Kaltenburg (35 page)

But didn't he think there was a certain innocence in that, an attempt to approach the animal without reservation?

“Innocence, without reservation—when I hear that language, I just see red. He's spent too much time reading Brehm's
Life of Animals.
”

Knut tried to calm the professor down by admitting that Martin might well have unclear notions of the borderline between animal and human, and when Martin philosophized about “communicating” and an “exchange with the animal,” Knut was as skeptical as Ludwig Kaltenburg.

“When he imitates the call of the blackcock, he imagines himself slipping into a blackcock's skin and feathers. When he sits in a cage with a weasel, he sees himself as a weasel. But who better than you to put him right about these notions, Herr Professor?”

Kaltenburg hesitated for a moment, reflected—but no, he had made up his mind.

“You can say I'm limited, you can call me quirky if you like, I can live with that. But any kind of cutesiness makes me furious, even as a kid I hated people using that coochy-coo voice to me.”

If he had ever found animals cute, if, as a so-called nice child, he had been drawn to animals because they were nice like him, he would never have become a researcher, he said. Animals are not cute critters, and a child is the last person to be interested in niceness: on the contrary, it was precisely the dignity of animals, their serious attitude to the world, even when at play, that aroused the child's interest.

“That's what attracted me to animals—there's no way an animal can do anything else, it's bound to take you seriously, even if you're a creature who can't yet walk, can't speak, can't even eat properly yet, and come crawling across the field in a diaper.”

Dispirited, we made our way to the garage, where Martin was waiting for us. No, we hadn't got anywhere. The professor had digressed into basic principles. And yes, once again he had been careful not to refer to Martin by name. I took Martin one of the young chaffinches we had brought up together in Loschwitz. That was the most I could do.

 

“I suppose he left Dresden very soon after that?” asked Katharina Fischer.

Meanwhile the crows had made their way to the upper end of the island, far fewer birds than in winter, and yet their noisy competition for roosting spots dominated our whole area.

I couldn't say now how much time elapsed between the two events. When did Knut make his stork film? It must have been 1959. During filming, a photograph was taken that has often been reproduced over time, and if I remember rightly, I was the one who took it, in Mecklenburg, far from Loschwitz and Kaltenburg's Institute. But not with my camera, which is why, as far as I know, it never bears any attribution. The camera must have been Knut's, or Martin's—though I never saw Martin holding a camera. Three men are standing in front of a fence. Grassland scenery. Rough wooden posts with barbed wire stretched between them. Wheat beyond the fence, almost ripe for harvesting. You can see, from left to right, Martin, Knut, and, with his back to the camera, Herr Sikorski, bending down, preoccupied. The photographer has made an effort to include a nest you can make out in the background on the roof of a farmhouse, while Martin is smoking a cigarette and talking. Though his hands are casually thrust into his pockets, Knut looks as if he is being pulled in two directions at once—he is lending an ear to Martin and looking into the lens; I have caught him in a rare moment of impatience.

One of the last shots before Martin left for the West. And I can remember, as if it were yesterday, what it was he was so eager to get across. Knut couldn't wait to get back to work; the stork on its nest looked settled enough, but it could easily decide to take off at any moment. Knut was incapable of concentrating on what his friend was saying, but I recall every word: Martin was talking about Ludwig Kaltenburg.

After what was basically an inexplicable breach, he had gone through all the phases that might conceivably follow such a vehement rejection, had ignored the professor, derided him, rebelled against him. He may have sensed that he would never be free of Kaltenburg's influence. Martin disappeared. Nothing was heard of him for years. It wasn't until the mid-sixties, when I was idly leafing through a few catalogs and picture books one day, that I was struck—because of his slight squint—by a snapshot of a stranger. He was looking past the camera, you couldn't help but stare at that face, as if to attract the subject's attention. The black hat, the white shirt with short sleeves, a shadow in the background, dark shapes, silhouettes, several people, obviously. That wasn't Martin Spengler.

