Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  But what lay behind Luckenwalde escaped me until later, when on my way to the toilet I saw someone going up to the woman in question, and noticed the change in her expression after she heard him say, “Luckenwalde is supposed to have been wiped off the map.”

  After the last guests had left, I was helping the two sisters in the kitchen, Ulli washed, I dried the glasses, Klara put away the dishes. “Did you notice anything about Frau Koch? She looked so distracted as she was leaving.”

  Ulli had noticed her husband slipping his arm under hers on the path to the garden gate. “She was quite unsteady on her legs.”

  “Like an old woman.”

  Herr and Frau Koch: for the Hagemann daughters they were “the English couple”—they had spent many years in London, and had hesitated to return to Germany, to settle in Dresden. The West was out of the question for Herr Koch. As for his wife, whether here or there, she didn’t want to be reminded of the time of the “world pogrom.”

  “Maybe I misunderstood, or perhaps it has nothing to do with it, but somebody took Frau Koch aside and told her Luckenwalde had disappeared from the map.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I don’t know his name, that shy medic.”

  “Domaschke,” Ulli helped me out.

  “Luckenwalde?” Klara reflected. “Did you hear any more?”

  “No, that’s all. It gave her quite a shock.”

  “That means Merker has gone into hiding.”

  “Do you mean Paul Merker, the Politburo member?”

  Ulli handed me a clean glass. “Politburo, that’s all in the past.”

  “Or they’ve arrested him.” Klara looked at her sister. “Because they need someone to go after.”

  “They have him running a grill in Luckenwalde.”

  Impatiently Klara took the polished wineglass out of my hand. “That’s neither here nor there at the moment. They’ve arrested him, haven’t they?”

  “I’ll do the rest tomorrow morning.” Ulli put down the sponge and emptied the water from the sink.

  “That’s what it means. It can’t mean anything else. They want to make an example of him.”

  One sister was leaning against the kitchen cabinet. The other was looking at the floor. I didn’t know where to put the dish towel.

  “If that’s true, Ulli, you know what will happen next?”

  “Don’t scream. Yes, I do know.”

  “If they put Merker in the dock and turn him into the great Zionist conspirator, then the Kochs will pack their bags. They’ll be off. We’ll never see them again.”

  4

  ULLI, QUICK, THERE are two real English people here.” Klara peered out into the hall, a couple stood there talking, the sentences flowing quickly, foreign and clear, Klara couldn’t understand a word. The cadence of their speech was what had struck her, a different cadence. Klara in her nightdress hid behind the slightly open door waiting for her parents to move away, her mother went to get glasses, her father had gone ahead into the drawing room, now Klara could take a look outside. The woman was adjusting her delicately patterned stole in front of the hall-stand mirror, the man was fishing a packet of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, perhaps they were talking about Herr Klein, the Super-Tenant, who had just gone upstairs. Klara didn’t even know whether her parents knew English, whether any of the regular guests would be able to converse with the couple.

  “Come on, Ulli, or the English people won’t be there anymore,” hissed Klara in a stage whisper over her shoulder, but before her sister could get out of bed the woman had caught sight of Klara in the doorway, she laughed, suddenly she was speaking German: “No, my dear, we’re not real English people.”

  Klara nodded. Went red. And shut the door. It was the first time in her life that she had seen émigrés.

  She was still a bit embarrassed about having behaved like a small child, Klara confessed to me when we were discussing the new faces that had appeared in the Hagemann circle after the war. A little girl from Dresden who knew foreign countries, foreign languages only from books. At the time Klara even acquired a few words of English to make up for it, so that the following week she could greet the Kochs as though she had grown up in London herself, as the couple appreciatively agreed.

  Ashamed she may have been, but she took a particular liking to her “English couple,” and for their part the Kochs never failed to look in on the girls before they went on into the drawing room to greet the other guests, the adults. Herr Koch would stand by the window while Frau Koch sat on the edge of Klara’s bed, only for a few minutes, and yet as the sisters drifted off to sleep there was a faint aroma of cigarette smoke and eau de cologne.

