by Marcel Beyer
“On the far left, the first-floor window—that was Ludwig Kaltenburg’s bedroom, the only room in the house I never went into, or rather I didn’t until the professor had left Dresden. The small window next to it is the bathroom. Then the archive and the library, then the staircase. But the important rooms were all on the side facing the slope—kitchen, study, the balcony, the jackdaws’ quarters in the loft.”
The Institute was constantly growing, it soon spread far beyond the villa, the summerhouse, and the tool sheds, taking in neighboring houses and above all plots of land for colleagues and animals. Huts for long-term guests. Barracks were built to house specialists along with their families, biologists, psychologists, scientific assistants, keepers to look after the birds, and the aquarium staff. Then there were the cleaning ladies, mechanics, carpenters, technicians, caretakers, administrators. The cook. The feed manager, ruler of three kitchen domains: for mammals, birds, fish. And the cameraman. Kaltenburg’s chauffeur, who was also in charge of the entire transport fleet. Almost a housing development.
Of course, you couldn’t compare this with the size gradually achieved by Manfred von Ardenne’s research establishment above Loschwitz, in Weisser Hirsch, where the number of employees and colleagues eventually reached four hundred—but even a tenth of that is a considerable figure, not counting the families of the researchers living on the premises.
Tense negotiations, applications, secret discussions, the group photos with politicians, with officials, with foreign academics—Kaltenburg often came home exhausted, especially when he had been to Berlin with his driver, Krause. He just wasn’t one of those people who make routine committee meetings more bearable by simply blocking out the speeches and reports and discussions, getting through the time of hollow words as though deaf, and speculating whether some influential man or other, this or that party official, might spare a few minutes for a friendly chat with them afterward. Though I must say that Kaltenburg never complained to me about the tiring sessions he sat through as if in a vacuum. In any case, if he felt like complaining, he would shun human company altogether and go off to be with his animals. No, not a hint of exhaustion, no doubts, or despair, in front of colleagues at the Institute, the professor radiated an energy that inspired everybody. And in return, the zest for the work that he saw around him gave strength back to Ludwig Kaltenburg, helped him through self-critical spells, helped him overcome occasional bouts of depression.
“Knowing the professor as I do now,” said Katharina Fischer, only to correct herself immediately, “I mean, knowing what you’ve told me about him, I’m puzzled by one thing: did he have any animals when he was a POW, or at least observe them?”
Ludwig Kaltenburg not surrounded by animals? Unthinkable. Probably there was a dog’s nose or a beak on his passport photo.
“How about on the night after Stalin’s death—did he really not mention a single animal?”
I didn’t realize that until years later: Martin, Klara, and I had witnessed the first long Kaltenburg monologue without any reference to the animal kingdom. Till all hours he talked about a human being as if he were talking about an animal.
People were in mourning, everywhere you could see eyes red from weeping—but Kaltenburg took his example from a man who knew no tears. When Archetypes of Fear appeared a decade later, Klara and I agreed that his work on the book had begun then, on the sixth of March 1953. Covertly—for Kaltenburg would surely not have formulated a plan by that time, in the years before his departure the most he would have done was to jot down a few cryptic, seemingly disparate notes. Nonetheless, the evening we four spent together was the occasion for a shift of perspective. Only a minimal change in the angle of vision at first, as if the professor had become aware of a gentle movement on the margin of his visual field, all the harder to ignore the longer he insisted he hadn’t noticed anything.
Gradually Kaltenburg was to turn toward a new area of observation. Our clandestine session in the Hagemanns’ house had brought him together with the first subject of his incipient researches, in fact the two had sat opposite each other for some hours. However, much to the professor’s regret, for the moment this future object of research showed no interest in submitting himself to observation. “The animals? It’s you I’m studying,” was what he claimed to have thrown at unwelcome visitors—later, there was no one the assertion fit better than Martin Spengler.
“Why not Klara Hagemann?”
