The Zookeepers' War Page 12

  “This heat!” Morgen thought, peeling off his leather jacket. He was still wearing his dark green Tierpark uniform underneath.

  The tracks directly behind the station were laid out in a wide curve, so the concourse was slightly off-kilter, making it impossible to get a view of the whole platform. No one saw Morgen get out of the first car, not even the trapos who were suddenly coming toward him. West Berlin’s train stations were run by the East German railway system, and trains were checked for refugees. Morgen knew that, but still, he hadn’t anticipated so many trapos. He counted about twenty of them, along with eight West German policemen, standing every few feet along the platform.

  During the whole trip he hadn’t been afraid, and he wasn’t now either; he was thinking about what he had to do. “If anyone stops me, I’ll jump down into the track bed and run across,” he thought as he walked past the first trapo, then past the second and the third. Morgen had the feeling they were scrutinizing him skeptically, but no one asked him to stop or show his papers. Maybe the Berlin bear on his uniform’s chest and sleeves made them think he was a railway worker. He passed by the two last trapos and a train conductor, who looked equally fierce, and arrived at the staircase that led down to the entrance hall.

  He’d have to change money somewhere so he could buy a ticket to Kreuzberg, where his mother lived. “Won’t she be surprised,” he thought.

  But it was already after ten at night. The currency exchange offices had closed hours earlier. Having no better idea in mind, he went to the travelers aid desk where, fortunately, one of the railway employees gave him twenty pfennigs.

  “Why are there so many police upstairs?” Morgen asked him.

  “Someone escaped,” came the reply.

  * * *

  When Gerd Morgen failed to show up for work two days in a row, the excitement in the Tierpark mounted. All the animal keepers were questioned, but none let on what they knew. His apartment was searched, without turning up a thing. Eventually Bernd Matern and the others were summoned to the Stasi’s district office, which was located right next to the Tierpark. They were grilled for hours, then let go. The officials learned nothing.

  Matern wasn’t sure why they’d gotten off so lightly, but he and others assumed that Dathe must have interceded. He’d probably said something along the lines of: “These men are indispensable. I can’t do without them for one more day.” And Dathe’s word carried weight. He wasn’t a member of the party, but he had the freedom to do as he liked. Otherwise Matern would have landed in prison.

  Matern was aware that Dathe had to outmaneuver party bigwigs to preserve what freedoms he could. But Matern no longer wished to have any restrictions placed on him. He wanted to read newspapers from the West and listen to AFN, a broadcast network for Americans overseas. Like so many others, he’d grudgingly made do with his new circumstances for a time, but that would change in 1964, when he was drafted into the National People’s Army. After half a year he decided to make his escape. Still, he knew what was at stake; three years earlier, his friend Günter had been caught.

  Eleven days after the Wall had gone up, twenty-four-year-old Günter Litfin tried to get to Lehrter Station in the western part of the city by crossing over some train tracks. When the trapos discovered him and fired off warning shots, he jumped into a canal. He’d nearly made it to shore when he suddenly stopped swimming. Two days earlier, the Politburo had issued orders for the GDR’s border guards to shoot anyone who tried to flee. A bullet pierced Günter’s neck and lower jaw. He was the first to be shot and killed at the Berlin Wall.

  Even so, Matern took the risk. He’d been planning his escape for some time, down to every detail. He and a few friends made arrangements for a boat, using his contacts in the West. They planned to cross a lake—the Wannsee—to the district of Grunewald, in West Berlin.

  They were caught even before they could cast off. The contacts were working for the Stasi. Matern was sent to prison for three years, but he got lucky. Since 1963, the Federal Republic had been buying the freedom of East German political prisoners in exchange for foreign currency. Matern was released from custody after two years and allowed to settle in the West.

  He later learned that Dathe was exasperated not to have known in advance about his plans to escape. Dathe apparently thought he could have saved him from serving time in prison and gotten him back to the Tierpark. But Matern had no interest in returning to East Berlin.