Today I know that the picture shows Martin during a stage appearance shortly after he had tipped a packet of laundry detergent into an open grand piano. It was taken on July 20, 1964, precisely twenty years after the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in his Wolf's Lair, and at first sight there is something Führer-like about Martin, with his right arm raised. His expression wavers between trance and wild resolution; it looks as if he's grown a little mustache, but then you realize it has nothing to do with hair. Coagulating blood. Martin is bleeding. Blood is trickling over his lips and down his chin. A few minutes earlier a student had smashed his nose.

That wasn't him. And then I did recognize him, after all. Martin in the setting of his large, disturbing art performances which regularly caused public uproar, and he himself took fright at the reactions he had provoked. The point at which other people lose control and blindly hit out, he would fall into a strange state somewhere between rigid self-control and self-absorption. I can see Martin standing on a stage with a bleeding nose, outwardly attentive but inwardly listening: a portrait which, in its very theatricality—the posture, the raised arm, the hand presenting an object—has more impact than the many later pictures in which, though apparently oblivious of the camera, he acts out the role of being photographed.

Did the two of them ever meet again in the West? Not that I ever heard. And I think it's unlikely. All the same, throughout their lives they seem to have moved along parallel lines, and as I corresponded with both of them I kept coming across mysterious coincidences. At the beginning of the seventies, for instance, when the professor began actively to promote the cause of wildlife conservation, he wrote to me one day that he had read out a manifesto in the Munich Hofbräuhaus beer hall, and because of the turmoil in the hall, he had stood on the table to make himself heard—and then I noted the date of the event, a day in July, the twentieth, eight years after Martin's broken-nose appearance.

B
ETWEEN THE BANK
and Bird Island the flow of the Elbe was much reduced, just a rivulet here and there. The gravel bed was exposed, by stepping from one patch of shingle to another you could easily get across, but we turned back. Bats had replaced the sand martins. In a bare, dead tree on the island bank a night heron sat motionless, watching the unruffled surface of the water below.

After what she had heard from me, said Katharina Fischer, she was slowly beginning to see Martin Spengler's appearances from a different angle. She had always found the artist slightly repellent, a person who allowed nobody and nothing to share the limelight with him, who ruthlessly made himself the center of attention on the stage or in a discussion group. Images of a murmuring, gesticulating Martin Spengler standing his ground for hours on end had unnerved her rather than attracted her to Martin's world.

“He behaved as if to prove to his audience how easy it is to ignore people. But now I'm suddenly wondering whether people played any part at all in Martin Spengler's performances.”

And yet in his countless statements about art, man is central. Martin never missed a chance to propagate his vision of mankind, which I've never really grasped.

“Of course. Nonetheless, I have the feeling that he was chiefly concerned to move with the patience of an animal observer, as though in his mind he was always communicating with animals.”

Then Martin had let it be known, if only indirectly, that he understood the professor's objections. That he accepted them. That he held nothing against him. On the contrary. A quiet echo. An overture.

“Messages directed at Ludwig Kaltenburg.”

No, Martin Spengler did not regard animals as “cute” or “nice.” That assessment was a crude error on Kaltenburg's part. Since Martin's banishment from the Institute there hasn't been a year when I haven't wondered whether the professor was right to get so deeply involved in the wrangling over the Berlin Research Center, whether he would ever have chosen Eberhard Matzke to be his archenemy, whether in fact he might not have spent the rest of his life in Dresden, if he had been a little more clear-sighted at that time. In Martin he would have had some support to counteract his forays into “zoological politics,” as Kaltenburg called it. A book about animal representation in art—it could be that in a weak moment he was afraid such a peripheral work might adversely affect his reputation, or that he heard his colleagues whispering, “Professor Kaltenburg's reaching the age when you take up a hobby,” or “His great research days are behind him, he's gone off poaching in other fields.” Which was exactly what he did later, and the further he ventured into sociology, anthropology, and history, the more damage he did to his reputation.

As a child I saw my father turning his back on Kaltenburg from one day to the next; in my mid-twenties, I saw the professor repudiating Martin. Both events affected me deeply, neither seemed to me inevitable. An outsider could do nothing but look on impotently. As a result I could never bring myself to break with Ludwig Kaltenburg, though there were times when I didn't want to know anything about him.

