The Zookeepers' War Page 16

  Among his colleagues, Schröder was esteemed beyond the borders of West Berlin. He had just as close a friendship with Heinrich Dathe as he’d had with Katharina Heinroth and Austrian animal behavorist Konrad Lorenz. When Lorenz came for a visit, they’d sit together into the evening hours in Schröder’s fourth-floor apartment, next to the insectarium. They drank tea, talked shop, and if they disagreed on some matter of fact, all they had to do was go down two floors to the aquarium and take a look. In zoology, everything had its proper place—just as it did in West Berlin.

  For Schröder, the city was like one big living room. Everyone knew him. He counted many prominent artists, including expressionist painter Max Pechstein and actors Hans Söhnker and Viktor de Kowa, among his friends. He sometimes played Ping-Pong with the boxer “Bubi” Scholz. Life was reasonably pleasant on the island of West Berlin—the only problem was the Wall.

  Schröder considered himself an optimist for the present and a pessimist for the future: he was sure that things would never again be as good as they were that day, so each and every day needed to be put to good use. He also sensed that not many days remained.

  Siting in the café in the Europa-Center, he drank his last sips of tea before making his way back to the aquarium. On the way there he passed by the theater where the Stachelschweine cabaret group, whose name translates to “porcupines,” held their shows. Since the opening of the Europa-Center, the group had performed there every evening on a small stage on the ground floor. In 1949, when the artists had been looking for a rehearsal space, no one had wanted to help them because young people like the theater troupe were thought to do nothing but smoke and make a mess. Schröder, who was a smoker himself, had made an empty room available to them under the condition that they would keep it clean.

  Close to thirty years had gone by since then. Schröder had witnessed the post-war reconstruction, and the division of Berlin. West Berlin was now itself a kind of aquarium, a microcosm that depended on supplies from the outside. Just as the animals in their tanks could survive only as long as the filters and heat kept working and the food kept coming, West Berlin was being fed intravenously by the Federal Republic and the West.

  The people of West Berlin were making the best of their lives, suppressing any fears of latent danger from the East; the Americans, French, and British would take care of that. The animal keepers had talked themselves into believing so too. They didn’t know how their colleagues in the Tierpark were faring because there was little way of contacting them. They could communicate with colleagues in Leipzig, or in Breslau, Sofia, or Prague, but not East Berlin, where people invariably jumped to the conclusion that everything was an attempt at espionage. All the Zoo staff knew about the Tierpark was what they could learn on individual visits to Friedrichsfelde and from the stories that circulated about Heinrich Dathe and his rivalry with Klös. People were saying that when one acquired a new species, the other was immediately envious. In the West, Dathe was said to make his entire staff stand at attention, military-style, every morning. Could he really be even stricter than Klös?

  Schröder’s friendship with Dathe put a strain on his relationship with Klös. They limited their contact to the essentials—press conferences or receptions that required them to appear in public together—and had nothing to do with each other outside of work.

  Klös had been searching for a successor for Schröder for quite some time. Schröder predated the director in Berlin and had overseen the rebuilding of the zoo and the aquarium, securing quite a bit of authority for himself. In Klös’s view, this left him too little room to exert his own influence on the running of the aquarium. He wanted Schröder out of the way, but it wasn’t so easy to find a capable replacement.

  Of Antelopes and Aquariums

  Zoo directors and scientists had recently joined forces for the first time, under the authority of the West German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Forestry, to establish general guidelines for the care of zoo animals. The resulting document, the 1977 Assessment of the Humane Treatment of Mammalians, addressed an array of issues including the size and furnishing of enclosures, climate, social conditions, nutrition, and shipping practices. Heinz-Georg Klös was, naturally, a member of the commission, as was zoologist Wolf Herre, who taught at Kiel University in the country’s north. The experts would gather at a different zoo each time they met to talk and so of course Klös invited the group to Berlin; he did everything possible to expand his influence and that of his zoo.

  Klös had previously tried to host a meeting of the German Society for Mammalian Biology, but had had to cancel on short notice, which Herre couldn’t resist bringing up. “He’ll uninvite you all again,” he supposedly joked to his fellow committee members.

  Herre was one of the most highly regarded zoologists in Germany, but he didn’t want to antagonize Klös. The West Berliner may not have had the influence that his rival Dathe enjoyed in the East, but since Frankfurt’s Bernhard Grzimek had retired, he was the leading voice among West German zoo directors. It could be advantageous to stay on his good side. So when, shortly afterward, Klös asked Herre whether he knew of someone who could serve as head of the Berlin aquarium, Herre came up with a candidate on the spot: his former doctoral student Jürgen Lange, whom he called up right away.

  “They’re looking for a successor for Dr. Schröder in Berlin,” he told the young man. “You should meet with Professor Klös.” But Lange wasn’t taken with the idea.

  “You don’t have to accept the position,” Herre insisted. “But please do me the favor and at least meet with him or he’ll never talk to me again.”

