Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  Considering how many wildlife films I have seen since, as an adult, including films by Knut himself, and how inspiring I have found them, often far more so than those with a human cast, I’m still surprised by how little I gained from seeing my first wildlife film, in fact the first film I had ever seen in my life.

  The screen had reverted to a brilliant blinding white, our motionless figures could be made out in the darkness, still looking toward the screen, as though comparing the image left on the retina with what we had just seen. But the film was finished. The reel turned a few more times, and then it was empty, the celluloid strip tapping against the sprocket, a regular, quiet clicking, like a clock measuring an infinite expanse of time, and apart from that nothing moved. Three more revolutions, three more disturbing clicks, and the projector lamp went out, the whirring gradually died away, then ceased altogether. Somebody switched on the chandelier lights and somebody cleared his throat, we viewers were clapping, Knut took a bow. He stood right next to me, but I hadn’t seen him in his film.

  7

  OUTSIDE, A SPRING SHOWER, the sky had blackened, it looked as though there might be a storm. The world beyond the window was deep blue: the approaching cloud front, in the distance the wall enclosing the grounds, where the gateway gave onto a long concrete drive that led right up to the building. On the left by the entrance the tall beeches, in summer the foliage is so dense that it looks like a forest, and on our right, behind the old storehouse, the birches on the gentle slope: all covered with a blue shimmer. Big puddles had quickly formed in the mud, the arc lamps in the car park were already lit.

  We had been discussing Martin’s work, exhibited in all the big public galleries, the drawings with their characteristic combination of roughness and fragility. We talked about Martin’s room installations, partly manic and partly pedantic in their effect, composed of everyday objects and sculptures which only a few art lovers were prepared to see as sculptures. Long rows of shelves, preserving jars, boxes, with stains on the floor where a dark, sticky-looking liquid had been spilled: as though someone had broken into a zoological collection.

  Traveling with her parents, she had regularly been taken to exhibitions, Frau Fischer told me, and whenever they planned a trip she could always count on spending at least one long day among contemporary works of art. At that time she had always felt uncomfortable in Martin’s rooms, not to say intimidated by things. The material was enveloped in a dangerous stillness, at once dead and alive. Whether it was just a sponge, or a piece of sacking, or a completely ordinary old pair of tailor’s scissors, it would never have occurred to her to touch these objects.

  “Soon I didn’t want to travel any distance at all during the holidays, and I swore that when I was older I would never go abroad. Then I became an interpreter.”

  Our empty coffee cups, the half-full ashtray. If we had been sitting in a ground-floor room, in the bluish half-light, we could have seen the steam rising from the grass, seeming to do battle with the falling raindrops. They were huddling out there, protected by the leaves, hunched, feathers puffed up, without a sound, waiting for the cloudburst to end.

  “Didn’t Knut Sieverding make a film about a hamster too?” asked Katharina Fischer, recalling a winter morning when the first-years were led by their teacher into the biology lab, full of anticipation but also a bit unsure; from their primary school years they were used to being read a story on the last day before the Christmas holidays. Here in the high school the class teacher busied herself with a video player, muttering to herself, and not until the cassette had been pushed home did the pupils in the back rows quiet down like the rest.

  “There was one scene that sent shivers down our spines.”

  A stoat crawls into a hamster’s burrow, and Katharina Fischer remembered as though it were yesterday how tense she felt watching the intruder, because she knew the nest contained a litter of young. The stoat moves in further and further. The mother hamster clearly notices changes taking place somewhere in the intricate system of runs, perhaps the soles of her feet have picked up vibrations from the ground, or she may have sensed unusual air movements through her whiskers, or maybe it’s simply the smell of the stoat—the hamster’s head jerks up, she stops for a moment, as though she has to arrange these irritating sense perceptions into a picture. She turns, runs up along the tunnel, and suddenly the hamster and the stoat confront each other face-to-face.

  Yes, she had seen Knut’s film.

  “Our teacher, in the semidarkness next to the screen, completely unmoved.”

