The Zookeepers' War Read online

  The pachyderm house officially opened in late September 1989. Dathe proudly announced in front of East Berlin’s mayor, Erhard Krack, Politburo member Günter Schabowski—an inveterate animal lover—and numerous colleagues that this was “likely to be the biggest building that will ever stand in the Tierpark.”

  It would also be the last building that he and architect Graffunder worked on together, and the very last one to be constructed in the Tierpark while Dathe was in charge.

  News of the new attraction quickly got around, and people streamed into the Tierpark in record numbers—3.2 million visitors as the year drew to a close, a record that would never be surpassed. Protests were slowly gaining strength throughout the country, and soon there would be more important matters on people’s minds than new houses for big animals.

  On the Go

  Thousands of East Germans traveled to Hungary in the summer of 1989, as they did every year. But now everything was different. This year, the goal was not to take a vacation, but to get to the West.

  In May, the Hungarian government, loath to spend money on renovations, had issued an order to dismantle the rotting border fence between Hungary and Austria, putting the first gap in the Iron Curtain. When horrified GDR leaders prohibited travel to Hungary, people went by way of Poland and Czechoslovakia, flooding into West German embassies in Warsaw and Prague.

  The keepers at East Berlin’s Tierpark continued feeding their animals and mucking out stables day in and day out, but many of them found their thoughts drifting in a very different direction. On October 2, the Stasi learned from an Informal Collaborator that “topic no. 1 among the animal keepers is leaving the GDR.”

  Three days earlier, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, West Germany’s foreign minister, who’d been born in Halle (now part of East Germany), appeared on the balcony of the German embassy in Prague, looking like a silhouette against the floodlights. Genscher had given many speeches, and often talked quite a lot without really saying anything new. This time, he said little. “Today, your departure…” he began, addressing the hundreds of people waiting down in the embassy garden. He couldn’t get any further. The sounds of rejoicing drowned him out.

  Those who’d stayed home didn’t want to wait any longer either. Resistance took hold. One of the centers was the Gethsemane Church in East Berlin, where members of the opposition held vigils for political prisoners and kept tabs on other protests throughout the country by telephone. One of the elephant keepers at the Tierpark was among the regulars there. Müller and his colleagues covered for him to keep him from getting into trouble, doing all his work.

  In Leipzig demonstrators had already been gathering every Monday evening for months to call for reforms, including the freedom to travel. Over the course of the year, their numbers swelled from a few hundred to several thousand. Jörg Adler was among them. He’d worked his way up at the Leipzig Zoo from a simple animal keeper to head of the primate section, studying both veterinary medicine and agricultural science. He was authorized to travel all the way to Vietnam to bring lions to the country in exchange for native elephants. Even though there were three research assistants technically above him in the zoo’s hierarchy, he was director Siegfried Seifert’s right-hand man.

  Outside the walls of the zoo, however, things had become increasingly dangerous. Since the early 1980s Adler had attended Monday prayer meetings at Leipzig’s St. Nicholas Church, where he’d witnessed the Stasi and the People’s Police arresting people. The rear window of his Trabant sported a sign boasting of another Leipzig parish in such large print that anyone driving behind his car could read it: “Leipzig-Grünau—the first new church in the GDR.” Since he’d stuck up the sign, he was constantly being stopped by the police for questioning on all kinds of trivial pretexts. On one of his trips to Berlin someone even tried to force him off the road. When his daughter was rejected from a music program for political reasons, he decided it was high time to apply to emigrate.

  Three years passed. In mid-September 1989, Adler was finally summoned to the Department of Internal Affairs, the cover name for the regional Stasi. Scores of would-be Leipzig emigrants were beating a path to its door. Adler had to wait for a while before he was called into one of the offices, where a gray-haired official sitting behind a gray desk told him, “If you don’t engage in political activities on October 7 and don’t appear in public on that day, you can assume that you and your family will be able to leave the GDR by the end of the year.”

  On October 7, the GDR would be celebrating its fortieth anniversary. Few suspected that this would also be its last—not even Adler, who made his way home and said to his wife, “Here goes.” She knew what that meant: any day now, they could be gone. They began to prepare for their departure, packing their bags, giving their friends everything they couldn’t take with them. But the hardest task of all for Jörg Adler still lay ahead: to explain himself to Siegfried Seifert, the man who had shaped his career more than anyone else.

  With a queasy feeling, he went to see the Leipzig Zoo director in his office the following morning. “Herr Professor,” he said in a hoarse voice, “I need to talk with you.”

  “Not here,” Seifert interrupted, pointing to the walls. They went outdoors and strolled through the zoo until they came to a park bench where they could speak without being monitored.

  Adler felt like a traitor to his mentor, without whom he would never have risen so high. Seifert was the one who’d urged him to continue his education. Seifert had even found a way for Adler to get around joining the party.

  One day in the early 1980s, two Socialist Unity Party representatives had come to Seifert to ask why Adler had yet to become a member. With a look of concern, Seifert told them, “Unfortunately you’ve come too late, gentlemen. Herr Adler recently joined the Christian Democratic Union.” No sooner were they gone than Seifert picked up the phone and made a few calls.

