Even though both of them were devoted to their work with heart and soul, I was absolutely a wanted child. My father was hoping for a girl, and when I entered the world in 1954, on a Sunday at seven o’clock in the evening, in the Clínica Delgado in the Miraflores District of Lima, his wish came true. I was born prematurely in the eighth month of my mother’s pregnancy and first had to go into the incubator. Perhaps it was a good omen that my parents decided to give me the name Juliane. It means “the cheerful one”—I find that the name suits me well.
At that time my father’s mother and his sister, Cordula, were also living with us in Peru. My grandmother wanted to spend a few years in the country to which two of her sons had immigrated. For after my father had settled down here, Joachim, his younger brother, decided in 1951 to build a life here too. He worked as an administrator on various large haciendas in the north of the country. One of them was even as large as Belgium. My parents visited Uncle Joachim several times there in Taulís, which was an exceptionally interesting area for them as zoologists. Because the Andes are relatively low there, at about 6,500 feet, an unusual flora and fauna exchange takes place between the east and west side of the mountain range, and my parents discovered some new animal species there. But completely unexpectedly, while my grandmother and aunt were making their departure plans in Germany, my uncle Joachim had a deadly accident in Taulís. Having just been perfectly healthy, he died within less than two hours from spasms. To this day it remains unresolved whether he fell victim to tetanus or might have been poisoned by opium farmers he was onto.
But his mother and sister had already severed all ties at home and now decided to come, anyway. So I had the good fortune of having not only my father and mother, but also my grandmother and aunt around during the first years of my childhood. The two of them remained in Peru for six years. My aunt worked for a time as the editor in chief of the Peruvian Post, a German newspaper in Lima. Then they returned to their native country, my aunt because of better professional opportunities and my grandmother for health reasons, and probably also because she was homesick for Germany.
I grew up with both languages, Spanish and German. The latter was spoken at home, and it was really important to my parents that I learned their mother tongue perfectly. By no means was that a given. Some of my schoolmates of German descent had only an imperfect mastery of the language of their ancestors. I spoke Spanish with my Peruvian friends, with our housemaid and later also in school. My parents had first really learned the language in Peru, and even though they were proficient in it, a few mistakes would always creep in. But Peruvians are polite people; when it was necessary to point out an error, they always did so as gently as possible.
One day, when I was already almost grown up, I realized that my father used the formal mode of address with me in Spanish. I told him: “You can’t do that. I’m your daughter!” But he became really embarrassed and confessed to me that he had never properly learned the informal mode. He was a very formal person, had few close friends and, thus, used the polite form of address without exception.
In Lima, I attended the German-Peruvian Alexander von Humboldt School. Instruction was mostly in German, but the military regime at the time placed value on subjects like history and regional geography being taught in Spanish. I remember my school days as very pleasant, even though my Peruvian schoolmates came from much better circles. No wonder, because you had to pay tuition, which the poorer families couldn’t afford. When you finished school, there was a mandatory trip, which in Peru was called the “Viaje de Promoción.” I took part in it, but there was to be no “Abitur,” as the German university entrance exam is called, for me. A German delegation would have come specifically to test us, but a flight over the Andes would change everything.
When I came home from school, I was always surrounded by animals. As an ornithologist, my mother was constantly bringing birds home that had been injured or shot and that we nursed back to health. For a while tinamous were her main object of study. This family of birds outwardly displays similarities with partridges, but is not otherwise related to them. They occur only in South and Central America. It is funny to compare their behavior with South American machismo. For among tinamous the females are in charge: They have several males at once, who have a lot of work to do. They build the nest, have to brood the eggs and raise the young, while the female defends the turf. That caused problems with the breeding: If a male wanted to leave the nest to eat something, the female would promptly chase it back onto the eggs. Incidentally, they were brown as chocolate and shiny as porcelain.
Sometimes we also raised hatched chicks. We fed them carefully with the dropper. They liked a mixture of hard-boiled egg, ground meat and vitamin formula best. My mother had a real knack for this: Not once did a chick she was raising die. I was responsible for naming the creatures. I came up with the wildest things: A large lizard I christened Krokodeckchen (a combination of the German “Krokodil” and “Eidechschen,” the diminutive for a lizard; in English, it might have been something like Crocolizzy), and my three tinamous I named Piups (an imitation of its call when it was frightened), Polsterchen (Little Pillow, because of its soft plumage, which I loved to pet and which it often ruffled) and Kastanienäuglein (Little Chestnut Eye, because of its beautiful chestnut brown eyes).
These animals originally come from a magical landscape. It’s called Lomas de Lachay and is a fog desert area on the Pacific Coast. An extremely dry desert, the Atacama, runs through parts of Peru. Because out on the ocean, the cold Humboldt Current flows by, a dense fog cover forms, known as “garúa,” which provides astonishingly lush vegetation at particular points where it meets the Andean slopes. In the middle of the desert, you thus encounter in those places vibrantly colorful islands of plants. My parents took me there with them a few times. This blooming oasis in the middle of the brown desert monotony appeared to me on each visit as a true wonder. And that’s where our tinamous came from.
