The Zookeepers' War Read online

  The spacious grounds and available buildings also enabled the animal keepers to meet with colleagues from the West without facing bureaucratic snares. Dathe’s younger son, Falk, was following in his father’s footsteps; his speciality was reptiles. When a snake expert from the West announced his intention to visit to mount a slide show about his recent excursions, Falk Dathe could call up a couple of terrarium hobbyists the morning of the event and be confident they would spread the news. By evening, the hall would be filled. Spontaneous events of this kind could never have taken place at universities, which deferred to the state.

  The Stasi left these gatherings alone, because animal lovers were considered innocuous. Even if the Stasi were to intercept their conversations, the secret police wouldn’t be able to make sense of shop talk about “sheltopusiks” and other creatures. Any officials who did recognize the Russian origins of the word and wondered who this “yellow belly” might be would soon learn it was a four-and-a-half-foot-long reptile that feeds primarily on insects and small animals and can live as long as fifty years. Talk of a legless lizard from southeastern Europe didn’t exactly sound like the stuff of conspiracy.

  The Stasi received very clear statements about a variety of other matters, however. Several Informal Collaborators (as the state termed them) reported on the staff’s dissatisfaction “with the paucity of building activity in reconstructing the existing installations and constructing new ones,” in the words of one.

  A shortage of raw materials, which had bedeviled the GDR since its establishment, was the major cause of these delays. Back in 1950, the Federal Republic had imposed a steel embargo on the GDR. Then, in 1964, a price reform shot the cost of raw materials up by as much as 70 percent. Ever since, what construction materials there were went to East Berlin first, and when more workers were needed in the capital, they were delegated there from other districts. The country’s other zoos suffered the consequences.

  As one of the city’s top attractions, Tierpark Friedrichsfelde was relatively well provided for. The Soviet writer Daniil Granin had praised the zoo exuberantly in his travel report “Look and See,” which appeared in Die Neue Welt in 1969. “The day was drawing to a close, the Tierpark was emptying out, and it seemed even more gigantic,” he wrote.

  Wild boars ran past us, ducks flew up above, flamingos strutted about, along with peacocks. Llamas pulled up grass, and young deer romped around. I have never seen so many birds and animals in freedom. They were not afraid of people; the Tierpark called to mind an expanded green version of Noah’s night lodging. You could stand there and observe the animals for hours. All these fowl, twittering, running about, fluffy, their eyes flashing, this life was living and expressing itself in the most natural way, almost in freedom, which made it seem even more beautiful, and more diverse…. There may well be zoological gardens in the world that are richer than this zoo in Berlin, but it is not a matter of the number of animals or the equipment; the most beautiful and astonishing aspect was the sensation of creativity.

  But even in the capital, construction would soon grind to a halt. While zoo director Klös was dedicating a new rhinoceros house, expanding the great ape house, and building new bear compounds, Friedrichsfelde was basically at a standstill. The Tierpark’s second entrance, with its small ticket booth and wooden lattice fence, more closely resembled the entry to a set of garden plots than a gateway to the world’s largest animal park.

  In the early years of the Tierpark, Dathe had been promised everything possible—animals, construction materials—but since the opening of the Alfred Brehm House in 1963, those heady days were gone. The stench of cat urine had eaten its way into the building’s masonry. When a Tierpark zookeeper came down with a head cold, his co-workers would suggest, “Go to the predator house for half an hour. The ammonia will clear your sinuses!”

  The elephants were still living in the old horse stable, where rats had settled in under the floorboards; at night, when the elephants slept, rodents nipped at their feet. A new home had been planned for some time, but kept being postponed. In the hoofed animal section, the so-called outer ring, many walkways were neither paved nor graveled, but little more than footpaths. In the summer they were dusty, in the winter either soaked from rain or frozen solid. Makeshift fences frequently had to be replaced or reinforced after animals ate through the wooden beams and broke out. Once two Canadian elks got as far as the train tracks that ran behind the Tierpark. Another time, a couple of muntjacs—small Asian deer—couldn’t be caught until they’d reached Karl-Marx-Allee in the city center.

