Kaltenburg (26 page)

He was aware of the years he had missed at the Hagemanns', for sure. If he had been able to envisage those faces, recall those conversations when he began work on
Archetypes of Fear,
then there would be no uncertainty today about precisely what he meant by “atmosphere of death.” Perhaps after more than two decades Kaltenburg might simply have dropped this favorite phrase of his, might have replaced it in new editions of older works with another, clearly delineated term. Or he might, once and for all, have struggled through to a definition of the shadowy expression “atmosphere of death.” Whatever the painful experiences involved in such an undertaking, Kaltenburg would not have shrunk from it, would not have turned his head away.

“Are you really sure?”

He must have realized he had missed something.

“But are you certain that he would have seen things differently among the Hagemann circle? Would people like the Kochs, Rudolf Schottlaender, or Klara Hagemann have led him to revise his ideas?”

That's what I would have wished for him, at any rate.

It had stopped drizzling. The narrow road ran gently up the hill, and Katharina Fischer was wondering whether, at his age, Ludwig Kaltenburg really would have welcomed a rethink.

“And after all, at that stage the Cold War tensions were gradually beginning to ease off.”

There wasn't much to stop him, in fact—all he lacked was a lifetime ahead of him. If he had been a younger man or, as he once wrote, a “representative of a future generation,” he would have approached the phenomenon of fear from a completely different angle.

“Under pressure from younger colleagues?”

I think that's unlikely. Nobody could have forced him to make discoveries.

So the “atmosphere of death” in his writings remained to the end a barely definable field that was the setting for a series of varied, insufficiently delimited phenomena. The “atmosphere of death” encompasses injured birds as much as countless field-hospital patients. According to Ludwig Kaltenburg, it includes in equal measure “the displaced,” “the homeless,” and “those ground down between ideologies.” And although the professor may gradually have become uncertain while working on his manuscript whether he was using the expression appropriately at any given point—in fact eventually he could not have said what he meant when he originally coined it—the “atmosphere of death” spread without distinction across slaughterhouses and flocks of dead jackdaws and military bands playing funeral marches alike, and had long since claimed a child wandering through the Great Garden during a night of bombardment.

But what use would a term like “world pogrom” have been to Ludwig Kaltenburg?

T
O OUR RIGHT LAY
some derelict land where for a while a few huts had stood, which, if I remember rightly, were torn down in the late fifties. Workrooms and dormitories, enclosures, and an infernal stench that pervaded the surrounding area when warm air crept up the hillside.

Ludwig Kaltenburg was very keen on a close bond between the researchers at his Institute. That's not to say they all had to have the same outlook on the world, the world of animals included: far from it. But I won't go into the experiments with hearing-impaired rhesus monkeys with which Etzel von Isisdorf began here.

“A hut full of rhesus monkeys?”

Yes. And even as a student at that time, when I was allowed to participate in the big evening meetings, I didn't take in his daily reports. I'm sure I wasn't the only one. Perhaps that's why the rhesus monkey section gradually developed into an institute within the Institute. Almost as soon as von Isisdorf accepted an appointment in the USA, the professor had the temporary housing demolished. After all, Kaltenburg argued, the neighbors—the non-animal-loving neighbors, that is—were already under almost inhuman pressure, without imposing that stench on them.

While Katharina Fischer walked silently at my side, I was trying to shake off some unbearable film images that had been running through my mind since I had brought up the name of Etzel von Isisdorf. A monkey's empty eyes, the bared teeth, the broken impression the animal makes on the observer, the look of a terrible presentiment running through it as it turns inward to listen and hears nothing. Its lips tremble as if filmed in slow motion, although the sequence was shot at normal speed.

When we reached a crossing, the interpreter pointed to a corner building: “Did that belong to the Institute as well?”