A multicolored parrot named Tobias also lived with us, whom I called “Bio” even before I learned to speak. Bio had already been in the house before my birth and at first couldn’t stand me, because he was jealous. When as a small child I approached him, shouting “Bio, Bio,” full of excitement, he would peck at me, until he finally had to accept me. Tobias was a very smart parrot, who didn’t like it at all when his cage was soiled. When he had to go, he let out a certain sound. That was a sign for us to take Tobias out of the cage and bring him to the toilet. Yes, to the regular toilet for people! We held him above the bowl and—plop!—he did his business. When Tobias one day suffered a heart attack, my mother cured him with Italian Cinzano. That revived his circulation, and is it any surprise: From that day on, he was a fan of this aperitif. Whenever guests came, Tobias waddled over and wanted to have his sip too.
In a letter to a friend in Germany, my mother wrote of my great enthusiasm for the jungle when she took me with her for the first time to the Río Pachitea, which would later become so important for my life. At the time I was only five years old:
She copes amazingly well with any situation, such as sleeping in a tent or in a sleeping bag on a rubber mattress, whether on the beach or on a boat. For her, these are all interesting things. And you have to imagine the atmosphere on the Río Pachitea: the dim morning or evening with dense fog, the calls of the howler monkeys, the river silvery green, close to the boat the high wall of the dark jungle, from which the many-voiced concert of the crickets and cicadas sounds. You feel as if you’re really in primordial nature. Juliane was probably most excited about the blooming trees and the diversity and beautiful shapes of the leaves. She has already collected a herbarium….
When I was nine years old, the Belgian animal catcher Charles Cordier visited us with his wife and his menagerie. Cordier was commissioned by famous zoological gardens all over the world to trap specimens of particular animal species. He had an extremely intelligent gray parrot named Kazuco, who could speak more outstandingly than I ever witness
ed a parrot speak before or since. There was also the boxer Böcki and the owl Skadi, who was allowed to fly around the bathroom at night. Monsieur Cordier released mice for the owl to catch. Sometimes it also attacked Daddy’s shaving brush, because it looked so similar. Kazuco, the gray parrot from the Congo, greeted you in the morning with “Good morning” and in the evening with “Good evening.” I was extremely fascinated by the clever little guy, who could also say “Böcki, sit!” And the boxer would actually sit down. Kazuco picked up sounds and sentences incredibly quickly. During the days in the Humboldt House, he learned to say: “Lima has two million people.” I loved to stroke his magnificent gray-shaded plumage. Once he bit my finger hard—to this day I have a scar. Unfortunately, our Tobias died that same year of pneumonia.
I myself became seriously ill the next year—during summer vacation, of all times! I got scarlet fever, which really alarmed my parents, for my father’s youngest sister had died of that illness at the same age. I was always so small, thin and frail, and so the whole family heaved a sigh of relief when after several weeks I was back on my feet and could take care of my animals again.
From an early age I was also totally enthusiastic about dogs. At the age of three I already got a spaniel. I loved Ajax dearly. Unfortunately, we had to give him away, because he needed more space to run around in than was possible in the city, and he constantly ravaged our garden. How sad I was then!
I was all the more blissful when a long-cherished wish of mine finally came true at the age of nine: We went to the animal shelter, where Lobo was already waiting for me. Lobo was a gorgeous German shepherd mix. He later came with us when we moved from Lima into the jungle to Panguana. He lived to the ripe old age of eighteen.
Some birds even came to us on their own, just as if word had gotten around that they would have it good with us. One day a gigantic Andean blackbird fluttered in, and, of course, it stayed too. My parents had visitors that day, American ornithologists from Berkeley, who immediately gave it the right name. They named the blackbird Professor because of its yellow-rimmed eyes, which gave it a bespectacled, intelligent look. Besides the Professor—whom I, however, called Franziska—we also had a yellow-crowned Amazon and a sunbittern. Those are indescribably beautiful birds. When they spread their wings, a colorful fan opens in the spectrum of dazzling earth colors. Later, in the jungle of Panguana, I benefited from my early experiences. When Indians brought me fig parrots, which they had taken from the nests when the birds were very small, I managed to raise them. In the manner of the indigenous people, I prechewed bananas and stuck the mush into their beaks. In this way they became amazingly tame.
There were also rare birds near Lima, in an inaccessible cove right by the sea. My parents liked to go there. While they pursued their observations, I played on the beach and often got sunburn. Which is no wonder, for Lima is only a few degrees of latitude from the equator. In any case my dermatologist still says today: “Your back has definitely seen too much sun.” How right he is! In those days people were still carefree about sunbathing. It was similar with fleas. We always carried a spray can of DDT—that would be unthinkable today!
On this beach lived tiny crabs, which were called “muy-muy.” “Muy” is the Spanish word for “many.” The doubling of the word says something about the way they would appear. Sometimes they covered the whole beach, along the shoreline, and if you wanted to go in the water, you had to walk over them barefoot. That felt really strange! But I was a girl who knew no fear and no disgust for the excesses of nature, and I ran as fast as I could over them and then plunged into the water.
