The Zookeepers' War Read online

  No sooner had the visitor gone than Klös called up Weizsäcker and told him about the new bid. “They’re only half as expensive,” he said.

  “Well then, let’s take them,” Weizsäcker answered happily.

  The Dresden company got the commission, and the West Berlin city government quietly drew up a contract with the GDR.

  * * *

  The dedication ceremony for the reconstructed elephant gate was held in October 1986. The Saxon stonemasons who’d faithfully re-created the gate were invited to the event. Only Richard von Weizsäcker was not in attendance; by that time he’d left West Berlin for Bonn. At first Klös worried that Weizsäcker’s successor would object to the contract with the GDR, but the new mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, also approved. In his opening remarks, he praised “the pan-German achievement that is now enriching the center of our city.”

  The only shadow that fell over the zoo’s stone guardians came from the adjacent Europa-Center, as the afternoon sun slowly set behind the towers of City West.

  The End of an Era

  Two years later, the people of West Berlin would bid farewell to one of their favorite animals. Knautschke the hippopotamus had been injured so severely in a fight with his son Nante that he had to be put to sleep on June 20, 1988.

  With the death of Knautschke, the Berlin Zoo lost its most prominent resident of the postwar era. Generations of children had grown up with the hippo; for many people, he was one of them. Knautschke had been born in 1943, a war baby who stayed put on the island that was West Berlin his entire life. The hippo had lived in the city for forty-five years and sired thirty-five calves during that time. (Berliners were unperturbed by the fact that almost all of these calves were a result of inbreeding.)

  Knautschke was an integral part of the zoo in much the same way that the actor Harald Juhnke was an integral part of his favorite bar on nearby Savignyplatz. Only in West Berlin, where an exaggerated love of animals and local patriotism combined to form a kitschy sort of hero worship, could a hippo become a symbol for an entire city.

  A few days after Knautschke’s death, the tabloid B.Z. published a letter to the editor in the form of a poem:

  I’m standing here beside your pool

  And that you’ve died just seems so cruel.

  Although the age you reached is high

  It’s still so hard to say goodbye.

  Forty years ago I came to you

  My dad and I, off to the zoo.

  Our stomachs empty, feet so chilled

  Alone this whole big pool you filled.

  The warmth here was quite a reprieve

  No one would ever want to leave.

  Now you’re gone, you’re not within,

  And we have lost some of Berlin.

  The most popular animal on the island was gone—and before long the island itself would be too.

  CHAPTER 8 THE GRAY GIANT COMES TUMBLING DOWN

  One evening, early in 1986, Heinrich Dathe came home even later than usual. When his wife asked him if he’d had something to eat, he said that he hadn’t, adding, “I really didn’t have the time.” He was grappling with a major problem, and had had to meet with several prominent men from the agricultural sector to talk them into providing two greenhouses. Greenhouses were in short supply in the GDR, as they were urgently needed to grow vegetables. But Dathe needed two to build a long-planned tropical hall for his crocodiles, which were still being housed either with the snakes or in an outbuilding behind the Alfred Brehm House. Some had already grown so large that they filled out their glass tanks completely and adapted their shapes to fit the space. Several of their snouts had actually grown vertically, making it impossible for them to eat on their own; they had to be hand-fed.

  Dathe had to go to great lengths to get any new facilities at all; other construction sites kept taking precedence. A new high-rise building had recently been added to the Charité university clinic, an ostentatious showcase of a hospital not far from the Wall that could be seen from West Berlin. The Lichtenberg train station had opened a new entrance hall, and even the city’s French Cathedral had undergone renovations.

  As usual, improvisation was called for. In 1984, Dathe had received a barred dome-shaped structure from an agricultural production cooperative that had been designed for housing tractors. He was happy to get it, as he could put pretty much anything to good use. A team of laborers spent months of after-hours work transforming the dome into an aviary for seagulls.