He must have thought of Martin as an open challenge—a person who resisted being seen through by Kaltenburg. And Ludwig Kaltenburg had a masterly ability to coax people’s secrets out of them. Secrets they themselves were not aware of. Some were grateful to him: under his guidance they had plumbed depths into which they would never have ventured but for the professor. However, Kaltenburg didn’t want to hear about depths. Others felt betrayed: in his presence they had given away something that nobody had a right to know. But Kaltenburg did not believe in any case that you could successfully go on concealing something from the world. Whether depths or involuntary revelations, everybody agreed on one thing: basically the professor had done the talking, interrupted only by questions and comments that sounded to the listener in retrospect like incidental confessions. Kaltenburg’s gift for talking and observing—however, as far as Klara was concerned, I’m not sure to this day whether she was a challenge that defeated him or whether he never took on the challenge.
“And Klara’s impression of the professor? I think I would have felt a bit uneasy about this man after a first meeting like that.”
I don’t know if it was shyness or embarrassment, but she wouldn’t really say anything about him. It may be that she wasn’t sure whether it was admiration or contempt that Kaltenburg felt for Stalin, and it seemed to me that she had to reach a clear verdict on that before she could decide whether to admire or despise the professor. After all, Ludwig Kaltenburg never made any secret of his love for all things Russian. It went right back to his youth in Vienna, did not go cold in captivity, survived the move to Dresden, and perhaps only flourished properly after Stalin’s death. For a few months he even preferred to eat lying down when, at the end of an intensive working day, long after the usual big meeting of all the colleagues, he indulged in a late snack. “No, it’s not just a fad, it really is more comfortable when you’ve been on your feet all day”: the great Professor Kaltenburg stretched out on his sofa with a plate of fruit, with tea and bread and a leg of roast chicken. Perhaps he dreamed of Karelian birch furniture.
One of his favorite words was Durak, “Da, da, durak,” he would say when he couldn’t make sense of something he had observed in his ducks, “Yeah, yeah, stupid,” when he simply couldn’t make a coherent connection between two series of movements: these were his first words of Russian, taught him by a Red Army soldier to whom Kaltenburg surrendered after an inept attempt to escape at the front. Then there was his love for diminutives and terms of endearment acquired in the field hospital, where they were lavishly employed, and in general his choice of names for his charges. There was a Ludmilla, a Turka, an Igor, and I wondered whether lurking behind Taschotschek there wasn’t a Natalia, a Natasha.
As though she had found a reasonable compromise for the time being, Klara began to make little jibes at Kaltenburg, to which he always reacted with a smile, with a good-natured growl. In fact very few people were allowed to tease him, but Klara had not only spotted at first glance a weakness in Ludwig Kaltenburg, she had also found the right tone, she had the gift of being able to talk mockingly to him without making him feel he was being mocked.
When she said in sepulchral tones, “I think I can see Stalin’s coal-black eyes glowing,” the professor had to laugh, and from the looks he shot at me I realized he would let her get away with anything, because his weakness was none other than a weakness for Klara. If she had wanted to, she could have twisted Ludwig Kaltenburg round her little finger.
“He respected her.”
Enormously.
�
��Because he noticed she was studying him.”
And not only him, Professor Kaltenburg. He must have gathered at a stroke that at barely twenty she was ahead of him. Studying human beings came naturally to her, and at an age when he was still concentrating fully on his jackdaws, his ducks and small mammals, when as yet Ludwig Kaltenburg knew nothing at all about the faces of his patients in the field hospital or Josef Stalin’s gaze.
3
HE INVITED US—strangely enough—to a café. He came on foot down the hill in Loschwitz, whereas usually when meeting young ladies he preferred to present himself on his motorbike. He wasn’t wearing gloves. And of course the first thing Klara wanted to know was how he had come by the scratch on the back of his hand. Nothing important, nothing earth-shattering, just the kind of mishap that was a common occurrence when dealing with animals: Igor, the tame magpie, couldn’t stand Kaltenburg drumming impatiently with his fingertips on the tabletop during breakfast while reading his paper.