  Not a coldhearted person, surely.

  “No, but in that situation it just disturbed us even more, the stoat attacking a young family of hamsters, and the teacher not even flinching.”

  She knew the outcome of the confrontation.

  In the end the stoat withdraws from the burrow. The whole class was relieved. Such death-defying courage. All the same, the image came back to Katharina Fischer for a long time afterward, the puffed-out cheeks of the mother hamster, the sharp teeth, the little claws.

  “What would Knut Sieverding have done if the defense had failed, if the stoat had got to the helpless young hamsters in their nest?”

  Knut Sieverding would never have imposed that on children. A dead mother hamster and an unprotected nest, never.

  “Did he look for a particularly tough hamster?”

  It took him weeks to train the stoat to go so far and no further into the hamsters’ burrow, stop, and turn back after a while. The scene was planned down to the last detail, you could say it was staged, and it didn’t matter to the stoat whether a mother hamster turned up to drive it off or not.

  Frau Fischer nodded absently. “A tame stoat meets a tame hamster.”

  Meanwhile, far more than the intended half-hour had elapsed, we ought to be getting back to the birds. The rain was becoming heavier all the time. Anything that had not found its way into Frau Fischer’s long-term memory would have to be revised.

  I unlocked the door to the egg collection again, the big yellow iron door, which I always think opens only against a certain resistance, as though higher air pressure prevails in the room behind it. As soon as the door shut behind us we could no longer hear the drumming of the rain, what pressed upon our ears now, subdued, a fine carpet of sound, was the steady noise of the recirculated air.

  The walls are lined all around with display cases, you are looking into glass birds’ eyes everywhere, but the shining buttons are no more than crude indicators of the location of the sense of sight in life, uniform dark points instead of the infinitely varied, subtly shaded colors of the iris. In the short space of our walk back to work we passed countless specimens whose eyes seemed to follow us attentively right into the small square left clear for table and chairs. Here were birds of paradise in a thousand variations, the color combinations, the form of the plumage, the pose, and there house sparrows, whose varieties reveal themselves only to the patient observer: every single bird has been carefully treated to create a lifelike impression. Even a habitual visitor can occasionally succumb to the illusion that he is surrounded here not by mounted specimens but by silent observers: I sometimes experience this when I stand lost in thought at a display cabinet and discover with a shock a bird that has fallen from its base.

  We sat down again at the wooden table, on two angles of a corner, close together; Frau Fischer sketched a finch in her notebook, then flipped back to the beginning of the book and looked at me, concentrating completely on the matter in hand. This I took to be my signal to stand up. I positioned myself behind the table, my thumb in the English bird book, and examined the interpreter as you would a schoolchild. We moved briskly through the Turdidae family, we touched on warblers, chats, redstarts, and thrushes, Frau Fischer had retained everything very well, I presented her with the English names and then the Latin ones, and she reeled off both German and English equivalents as though she had always known them. Just as quickly, we put titmice and sparrows behind us and came back to
the finches, where we had started.

  I laid a gentle finger on the gray head of a bird slightly smaller than a sparrow, with a crimson forehead and breast, its back cinnamon-colored. The answer came without hesitation: the Bluthänfling, the linnet, Latin Carduelis cannabina or—very confusingly—also Acanthis cannabina. She made a note, “unusual white edges to primary feathers,” and drew an arrow from it pointing to her linnet sketch.

  The teacher posed the questions, the pupil answered, but after a while a third voice intruded into our dialogue: “If we ever go to Vienna together, you must remind me to show you the crown prince’s last eagles.”

  The voice of my teacher, Ludwig Kaltenburg. He taught me to observe mounted birds as you would live creatures.