  The Kochs alerted Klara to cadences. The mere memory of the sound of a foreign language out in the hall was enough later to make Klara aware when there was a cool atmosphere between guests, when someone was covering up insecurity or close to losing self-control, when the drawing room conversation took a turn nobody had anticipated.

  One evening in the summer of 1948 she was at the door when the Kochs happened to arrive at the same time as a man Klara didn’t know. Clearly the Kochs didn’t know who the man was either, for as Klara took their hats and coats to the hall stand, she heard, “My name is Koch, and this is my wife.”

  Looking for spare hangers for the coats damp from the light summer rain, she missed the new guest’s answer.

  “Sorry, help me a bit here—the philologist, the philosopher?”

  “The last living Proust translator, if you like.”

  Was he offended? Was he just being modest? Was he joking at his own expense? Herr Hagemann appeared in the drawing room doorway, Frau Hagemann called Klara into the kitchen: “Could you take care of the rest, please?”

  Ulli was slicing cucumber; Frau Hagemann took off her apron, washed her hands. “Who’s here?”

  Klara shrugged and set about preparing the radishes. Flashing eyes, theatrical voice—but for that mincing walk, the man would have been a frightening phenomenon.

  The next day she searched her parent’s bookshelves, in the French literature section she found two volumes with the titles Auf den Spuren der verlorenen Zeit (In Search of Lost Time): opening one at the title page, Der Weg zu Swann (Swann’s Way), she read the name RUDOLF SCHOTTLAENDER. She struggled with the book for two or three evenings but couldn’t get past the first fifty pages. There were passages that remained obscure to her, she came across oddities, expressions she didn’t understand, she could have asked her parents about them, perhaps even the translator himself, but then she was distracted by something else she wanted to read, and soon Proust disappeared under a pile of books on the dressing table: forgotten were the long scene where a lonely young boy falls asleep, the visit of a certain M. Swann, the “bioscope,” the “rooms in winter,” and, in parentheses, the sea swallow so elaborately busy building its nest.

  A year later Schottlaender’s name came up again. By this time the sisters were allowed to sit up with the guests for half an hour after they arrived, but the strange man who translated that strange book into German had obviously not appeared again. “A difficult person”—that was all Frau Hagemann would say about it.

  “Have you seen what they’re saying about Professor Schottlaender in the newspaper?” asked Herr Koch one light summer evening.

  “Quite a problematical case.” Domaschke, the young internist, sprang to Klara’s mother’s aid, knowing she didn’t like making unkind remarks about guests. “If a university professor fails to march on the First of May, is he really obliged to justify himself in writing afterward?”

  Herr Koch: “Naive.”

  “What do you mean, naive?” His wife sounded irritated.

  “I mean all he’s done is give them the material they wanted.”

  “You might as well say ‘and played right into their hands’—but after all, they will have started collecting material long before yesterday.”

  “Do you mean documents?” Domaschke didn’t dare ask directl
y. “Do you mean official papers from the past?”

  “What do you think? If somebody like that was in a camp without being a political prisoner?”

  “Now you’re exaggerating.” Herr Koch laid his hand on his wife’s forearm. “And anyway, Schottlaender was not in a camp.”

  “Be that as it may, he had to think of his wife and little daughter. You would have done the same.”

  “For me there would have been no question of going to West Berlin, though.”

  Klara took up Swann’s Way again. The edition had appeared in 1926, and Rudolf Schottlaender was not yet fifty when Klara heard him calling himself “the last living Proust translator” while she was busy with damp summer coats and coat hangers at the other end of the hall. Had Herr and Frau Koch nodded silently to show they understood what he was talking about? Even if there was not much to connect them, as readers of detective stories, with Marcel Proust, they nodded when Schottlaender looked them in the eye as though subjecting them to examination: “It was only about eight years ago that we were still at full strength.”

