“That’s what attracted me to animals — there’s no way an animal can do anything else, it’s bound to take you seriously, even if you’re a creature who can’t yet walk, can’t speak, can’t even eat properly yet, and come crawling across the field in a diaper.”
Dispirited, we made our way to the garage, where Martin was waiting for us. No, we hadn’t got anywhere. The professor had digressed into basic principles. And yes, once again he had been careful not to refer to Martin by name. I took Martin one of the young chaffinches we had brought up together in Loschwitz. That was the most I could do.
“I suppose he left Dresden very soon after that?” asked Katharina Fischer.
Meanwhile the crows had made their way to the upper end of the island, far fewer birds than in winter, and yet their noisy competition for roosting spots dominated our whole area.
I couldn’t say now how much time elapsed between the two events. When did Knut make his stork film? It must have been 1959. During filming, a photograph was taken that has often been reproduced over time, and if I remember rightly, I was the one who took it, in Mecklenburg, far from Loschwitz and Kaltenburg’s Institute. But not with my camera, which is why, as far as I know, it never bears any attribution. The camera must have been Knut’s, or Martin’s — though I never saw Martin holding a camera. Three men are standing in front of a fence. Grassland scenery. Rough wooden posts with barbed wire stretched between them. Wheat beyond the fence, almost ripe for harvesting. You can see, from left to right, Martin, Knut, and, with his back to the camera, Herr Sikorski, bending down, preoccupied. The photographer has made an effort to include a nest you can make out in the background on the roof of a farmhouse, while Martin is smoking a cigarette and talking. Though his hands are casually thrust into his pockets, Knut looks as if he is being pulled in two directions at once — he is lending an ear to Martin and looking into the lens; I have caught him in a rare moment of impatience.
One of the last shots before Martin left for the West. And I can remember, as if it were yesterday, what it was he was so eager to get across. Knut couldn’t wait to get back to work; the stork on its nest looked settled enough, but it could easily decide to take off at any moment. Knut was incapable of concentrating on what his friend was saying, but I recall every word: Martin was talking about Ludwig Kaltenburg.
After what was basically an inexplicable breach, he had gone through all the phases that might conceivably follow such a vehement rejection, had ignored the professor, derided him, rebelled against him. He may have sensed that he would never be free of Kaltenburg’s influence. Martin disappeared. Nothing was heard of him for years. It wasn’t until the mid-sixties, when I was idly leafing through a few catalogs and picture books one day, that I was struck — because of his slight squint — by a snapshot of a stranger. He was looking past the camera, you couldn’t help but stare at that face, as if to attract the subject’s attention. The black hat, the white shirt with short sleeves, a shadow in the background, dark shapes, silhouettes, several people, obviously. That wasn’t Martin Spengler.
Today I know that the picture shows Martin during a stage appearance shortly after he had tipped a packet of laundry detergent into an open grand piano. It was taken on July 20, 1964, precisely twenty years after the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in his Wolf’s Lair, and at first sight there is something Führer-like about Martin, with his right arm raised. His expression wavers between trance and wild resolution; it looks as if he’s grown a little mustache, but then you realize it has nothing to do with hair. Coagulating blood. Martin is bleeding. Blood is trickling over his lips and down his chin. A few minutes earlier a student had smashed his nose.
That wasn’t him. And then I did recognize him, after all. Martin in the setting of his large, disturbing art performances which regularly caused public uproar, and he himself took fright at the reactions he had provoked. The point at which other people lose control and blindly hit out, he would fall into a strange state somewhere between rigid self-control and self-absorption. I can see Martin standing on a stage with a bleeding nose, outwardly attentive but inwardly listening: a portrait which, in its very theatricality — the posture, the raised arm, the hand presenting an object — has more impact than the many later pictures in which, though apparently oblivious of the camera, he acts out the role of being photographed.
Did the two of them ever meet again in the West? Not that I ever heard. And I think it’s unlikely. All the same, throughout their lives they seem to have moved along parallel lines, and as I corresponded with both of them I kept coming across mysterious coincidences. At the beginning of the seventies, for instance, when the professor began actively to promote the cause of wildlife conservation, he wrote to me one day that he had read out a manifesto in the Munich Hofbräuhaus beer hall, and because of the turmoil in the hall, he had stood on the table to make himself heard — and then I noted the date of the event, a day in July, the twentieth, eight years after Martin’s broken-nose appearance.
8
BETWEEN THE BANK and Bird Island the flow of the Elbe was much reduced, just a rivulet here and there. The gravel bed was exposed, by stepping from one patch of shingle to another you could easily get across, but we turned back. Bats had replaced the sand martins. In a bare, dead tree on the island bank a night heron sat motionless, watching the unruffled surface of the water below.
After what she had heard from me, said Katharina Fischer, she was slowly beginning to see Martin Spengler’s appearances from a different angle. She had always found the artist slightly repellent, a person who allowed nobody and nothing to share the limelight with him, who ruthlessly made himself the center of attention on the stage or in a discussion group. Images of a murmuring, gesticulating Martin Spengler standing his ground for hours on end had unnerved her rather than attracted her to Martin’s world.
“He behaved as if to prove to his audience how easy it is to ignore people. But now I’m suddenly wondering whether people played any part at all in Martin Spengler’s performances.”
And yet in his countless statements about art, man is central. Martin never missed a chance to propagate his vision of mankind, which I’ve never really grasped.
“Of course. Nonetheless, I have the feeling that he was chiefly concerned to move with the patience of an animal observer, as though in his mind he was always communicating with animals.”
Then Martin had let it be known, if only indirectly, that he understood the professor’s objections. That he accepted them. That he held nothing against him. On the contrary. A quiet echo. An overture.
“Messages directed at Ludwig Kaltenburg.”
No, Martin Spengler did not regard animals as “cute” or “nice.” That assessment was a crude error on Kaltenburg’s part. Since Martin’s banishment from the Institute there hasn’t been a year when I haven’t wondered whether the professor was right to get so deeply involved in the wrangling over the Berlin Research Center, whether he would ever have chosen Eberhard Matzke to be his archenemy, whether in fact he might not have spent the rest of his life in Dresden, if he had been a little more clear-sighted at that time. In Martin he would have had some support to counteract his forays into “zoological politics,” as Kaltenburg called it. A book about animal representation in art — it could be that in a weak moment he was afraid such a peripheral work might adversely affect his reputation, or that he heard his colleagues whispering, “Professor Kaltenburg’s reaching the age when you take up a hobby,” or “His great research days are behind him, he’s gone off poaching in other fields.” Which was exactly what he did later, and the further he ventured into sociology, anthropology, and history, the more damage he did to his reputation.