And one day, as I was engrossed in studying our gray-headed goldfinches, Martin Spengler suddenly turned up on the doorstep as if from nowhere, leaned across the table, and said, “Reminds me of a piece I was once planning for Venice.”
That must have been in 1980. Martin, who was already world-famous by that time, bowed and introduced himself with a strange, Dutch-sounding name. He had come from Amsterdam, the sole male participant in a tourist group which, after an intensive sightseeing itinerary, was now enjoying a coffee break, allowing Martin ostensibly to take a stroll along the Elbe while actually visiting me in the Ornithological Collection. He wanted to see everything, every drawer containing skins, the nests, the mounts, wanted to meet my colleagues, was astonished by the pigeon’s nest behind the toilet, admired the snapping turtles in their aquarium in the corridor. Nothing was beneath his notice, no detail was lost on him, the tinned milk, the chipped Meissen cups, the coating of a tabletop, the curtain at a little window overlooking the courtyard, the smell in the stairwell — Martin soaked up these impressions as if it were high time he revised his idea of art.
Just as it’s difficult to identify a bird when you see it in surroundings where you wouldn’t expect it, so it didn’t occur to any of my colleagues, nor to his traveling companions, nor to the tour guide, nor to the border officials, to suspect that the old friend unexpectedly calling on me was the famous Martin Spengler, although his clothes, his figure, and his posture differed in no way from his usual appearance. He hadn’t even bothered to disguise himself by growing a beard or wearing glasses, he knew he could get by perfectly well as an art-minded tourist among other art-minded tourists.
The art historians, on the other hand, wonder to this day why Martin Spengler’s late work bears so many obvious traces of local life in this area. Noting the dull, earthy, and industrial colors, the biological references, the worn but almost lovingly assembled functional objects of his later installations, they have interpreted them as imaginary extensions of 1950s perceptions into the present, but so far nobody has thought of looking at the register of the Dresden Interhotel, the Newa, for a supposed Dutchman signing in under a pseudonym.
He stayed for about two hours, which seemed like a whole long day to me, we said not a word about complicated travel arrangements or nerve-racking border checks, not a word about the worrying condition of the building, the ruins around us, or the miserable appearance of the city in general. We were completely wrapped up in the world of the collection’s holdings, every drawer revealed new natural marvels, the blue jays, the shore larks, the blood-red, white-spotted parts of the strawberry finches, and under Martin’s thorough scrutiny, alert to every shade of gray and brown, even the close-packed rows of house sparrows, whose live counterparts were regarding us from the windowsill, radiated a glow that few people ever notice.
“These faces — every sparrow here has an individual face,” cried Martin, he exclaimed, “What I’d really like to do is take the whole case and set it up in a gallery.”
It was also thanks to Martin that I started writing to Ludwig Kaltenburg again. When I showed Martin the great auk among the exhibits recently returned from the Soviet Union, he stood speechless before the bird, reverent, overwhelmed, stunned, torn this way and that between the different eras. Finally he stepped up closer, viewing the great auk from all sides, stammering, “He must have been pleased,” and again, respectfully, “It must have given him enormous pleasure to hear about this,” and although I knew what he meant, I wasn’t quite sure whether his respectful tone related to the great auk or to Professor Kaltenburg.
That same evening I took an envelope, addressed it to Professor Ludwig Kaltenburg, Vienna, Austria, and placed in it a carefully folded sheet of paper on which I had written nothing but “The great auks are back.”
I was glad at the time I had taken this step, and I’m even gladder now. Otherwise I would never have heard about the doubts the professor had to struggle with in his final years, nor about the worries he probably did not care to divulge to anyone around him. Many things never went beyond the letters, letters to a very distant country, letters to somebody who had never become a disciple of the great Ludwig Kaltenburg.
“I’m sure you’ll let me have a detailed description soon,” he replied. “Meanwhile, it’s reassuring to hear that all the exhibits are clearly back in place, insofar as they survived the war unscathed, and weren’t scattered all over the landscape by disappointed looters in the first days of peace. And don’t ask me how I am. You know I’ll always make an effort to appear cheerful for your sake.”
I respected his wish, and so it was only through incidental remarks in the course of our correspondence that I managed to piece together some idea of the professor’s physical condition. For example, when I asked him whether he still loved to spend his days in the open air as he had always done, he wrote back that those long walks in the country, where his animals had always kept him company, were now a thing of the past for good and all. For more than two years he had been confined to a wheelchair and mostly stayed indoors, or in the garden if the weather was fine. The less mobile you were, the more sensitive you became to the temperature. Storms, rain, and blizzards — he saw them now only from the terrace window.
“I have started getting rid of old documents,” he wrote, “but don’t worry, I have no intention of discarding incriminating material, as you might assume, what matters to me is completing my public break with ideas which I supported for many years without being aware of the madness that underlay them.
“Everybody wants to protect me,” he wrote. “But when I listen to my protectors it often gives me the creeps, as though I were surrounded by people who doggedly insist there’s no conclusive proof of evolution. Even the noise, the noise they create, you know, that’s a betrayal in itself.”
My father had always been wonderful to argue with, wrote Kaltenburg, without my raising the subject. “Your father was never a National Socialist — any more than I was — he had no connection with those people and refused to have any truck with them. Hence the misunderstanding, our quarrel, if you like, when I joined the Party without sharing its convictions. No, I certainly never appeared at your place wearing a Party button in my lapel, your parents would have shunned me a lot sooner if I had. It’s always puzzled me how he eventually found out. Somebody must have reported it to him, some malicious person to whom our friendship was a thorn in the side. He had a hard time with his university colleagues, in fact he once confided to me that he was afraid they would stop at nothing to get rid of him.”
When I cautiously followed this up with a question, he responded, “Your parents were deliberately frozen out. I was very sharply attacked at the time for persisting in visiting you. As a small boy you won’t have noticed the depressed mood in your family. Your house seemed desolate, and I almost think that was why your parents acquired their first birds. Yes, they did it for you, though not for the reason you’ve always assumed. No, an atmosphere of death — I wouldn’t call it that today.”
Certainly, he wrote in a letter at Christmas 1988, sooner or later, like him, I would become aware that at an early point in my life, almost too early to identify, I had involuntarily begun to discriminate in terms of human and animal encounters. “Your early confrontation with a bird, for example, in whose company you spent an afternoon in your drawing room, will be strictly separated in your memory from the following events, the entry of your nanny or your parents on the scene.” Every zoologist, maintained Kaltenburg, had a similar story to tell. True, our mentors also stood out in our mind’s eye, the figures under whose direction we channeled and refined our animal observations, but such a mentor came into the picture only as a secondary step, when his attention was attracted by a young person absorbed in the world of animals.