Maybe. Although it's quite a distance from the main Institute site. The numerous many-angled extensions, the clutter under the awning: at first I didn't associate anything with this building, but then we turned off to the right, and there was the small window in the side wall of the garage, the wall was piled up with rain barrels and garden tools, I saw the curtains, and then I remembered: this was where Knut stayed when he had work to do in Loschwitz.

“In the house?”

No, in the garage.

“In that poky den?” Katharina Fischer couldn't believe it.

Here again I read the nameplate next to the bell, it bore the same name as it had then, and once more I was loath to ring. Frau Fischer should have seen the garage before it was converted into a place for Knut to stay. The little window, the curtains—in reality I knew it wasn't possible, but I had the feeling they were the same curtains as fifty years ago.

The garage was leased, that is to say it was used by the Institute, and in return Kaltenburg sent his workmen along. They fitted the garage out so that you could stay there overnight, put in a window, insulated the walls. Afterward they carried out repairs to the main building, and as I recall they even put in a sauna. A pretty high price to pay for the use of a drafty hut in which you couldn't even have kept your coach horses with a good conscience. Kaltenburg thought wanting to live here was something of a fixation on Knut's part, but then again, he had a soft spot for fixations, he was no stranger to them himself. Nonetheless, Knut couldn't have cared that much about the garage, perhaps it was just that in the villa or one of the outbuildings he would have felt hemmed in, he enjoyed walking a few hundred meters after a long day's work in the Institute grounds. The fresh night air over Loschwitz, not a soul around by then—the location and comfort of his lodgings were of secondary importance.

They put down linoleum, installed a bed that was much too wide, a bench, and a table; Knut was grateful for the accommodation. Except that, if it had been up to him, they would have made the window a bit larger. The workmen thought they were doing him a favor, the cold at night, the winter cold—whatever tales Knut had to tell about nights spent out in the open, nights on Lüneburg Heath as well as by the Black Sea, he was talking to workmen from Dresden, here we were in Loschwitz, and all they knew was that it can be bitterly cold at night in Loschwitz.

How proud Kaltenburg was to announce one morning that, in the intervals of a conference, he had persuaded Knut Sieverding to use the grounds of the Institute to make the hamster film he was planning. The open-air shooting had been completed, now filming was to proceed in an artificial hamster burrow. There were plenty of hamsters at the Institute, Knut would be able to take his pick from golden and black-bellied hamsters, tame animals gone feral and hand-reared wild animals. There was time, there was space, and all that Knut needed to bring with him was a few sacks of cement to build a proper hamster's burrow in the garden.

“A pane of glass two meters square? We enjoy excellent relations with a first-class glazing firm, Herr Sieverding.”

There would probably have been enough cement at the Institute too. Knut asked no questions, however, but promised to take care of it. For all his pride at having engaged the aspiring young nature-film maker, Kaltenburg may have seen the requirement to supply cement as a little test of Knut's serious intentions. But when a truck appeared outside the house and the professor watched Knut struggling with the cement sacks, hauling them off the loading platform and trundling them on the trolley into the garden, there was no doubt about it: with this man, Kaltenburg had made a good choice.

Knut Sieverding's working methods were always a model of patience and attention to detail. He himself would have said that this was not exceptional in his line of work, since anyone who didn't possess these qualities wouldn't be making films in the first place but looking for some other kind of job. If I'd had the same attributes as Knut, it would have been hard for me then to decide whether to emulate him or the professor. Calm. Physical self-control. On good terms with sleep. And naturally his ingenuity in constructing blinds. The professor may have envied this ability in particular. When Kaltenburg worked with animals, it was always face-to-face. Film footage from the early days of the Institute shows him with ravens on his head, his forearm, and his knee, or on the Elbe shore with his young flock of jackdaws giving a demonstration of flying, or in the company of his ducks: the iridescent markings of the parent birds, the light, downy plumage of the chicks, and then a thick white shock of hair—a shot of a pond, taken almost at water-surface level, reeds swaying in the background. By contrast, in the countless open-air sequences Knut filmed in the course of a lifetime, not a single human being ever appears, although a specialist would know there must have been other people present because Knut often situated a number of cameras to capture an animal scene from a variety of perspectives.

