In one of his last letters he assured me that he hadn’t actually written the infamous gas chamber sentence himself but that a zealous follower of his had inserted it at a late editorial stage. He wouldn’t name him, just as he had given nothing away in the previous twenty-five years, he had taken all the unpleasantness upon himself and had protected the anonymity of his assistant’s handwriting. “It’s a bitter irony,” he wrote at the end of January 1986, after Martin’s death, “that in the end we both suffered the same fate. When I think how difficult it was for me at that time to fend off your friend’s admiration — only to realize now that both he and I gathered more and more acolytes around us, but, sadly, not independent-minded followers.”
He was forced to cast his mind back to his earlier researches. He would have done anything in the world to avoid returning to them. No animal obstructed his view of his own past. Kaltenburg lost the ground from under his feet. Just as I came close to losing the ground under my feet. His early engagement with human beings fell within his Posen phase. He will not have given my father the relevant essays to read. And if on the tram home my mother responded evasively, almost nervously to my questions about Professor Kaltenburg, then it was simply because he himself had nothing very clear to say about his activities in the military hospital in Posen, which remain obscure to this day.
12
MATZKE.” PERHAPS ONE reason why that long, indeed grotesquely long phone call in November 1973 between Dresden and London has stayed so fresh in my mind is that for the first two or three minutes after I picked up the receiver, which seemed to me like an eternity, I couldn’t match the voice at the other end to the caller’s name.
“Matzke. Can you hear me? Is there someone else on the line?” It was Ludwig Kaltenburg.
A London conference had been organized to mark his seventieth birthday. Zoologists from all over the world were gathering in recognition of the life and work of their celebrated colleague. People were only waiting for the greatest prize of all, from Stockholm. But it is surely not wrong to see in the London conference a reaction to the scandal that, beginning with the Apocalypse book, had rapidly become a scandal surrounding the person of Ludwig Kaltenburg himself. By this time there was also a rumor circulating to the effect that after the annexation of Austria by the Reich, the professor had immediately applied for membership in the Party, banned till then in Austria. There was no mention of it in the curriculum vitae he had put together himself especially for the conference.
“Professor Doktor Eberhard Matzke. Those mudslingers. And all the papers, even the serious ones, have reproduced this nonsense spread by East Berlin. But do you know what I did today?”
“Went to see the ravens in the Tower?”
“That was later in the morning. Straight after breakfast I was already giving a TV interview saying once and for all what I think of these mudslingers who make me out to be a Party member. As though I didn’t know what’s behind it. Who started this rumor. Only Professor Doktor Matzke can be that persistent. With the camera running I said that if that’s what the public wants, I can give them a cast-iron guarantee that I was never in the Nazi Party.”
It was getting on for midnight, I was lying in bed reading when the telephone rang. And I’ve got to say I wasn’t feeling particularly well disposed toward Ludwig Kaltenburg. I knew he was going to call, but I might not have got up to answer if Knut hadn’t been working hard on me for some months beforehand: “I’ve told the professor many times that he can call on you, he knows how important he is to you, but he’s shy about calling you, the attacks on him have made him quite timid.” I had written back in a noncommittal manner. Knut’s next letter included Kaltenburg’s CV. “He’s scared that even his closest friends might turn away from him, I’ve tried to make it clear to him that he needn’t fear anything of the kind, especially from you, on the contrary.” Knut knew where to put pressure on me, I felt duty-bound, perhaps less toward Kaltenburg than to him, Knut Sieverding.
“Can you hear me?”
“Sorry?”
“I’m going to prove it to them, colleague Matzke and his henchmen, give them cast-iron proof.”
Kaltenburg had lied. In his CV he had reduced his stay in Posen to a few months by claiming that in the summer of 1942 he was already a prisoner of war in Russia. But it wasn’t until the autumn or early winter of that year that my mother and I ran into him while out buying gloves in town. “I can give you a cast-iron guarantee”—the formulation suddenly seemed familiar to me, like a half-remembered sentence from childhood that you heard through an open door without being able to make sense of it. I lost concentration for a moment, accidentally made a noise, the tame starling was rustling in the rubber tree, I hadn’t understood the question, my father was speaking too quietly. In the background, Kaltenburg was working himself up into a fury—“Party, Party, I was never a Party man”—I didn’t need a Matzke to tell me that the professor was lying. “Didn’t share their worldview,” I heard him clamoring, my father had asked him the same question, to which we were now awaiting an answer. I heard “ugly campaign” and grasped that Kaltenburg had used the same words at that time to deny his Party membership, just as his CV was now suppressing information about our shared time in Posen, as though I were the one who was lying whenever I recalled childhood memories, as though I were just making things up.
I couldn’t raise it with him. He would have given me some convoluted explanation, about how Matzke was forcing him to make some awful moves in his public life just at the moment, we would have to wait for things to quiet down, and no, of course he hadn’t forgotten our earlier meetings, or his acquaintance with my highly esteemed and respected parents. I didn’t want to ask Kaltenburg. But he must have noticed that his phone tirades were falling on thin air, and suddenly he was quite crestfallen.
“And I was stupid enough to help this man.”
“So you were involved in the rise of Matzke after all.”
“Berlin? I had nothing to do with that. Earlier, I mean, much earlier. When he was collecting birds under the most adverse conditions.”
“You knew Eberhard Matzke before you came to Leipzig?”
“Oh, yes. That is, I may not have met him personally. But I gave him my support. We knew each other by name. Nineteen forty-two, it must have been.”
“He was in the army then — did you make sure he could continue his ornithological studies? Like Knut Sieverding in Crete?”
“Pretty much. No. Worse. Much worse. Matzke was in the camps. A terrible time. The awful nervous strain. He complained, as you can imagine.”
“He appealed to you?”
“Not then. Initially he thought he could sort things out for himself, in fact he seriously believed they would grant him an interview with the commandant. Amazing what people’s minds can dream up when they’re stuck in a hopeless situation. Of course, nothing came of his appointment with the commandant. But Matzke was tenacious. Who knows whether he patiently devised a different tactic or whether he bribed the right person at the right time, whether he went on bended knee to beg or whether eventually they just saw him as a weirdo — but at some point he received a special permit, complete with name, date, official stamp, everything in order, which must have looked odd when the text said something like ‘This is to confirm that Eberhard Matzke may observe birds.’”
“But people always say that birds avoided the camps, there was no bird life in the camps.”
“Quite right. The smoke. They couldn’t stand the smoke. So he had to be able to get out of the camp. He actually got permission to leave the camp for hours at a time. The guards at the gate soon got to know the bird-watcher, they exchanged greetings, perhaps even a few words when they were checking on what Matzke had shot that day.”