The Zookeepers' War Read online

  Lübke’s successor, Gustav Heinemann, balked at the idea of visiting the Zoo, but the chief of protocol for Berlin’s mayor insisted it was a must. So Heinemann agreed to go, although he did so sullenly. He had a better time there than he had expected, however, and when the chief of protocol started looking at his watch and reminding the president of his next appointment, Heinemann answered, “Oh, I like it here so much that I’d enjoy staying a little longer.” Mayor Klaus Schütz, who was scheduled to join Heinemann in dedicating a new hospital in the neighborhood of Urbanhafen, had to wait three hours until the president wrapped up his visit to the zoo.

  * * *

  Klös’s ancestors came from a farm in central Hesse, in the rural middle of Germany, and he ran his zoo in the hands-on way a patriarch would oversee his lands. He could be quick-tempered and shout at the slightest provocation. But he could calm down just as quickly and act as though nothing had happened. The “Elder,” as he was reverently referred to by the animal keepers, was always there—mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights. He knew about everything: who was pitching in at which section, who was married, who had children and who did not.

  His own children, though, rarely saw him. Like Dathe’s, they had learned early on that their father’s most important child was the zoo. Klös managed his household the way he did his work, always believing that he was doing what was best for his family. As long as his children were still at his table, he wouldn’t tolerate any dissent. His daughter Susanne put up a sign on the door to her room that read, “This place is hell.” And whenever a fight broke out between Klös and his son, Heiner, Heiner would declare, “I never want to be like you!”

  Heinz-Georg Klös would have loved for his son to take over for him at the zoo one day. He dreamed of the kind of dynasty the Hecks had enjoyed in Berlin for three generations—more than eight decades—which left an enduring imprint on Germany’s zoos.

  Klös tried to portray the history of the Berlin Zoo as a continuous and uninterrupted tradition dating back 130 years. An establishment of this sort had to be scrupulously built up and maintained—not plucked out of thin air like the Tierpark over in the East. In this spirit, he tried to patch things up with Katharina Heinroth, who was still living in Berlin and lecturing occasionally at universities. Heinroth, for her part, suspected he had something quite different in mind. “Klös just wants to get his hands on my inheritance,” she told Werner Schröder and his wife, actress Inge Sievers-Schröder. Many elderly women in West Berlin remembered the zoo in their wills.

  Heinroth happily played along, pretending in public to be reconciled with Klös and the board, and accepting rides in the zoo’s chauffeured Mercedes. “They should keep clinging to the belief that they’ll get my inheritance,” she told her friends, “but my brother Lollo will get it no matter what.” She called this her “little act of revenge.” Her contented grin as she said it made her wrinkles look even more deeply etched into her face.

  Klös also wanted to publicly recognize Heinroth’s predecessor, Lutz Heck. At the 1977 convention of the German Federation of Zoo Directors, he proposed making the former director an honorary member of the group, as though that man’s friendship with Hermann Göring, his use of forced laborers during World War II, and his expropriation of the shares of Jewish stockholders had never happened. Horrified, several members of the association threatened to resign and alert the press. This response surprised Klös, not because he had any affinity with National Socialism—quite the contrary—but because he regarded Lutz Heck first and foremost as a great zoologist who had helped the Berlin Zoological Garden attain world renown. Klös was also willing to overlook the fact that Heck had disappeared when the war ended, and then had the temerity to sue the zoo for outstanding pension payments.

  Klös was pragmatic—or naive—about political matters in much the same way Dathe was: everything was fine as long as it worked to the benefit of his beloved zoo. They were the alpha males, and they had little tolerance for criticism. When Klös believed that someone had it in for his zoo, he took extreme action—especially when the threat came from someone like journalist Werner Philipp.

  Klös had been following Philipp’s career at West Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel for over a decade, since well before he’d tried to make the reporter the zoo’s press officer. At times Klös would have loved to forbid Philipp to write his articles, which tended to be critical—and what Philipp had recently come out with had finally gone too far. A few small panes had cracked in the aquarium, Philipp wrote, and could easily have been replaced, except that, as was typical in sluggish West Berlin, things seemed to work according the principle “Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow.”

