Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  I force myself to look elsewhere, the art print on the kitchen wall, the linen cloth on the table, I make the embarrassed old man disappear.

  I only vaguely recollect his sending me to Matzke in late 1961 or early 1962 with a peace offer. “Don’t forget to have a good shave, you know colleague Matzke can’t stand to see a badly shaven man of a morning.”

  Eberhard Matzke no longer knew me. There was no reply to the peace offer. It will have been around then that the professor finally understood that this wasn’t about Reinhold at all. It was he, Ludwig Kaltenburg, that Matzke had had in his sights all along. From that moment on things went downhill with Kaltenburg.

  The jackdaw skins lie spread out before me, a uniform blackish gray shimmer covers the work surface once the sun goes down. Yes, I skinned Taschotschek. I have preserved it and its fellows very carefully, and in Klotzsche too Kaltenburg’s jackdaws will be kept in a safe place.

  10

  THE JAYS ARE GONE,” he wrote in his first animal handbook. “The geese have moved away, to who knows where. Of all my free-flying birds, there remain only the jackdaws.” Now they too were gone.

  One morning Klara said at breakfast, “The professor is beyond saving.”

  I left my coffee, put my jacket on. Klara looked at me, she knew where I was going. It was as though Ludwig Kaltenburg had taught us all to sense the slightest change in the condition of certain life forms from miles away.

  Half an hour later I turned into the familiar street, out of breath though I hadn’t been running. I stopped outside the villa. On the stones of the path leading to the house I saw drops, not rain and not animal droppings, a trail. Right up to the garden gate, as well as on the footpath behind me, I had followed the trail for some while without registering it. At every step I observed these small circles, frayed at the edges, dark, a watery substance, they would soon evaporate. The door was open, it was always open, there was no doorbell—Kaltenburg said, early on, “You know how it is here, people continually calling in wanting something from me. If we had a doorbell, my nocturnals would never get any rest.”

  On the linoleum of the stairs up to the first floor, the marks changed color. White drops on a red background. Step by step I followed the milky trail up to the study. Kaltenburg’s socks. An embarrassed smile.

  “Oh, it’s you.”

  Kaltenburg sat hunched on the edge of the sofa. He used to eat on it lying back; at night, Martin would sometimes sit there too, as I did countless times. Kaltenburg was struggling with his shoelaces. As though it explained everything, as though on this morning the whole world could be summed up in a single sentence, he said, “I went out to get milk.”

  His bare hand brushed across the suede leather, the other shoe was standing on the parquet floor in a shiny little puddle. Then it struck me that Ludwig Kaltenburg was wearing socks with holes in them. He raised his head, smiled sheepishly: “I went out to get milk and didn’t notice.”

  He seemed not to know what he wanted to do with the milk. Like a self-conscious young boy. No, to be honest, he looked at me like an old man who has realized that his powers are slipping away.

  “The milk was dripping on my shoe, and I didn’t notice,” he said.

  The bag sat in a pool of milk, I took the bottles out carefully, no, there was no broken glass, but one bottletop was ripped off. On the way back from the shop Kaltenburg had spilled almost a liter of milk.

  “I’ll wipe it up,” he said, now sounding like a child wanting to undo a mistake.

  I found a bucket in the broom closet, the scrubbing brush, a cloth, fetched water. I started at the foot of the stairs. The same silence as on that evening when we had gathered up the dead jackdaws. Kaltenburg had called for me because no one else was available. He had to wait for nearly an hour in a state of uncertainty until I arrived. It was during that night that Klara first said to me, “You won’t be able to save Ludwig Kaltenburg.”

  His clear look as he talked about the abysses, “There, there, and there,” the light spring breeze in his hair, the first sunshine of the year on his weather-beaten face. And yet Ludwig Kaltenburg never really wanted to see that he was surrounded by monsters. Later, people would say that he had gradually isolated himself, that the seal had been set on the end of his time in Dresden long before, but he had been remarkably good at concealing this from himself and the world.

  I wiped the milk from the parquet, a trickle running under the desk, the rugs would need cleaning—no, no great store was set by clean carpets in the Kaltenburg household. But with all this milk, there would have to be new carpets.

