds:

The aesthetic of silence appears hand in hand with a barely controlled abhorrence of the void. Accommodating these two contrary impulses may produce the need to fill up all the spaces with objects of slight emotional weight or with even, large areas of barely modulated color or evenly-detailed objects or to spin a discourse with as few possible inflections, emotive variations, and risings and failings of emphasis (Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence, 1967).

The absence, the vanishing, and the downfall of love leads to silence – the ‘I have nothing more to say’ stage in the relationship between Schubert and his father plays a crucial role in his diary note from 3rd July 1822. The lack of affection leads to a resolution analogous to the end of a conversation – the ‘Horizontverschmelzung’ takes place. The speaker stops speaking as he realizes his desired meaning and expression does not venture into the other’s horizon. The construct called love, which manifests itself as a preference, falls apart. It is no longer the partner one is addressing but the individual – the conversation is no longer an act of self-reflection and self-realization. Therefore, this resolution in silence reveals the threshold of language, the ‘end of the horizon’ for things that pertain to communication, beyond which lies elusive content. Silence, like language, is a world of meaning but may equally be devoid of meaning in the manner of an artificial, nonsensical language. The presence of specific determiners breathes life into the potential contained within. There is a difference between being unwilling to speak or hear and not being able to say something because lovers, family, and friends have arrived at an empty space, a void. The conglomeration of everything that has not been said leads to the inability to speak due to the overwhelming sense of deprivation. In order to arrive at the conception of silence which has meaning, we must fathom and comprehend the world that surrounds silence. As Sontag puts it:

Just as there cannot be ‘up’ without ‘down’ or ‘left’ without ‘right’, so one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language to recognize silence. Not only does silence exist in a world full of speech and other sounds, but any given silence takes its identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound (Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence, 1967).

Although Sontag understands silence as a literal stage, she realizes that silence in art is not just a stimulus. ‘Silence’ never ceases to imply its opposite and to demand its presence. The lack of affection creates a void, a distance; when one reveals it, nothing is left. The relation between silence and language is an endless threshold interwoven with corners and curves and reduced to perception and imagination, which close the frame.

In conclusion, all the possible things, circumstances, and opportunities behind silence are controversial and beyond the common understanding of the term itself. At this point, this paper will establish silence as a theoretical literary category – concealment or the dissolution of meaning. The aim is not to read between the lines but rather to discover the point of the dissolution of meaning, where everything else appears useless, forbidden, or impossible to say.

In his short creative period, due to his early death after a long-lasting, fatal syphilis infection, Schubert produced a tremendous number of compositions, around 1500 pieces that contain roughly 630 songs for piano and violin. His diary, the allegoric narrative titled Mein Traum dated 3rd July 1822, has polarized research since its first publication in 1914. The scholar Deutsch denied any relation to Schubert’s life story and declared it simply as ‘romantischer Erguss’ (Deutsch, Franz Schubert, 56). Hans Fröhlich, on the other hand, saw precisely that – an autobiographic document, but not without distancing himself from other biographers who followed unprovable theories. Some scholars, e.g., Arnold Schering, saw in it a pretext for the symphony commonly known as ‘die Unvollendete’. As I do not intend to take part in the argument between musical theorists about whether or not it represents a pretext for a symphony, I will focus on the text itself and the momentum that I relate to the concept of ‘the dissolution of meaning’. Details from Schubert’s biography will be used to prove specific points, e.g., in the text, he traveled ‘in ferne Gegenden’, which must represent an internal journey as he never really left Vienna nor the Austrian Empire.

