I remember how, in that same year, Klara once clashed with a representative of the Cultural Association. It was at a summer festival we were allowed to attend with Ludwig Kaltenburg. The effect on the professor must have been like watching the unfamiliar ritual of a newly discovered species. The two were discussing literature, initially it was hardly more than one of those conversations you have with a stranger in a large gathering. And Klara’s interlocutor was in no way an unfriendly sort, an elderly gentleman who looked as though he had lived through a great deal, even if he hadn’t achieved much of what he set out to do. Now he felt obliged to look to the future, and so for Klara’s benefit he lauded examples of the latest activist writing, naming names that are forgotten today, that were soon to be forgotten even at the time. Privately he may have been a Stendhal admirer, but whatever names Klara put forward, he dismissed the authors out of hand. Inwardly seething, he worked himself up to the point of praising the most dubious tractor-versifier, in his blind zeal he would even have betrayed his beloved Stendhal. Klara did not give way, she went for broke: Proust. A body of work, she maintained in a completely unwavering voice, that was practically without equal in our century.
Klara was being foolhardy, she knew that, but in such moments everything was eclipsed by her fearlessness, not even Vorkuta existed. It took her interlocutor a second or two to compose himself. A word like “debauchery” sprang to his lips. He suppressed it. What came out was “decadence.”
But whatever attack he launched against Proust, Klara had an answer to all his phrase-mongering, and of course she let slip that she had read a few hundred pages by that decadent, debauched author. The Cultural Association representative could have broken off the altercation, could have sought out different listeners. It was as plain to him as to anybody else who was following the exchange of blows that he was not going to convince this “defiant,” articulate “girl.” But he could not tear himself away. Something pinned him to the spot. Some voice he didn’t recognize was telling him to go on arguing with Klara. Finally, all he could do was exclaim, “We don’t need anyone like Proust. We don’t need any Proust here.”
Like all of Klara’s admirers, Kaltenburg was dazzled by her energy, grateful that this young woman had dared to banish Vorkuta for a while, as though she had the power to turn the place back into a blank spot on the map. Afterward, though, he asked me in all confidence, “Tell me, this Proust, is he really one of the greatest?”
He was aware of the years he had missed at the Hagemanns’, for sure. If he had been able to envisage those faces, recall those conversations when he began work on Archetypes of Fear, then there would be no uncertainty today about precisely what he meant by “atmosphere of death.” Perhaps after more than two decades Kaltenburg might simply have dropped this favorite phrase of his, might have replaced it in new editions of older works with another, clearly delineated term. Or he might, once and for all, have struggled through to a definition of the shadowy expression “atmosphere of death.” Whatever the painful experiences involved in such an undertaking, Kaltenburg would not have shrunk from it, would not have turned his head away.
“Are you really sure?”
He must have realized he had missed something.
“But are you certain that he would have seen things differently among the Hagemann circle? Would people like the Kochs, Rudolf Schottlaender, or Klara Hagemann have led him to revise his ideas?”
That’s what I would have wished for him, at any rate.
It had stopped drizzling. The narrow road ran gently up the hill, and Katharina Fischer was wondering whether, at his age, Ludwig Kaltenburg really would have welcomed a rethink.
“And after all, at that stage the Cold War tensions were gradually beginning to ease off.”
There wasn’t much to stop him, in fact — all he lacked was a lifetime ahead of him. If he had been a younger man or, as he once wrote, a “representative of a future generation,” he would have approached the phenomenon of fear from a completely different angle.
“Under pressure from younger colleagues?”
I think that’s unlikely. Nobody could have forced him to make discoveries.
So the “atmosphere of death” in his writings remained to the end a barely definable field that was the setting for a series of varied, insufficiently delimited phenomena. The “atmosphere of death” encompasses injured birds as much as countless field-hospital patients. According to Ludwig Kaltenburg, it includes in equal measure “the displaced,” “the homeless,” and “those ground down between ideologies.” And although the professor may gradually have become uncertain while working on his manuscript whether he was using the expression appropriately at any given point — in fact eventually he could not have said what he meant when he originally coined it — the “atmosphere of death” spread without distinction across slaughterhouses and flocks of dead jackdaws and military bands playing funeral marches alike, and had long since claimed a child wandering through the Great Garden during a night of bombardment.
But what use would a term like “world pogrom” have been to Ludwig Kaltenburg?
6
TO OUR RIGHT LAY some derelict land where for a while a few huts had stood, which, if I remember rightly, were torn down in the late fifties. Workrooms and dormitories, enclosures, and an infernal stench that pervaded the surrounding area when warm air crept up the hillside.
Ludwig Kaltenburg was very keen on a close bond between the researchers at his Institute. That’s not to say they all had to have the same outlook on the world, the world of animals included: far from it. But I won’t go into the experiments with hearing-impaired rhesus monkeys with which Etzel von Isisdorf began here.
“A hut full of rhesus monkeys?”
Yes. And even as a student at that time, when I was allowed to participate in the big evening meetings, I didn’t take in his daily reports. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. Perhaps that’s why the rhesus monkey section gradually developed into an institute within the Institute. Almost as soon as von Isisdorf accepted an appointment in the USA, the professor had the temporary housing demolished. After all, Kaltenburg argued, the neighbors — the non-animal-loving neighbors, that is — were already under almost inhuman pressure, without imposing that stench on them.
While Katharina Fischer walked silently at my side, I was trying to shake off some unbearable film images that had been running through my mind since I had brought up the name of Etzel von Isisdorf. A monkey’s empty eyes, the bared teeth, the broken impression the animal makes on the observer, the look of a terrible presentiment running through it as it turns inward to listen and hears nothing. Its lips tremble as if filmed in slow motion, although the sequence was shot at normal speed.
When we reached a crossing, the interpreter pointed to a corner building: “Did that belong to the Institute as well?”
Maybe. Although it’s quite a distance from the main Institute site. The numerous many-angled extensions, the clutter under the awning: at first I didn’t associate anything with this building, but then we turned off to the right, and there was the small window in the side wall of the garage, the wall was piled up with rain barrels and garden tools, I saw the curtains, and then I remembered: this was where Knut stayed when he had work to do in Loschwitz.
“In the house?”
No, in the garage.
“In that poky den?” Katharina Fischer couldn’t believe it.