  Klara was soon reading about Gilberte, who was either frivolous or timorous, reading once more about Swann, a name she had known for a long time but that seemed to her now—as the most commonplace words seem to many people suffering from aphasia—like a new name. She read about acacia avenues, about a forest from which, wearing a sleek fur coat and with the lovely eyes of an animal, a hurrying woman emerges, only to vanish again in the next sentence without leaving a trace.

  Having finished the book, Klara went to Herr Lindner’s bookstore to acquaint herself with the German that Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel bestowed on Proust. For a quarter of a year she was carrying around with her the first two volumes of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, printed by Hegner in Hellerau. At Christmas 1951 Herr Lindner surprised Klara with a copy of Pleasures and Regrets. This would have given her the opportunity to compare Ernst Weiss’s language with that of the other translators, but what intrigued her above all was the third part of the novel. Every time there was a card from Lindner in the mail with the brief message “Fresh goods. Regards, Lindner,” she hoped he had found the longed-for volume, published by Piper.

  Apart from Ulli, no one knew how Klara had come across this author, and no one would have been able to understand why they took turns reading each other a few pages before going to sleep, as though, if only they studied the same sentences often enough, they would find out something about their own relatives, about whom their parents would tell them nothing.

  “That man Schottlaender was right,” Klara interrupted once when she had lost the thread while listening to a reflection on ladies’ hats.

  Ulli looked up from the open page and blinked in the beam of the bedside lamp. “With his story about the dead translators?”

  “Herr Lindner knew the dates of their deaths: the first one died in June 1940, the second in September, and the last in January, shortly after New Year.”

  “Here?”

  “In France.”

  “All three of them?” Ulli leaned forward to make out the face of her sister in the darkness on the other side of the room. “June—wasn’t that when the Germans marched into Paris?”

  “I think they committed suicide.”

  “You’ll have to ask Herr Lindner again.”

  “I’ll do that next week. Where were we?”

  “The grandmother has a teacher with an illegitimate daughter.”

  “I thought it was ladies’ hats? Go on, read.”

  “No, that’s enough for tonight.”

  Ulli put the book down, turned off the light. She was still looking across to Klara’s bed.

  “Did the translators all know each other, do you think?”

  “Do you mean was Schottlaender friendly with the others? I don’t think so.”

  “I wonder what he was doing during that time?”

  “We can ask the Kochs.”

  “And none of them died of old age. Did he really tell you that?”

  “I don’t remember. Let’s go to sleep now.”

  The English couple could not agree. Herr Koch said Schottlaender had worked in an arms factory, but his wife thought she remembered him looking after an old lady. Moving between the hall stand and the drawing room, Frau Koch halted in her tracks: “Or was he translating for the criminal police?”

  “I think you’re wide of the mark there. Schottlaender never did slave translation labor.”

  When we got to know each other, Klara was still waiting for the continuation of her Proust. For months the main topic at the Hagemanns’ had been the sensational trial of Philipp Auerbach: nobody there could possibly condone the police turning the state-appointed representative of victims of Nazism into the victim of a car chase on the autobahn, as though foiling the last-minute escape attempt of some enemy agent. Nobody thought much of the charges that took Auerbach to court. And nobody could forgive the expert witness who said that the accused was incapable of distinguishing between delusion and reality. But opinions were divided about the verdict.

  “The man is innocent,” said Herr Hagemann heatedly. “He was in the camps.”

  His unconditional support for the accused—even his wife couldn’t quite fathom it. He would allow no room for doubt about the man. When he referred to a “show trial,” there was a sharp intake of breath from one of the guests.

  “You’ve only got to look at the judge. The assistant judge. The state prosecutor.”

  His daughters had never seen him so angry. “I know this type of person, I know them,” cried Herr Hagemann, and both Ulli and Klara were convinced he was on the point of divulging something about their own relatives, if Herr Koch hadn’t interrupted him: “Herr Hagemann, we all know this type of person, but some of us also know Herr Auerbach.”