Fröhlich already noted the literary potential of the text but stumbled in the same way as Deutsch about Schubert’s ‘taciturnity’ and avoided getting involved in more considerable intricacies by pointing out that music, rather than the word, was his choice of expression. There is no doubt that the composer realized a new possibility for expression by charging music with emotion and melancholy[2]. Schubert concluded in a later note, March 1824:

Meine Erzeugnisse sind durch den Verstand für Musik und durch meinen Schmerz vorhanden; jene, welche der Schmerz allein hat, scheinen am wenigsten die Welt zu erfreuen. (Valentin, Franz Schubert, 37)

Considering all Schubert’s writings – letters, notes, and poems –, I regard it as highly unlikely that they bear no connection to his own circumstances – his life, his suffering, and, as Pesic has stated, to his music. As shown in the quote above, Schubert very much does give us a glimpse into his worldview, his mind, work, and pain. Writing was not his art; nevertheless, the idea that his writing was only a ‘literary effusion’[3] does not sound convincing when speaking of someone who wrote world-renowned classical pieces of music. Schubert draws a clear line between his perception, person, and art. The composer’s interpretation of his work seems to take into account the musical ideas of his time – especially in Vienna – namely, that music ought to be joyful. Schubert’s later works, however, are more likely the pain-impregnated pieces for which he is best known. As Fröhlich notes, it is evident that Schubert, a theoretically educated musician, became an artist to overcome his pain.

In this allegoric narrative Mein Traum, there is the ‘I’ – the dreamer and wanderer – who is banished twice. The first time, the narrator’s voice is compelled to leave; the second time, by its own choice, although affected by the father’s violent act. In the center of the story are two public visions, one of his mother’s death and the other of a recently deceased virgin. The death of the mother reunites the voice with his father, yet not in the form of a genuine reconciliation, but only as a reunification in pain. Between the first banishment and the second, the motifs of the singer and the wanderer change places. The wandering does not represent roaming through space but through time. The far region to which the wanderer goes is internal, «So zertheilte mich die Liebe und Schmerz (Deutsch, Franz Schubert, 55)»[4]. The dreamer works through the pain of rejection by loved ones and the feeling of being displaced in the world. Although the story has more transcendental encounters, a third reunion with the father raises further questions. «The wanderer’s homecoming augments his father’s weeping; the prodigal father and son are finally reconciled in tears (Pesic, Schubert’s Dream, 138)». Nevertheless, in this reconciliation – «noch mehr aber weinte ich» – the dreamer rises above the endless oppression by his father. Nevertheless, the wanderer’s suffering is superior to the father’s pain. Judging from Schubert’s letters to his father’s second wife, Fröhlich suggests that he never really forgave Franz Theodor for having remarried before the end of the year of mourning. The biographer believes that Schubert questioned the fidelity of his father during his mother’s lifetime. Thus, he chose to rise through his mother’s love – he became the father in a psychoanalytical sense.

What Fröhlich calls ‘ein autobiographisches Dokument’ cannot be definitely regarded as non-fiction and therefore, a reliable account of his life or dream, whether it be a daydream or not (Fröhlich, Schubert, 124). What must be considered more seriously is that Schubert never overcame the pain caused by the death of his beloved mother. The whole debate about this particular piece of short prose is somewhat problematic, as we lack any other insight from the author himself. Instead of opposing other opinions (regarding the discussion from Deutsch 1914 to Pesic 1999), Gadamer’s hermeneutics seems to be the most sensible approach to discovering as many layers of meaning as possible. The problem with a reading that relies on a theory, for example, in Derrida’s reading of Kafka’s Process, is that the process of interpretation often requires the presence of motives that are, in fact, completely lacking (Neumann, Electrischer Prometheus, 24). Deutsch saw Mein Traum ‘literary effusion’ of a contemporary of German Romanticism. (…) an embodiment of ideas in the style of Novalis (Pesic, Schubert’s Dream, 137)». Furthermore, Deutsch did not recognize the psychoanalytical speculations: «Sie selbstbiographisch, oder gar psychoanalytisch auszulegen, war abwegig». A Freudian reading would indeed be too simple, although there is no doubt that Schubert wrote to overcome trauma, and one could detect the Oedipus complex and, of course, a very Kafkaesque moment – the return of the law, i.e., the father. However, the psychoanalytical approach does not reveal more about the text than the text already offers on the face of it, and to speculate upon such things as incest fantasies, as Fröhlich did, is to go a little too far in the wrong direction.

