The Zookeepers' War Read online

  The Berlin Zoo kept its gates open throughout this upheaval. During the blockade, Berliners had fed Knautschke the hippo, their favorite animal, heads of cabbage, which they had scrimped and saved for. Now the new resident of West Germany would be getting a lady visitor from the East.

  After the war, hippos were rare in European zoos. Katharina Heinroth had Knautschke, and Leipzig’s zoo director, Karl Max Schneider, had two females, Grete and Olga. Schneider and Heinroth had been trading animals back and forth for quite some time, undeterred by the fact that their zoos were in two different and increasingly hostile countries. They were not about to be stopped by political borders. After all, far more was at stake: the survival of a species. And so they sent the animals on their honeymoons.

  The females, Grete and Olga, took several trips on a freight train to West Berlin, where they were briefly housed in a hippo house that had been patched together. The British soldiers called the building a “pissoir,” but it did the job. The ownership of the hippos’ offspring followed a time-honored farmer tradition: the female goes to visit the male, and the first male issue becomes the property of the female’s owner.

  Meanwhile, managing director Werner Schröder was trying to come to grips with the Berlin Zoo’s dire financial situation. The zoo was barely bringing in enough money to pay the keepers and cover the costs of feeding the animals. Somehow or other he would have to entice more people to visit.

  Schröder had always been a big fan of boxing; as a student he had even twice been German champion. He decided to organize boxing and wrestling matches in a small arena on zoo premises. He also set up animal fairs, and was able to sign on two circuses, Astra and Busch-Aeros, to give performances on an open area near the antelope house. He thought of arranging an Oktoberfest too. Katharina Heinroth was underwhelmed by that idea.

  “What about all the animals?” she asked. “They definitely won’t be able to cope with the noise and commotion.”

  Schröder worried about that as well, but he knew the zoo’s losses, and they were alarming.

  “We’re up to our necks in trouble,” he said. The dark circles under his eyes accentuated his anxious look. “We have to try this.”

  Berliners were a bit perplexed when they saw the zoo’s new promotional posters, which featured two grinning hippos toasting each other with beer steins. Each sported a gingerbread heart around its neck, one saying Gretchen and the other Knautschke. Above them cursive script announced: “Oktoberfest in the Zoo.” There would be shooting galleries and carousels in with the reindeer, parrots, and bears? As it turned out, any misgivings were unfounded; the festival was a roaring success. More than half a million visitors came in the four weeks, providing the zoo substantial revenue that assured its survival. Contrary to Heinroth’s fears, the animals barely noticed all the commotion.

  Even the two advertising icons were unimpressed, but they had other reasons to be excited. In May 1950 a male hippo named Schwabbel was born; he went to Leipzig, as stipulated. Two years later came a female, Bulette, who could eventually become a new partner for Knautschke. The incestuous nature of this union was beside the point. Hippos were rare and drew large crowds; it made no sense to be too picky.

  * * *

  Young hippos were not the only new attractions during this time. By 1951, there had been no elephants for four years, ever since the old male, Siam, the only elephant to survive the wartime bombings, had died in 1947. Heinroth was convinced that a zoo without elephants could not be a real zoo, but she lacked the funding to buy a new one. At some point she read in the newspaper that India’s head of state, Pandit Nehru, had made a gift of a young elephant to a foreign zoo. She lost no time in establishing contact with the Broadcasting Service in the American sector, which ran a program for local schools; she hoped her request would have a greater chance of success if it came from the children of Berlin. Heinroth’s plan worked, and soon a young female elephant, Dathri, was located. Dathri, who was three years old and five foot three inches tall, was soon renamed Shanti.

  There was no longer an elephant house, so at first Shanti lived in the so-called equid house, a thatched half-timbered building, next to the horses and zebras. But something was wrong. When she was let out onto the enclosure every morning, she was so exhausted that she threw herself down in the sand and slept for hours. This was not how Heinroth had pictured her; after all, people don’t come to the zoo to see an elephant lie around all day. Shanti’s keeper stayed on for night shift after night shift to find out what was keeping the young elephant awake all night—a mouse, perhaps, or one of the other animals next to her in the stable. But he found nothing.