  These makeshift solutions were a consequence of the Tierpark’s hasty opening in the summer of 1955—and of Dathe’s preference for spending his allotted funds on collecting. Some visitors got the feeling that they’d wound up not at the much touted “zoo of the future,” but at an agricultural production cooperative—and that they were unwelcome there.

  Even so, Dathe went to great lengths to ensure that the Tierpark continued to be an exemple to other zoos. He arranged for the construction of smaller aviaries and installations, and always invited the media to the openings, to create the impression that things at the Tierpark were moving forward. But as the years passed, plans and reality continued to diverge—and the ill-fated tapir house became the most symbolic of all the stalled construction projects.

  Tapir or Not Tapir

  It all started back in 1961, when the Building Academy in Berlin offered Dathe plans for a futuristic structure. The drawings showed a hall that measured 80 by 80 feet. Its roof would be held up by steel cables, like a hammock, dispensing with the need for supporting columns on the inside. Architects call this form a “hyperbolic paraboloid.” It was an experimental construction, without precedent. “Could you use this?” Dathe was asked.

  “Yes,” he replied, pleased to finally have the opportunity to implement one of his favorite ideas. “We’ll make a tapir house out of that.”

  A tapir house had been included in the first site plans for the Tierpark in the mid-1950s. The black-and-white Malayan tapirs from Southeast Asia were already living on zoo grounds, behind the old stable that housed the elephants and rhinoceroses and inconveniently away from visitors’ paths.

  The following year, the foundations for the new tapir house were laid and the first steel girders erected. The newspapers ran articles about it, complete with sketches showing tapirs and hippopotamuses bathing in the shade of palm trees. The construction site displayed a sign announcing: “A tapir house is being built here.” Even the route maps in the Tierpark guide sketched in the scaffolding, which looked like an oversized, bulky letter “M.” Erich Schmitt, the caricaturist for the East German Berliner Zeitung, nicknamed it the “grasshopper building.”

  Heinz Tellbach was asked to supervise the project. The young architect had designed pens, cages, and fences for the Tierpark in its early years, before moving on to drafting small houses for GDR VIPs in the secure and luxurious Waldsiedlung housing development north of Berlin. After work, Tellbach sketched buildings for various zoos. When the Tierpark started planning its next batch of construction, his former mentor, zoo architect Heinz Graffunder, brought Tellbach back onto his staff.

  Tellbach was authorized to accompany Graffunder to West Berlin to gather ideas at the Zoological Garden. Director Klös took them around personally, proudly showing them the new buildings that had been added over the years. Tellbach had expected more. He found the architecture too plain. The aviary was particularly disappointing, its nondescript low-rise building about as attractive as a shoebox. Buildings of this kind needed to stand out, he thought, like the Tierpark’s Alfred Brehm House and the tapir house he was going to build. He refrained from saying this aloud to Klös, who ended their meeting with the patronizing gesture of slipping Tellbach two marks so he could visit relatives in West Berlin.

  Several more years went by, but while the tapirs had had offspring, they’d yet to emerge from their temporary stable. After the house’s steel framework was comp
leted in 1967, work came to a halt. The Berlin municipal authorities were running out of construction materials, and needed them more urgently at Alexanderplatz to spruce up the central square downtown.

  Shortly thereafter Heinz Tellbach attended one of the popular Tierpark balls, which had become a lively part of the East Berlin social season, where he met Erich Schmitt. As a loyal Tierpark visitor, the caricaturist had already heard that construction had been stopped. On the reverse side of Tellbach’s invitation he drew a sketch of the unfinished steel building, with a father and son in front of it.

  “Daddy,” the son asks, “is that the framework where the tapirs are hanging?”

  Tellbach grimaced. He didn’t know whether Schmitt was trying to cheer him up or taunting him. It was probably a combination of both.