Back when my father finally arrived in Lima after an odyssey that lasted years, he had in his pocket a letter of recommendation to the daughter of an admiral who was acquainted with my maternal grandfather. When he showed up, completely ragged, at that door, they at first didn’t even want to let him in. The letter of recommendation, however, opened not only the door for him, but also the hearts of these people, who later became my godparents. So it was that along with our home—the Humboldt House—my godfather’s house became one of my favorite places in Lima. My godfather and his family were German too and made a fortune in Peru in the cotton and paper trade. When my mother arrived in Lima, these faithful friends even organized my parents’ wedding. Up to the age of fourteen, I often spent vacations there. I loved that house, built in Bauhaus style, with its magical garden, swimming pool and goldfish pond, in which I learned to swim. In this garden I also sometimes let my tinamous, which I always brought along in a cage, run free. To this day I can see myself walking down the street from the Humboldt House to the coast, the cage with Little Pillow and Little Chestnut Eye in one hand and my bag in the other. The house is in a prime location on the steep coast that descends from the city to the Pacific. At the time there were nothing but such villas in that area. Those who lived there could afford a large staff. But my parents lived much more simply and preferred it that way. It was important to them to remain “down-to-earth.” But many of my schoolmates grew up with servants. If they had to sneeze, some of them immediately called for their maid so she would bring them a handkerchief and a glass of water.
What a shock it was when on one of my later visits, I returned to the area and all around my godfather’s house high-rises had sprouted up out of the ground like gigantic mushrooms! How minutely the actually sizeable and capacious house now cowers in the shadows of those architectural giants! All the other villas were torn down in the meantime, sold by their earlier owners for large sums. Only my godfather’s daughter steadfastly refused to do the same. She didn’t even change her position when an amusement park was built in the immediate vicinity. And so her house is a persistent witness from the years of my childhood, a sign of continuity in the changing times.
Today my parents’ house, the Humboldt House, is gone too. As in every metropolis in the world, the neighborhoods of Lima often change more rapidly than one would wish. The streets of my childhood are still quiet and safe—but when I first discovered that the house had disappeared, a great sadness came over me. That happens when it becomes a certainty that from now on all you have left are memories: how the Humboldt House was often full of scientists, whether ornithologists, geologists or cactus researchers. They came from all over, from Switzerland, Germany, the United States, Australia. Each of the three guest rooms had its own bathroom, and for all the visiting researchers there was a gigantic shared study, a library and a communal kitchen. The explorers received support from the German Foreign Office and the German Ibero-America Foundation founded in 1955, and my father usually secured a sort of grant through the Peruvian ministry of agriculture for the on-site costs. When the scientists then went on their expeditions, they could store their things with us. When they returned, they always had a lot to tell and show. That was a glorious time for me.
But my parents experienced how fragile this happiness was when they planned a two-month trip to the jungle less than half a year after my birth. I stayed behind, well taken care of by my aunt and my grandmother. But only eight days after their departure, an accident occurred in the mountain rain forest on the eastern slope of the Andes. A truck hurled a fallen telephone power line through the air with incredible speed and, unfortunately, it knocked down both my parents and injured them seriously. My father suffered numerous cuts and a concussion, and broke a collarbone and a rib. My mother initially lay unconscious, bleeding heavily. It turned out that she’d suffered a skull fracture. She was bedridden for many weeks and recovered only slowly. Later she had no memory of the accident and the time that followed, and she had lost her sense of smell and, partially, taste. All her life she was plagued by frequent headaches. But once she had recovered, that didn’t prevent her from pursuing her research work again. “It would have been much worse,” she would say, “if I couldn’t see anymore.”
As soon as it was possible, my parents took me with them on their expeditions. Often we went to the sparse mountain forest of Zárate, on the western
side of the Andes. It was a very remote, still completely unexplored forest with numerous new animal species. Here my mother discovered an entirely new bird genus and named it “Zaratornis.” Because it was a previously unknown vegetation zone, my parents also found here many new plants and even trees, which created a stir among experts. I still remember those excursions clearly: First we drove a great distance in the car; then we climbed the mountain on foot—I can still feel today the weight of my small backpack. We couldn’t make the climb in one day, so we had to spend a night on the mountainside under the open sky. Once we arrived up in the forest, we would then camp, usually for about a week. My parents kept secret the entrance to this forest, to protect it from plunderers. I loved those excursions and could occupy myself for hours in nature, as little as I still was.
I was just two years old when my father set out on a much farther journey: He had to return to Kiel and hold a few mandatory lectures in order to qualify as a university professor. He departed on December 27, 1956, on the ship Bärenstein and reached Bremen on January 25, 1957. Because of formal difficulties in Kiel—above all, because he didn’t live in Germany—he ultimately gave his professorial-qualification lecture in July at the university in Hamburg. Here he immediately went on leave for a few years under the condition that he would hold lectures after his return. He wrote his “Habilitationsschrift,” the postdoctoral dissertation required for a professorship in Germany, on the ecology and biogeography of the forests on the western side of the Peruvian Andes.
When I Fell From the Sky Page 2