Having finished the book, Klara went to Herr Lindner’s bookstore to acquaint herself with the German that Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel bestowed on Proust. For a quarter of a year she was carrying around with her the first two volumes of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, printed by Hegner in Hellerau. At Christmas 1951 Herr Lindner surprised Klara with a copy of Pleasures and Regrets. This would have given her the opportunity to compare Ernst Weiss’s language with that of the other translators, but what intrigued her above all was the third part of the novel. Every time there was a card from Lindner in the mail with the brief message “Fresh goods. Regards, Lindner,” she hoped he had found the longed-for volume, published by Piper.
Apart from Ulli, no one knew how Klara had come across this author, and no one would have been able to understand why they took turns reading each other a few pages before going to sleep, as though, if only they studied the same sentences often enough, they would find out something about their own relatives, about whom their parents would tell them nothing.
“That man Schottlaender was right,” Klara interrupted once when she had lost the thread while listening to a reflection on ladies’ hats.
Ulli looked up from the open page and blinked in the beam of the bedside lamp. “With his story about the dead translators?”
“Herr Lindner knew the dates of their deaths: the first one died in June 1940, the second in September, and the last in January, shortly after New Year.”
“Here?”
“In France.”
“All three of them?” Ulli leaned forward to make out the face of her sister in the darkness on the other side of the room. “June — wasn’t that when the Germans marched into Paris?”
“I think they committed suicide.”
“You’ll have to ask Herr Lindner again.”
“I’ll do that next week. Where were we?”
“The grandmother has a teacher with an illegitimate daughter.”
“I thought it was ladies’ hats? Go on, read.”
“No, that’s enough for tonight.”
Ulli put the book down, turned off the light. She was still looking across to Klara’s bed.
“Did the translators all know each other, do you think?”
“Do you mean was Schottlaender friendly with the others? I don’t think so.”
“I wonder what he was doing during that time?”
“We can ask the Kochs.”
“And none of them died of old age. Did he really tell you that?”
“I don’t remember. Let’s go to sleep now.”
The English couple could not agree. Herr Koch said Schottlaender had worked in an arms factory, but his wife thought she remembered him looking after an old lady. Moving between the hall stand and the drawing room, Frau Koch halted in her tracks: “Or was he translating for the criminal police?”
“I think you’re wide of the mark there. Schottlaender never did slave translation labor.”
When we got to know each other, Klara was still waiting for the continuation of her Proust. For months the main topic at the Hagemanns’ had been the sensational trial of Philipp Auerbach: nobody there could possibly condone the police turning the state-appointed representative of victims of Nazism into the victim of a car chase on the autobahn, as though foiling the last-minute escape attempt of some enemy agent. Nobody thought much of the charges that took Auerbach to court. And nobody could forgive the expert witness who said that the accused was incapable of distinguishing between delusion and reality. But opinions were divided about the verdict.
“The man is innocent,” said Herr Hagemann heatedly. “He was in the camps.”
His unconditional support for the accused — even his wife couldn’t quite fathom it. He would allow no room for doubt about the man. When he referred to a “show trial,” there was a sharp intake of breath from one of the guests.
“You’ve only got to look at the judge. The assistant judge. The state prosecutor.”
His daughters had never seen him so angry. “I know this type of person, I know them,” cried Herr Hagemann, and both Ulli and Klara were convinced he was on the point of divulging something about their own relatives, if Herr Koch hadn’t interrupted him: “Herr Hagemann, we all know this type of person, but some of us also know Herr Auerbach.”
Frau Koch got up, excused herself, left the room. Klara went after her. She knew that Frau Koch was not so much concerned about Auerbach’s character as she was disturbed because they were discussing a trial taking place in the West.
And then, a few days after the verdict in Munich, Philipp Auerbach took an overdose of sleeping pills. Frau Koch didn’t want to know whether he was buried according to Orthodox rites, didn’t want to know whether a rabbi was present when the scuffle broke out at the cemetery. Whether the police really had used batons on the angry mourners, whether a water cannon was deployed. She didn’t want to know. For a while it looked as though the Kochs would stay in Dresden. Until Merker disappeared from the scene.
5
AS I RECALL, THE domestic offices were on the other side of the street, directly opposite the Institute villa. Often when I left Kaltenburg, I dropped the dirty washing off at the laundry, I can see myself crossing the road with lab coats covered in green algae stains, with matted winter pullovers, but now I wonder whether I didn’t find a secret path, for the buildings that most resemble the former laundry and joiner’s workshop are situated two house numbers further down the road, half hidden behind a hedge.
“Did the Kochs go back to England?” asked Katharina Fischer as we left the Institute villa behind us.
For a while, it’s possible that they thought about doing so. Rudolf Slánský was executed, at the Hagemanns’ somebody expressed the fear that the Prague show trial would have repercussions here as well, and in fact the first house searches and arrests were soon under way in Dresden. It seemed that they were only waiting for the nod from Moscow to start uncovering a Zionist conspiracy, since they already held the ringleader, Paul Merker. In January, Stalin — they could always count on Comrade Stalin in Berlin — gave the signaclass="underline" among the doctors in his entourage he had discovered agents working for an international organization, possibly even for Israel, who had designs on his life. Stalin gave full vent to this last delusion, accepting the confessions, satisfied to stack them up on the desk in front of him, there was no need for him to read a single one, after all he had often issued warnings about the Jews.
The first absences occurred in the Hagemanns’ drawing room. And the English couple no longer hesitated. They celebrated Stalin’s death in West Berlin: Charlottenburg.
Archetypes of Fear would have been a different book. Kaltenburg didn’t notice the gaps, I’m sure, until at least the first draft of his study. But you notice them when you’re reading the book: when he mentions “how people are crammed together into the most restricted spaces,” when he talks about “dehumanization”—you don’t quite expect a critique of living conditions in the modern city. At one point he mentions “heat death”—you can imagine the professor recoiling the moment he has committed this term to paper, you can see him reflecting, crossing out, looking for an alternative, until “heat death” comes to mean something about as innocuous as a warning against hothousing a child. Just when you think that Kaltenburg is finally beginning to face up to the gaps, writing how difficult it is to make someone understand “that a culture can be extinguished like a candle flame,” then you turn back a few pages and find that this chapter is devoted to a lengthy treatment of the war between the generations.