  “I’ve taken care of everything,” he explained to a bemused Adler. “All you have to do is come here and sign, and you’ll have been a member of the CDU since the beginning of the year.”

  Adler spent a year attending Leipzig’s city council meetings. He had no intention of sitting around and doing nothing, so he advocated for a women’s rights group, and—far more scandalous—decried the city’s air pollution. Eventually his fellow party members suggested that it would probably be better for him to withdraw from active participation in politics. Still, something good came out of his brief foray: the Socialist Unity Party left him alone from then on.

  Now, Adler had to tell his mentor that his request to emigrate would soon be granted. “I’ll be going,” he said softly.

  Siegfried Seifert had always been only as loyal to the regime as was absolutely necessary, but he could hardly hide his disappointment. After a moment of silence he said, “But I wanted to make you my successor.”

  Adler was flattered, but he didn’t think he’d be the right person for the Leipzig Zoo. And besides, he’d made up his mind. He wanted to get out.

  Still, he refused to abide by the Stasi’s demand to keep a low profile—he wasn’t about to be intimidated. Together with his wife and some four thousand other demonstrators, he spent October 7 on Leipzig’s Karl Marx Platz at the corner of Grimmaische Strasse, facing water cannons used for riot control. Throughout the country, people were taking to the streets. There were more than two hundred arrests in Leipzig alone, but Jörg Adler was not among them.

  Then came the evening of October 9. It was a Monday, which meant that there would be protests in Leipzig, as usual. Nobody knew what would happen. There were reports that orders had been given to shoot, and that hospitals had stepped up their requests for blood donations. Everyone remembered the images from Beijing where only that summer the Chinese military had brutally suppressed protests on Tiananmen Square. In the GDR rumors of a “Chinese solution” were making the rounds.

  Even so, seventy thousand people showed up that evening in Leipzig. They moved through the streets with
candles in their hands, singing the socialist anthem, “The Internationale.” Government officials weren’t prepared for such crowds, and could only look on. Shouts, not shots, filled the air as the marchers made their way through the city streets. Jörg Adler and countless others sensed that on this evening a movement had started that could no longer be stopped. Still, no one anticipated what would happen one month later in Berlin, when, on November 9, Socialist Unity Party spokesman Günter Schabowski announced a relaxing of travel laws at a press conference in Berlin. When asked by a journalist when the new legislation would take effect, he distractedly said immediately. That night, East Germans stormed the Wall. They streamed past astonished border guards and through the doors to West Berlin. When traditional entrances wouldn’t let them out quickly enough, the crowd hacked new ones. After twenty-eight years, the Wall was finally falling. After that, Adler knew it was just a matter of time until his application to emigrate was approved. There was no reason for the state to drag things out any longer. By this point, the Adlers could simply travel to Berlin and climb over the remnants of the Wall.

  Over the coming days East Germans streamed en masse into West Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany. Eight hundred thousand people who’d been penned in for so long used their newfound freedom to have a look at the animals at the Berlin Zoo, which offered them free admission for two weeks. Most knew the zoo only from their parents’ and grandparents’ stories. From the main entrance on Hardenbergplatz, the lines stretched out for several blocks, all the way to Budapester Strasse. People stood in amazement in front of the enclosures, although here and there a child chimed in with comments like, “But our elephant house is much bigger.”

  Nine miles to the east, at the Tierpark, only a skeleton crew had showed up for work. Everyone wanted to see for themselves whether the Wall was truly down.

  * * *

  In all the confusion, Dathe worried what would become of his Tierpark. For the closing paragraph of his 1989 annual report—which listed all the special distinctions members of staff had been awarded as well as which animals had given birth, how many visitors had come, and how much bratwurst and broiled chicken they had consumed—he wrote:

  Societal changes in our country necessitate not only an adjustment in thinking, but also an enhanced personal commitment from the entire Tierpark collective in order to achieve a successful activation of the new aspects of our endeavors. This should also function as a pledge on behalf of the Tierpark collective for 1990 and the years ahead.

  Dathe understood the danger of having two zoos in one city. When the Tierpark first opened, the “zoo of the future” seemed to be putting the cramped, old zoo in the West out of business. The Wall made for clear boundaries—and a reliable stream of visitors for decades. But now Heinrich Dathe and Heinz-Georg Klös were again rivals in a city that maybe wasn’t big enough for the both of them. Dathe had actually wanted to retire at some as yet unspecified time, but with this turn of events he felt it was his duty to remain. Who else besides him would do what was needed?

  Lothar Dittrich, his longtime acquaintance from their time together in Leipzig, advised him to step down. “You’ve accomplished everything,” he said to Dathe, who was more than twenty years his senior. “Now would be the right time to leave the future of the Tierpark to others.”

  Dathe saw the situation differently. “No, no, you’re wrong,” he replied. “I’m the only one here who has seen how a zoo is run under nonsocialist conditions.”

  Dittrich was astonished and a bit amused, and shook his head as he explained, “This is a completely different capitalism from the one you got to know in the 1930s.”

  But Dathe wasn’t listening.

