Kaltenburg

by Marcel Beyer

  The art historians, on the other hand, wonder to this day why Martin Spengler’s late work bears so many obvious traces of local life in this area. Noting the dull, earthy, and industrial colors, the biological references, the worn but almost lovingly assembled functional objects of his later installations, they have interpreted them as imaginary extensions of 1950s perceptions into the present, but so far nobody has thought of looking at the register of the Dresden Interhotel, the Newa, for a supposed Dutchman signing in under a pseudonym.

  He stayed for about two hours, which seemed like a whole long day to me, we said not a word about complicated travel arrangements or nerve-racking border checks, not a word about the worrying condition of the building, the ruins around us, or the miserable appearance of the city in general. We were completely wrapped up in the world of the collection’s holdings, every drawer revealed new natural marvels, the blue jays, the shore larks, the blood-red, white-spotted parts of the strawberry finches, and under Martin’s thorough scrutiny, alert to every shade of gray and brown, even the close-packed rows of house sparrows, whose live counterparts were regarding us from the windowsill, radiated a glow that few people ever notice.

  “These faces—every sparrow here has an individual face,” cried Martin, he exclaimed, “What I’d really like to do is take the whole case and set it up in a gallery.”

  It was also thanks to Martin that I started writing to Ludwig Kaltenburg again. When I showed Martin the great auk among the exhibits recently returned from the Soviet Union, he stood speechless before the bird, reverent, overwhelmed, stunned, torn this way and that between the different eras. Finally he stepped up closer, viewing the great auk from all sides, stammering, “He must have been pleased,” and again, respectfully, “It must have given him enormous pleasure to hear about this,” and although I knew what he meant, I wasn’t quite sure whether his respectful tone related to the great auk or to Professor Kaltenburg.

  That same evening I took an envelope, addressed it to Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, Vienna, Austria, and placed in it a carefully folded sheet of paper on which I had written nothing but “The great auks are back.”

  I was glad at the time I had taken this step, and I’m even gladder now. Otherwise I would never have heard about the doubts the professor had to struggle with in his final years, nor about the worries he probably did not care to divulge to anyone around him. Many things never went beyond the letters, letters to a very distant country, letters to somebody who had never become a disciple of the great Ludwig Kaltenburg.

  “I’m sure you’ll let me have a detailed description soon,” he replied. “Meanwhile, it’s reassuring to hear that all the exhibits are clearly back in place, insofar as they survived the war unscathed, and weren’t scattered all over the landscape by disappointed looters in the first days of peace. And don’t ask me how I am. You know I’ll always make an effort to appear cheerful for your sake.”

  I respected his wish, and so it was only through incidental remarks in the course of our correspondence that I managed to piece together some idea of the professor’s physical condition. For example, when I asked him whether he still loved to spend his days in the open air as he had always done, he wrote back that those long walks in the country, where his animals had always kept him company, were now a thing of the past for good and all. For more than two years he had been confined to a wheelchair and mostly stayed indoors, or in the garden if the weather was fine. The less mobile you were, the more sensitive you became to the temperature. Storms, rain, and blizzards—he saw them now only from the terrace window.

  “I have started getting rid of old documents,” he wrote, “but don’t worry, I have no intention of discarding incriminating material, as you might assume, what matters to me is completing my public break with ideas which I supported for many years without being aware of the madness that underlay them.

  “Everybody wants to protect me,” he wrote. “But when I listen to my protectors it often gives me the creeps, as though I were surrounded by people who doggedly insist there’s no conclusive proof of evolution. Even the noise, the noise they create, you know, that’s a betrayal in itself.”

  My father had always been wonderful to argue with, wrote Kaltenburg, without my raising the subject. “Your father was never a National Socialist—any more than I was—he had no connection with those people and refused to have any truck with them. Hence the misunderstanding, our quarrel, if you like, when I joined the Party without sharing its convictions. No, I certainly never appeared at your place wearing a Party button in my lapel, your parents would have shunned me a lot sooner if I had. It’s always puzzled me how he eventually found out. Somebody must have reported it to him, some malicious person to whom our friendship was a thorn in the side. He had a hard time with his university colleagues, in fact he once confided to me that he was afraid they would stop at nothing to get rid of him.”

