It is no doubt a matter for dispute whether my parents were being particularly progressive for their time or, on the contrary, old-fashioned and exceptionally strict: the conclusions they drew from the incident to help me conquer my bird phobia expanded step by step into a large-scale program of education. Knut and Martin suited their purposes right from the beginning.
My father had noticed them in his lectures for different, in fact opposing, reasons, which in itself says something about the friendship of the two young men, four years apart in age. Martin, the younger one, the boot cleaner, behaved badly, not to say rudely, one morning in an upper tier of the auditorium during an “Introduction to the Foundations of Botany” lecture. My father was obliged to ask him to be quiet, because as he was taking notes he was frantically shuffling his papers, and even groaned aloud at one point when my father came to cell structure. After the lecture, as my father was to tell my mother with forced jocularity, perhaps with a trace of bitterness, it wasn’t the disruptive student who came down to the podium to apologize, as you might have expected, but his friend Knut, the older one, who begged with exquisite politeness not for understanding, but for forgiveness, while Martin remained unmoved, brazenly lolling about up there on his bench and following with lowered gaze as Knut, on his behalf, repeatedly bowed his head to my father down there by the blackboard.
It transpired that both were in the Luftwaffe training school here in Posen, and Knut was a regular student of biology and zoology besides. Martin only occasionally accompanied Knut, his immediate superior, to the university. Martin, a lad who was not quite of this world and who tried to overlay his insecurities with a rough manner, a questing spirit, dreamy, you might say; others would call him impudent. Knut by contrast steadier, altogether more mature, he knew exactly what he wanted and was a good influence on his younger companion, a bit like an older brother.
Knut came out to show us his bird photos from the Courland Spit. He brought his camera with him, Martin and he allowed me to take them on secret paths through the woods, I showed them where we found deer.
“Up there — can you see it? A woodpecker.”
“Green or spotted?” I could hear it, but I couldn’t make it out yet.
“Now he’s moved off to the other tree.”
There on the ground was some sticky stuff, a ball of feathers, Knut poked around in it with his stick: “That’s where a long-eared owl has eaten a small songbird and spat out the remains.” He looked at me inquiringly.
“That’s what you call a pellet.”
And Martin: “Now I wouldn’t have known that.”
Sometimes Martin came to see me by himself. Soon the pilot, who wanted to become a pediatrician after the war, was a regular visitor to our place, even when my parents were not at home.
A gust of warm wind stirred up dust from the road, for a moment I couldn’t see anything. Somebody was coughing. Then Martin emerged from the dust cloud, his hands covering his mouth, nose, and eyes. As soon as he recognized me he waved. How dusty his boots were. Despite the sunshine, Knut had stayed behind to prepare for the next day’s classes. We had this afternoon to ourselves. But first Martin needed a big glass of cool tap water from the kitchen, to quench his terrible thirst. Maria was standing by the table peeling vegetables, and as soon as she saw who had come in with me she wiped her hands on her apron and beamed. If anybody else came into the kitchen with dirty shoes, she would go crazy. Martin had struck up an understanding with Maria immediately, in fact I sometimes thought there was a closeness between them, as though they hadn’t just met at dinner the other evening, when they could only exchange a few polite words in any case since Maria was serving the food. It almost seemed to me as if they had known each other for some time.
With Martin I spent whole afternoons in the countryside. He said he found the city too oppressive, not because of the streets and houses but because of all the people. We took nothing with us to the fields except a sketchpad and pencils. We just drew what happened to be in front of us: panicles, lumps of clay, beetles. Martin was utterly calm as he watched my efforts, his sleepy, then suddenly alert glance. He commented on this or that pencil mark, the strength, depth, darkness of the line, he saw the way the color covered the background, followed the direction of a movement, a turn or stroke as it tended out beyond the edge of the paper. A hare didn’t have to be a thing with long ears, if the seemingly shapeless collection of lines on the page squatted or leapt like a hare. He never minded that I drew a hare when he asked me to draw a bird.
I took my first snapshots, with Knut’s camera: in the garden, my parents with friends, an early summer’s evening, everybody looking up at me from the table, in the corner on the right you could see part of the greenhouse. Knut, half hidden in the grass while we waited for partridges. Martin, a snap I took of him on the road a long way from our house, and no, it didn’t peter out in a narrow track between the fields, it led, quite recently paved with granite, to the next village. In the sky in the background were dots, migratory birds, geese, you could tell by the formation.
So autumn came. And one event from that time particularly stands out for me, even though the central feature itself escapes my memory. Somebody — Martin? my mother? — at some point suggested that Knut should show us his film about the snipe which had been mentioned at our dinner together. To begin with it was no more than a persistently recurring notion, but how could you carry out such a bold venture, you’d need a hall to show it in, then there would be the problem of a suitable projector, and anyway, Knut was here with the Luftwaffe and as a student, he didn’t have the film ready to hand.
Gradually, though, everybody became quite carried away by the idea. If necessary you could rig up a makeshift projection room here in the house, the drawing room with its heavy curtains would do quite well. Once the others showed they were really serious about it, then of course Knut would gladly make sure we obtained the film. Martin would ask around about a projector, but without attracting attention. I had never seen my parents so feverish. However, they insisted I should not go around talking about it. They didn’t like their son trying to impress the neighboring children by boasting about family matters. Martin had found a suitable projector, which he could borrow for a day. My parents kept reminding me of my promise. Knut dropped in to tell us that somebody would soon be traveling to Königsberg and would visit Knut’s parents to collect the film and bring it safely back to Posen. I couldn’t wait for the weekend, I would no longer have to restrain myself.
The night before the great occasion I hardly slept; my parents were very excited too, I could hear footsteps on the stairs until very late, and voices coming from the kitchen through the open door. But the only thing I can remember about the snipe film itself is one word: “Rossitten,” and that didn’t even come from the film, which was silent. “Rossitten”: Knut used it in his commentary, describing the ornithological station up north in East Prussia.
The next morning I was woken by the preparations: on the ground floor chairs were being dragged to and fro across the parquet, my nanny was taking out a large bed sheet from the linen cupboard in the corridor to iron for use as a screen. I could hear the curtains being opened and closed again a few times, then my father went shouting through the house that we needed dark blankets. Our drawing room was being got ready for the screening. The stove and sideboard had disappeared behind the improvised screen. My father stood on a ladder pushing woolen blankets down between the window frame and the curtain rail.