The Zookeepers' War Read online

  In 1976 the GDR signed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora; the Federal Republic followed a year later. And yet, at least at first, these laws applied only on paper. Zoos continued to find creative ways to acquire rare and protected species.

  As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, Duisburg’s zoo director, Wolfgang Gewalt, would become an increasingly frequent target of criticism on account of his numerous trapping expeditions, while protests against keeping dolphins in captivity grew more vocal. As people became accustomed to seeing the creatures in zoos, a new concern for their well-being developed. Dolphins and whales were suddenly glorified as friendly and intelligent. Gewalt was baffled by this kind of mythologizing. “Just let them be animals, the way seals are,” he said in one interview.

  Martin Stummer would continue to capture animals in Ecuador for a few more years; in 1972, Klös finally got his northern pudus from him. Unfortunately they survived less than half a year in Berlin, the male dying of pneumonia and the female succumbing to food poisoning shortly afterward. Some zoologists call animals that neither reproduce nor survive for long in captivity “nails in the coffin.” The mountain tapir, which spent only a brief period in European zoos, was one of these.

  Eventually, even Martin Stummer left South America, first for Papua New Guinea, where tribes of headhunters were said never to have seen a white man before, then to the Philippines, where he became the king of a small island nation. He was a man who kept on going, on to the next adventure.

  CHAPTER 6 BIG PLANS, LITTLE FISH

  Jörg Adler headed down the autobahn toward Berlin at 60 miles an hour. The young animal keeper had started his trip at the Leipzig Zoo an hour earlier. At this rate he’d arrive at Tierpark Friedrichsfelde in two and a half hours. Unless he had engine trouble, nothing could stop him now. An accident was almost out of the question—that morning, there was only one other driver on the road; in the early 1970s hardly anyone in the GDR owned a car. If Adler were passed by another vehicle along this drive, it would be quite a sensation.

  The sure part was the trip’s duration. Three and a half hours of monotony, no more and no less. There was no shorter or faster route. Adler needed three and a half hours each and every time, pretty much on the dot; the motor of his Trabant couldn’t manage any faster. Each of these trips to Berlin seemed to Adler symbolic of the state of the GDR: no matter how hard you tried, things in this country couldn’t be rushed, and destinations could be reached only by specific routes.

  Adler had long been painfully aware of this state of affairs. In 1964 he’d graduated from high school with mediocre grades. Instead of studying, he’d opted to clean syringes for his veterinarian father or go with him to visit patients. His father, whose specialty was horses, also taught at Leipzig University. Jörg wanted to become a veterinarian as well, but the problem was that Jörg Adler’s father was neither a laborer nor a farmer, which put Jörg at a disadvantage in admission to a veterinary medicine program. He needed better grades, or he’d have to use the national fast track by enlisting in the army or joining the party. The latter two options were out of the question; Adler came from a Christian-minded dissident family. There would be no fast track for him.

  As was customary in the GDR at that time, Adler had to complete an apprenticeship in addition to his secondary education. The course of study was assigned to him: he would train as a mason, as would all of his classmates. Along with his high school diploma, Adler received a certificate of proficiency as an installer, and the central university bureau designated him a student of structural engineering.

  He spent a year torturing himself in an academic field he found exceedingly dull, until he broke off his studies and applied to several zoos and stud farms as a laborer. His first response came from the Leipzig Zoo, and he began working there in 1966. Two years later, he completed his training as an animal keeper. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming section head for the hoofed animals, then for the apes. The next thing he knew, he was responsible for everything under the sun. Adler was one of only three licensed drivers at the zoo, and the only one with actual driving experience, so director Siegfried Seifert often sent him to the capital on delivery runs to the Commission for Zoological Gardens or to oversee an upcoming shipment of animals from the Tierpark.

  In politics as in zoos, all roads led to Berlin—and in the latter case, straight to Heinrich Dathe, who was by then the undisputed patriarch of East German zoos. In 1976, the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote, “Dathe is for the GDR what Grzimek is for the Federal Republic.”