“Sudden rustling of paper—I’m familiar with that.”
“Aren’t magpies pretty dissolute birds, cowardly and devious?”
“That’s what everyone says. It’s just that they’re too intelligent for most people.”
It was the first time I had ever sat in a café with Ludwig Kaltenburg, his idea of a suitable place to take a young woman, a young woman whose admirer, whose future fiancé, you have known since childhood. To left and right of us elderly ladies and gentlemen having afternoon coffee, families, children behaving so politely that their parents must have promised them a second piece of cake if they would stop staring at the famous animal professor.
Klara asked him about the types of animal he had in his collection, all of which she knew from me, and carefully counted them off along with him as Kaltenburg strolled from room to room, peering into the stairwell, the loft, the basement: “Cichlids, or have I mentioned them?”
“They came first, when we were at the aquariums.”
“The goldfish, Fritz.”
She asked him why certain animals had names and others didn’t. I had already explained this to Klara on one of our first dates, it was the hand-reared specimens and those closely involved in research work that were given proper names. She wanted to hear it again from the professor, he didn’t mind, he enjoyed it, we hadn’t touched the cake on our plates.
Where in Germany do people eat tart and where do they eat “Torte,” what is the difference between bread and pastry, and exactly what dessert dishes do the Austrians include under the heading of “Mehlspeise”? We had never had such discussions before, but we sat in the café, all equally out of place, our polite behavior, our nice conversation, after a quarter of an hour of this we surely deserved at least an extra helping of whipped cream. We might have been ready to move on if Kaltenburg hadn’t jumped in with a story that was new even to me.
“If my parents are to be believed, I began life as a tumor.”
The painted eyebrows of the old ladies over there by the window shot up. Kaltenburg’s parents married late, nobody thought pregnancy was in the cards, in the first instance they may have been almost as shocked by this news as by the earlier misdiagnosis.
“Fortunately I wasn’t born prematurely, otherwise my father would have seen me as a questionable gift for the rest of his life.” The professor laughed. “I came into this world—and turned their lives completely upside down.”
His upbringing was all the more careful, his parents looking after their unexpected son as though they had a bad conscience about him, the father even accepted the son’s ambition to become a zoologist instead of continuing the line of eminent surgeons named Kaltenburg. He shook his head in bewilderment, but he didn’t object. So, for his sake, initially Ludwig Kaltenburg went into medicine.
Klara nodded appreciatively. “But he must be very proud of you today.”
“Even if he were still alive, he certainly wouldn’t be proud of a son who voluntarily moved to Dresden.”
“Your parents are no longer alive?”
“My father didn’t even find out that I had survived the war and been captured by the Russians.”
“The patient who hid the note in his mouth arrived too late.”
“Yes, he arrived too late.”
Klara ate the rest of her cake, the professor looked on.
“Shall I order some more coffee?” He lifted the lid of the pot as though inspecting it carefully to see whether a small mammal was nesting there.
“Animals are just messy, the old man used to say.”
“Messy? Nothing new for a surgeon, surely.”
Somebody at the next table cleared his throat, the ladies at the window put down their coffee cups.
“And was it a childhood dream to become a librarian?” The professor avoided addressing Klara directly, he didn’t know whether to say Du or Sie to her. “That’s certainly the way Hermann puts it, at any rate.”
She told the story of the family outing to Leipzig, Kaltenburg listened, Kaltenburg was moved, and Klara didn’t seem to know what to make of his emotion, over a slice of cake, with my Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg in a café.
We were all relieved to be standing outside again. The professor’s choice of a café was certainly a considered one—later he was to tell me, “On principle I never invite young women into this desolate-looking animal household.” But outside in the fresh air, free of the audience in the café which was impossible to ignore, the conversation between Ludwig Kaltenburg and Klara could have been steered in a different direction, just as it would have taken another course altogether if we had been invited to Kaltenburg’s villa. The professor quickly said goodbye, he had another appointment, much less pleasant, but such appointments were unavoidable, and then I saw him hurrying away, an unusual picture: Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg on foot on a paved road in the middle of the city.