  Lange was no stranger to Berlin. In the mid-1960s he’d spent several months at Humboldt University studying antelope skulls. A West German student at an East German university was quite a rarity at the time. Lange lived with relatives in West Berlin and worked as an animal keeper in the zoo on the side. When he left, Klös told him to come back once he’d graduated. But no job opened up.

  A position did, however, become available elsewhere. In 1970, the Wilhelma Zoo in Stuttgart was seeking a new head for its aquarium after the man in charge was named zoo director. The facility had opened only three years earlier and was considered the most modern aquarium in Europe.

  Fish were actually the last thing Lange was interested in. As a child he’d owned guppies, and he minored in marine biology in college, but he hadn’t found it very stimulating. He wanted to continue working with mammals, preferably antelopes. “Take the job at the aquarium for now,” he told himself, somewhat naively. “You can always make the switch later.”

  Lange soon figured out that running an aquarium was far more complicated than keeping antelopes or other mammals. Many of the aquatic animals that came to Stuttgart from the wild had never before been kept in captivity. He had to pore over textbooks to find out the most basic information—sometimes even their species’ names.

  He also became fascinated by tank design. Antelope enclosures all looked pretty much the same, but re-creating a riverbank in a tank only six and a half feet long entailed far more than simply copying six and a half feet of shoreline. Everything had to be right. Visitors had to think, “That looks just like our brook back home.” Lange was intrigued by the creative challenge. And even the most brutish aquarium fish didn’t wreak havoc on their habitat the way hoofed animals or elephants did; no matter how big their sections were, after a few months they’d turn into dusty wastelands. There was also all the ingenious technology the fish needed to survive. Before long, Lange couldn’t imagine anything more exciting.

  * * *

  Zoos had unwritten laws, just like free enterprise. When people made a career change, it was either to take a step up or because more money was coming their way.

  But Lange had no desire to make a change. He’d been in Stuttgart for close to seven years, and was content there. Still, he did his dissertation adviser the favor of contacting Klös and arranging to meet with him in Berlin.

  K
lös invited him to his office in the zoo’s administration building for their discussion. Klös’s assistant, Hans Frädrich, and a member of the zoo’s supervisory board were already waiting there. The four spent a long time talking about this and that before turning to the job itself, which Klös praised to the skies. But Lange had a plan: the way to get out of this as quickly as possible was to make excessively high demands, at which point Klös would have no choice but to reject him.

  “How many staff members does the aquarium have?” Lange asked.

  “At the moment, ten,” said Klös.

  “That sounds like too few to me. At least five or six more would need to be hired,” Lange said, his voice resolute. “How old are they on average?”

  Klös thought for a moment. “About forty.”

  “Then at least four new people in their early twenties have to join the staff. The older ones are already too stuck in their daily routines.”

  That made sense to Klös. He’d seen things the same way when he came to Berlin as a young director. But he couldn’t make this sort of decision on his own. “I’ll have to discuss that with the board,” he said, looking embarrassed.

  “You do that,” Lange said contentedly.

  This sequence of questions and answers repeated itself several times that day. Every time Lange came up with a new demand, Klös asked him to step outside so he could work things out. Whenever Klös asked him to come back in, a different board member was sitting at the table. After countless rounds of negotiations, which extended over two days, Lange had the feeling that he’d met the entire board.

  “We’ll need to talk about your salary,” Klös said at some point.

  “What can you offer me?” Lange asked.

  When Klös named the sum, Lange raised his eyebrows. “If I’m to come here, you’ll have to offer me substantially more than I earn in Stuttgart now,” he said. “And every year I would like to have 7 percent more, to keep pace with inflation.” Friends in Stuttgart who were freelancing for TV and theater had given him this advice.

  Klös, who was infamous for his negotiating skills among West Berlin’s politicians and leading business figures, began to sweat. He hadn’t sat across from such a hard bargainer for quite a long time. He didn’t suspect that Lange’s only goal was to make himself unaffordable.

  * * *

  Jürgen Lange was prepared for any eventuality except one: that Klös would give him everything he asked for. He hadn’t known how desperately the director had been seeking a successor for Schröder. Lange had played his cards all wrong.

  He was aware that he couldn’t turn the offer down; word would soon get around. If he were to back out now, any time he applied for a job, the person doing the hiring would say, “That Lange’s not for us. He didn’t even take the offer from Berlin.” So he said yes to Klös and, with a heavy heart, left Stuttgart.

  Lange did have to agree to one compromise: although he’d be head of the aquarium, he would not be its director, as Schröder had been, but only a research assistant. With Schröder out, Klös would no longer have to work alongside a competitor.

  Schröder had been assured, even quite recently, that he could stay at the aquarium as long as he liked. But at a meeting of the supervisory board he learned that his contract would not be renewed and that his successor had already been identified.

  Schröder would be turning seventy at the end of the year. He’d already given thought to his departure—at his age it was time to think about retiring. But he hadn’t expected to be dismissed. The worst part was that he’d have to move out of the apartment he’d been living in for thirty years. At night he began receiving anonymous phone calls warning, “If you aren’t out by the end of the year, we’ll leave your things in front of the door.” Schröder was reminded of what had happened to Katharina Heinroth. But unlike her, he wasn’t a fighter. The stress wore away at him so much that he fell ill and had to spend several weeks in the hospital.

