The Zookeepers' War Read online

  Over the coming days, Gewalt took Adler along to public appointments. At a Christian Democratic Union function he even introduced him to West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was impressed by Adler’s story and immediately sent for one of his aides to help him out, although not much came of that.

  In the long run there was no place for Adler in Duisburg either, so his odyssey went on. In late January he and his family went to Berlin. He had met Heinz-Georg Klös back in Leipzig, and Adler would have liked to move to the capital and work in the zoo. But Klös had no opening for him, although he did have an idea of who might. He called up several colleagues and finally got the information he sought from Lothar Dittrich in Hanover: the all-weather zoo in Münster was looking for another section head.

  This was the city in which Adler’s journey had begun a good month earlier. Even more serendipitous, this was the very zoo whose massive concrete buildings he had so admired all those years before, when they’d seemed so much more progressive than the ramshackle ape house in Leipzig. This new position seemed meant to be.

  The Gray Giant Comes Tumbling Down

  In less than a year the GDR would be history, but no one thought that 1990 would also be Dathe’s final year in his Tierpark. The animal keepers were preoccupied with more quotidian concerns.

  On April 7, early in the morning, Dathe was called into the pachyderm house. When he arrived, several zookeepers were standing in front of the Asian elephants’ area, trying to calm down the agitated females, who were pulling at the chains on their feet. When Dathe approached, he saw Dombo, the matriarch, lying on her back in the moat.

  “She must have torn herself away from the chain at night and fallen down,” one of the keepers said. What his colleagues had feared as far back as the construction phase had come to pass. Unable to turn herself right-side-up in the moat’s tight space, Dombo had suffocated under the weight of her own legs.

  Two days later, readers of Neues Deutschland could see for themselves, on the bottom left corner of page three, how the lifeless body of the elephant was attached to ropes and pulled out of the moat of the pachyderm pavilion. Two despondent zookeepers stood next to her, trying to heave the huge cadaver in the proper direction.

  It was another blow for Dathe. His son Falk had never seen him so disconsolate. The elephant’s death came at a time when the director feared for the continued existence of the Tierpark and for the future of its more than four hundred employees—not to mention his own life’s work. The demise of the gray giant seemed like an omen of things to come.

  In spite of his fears for the future, Dathe appeared confident in public. He was quoted in Neues Deutschland on September 8, saying, “I agree with Prof. Dr. Heinz-Georg Klös, my colleague in West Berlin, that a city like this one needs two cultural institutions of this kind, particularly as they have different characters.” When asked whether he’d thought about retiring, he answered simply, “I have. But here there’s still so much I have to do.” The next month he again emphasized, this time to the Berliner Zeitung, that the city’s two zoos were “of differing structure and differing character.”

  * * *

  Still, the two halves of Berlin would have to coalesce. Decades of division had required everything to be duplicated, including the city’s government. Since the local elections the previous May, the two municipalities had been governing jointly, with politicians commuting back and forth between two city halls, the Rathaus in Schöneberg in the West and the Rotes Rathaus on Alexanderplatz in the East. With cutbacks looming, the public now began to discuss whether Berlin really needed, and could finance, two zoos.

  Heinrich Dathe considered it his duty to keep the Tierpark open. In the nearly four decades he had lived in Friedrichsfelde, he had grown up, grown old, and grown together with his zoo. His villa on the Tierpark grounds was chockful of things he had accumulated over the years—from scientific articles and books to unfinished manuscripts, all piled high on his desk. “I live to work” had always been his motto.

  On November 7, 1990, the Tierpark held a celebration to mark Heinrich Dathe’s eightieth birthday. A horse-drawn carriage brought him to the austere, flat-roofed administration building. Sitting beside him was his new wife (named Elisabeth like his first), whom he had met a year earlier at an ornithology meeting in Neubrandenburg. The Tierpark staff, accompanied by a band, serenaded the newlyweds upon their arrival. Some of them took animals out of their cages to join in the birthday celebration. One zookeeper brought along a young Catalan donkey for Dathe to pet in front of the cameras. Dathe’s face looked gaunt; the past few months had taken a toll on him. Hardly anyone outside the family knew that he was suffering from stomach cancer.