  Dathe was exasperated that the Tierpark’s expansion was moving so slowly. It’d been like this for years. The unfinished tapir house had been torn down rather than completed, and while a new pachyderm house was supposed to have been built by the beginning of the decade, all there was to show for it were plans gathering dust in some drawers. The elephants were still living in their makeshift stable. When the first two females, Dombo and Bambi, had moved in in 1955, the shelter was supposed to be a temporary measure, but “temporary” had turned into three decades. In the following year, Berlin would be commemorating its 750th anniversary. Dathe imagined it would be embarrassing if there were no new building to mark the occasion. Sometimes he thought it might be better for there to be no celebration at all.

  The zoo staff was unhappy too. One Stasi Informal Collaborator bemoaned the lack of exacting anniversary plans; there was little to report other than “that the painting and locksmith guilds will help overhaul the existing enclosures.”

  Most of Dathe’s visions fell victim to the GDR’s flagging economy, but one did succeed. For a long time he’d been planning to construct buildings on a mountain of rubble in the northeastern part of the park. He already had definite ideas about what should go there. In 1984, when his counterparts in West Berlin came for their yearly visit, Dathe brought them down muddy paths and up to the landfill. The wind whipped around their ears while Dathe spoke in the pouring rain about the future. With a big sweep of his hand he pointed down the hillside. “Over there we’ll soon have spacious enclosures for mountain animals,” he said. Klös’s eyes widened in surprise. He couldn’t imagine how a dreary slope with bits of birch trees and brushwood could be turned into an attractive animal enclosure. But before Klös could get a word in, Dathe continued trudging up the hillside to a rough area at the top. He stopped at the edge of a puddle and said, “And here there will be a café where we’ll sit on the terrace and look out over the entire city!”

  Dathe’s neighbors had done everything they could to foil this plan. At the foot of the hill, behind a gray concrete wall, stood the Stasi district administration building. If there was anything the secret police wanted to prevent, it was coffee-drinking Tierpark visitors watching their every move.

  But the Stasi also knew by now that it was not so easy to talk Dathe out of his plans. Several Informal Collaborators kept the police in the loop about the director’s intentions for the café—and time was on their side. The minutes of an Informal Collaborator meeting in the spring of 1986 noted that even if Dathe were eventually permitted to build his café, at least five years would elapse before construction got underway, and another five before it opened. Even the Stasi counted on the slowness of the state.

  Not that the Stasi had it in for Dathe’s zoo. Quite the contrary—the Tierpark was an asset that could be used to present the GDR in a positive light, and so the secret police sought to maintain its international renown. When an informant from the Tierpark’s senior management reported that West Berlin’s zoo director was trying to divide the annual Symposium on Disorders of Zoo Animals and Wildlife, which had always been held in East Berlin, between the city’s Eastern and Western halves, the Stasi jumped in to prevent this from happening. “Tierpark Berlin has many friends in various countries, including the United States,” an internal memo noted, “and they are informed by these friends about the actions of Prof. Dr. Klös.”

  Greedy Gifts

  While Dathe focused on getting materials to develop his spacious site, Heinz-Georg Klös was running out o
f ideas for where to put his animals. The biggest problem was a lack of space. He’d recently expanded the zoo by seven and a half acres, and yet the director’s passion for collecting still led to double occupancies. In some enclosures the animals had to use the space in shifts. The hyenas, for instance, could be let out onto the large outdoor installation at the predator house only at night, when the lions were asleep in their cages.

  All the same, Klös tried to use the city’s upcoming anniversary to get even more animals. He’d already been pestering the mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, for some time. “Have the guests of honor bring along animals for our Zoo,” he wrote, enclosing a wish list: cranes and pelicans from Australia, fallow deer and red deer from Denmark, spectacled bears from Ecuador, okapis from Zaire, elephants from Thailand, Sumatran rhinoceroses from Indonesia, and Indian rhinoceroses from Nepal and the United States. Los Angeles, Berlin’s sister city, had a full herd of rhinoceroses in its zoo, and he was eager to get a female he could breed.

