Kaltenburg (23 page)

Anoth
er suggestion was received with an unappreciative shake of the head: someone suggested piping solemn music into the enclosures. No music. Who would answer for the possible negative effects, territorial battles, premature births, general lethargy, no, the risk was simply too great. Ludwig Kaltenburg had a lifelong aversion to funeral marches.

Eventually he even sent one or two colleagues home, either out of sympathy or because he detested their overemotional tendencies. The various jobs were allocated, and Kaltenburg withdrew to his study to write a newspaper article. He had promised to contribute a page entitled “Stalin, Friend of Animals,” but when I looked in on him later at teatime the sheet of scrap paper still bore only the title, and the article never got beyond the concept stage.

Yes, Stalin's death did loosen the professor's tongue, but it seems that with his long monologue about the coal-black eyes that chapter was closed for Kaltenburg. The Stalin portrait at the Institute villa, pictures of Stalin all over the city: Kaltenburg passed the portraits without looking up. Whatever nightmares his experiences in the camp may have caused him, and whatever mistrust Ludwig Kaltenburg had to live with at that time, after Stalin's death he seemed liberated. In a single night he had freed himself from the vigilant eyes of Stalin. Furthermore, it was as if Kaltenburg knew that in the future a path would be open for him to return to the Soviet Union.

“A sigh of relief?” thought the interpreter, as we turned into the little street that led to the Institute.

But people would go on disappearing, and would go on being referred to only in hushed tones. A short breathing space, perhaps.

While the professor was talking at the Hagemanns' about his encounters with Stalin, Martin did not look once at the black dot on the ceiling. Not that he had forgotten about it, certainly not. It was rather that under Kaltenburg's influence he had managed to put the spot between chandelier and sunflower leaf out of his mind. Whether it was only a dried-up housefly or whether every word was audible in the room above: Martin could cope with the uncertainty.

The Institute villa itself was now screened on the street side by a high wall, it could not have been built very long before, the whitewashed surface showed no sign of weathering, and the footpath had been freshly laid too, no moss, not a blade of grass between the slabs. We walked up to the wide gray iron gate and had the feeling we were being caught on video cameras as we examined the polished brass plate, two names by the bell, only two:
LORENZ
and
DR. LORENZ
—it looked like an accommodation address, or at any rate not like the names of real residents.

“Do you think we should just ring?” asked Frau Fischer, reaching out, her index finger poised above the bell, then she hesitated, and I laid my hand on her forearm, “I'm not sure,” and looked at the circular pattern of perforations in the brass plate, I didn't know if I could bear to listen to the crackling, the hissing, and the tinny voice that would issue from this crude showerhead: “No.”

Earlier there was just a garden gate here in a crooked fence, hardly waist height, who would have wanted to intrude on the grounds, who was there to escape from the Institute, and if you heard a distant, barely intelligible voice, you knew it was the professor calling his animals behind the house. “No, come on, we'd better leave it,” I said to Frau Fischer, and I had the impression that she understood me very well as she followed me across to the other side of the street, which might at least give us a view of the upper part of the villa.

“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.

H
E 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.