Here again I read the nameplate next to the bell, it bore the same name as it had then, and once more I was loath to ring. Frau Fischer should have seen the garage before it was converted into a place for Knut to stay. The little window, the curtains — in reality I knew it wasn’t possible, but I had the feeling they were the same curtains as fifty years ago.
The garage was leased, that is to say it was used by the Institute, and in return Kaltenburg sent his workmen along. They fitted the garage out so that you could stay there overnight, put in a window, insulated the walls. Afterward they carried out repairs to the main building, and as I recall they even put in a sauna. A pretty high price to pay for the use of a drafty hut in which you couldn’t even have kept your coach horses with a good conscience. Kaltenburg thought wanting to live here was something of a fixation on Knut’s part, but then again, he had a soft spot for fixations, he was no stranger to them himself. Nonetheless, Knut couldn’t have cared that much about the garage, perhaps it was just that in the villa or one of the outbuildings he would have felt hemmed in, he enjoyed walking a few hundred meters after a long day’s work in the Institute grounds. The fresh night air over Loschwitz, not a soul around by then — the location and comfort of his lodgings were of secondary importance.
They put down linoleum, installed a bed that was much too wide, a bench, and a table; Knut was grateful for the accommodation. Except that, if it had been up to him, they would have made the window a bit larger. The workmen thought they were doing him a favor, the cold at night, the winter cold — whatever tales Knut had to tell about nights spent out in the open, nights on Lüneburg Heath as well as by the Black Sea, he was talking to workmen from Dresden, here we were in Loschwitz, and all they knew was that it can be bitterly cold at night in Loschwitz.
How proud Kaltenburg was to announce one morning that, in the intervals of a conference, he had persuaded Knut Sieverding to use the grounds of the Institute to make the hamster film he was planning. The open-air shooting had been completed, now filming was to proceed in an artificial hamster burrow. There were plenty of hamsters at the Institute, Knut would be able to take his pick from golden and black-bellied hamsters, tame animals gone feral and hand-reared wild animals. There was time, there was space, and all that Knut needed to bring with him was a few sacks of cement to build a proper hamster’s burrow in the garden.
“A pane of glass two meters square? We enjoy excellent relations with a first-class glazing firm, Herr Sieverding.”
There would probably have been enough cement at the Institute too. Knut asked no questions, however, but promised to take care of it. For all his pride at having engaged the aspiring young nature-film maker, Kaltenburg may have seen the requirement to supply cement as a little test of Knut’s serious intentions. But when a truck appeared outside the house and the professor watched Knut struggling with the cement sacks, hauling them off the loading platform and trundling them on the trolley into the garden, there was no doubt about it: with this man, Kaltenburg had made a good choice.
Knut Sieverding’s working methods were always a model of patience and attention to detail. He himself would have said that this was not exceptional in his line of work, since anyone who didn’t possess these qualities wouldn’t be making films in the first place but looking for some other kind of job. If I’d had the same attributes as Knut, it would have been hard for me then to decide whether to emulate him or the professor. Calm. Physical self-control. On good terms with sleep. And naturally his ingenuity in constructing blinds. The professor may have envied this ability in particular. When Kaltenburg worked with animals, it was always face-to-face. Film footage from the early days of the Institute shows him with ravens on his head, his forearm, and his knee, or on the Elbe shore with his young flock of jackdaws giving a demonstration of flying, or in the company of his ducks: the iridescent markings of the parent birds, the light, downy plumage of the chicks, and then a thick white shock of hair — a shot of a pond, taken almost at water-surface level, reeds swaying in the background. By contrast, in the countless open-air sequences Knut filmed in the course of a lifetime, not a single human being ever appears, although a specialist would know there must have been other people present because Knut often situated a number of cameras to capture an animal scene from a variety of perspectives.
He never appears in his own films, you don’t see him in a studio setting, or prowling around the landscape in search of a hidden breeding site. Knut may not have attached much significance to this, but it takes me back to his earliest bird shots, the period of his youthful excursions when, with camera and binoculars, he explored a small peninsula in the Frische Haff from early morning till sunset, for months on end, left completely to his own devices. There was no one there to photograph Kurt in the presence of birds, nervous as they were of human contact.
He invited inquisitive school friends to help him build a shelter; they laid a waterproof sheet across a framework of birch trunks, arranging twigs and grasses as camouflage, then squatting with Knut for two or three hours in his blind — increasingly restless, under an increasing strain as they peered into the landscape ahead, until they reached a point where they politely asked Knut for permission to leave him to it. He waited until they had left the breeding area, until even the lapwings felt safe, then carefully moved his observation post another half-meter closer to the nest.
Later he was surrounded by assistants, cameramen, and lighting specialists who could easily have helped him to make small appearances: Knut Sieverding lying in wait at dawn, Knut Sieverding pointing, Knut Sieverding surveying the mating ground, and here Knut Sieverding watching the ruffs at their ritual display. “What a waste of valuable film time”—that’s all he would have said. Even when his protagonist was a completely tame animal, he didn’t dare raise his voice above a whisper as he worked, staying motionless beside the camera, and sometimes for an instant you feel the stoat is looking offscreen for eye contact, the young woodpeckers are becoming impatient, because Knut Sieverding is not reacting to their pleading. His view was that the author should be out of shot, present only as a voice. As though he were still working under the conditions of his early days, or had derived from them something like a commitment to staying out of the picture.
I am one of those people privileged to have witnessed Knut in action, I have seen him in those moments where everything has to move very fast, where everyone is in place, where a scene is successful or goes even better than hoped for, when everybody feels like cheering but must hold back because animals can’t stand the sound of cheering. I have seen him full of self-doubt because of an unsatisfactory day’s work, bad weather, running out of time. I have retained even more powerful impressions from the preparatory phase of work on Knut’s full-length films, from those months partly filled with excited anticipation, in part characterized by depressing setbacks, when many a film project has collapsed because the director’s nerve has failed.
The way that Knut presented his plan for the hamster burrow to me, drawn on graph paper, in the tones of an engineer but with the air of someone rolling out a map of hidden treasure, and suddenly said, as though we had been discussing Kaltenburg all along, “You know how important you are to the professor,” then returned immediately to his design. Not “I’ve noticed” or “It’s obvious”: Knut said “You know,” as though he merely wanted to confirm that I had arrived unaided at an insight that had been in the offing for years.
“The last thing I want to do when I’m trying to film an encounter between animals is interfere,” he explained one day during the tedious business of training the stoat. I can see him sitting in the meadow, wearing an angler’s waistcoat as usual over his checked shirt, its pockets containing not hooks or worms but light meters, pencils, bits of film stock. Laughing, he let the stoat have the end of a flex. No, he wouldn’t interfere, but he did take the necessary precautions to prevent a fatal clash between his performers.