  While the massive framework rusted away, the sign at the construction site continued to announce: “A tapir house is being built here.” In the Tierpark guides little flowers were drawn in to entwine the shell, as though it had fallen into a deep sleep, like Sleeping Beauty, and was waiting to be awakened with a kiss. As the years went by, the “M” grew smaller and smaller on the page, until it disappeared altogether.

  In the late 1970s what were now ruins were finally torn down. The foundations would remain in the ground for decades to come, until they, too, were removed, and there was nothing left to remind Germans of the failed experiment.

  * * *

  In many other zoos, the country’s economic troubles were even more pronounced. Sometimes all it took for grand goals to go awry was something small.

  In the mid-1970s, the director of the Magdeburg Zoo appealed to the local building authority for authorization to create a penguin enclosure with a swimming pool. Too eager to wait until the agency had granted permission, he had his workers start digging, figuring that the approval would soon be on its way. Not long after, however, the mayor announced that he would be coming for a visit, and the illegal construction pit was quickly covered over with foliage to avert any suspicion. Over the following years, a great deal more foliage would be added, because the director had overlooked a very different, basic problem: in no other district of the GDR was it as difficult to get fresh sea fish, and without fresh sea fish the penguins could not be fed. The dream of penguins at the Elbe River came to naught for a lack of mackerels.

  A Dream in Gray

  Meainwhile, in Leipzig, Jörg Adler was distressed by the state of the great ape house. Something or other was always broken, even if it was just a wobbly door handle. The building had been constructed in 1901, and had grated on Lothar Dittrich’s nerves back in the 1950s because the iron girders were rusting through. Even though the roof had been patched several times, there were frequent leaks, and since the cage doors didn’t close properly, now and again one of the apes would break out.

  And so Adler could hardly take his eyes off the pictures he’d discovered in Der Zoologische Garten. He sat enthralled in his study, staring at the black-and-white photos of enclosures in the newly opened zoo in Münster, West Germany. Adler felt as though they had come from another world.

  In 1974, a new zoo had been built on the outskirts of Münster after its original site in the city center was claimed by Westdeutsche Landesbank. The head of the bank had threatened to relocate to Dortmund if his demands weren’t met, and so the hundred-year-old zoo was moved to the suburbs.

  On a new site of almost seventy-five acres, the “all-weather zoo”—as it was called because the large animal houses were joined together by canopied paths—was five times larger than the old one. It had been planned in advance, on a drawing board, like Tierpark Friedrichsfelde. But while the latter had to be put together bit by bit, with Berlin’s residents pitching in, the installations in Münster arose all of a piece. In the photos, Adler saw small black bears climbing around on a lone bare tree in a terraced concrete landscape, like teenagers in an apocalyptic fantasy.

  This design, considered progressive at the time, was used for both inner-city pedestrian zones and zoo installations for apes and bears. But just one year after the all-weather zoo opened its gates, the nearby Krefeld Zoo set a new standard in keeping apes. There, gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans lived in family units in a tropical hall with a warm, humid climate and jungle plants, separated from visitors by only a narrow moat.

  Krefeld’s tropical ape house was a pioneering structure in modern animal keeping, but it remained the odd building out for quite some time. Concrete, tiles, and bulletproof glass continued to define zoos for decades to come, mainly for reasons of hygiene: roundworm infestations were still a major health problem, and in some zoos apes’ cages were scrubbed twice a day. Tiled walls were easier to clean, and bulletproof glass was more attractive than bars because they didn’t evoke thoughts of prison cells. The glass also prevented visitors from feeding the animals.

  All that concrete monotony didn’t bother Jörg Adler. He marveled at the solid structure, thinking, “At least they don’t need to worry the ceiling might come crashing down.” The all-weather zoo remained to him a fantasy, a promise in black and white. The idea that Adler might actually visit Münster and get to know the zoo firsthand was as likely as the prospect of a leakproof roof atop Leipzig’s great ape house.

