I hear, therefore I am

He had a profound influence on music in post-war Germany, but also later in his creative work on hearing and listening. He built a bridge between music and physics, spirituality and philosophy—so how is it that he seems almost forgotten? While he was virtually omnipresent in his heyday, today he has disappeared from collective memory.

We are talking about Joachim-Ernst Behrendt (1922-2000), and his inspiration to reflect on hearing and to listen more consciously. He also invites us to seek and value silence: a precious gift in our very noisy world.

Lessings “torment of inexhaustible noise”

Already over 100 years ago, the German philosopher Theodor Lessing lamented urban noise pollution. The “torment and pain” of the “inexhaustible noise” prompted him to found the first German Anti-Noise Association in 1908 (modeled on the “Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise” founded in New York in 1906). In his book “The Noise”: A Polemic Against the Sounds of Our Lives”, Lessing laments the rattling machines and the constantly passing bakery carts. He complains about people haggling in the alleys, hustling craftsmen, and quarreling children: “All mental strength is used up to overcome these constant tensions. The lack of healthy, deep sleep shatters our nerves.” – What Lessing wrote down as a subjective experience over a hundred years ago (the automobiles started to become common only then) has now been backed up by research: Constant noise exposure can have health consequences. These include sleep, attention, and communication disorders; numerous studies also link chronic noise exposure to cardiovascular and vascular diseases. Constant noise is not only annoying, but also harmful to health.

So it´s worth paying attention to our noise exposure, limit it – and listen more closely.

“Listen, that’s how your soul lives!” – that was one of Behrendt´s father’s favorite Bible verses. And it was the mantra with which Berendt moved through the lecture halls in the second half of his life.

But already at a younger age, Behrendt set things in motion: he brought the blues to Europe, German jazz to communist countries, he brought poetry and jazz together. In 1953, he published “The Jazz Book”, which became the best-selling book on jazz even in the USA. His biography seems typical for the Germany of his time – and yet so unusual.

“Listen, that’s how your soul lives!”

In 1925, when Joachim was three years old, his father, a pastor, left his mother. It is said that he drove her away, and Joachim and his sister stayed with their strict father. Lonely and intimidated by him, Joachim began to undermine the garden and, over the years, built a system of caves, which he even supplied with electricity, so he could write poems and read Rilke, his mother’s favorite author. His father took him on long nighttime walks and explained the constellations to him. Joachim wanted to study physics – just not to succeed his father as a pastor.

In 1942, Berendt was drafted. He huddled in bunkers and shelters – almost like in the cave system of his childhood – reading, and lugging books around with him. During this time, his father was in the “Confessing Church” the opposition movement of Protestant Christians against the Nazis, and was repeatedly arrested. Meanwhile, Behrendt, the son, fought in Leningrad. And out of fear of being disadvantaged by his superiors in the Wehrmacht, he disowned his father, who was already in a concentration camp at the time.

Perhaps all of this – the loss of his mother, much too early, feelings of guilt, the desire for reparation, the search for meaning – drove him throughout his life. His father died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1942. That Joachim-Ernst Berendt survived Leningrad was nothing short of a miracle, given that almost his entire company was killed.

After the war, in 1949, he traveled to the USA for three months. He became friends with Charlie Parker and John Hammond, the great American music critic, and entered a gospel church in Harlem. “The service had barely begun when I was singing, shouting, and dancing along, as if I’d always been a part of it,” Berendt later said.

“He who swings, doesn’t march”

Back in Germany, in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s, the rebellion against the Adenauer era began. Society seemed to him to be stiffening and freezing again; it needed to be shaken awake. For Berendt and others, jazz became the epitome of protest. He produced weekly television and radio programs featuring jazz concerts – over 10,000 in total over the years.

For him, jazz was a political music, a music that emphasizes individuality, equality, freedom, democracy, tolerance, and cultural exchange. He repeatedly said: “He who swings, doesn’t march.”

In 1962, Behrend flew to Asia – because for months, a ticket, a promotional gift from Pan Am, had been lying in the radio office that no one used … As the plane hovered over the Indian continent, Berendt fainted, so powerful was the experience for him. Berendt once called this trip “the greatest voyage of discovery of my life“, because for him it meant not only setting out for a new continent, but also a journey into the inner self.

Berendt stayed in Asia for four months. And from then on, he flew back every year, for a total of twelve years. He was one of the first Europeans to produce “world music.” Opinions differ as to whether Berendt coined the term or not.

During the 1970s, Berendt increasingly turned away from the jazz scene to engage with music in a broader sense. In his later years, he understood music more as an expression of human existence itself, always understandable in the context of its social and religious references.