  “Remind me to let you have a key before you go, Hermann.”

  They took their time, they studied him. And didn’t Kaltenburg himself always insist on patient observation? First of all they wanted to acquire an all-round understanding of the subject, sooner or later his weak spots would be exposed, inadvertently he would tell you himself how to throw someone like Ludwig Kaltenburg off balance. It couldn’t be done in a hurry—a man like Kaltenburg was able to withstand a great deal, he would fight for his corner, not yield easily. They could have deprived Kaltenburg of his university chair, prohibited him from researching and publishing—he would just have laughed: “Ban me from research? I only have to see to be doing research. You’ve only got to keep your eyes open, how can anyone stop me doing that?”

  Was his gaze fixed on the cleaning cloth, or was he simply staring into space? He sat there motionless, only his toes moving. I wouldn’t have expected the holes in his socks. When I had wrung out the rag and washed my hands, I caught myself secretly scrutinizing Kaltenburg as I returned to the room: Had he combed his hair today? Was his collar clean?

  “A key, yes, I won’t forget.”

  He said, “Actually, I’ve always preferred the country.”

  I knew that for the past few weeks he’d been working on a lecture to be given at a conference in Oslo or Helsinki. And if he insisted on giving me a key to the villa, I also knew that he would not be coming back from this trip.

  At that moment there wasn’t the slightest doubt. Kaltenburg had dropped many hints, possibly lost on everyone but me. Kaltenburg’s fear. The animals sensed you were going to leave them, you moved differently, you approached the animals in a different way, you didn’t smell the same: there was no need for luggage in the corridor. It was to be the only time in his life that he would move his household without a single animal.

  Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg perched on the edge of the sofa, without looking up he lifted some paper from the desk, scrunched it up, and stuffed his right shoe with it. I almost thought I heard him muttering, “Da, da, durak.”

  I took stock, reaching for the wadding. I ran my fingers over the pleasantly warm, dark jackdaw feathers. Effortlessly, I filled the skin.

  11

  THERE WAS STILL a pale orange and blue glow in the sky over the city, a pair of cranes were winging their way up the Elbe, giving voice as they flew, and when we sat down at one of the empty tables outside a long-since-closed snack bar called the Elbe Idyll, Frau Fischer asked what had become of Ludwig Kaltenburg’s other animals.

  The northern raven disappeared for good soon after its old friend. Some of the exotics went to dealers, some to the zoo, which also took the rare duck species. For some years I didn’t dare venture anywhere near the waterfowl ponds, because the older birds were absolutely not to be dissuaded from following me as far as the tram stop. The sulfur-crested cockatoo got away from me one day when I managed to corner it in Kaltenburg’s bedroom—it was clearly so disgusted that it wanted nothing more to do with me and went off to look for a new feeding station. Later, it was often spotted by people who were out walking in the Great Garden, and regularly visited the afternoon feeding sessions at the zoo. Taking up its position on a branch or on the large uprooted tree stump which also served the heron as a lookout post, the cockatoo squatted there, less on account of hunger, perhaps, than because it enjoyed the familiar company of the mandarin ducks and
pochards, the red-breasted and bar-headed geese, of every kind of strange bird, in fact, whether they were cormorants, sacred ibises, or flamingos.

  Like other birds, however, it will have succumbed to the long, hard winter of 1962–63, when the swans were solidly frozen in on the Elbe and the tits were picking at any fresh putty in window frames, attracted by the smell of linseed oil, which was becoming weaker by the day. One day a group of young field ornithologists who spent some years mapping the Great Garden came across a single primary feather in the snow and noted, “Vestige of an escaped bird,” then went on, “Obviously brought into the area by visitors,” and then, in view of the white parts of the feather, which had a yellow sheen in the winter sunshine, added, “Sulfur-crested cockatoo,” followed by a question mark. Because of severe frost damage, among other things, a positive identification would have been impossible.

