Ludwig Kaltenburg was in his element when he could pluck a surprise out of the hat, especially if no one knew what effort had gone into it. The professor was only really pleased with himself when he seemed to have been inspired by a sudden brain wave, a crazy idea, and in a flash had come up with an elegant solution to the toughest problem. You might suspect the struggles behind the scenes — but you couldn’t say so, because for a Professor Kaltenburg it was all child’s play.
I was supposed to fall upon his neck, to jump for joy. But I could neither move nor speak. The surprise had succeeded. Afterward, I hoped he would assume I had been struck dumb with delight. It looked as though Ludwig Kaltenburg was fulfilling wishes I didn’t even know I had.
When I look back on that afternoon, I am overcome with rueful feelings. I’m ashamed to think that I almost feel sorry for Kaltenburg. His outburst, his surprise, the staged attack of weakness — as though he were covering up a real state of weakness, as though contrary to appearances he had shown that he could be hurt, that he had in fact been hurt by me. The “greatest disappointment of my life”: just as I was previously unwilling to tell him about my foster family, so I had not confided in him about Klara. He wouldn’t have held it against me that I didn’t visit him so often, no longer came over to Loschwitz in a tearing hurry and left again soon afterward muttering some excuse — it didn’t take much imagination to work out that a date with a woman lay behind it. Kaltenburg was probably waiting for me to tell him about Klara. But I didn’t. He was offended. He was afraid I would slip away from him. And that is how, always willing to try anything that would turn the threat of defeat into a triumph, he came up with the idea of the study place.
Those clear, plain sentences of Kaltenburg’s that run through my life — they’ve always been a puzzle to me: his definite “It’s the boy I’m worried about” in the discussion with my father that I heard from the conservatory. His “I said you wouldn’t get rid of me so quickly” between two interviews outside the Loschwitz villa on a radiant afternoon. The sentence he tossed out to me which forbade contradiction, no, which belonged in a world where Kaltenburg simply couldn’t be contradicted: “You’ll be one of my disciples.” And at some point, arising out of his despair, half self-surrender, half challenge to me: “Then you’ll always remember me.”
Right into the eighties, in his late letters, there was a whole series of such sentences, and in situations where my courage threatened to fail me I muttered them to myself, hearing Kaltenburg’s voice, his confidence, his irrefutable phrasing. How clear and predetermined was the life — and, with the best of intentions, the life of others — he saw before him, stretching into the future: the world as created by Ludwig Kaltenburg. Whenever I couldn’t see any way forward I willed myself to take heart from his sentences, but as soon as I heard him speaking, the words had an uncanny ring to them, as though someone were trying to teach me to be afraid. Kaltenburg’s confidence has been alien to me throughout my life.
Had he in fact made a plan in the early forties, when he was in and out of my parents’ house, and had he, the falcon poised to swoop, spotted with his sharp eyes a creature down there on the ground that looked promising to him? Did it simply suit him that after the move to Dresden the youth seemed as attached to him as the child had previously been, did he feel, rather than plan, at that moment that he should take care of the war orphan who was wandering aimlessly through life, steer him, make something of him? It may be that he was at pains not to destroy my childhood image of the great Professor Kaltenburg, perhaps he himself needed to make a supreme effort to maintain it after what had happened to my parents. Naturally he always had a weakness for youth, he couldn’t help turning toward a youngster, supporting him, so long as he spotted in his eyes the least sign of a sharp mind. And once he had committed himself to someone, he wasn’t going to drop him again in a hurry.
It must have been clearer to him than to anybody that I did not have the makings of a world-class ornithologist. All the same, I was “his candidate.” I can remember that — though it was none of my doing — I even came out ahead of a school leaver of about my age who had more ability and stamina than I, was harder-working and brighter. But the less ambition I demonstrated to Kaltenburg, the more privileges I was granted, the easier everything was made for me.
In the grounds of the Institute I was the only one Kaltenburg addressed with the informal Du, while I stuck to the formal Sie for him. That alone made me stand out in his surroundings. I helped out here and there, I was around when needed, but it was always clear that I was free to come and go as I pleased. And the director of the Institute always had time for me. Scientists came to visit, old friends of Kaltenburg’s, they called each other Du. Young people, assistants, researchers starting out were called Du at first, but at some point Kaltenburg moved without much fuss to the Sie form. With colleagues and people from politics or culture, it was Sie on both sides. Kaltenburg would call me over: “Can you [Du] give me a hand with the stickleback tank?” and I would say, “Do you [Sie] need rubber gloves?” That’s how it was during my time as a tenured member of staff at Loschwitz, and we kept it up after the Institute closed, right until the end, in our last letters.
I had been given the chance to study zoology with Professor Kaltenburg in Leipzig. He didn’t want any thanks, however, or at least he waved away the words I had scraped together when he was briefly called out of the room by a colleague. When Kaltenburg came back—“We must go down to the garden”—he seemed to have put the preceding scene out of his mind completely. “Yes, you’re welcome,” he growled, “what did you expect from me,” and, full of impatience because he might be missing some new observation, “Now, let’s go and take a look at the geese.”
All the same, I did not become a disciple of Kaltenburg’s. At least, if he could look back and survey my path from today’s standpoint, I don’t believe that he would want to describe me as “his disciple.” I would have had to share his views, at many stages of my life, and that was a situation which was often painful for me. Especially just before his death, when I had to look on from a distance at the kind of followers he had around him. Among them were some whose rather clumsy, not to say small-minded, efforts to defend their honored professor hardly improved matters when they fought back against public attacks with the blind fury of wounded epigones, only to attract even noisier criticism of the professor. Suspicions which Ludwig Kaltenburg, left to himself, would have defused with some calm words. It’s possible that, while not reproaching me, he was revealing a trace of his disappointment that I never became his disciple when his later letters referred to the “lickspittles” and “idiots” who surrounded him.
The interpreter followed my pointing hand, lights in the Weisser Hirsch district, lights in Loschwitz, the roads showed up as dotted lines running up the hillside, that’s where Ludwig Kaltenburg used to live, up there on the right. No, I wouldn’t have wanted to follow him to the West. Even assuming I hadn’t met Klara, hadn’t run into Martin again, I had long ceased to regard Dresden as a mere stopping-off point, a place where I got stuck for a while due to unfortunate circumstances. And it was the professor I had to thank for that.