Deutsch’s following note is highly questionable:

Wenn man schon daran glaubt, daß Schubert hier auf den Tod seiner eigenen Mutter (1812) anspielt, daß er beim Grabmal der heiligen Cäcilia sich entschließt, Liederkomponist zu werden, so kann man der Beschreibung der väterlichen Schule einmal als Stätte eines, Lustgelages’ und dann wieder als des Vaters, Lieblingsgarten’ nicht wohl hinnehmen (Deutsch, Franz Schubert, 56).

He appears to suggest that if someone wants to believe that Schubert is referring to the death of his mother, it is impossible at the same time to think that the father’s ‘Lustgelage’ and ‘Lieblingsgarten’ are metaphors for the school in which he worked as a director. Deutsch’s argumentation is rather fragile, and the discussion becomes even more paradoxical as the title given by the editor himself is ‘an allegoric narrative’. That is very much the point – the meaning cannot be proven and is therefore captured in a dialectic between right and wrong or credible and incredible.

Pesic, on the other hand, calling it ‘Schubert’s tale’, is willing to recognize in the narrative a musical structure A B A. If this is true, then Deutsch’s position is not entirely without significance, as he noted some closeness to romanticism, especially that of Wackenroder. The threefold division was not unusual in Romanticism and is indeed also found in Novalis, Hölderlin, and others. The literary category of ‘Dreitakt’ reflects the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The ‘absolute I’ splits into an object and a subject that later reunites. In literature, a typical plot follows a hero who is forced to leave his home, performs a heroic deed, and discovers that the only way to find peace is to return home as a better person. It might sound a little trivial or overly simplified, but that is the basic plot structure of Schubert’s allegory. So far, so good; at the core of both propositions by Deutsch and Pesic is a common foundation, and they complement each other. Pesic observes a credible allegory and discovers a relationship between Schubert’s writings and his music.

My Dream tells a story of banishment and reconciliation. It begins and ends with an evocation of the bliss of familial intimacy; in the middle, there is anger, alienation, and wandering which has a musical form, A B A’: the peaceful material returns at the end, transfigured and transformed, after a contrasting dramatic section that develops the initial motifs (Pesic, Schubert’s Dream, 137).

In its broadest sense, the concept of reconciliation must be understood as having the same meaning as being held accountable. Franz Theodor’s wife and Franz’s mother died, and her death brought them together. Franz visited his family home, and his father did not prevent him from doing so – they reunited in pain and suffering. The absence of a desire for reunion precludes the possibility of a complete reconciliation. Nevertheless, it is questionable if taciturnity is at play here. All kinds of silences, as described above, exist in Mein Traum, owing not only to the mores of the time but also to the elusiveness of the meaning of it all for the dreamer, who has no choice but to keep on moving. Therefore, the question ‘why?’ takes precedence over meaning. Why was the dreamer and wanderer not loved, and where does the pain come from?

Mein Traum introduces the reader to the world of deep thought and positions the narrator’s voice – which we must assume is Schubert’s – in his own meaninglessness. «Ich war ein Bruder vieler Brüder und Schwestern». There within is a moment of being lost and an attempt to justify his being for himself – he is only one of many. Throughout the whole text, there is always the opposition of ‘I’ and ‘They’. ‘They’ are probably his brothers and the father, whom he loved without receiving love in return. Again, this analysis focuses on the text and the emotion involved; it is challenging to know the exact nature of the relationship between Schubert and his father, as historians have demonstrated that Franz Theodor Schubert supported his son in his career. In the story, the personalities are reduced to the family affiliation and their relation to the author. Whereas his regular writings take the form of an inner dialogue, this piece is an inner monologue in which the whole narrative is described in the way the dreamer perceives it. We have a tangible feeling only of his identity, but not theirs, as he was one among many brothers and sisters. The structure of the text is divided into three parts, and Schubert uses three hyphens. The hyphen in German – ‘Gedankenstrich’ – is primarily a digression, or submersion of one thought into another. In the 19th century, using them in different ways was expected, and writers and thinkers often had a precise, personalized way of utilizing punctuation. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, had a very idiosyncratic manner of using punctuation in his aphorisms. The title is typically followed by a point and a hyphen, as in the collection gaya scienza, e.g., «Gedanken. – Gedanken sind die Schatten unsrer Empfindungen – immer leerer und dunkler, einfacher als diese (Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 631)». The period after the title signals that the thinker himself completes the thought but does not imply that it is realized in the writing. The hyphen, on the one hand, introduces parts of the thought, but on the other hand, it demands that the readers complete it themselves. It is helpful to keep such usage in mind when reading Mein Traum. Even though it is an allegorical narrative, the hyphen has several, almost transcendental functions. The first comes after the first three sentences, regarded as the introduction. The initial thought, or problem, has been stated; a more complex thought will follow. Thus, the structure of the foundational thoughts is very plain and simple: subject, predicate, object. The sentences that follow are in hypotactic order. «Ich war allen mit tiefer Liebe zu getan. […] Da wurden die Brüder sehr fröhlich. Ich aber war traurig». Love is far from romantic; the love that the wanderer is talking about is painful, not chosen, and not reciprocated. ‘Mit Liebe zugetan’ describes a love that is a forced experience that he could neither choose nor reject. The first three simple sentences, separated from the rest of the text by a hyphen, serve as the short introduction. From this generality, the story moves into the domain of a particular situation before departing again in generality.