  Adler first met the “Grzimek of the GDR” while on vacation with his parents sometime in the late 1950s in Ahrenshoop on the Baltic Sea. The little town was a gathering spot for the GDR’s artistic and intellectual elite. Gerald Götting, the future president of the People’s Chamber, East Germany’s unicameral legislature, was staying in the hotel room next door, and Wolfgang Ullrich, the director of the Dresden Zoo, had his beach chair three places away. Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the most popular commentator on GDR television, put in appearances at one of the local restaurants—unless barred from the premises for misbehavior, as he frequently was.

  The young Jörg Adler had already noticed a short stocky man back then, not because of his stature, but because of his behavior: he never lounged on his beach chair or in the bar, but was always walking with his binoculars. Every few feet he would stop and look up, hoping to spot a bird. Adler couldn’t imagine that one day he would interact with the great Dathe, who could be heard on the radio and seen every week on TV. Life doesn’t move along as predictably as a monotonous trip from Leipzig to Berlin.

  Even before turning off the autobahn, Adler could see the signs: “Visit Tierpark Berlin.” Dathe had had them mounted along all the access routes leading into the city. He’d even arranged for parking spaces at the entrance to the castle when the Tierpark was first built, although hardly anyone had a car in the 1950s. Even now, Adler’s was generally the only one parked there.

  Those summers at the Baltic, young Adler had never attracted Dathe’s attention; after all, the zookeeper was absorbed in looking up at the sky. But he’d come to think highly of the young man from Leipzig, or at least that was Adler’s impression. Every time he came to the Tierpark, Dathe took a few minutes to spend with him—sometimes even half an hour—no matter how much he had to do. Dathe began by asking how Adler’s family was faring, before the conversation quickly moved on to technical matters: how to restore sick animals to good health, how to improve the animals’ living conditions, how best to feed species with limited diets…

  Adler was at times surprised by the interest the director showed in him, as Dathe and Adler’s boss, Seifert, were not exactly the closest of friends—in a way they were even rivals. The Tierpark had a say in which of the country’s zoos got which animals, leading to frictions. When the Leipzig Zoo had wanted to import mountain goats from Canada a few years earlier, a good deal of squabbling had ensued, with Seifert ultimately prevailing. Still, the Tierpark could also be quite helpful, like when three elephants destined for Leipzig were impounded at the Port of Rotterdam. It took help from Berlin to get the animals into the GDR.

  Perhaps Dathe’s fondness for Adler was due to the zookeeper’s special relationship to the city in which he’d launched his career. Or perhaps it was simply that Dathe set great store by achievements—and Adler was certainly ambitious.

  “Write some more for Der Zoologische Garten,” Dathe would suggest to the young man as he left Friedrichfelde for the three-and-a-half-hour journey home.

  Still, it was Seifert, not Dathe, Adler had to thank for having advanced this far in his career. The director of the Leipzig Zoo was, like Adler, a devout Christian, and he supported the young animal keeper in whatever way he could. He even helped him begin a degree in veterinary medicine and become a technical assistant in the Leipzig veterinary clinic, which served the zoo.

  Seifert may not have been especially close to
Dathe, but he did get along with Dathe’s rivals in West Berlin. When Heinz-Georg Klös visited Leipzig, Seifert usually sent for Adler and asked him, “Please show Professor Klös around.” Klös had known Adler’s father well, but his conversations with the son were usually limited to chatting about the weather and the health of Adler’s children. Even so, they spent hours together strolling through the zoo.

  Klös had a good relationship with people in the East—in Leipzig, Prague, and Wrocław. The Leipzig Zoo in particular often benefited from this relationship. On one occasion the West Berliner even helped them get bananas for a sick orangutan; an assistant passed the fruit off to Adler at a border crossing one night. (Bananas were hard to come by in the East.) Such sharing would have been inconceivable between the zoos directly on either side of the Berlin Wall.