He never appears in his own films, you don't see him in a studio setting, or prowling around the landscape in search of a hidden breeding site. Knut may not have attached much significance to this, but it takes me back to his earliest bird shots, the period of his youthful excursions when, with camera and binoculars, he explored a small peninsula in the Frische Haff from early morning till sunset, for months on end, left completely to his own devices. There was no one there to photograph Kurt in the presence of birds, nervous as they were of human contact.

He invited inquisitive school friends to help him build a shelter; they laid a waterproof sheet across a framework of birch trunks, arranging twigs and grasses as camouflage, then squatting with Knut for two or three hours in his blind—increasingly restless, under an increasing strain as they peered into the landscape ahead, until they reached a point where they politely asked Knut for permission to leave him to it. He waited until they had left the breeding area, until even the lapwings felt safe, then carefully moved his observation post another half-meter closer to the nest.

Later he was surrounded by assistants, cameramen, and lighting specialists who could easily have helped him to make small appearances: Knut Sieverding lying in wait at dawn, Knut Sieverding pointing, Knut Sieverding surveying the mating ground, and here Knut Sieverding watching the ruffs at their ritual display. “What a waste of valuable film time”—that's all he would have said. Even when his protagonist was a completely tame animal, he didn't dare raise his voice above a whisper as he worked, staying motionless beside the camera, and sometimes for an instant you feel the stoat is looking offscreen for eye contact, the young woodpeckers are becoming impatient, because Knut Sieverding is not reacting to their pleading. His view was that the author should be out of shot, present only as a voice. As though he were still working under the conditions of his early days, or had derived from them something like a commitment to staying out of the picture.

I am one of those people privileged to have witnessed Knut in action, I have seen him in those moments where everything has to move very fast, where everyone is in place, where a scene is successful or goes even better than hoped for, when everybody feels like cheering but must hold back because animals can't stand the sound of cheering. I have seen him full of self-doubt because of an unsatisfactory day's work, bad weather, running out of time. I have retained even more powerful impressions from the preparatory phase of work on Knut's full-length films, from those months partly filled with excited anticipation, in part characterized by depressing setbacks, when many a film project has collapsed because the director's nerve has failed.

The way that Knut presented his plan for the hamster burrow to me, drawn on graph paper, in the tones of an engineer but with the air of someone rolling out a map of hidden treasure, and suddenly said, as though we had been discussing Kaltenburg all along, “You know how important you are to the professor,” then returned immediately to his design. Not “I've noticed” or “It's obvious”: Knut said “You know,” as though he merely wanted to confirm that I had arrived unaided at an insight that had been in the offing for years.

“The last thing I want to do when I'm trying to film an encounter between animals is interfere,” he explained one day during the tedious business of training the stoat. I can see him sitting in the meadow, wearing an angler's waistcoat as usual over his checked shirt, its pockets containing not hooks or worms but light meters, pencils, bits of film stock. Laughing, he let the stoat have the end of a flex. No, he wouldn't interfere, but he did take the necessary precautions to prevent a fatal clash between his performers.

Then we crouched in the darkened tent in front of the camera-ready hamster set, together with Professor Kaltenburg and Herr Sikorski, the cameraman. For one last time Knut let his flashlight sweep along the passageway behind the pane of glass. From outside we could hear the sound of the mother hamster beginning a tentative exploration of her new quarters. The beam of light tracked down to the sleeping den, while the hamster was enjoying the pieces of carrot, wheat grains, and ears of rye that had been scattered over the miniature field. We saw the food storage chamber lit up, the escape tunnel, a side tunnel with bays—it was as though Knut were once more mentally rehearsing each individual scene he was planning to shoot. Now somebody was telling us that the hamster had discovered the entrance to the burrow, and Knut turned off the flashlight.