“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.