  When I cautiously followed this up with a question, he responded, “Your parents were deliberately frozen out. I was very sharply attacked at the time for persisting in visiting you. As a small boy you won’t have noticed the depressed mood in your family. Your house seemed desolate, and I almost think that was why your parents acquired their first birds. Yes, they did it for you, though not for the reason you’ve always assumed. No, an atmosphere of death—I wouldn’t call it that today.”

  Certainly, he wrote in a letter at Christmas 1988, sooner or later, like him, I would become aware that at an early point in my life, almost too early to identify, I had involuntarily begun to discriminate in terms of human and animal encounters. “Your early confrontation with a bird, for example, in whose company you spent an afternoon in your drawing room, will be strictly separated in your memory from the following events, the entry of your nanny or your parents on the scene.” Every zoologist, maintained Kaltenburg, had a similar story to tell. True, our mentors also stood out in our mind’s eye, the figures under whose direction we channeled and refined our animal observations, but such a mentor came into the picture only as a secondary step, when his attention was attracted by a young person absorbed in the world of animals.

  Perhaps you could even say that at first every child makes a sharp distinction, animals here, human beings there, two worlds that are interwoven in a mysterious way that the child hardly recognizes as yet, as though there were openings somewhere through which you could slip from one to the other. Except that most people, especially those who confuse retrospective self-observation with the transfiguration of their own youth, can later not remember the time when they regarded people and animals equally with a mixture of curiosity and anxiety, as though it was very far from decided in which of the two spheres you would eventually make your own life.

  You could even observe this phenomenon in animals, Ludwig Kaltenburg had discovered: “The jackdaw which courts its human friend at lunchtime, trying to stuff mealworm mash into his ears, and then flies off with its friends, the hooded crows.”

  I had expected Kaltenburg to return to the subject of his Dresden jackdaw colony, I knew it preoccupied him as much as ever, I heard from the people around him that he brought it up more and more often, but it was never mentioned in his letters to me. When he did describe to me the distinctive behavior of his favorite jackdaw, Taschotschek, for me it was a sign: the professor did not have long to live.

  4

  DID THEY EVER find out how the professor’s jackdaws were poisoned?” she asked at this point. “And by whom?” Not for certain. There’s been plenty of speculation over the years, of course, there have been suspects—Eberhard Matzke, no less, personally ordered them to be killed, so thought the professor when he was already in the West and wanted to believe in a conspiracy aimed at getting rid not just of Reinhold but of him too. In his less dark hours he was inclined to see it as a mere oversight: stupidly, his jackdaw flock had fallen victim to an illegal pest-control operation carried out by some collective farm organization.

  “Is it difficult to poison
a jackdaw, then?”

  Not at all, and it’s happening all the time. The odd bird had already unaccountably disappeared in previous years, after all. In the nineteenth century the farmers put out poisoned voles to deal with the crow problem, the corvids were regarded as nothing but pests, and jackdaws mingling with the great flocks of foraging crows were affected too. In Kaltenburg’s day, when bird poisoning was on the increase again, there’s no doubt they had begun large-scale experimentation in secret to develop plant protection through poisoned grain crops.

  “Poisoned grain?”

  Grain that had been contaminated with an agent called Hora. At the end of October 1964, for example, it was openly planted near Fürstenwalde along with drilled winter wheat. Right up until the following March dead birds were being collected from the area, though in fact very few of them were jackdaws or crows. The majority, over a hundred specimens, were skylarks that had no doubt been looking for food in the fields as the thaw began.

  “Large-scale anti-crow measures—sounds terrible.” Katharina Fischer shook her head. “And surely that sort of thing was prohibited?”