  CHAPTER 7 GOLDEN TIMES IN THE GOLDEN CAGE

  Every morning at ten o’clock, Werner Schröder, the director of the Berlin Aquarium, left the realm of fish and reptiles and strolled down Budapester Strasse, past the zoo’s graffiti-covered outer wall, past the gate, past the gray ticket booths, and over to the world of real estate sharks and snaking lines. All around the ruins of the Memorial Church a new city center—City West—had been arising slowly over the past twenty years. After the Wall was built, West Berlin needed a downtown shopping center, a counterpart to Alexanderplatz in the East. Its striking centerpiece turned out to be a clunky glass and aluminum colossus, twenty floors of offices plus a movie theater, swimming pool, and shopping mall, with an ice rink in an inner courtyard. At more than 280 feet high, it was the tallest building in West Berlin. At least zoo director Klös was able to secure the major concession he fought for: the design was rotated by 90 degrees so as to cast less of a shadow on the adjacent zoo.

  The Europa-Center, which opened its doors in 1965, was intended to introduce a hint of America into the walled-in city. But now, in 1977, it was just another staid office tower in a strip mall of souvenir stores.

  Whenever Werner Schröder didn’t feel like strolling along the Kurfürstendamm, he’d stop to spend his breakfast break there. He sat down in a café, ordered a cup of tea, and would watch the young women skating in circles next to him on the ice rink, the loudspeakers droning out lyrics of the song “Movie Star” by Swedish pop star Harpo: “And you think you will look like James Bond…” Schröder lit a cigarette and turned up the collar of his overcoat to shield him from the breeze.

  At six o’clock each morning he’d get up and feed his pets—a gray parrot, a greyhound, and several chameleons. He and his zookeepers would complete their morning rounds through the aquarium, and then he’d have a look at the mail and make his way here.

  Schröder had headed the aquarium for a quarter of a century. When he began working on the building’s reconstruction—it had been destroyed in the war—the site where the Europa-Center now stood was nothing more than an abandoned lot. The local press called it a “blot on Berlin’s calling card.” Now decals and posters proclaimed, “This is where Berlin does its buying. This is where the world meets up.” But the spot that truly ought to have been called the Europa-Center was on the other side of the street.

  Schröder had turned the aquarium into one of the most popular cultural institutions in the city, and the most biodiverse place on the continent. The great public aquariums of Europe could still be counted on two hands, and Berlin’s was clearly one of them. Seven hundred thousand visitors—from the city and beyond—came every year. Unlike at a zoo, tourism wasn’t dependent on the seasons, because visitors wer
en’t exposed to the elements. When it was as cold and gloomy as it was this time of year, not quite yet spring, it was easy to forget how pleasant Berlin could be in the summer, although the previous summer had been somewhat too hot, with temperatures regularly rising to 95 degrees as early as June. All of Europe had suffered from a heat wave that had dragged on for months. In Hanover, zoo director Lothar Dittrich had to house the South African jackass penguins in a cold storage facility; in Duisburg, Wolfgang Gewalt had a canopy roof put up over the whalearium so the snow-white belugas wouldn’t get sunburned. Werner Schröder and his staff had been kept busy cooling the aquarium’s water and placing damp moss in the amphibians’ habitat. With the exception of a few sensitive animals, most survived the heat unharmed.

  Schröder was especially proud of his crocodile collection, which comprised twenty-six species and was the largest in any European zoo. His friends in the East could only boast that Friedrichsfelde had the second-largest number.

  Recently two of Schröder’s keepers had discovered a clutch of American crocodile eggs buried in a sandhill in the crocodile hall. While one of them used a long iron rod to keep the ten-foot-long parents at bay, the other removed three eggs and placed them in an incubator. Breeding crocodiles isn’t easy. American crocodiles don’t become sexually mature until they’re ten to twelve years old. And even then everything has to be just right: the environment, the climate, and above all the chemistry. Female crocodiles are picky and in no rush. If their suitors fail to impress them, they can wait. They have plenty of time; they can live up to eighty years, and are fertile past the age of fifty. But this time everything had worked, and with any luck, the next few months would see baby crocodiles born in Europe for the first time.