  Frau Koch got up, excused herself, left the room. Klara went after her. She knew that Frau Koch was not so much concerned about Auerbach’s character as she was disturbed because they were discussing a trial taking place in the West.

  And then, a few days after the verdict in Munich, Philipp Auerbach took an overdose of sleeping pills. Frau Koch didn’t want to know whether he was buried according to Orthodox rites, didn’t want to know whether a rabbi was present when the scuffle broke out at the cemetery. Whether the police really had used batons on the angry mourners, whether a water cannon was deployed. She didn’t want to know. For a while it looked as though the Kochs would stay in Dresden. Until Merker disappeared from the scene.

  5

  AS I RECALL, THE domestic offices were on the other side of the street, directly opposite the Institute villa. Often when I left Kaltenburg, I dropped the dirty washing off at the laundry, I can see myself crossing the road with lab coats covered in green algae stains, with matted winter pullovers, but now I wonder whether I didn’t find a secret path, for the buildings that most resemble the former laundry and joiner’s workshop are situated two house numbers further down the road, half hidden behind a hedge.

  “Did the Kochs go back to England?” asked Katharina Fischer as we left the Institute villa behind us.

  For a while, it’s possible that they thought about doing so. Rudolf Slánský was executed, at the Hagemanns’ somebody expressed the fear that the Prague show trial would have repercussions here as well, and in fact the first house searches and arrests were soon under way in Dresden. It seemed that they were only waiting for the nod from Moscow to start uncovering a Zionist conspiracy, since they already held the ringleader, Paul Merker. In January, Stalin—they could always count on Comrade Stalin in Berlin—gave the signal: among the doctors in his entourage he had discovered agents working for an international organization, possibly even for Israel, who had designs on his life. Stalin gave full vent to this last delusion, accepting the confessions, satisfied to stack them up on the desk in front of him, there was no need for him to read a single one, after all he had often issued warnings about the Jews.

  The first absences occurred
in the Hagemanns’ drawing room. And the English couple no longer hesitated. They celebrated Stalin’s death in West Berlin: Charlottenburg.

  Archetypes of Fear would have been a different book. Kaltenburg didn’t notice the gaps, I’m sure, until at least the first draft of his study. But you notice them when you’re reading the book: when he mentions “how people are crammed together into the most restricted spaces,” when he talks about “dehumanization”—you don’t quite expect a critique of living conditions in the modern city. At one point he mentions “heat death”—you can imagine the professor recoiling the moment he has committed this term to paper, you can see him reflecting, crossing out, looking for an alternative, until “heat death” comes to mean something about as innocuous as a warning against hothousing a child. Just when you think that Kaltenburg is finally beginning to face up to the gaps, writing how difficult it is to make someone understand “that a culture can be extinguished like a candle flame,” then you turn back a few pages and find that this chapter is devoted to a lengthy treatment of the war between the generations.

  I remember how, in that same year, Klara once clashed with a representative of the Cultural Association. It was at a summer festival we were allowed to attend with Ludwig Kaltenburg. The effect on the professor must have been like watching the unfamiliar ritual of a newly discovered species. The two were discussing literature, initially it was hardly more than one of those conversations you have with a stranger in a large gathering. And Klara’s interlocutor was in no way an unfriendly sort, an elderly gentleman who looked as though he had lived through a great deal, even if he hadn’t achieved much of what he set out to do. Now he felt obliged to look to the future, and so for Klara’s benefit he lauded examples of the latest activist writing, naming names that are forgotten today, that were soon to be forgotten even at the time. Privately he may have been a Stendhal admirer, but whatever names Klara put forward, he dismissed the authors out of hand. Inwardly seething, he worked himself up to the point of praising the most dubious tractor-versifier, in his blind zeal he would even have betrayed his beloved Stendhal. Klara did not give way, she went for broke: Proust. A body of work, she maintained in a completely unwavering voice, that was practically without equal in our century.