“The world is sound”

In 1981, his listening soiree “Nada Brahma: The World is Sound” was published, where he explored hearing in its medical, historical, cultural and philosophical aspects. As a former physics student, he also explored magnetic, electrostatic, and other physical vibrations. As one of the few radio programs in the cultural program, this radio feature reached a large audience and generated over a thousand responses.

Then he wrote Nada Brahma, in a state of “great excitement.” In the book, he outlined a plea for a new introspection, for a turning away from the dictatorship of vision, which, through its expansive nature, naturally grasps for prey – like an eagle. The attributes that described the ear, on the other hand, all come “from the realm of receiving, absorbing, and opening up,” Berendt wrote.

“A society in which people listen to one another,” this increasingly became his credo from then on, “can be nothing other than a loving, considerate society.” For Berendt, when the book was finally finished, it was “his new path.”.

The very reverent atmosphere of his talks, and also the exclusive focus on listening, as well as Berendt’s radical critique of rational Western thought – his critics had problems with that.
His turn to the philosophical and spiritual, to Japanese Zen Buddhism and the Indian mystic Osho, was regretted by some, but warmly welcomed by others.

Joachim-Ernst Berendt died in 2000 at the age of 78 in Hamburg on his way to a reading when he ran a red light and was hit by a car. Perhaps it was fitting for him that he didn’t follow traffic rules when they didn’t seem to suit him.

“The ear is the way”

In his lecture “I hear, therefore I am,” Behrendt said: “We live in such a one-sidedly visual civilization that our other senses have atrophied; indeed, our eyes have atrophied along with them. They have resigned themselves to perceiving the world only in images and reflections, and they confuse images with reality. (…) The goal is the balance of the senses. (…) In the great ancient cultures, it was not the eye, but the ear that was considered our noblest sense. “The ear is the way,” it says in the Upanishads, the fundamental book of Indian wisdom.“

For Berendt, the following applied: “I hear, therefore I am” – rather than “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” has shaped the West like no other expression. Yet we live most intensely when we don’t think – in nature, by the sea or on a mountain, in art, music, in love…

Descartes’s dictum led to the separation of mind and body, and to a separation from other life forms: All the other living beings that don’t seem to think, don’t have the same right to exist as we humans. As early as the 1980s, Behrendt spoke of 47 species being exterminated every day – today, estimates say 130 to 150 species are extinct every day, and according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (ICUN), approximately one in four land mammal species and one in three marine mammals are threatened with extinction.

“I think, therefore I am” – are humans ultimately the only ones left? It’s impressive that Joachim-Ernst Behrendt already addressed the loneliness of modern humans on our planet.

According to him, “I hear, therefore I am” has a completely different effect. Discovering the wonder and beauty of our hearing invites us to humility and reverence – and to turn away from our dominant, destructive, and exploitative way of life.

The ear – the first and last of our senses

The physiology and development of the ear demonstrates just how miraculous hearing is: An embryo has microscopic ear buds just 7–8 days after fertilization. Four and a half months after fertilization, the cochlea and labyrinth are fully developed and have already reached their final size.

And at the end of life, the last sense to die is usually hearing. “When we stop hearing, we cease to exist,” Behrendt put it. The sense of hearing develops first and disappears last in human life.

The ear is our most sensitive sense, far superior to the eye and the other senses. We can hear almost seven times faster than we can see. If we could see as fast as we hear, we would only see dots and lines in films.

We can hear the murmur of our own cells – we can, so to speak, hear that we are alive. Behrendt draws associations between seashells by the sea and the outer ear; he describes the image of a child reverently holding a shell to its ear and listening to the murmur, like an embryo to the murmur in the womb. And again and again, Behrendt builds a bridge to silence, meditation, and spirituality. To listening, both outwardly and inwardly.

“Our one-sided dominance of the eyes has programmed us for that aggressiveness that is the most striking characteristic of Western humanity. The ear, however, programs us for a receptive, absorbing, feminine, and devoted attitude—precisely the attitude we need today if we want to survive on this earth. (…) The new human being will be a hearing human being—or he will be nothing. The ear is the way.”

“The ear is the way” – that may seem too apodictic to many today, but it’s still worth becoming more aware of the qualities of listening, as Ian McGilchrist once described it:

The experience of listening to music is a betweenness. Is it just out there, on its own? Clearly not. Is it, then, just in my brain? Clearly not. It exists only when outer and inner come together: that is, it lies in the betweenness. Experience – mind – is always a betweenness. And I believe all reality is like this. – an interconnectedness, not like Decarte`s  separating view. – Ian McGilchrist