  At some point Heinroth recalled a photo she had received from Mumbai. Wasn’t Shanti chained up in that picture? Heinroth was relieved to find that yes, two of the elephant’s feet had indeed been chained to a tree. No sooner was Shanti chained up in the equid house than she slept through the night and romped about during the day.

  * * *

  Now that the zoo’s finances were relatively stable, Werner Schröder was finally able to devote himself to a project he’d cared about for years: rebuilding the demolished aquarium. Schröder’s great passion was for everything that crept and swam. As a little boy, he’d caught frogs, newts, bugs, and fish in the Wilmersdorf fen and kept them in preserving jars at home. His mother patiently observed her son’s interests, but his father attempted to get this “obsession with critters,” as he called his son’s hobby, out of his system, and dragged him to imperial military parades. His efforts were unsuccessful.

  As a student, Schröder had visited the aquarium frequently, bringing reptiles from his travels in Greece and North Africa. After the war he often spent time when the workday was through standing in the dilapidated structure, in which trees were now growing, and gazing into the evening sky.

  In September 1952, after two years of construction, the Berlin Aquarium reopened as the home to one thousand animals, purchases made possible in part by the annual Oktoberfests, which continued to enjoy great success. Over the next twenty-five years it would be Schröder’s mission in life to bring new glory to the aquarium, making it one of the most important institutions of its kind in Europe.

  While Schröder was rebuilding the aquarium, a new elephant house—the zoo’s first new building since the war’s end—was approved for construction. Heinroth had until then worked primarily on repairs, such as to the historic antelope house, and on simple stopgap solutions. Sensing that her critics were waiting for her to slip up on this first major undertaking, she showed the plans for the elephant house to Karl Max Schneider, her friend and colleague in Leipzig, who found no problems with them.

  The elephant house opened in 1954, after two years of construction. In addition to Shanti and two newer elephants, the long building with a high glass facade and green-tiled interior welcomed the zoo’s first rhinoceros in eleven years, along with a tapir and a sloth.

  A Woman in a Man’s World

  During the years of reconstruction it became evident that Katharina Heinroth and Werner Schröder made a good team. Heinroth always pitched in when a tree needed to be planted, and bawled out zookeepers to keep them in line, while Schröder remained in the background. “Let her handle it,” he would think, with a chuckle. He was the one to keep things calm. When a zookeeper had problems, he was more likely to confide in the unruffled Herr Schröder than in the effusive Frau Heinroth, who had had to learn to assert herself in a man’s world. Schröder, by contrast, lived by the motto, “Step on those above you if you need to, but never step on those below you.” Still, in spite of their differences in temperament, Heinroth and Schröder liked and relied on each other. Some people even claimed that Katharina Heinroth had a bit of a crush on her scrawny, stern-faced colleague with dark circles under his eyes.

  Even though Heinroth had successfully guided the zoo through the formative years of the Federal Republic of Germany, she continued to face hostility at every turn. Back in 1945, shortly after the end
of the war, the zoo’s supervisory board had handed her a letter at one of its first sessions in which Hans Ammon, the former managing director who’d failed in his bid for the top job when he was outed as a Nazi, called for her dismissal. He claimed that although it could “not be held against her that she has no overall grasp of the situation, this is quite simply a job for a man.”

  Four years later, while Heinroth was recovering from an illness in the hospital, several members of the board went to see Werner Schröder. After much hemming and hawing and talk of how running the zoo was evidently too strenuous for a woman, Schröder knew what they were looking for from him. Before they could ask him directly whether he wanted his boss’s job, he ended the conversation by saying, “We’re a good team, and our personalities complement each other for the good of the zoo. Besides, I want to build the aquarium.”