  In October of 1977, while Schröder prepared to depart by year’s end, his successor, Jürgen Lange, started work in Berlin. After visiting the aquarium, Lange once again wished he could cancel his contract. Aquarists have a saying: after ten years you refurbish the tanks, after twenty years you tear them down. Some of the technical installations at the Berlin aquarium were even older than that. In the early 1950s, when Schröder was rebuilding the aquarium, high-quality construction materials were in short supply, so he’d had to make do with what was available. In the decades since, the pipes and insulation had begun to crumble. The building was falling apart.

  The Berlin Zoo was the oldest in Germany, and the institution’s age was evident to Lange every day. Many things struck him as oddly formal and antiquated, and the atmosphere was much sterner than what he was used to in Stuttgart. Some of his early interactions were downright troubling. It wasn’t long before Schröder warned him, “You can’t believe anything Klös tells you over there at the zoo. He lies from morning to night.”

  The next day, when Lange stopped by the administration building, he ran into Klös. “Ah, you’ve just been at the aquarium, haven’t you?” Klös asked. He took Lange aside and said in a quieter voice, “Listen, you can’t believe a word Schröder says. He lies from morning to night.”

  * * *

  Lange went about things differently from Klös. He took on only apprentices who were in the third year of their rotation through the zoo, so that they could stay on at the aquarium as soon as their training ended, not up and leave for another temporary position. He entrusted these new hires with running the insectarium or the amphibian division. Elsewhere in the zoo that would have been inconceivable. Under Klös, only staff members who’d been working for at least ten years could be promoted to section head.

  In the evenings, Lange often made the rounds of West Berlin’s discotheques, not to dance, but to examine the generators and ceiling lights to gather ideas for more effective lighting for his tanks. He also brought events to the aquarium—fashion shows and theater performances.

  Klös thought this was far too much like the carnival atmosphere of the Oktoberfests in the 1940s and 1950s. When Lange was on vacation or a business trip, Klös seized the opportunity to tighten the reins at the aquarium, but the keepers refused to take orders from him. Disputes arose, with one word harsh leading to another.

  “Tomorrow you can pack up your things!” Klös would shout.

  “I quit!” the staff member would fire back.

  When Lange returned, he would generally find one or two letters of resignation on his desk. As he heard his staff’s stories, he would shake his head and ask, “Couldn’t you keep your mouths shut for two weeks until I was back?” In the end he was always able to change their minds; none of the resignations went through.

  Golden Times in the Golden Cage

  West Berlin was a special place. Because it was isolated from the rest of the Federal Republic, its economy lagged several years behind that of “mainland” West Germany. Bullet holes could still be seen on the fronts of buildings, traces of urban military operations during World War II. At some street corners people could easily get the sense that the weapons had only recently fallen silent.

  The “island in the Red sea” had to be buoyed by the Federal Republic. There was no free competition; everything was highly subsidized, from the construction industry to culture to nightlife to the zoo. Nepotism ruled.

  Within this world, Klös had risen to a position of considerable power. He was the undisputed lord of the most popular recreational facility. He knew how to make patrons of the arts, men of independent means, and owners of department stores scramble to finance the next lion or elephant. Lange never failed to be amazed by how the director got so much money. When Klös first started working at the Zoo in 1957, he was sometimes underestimated. Now, people would whisper to each other, “Here comes old Klös. This will be expensive.”

  Local politicians were also aware of the importance of Klös’s zoo. People said that anyone who picked
a fight with the Berlin Zoo was done for. The director was not a party man, but he had the backing of the “Zoo Party,” which had more members than any other. Klös told the newspaper Die Zeit in 1978 that he had “the world’s best zoogoers.” There were just about two million people living in West Berlin, and yet the zoo and the aquarium welcomed three million visitors annually, only a tenth of whom were tourists. West Berliners were impressed by the diligence and shrewdness with which Klös cared for their zoo, this one spot in the walled city that offered a hint of wilderness.

  Klös’s influence was not limited to West Berlin. When the sitting president of the Federal Republic visited the divided city, his agenda included not only the obligatory opening of hospital wards, but also a walk through the zoo. Klös planned to entice every president to the zoo at least once, although these outings didn’t always go off without a hitch.

  Theodor Heuss, the first man to serve as president of West Germany, had visited the zoo when Katharina Heinroth was still there. Heinrich Lübke, his successor, dabbled in microbiology in his spare time and was eager to make the trip. However, he was also known for making unfortunate remarks. When he saw the zoo’s parrots gnawing on the branches in their cages in order to trim their growing beaks, he asked Klös, “How can you let the animals get so hungry that they eat wood?” Klös tried to laugh off the criticism, but Lübke wasn’t finished. “Your parrots have such ruffled feathers,” he continued. “Haven’t you ever heard of trace elements?” When Klös took issue with the allegation that he wasn’t feeding his parrots the right vitamins and minerals to promote healthy feather growth, Lübke replied, “You can’t talk your way out of anything with me. Don’t forget that I was once the minister of agriculture.”