  Inge Sievers-Schröder, the widow of former aquarium director Werner Schröder, also warned him, “Klös will throw you out, just as he did my husband.” Dathe didn’t believe her either and made light of her concerns. “Nothing will happen to me,” he insisted.

  Several days after the fall of the Wall he met up with his rival to talk about the future of the two zoos. The West Berlin city government was responsible for financing the zoo, but the Tierpark was still under the control of the cultural affairs department of the East Berlin municipal authorities.

  “Believe me, dear colleague,” said Klös, who wanted to persuade Dathe to place both facilities under the control of the Department of Finance. “That has always worked well for the zoo. It would definitely be the best thing for everyone, including you.”

  “That may be your experience,” Dathe replied. “But a zoo is a cultural institution. And I see no reason to change that.”

  * * *

  Still, many changes did occur—and not only in Berlin. Members of the German Federation of Zoo Directors pondered how to deal with colleagues from the foundering GDR. In 1968 they had left the association under pressure from their government. Now they could be readmitted, but some had misgivings about the East German directors, especially about Dathe. There were those who figured that a man in his position—the director of the most important zoo in the GDR—could only have made it as far as he had by being extremely loyal to the regime.

  Heinz-Georg Klös suggested that all newcomers be evaluated on a case-by-case basis to see whether they’d cozied up to the Socialist Unity Party. Lothar Dittrich, who had known Dathe longer than most, and Wolfgang Gewalt, who didn’t think much of any of Klös’s suggestions, were against this idea. “We don’t want to sit in judgment on a man with as complicated a life as Dathe,” Dittrich said. He recommended readmitting all of the East German directors.

  And that’s the way it was handled. In 1991, the zoo directors from the former GDR were invited back, and Wolfgang Puschmann, from Magdeburg, was elected to the executive board. Only Dieter Schwarz, from Rostock, who was exposed as an Informal Collaborator, was barred from the association.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, at Tierpark Friedrichsfelde, the animal keepers found that the Free German Trade Union Federation no longer represented their interests effectively, so in January 1990, elephant keeper Patric Müller and several colleagues set up a spokesmen’s council, one of the first in the GDR. The old East German trade unionists offered no resistance. Presumably they weren’t eager to grapple with the problems facing animal keepers, or maybe they had a sense that a new era was dawning, and it might be better if representatives of the old system stepped aside.

  The animal keepers weren’t aiming for a revolution; they just wanted greater worker participation in decision making. They asked their colleagues in the various sections what they’d like to see improved day to day, and compiled wish lists from what they learned. They also sought more of a say in determining the overall composition of the animal collection. In the past, keepers often hadn’t learned that animals had been sold until they were gone. That had to change.

  Dathe was known for his fits of rage, which were generally directed at his research associates. His ire usually pertained to everyday operations or construction work that failed to move ahead at the pace he thought they should. But Müller had also seen another side to the director. Dathe listened to what he had to say and seemed to take staff concerns seriously. Müller finally felt that he could contribute his ideas.

  But this state of affairs didn’t continue for long. It took just half a year for West German trade unions to impose themselves on the East.

  The Eagle Lands in the Aviary

  In Leipzig, Jörg Adler’s expatriation had finally been approved. Shortly before Christmas of 1989 he and his wife, his daughter, and his two sons traveled southwest to a reception camp in Giessen and from there north to a field office in Schöppingen, where they were given train tickets to a destination of their choice. They took a bus to the train station in nearby Münster, and because it would be a while before their train left, went on a short walk to the historic city center.

  All Jörg Adler had known about Münster came from a couple of black-and-white photos of the newly opened zoo taken in the 1970s. They’
d made quite an impression on him back then, but that was no comparison to what he now saw when he reached the Prinzipalmarkt on the final day of the Christmas market. The medieval gabled houses were aglitter with festive lights. Everyone was hurrying past to make one last purchase. The Adlers were standing right in the middle of a strange, seemingly idyllic world that was so different from gray Leipzig, where even at Christmastime the stench from the lignite and cars with old two-stroke engines was overpowering.

  From Münster they continued their travels to Kempten in Bavaria to celebrate Christmas with friends. Then it was on to spend New Year’s at the Wilhelma Zoo in Stuttgart, where they stayed in a staff apartment within the ape house, sharing a wall with the gorillas. All the while, Adler was searching for a new job. Luckily he knew a few zookeepers in the West. And if there was one person who could help him, it was Wolfgang Gewalt in Duisburg.

  Since the late 1980s, the Duisburg Zoo had been a veritable reception camp for zookeepers from the entire Eastern Bloc. Gewalt was happy to help everyone who had turned his or her back on communism. The former director of the Erfurt Zoo, Fritz Dietrich Altmann, who had fled to Austria by way of Hungary, had stayed in the Duisburg ape house, and two Eastern European animal keepers were given lodgings on the grounds. Gewalt—who had ulterior motives of his own—made a staff apartment available for the Adler family in the aviary, and lost no time in communicating this fact to the local press. A few days later, Adler read the headlines—which played on his surname (which meant “eagle”): “Adler family from the East finds sanctuary in the aviary.”