  Despite the lingering mistrust of the zoo’s board, Heinroth enjoyed a very good reputation in professional circles. When the first four German zoo directors were reaccepted into the International Union of Directors of Zoological Gardens in 1950, Heinroth was among the favored few.

  And in spite of all the hardships, Heinroth enjoyed the postwar years. Cultural life in the damaged city was gradually coming back, and the restored zoo restaurant and banquet hall were once more hosting conferences and balls. Expectations had risen. Even if Berlin was no longer the capital of all of Germany, it could regain at least some of its old sparkle. The new era of the “economic miracle” had come to West Berlin, and the burgeoning City West downtown shopping and commercial center was especially well placed, right near the zoo. There were plans to build a nearly two-hundred-foot- high, sixteen-story office building directly at the corner of Hardenbergplatz and Budapester Strasse, although Heinroth was skeptical about the project. Because of the way the building was laid out, large parts of the zoo would be in shadow.

  Heinroth arranged a meeting with the architect and a new member of the zoo’s board named Walter Rieck. As Heinroth tried to persuade the architect to build the high-rise with a north–south rather than an east–west orientation, so as not to rob the zoo of too much sunlight, Rieck cut her off, saying, “As you know, dear lady, the interests of the city come first. In this instance, the zoo has to take second place.” Heinroth turned to him and replied gruffly, “In that case, you’d seem to be the wrong man for the zoo.” The building was eventually constructed in accordance with Heinroth’s wishes, but her attitude had made her unpopular with the board once again.

  Meanwhile, men who had vanished after the war were back, and had no intention of holding their tongues. Lutz Heck, the former zoo director, was now living in the western half of the country, in the city of Wiesbaden, and making statements about the goings-on at the zoo to the West Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. He bemoaned the difficulties in saving the zoo from going under after the war. When Heinroth read that comment, she was furious, and wrote a letter to the editor setting the record straight about how Heck had fled the city before the war had even ended. The letter was published in late May 1954 alongside readers’ views on refugees and foreign words in the German language.

  But the events of the past would have sadly little impact on the future. The women who had rebuilt the city—as rubble women or zoo director or even as mayor—had fulfilled their roles. Louise Schroeder, the mayor of Berlin from 1948 to 1951 and a close confidante of Heinroth, had bowed out of the zoo’s supervisory board, and Heinroth was continuously undermined on zoo grounds. Just weeks after her indignant letter to the editor, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel wrote, “Before the month is out, a decision will be made as to whether Frau Dr. Käthe Heinroth—the only female zoo director in Germany—can remain the head and director of the Berlin Zoological Garden.”

  This article was prompted by a call by Otto Radke, a Berlin businessman and the spokesman for the zoo shareholders (as well as, coincidentally, an old friend of Lutz Heck). For the upcoming shareholders meeting he had drawn up a plan that included holding new board elections and mounting a scathing attack on the director. Management of the zoo, he declared, “belongs in the hands of a man with an international reputation.” Even though she held a doctoral degree in zoology, Katharina Heinroth was still regarded by the old boys’ club as nothing more than a top-notch secretary and “trained beekeeper,” in Radke’s words. She was an interim solution—that was all.

  When Heinroth read Radke’s plan, she shook with anger. She wanted to go to court to fight his accusations, but one of the board members, a jurist, dissuaded her with assurances that the board stood behind her. But just one week later, Der Tagesspiegel published a report on shareholders who blamed Heinroth for “the Berlin Zoo’s continuing to make a parochial impression nine years after the end of the war.” Some visitors from across Germany who came to Berlin with memories of the venerable zoo were disappointed to find such a small number of exotic animals. Aside from the newly constructed elephant house and Knautschke the hippo, there were few star attractions—not worth the trip to Berlin, they concluded. “Of course we need to bear in mind,” Der Tagesspiegel went on to write, perhaps a tad hyperbolically, “that no other zoo has lacked visitors with disposable income from surrounding areas as Berlin has since 1945.”