  Divided Gardens

  In 1968 it became even more difficult for zoologists and veterinarians in East and West to gather and share information. Until then the pan-German zoo association had held an annual East-West summit meeting. The organization’s leadership had for years been allocated evenly between the two countries; if the president came from the Federal Republic of Germany, his deputy would hail from the German Democratic Republic. In response to government pressure, however, the East German zoo directors were forced to to withdraw from the association, which they did by issuing identical, stiffly worded letters that made it clear to their colleagues in the West that this was a dictated statement.

  The East German zoo directors established their own Commission for Zoological Gardens the following year, and appointed Dathe its chairman. They deliberately opted to call the new group a “commission”—rather than an association—in hopes of avoiding the suggestion that the coerced separation was permanent.

  After the split, the annual Symposium on the Disorders of Zoo Animals and Wildlife, which was organized by the GDR’s Center for Vertebrate Research, assumed much greater importance as a place for veterinarians and zoo directors from both sides of the Wall to stay in touch and share their experiences. The trade magazine Der Zoologische Garten, edited by Dathe in East Berlin, also continued as a joint publication, while textbooks published in the GDR stayed in use in West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Still, the forewords to these books created problems for Western zookeepers, with their praise of running a zoo according to socialist principles. Lothar Dittrich, Hanover’s zoo director, prepared a new foreword better suited to the Federal Republic, which would later be pasted in.

  In other respects, though, good communication between zoo directors in East and West continued, the Iron Curtain notwithstanding. They corresponded, visited one another, and socialized. All, that is, except those in Berlin.

  The Wild, Wild East

  Zoos had a fixed place in GDR state ideology: in accordance with paragraph 67 of the 1965 law regarding the uniform socialist educational system, zoos, like cultural centers, museums, theaters, and botanical gardens, were “to support the educational process at all levels and to give all members of the public the opportunity to expand and enhance their education.”

  As cultural establishments they were under the purview of the ministry of culture, whose goal was to establish a zoo in each of the fourteen districts of the GDR. In addition to the three zoos already in existence in Dresden, Leipzig, and Halle, six new facilities were created by the mid-1960s. Besides the one in Berlin, new zoos were built in Rostock (1956), Erfurt and Magdeburg (both 1959), and Cottbus (1960), with a later addition in Schwerin (1974). Moreover, all over the young German Democratic Republic, a series of small domestic animal gardens known as Heimattiergärten were set up. In towns that had no major zoo, these Heimattiergärten were designed to introduce people to the country’s varied fauna and ignite their interest in the world of zoos. At the beginning domestic species were kept there, but later they were expanded to include individual exotic species. The significance of the Heimattiergärten for local residents was particularly evident in Hoyerswerda.

  This town in Upper Lusatia had grown rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, attracting more and more people, who found work at Black Pump, a nearby industrial combine. Prefabricated housing developments proliferated on the outskirts of town and into the countryside, and before long a handful of residents constructed enclosures for deer and swans at the castle moat in the Old Town. By the mid-1960s more than 260,000 people visited its Heimattiergärten annually, at a time when the city itself had a mere 46,000 residents. The region had hardly any other recreational facilities, and vacation getaways were rare. At most people went to the Baltic, but even that was far away—so families went to the local animal park five or ten times a year.

  By the early 1980s, zoos were the country’s most popular leisure destinations, welcoming sixteen million visitors annually—meaning that there were as many zoogoers as citizens of the GDR. The number of Heimattiergärten swelled to 125. Even though there was a clear hierarchy in the East German zoos landscape, with the Berlin Tierpark at the apex, the zoo commission stipulated in 1974 that the big zoos had to help out the small Heimattiergärten in their regions. Each of them served an assigned territory, which generally extended over several districts. The nine zoos provided veterinary guidance to the smaller animal parks and Heimattiergärten in their territories; they also supplied new animals and trained apprentices.