  Few of his wishes were fulfilled. Some turned him down, or cited export restrictions; others didn’t even bother to reply. Although the mayor of Los Angeles brought two animals with him when he came for a visit in May 1987, they were a pair of fishers, weasel-like mammals found in large numbers on the West Coast of North America.

  Klös was underwhelmed by these unwanted gifts, yet he had no choice but to accept them with a show of happiness. He could, of course, understand that his American colleague didn’t want to hand over any of his more valuable animals, preferring to send ones he could easily do without. After all, Klös had done something similar back when Willy Brandt was mayor in the 1960s.

  When Brandt had gone on business trips, he’d enjoyed taking along a young brown bear as a present for the local zoo, whether or not the recipients had need of one. He thought there was no more suitable gift than a living specimen of Berlin’s mascot. Before leaving on his trips, he always called up Klös and said in his rather hoarse voice, “I need another bear.”

  The director had been happy to oblige. Breeding bears wasn’t very difficult, and Berlin’s were reproducing so abundantly that they were sometimes given birth control pills. Of course the young bears grew up quickly and would soon look less cute and take up precious space. Thanks to Brandt’s lack of imagination when it came to gift giving, Klös no longer had to worry about what to do with the adolescents.

  While brown bears were a sure crowd pleaser, fishers were rarely kept in European zoos, as the nocturnal predators could hardly ever be seen; they spent most of the day sleeping indoors. Even Klös seldom caught sight of one. Every time he asked the animal keepers about their whereabouts, he got the same terse response: “They’re always inside the building when you come, boss.”

  At one point, a few weeks went by during which only one of the fishers was seen. Deaths in the aviary were also growing more frequent. Several geese, a cockatoo, and two rare cranes had already been killed. The keepers couldn’t explain what had happened. The culprit wasn’t a fox; it had to be something larger. Eventually, Klös thought to have the fishers’ lair examined. When a keeper opened the lid of the wooden crate, he found only one of the two animals, gazing up at him sleepily.

  Klös was beside himself with anger. “I don’t care how you do it,” he hollered at his staff, “but bring me back that damned fisher!”

  Luckily, the escaped animal was found shortly, holed up in a shed near the petting zoo, having a nap.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, at the Tierpark, construction was—shockingly—moving ahead. Dathe had finally been able to obtain two greenhouses for his crocodiles’ tropical hall, as well as authorization to build a new pachyderm house. Architect Heinz Graffunder, who’d drawn up the plans for the Alfred Brehm House for big cats, oversaw the design. Graffunder was by now well versed in crafting housing for humans as well, and had made a name for himself in the GDR. Since his last work for the zoo, he’d received a commission to design the Palace of the Republic, the seat of the East German government.

  By early 1987, construction on the pachyderm house was well underway. It would be even larger than the predator house, with 65,000 square feet, enough space to breed African and Asiatic elephants as well as rhinoceroses and pygmy hippopotamuses.

  Sadly, Dathe had little time to relish this triumph. On April 16, his wife died of heart disease at the age of sixty-eight. Elisabeth had been unwell for quite some time, but had never thought to go to the hospital. Without her, the Dathe household ceased to function. She had freed her husband from many responsibilities, taking care of the house and their children and even typing his manuscripts, which enabled him to devote himself completely to his scientific work. All of a sudden, he was on his own. The children had grown up and moved away, and Heinrich Dathe was not the sort of person who’d be comfortable alone. To blunt the pain, he did what he did best: he threw himself into his work.

  Luckily there was plenty for him to do. In August, the crocodile house opened, and in September he hosted zoo directors from every corner of the world for a five-day conference on “Zoos and the Environment.” He guided the visitors through his Tierpark as though nothing was amiss, giving one speech after another and trying not to let on about his recent loss. Although he would soon be turning seventy-seven, he had no desire to stop working and the municipal authorities gave no indication that the time was coming for him to step down. He barely gave any thought to what retirement might be like. There were still a good number of manuscripts piled up on his desk that he wanted to publish and a great deal else to get done.