  A few former assistants took over the dogs. The resident tomcat was unwilling to leave his familiar territory, the neighbors went on putting food out for him until the end of the decade. We released Kaltenburg’s sticklebacks into the wild and distributed the tropical fish among various aquariums around the city: commercial firms, schools, the sanatorium in Wachwitz.

  The hamsters? I can’t remember the details of what happened to them. Anyway, I believe two fundamentally different types of hamster must be distinguished in Kaltenburg’s life. When he talked about hamsters in the plural, he did actually have in mind the nocturnal animals who kept him company when everybody else was asleep. But when he talked about a hamster, singular, it was just as well not to form too concrete an image of this creature that constantly chewed paper and helped itself to important documents and private letters to build its nest; it wasn’t to be taken literally. If the minutes of a meeting had disappeared, let alone unanswered mail from friends, there would soon be a reference to the infamous hamster. And so in time I gathered that “the hamster” in the singular was simply another way of talking about papers that were, unfortunately, nowhere to be found.

  Most of the Institute buildings were put to new uses, and I gather there was some idea of turning the villa into a guesthouse. But then it deteriorated bit by bit, the grounds became overgrown, quite a few animals may even have come back to live in this new wilderness. Long after its dissolution, Kaltenburg continued to be very interested in his former Institute, sending me back there time and again to keep him informed. I sent dismal reports to him in Vienna, but he reacted enthusiastically—“Good, excellent”; he was content to know that the Institute he had built up had not fallen into the hands of Matzke.

  I wrote to him, “Now the rain has started to come in through your study ceiling.”

  He replied, “Very good, go on reporting back.”

  It wasn’t until the mid-nineties that the villa was renovated, that is to say, completely rebuilt from the ground up—the crumbling floorboards, the dry rot in the walls of the aquarium wing. The present occupants probably have no idea what sort of place they’ve moved into, they can’t begin to suspect all the things that came to light during the restoration work. Including perhaps a nest made out of scraps of paper, of Kantian paragraphs, and containing little mummified hamsters—it comes to me now that when I was clearing out the villa several adult hamsters fell prey to the buzzard, but as I couldn’t find their nest, their last litter must have perished.

  Kaltenburg triumphed—in his letters, at any rate. A dubious triumph. It’s true that Eberhard Matzke did not succeed in extending his influence as far as Loschwitz, but then again, if he had done so, it might well have been precisely the right outcome: at least the Institute would have been saved, even if it would no doubt have been run along different lines from Kaltenburg’s. Until I managed to find a berth in the Ornithological Collection, it wasn’t a pleasant time for me, having to see staff layoffs taking effect and difficulties arising with the supply of animal feed. Not long after Kaltenburg left, my days in Loschwitz were numbered too, I found myself responsible for disposing of one familiar creature after another. Dead rooms, a dead garden—the whole Elbe hillside seemed to me bereft.

  Meanwhile, near Vienna, Kaltenburg had long since begun to collect new animals around him, in the following years he was to build up colonies far bigger than his Loschwitz flocks.

  However many species and specimens Kaltenburg may have surrounded himself with in the West, I’m afraid his Dresden experience always remained on his mind. I see his increasing turn to human beings as a reaction to a painful loss. In fact, perhaps Kaltenburg was driven to turn his attention to human beings because he sensed he would never again be able to give full and unconditional commitment to any animal, having once left his animal household in the lurch. That is my reading of his first book written in the West, his first extensive study of human beings, Archetypes of Fear.

  Katharina Fischer said that, particularly from reading Kaltenburg’s polemic, The Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse, she felt she could see the way the author was gradually losing the ground from under his feet. It was as though he were waiting the whole time for someone to hold him in check while he raged ever more blindly. A rage from which no well-meaning assistant, no devoted follower, no human being, could have freed him, because it was directed at human beings themselves. Only an animal might have had that power, observing him from within its own world, with no comprehension of this noisy man who swept everything aside and foresaw a dismal future.

