“Messy? Nothing new for a surgeon, surely.”
Somebody at the next table cleared his throat, the ladies at the window put down their coffee cups.
“And was it a childhood dream to become a librarian?” The professor avoided addressing Klara directly, he didn’t know whether to say Du or Sie to her. “That’s certainly the way Hermann puts it, at any rate.”
She told the story of the family outing to Leipzig, Kaltenburg listened, Kaltenburg was moved, and Klara didn’t seem to know what to make of his emotion, over a slice of cake, with my Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg in a café.
We were all relieved to be standing outside again. The professor’s choice of a café was certainly a considered one — later he was to tell me, “On principle I never invite young women into this desolate-looking animal household.” But outside in the fresh air, free of the audience in the café which was impossible to ignore, the conversation between Ludwig Kaltenburg and Klara could have been steered in a different direction, just as it would have taken another course altogether if we had been invited to Kaltenburg’s villa. The professor quickly said goodbye, he had another appointment, much less pleasant, but such appointments were unavoidable, and then I saw him hurrying away, an unusual picture: Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg on foot on a paved road in the middle of the city.
“Was I too forward?”
“Forward? No, honestly, you weren’t. And anyway, you must have noticed yourself: the professor has a soft spot for self-confident young women.”
“Too well behaved?”
“All three of us were well behaved.”
“So I passed?” Klara didn’t wait for my answer. “All the same, I had the impression that the professor thought I was trying to keep something from him.”
“He would like to have gone on listening to you: the Hagemann family, your salon, your guests.”
“What could I do, with all those people around us?”
“He shouldn’t have taken us there if he was keen to hear Hagemann stories.”
“I’m going to tell my parents to invite him more often.”
And the professor did indeed become a regular visitor to the Hagemanns’. But he came too late, only after Stalin’s death. He had missed certain decisive years, conversations and guests on whom he could have sharpened his powers of observation. Yes, the people themselves would have opened up worlds to him which he was never to know.
Kaltenburg should have come to Dresden right after the war and been in touch with the family, he should not have had to wait for me to get to know Klara Hagemann and to bring him his first invitation to the Hagemanns’. Klara was ahead of the professor, and she would always be ahead of him: with the best will in the world, Ludwig Kaltenburg would never be able to make up for that gap of seven years.
Take a figure like Paul Merker, I said to the interpreter: that name does not figure at all in Kaltenburg’s world. A member of the Central Committee secretariat and of the SED Politburo who was removed from all his official positions in 1950, expelled from the Party, and banished to the provinces in Brandenburg — at most the professor would have remarked laconically, “Ideologists put nooses around each other’s necks.” And added portentously, “A side effect of every ideology.”
It all had a different ring in the Hagemann salon. I learned to distinguish between those functionaries who had gone underground in 1933 and those who owed their worldview to a determined course of reeducation as POWs. I learned that you shouldn’t confuse those returning from Moscow with returnees from Scandinavia, those coming back from Mexico with others coming out of the German camps. One was said to have betrayed several members of his resistance cell, another to have spent years in hiding on a smallholding, and a third was reputed to despise people who feared for their lives. Here was a former SA man, once a lanky type, an excellent horseman, whose eyes were now sunk deep in his fat face, and there a gaunt character with an agitated look, as though forever assessing which figure in the inner circle should be pushed out next. They might use the same language, shake hands, slap each other’s backs, even hug: for the Hagemanns this was simply the solidarity born of necessity, and that kind of solidarity is notoriously unpredictable.
“Now they’re putting nooses around each other’s necks”: it was this same Paul Merker who, aware of the death camps, was talking in 1942 of a “world pogrom,” and — as a number of the Hagemanns’ guests thought — in doing so incurring the distrust of his comrades in arms. After his return from exile he could easily have joined the ranks of antifascist veterans without another word about those whom the new jargon described merely as “the persecuted.” But mindful of the “world pogrom,” Merker urged — and he enjoyed great respect for this at the Hagemanns’—that reparations should be made to all survivors, regardless of whether they had been avowed Communists or had been forced to wear the Star of David on their chests.
On one occasion, when the conversation centered on a Berlin theater premiere, a woman suddenly asked, “Has anyone heard from Luckenwalde lately?” She looked keenly into each face in turn — Klara’s father shrugged his shoulders, other guests shook their heads, everybody had understood, nobody had any information, so there was nothing for it but to return to the previous topic. They focused on the stage design, moving on to what could be done with trompe l’oeil painting, I looked across at Martin and could have sworn that he had missed the intervening question. I had no idea what “Luckenwalde” stood for. I would have understood references to Moscow, or to Leningrad, or, on that Advent Sunday of 1952, to Prague, because not an evening passed at the Hagemanns’ without some discussion of the Prague show trial of Rudolf Slánský and his fellow conspirators, singled out by the authorities only after the most painstakingly detailed investigations.
But what lay behind Luckenwalde escaped me until later, when on my way to the toilet I saw someone going up to the woman in question, and noticed the change in her expression after she heard him say, “Luckenwalde is supposed to have been wiped off the map.”
After the last guests had left, I was helping the two sisters in the kitchen, Ulli washed, I dried the glasses, Klara put away the dishes. “Did you notice anything about Frau Koch? She looked so distracted as she was leaving.”
Ulli had noticed her husband slipping his arm under hers on the path to the garden gate. “She was quite unsteady on her legs.”
“Like an old woman.”
Herr and Frau Koch: for the Hagemann daughters they were “the English couple”—they had spent many years in London, and had hesitated to return to Germany, to settle in Dresden. The West was out of the question for Herr Koch. As for his wife, whether here or there, she didn’t want to be reminded of the time of the “world pogrom.”
“Maybe I misunderstood, or perhaps it has nothing to do with it, but somebody took Frau Koch aside and told her Luckenwalde had disappeared from the map.”
“Who said that?”
“I don’t know his name, that shy medic.”
“Domaschke,” Ulli helped me out.
“Luckenwalde?” Klara reflected. “Did you hear any more?”
“No, that’s all. It gave her quite a shock.”
“That means Merker has gone into hiding.”
“Do you mean Paul Merker, the Politburo member?”
Ulli handed me a clean glass. “Politburo, that’s all in the past.”
“Or they’ve arrested him.” Klara looked at her sister. “Because they need someone to go after.”
“They have him running a grill in Luckenwalde.”
Impatiently Klara took the polished wineglass out of my hand. “That’s neither here nor there at the moment. They’ve arrested him, haven’t they?”