  When Klös next saw the journalist bicycling through the zoo, he rode up to him and braked sharply, so close to Philipp that gravel flew up from the ground. “You’ve written something bad about the aquarium again!” he shouted.

  “So what?” Philipp snapped back. “It was true, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Klös answered, snorting with rage, “but you can’t write something like that. From now on you’re banned from the premises.”

  Philipp had no intention of accepting this ban, so he bought one of the Zoo’s four thousand shares for 1,900 marks, reasoning that Klös couldn’t keep a stockholder out of the zoo. Before long, they ran into each other again.

  “What are you doing here now?” Klös asked in surprise.

  “I’m a stockholder,” Philipp answered. “At the next shareholders meeting I’ll make sure we get a new director.”

  Klös didn’t reply, but Philipp sensed from the director’s face what he was thinking: “Philipp, you’ve got nerve!”

  The zoo’s alpha male wouldn’t put up with dissension from his direct subordinates, but it seemed to please him that the journalist hadn’t caved.

  Schmidt’s State Gifts

  Klös aspired to make the Berlin Zoo the world’s most biodiverse. But missing from his collection was a giant panda. In the mid-1960s, after passing on the opportunity to take in Chi Chi and watching as people flocked to Friedrichsfelde by the hundreds of thousands to see her there instead, he put out feelers to Willy Brandt, the city’s former mayor who had become foreign minister—but to no avail. Apart from a pair that went to North Korea, China was no longer exporting pandas at that time.

  Not until the early 1970s did the People’s Republic gradually open up to the West, with so-called panda diplomacy playing a major role. Pandas were handpicked to be presented as state gifts to carefully selected countries. Japan was the first recipient, accepting a pair in 1971. The following year, Richard Nixon received two of the rare animals, which he had placed in the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Two more went to Paris, and another two to London. In 1975, when West Germany’s new federal chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, made his first visit to China, Klös couldn’t help but get his hopes up—but Schmidt came back empty-handed. Klös had to look on as zoos in Mexico City and Madrid were given preference over Berlin.

  When the Chinese premier, Hua Guofeng, announced that he would be visiting Bonn for a week in October 1979, Klös wrote a letter to Schmidt’s wife. Loki Schmidt was a friend of Ursula Klös, so Klös made the bold suggestion that her husband should request “not vases or silk carpets, but rather pandas.”

  In early November he received a reply from the chancellor himself: “For you personally—but truly only for you! I wish to say the following: if we should get the panda bears, I will give them to Berlin.”

  Schmidt asked Klös to keep quiet about this promise. The federal election and several state elections were approaching, and other German zoos were hoping to get the pandas for themselves. But Klös, ever the optimist, had an enclosure designed, and was left scrambling to explain to the zoo’s board what he intended to do with a glass annex to the predator house that would run up a bill of 750,000 marks. “This will be a play area for the baby animals,” he fibbed. “We absolutely have to have one in case our big cats cast ou
t their young and we have to hand-raise them.” The board considered that plausible enough and approved the funds.

  In the spring of 1980, Chancellor Schmidt at last instructed his spokesman to announce that pandas would be coming to Berlin. Schmidt intended the gesture to send a signal to the Soviets that West Berlin was a full part of West Germany. Vladimir Semyonov, the Soviet ambassador, understood—and was affronted. He protested that West Berlin was ineligible to receive a state gift as the city was not a part of the Federal Republic, but rather a “special political entity.” Berliners cared little about this semantic argument—they were brimming with panda fever.