  While the shell of the pachyderm house was growing rapidly, the building wasn’t yet habitable—but already four young African elephants had arrived from Zimbabwe, and two Asian elephants were on their way from Moscow. The old elephant stable was getting more and more cramped, and the keepers needed all the help they could find, even if that help came in the form of Patric Müller, who was still in training.

  In 1986, sixteen-year-old Müller had begun his apprenticeship as an animal keeper. The program rotated him through almost all the sections of the Tierpark, but from the outset he much preferred working with the elephants. The older keepers soon noticed that he had a knack for dealing with the most challenging animals, unlike most of the other trainees, who lacked the levelheadedness and natural authority to show an elephant—who could weigh a good three tons and have the intelligence of a five-year-old child—who was in charge. Sometimes the elephants would stage mock attacks, only the keepers wouldn’t know until afterward whether it had been a mock attack or a real one—assuming they even survived. In 1963, the West Berlin zoo’s eleven-year-old bull, Salim, gored his keeper in front of horrified onlookers. Müller soon learned the trick in these situations was to stand still, but even so, he sometimes went weak-kneed; he knew that what might feel like a gentle push to a playful or irritated elephant could be lethal for him. For this reason, many elephant keepers regarded themselves as a kind of elite among zoo staff, with the most dangerous job of all. A predator keeper has only to open a sliding gate to let lions, tigers, or leopards in and out of their cages; there’s no way to avoid direct contact with an elephant. When the visitors left the Tierpark in the evening, some elephant keepers even rode their charges through the grounds to the construction site, so that the elephants would get used to the route to their new home.

  Müller was living in a housing cooperative that required him to spend a certain number of hours doing construction work each week, so he figured he might as well pitch in at the pachyderm house. He and his colleagues quickly noticed a flaw in the design: the doors were mounted in a way that prevented the keepers from getting their wheelbarrows through. There was also another far more worrying flaw.

  Dathe had asked for the new section to be designed according to the “Leipzig principle” of a raised enclosure surrounded by a deep moat. It was the old model of the zoo as a stage, an analogy he’d gotten to know during his time in Leipzig and had been using ever since the Tierpark ha
d opened. But this construction method was now considered outdated, because it posed too many risks. The moat was shaped like a funnel, and with no fence or rope to get in the way of the visitors’ view, there was a risk that an elephant might fall in. If one did, there was no easy way into the moat to rescue it.

  The keepers couldn’t just go to Dathe and register their complaint; there were fixed protocols to be respected. So they pointed out the problem to the zoo’s inspectors. Some minor faults were corrected, but the moat’s basic design remained unchanged. Dathe planned to keep the elephants chained up at night to keep them from falling into the water in the dark. The keepers tried not to imagine what would happen if one of the animals managed to break free.

  In the late summer of 1989, the elephants moved into their new home. Tall palm trees, creeping figs, rubber and eucalyptus trees planted inside the building gave the space a junglelike atmosphere. The only thing still missing was the doors. Until they were installed, the keepers would have to stay for night shifts to ensure the animals’ safety. Patric Müller took advantage of the opportunity to impress his new girlfriend, whom he invited to tag along. Where else in the East could you spend the night beneath palm trees? A vacation in Bulgaria might afford the opportunity, but certainly nowhere else in the GDR. As it turned out, however, the night was less romantic than Müller had hoped. The elephants kept rustling loudly with bales of hay—and farting.

  With its sixteen-meter-high roof, gray prefab walls, and large, mostly empty interior, the pachyderm house looked like a combination of concrete slab, greenhouse, and factory. It was outmoded by the time it opened. The long planning and construction periods posed a particular problem for zoo design; by the time an enclosure was finally complete, standards had often evolved. In the West, six or seven years could elapse from planning to completion; in the East, a lack of materials and skilled workers could double that time. Dathe had had to wait almost fifteen years for this new elephant house, only three of which were spent actually building the thing (quite nearly a speed record). At least the new building, however unfashionable, was an improvement over the old elephant stable.