  It might never have been discovered if ornithologists on their routine rounds had not come across an unusually high number of dead birds. Late in February 1984, at a crow roosting place by the former gravel pit near Ichtershausen, forty-five jackdaws and eighty-five rooks were found. Subsequent investigations showed that the Rudisleben plant production collective had illegally soaked wheat and corn in the plant protectant Dimethoate and scattered the grain across the freshly plowed fields, which eventually led to the death of over a thousand birds.

  “So poisoning operations took place mainly in winter?”

  Yes.

  “And yet according to your account, Kaltenburg’s jackdaws died in late summer?”

  That’s true. And at that time of year you don’t see massive raids by crows. What always matters is protecting the winter sowing.

  “Therefore, if I’ve got it right, we can’t be looking at either plant protectants or any other way of treating grain? Perhaps you’ve got to approach the question from a different angle altogether, and consider who had close contact with Kaltenburg’s jackdaws.”

  Too many to allow the circle to be gradually narrowed down. Countless people. Workers at the Institute. Visitors. Neighbors. And strangers never seen by anybody but the jackdaws themselves.

  “Is it conceivable that the jackdaws were poisoned by a stranger?”

  It’s possible they were. Jackdaws are pretty inquisitive birds, after all, willing to engage with new people and new situations—but I’m not quite convinced. I’m assuming that Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws were duped by somebody who was around them every day.

  “So we can rule out Eberhard Matzke, then.”

  After all that man has hatched up, I’d be the last person to want to defend him. But by that point he had long since achieved all his aims; he had cut Reinhold out and had succeeded in deeply humiliating Kaltenburg as well by harshly rejecting the peace offer from Dresden, that is to say, by behaving as though the offer never existed. When I think what care Ludwig Kaltenburg took over planning for the peace negotiations, how important he thought it was to consider every possible reaction on Matzke’s part. In fact he didn’t even want to divulge precisely what his offer consisted of, he thought it essential that nobody should know the substance of the forthcoming talks, this was a matter between him and Eberhard Matzke above all. No doubt he still had Knut’s objections ringing in his ears when he decided not to go to Berlin himself—but none of his precautions did any good in the end.

  He handed me a pile of documents. “Krause will drive you, and he’s going to drop you off at the Tierpark, all right? I promised to send over a bundle of papers, that’s this large envelope here, don’t get it mixed up with the smaller envelope you’re going to give to colleague Matzke in the afternoon. You know everybody there at the zoo, go straight to the boss, I’ve told them you’re coming, pass on our greetings, get the business over as quickly as possible without seeming impolite. Then make your own way to the Invalidenstrasse. Don’t worry about Krause lurking around, he won’t wait for you—when we’re in Berlin he always goes to see his sister, he gets well fed there and he can shoot his mouth off about how he’s treated in Dresden. He’ll pick you up again at the Tierpark at five o’clock on the dot.”

  There’s nothing to report about my appointment with Eberhard Matzke. He didn’t even offer me a seat. He laid the envelope aside without thanking me. He just muttered, “Funk, Funk—and you say I supervised your microscope work?” as though he couldn’t remember a thing. I was idiotic enough to mention his bike, his cardigan, Martin Spengler in the practical lab, I wanted to smooth the path for him, and all the while I had no idea that I was looking into the face of an SS man.

  I spent only about ten minutes in his office, and I still recall how surprised I was not to run into any of the museum assistants, either in the corridor or on the stairs. When Kaltenburg’s limousine arrived at the Tierpark, I had been walking up and down the path for more than an hour. Krause switched the heater on.

  “Did he quiz you?” the interpreter wanted to know.

  He wouldn’t have been Krause if he hadn’t. But you had to get used to his way of questioning. He dispensed with question marks. We chatted about the weather: “Yes, it gets pretty cool after sunset,” he nodded, offered me a cigarette, an S-Bahn train passed by, I sat at the back of the limousine and let myself be driven to Dresden. We discussed Kaltenburg’s attitude to vodka, vodka was always said to harden you against the cold, but the professor was strictly opposed to the usual practice of giving zoo animals alcohol with their drinking water in winter. “I reckon he’s right there,” said Krause, glancing at the rear mirror, “Think of that nasty business last year,” after drinking several bottles of vodka an elephant in the Moscow zoo had torn a radiator from the wall and turned on its keeper.