  Klös’s assistant, Hans Frädrich, took an extended trip abroad to visit several zoos and learn what their pandas ate besides 20 kilograms of bamboo per day. He discovered the animals’ fondness for chocolate, chopped meat, honey, spinach, rice, and gruel. The bamboo for Berlin’s pandas would be imported from the south of France twice a month and kept in the zoo’s cold storage facility at 39 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Meanwhile, Berlin’s journalists speculated about how to pronounce and spell the names of the two pandas, who were already accustomed to life in captivity from their time in the Chengdu Zoo. The German press referred to the female as “Quan Quan,” “Tschüan Tschüan,” “Tian Tian,” or “Tjen Tjen,” which translated to “the flawless one,” “the divine one,” or “little heaven.” The male was called “Bao Bao,” which meant “sweetie” or “darling.”

  The summer of 1980 gave way to fall, and still the pandas’ arrival kept being put off. First, the planned flight from Beijing was postponed when Lufthansa found out that the animals would have to be looked after continuously. When the Chinese government started wondering why things were taking so long, Schmidt instructed the West German air force to fly the pandas to Germany. Defense Minister Hans Apel, however, objected that spending 150,000 marks to transport two bears was just too much, whereupon negotiations were taken up again with Lufthansa. Eventually it was decided that three Chinese zookeepers would accompany the pandas on the flight, and a departure date was set for October 1. But these arrangements also came to naught. This time it was the Chinese authorities who balked; October 1 was a national holiday.

  More than a month later, on November 5, at 2:05 p.m., the moment finally came. When the plane landed three hours late at Tempelhof Airport, the pandas were received as though they were state guests. A “Welcome to Berlin” sign was illuminated on the display board at the gate. Countless journalists were standing by, cameras flashing, as the pandas’ metal crates were loaded onto a green VW bus and driven to the zoo, where several hundred visitors were already crowding around the bulletproof glass and singing the German equivalent of “For they are jolly good fellows!”

  The new open-air enclosure looked like a cross between a solarium and a dog park. Bright blue tiles oozed all the charm of a hospital, yet in the papers the dwelling was touted in terms that suggested a lavish preschool. The pandas “can tromp across the sod that has been laid out for them, they can luxuriate in two swimming pools, they can climb up artificial trees and have fun on a swing,” the Hamburger Abendblatt wrote. “Each panda has a sleeping area that measures 65 square feet, and a lounge 550 square feet in size, with a play corner and dining table, of course.”

  The pandas had three days to settle into their new home before Chancellor Schmidt stopped by for a visit. When he signed the zoo’s guestbook, his wife added, underneath his entry, “The ‘godmother,’ Loki Schmidt, is especially delighted.”

  When the Schmidts and the Klöses gathered at the zoo restaurant for a celebratory drink, journalists asked the chancellor what he liked best about the pandas. “They’re so wonderfully silent,” he quipped. “We ought to vote them into the party executive committee.”

  Like so many zoo animals before them, the pandas quickly became Berlin celebrities. A picture of the two soon embellished decals alongside the text “Berlin does you good.”

  Little more than three years later, however, in February of 1984, Tjen Tjen’s health declined rapidly. Over the course of several days she wasted away as one organ after the other failed. Veterinarians were baffled. When the zoo reported her death, the media coverage ran the gamut from sarcasm to sympathy. The left-leaning newspaper taz wrote a sneering piece about the “most tragic event since the death of Ernst Reuter,” Berlin’s former mayor who died in office of a heart attack, while the tabloid B.Z. ran a seven-page report, and a commentator on the broadcasting station Sender Freies Berlin mockingly called for a period of “national mourning.” Even the outgoing mayor, Richard von Weizsäcker, commented on Tjen Tjen’s death, calling her “a city VIP.” In Berlin—and perhaps only there—this was nothing out of the ordinary. “In the walled-in city, a yearning for nature and a proverbial love of animals are at an all-time high,” the magazine Der Spiegel wrote.

  While veterinarians and pathologists were still investigating the cause of death, the public had already started speculating about whether it was the smog-laden Berlin air at fault or the KGB, seeking to snuff out the symbol of German-Chinese friendship. It turned out that the female panda had died of a viral infection. But whatever the cause of death, the era of panda diplomacy was over.