After the short introduction, happiness and sadness are juxtaposed as the brothers are happy and the dreamer is sad. No reason is given for his sadness. The father ordered the dreamer to try ‘die köstlichen Speisen’ but the dreamer could not comply, which made the patriarch angry and caused him to banish his son. The never-answered question in the text is ‘Why?’. What kind of festivity this was and what the delicacies were has been widely speculated about, but the omission suggests that the critical problem is to be sought elsewhere – in separating the son from the father. The fact that he could not enjoy the reunion and was punished by banishment transformed the dreamer into a wanderer who travels to remote regions where love and pain coexist.

The path that leads away from the father is filled with confusion and emotional distress. The dreamer realizes that the person he loved reacted with indifference and thus converted it into pain. «Ich wandte meine Schritte und mit einem Herzen voll unendlicher Liebe für die, welche sie verschmähten, wanderte ich in ferne Gegend». In the following years, while far away from home, the dreamer experienced the division of his being through the force of incredible love and pain. As the mother dies, the love between the son and the father is replaced by suffering, and both are reconnected through pain. The wanderer came home, and his father did not hinder his entrance. The collapsing meaning, so to say, the evoked silence, stayed stable and was not replaced by speech as there was still nothing to say. The dreamer saw that the father’s countenance had softened, and he shed silent tears while observing the dead body of his mother, the sole meaningful subject of their communion. The ‘I’ transformed into a ‘We’, which could, for the first time in the text, be understood, as Pesic did, as a reconciliation. And they, whoever that might be, bury the corpse, and the thought will be included by the following hyphen, which will be left open and stabilize the reunification. Nothing is said, the relationship is not charged with meaning, and there are still no words to say – there is silence. After the hyphen, the journey of the wanderer through time and the coexistence of love and pain will divide him. This journey will transform in space and lead him back to the beginning where the wandering began, and the ‘We’ once again mutated into ‘I’. Nevertheless, it is not only a starting point; it is the point of no return and silence – words fail to express the underlying tension, and the second banishment occurs. The father and the son travel to one of the father’s ‘Lieblingsgärten’ – an allegory from which no convincing interpretations can be derived. It could represent a metaphoric area for communicating values, perhaps an emotional stage or a state of mind. The reconciliation was about to manifest itself as the dreamer had been summoned to approve his father’s ‘taste’, but he was disgusted and could not share in his affinities. The dreamer felt anxious about being unable to answer the first question and denied it after the question was repeated. The father hits the son, who resorts to wandering with the same great love and pain «into far-off regions (Pesic, Schubert’s Dream, 139)». The love and pain divide the dreamer, who comes to terms with the trauma and begins to sing.

