THERE WAS STILL a pale orange and blue glow in the sky over the city, a pair of cranes were winging their way up the Elbe, giving voice as they flew, and when we sat down at one of the empty tables outside a long-since-closed snack bar called the Elbe Idyll, Frau Fischer asked what had become of Ludwig Kaltenburg’s other animals.
The northern raven disappeared for good soon after its old friend. Some of the exotics went to dealers, some to the zoo, which also took the rare duck species. For some years I didn’t dare venture anywhere near the waterfowl ponds, because the older birds were absolutely not to be dissuaded from following me as far as the tram stop. The sulfur-crested cockatoo got away from me one day when I managed to corner it in Kaltenburg’s bedroom — it was clearly so disgusted that it wanted nothing more to do with me and went off to look for a new feeding station. Later, it was often spotted by people who were out walking in the Great Garden, and regularly visited the afternoon feeding sessions at the zoo. Taking up its position on a branch or on the large uprooted tree stump which also served the heron as a lookout post, the cockatoo squatted there, less on account of hunger, perhaps, than because it enjoyed the familiar company of the mandarin ducks and pochards, the red-breasted and bar-headed geese, of every kind of strange bird, in fact, whether they were cormorants, sacred ibises, or flamingos.
Like other birds, however, it will have succumbed to the long, hard winter of 1962–63, when the swans were solidly frozen in on the Elbe and the tits were picking at any fresh putty in window frames, attracted by the smell of linseed oil, which was becoming weaker by the day. One day a group of young field ornithologists who spent some years mapping the Great Garden came across a single primary feather in the snow and noted, “Vestige of an escaped bird,” then went on, “Obviously brought into the area by visitors,” and then, in view of the white parts of the feather, which had a yellow sheen in the winter sunshine, added, “Sulfur-crested cockatoo,” followed by a question mark. Because of severe frost damage, among other things, a positive identification would have been impossible.
A few former assistants took over the dogs. The resident tomcat was unwilling to leave his familiar territory, the neighbors went on putting food out for him until the end of the decade. We released Kaltenburg’s sticklebacks into the wild and distributed the tropical fish among various aquariums around the city: commercial firms, schools, the sanatorium in Wachwitz.
The hamsters? I can’t remember the details of what happened to them. Anyway, I believe two fundamentally different types of hamster must be distinguished in Kaltenburg’s life. When he talked about hamsters in the plural, he did actually have in mind the nocturnal animals who kept him company when everybody else was asleep. But when he talked about a hamster, singular, it was just as well not to form too concrete an image of this creature that constantly chewed paper and helped itself to important documents and private letters to build its nest; it wasn’t to be taken literally. If the minutes of a meeting had disappeared, let alone unanswered mail from friends, there would soon be a reference to the infamous hamster. And so in time I gathered that “the hamster” in the singular was simply another way of talking about papers that were, unfortunately, nowhere to be found.
Most of the Institute buildings were put to new uses, and I gather there was some idea of turning the villa into a guesthouse. But then it deteriorated bit by bit, the grounds became overgrown, quite a few animals may even have come back to live in this new wilderness. Long after its dissolution, Kaltenburg continued to be very interested in his former Institute, sending me back there time and again to keep him informed. I sent dismal reports to him in Vienna, but he reacted enthusiastically—“Good, excellent”; he was content to know that the Institute he had built up had not fallen into the hands of Matzke.
I wrote to him, “Now the rain has started to come in through your study ceiling.”
He replied, “Very good, go on reporting back.”
It wasn’t until the mid-nineties that the villa was renovated, that is to say, completely rebuilt from the ground up — the crumbling floorboards, the dry rot in the walls of the aquarium wing. The present occupants probably have no idea what sort of place they’ve moved into, they can’t begin to suspect all the things that came to light during the restoration work. Including perhaps a nest made out of scraps of paper, of Kantian paragraphs, and containing little mummified hamsters — it comes to me now that when I was clearing out the villa several adult hamsters fell prey to the buzzard, but as I couldn’t find their nest, their last litter must have perished.
Kaltenburg triumphed — in his letters, at any rate. A dubious triumph. It’s true that Eberhard Matzke did not succeed in extending his influence as far as Loschwitz, but then again, if he had done so, it might well have been precisely the right outcome: at least the Institute would have been saved, even if it would no doubt have been run along different lines from Kaltenburg’s. Until I managed to find a berth in the Ornithological Collection, it wasn’t a pleasant time for me, having to see staff layoffs taking effect and difficulties arising with the supply of animal feed. Not long after Kaltenburg left, my days in Loschwitz were numbered too, I found myself responsible for disposing of one familiar creature after another. Dead rooms, a dead garden — the whole Elbe hillside seemed to me bereft.
Meanwhile, near Vienna, Kaltenburg had long since begun to collect new animals around him, in the following years he was to build up colonies far bigger than his Loschwitz flocks.
However many species and specimens Kaltenburg may have surrounded himself with in the West, I’m afraid his Dresden experience always remained on his mind. I see his increasing turn to human beings as a reaction to a painful loss. In fact, perhaps Kaltenburg was driven to turn his attention to human beings because he sensed he would never again be able to give full and unconditional commitment to any animal, having once left his animal household in the lurch. That is my reading of his first book written in the West, his first extensive study of human beings, Archetypes of Fear.
Katharina Fischer said that, particularly from reading Kaltenburg’s polemic, The Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse, she felt she could see the way the author was gradually losing the ground from under his feet. It was as though he were waiting the whole time for someone to hold him in check while he raged ever more blindly. A rage from which no well-meaning assistant, no devoted follower, no human being, could have freed him, because it was directed at human beings themselves. Only an animal might have had that power, observing him from within its own world, with no comprehension of this noisy man who swept everything aside and foresaw a dismal future.
And then the author made a serious mistake, which would soon lead to his pamphlet being popularly known, not as The Five Horseman of the Apocalypse, but simply as Kaltenburg’s Gas Chamber Book. Frau Fischer had heavily underlined the relevant passage in her copy, and to this day I too could repeat it by heart. And yet it’s only a matter of an exaggerated formulation, in retrospect just a stupid thing, one of those peculiar turns of phrase used in the hope of surreptitiously erasing some dark chapter in one’s past but succeeding only in arousing the reader’s suspicions. But for Kaltenburg’s indignant comment that nowadays you could hardly talk about the differing value of different people without being accused of wanting to build new gas chambers, and but for the stubborn way he stood by his utterance afterward, it might never have come to light that, long before his return to the West, even long before Stalin’s death, he had turned his attention to human beings.