  * * *

  In the meantime, Gerd Morgen had settled down in West Berlin, where he introduced himself at the Zoological Garden. He’d gone there regularly before the Wall went up, so he knew some of the animal keepers, including primate section head Kurt Walter. Morgen would have liked to get a job in the zoo, but Klös had made Dathe a gentlemen’s agreement not to employ animal keepers who’d escaped from the East. Morgen stayed in West Berlin for eight months, and had found a job in an equine clinic at the Free University when Klös asked him to come by again. “Could you picture going to Basel?” he asked. “My colleague Dr. Lang is looking for another keeper for his apes.” Morgen didn’t hesitate.

  Rivals on Their Own Turf

  Dathe kept up with his counterparts in West Berlin. Werner Schröder, the director of the aquarium, was a friend, someone with whom he could toss around technical terms in Latin and share a hotel room at international conferences. Klös found it harder to get along with his colleagues. But for some time now he had been troubled by a growing rivalry within his zoo—not with an introverted, offbeat fellow like Schröder, who kept to his aquarium, but with a man whose very presence must have struck the director as dangerous.

  Wolfgang Gewalt was fresh out of college when he came to the Berlin Zoo as a research assistant in 1959. He was the complete opposite of Klös: a giant with an angular, bearded face, who at six foot two jumped so effortlessly and nonchalantly over every railing that women visiting the zoo swooned at the sight of him. Any comparison with Gewalt made Klös seem even stiffer and more awkward.

  Klös’s six-year-old son, Heiner, enjoyed taking walks with Gewalt, a passionate hunter who shot at wild foxes, crows, and pigeons on zoo grounds without asking permission. To him, they were simply pests. The boy was impressed by this man so very different from his father, who hadn’t touched a gun since the war.

  Gewalt was two years younger than Klös, but two heads taller and twice as garrulous. And he didn’t shy away from contradicting Klös, even in front of colleagues. On morning rounds, which some said made physician’s rounds seem like a democratic discussion group by comparison, Gewalt refused to adhere to the unwritten rule that no one was entitled to ask a question until Klös had done so first.

  One morning, in the rhinoceros house, the group surveyed some newly arrived Malayan tapirs. Captured in the wild in Southeast Asia, the creatures were real treasures. One female had already been living in the zoo for two years, and now two additional females and a male would be joining her in three cramped crates, even though tapirs are shy loners by nature.

  “Say, Herr Doktor,” Gewalt blurted out. “Don’t you think it’s a bit crowded in there?”

  Klös let out a quick snort. “If I get another three, I’ll put them there too!” he said.

  Everyone—zookeepers, inspectors, and veterinarians—looked over at Gewalt expectantly. He grinned. “Well, I’d certainly like to see that, Herr Doktor,” he said.

  Wolfgang Gewalt was a Berliner through and through. He’d attended the renowned Französisches Gymnasium, a public high school in the Tiergarten district, before enrolling at Humboldt University in the East in 1948 to study zoology. He later transferred to the Free University in the West, where he received his doctorate in 1959. His dissertation was on the visual faculties of martens, a family of small, furry animals with bushy tails.

  Even as a student Gewalt was a daredevil who’d go swimming in the ice cold Baltic and climb pine trees to pluck young long-eared owls from their nests. During those years he wrote scientific articles about squi
rrels, raccoons, curlews, and great bustards, one of the heaviest flying birds and already extinct in large parts of Central Europe. At his parents’ home in Frohnau in the northern part of Berlin, he hatched and raised several chicks. When guests came to visit, they were astonished to find a tame bustard strutting around the table and being hand-fed kitchen scraps.

  In time, the animals grew larger: At the Berlin Zoo he hand-raised two young gorillas, which made him even more popular with visitors, especially women. Klös cast a wary eye, displeased to see his assistant getting more attention than he did.

  Even though Gewalt greatly enjoyed being in the spotlight, he also helped his fellow zookeepers whenever he could, including Dathe’s former right-hand man in Leipzig, Lothar Dittrich. After escaping to the West, Dittrich had worked his way up in the Ruhe animal trading company. First he captured gazelles in East Africa. Then he served as head of the Hanover Zoo, which Hermann Ruhe ran as a place to exhibit his animals for resale.