  Thanks to Kaltenburg’s careful planning I was well prepared for this bait. I praised Krause’s driving, remarked yet again how well the heating worked in the car, and asked him a personal question: which did he prefer, vodka or mulled wine? “Mulled wine, the way my wife makes it,” he answered promptly—and that was the end of a cunningly contrived attempt to find out something about what he thought had been my stay of several hours in the Tierpark.

  We tore along in the outside lane of the dark autobahn. “Pull yourself together,” I said to myself. “Don’t tell him anything about Kaltenburg, don’t tell him anything about your visit to Matzke.” Then it went quiet. Krause was concentrating on the road, nothing out there but night, I was feeling drowsy.

  “Did you drop off to sleep?” asked Frau Fischer. “Not a bad way of avoiding the chauffeur’s probing.”

  Perhaps I actually did fall asleep. No more steady hum from the engine, no rumbling as we drove over the joints between the slabs in the road. I heard Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaws calling quietly. I sat stretched out on the back seat, my hands resting on the upholstery, I blinked up at the roof of the car and heard in turn the various gradations of jackdaw calls, depending on whether the birds were in a mood to fly off or felt the urge to head homeward. I opened my eyes again and looked out at the landscape. There was no landscape. The jackdaws went on calling. I looked around in the car, the rear shelf, the floor beneath my feet, the armrests, then somebody said, “Mating calls are really quite easy to imitate.”

  Krause was making jackdaw noises. Or was it the professor I was hearing? Yes, the chauffeur wasn’t so much imitating jackdaws as imitating Ludwig Kaltenburg’s jackdaw calls. In the rear mirror I saw Krause nodding. He was obviously pleased to be able to continue our conversation over the last fifty kilometers. Of course you could sometimes see when the professor was worried or a particular person was bothering him—he, Krause, could tell that not from his expression, nor from any bad-tempered tone of voice, but simply from the fact that the professor was spending even more time with his fish than usu
al. He had never in his life met anyone like Professor Kaltenburg, although he had got to know quite a few famous zoologists over the years. He started listing names, I could see who he was going to name next—so far he had never yet seen Professor Doktor Eberhard Matzke in Loschwitz. “Follow Kaltenburg’s example and wear a neutral expression,” I said to myself. “Pull yourself together, for goodness’ sake, you’ve got to distract him, do what Ludwig Kaltenburg does, talk about animals.”

  I told Krause about the jackdaws. But this may have been exactly the wrong move.

  “And now you’re asking yourself whether that was the wrong move,” said Katharina Fischer at the same moment that the thought occurred to me.

  It was possible that I had put an idea into his head.

  “Even if we assume that this man was responsible for poisoning the jackdaws, people like that arrive at such notions sooner or later without any outside help, and you shouldn’t reproach yourself,” the interpreter protested. “Whether he was just nursing the desire for revenge because he thought Kaltenburg despised him, or whether he was brooding over his reports, disappointed that the professor wouldn’t indulge in any disparaging remarks about the regime or the closing of the border which Krause could have passed on to curry favor for himself—seen in a sober light,” she declared, “that has nothing to do with you.”

  It was to keep Krause at a distance that I told him about the jackdaws. “Yes, they love cherries,” he said, “I know that.”

  Even better: redcurrants.

  “Really?”

  Hadn’t he ever watched that game involving the little shed butting onto the villa, a game whose attractions nobody could quite make out but which seemed to give Kaltenburg as much pleasure as it gave his jackdaws? “I must admit, I don’t often go there, that raven is always hanging about.” But the raven wasn’t interested in slipping into the shed. The jackdaws, by contrast, were always intensely curious about what might be hidden in this lean-to. But Ludwig Kaltenburg couldn’t bear to see them coming out disappointed each time because there was nothing new for them to find, so several times a day around harvest time he hid redcurrants among the clutter.