Read Online Kaltenburg by Marcel Beyer - Free Book Online

cardboard boxes on top of the cupboard, DAMAGED NESTS, NO LABEL, NEST STANDS , perhaps she was avoiding looking at me. The goldfinch, strikingly colorful with a red face against its black-and-white head, brown body, the rump again white, the tail and wings—they have a yellow band, hence the “gold”—are black.
    We had begun by discussing the fact that my voice had never taken on a local timbre, despite the sixty years I had spent in Dresden. Certain everyday expressions, of course, one or two constructions, and unconsciously, especially when I’m tired, a slight slurring of my speech. But for me Saxon has remained a foreign tongue. Sometimes I secretly envy people who are at home in a recognizable dialect or even just a regional inflection, I’ve always listened carefully, acquiring a tone here, a touch of red, a few words there, which in time ran together to form a yellow band, and I’ve mixed them all into my total speech picture, my parents’ white High German, the darker coloration of my surroundings here. You could say someone like me has a goldfinch accent, with a bit of local color picked up in every quarter.
    â€œSo I’d have to think of you as a goldfinch.”
    I asked the interpreter to point out the thistle finch on the desk for me.
    â€œThis colorful one,” she said and drew a circle around her drawing of a goldfinch.
    â€œAnd Ludwig Kaltenburg was your teacher? Of course, it’s easy to forget that he taught zoology in Leipzig for years. Because he was an Austrian, I always think of him as someone whose whole life was bound up with Vienna. His famous Dresden Institute. When did he leave the GDR?”
    Shortly after the Wall went up. Although I’m not quite sure that Ludwig Kaltenburg ever really was in the GDR, or whether he insisted that he lived in Dresden and simply made a few excursions from here to the GDR.
    â€œBut he left for political reasons, didn’t he?”
    He would have shrugged that off. “I don’t understand the finer points of ideology. I’m a zoologist. Everybody contributes in his own way.” And if his interlocutors should happen to shake their heads or put their finger to their lips or even look at him askance, Kaltenburg was always ready with a disarming smile, adding, “As a zoologist, however, I know that there can be no going back to conditions that have already been overcome.” He would have invoked Darwin, talked about “difficult struggles” and “victory over the counterrevolution,” he would have recalled the Dresden zoologist Adolf Bernhard Meyer, a passionate advocate of the theory of evolution, and finally, with expressions like “historical necessity” and “not by chance” and “in this time and place,” he would have returned to his own specialization without having blotted his copybook.
    Yes, there were political reasons. Or else Ludwig Kaltenburg left out of desperation.
    â€œYou got to know him as a student, in Dresden?”
    It was a renewed acquaintance. Early fifties. My parents already knew Kaltenburg. If we hadn’t had a shared background, he would hardly have noticed me: one of the many young people strolling along the Elbe and looking up at the Institute site in Oberloschwitz where the great Ludwig Kaltenburg lived with his animals. A not particularly gifted student in a full lecture hall whose name needed to be spelled out to you again at exam time.

8
    P O SEN MUST HAVE BEEN a strange city in my childhood. It would never have occurred to me that I was in Poland, I never heard anybody speaking Polish on the streets, Polish was prohibited in public, and I never heard the language at home either, there were Viennese, Königsberg, and Rhineland accents, but not a single word of Polish. All the roads had German names, and even the castle that you approached via Sankt-Martin-Strasse was naturally a German building. I don’t know why my