  But Heinroth’s adversaries did not care about these fine points, and they did not drop their opposition. Heinroth, along with Schröder, had saved the zoo from closing down and slowly steered it back to profitability, but demands to entrust Germany’s formerly most important zoo to a man only increased.

  CHAPTER 2 THE ZOO ON THE OTHER SIDE

  The train slowly made its way into the Treptower Park station, stopping at the paved platform as usual. “Treptow,” as the locals called it, was the final station before the border between the occupied zones, and the beginning of the American sector of West Berlin.

  Since 1949, Germany had been divided into two states, but there were still four powers in Berlin. The borders between the sectors existed only on paper, but the East German regime frowned on its Berliners traveling to the capitalist West.

  Several people got in or out, and the train started up again, but those who figured they were in the clear were sadly mistaken. After just a few yards, the train stopped again at a long wooden walkway. No one got out here. Werner Philipp looked through the train window and saw several trapos waiting outside, along with a group of men in long dark brown leather coats. They boarded the train and walked slowly along the rows of seats, with the “coats” remaining in the background.

  The transport police, known as trapos, monitored the Berlin railway network. Philipp was well acquainted with their little game. If you answered their question of where you were going by saying you were headed to the West to go to a bakery or the movies, the trapo would come back with a patronizing reply, like “The capital of the GDR has movie theaters and cakes too.” But Philipp knew how to outsmart them. He had recently bought a new Western printing machine for his father, who was working as a tax accountant in the East, and had been determined not to let the trapos catch him with it. That could have gotten dangerous, particularly because his father’s profession was considered suspiciously capitalist. So before boarding the train Philipp had bought the latest edition of the party newspaper, Neues Deutschland, pushed the shipping crate under the table in his compartment, and made a show of opening the paper to the page with Socialist Unity Party leader Walter Ulbricht’s latest speech. The trapos didn’t bother him.

  Now one of the trapos was standing right in front of him. “And where are you headed?” the man asked.

  “Well, I want to go to the zoo,” Philipp replied.

  The policeman turned up his nose, unable to come up with a retort. If there was anything that did not exist in the capital of the GDR, it was a zoo.

  Werner Philipp had been going to the zoo since his early childhood; he had worn through several pairs of shoes there. As a child he was often sick and feverish, but whenever his father had free time during the week and suggest
ed, “Tomorrow we can go to the zoo,” his fever seemed to melt away. In the late 1930s, the zoo was still one of Berlin’s major cultural attractions. Families came for a weekend getaway and wore their Sunday best. People sometimes joked that “the zoo never needs sweeping, because the ladies’ long dresses wipe up the dust from the paths.” Werner Philipp’s parents dressed him for these outings in a sailor suit, and made him wear scratchy knee socks. But he put up with all that, as long as they were going to the zoo. Long before the train stopped at the Zoological Garden station, Philipp could see the elephant pagoda in the distance—a massive building that resembled an Indian temple. Every time he looked at the towers with their reddish gold adornments, anticipation welled up within him, and he felt terrible whenever his parents did not get out there, but simply passed by on their way to other stations. He’d keep looking back at the towers until they had disappeared behind the rows of houses. By the next day, he was typically back to feeling sickly.

  Even then, Werner Philipp knew he wanted to become a zoo director. But he was nineteen years old now, and his parents could not afford to finance his university education. Besides, there were more important things going on in the spring of 1953.

  Just three and a half years old, the GDR was already experiencing its first economic crisis. The young state, which wanted to expedite the “advancement of socialism” as quickly as possible, prioritized heavy industry (iron and steelwork) over all other areas of development. This resulted in a shortage of food and consumer goods. The so-called workers’ and farmers’ state reacted by forcing farmers to collectivize and by raising minimum work quotas on construction sites by 10 percent. But the true “enemies” the state targeted were members of the middle class. Entrepreneurs, retailers, and wholesalers lost their businesses as state priorities shifted away from their services, and taxes were increased.