  If you’re ever in Vienna, I said to Frau Fischer, you must go to the Natural History Museum and take a look at the two sea eagles that Crown Prince Rudolf of Habsburg shot a few days before his suicide. It would be hard to find such strange mounted specimens anywhere—the pose, the expression, the plumage—and remember, the taxidermist will have had not just two dead birds on the table before him as he went to work but another death on his mind, and so the two eagles, not to say the one double-headed eagle of the Habsburg emblem, became in his hands two birds with drooping feathers, bowed down with grief as though they knew on the day they were hunted that the man who ended their lives would soon take his own. They are anything but proud heraldic beasts, and perhaps that’s why the little explanatory tablet was added, otherwise such taxidermy might have been regarded in 1889 as an insult to the Crown. They’re beautiful, these two eagles from the Orth region, the wide, marshy Danube meadows, they’re far more beautiful than many a superb, lavishly spruced-up eagle specimen.

  “Your teacher—was that the same Ludwig Kaltenburg who wrote The Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse?” asked Katharina Fischer.

  Yes.

  “The author of A Duck’s Life?”

  The very same.

  “Didn’t he write Archetypes of Fear too? And Studies of Young Jackdaws?”

  As a young academic he made a name for himself with his work on jackdaws.

  I shouldn’t have mentioned Ludwig Kaltenburg, not at that point, because now the interpreter was no longer so focused, constantly mixing up goldfinch and goldhammer, thistle finch and yellowhammer, despite the mounts in front of her. Nor could she get the names for Carduelis chloris, the greenfinch, to stick in her mind. Either she couldn’t connect one name with the other or one of the names did not match the bird.

  “The goldfinch—isn’t that this bird here with the bright yellow head and yellow belly?”

  No, that’s the yellowhammer, Emberiza citrinella. Citrinella, lemon-colored, that ought to be easy to remember. The goldfinch is what we call the Stieglitz. The ending of its German name betrays its Slav origins. It’s onomatopoeic, supposedly, and no doubt that’s why it eventually managed to establish itself on equal terms alongside the old Germanic name Distelfink, thistle finch. A bird translated, you might say.

  But this still wasn’t enough to imprint the goldfinch on the interpreter’s long-term memory, her gaze seemed to be held by the cardboard boxes on top of the cupboard, DAMAGED NESTS, NO LABEL, NEST STANDS, perhaps she was avoiding looking at me. The goldfinch, strikingly colorful with a red face against its black-and-white head, brown body, the rump again white, the tail and wings—they have a yellow band, hence the “gold”—are black.

  We had begun by discussing the fact that my voice had never taken on a local timbre, despite the sixty years I had spent in Dresden. Certain everyday expressions, of course, one or two constructions, and unconsciously, especially when I’m tired, a slight slurring of my speech. But for me Saxon has remained a foreign tongue. Sometimes I secretly envy people who are at home in a recognizable dialect or even just a regional inflection, I’ve always listened carefully, acquiring a tone here, a touch of red, a few words there, which in time ran together to form a yellow band, and I’ve mixed them all into my total speech picture, my parents’ white High German, the darker coloration of my surroundings here. You could say someone like me has a goldfinch accent, with a bit of local color picked up in every quarter.

  “So I’d have to think of you as a goldfinch.”

  I asked the interpreter to point out the thistle finch on the desk for me.

  “This colorful one,” she said and drew a circle around her drawing of a goldfinch.

  “And Ludwig Kaltenburg was your teacher? Of course, it’s easy to forget that he taught zoology in Leipzig for years. Because he was an Austrian, I always think of him as someone whose whole life was bound up with Vienna. His famous Dresden Institute. When did he leave the GDR?”

  Shortly after the Wall went up. Although I’m not quite sure that Ludwig Kaltenburg ever really was in the GDR, or whether he insisted that he lived in Dresden and simply made a few excursions from here to the GDR.

  “But he left for political reasons, didn’t he?”