Pesic compared the structure of the text to a sonata. «The dreamy quality of this movement is evident from the first measures, which emerge as if the music had already been going on for a long time. (Pesic, Schubert’s Dream, 138)» The structure of a song can be discerned, in which the repetition of banishment and the dividing into pain and love represent different parts. Schubert’s songs often had two to three strophes. The banishment and reunification, as well as the two deaths, bear a similarity to components in a song. In this framework, the wandering and the division of the self through love and pain would, therefore, stand as refrains. Another clue to this structural interpretation is «Lieder sang ich nun lange, lange Jahre». It represents a breakthrough in the metalevel, as one assumes that the text was written as a consequence of dealing with pain. It is not unusual that Schubert personifies instruments[5]. What the dreamer describes after the second banishment is exactly what Schubert expresses in the Note above. In Mein Traum the dreamer says «Wollte ich Liebe singen ward sie mir zum Schmerz. Und wollte ich wieder Schmerz nur singen ward er mir zur Liebe». Schubert explains in March 1824 that his productions exist thanks to his understanding of music and his pain. Music and pain are deeply interwoven throughout his work and life. The dreamer reports that when he sings about love it becomes pain, a deprivation that might have led him into the interior regions and the regions of allegory and metaphor. In the climax, everything becomes more fantastic, even though the suicidal desire can also be distinguished as he desires to enter the circle of the dead virgin. At this point, the dream becomes much more dream-like before resolving into reality, where the father and the son embrace each other. The virgin was part of a magical circle composed of young men. Celestial thoughts burst out of the grave on the young men. As the dreamer desires to enter into the inner circle, he is warned that only a miracle could grant him entry. The desire seems to include the will to overcome pain and death. It is said that Schubert was, at that time, aware that he had an incurable syphilis infection. In a state of devotion with a strong belief, he enters the magical circle and casts the spell, having felt that the significance of eternity was realized in one moment in which he was finally able to overcome the pain of the loss of his mother and to forgive his father and face his death. Again, Deutsch does not see that the virgin represents the mother on a metaphorical level. The long wandering through pain and suffering in reality and in his dreams always concludes in reunion with the father. This Kafkaesque moment is emphasized to the extent that the dreamer becomes what the father was incapable of – instead of receiving forgiveness, he forgives and absorbs the pain of both the father and the son. Two lovers try to be reconciled and speak through pain, but it does not work as words become dull. Saying the same again and again without receiving a response and seeing actions evokes a literal silence as it is useless and meaningless to say another word, which leads to a painful silence. The father is always present in all stages of the dream and is always visible as the symbol of pain next to the deceased, whether the mother or the virgin. This scenery is covered with the veil of silence, the sum of all emotions and actions that loom beyond the manifest picture of the father and the son united in mourning.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques, and Maurice Blanchot. The Instant of My Death / Demeure. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford UP, 2000.

Fröhlich, Hans. Schubert. Carl Hanser Verlag, 1978.

Deutsch, Otto Erich. Franz Schubert. Briefe und Schriften. Verlag Brüder Hollink, 1954, 54-56.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Hermeneutik 1. Wahrheit und Methode. Ergänzungen und Register, Gesammelte Werke, Band 2. J.C.B Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993.

–. Hermeneutik 2. Wahrheit und Methode, Ergänzungen und Register, Gesammelte Werke, Band 2. J.C.B Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993.

–. Ästhetik und Poetik 2. Hermeneutik im Vollzug. Gesammelte Werke 9. J.C.B Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1993.

Gardt, Andreas. Interpretation. In Handbuch Sprache in der Literatur. Hrsg. v. Anne Betten et al. De Gruyter 2017, 487-508.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Verlag von Ernst Schmeitzner, 1882.

Neumann, Bernd. «Electrischer Prometheus» Umrisse einer Dritten Kultur im interdisziplinären Zusammenspiel zwischen Literatur und Naturwissenschaft. Metzler, 2021.

Pesic, Peter. Schubert’s Dream. In “19th-Century Music” 23 (1999) 2, 136-144.

Schubert, Franz. Briefe. Tagebuchnotizen. Gedichte. Hrsg. von Erich Valentin. Diogenes, 1997.

Sontag, Susan. The Aesthetics of Silence, in Styles of Radical Will. Penguin Classics, 2009, 3-34.

Watzlawick, Paul. et al. Pragmatics of Human Communication. A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes. Norton & Company Inc, 1967.

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/silence_1?q=Silence Accessed 30th March, 2022.