In the central part of his book Kaltenburg classifies various kinds of fear experience on the basis of fifty years of personal observation, and then, in a chapter called “Fear of Death,” he turns to a series of sensational baboon photographs taken under the most adverse conditions in the monkeys’ natural habitat and made available to the author by a friendly film director. According to Kaltenburg, the facial expression of a baboon at the very last moment of its life, when the animal realizes in a flash that this time there is no escape from its attacker, differs in no way from that of a human being who finds himself helplessly cornered by a deadly enemy.
Up to this point, as he says, the study essentially confines itself to drawing up a sober account of zoological findings since the beginning of the twentieth century. But what both fellow specialists and scholars from other disciplines particularly balk at is a chapter called “Prospects: The Nameless Fear,” devoted to the correspondence of animal to man under extreme conditions. Initial reaction is that here the author has stepped over a line. One erstwhile colleague complains angrily that Ludwig Kaltenburg seems to have forgotten where he belongs.
4
KALTENBURG TALKS ABOUT a prisoner held for years in solitary confinement who relieves his isolation by befriending the crows that gather every day outside his cell window. Talks about the common practice of inflicting electric shocks on working dogs to make them bond more closely with their masters. Talks about rats. About bird-watching outside Stalingrad and in Leningrad; wonders whether the proximity of death, paralyzing all their limbs, makes people and animals particularly clear-sighted. However, the question of where his case-study material comes from remains open, since Ludwig Kaltenburg fails to name either written or oral sources. Thus he is vulnerable to the charge of using practically unverifiable information and developing his theories from phenomena of which he has no personal knowledge.
A case in point is the episode in Dresden in February 1945, when a horde of monkeys escaped from the bombed-out zoo and a “well-known acquaintance” or, as we are told elsewhere, a “student” of Kaltenburg’s claims to have had the chance to observe behavior extremely unusual in animals, and lasting several hours. The witness, still a child at the time, says that all through the night when Dresden was reduced to rubble and ashes, he was wandering about in the town’s biggest park looking for his parents, and that by the next morning he was still in the same state of literal disintegration, that is to say, bereft of any sense of self. At the edge of the Great Garden he stopped near a group of distraught people with whom half a dozen chimpanzees or orangutans or rhesus monkeys had mingled — Kaltenburg’s witness could not recall the exact composition of the group.
Eyes on the ground, the survivors search for familiar faces. At some point the chimpanzees too begin to scrutinize the features of the motionless figures; you might almost imagine they are looking for guidance from the eyes of the living and the dead in turn. In fact the observer thinks he notices something like relief among the animals when the humans rouse themselves from their torpor, collect the bodies strewn everywhere, and lay them out in some sort of order on an undamaged grass verge. The chimpanzees know nothing about identifying lost relatives, nothing about lining up the dead on the grass, nothing about how you take a corpse by the shoulders and feet to carry it across to its own kind. And yet one ape after another joins in this work, as Kaltenburg reports, without saying who described this scene for him. I did.
II
1
WHERE WERE THE old man’s urges I was supposed to succumb to, where was the rush of hot blood, where, I wondered, was the sheer panic, combined with the shrewd look of appraisal? And where was the masterful air of the older man that I ought to have been projecting in the presence of a woman who was only half my age but who had nonetheless shown an interest in me, even if it was only in my talk? I was privately surprised to find in my behavior no sign of that ridiculous capering, crowing, and chest-puffing, not the slightest trace of the courtship display that my younger self would have anticipated from a gray-haired gentleman like me.
Now and again I almost long to be one of those men I have often observed doing what’s expected of them at their age. I would make a show of fussing around in my pocket to produce a fresh white handkerchief with which to continually mop my brow, and it would not occur to this young woman before me to be in the least surprised, even though it was only the end of March and not at all warm. At most she would ask sympathetically whether she could fetch me a glass of water, and whether we should take a short break, which could only mean that she would allow me some privileged access to her life that is never granted to men of her own age. By inclining my head I could indicate that something of the kind she was suggesting would be very acceptable, while I patted my neck with the damp handkerchief, imagining it was her young woman’s hand dabbing the beads of sweat from my skin, not my own.
Years ago I used to pity my young contemporaries constantly showing off their Latin and Greek, even murmuring words like “omnibus” as though imparting some arcane knowledge to the lady beside them. But while those young fogeys may have become wise old gentlemen, silently observing a few blades of grass day in and day out, or fatuously enjoying misquoting their dubious classical jokes, today I’m the one who is flaunting my Latin for this young interpreter: Carduelis carduelis, I say slowly, so that she can write it down; her list is gradually filling up. Carduelis chloris, I say, and Carduelis spinus.
The names of birds: goldfinch, greenfinch, and siskin. “What on earth do you want to learn bird names for?” I had asked when she rang and told me that she had to prepare for a high-ranking visitor from the English-speaking world who was interested not only, as protocol demanded, in informing himself about economic developments since 1990, but — as a seasoned nature-lover — in discussing the local flora and fauna with a few of his hosts. It wasn’t the names that worried her, she could easily learn them by heart, but she couldn’t visualize the birds. She asked if, to put her mind at rest, I could spare a couple of hours to go through the English, German, and Latin names of the mounted specimens on display.
The collection I used to work in was formerly located in the old town but is now housed at a new site: it was there that we arranged to meet. The old building had a view across to the castle ruins. Tourists came to admire the mural, the Procession of the Dukes, and in summer voices drifted up from the street to my room, Russian babble, Swedish babble, then the unvarying harder tones of the tour guide. And in the evenings I used to stand on the banks of the Elbe to watch the gulls flocking above the Court Church. Here in the new building I have been given a little room in the corridor where the offices are. I still come nearly every week. I’m drawn to the mounts. One of my colleagues had directed Frau Fischer to me. “And don’t forget,” I managed to call down the phone before she rang off, “you’ll have to go out to Klotzsche, the Zoological Collections aren’t in the former House of Assembly anymore.”
I met Katharina Fischer at the top of the stairs. We turned from the open corridor into the collection area, through the glass door from daylight to artificial light, past the notice NO FOOD IN THE COLLECTION ROOMS, PLEASE. Silence. The whitewashed walls, the heavy iron doors, the composition floor under our feet, were evenly lit by the fluorescent strip lights. The double door next to the sign saying DRY VERTEBRATES was lemon yellow, canary yellow, and easily wide enough to allow the bulk of a mounted adult elephant to be wheeled into the collection, although nowadays the room behind the door contains mainly animals you would have no trouble carrying in your jacket pocket. I’ll never get used to this building, won’t have to, the move at the end of 1998 coincided with my leave-taking from the Ornithological Collection.