  He would have shrugged that off. “I don’t understand the finer points of ideology. I’m a zoologist. Everybody contributes in his own way.” And if his interlocutors should happen to shake their heads or put their finger to their lips or even look at him askance, Kaltenburg was always ready with a disarming smile, adding, “As a zoologist, however, I know that there can be no going back to conditions that have already been overcome.” He would have invoked Darwin, talked about “difficult struggles” and “victory over the counterrevolution,” he would have recalled the Dresden zoologist Adolf Bernhard Meyer, a passionate advocate of the theory of evolution, and finally, with expressions like “historical necessity” and “not by chance” and “in this time and place,” he would have returned to his own specialization without having blotted his copybook.

  Yes, there were political reasons. Or else Ludwig Kaltenburg left out of desperation.

  “You got to know him as a student, in Dresden?”

  It was a renewed acquaintance. Early fifties. My parents already knew Kaltenburg. If we hadn’t had a shared background, he would hardly have noticed me: one of the many young people strolling along the Elbe and looking up at the Institute site in Oberloschwitz where the great Ludwig Kaltenburg lived with his animals. A not particularly gifted student in a full lecture hall whose name needed to be spelled out to you again at exam time.

  8

  POSEN MUST HAVE BEEN a strange city in my childhood. It would never have occurred to me that I was in Poland, I never heard anybody speaking Polish on the streets, Polish was prohibited in public, and I never heard the language at home either, there were Viennese, Königsberg, and Rhineland accents, but not a single word of Polish. All the roads had German names, and even the castle that you approached via Sankt-Martin-Strasse was naturally a German building. I don’t know why my parents insisted on taking this route when we went into town, past that monstrous edifice, somewhere between giant prison and baronial keep. Over that short stretch of road I became completely silent and kept my head down, the distance across the square with its pond and Bismarck statue seemed to me endless, and when we went that way I fixed my eyes on the projecting, square castle tower at the end, a stone box that was always surrounded by scaffolding, just as the castle always seemed to be undergoing building work and renovation and modification, as though it were a medieval structure that had gradually fallen into disrepair through time and war and weather, perhaps in danger of collapse, certainly always under threat, while it in turn seemed to be threatening me: the walls might not be about to fall down, but two sinister bailiffs were going to leap out from the gateway, seize the nearest passerby, and drag him off to their dungeon. A dark, prehistoric fortress, and yet the castle was hardly more than thirty years old.

  Everybody knew this was where the local Gauleiter was settling in, for my parents that would have been a reason to avoid this route, I don’t know whether it was defiance or some compulsion that made them take me past the castle every time, grim, withdrawn, it had to be done. You
didn’t have to be a child to be mystified by the immense deliveries of sandstone, marble, and granite to the site. Once, I remember, we were stopped, a workman was blocking the footpath, but my father wouldn’t give in, no one was going to prevent him from picking his way, hand in hand with his son, between the massive building blocks. There was almost a row, I think, we stopped, or maybe my father couldn’t find a way through the stone blocks: that was when I discovered, in a polished slab of marble, my first embedded sea snail.

  What a contrast to the world of the shopping arcades, how differently they greeted me, with their comfortable temperature in summer or winter, the light, the voices, where I couldn’t get lost. The space was covered by a glass roof, and pigeons sat up there on the girders. I was in town with my mother, and while she was flitting between shops, soon going back to the first place she had tried, unable to decide in her search for a winter hat between rabbit, otter, and fox, I was allowed to play in the arcade: half in the open, half indoors, the daylight made the pigeons’ necks shimmer as the birds swooped down from above, just over the heads of the grownups, and then flew noisily with their rather clumsy-looking flight action out onto the street.

  I had time to look at everything. For a long time I crouched in front of a young beagle waiting for its mistress to return, after I had established from a safe distance that its lead was firmly tied to the ring and there wasn’t too much slack in it. I knew my mother’s shopping wasn’t going to be a quick business, she had been at the furrier’s, and now she had disappeared into the haberdasher’s. I wished I could defer for as long as possible the moment when I heard my name being called, right through the arcade, people turning around to look at me, salesladies coming to their doorways to see who was missing, I would thread my way through to the familiar voice, and then as usual we would finally go over to the department store, which supplied the things we really needed.