  He was asked to grant interviews by the dozens. Everyone wanted to know what was in store for the Tierpark, and what was in store for him.

  “I have enjoyed my work, and I still do,” Dathe said to the cameraman in a faint voice. “During this rather difficult time in particular I find it essential for me to keep on going for a few more days in order to guide my institution into calm waters.”

  Numerous well-wishers crowded around him, his West Berlin adversary among them. Klös couldn’t pass up the opportunity to give a speech on behalf of his “valued colleague”:

  Anyone who knows me knows that I am an ambitious man who always wants the best for his Zoo, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And when I profess to you, my dear colleague, on this special day, that much in Tierpark Friedrichsfelde so delights me that I could picture it between the Kurfürstendamm and the Landwehrkanal [the borders of his own zoo], please regard it as an expression of the highest respect.

  It sounded like a threat. Anyone who knew Klös knew that he liked to be in charge of everything, especially here in Berlin.

  The city government resolved that the Tierpajrk would continue to exist. But one month to the day after the festivities, Dathe received a letter written by Richard Dahlheim, the deputy to Irana Rusta, East Berlin’s city councilor for culture, who had been placed in charge of Friedrichsfelde—at least for now. Dathe had already received many letters about upcoming changes, but never one like this. At first he could hardly believe what he was reading:

  … as you are aware, the unification treaty makes it mandatory for all persons employed in the public service sectors of the former GDR who have reached retirement age… to be placed in retirement automatically at this time. In your case we have adopted an interim solution because of your indisputably great accomplishments for the Tierpark and in consideration of your upcoming 80th birthday….

  In view of the swift implementation of the Tierpark’s changeover to a legal sponsorship it seems essential for us to appoint a younger person to tackle the problems arising from this change in order to spare you any additional burdens. Therefore, on Monday, December 10, 1990, you will turn over your official functions to your deputy, Herr Grummt, who has been appointed temporary director of the Tierpark. You will have until Friday, December 14 to surrender your office.

  Unfortunately we also have to instruct you to vacate your official lodgings by the end of the month, which, we hope, will not be a problem for you….

  We thank you sincerely for your decades of work, which were marked by competence and dedication, and wish you all the best for your future.

  Dathe had seven days to clear out his office, which held not only mountains of books and papers, but also heaps of gifts he’d just received for his eightieth birthday. The city council was in a hurry, for as of December 15, West Berlin’s Department of Finance would be overseeing the Tierpark as well as the zoo. Klös had prevailed.

  Dathe had three weeks to leave the home where he had lived for more than three decades. He’d been aware that he would soon have to bow out of his directorship, but he still found it difficult to cope with so abrupt a departure.

  The shift in oversight from East to West and cultural affairs to finance sowed confusion throughout the Tierpark. In early December, a letter arrived from the cultural affai
rs administration, stating that the 439 employees would be “placed on waiting lists and only absolutely necessary areas would continue to be staffed for the time being.” No information as to which of them would stay on, face retraining, be asked to retire, or get laid off was shared. The staff of the Department of Finance were themselves befuddled at first, as they claimed to have heard only one week before the handover that they were now in charge of the Tierpark, a representative explained at a gathering of the outraged staff. People were afraid that the zoo might be closed down altogether, as had already happened with other establishments in the GDR.

  In mid-December, several thousand people met up in Friedrichsfelde for a mass march. Some 7,500 patrons signed their names to support the preservation of the Tierpark and to express their solidarity with Dathe, while others fired off letters to various newspapers to vent their indignation at his dismissal. One reader of the Berliner Zeitung asked sardonically whether Dathe might have been “teaching the elephants about Marxism and Leninism” and had to go for that reason.