  And then the author made a serious mistake, which would soon lead to his pamphlet being popularly known, not as The Five Horseman of the Apocalypse, but simply as Kaltenburg’s Gas Chamber Book. Frau Fischer had heavily underlined the relevant passage in her copy, and to this day I too could repeat it by heart. And yet it’s only a matter of an exaggerated formulation, in retrospect just a stupid thing, one of those peculiar turns of phrase used in the hope of surreptitiously erasing some dark chapter in one’s past but succeeding only in arousing the reader’s suspicions. But for Kaltenburg’s indignant comment that nowadays you could hardly talk about the differing value of different people without being accused of wanting to build new gas chambers, and but for the stubborn way he stood by his utterance afterward, it might never have come to light that, long before his return to the West, even long before Stalin’s death, he had turned his attention to human beings.

  In one of his last letters he assured me that he hadn’t actually written the infamous gas chamber sentence himself but that a zealous follower of his had inserted it at a late editorial stage. He wouldn’t name him, just as he had given nothing away in the previous twenty-five years, he had taken all the unpleasantness upon himself and had protected the anonymity of his assistant’s handwriting. “It’s a bitter irony,” he wrote at the end of January 1986, after Martin’s death, “that in the end we both suffered the same fate. When I think how difficult it was for me at that time to fend off your friend’s admiration—only to realize now that both he and I gathered more and more acolytes around us, but, sadly, not independent-minded followers.”

  He was forced to cast his mind back to his earlier researches. He would have done anything in the world to avoid returning to them. No animal obstructed his view of his own past. Kaltenburg lost the ground from under his feet. Just as I came close to losing the ground under my feet. His early engagement with human beings fell within his Posen phase. He will not have given my father the relevant essays to read. And if on the tram home my mother responded evasively, almost nervously to my questions about Professor Kaltenburg, then it was simply because he himself had nothing very clear to say about his activities in the military hospital in Posen, which remain obscure to this day.

  12

  MATZKE.” PERHAPS ONE reason why that long, indeed grotesquely long phone call in November 1973 between Dresden and London has stayed so fresh in my mind is that for the first two or three minutes after I picked up the receiver, which seemed to me like an eternity, I couldn’t match the voice at the other end to the caller’s name.

  �
�Matzke. Can you hear me? Is there someone else on the line?” It was Ludwig Kaltenburg.

  A London conference had been organized to mark his seventieth birthday. Zoologists from all over the world were gathering in recognition of the life and work of their celebrated colleague. People were only waiting for the greatest prize of all, from Stockholm. But it is surely not wrong to see in the London conference a reaction to the scandal that, beginning with the Apocalypse book, had rapidly become a scandal surrounding the person of Ludwig Kaltenburg himself. By this time there was also a rumor circulating to the effect that after the annexation of Austria by the Reich, the professor had immediately applied for membership in the Party, banned till then in Austria. There was no mention of it in the curriculum vitae he had put together himself especially for the conference.

  “Professor Doktor Eberhard Matzke. Those mudslingers. And all the papers, even the serious ones, have reproduced this nonsense spread by East Berlin. But do you know what I did today?”

  “Went to see the ravens in the Tower?”

  “That was later in the morning. Straight after breakfast I was already giving a TV interview saying once and for all what I think of these mudslingers who make me out to be a Party member. As though I didn’t know what’s behind it. Who started this rumor. Only Professor Doktor Matzke can be that persistent. With the camera running I said that if that’s what the public wants, I can give them a cast-iron guarantee that I was never in the Nazi Party.”

  It was getting on for midnight, I was lying in bed reading when the telephone rang. And I’ve got to say I wasn’t feeling particularly well disposed toward Ludwig Kaltenburg. I knew he was going to call, but I might not have got up to answer if Knut hadn’t been working hard on me for some months beforehand: “I’ve told the professor many times that he can call on you, he knows how important he is to you, but he’s shy about calling you, the attacks on him have made him quite timid.” I had written back in a noncommittal manner. Knut’s next letter included Kaltenburg’s CV. “He’s scared that even his closest friends might turn away from him, I’ve tried to make it clear to him that he needn’t fear anything of the kind, especially from you, on the contrary.” Knut knew where to put pressure on me, I felt duty-bound, perhaps less toward Kaltenburg than to him, Knut Sieverding.