“Was I too forward?”
“Forward? No, honestly, you weren’t. And anyway, you must have noticed yourself: the professor has a soft spot for self-confident young women.”
“Too well behaved?”
“All three of us were well behaved.”
“So I passed?” Klara didn’t wait for my answer. “All the same, I had the impression that the professor thought I was trying to keep something from him.”
“He would like to have gone on listening to you: the Hagemann family, your salon, your guests.”
“What could I do, with all those people around us?”
“He shouldn’t have taken us there if he was keen to hear Hagemann stories.”
“I’m going to tell my parents to invite him more often.”
And the professor did indeed become a regular visitor to the Hagemanns’. But he came too late, only after Stalin’s death. He had missed certain decisive years, conversations and guests on whom he could have sharpened his powers of observation. Yes, the people themselves would have opened up worlds to him which he was never to know.
Kaltenburg should have come to Dresden right after the war and been in touch with the family, he should not have had to wait for me to get to know Klara Hagemann and to bring him his first invitation to the Hagemanns’. Klara was ahead of the professor, and she would always be ahead of him: with the best will in the world, Ludwig Kaltenburg would never be able to make up for that gap of seven years.
Take a figure like Paul Merker, I said to the interpreter: that name does not figure at all in Kaltenburg’s world. A member of the Central Committee secretariat and of the SED Politburo who was removed from all his official positions in 1950, expelled from the Party, and banished to the provinces in Brandenburg—at most the professor would have remarked laconically, “Ideologists put nooses around each other’s necks.” And added portentously, “A side effect of every ideology.”
It all had a different ring in the Hagemann salon. I learned to distinguish between those functionaries who had gone underground in 1933 and those who owed their worldview to a determined course of reeducation as POWs. I l
earned that you shouldn’t confuse those returning from Moscow with returnees from Scandinavia, those coming back from Mexico with others coming out of the German camps. One was said to have betrayed several members of his resistance cell, another to have spent years in hiding on a smallholding, and a third was reputed to despise people who feared for their lives. Here was a former SA man, once a lanky type, an excellent horseman, whose eyes were now sunk deep in his fat face, and there a gaunt character with an agitated look, as though forever assessing which figure in the inner circle should be pushed out next. They might use the same language, shake hands, slap each other’s backs, even hug: for the Hagemanns this was simply the solidarity born of necessity, and that kind of solidarity is notoriously unpredictable.
“Now they’re putting nooses around each other’s necks”: it was this same Paul Merker who, aware of the death camps, was talking in 1942 of a “world pogrom,” and—as a number of the Hagemanns’ guests thought—in doing so incurring the distrust of his comrades in arms. After his return from exile he could easily have joined the ranks of antifascist veterans without another word about those whom the new jargon described merely as “the persecuted.” But mindful of the “world pogrom,” Merker urged—and he enjoyed great respect for this at the Hagemanns’—that reparations should be made to all survivors, regardless of whether they had been avowed Communists or had been forced to wear the Star of David on their chests.
On one occasion, when the conversation centered on a Berlin theater premiere, a woman suddenly asked, “Has anyone heard from Luckenwalde lately?” She looked keenly into each face in turn—Klara’s father shrugged his shoulders, other guests shook their heads, everybody had understood, nobody had any information, so there was nothing for it but to return to the previous topic. They focused on the stage design, moving on to what could be done with trompe l’oeil painting, I looked across at Martin and could have sworn that he had missed the intervening question. I had no idea what “Luckenwalde” stood for. I would have understood references to Moscow, or to Leningrad, or, on that Advent Sunday of 1952, to Prague, because not an evening passed at the Hagemanns’ without some discussion of the Prague show trial of Rudolf Slánský and his fellow conspirators, singled out by the authorities only after the most painstakingly detailed investigations.