  Eastern Stones for West Berlin

  Paying his respects to Tjen Tjen was one of Richard von Weizsäcker’s final acts as mayor. In May 1984 he was elected president of the Federal Republic and moved to Bonn. Before leaving West Berlin, he saw to it that one of the final makeshift arrangements from the postwar years disappeared from the Berlin Zoo.

  Two years earlier, in August 1982, Weizsäcker had spent an evening in the Klös family’s living room. He frequently visited the zoo, and the director usually invited him in afterward for a glass of red wine or a cheese sandwich. When Klös later walked with the mayor to the exit on Budapester Strasse, it was already growing dark. The two ticket booths with their gray-sprayed concrete facade and a wrought iron gate between them now looked even more dreary than they had during the daytime.

  “This is where that lovely elephant gate once stood,” Weizsäcker said to Klös somewhat hesitantly, as though he couldn’t even imagine it while staring at the blocks of concrete.

  “Yes,” Klös echoed pensively, “that’s where the elephant gate once stood.”

  Weizsäcker had fond memories of the old gate. In 1937, on the day before his college entrance exams, he’d gone to the zoo. Two stone elephant statues, almost life-size, had held up the expansive red entrance archway with a green tiled roof. Constructed in 1899, in Siamese style, the magnificent gate was designed to herald, even from afar, “that a realm of the exotic opens up here,” as Lutz Heck, the former director, once wrote. Weizsäcker passed his exams the following day; the way he remembered it, the elephant gate brought him good luck. Six years later, in November 1943, the gate was destroyed by bombs.

  Klös had often thought about how this area could be improved. It could be turned into an enclosure for African hoofed animals, with only a moat to separate it from the downtown neighborhood of City West. Even a dolphinarium was discussed, although Klös rejected that idea as financially imprudent.

  Lost in thought, he gazed at the two wretched ticket booths.

  “Why haven’t you rebuilt them?” Weizsäcker asked.

  “Zoo funds are earmarked for specific purposes,” Klös explained. “I have to build more animal houses before I can worry about entryways.”

  Weizsäcker examined the gate, grabbing the wrought iron bars with one hand. “But surely it would be nice if there were a stately entrance here again, instead of something like this.”

  Klös grinned. “Well then, Mayor, how about you try to get us a gate?” he said. “Although I don’t know whether the Class Lottery would make money available for that.”

  Many of the zoo’s structures had been paid for with funds from the German Class Lottery, an authorized betting ring that raised money for the state, but Weizsäcker was well aware that this money could only
be used for animal housing. “No,” he said. “It has to be something involving animals. But if it is, the sum could easily go higher.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Klös to think of combining the gate with a new enclosure, though he’d wanted to replace the nondescript pens directly behind the entrance for a long time.

  “I’ll figure something out,” he promised the mayor as they parted.

  A few weeks later, Weizsäcker had a design for an “Asia enclosure with elephant gate” on his desk. Klös had even found the original plans for the old elephant gate, although the zoo archive had been destroyed in the war; former director Lutz Heck had saved them. Construction was projected to cost a hefty 16 million marks. Hardly anyone knew that the gate was not an add-on, but the very reason for the project. The city gave the green light to invite competitive bidding.

  Two West German companies submitted bids for the project. There was only one problem: the columns of the original elephant gate had been made out of Elbe Sandstone, and the only place to get that was from a quarry in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, outside Pirna—in the German Democratic Republic.

  Shortly before Klös could decide which bid to accept, a man with a Saxon accent showed up at the zoo. He introduced himself as the general director of the State-Owned Enterprise for Elbe Natural Stone in Dresden.

  “Why don’t you order the gate directly from us?” he asked.

  “I already have two bids from companies in the Federal Republic,” Klös replied.

  “They always come to us anyway,” his guest said. “They don’t lift a finger. All they do is rake in money.”

  The director of the State-Owned Enterprise for Elbe Natural Stone eventually made Klös an offer that was markedly lower than those of the two West German companies—and whenever Klös could save money, he was happy to pounce. But this time was somewhat more complicated, because it would entail doing business with an East German company.