  Even though politicians from all parties gave their assurances that the closing of the Tierpark was “never up for debate,” the battle lines had been drawn. Many at the Tierpark were angry at the West Germans (dismissively dubbed “Wessis”), at Klös, and at the zoo. But they were also afraid of being let go, and so hardly anyone on staff dared to make a peep. The time for grassroots democracy was over. Patric Müller felt even more silenced than before the fall of the Wall.

  Even Dathe seemed to have given up hope. “The Tierpark will likely continue to exist, but maybe as a plain old deer park, which would not be a source of competition for a zoo,” he told Neues Deutschland on December 29. “We were always a research center, while the West Berlin zoo was more a spectacle,” he continued, pessimistically. “And the research center is what has to go.”

  The retiring director was able to postpone moving out of his home by half a year, but in the end, it hardly mattered. On January 6, 1991, Heinrich Dathe died at the age of eighty, right in his Tierpark. People in both East and West said that the stress of knowing he’d soon be thrown out of his home had done him in.

  The day was Heinz-Georg Klös’s sixty-fifth birthday.

  Farewell to Dathe

  On the morning of January 17, a large crowd gathered at the Baumschulenweg funeral home. “Berlin bids farewell to a native-born Saxon, arguably the most famous one in Berlin” since turn-of-the-century illustrator Heinrich Zille, the GDR TV youth broadcast Elf99 reported the next day. Several thousand people had come, so many that the funeral home was quickly filled to capacity.

  Lothar Dittrich had arrived from Hanover only a short time before the service began. Unable to get a seat he, like hundreds of others, had to listen to the eulogy from outside over the loudspeakers. Heinz-Georg Klös was observed pushing his way into the funeral home to lay a wreath at Dathe’s coffin.

  Rumors had been swirling for some time that Klös had played a part in Dathe’s dismissal. The day before the funeral, the Berliner Zeitung reinforced this speculation by scooping an article due to run in the Neue Berliner Illustrierte:

  As the Neue Berliner Illustrierte will be reporting in tomorrow’s edition, an NBI reporter witnessed a telephone call between [deputy counselor for cultural affairs] Dahlheim and the head of the West Berlin Zoo, Heinz-Georg Klös (who had praised Dathe to the skies in November at Dathe’s 80th birthday celebration). Dahlheim’s remarks included this: “Now I am the gravedigger. And yet it was actually an act of mercy to finally send him off to retirement.” Referring to Klös, he added, “Well, we share the burden of his corpse.” In speaking to the journalist, Dahlheim evidently claimed that Dathe was “totally senile” and “far from a martyr,” and was regarded as the “Ceaus¸escu of the zoo world.” Dahlheim regretted only that Dathe had “died at an absolutely inopportune time.”

  Two months later, Dahlheim’s rebuttal was published in the Berliner Zeitung; he disputed the quotations attributed to him, such as the claim that Dathe was a totalitarian on par with an infamous Romanian dictator. But the feeling that the Tierpark director had been cast aside with Klös’s help, “like some annoying bug” in the words of one letter to the editor of Neue Zeit, remained.

  Many institutions were shuttered in the course of German reunification, but Heinrich Dathe’s treatment seemed to infuriate people the most. Maybe the outcry was so strident because his dismissal meant that a part of their own history—their own identity—was being erased. In an obituary for his former boss and friend, Lothar Dittrich wrote, “Perhaps one cannot accept in Berlin that an exceptionally gifted man could achieve something behind the Wall that attracted attention around the world.”

  Dathe’s death showed that poor losers may be unpleasant, but poor winners are the greater evil. “The way things are going now,” a reader wrote to Neue Zeit in January 1991, “we will never really come together.”

  That impression would endure for quite some time. And as far as Berlin’s two zoos are concerned, it remains true to this day.

  EPILOGUE OLD MEN, NEW ERA

  The cost of being a master of one’s trade is also being its victim.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

  In the fall of 1993, less than three years after Dathe’s death, the staff of the Berlin Zoological Garden contacted the city’s mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, with the following message: “Cooperation between the Zoo and the Tierpark has reached rock bottom.”