  Before the Wall, when Dittrich was still working in Leipzig, he’d have to make a special trip to West Berlin whenever he wanted to travel to “capitalist countries.” Western Europe had yet to recognize the GDR as a sovereign state, so Dittrich first had to apply for a temporary West German passport and then get a visa at the embassy in question. All of this needed to happen within one day. Dittrich could not afford a taxi, and these errands could not be accomplished on foot, so Gewalt would drive him back and forth in his own car. During the trip they’d chat about the latest developments at the Zoo. Whenever Dittrich asked why Gewalt did things the way he did, Gewalt would reply, “Well, I arranged that with blond Heinz.” By “blond Heinz,” he meant his boss, Heinz-Georg Klös.

  * * *

  In the long run, having both Gewalt and Klös made for one director too many. Gewalt saw no path for promotion, and so he left Berlin after seven years. Several versions of the reason for his departure made the rounds. According to one, an antelope was killed while he was on duty, which turned the tabloids against him. Another claimed that during his morning foxhunt he shot a woman in the leg while she was on zoo grounds. The third, and correct, version was that the two men were heading for a major clash. Gewalt was upstaging Klös on his own turf.

  Gewalt began looking for new employment and on April 1, 1966, was named director of the Duisburg Zoo. His predecessor, Hans-Georg Thienemann, had opened a dolphinarium there the previous year—the first in Germany and one of few anywhere in Europe. But just a few months later, Thienemann unexpectedly died of a stroke, at the age of fifty-six. The zoo could no longer keep pace with the one in Berlin, and the drab industrial city at the confluence of the Rhine and Ruhr Rivers was not what could be described as anyone’s dream destination. “Gewalt will not be heard from again,” Klös told journalist Werner Philipp contendedly.

  Rarely had Heinz-Georg Klös been so wrong, and he’d soon come to realize as much. Duisburg turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Wolfgang Gewalt.

  White Whale in the Gray Rhine

  On New Year’s Day of 1966 the series Flipper began running on German television. Throughout Germany, both East and West, children spent every Saturday afternoon glued to their TV screens from the moment the theme song came on. They all wanted an animal like Flipper for their friend—and for the lucky children of Duisburg, this new friend was just a few streetcar stops away. At the zoo they could watch bottlenose dolphins perform their tricks, and with any luck they might even be chosen to climb into a boat and be pulled by the dolphins through the pool. Spectators came to the little zoo in droves. By the end of the year the number of visitors exceeded one million.

  Gewalt’s predecessor couldn’t have chosen a better time to build a dolphinarium, and zoo directors in East and West did not look idly on. Dathe had intended to include a dolphinarium in his first sketches for the Tierpark, and now Leipzig started making plans. The coastal city of Rostock came closest to building one, but shortly before construction could commence, East German head of state and sports fan Walter Ulbricht rejected the plan. “Before we build swimming pools for dolphins, we should be building them for humans,” he said, or words to that effect. Not for another half decade would Klös be able to bring a dolphin show from Florida to Berlin for performances during the summer months.

  Then Gewalt had another amazing stroke of luck: two months after he started his job in Duisburg, an animal unlike anything seen in the almost thousand-year history of the city turned up in the waters of the Rhine.

  On the morning of May 18, two Rhine skippers were on the river aboard the tanker Melani when at kilometer 778.5 something white appeared in the gray water next to the boat, ten or maybe twelve feet long, spouting air and snorting water. The sailors immediately radioed the river police to report, “There’s a white monster swimming here.” The officers assumed the two men had had one too many drinks the previous night. When the police arrived, they first had the men take a blood alcohol test. Negative. Then they saw it for themselves: a white back, rutted by scars and welts, surfaced from the water, and air spouted out.

  But if this truly was a whale, the police reasoned, how did it get into the Rhine? Three days earlier there had been a report of a whale sighting near Rotterdam, where, at the mouth of the Rhine, things like that had been known to happen. But here, almost three hundred miles upstream, in the largest inland port in Europe? Weren’t whales supposed to live in salt water? The officers wasted no time in calling up the Ministry of the Interior, whose staff at first took the call to be a prank. “Who is this anyway?” one official asked, annoyed.