  Despite this support, zoological gardens across the country felt the effects of the GDR’s structural problems. In the Leipzig Zoo, the workday usually began at seven in the morning and rarely ended before eight at night. The keepers, who faced shortages of virtually everything, had to chip in to keep things afloat. During their breakfast break, they’d discuss the schedule for the day: some took care of the animals and mucked out the stables, while others went to town and spent hours waiting in line to get ham, wallpaper, or other goods for themselves and their colleagues. This mentality created a bond—and the staff in Leipzig was an especially tight-knit bunch. After work they’d head to a pub and indulge in drinking and singing, before roaming the streets. After all, there was nothing worth watching on TV, there were few opportunities to travel, and hardly anyone owned a car.

  Jörg Adler felt that in spite of all the problems, it was a fantastic era, in which the “Shit Party” took quite some time to gain a foothold. Until the late 1970s, there wasn’t a single Socialist Unity Party member in the entire zoological senior management, but there were several active Christians. The zoo could be regarded as a small oasis of subversion. This had to do in part with the special character of the city itself. Because of the trade fairs, which took place twice a year in Leipzig, this city, along with East Berlin, was arguably one of only two places in the GDR with even the slightest bit of cosmopolitanism.

  * * *

  The Berlin Tierpark had a staff of more than four hundred, yet Dathe still had to improvise to get all the necessary work done. He relied on people who were “somewhat outside the normal work process,” as he wrote in his diary: unskilled workers from prisons, mental institutions, and homes for the disabled were brought in to perform simple tasks. These helpers tended not to be the least bit squeamish. Some tried to catch ibises by whacking the slender, crescent-beaked birds from tree branches with a broom.

  Within the confines of the zoo grounds a subculture developed, a refuge for people who didn’t fit into the social mold—political nonconformists, oddballs, outsiders. The animal keepers gave them nicknames. In Leipzig there was the “chain woman,” whose entire face was pierced at a time when there was no fashionable term for her look. There were also the “bookworm” and the “mushroom picker.” In the Berlin Tierpark, the “rhino masturbator” would hang around waiting for the rhinoceroses’ next attempt at mating. The animal keepers would crack jokes about these regulars, and call to one another, “Look who’s standing in front of the enclosure again!”

  The occasional visitor asked outright whether the keepers could call them over when the next mating was getting underway. Others just wanted a few slivers of
elephant toenail clippings to use as fertilizer for their gardens.

  The other side of the Wall had these kinds of characters as well. One elderly woman who regularly visited the Berlin Zoo was able to differentiate each individual animal in the huge baboon clan on the monkey rock, and she gave each of them names. One morning, a young temporary worker found the woman placing ten candles on the wall of the enclosure and lighting one after the other.

  “What are you doing there?” the baffled worker asked.

  “Well, today is Bodo’s birthday,” she replied, her eyes shining.

  The young worker was taken aback. “Who’s Bodo?” he blurted.

  The old woman’s face, which had been beaming, now looked annoyed. “What’s this, young man?” she asked. “You claim to care for the apes yet you don’t know Bodo?” Before he could answer, she grabbed his sleeve and pulled him toward her. Bending over the wall, she pointing to a baboon perched on one of the huge rock’s lower ledges, partly hidden from view. “That’s Bodo,” she shouted, “and he’s turning ten today!”

  Another character was a man the zookeepers called “Hyena Heinrich,” because he made a habit of standing in front of the hyena cage and trying to kiss the fur of one of the animals as it made its way along the bars. However, the zookeepers also profited from these strange regulars, who knew each creature so well. In the sprawling hoofed animal section of the Berlin Tierpark, it was a great help to be able to ask them when which bull had mated with which cow.

  Friedrichsfelde’s vast size was a problem not only for the keepers, but also for those monitoring the grounds. Some children took advantage of the expansive premises by swiping flowers from the flowerbeds and selling them for a few pennies to passersby. When the Tierpark closed at sunset, visitors could stay as long as they wanted, because there were no guards to make them leave.