The night heron had left its perch. I picked it out again in the reeds on the bank, reflected in the water. Its head lowered, it was on the lookout for fish, its beak gliding to and fro above the smooth, seemingly impenetrable surface. It looked up as we passed. You might almost have thought it wanted to hear what Katharina Fischer had to say.

“At least he didn't regard Martin Spengler as his archenemy.”

Knowledgeable as he was about animals, Kaltenburg was unable to see that he himself was fixated on a displacement object. In any case, I'm very cautious when it comes to the subject of Matzke as Kaltenburg's opponent. Perhaps it was Knut—I regret to say—who first put the idea into the professor's head that Matzke was out to get him. Not deliberately, certainly not, I'm not reproaching him, it could just as easily have been me.

“A sideswipe?” asked an astonished Kaltenburg one day, when Knut was expressing his annoyance at an article of Eberhard Matzke's. “I can't believe it.”

“After all, it's not the first time we've read this kind of thing, Herr Professor. Don't you remember the brazen words that man dared to utter about the inhibition against biting among canines? Since then it's been one malicious comment after another.”

Knut Sieverding, the only realist among us. It was beyond his powers of imagination to foresee the phantasms his matter-of-fact observations might possibly unleash.

“Malicious comments? Colleague Matzke? Aimed at me? But we always got on extremely well.”

Knut wanted to proceed carefully, wanted to save Kaltenburg from a defeat, or rather from yet another “small setback” after the professor's failed efforts to bring the missing exhibits back to the Zoological Collections. In Berlin's new Zoological Research Center, Reinhold held the office of director, Matzke becoming his deputy with responsibility for day-to-day business, making it possible for Reinhold to concentrate fully on the kind of large-scale research that had, at least in part, preoccupied him for more than thirty years. We were all convinced that, thanks to Reinhold's newfound freedom, the long-anticipated monograph on avian plumage would now finally come to fruition.

Kaltenburg's plan had worked. Eberhard Matzke, meanwhile, was clearly on a different track. He did not want to be deputy director. What resulted was the Matzke rebellion, as the colleagues called it, not without a certain irony, since everyone knew that Dr. Eberhard Matzke lacked the nerve for a Matzke revolution. Perhaps Matzke had not expected the Saxon zoologists to rally around Reinhold, perhaps he had pictured them joining forces with him to drive Reinhold out. A Leipziger, a Dresdener—but for Ludwig Kaltenburg's involvement, you could have seen the Matzke rebellion as a purely Saxon affair which happened to be played out on the big stage of Berlin.

“Somebody's got to make him see sense,” was the professor's conclusion. “Who else but me could attempt it under the circumstances?”

“Are you sure that's a good idea?”

“Misunderstandings are always better tackled man-to-man.”

“Misunderstandings are a different matter, Herr Professor. We're past the stage of misunderstandings. Matzke and Reinhold, the whole setup behind them—the battle lines have been drawn.”

“That's just why we need skilled diplomacy, we need to come up with an offer of peace that colleague Matzke, who is prone to bouts of confusion, can accept without losing face.”

“I strongly advise you against approaching Matzke in this situation. And with all due respect, I am not convinced that you are the right man for such a mission.”

I could see it was a considerable effort for Knut to talk to Kaltenburg about past failings, about Matzke plodding, shoulders miserably hunched, down the Institute corridor under the eyes of the staff, about students in the lab excitedly putting aside their work as soon as Kaltenburg appeared in the doorway, and about the tense silence in the professor's lecture when Matzke took too long to fetch a new stick of chalk for the blackboard.

“But I always helped him where I could.”

“I don't deny that. But has it ever occurred to you that Eberhard Matzke has never come to the Institute? Have you ever invited him to Loschwitz? You have people coming and going all the time, with zoologists of all nationalities staying here, and if any up-and-coming young researcher—even a child interested in wildlife—shows the slightest hint of promise, the Institute's doors are open to him.”