  The next day, Wolfgang Gewalt was notified. He was familiar with these kinds of calls. Concerned citizens or firefighters often called up the zoo in springtime claiming to have found an abandoned eagle chick on the roof, and when a keeper went to have a look, it turned out to be nothing but a young swift. Now there was supposedly a white whale swimming in the Rhine. Gewalt figured it was probably nothing but a drowned and bloated pig floating in the water. He grudgingly arranged to have a police boat drive him to the spot where the animal had last been seen. But this was no false alarm. The young zoo director could hardly believe it—there was actually a whale. And a white whale, no less, also known as a beluga, an animal that can measure up to twenty feet long and weigh more than a ton. When Gewalt saw the animal—this one thirteen feet long and more than 1,600 pounds—he blurted out, “Man, that is some creature!”

  Gewalt had already been planning to build a new, bigger pool for his dolphins. And he was not going to stop there. He wanted to use the old pool as a whalearium. And now here, right in front of his nose, his very first resident was swimming—a creature so rare that even many of his zoo colleagues had never seen one. It would therefore be “grotesque for the Duisburg Zoo to leave alone the whale that was wandering about in front of our door,” Gewalt explained to the public, only to “procure a specimen of this sort from Alaska.”

  Thus began the hunt for the whale, which the media named “Moby Dick,” after the title character in Herman Melville’s novel. But the fishers on the Lower Rhine weren’t prepared for whales, so Gewalt had to get creative. The zoo director and his assistants put together a trap made of fence posts and nets from a nearby tennis club. They tried to use boats to force Moby Dick into a shallow basin and catch him there, but their attempts were unsuccessful. The whale kept diving under the nets.

  Gewalt brought in a national champion in archery to affix a small round buoy to the whale to prevent it from diving below the surface and disappearing. Animal rights activists responded by renting a helicopter and pitching oranges into the water to throw off the hunters, certain that they were doing the right thing. Gewalt was equally sure that in the sludgy waters of the Rhine, the whale wouldn’t survive for even a week.

  While the Ruhr region’s coal and steel had propelled the German postwar economic miracle, the environmental consequences had largely been ignored. The Rhine became a cesspool, contaminated by tons of chemicals and industrial w
astewater; sulfur dioxide from the steel mills scorched the fruit trees and garden plot vegetable beds. Ground Thomas slag, a waste product of steelmaking, settled on windowsills like pink and gray snow. The 1960s were the heyday of steel production in Duisburg, which achieved prosperity as one of the largest steel manufacturers in the world. But the “City of Coal and Steel,” as residents proudly called it, was far ahead of other cities in air pollution as well. Its poor air quality had long since acquired a new, alien-sounding name: smog.

  * * *

  In the GDR, any mention of environmental pollution was taboo, and reporting on it was forbidden. Economic progress was the top priority and so, according to the government, socialism simply had no smog. Only capitalism produced such a thing.

  “Products from Leuna bring bread, prosperity, and beauty….” The advertising slogan could be read on the wall of a building in East Berlin. But Leuna Works, located south of the city of Halle, was also spewing tons of sulfur dioxide into the air; a black fog that burned in people’s eyes and noses was making its way through the streets. Wastewater full of mercury and lead from the so-called chemical triangle (the cities of Halle, Merseburg, and Bitterfeld) was contaminating the Elbe River and its tributaries. A popular ditty went like this: “Bitterfeld, Bitterfeld, its dirty air is unexcelled.” In 1970, the GDR would pass a comprehensive conservation law, one of the most progressive environmental protection acts in Europe—but the only real change was the introduction of higher chimneys, which meant that factories would now spread their toxins even farther. For many years state propaganda created the impression that smog came to a halt at the “anti-imperialist protective wall.” But over time the air pollution in the GDR increased so drastically that it could no longer be denied, and so a harmless-sounding phrase, “industry fog,” was coined to describe the mess, in the press and on the radio.