  Everything had been going along so well. After half a year of uncertainty, the Tierpark had been converted into a state-owned company in March 1991. Of the animal park’s 439 employees at the time of reunification, only 285 still had jobs, but fears of a complete phase-out had faded. A peaceful coexistence between the zoos seemed to be developing, and animals were even being traded: great apes moved from the Tierpark to the Zoo, while red deer, boars, and owls were sent to Friedrichsfelde. In September 1993 Neue Zeit reported that the Zoo would acquire the Tierpark company holdings from the state. “The city will pay only for operating losses, revenue shortfalls incurred by reduced admission fees, and investment subsidies,” the paper wrote.

  By that time, East Berliners were starting to notice that something more was afoot. There had been an announcement that two thousand reptiles from the Tierpark’s snake farm and cafeteria aquariums would be relocated to the Zoo; the old installations were in need of renovation, but the Tierpark had no money to pay for improvements. Tensions ran high, and fears of a phase-out returned. The head of the snake farm appeared weeping on television, pleading for the preservation of his life’s work. There was a groundswell of outrage; letters of protest reached Berlin from as far away as the San Diego Zoo. Tierpark employees collected thirty thousand signatures in support of the snake farm, which had been around since 1956. It had a unique diversity of species. In the days of the GDR, Tierpark visitors could watch venom being taken from snakes for use in developing serums.

  Many enthusiasts’ fury was directed at Heinz-Georg Klös, who had been presiding over the Tierpark’s supervisory board since 1991. When he went to see Friedrichsfelde with members of Parliament, angry visitors were there to take him to task over the snakes. “Dathe is to blame for this,” he blurted out. That made them even angrier. “If you’re short on money, shut down the Zoo,” they shouted.

  After weeks of back-and-forth, a decision was made in early November: the snake farm would remain in Friedrichsfelde. Shortly afterward the Tierpark’s transfer went through, and it became a subsidiary of Zoo, Inc.

  Klös had been wary enough to insist on a contractual stipulation that the zoo could be returned to the state if the Tierpark didn’t get back on track financially. For him, Friedrichsfelde was “a bottomless pit,” and someone from the West needed to plug it up. After Klös reached out to several qualified individuals, all of whom turned him down, he settled on Bernhard Blaszkiewitz, a thirty-seven-year-old who was over six feet tall and almost as wide. Blaszkiewitz had begun his career as a zo
okeeper in 1974, before leaving to earn a doctorate in biology, after which he returned to Berlin as a research associate. “The fat guy will get it done,” Klös said.

  Blaszkiewitz’s first challenge was to improve on a less appealing part of Dathe’s legacy. Operating in an economy in which building materials were often in short supply, Dathe had needed to improvise, leading to a mismatched patchwork of fences and latticework. Some parts of the hoofed animal enclosure had been pieced together from railway ties. Dathe had also never taken full advantage of the park’s expansive grounds. Not until 1997 was the zoo completely fenced.

  Blaszkiewitz’s critics thought he was taking this fencing business a bit too far. His functional enclosures with their green, chest-high fences looked monotonous; his wooden stables resembled the garden sheds sold by the thousands at any home improvement store.

  In 2007, after more than a decade at the Tierpark, Blaszkiewitz took over management of the Berlin Zoo as well. While the two institutions now shared a director, they remained competitors—although perhaps less in the minds of the staff than of the visitors; nowhere else in Berlin was the Wall still as present as in people’s identification with either the Zoo or the Tierpark. A 2014 survey revealed that even a quarter of a century after reunification, former West Berliners go mainly to “their” zoo, former East Berliners to theirs.

  Other zoos are getting competitive too. Anyone changing trains at Berlin’s central station can’t help but notice big billboards luring visitors to zoos in Hanover and Leipzig, which have each been recently modernized at a cost of more than 100 million euros. These two institutions, which came close to closing in the early 1990s, are now vying to steal visitors away from Berlin’s two zoos. Thanks to direct trains, both are only about an hour and a half outside the city.