© 1998 Norbert Busè Newspaper review: "A person who cannot keep quiet cannot hear." The hermit speaks calmly and confidently, without pathos, her clear, deep eyes do not assess the curious visitor, they look at him, her contented mouth does not twitch in judgment, it waits for carefully considered words: "When you start to be silent, the thoughts in your head become louder and clearer, and you notice that things also have voices. Only when you have silenced these sounds in your head are you open to what people can say." The hermit knows well what the strange eyes of hurried guests stammer, while their mouths ask: "What do you do with long evenings - without a television? Is it really that lonely?!" "It works alone," she tells the hurried guests with a smile. She tells frequent visitors that she prays and meditates a lot and that city dwellers often come to her who are sore from loneliness. For a year, a television team accompanied her life on the edge of a forest in the Weserbergland, following her into the silence to listen and watch. Watch how the morning envelopes the tree in the meadow in a delicate yellow, damp mist and the evening bathes it in a heavy blue. Simply hear how the dew drips from the leaves, how the hermit loosens the soil for the plants. As a television viewer, you could, if you wanted, be taken into the silence. For thirty minutes, this report by Norbert Buse lifted her out of her viewing habits. Half an hour of no over-talked, garish images, no rattling chains of information, no noisy judgements. Rare film cuts made the pulse beat more cautiously. Time for quiet thinking. To withdraw sometimes, to get away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life for a few weeks. What stressed, civilization-weary affluent citizen wouldn't want that? But the nameless 60-year-old hermit, portrayed by ZDF author Norbert Buse, has consistently chosen a life of solitude from which there is no return to the hustle and bustle of her fellow human beings. Claudia Sudik The pictures of her hermitage in a remote landscape in the Weserbergland are seductively beautiful. But it takes a strong faith to accept this silence and isolation from the world day after day, without the consolations of television and radio, without the multimedia flickering that many use to cover up their loneliness and emptiness. The former nun, who radiates peace and inner serenity, does not act as if she had taken on a cross with her hermit life. But as an active solidarity with the many unhappy, lonely people in this world, her way of life is an act of faith that people whose faith and trust in God is weaker can hardly understand. It remains fascinating and confusing that such a life, which on closer inspection turns out to be more active and busy than it appears on the outside, is still possible today, and it prompts us to ask ourselves: How do we deal with loneliness? And how do we endure it?