The Zookeepers' War Read online

  It took some time for Franz Althoff to lure Tuffi out of the Wupper. People on the street and at their windows were astonished to see an unusual procession moving through the streets of Wuppertal: a dripping wet elephant with a sopping retinue of circus people and journalists, some of whom had ventured into the river up to their waists to take their pictures of Tuffi at long last. Pictures show her before, after, and even during the short trip on the suspension railway. But no photographer managed to capture her leap into the Wupper; they were too shocked by all the tumult. A picture postcard with a photomontage assembled afterward sold like hotcakes.

  The planned zoo visit had literally fallen apart. But even though the stunt could easily have had a worse outcome, it was still effective publicity. No matter where the Althoff circus went from then on, people wanted to see Tuffi. Fans sent her sacks of mail, and the Cologne-Wuppertal Dairy named its products after her. Still, the two originators of the bungled advertising stunt—circus director Franz Althoff and the head of the Wuppertal transportation services—had to face charges in court. They were each fined 450 marks for recklessness resulting in traffic hazards and bodily harm.

  Germany’s Youngest Zoo Director

  The story of Tuffi’s jump from the suspension railway is certainly extraordinary, but Heinz-Georg Klös wasn’t actually there for any of it. The anecdote comes from a little-known book, Noah’s Ark—Steerage by Martha Schmetz (pen name: Marte Smeets), an animal illustrator from Wuppertal. Fifty years later, Klös would adopt this passage almost verbatim for his memoir, Friendship with Animals. It fit with the image he wanted to create for himself. But at the time of the events in question, he was still at the very beginning of his career and doing everything in his power to achieve his goal of becoming a zoo director.

  In 1952 he completed his graduate studies with a dissertation on the effect of heart medicine on the intestinal and uterine musculature of guinea pigs. For a while he worked as a veterinarian in Holstein and then as a research assistant in his hometown zoo. He was determined that one day he would take the reins of the Wuppertal Zoo himself. In the interim, however, he was given the opportunity to become director of the Osnabrück Zoo in the spring of 1954.

  Osnabrück’s “animal garden” was situated in a hilly beech grove. Like many small zoos of its kind, it was founded in the mid-1930s, during the rule of the National Socialists, who set great store by nature and one’s place of origin, and so favored animal gardens featuring only creatures native to Germany. The new director, according to announcements placed in professional journals, would be expected to turn the facility, which had been destroyed in the war, into a modern zoo. Although Klös was one of more than fifty applicants, the ambitious young veterinarian had the good fortune of frequently having the right benefactor at the right time. This time, it was his acquaintance with Otto Fockelmann, an influential animal trader in Hamburg, that came in handy.

  Fockelmann visited the young man one morning at the Wuppertal Zoo. He had known Klös when the latter was still a trainee at one of his companies, and had kept track of his career. He knew that Klös hoped to become director of Wuppertal’s zoo.

  “Herr Doktor Klös, do you really want this post in Osnabrück?” he asked, pausing briefly before adding, with a telling grin, “Or is it just a trick to make the Wuppertal administration see that you have other options?”

  “Of course I want to be the boss here at some point,” Klös replied. “But I think my chances will improve if I first show what I’m able to do somewhere else, the way an attending physician moves to a different clinic in order to be appointed to his old clinic later as chief of staff.”

  Fockelmann liked this self-assured attitude. “Then I’ll help you,” he said.

  “How are you going to manage that?” Klös asked.

  Fockelmann grinned again. “Just leave it to me.”

  Fockelmann presented the following offer to the Osnabrück board: he would bring the zoo two lions, two hyenas, two zebras, two lion-tailed macaques, two pelicans, six cranes, six vultures, ten flamingos, and some ducks and geese. They, in return, would not have to pay the full purchase price of 35,000 marks until they had earned it back through admission revenue. If an animal died before they had, Fockelmann would assume the loss. His only condition was that Klös be named director.

  The board had an easy decision to make. The people of Osnabrück had never seen the kinds of sensational animals that Fockelmann was promising; the animal garden’s most famous residents to date had been Teddy the brown bear, Tutti the badger, and a fox named Frecki. And so Heinz-Georg Klös started his new job in April 1954. He had just turned twenty-eight, making him the youngest zoo director in Germany.

  Fockelmann would not have helped Klös had he not gained some advantage of his own from the appointment. Klös was added to his roster of customers with whom he could house his animals inexpensively while arranging to sell them elsewhere. Animal traders always have to figure out where to park their “merchandise” so they can create space for more.

  In his first months on the job, Klös had to do many things by himself: calculate and purchase vast quantities of food, design enclosures, oversee advertising and public relations, and, most importantly, come up with new sources of revenue. In this, he was a trailblazer. He persuaded Osnabrück’s public utility companies to donate polar bears and sponsor the animals so that their food would be paid for in perpetuity. He shook things up at the zoo, dividing the grounds into sections for predatory cats, hoofed animals, and birds, and bringing in special animal keepers to care for each. The newcomer’s approach was sometimes a bit fast-paced for the board, who resisted his desire to turn everything upside down instantly. They denied his request, for example, to bring in elephants.

  Reinhard Coppenrath, however, was fascinated by the new director. Although Klös was only ten years older than eighteen-year-old Coppenrath, and looked even younger than that, he did not take orders from anyone. Impressed, Coppenrath came to regard Klös as a role model. Coppenrath’s father, Heinrich, was one of the founding fathers of the Osnabrück Zoo, and as a boy Reinhard had helped feed the animals. When one of the animals was about to give birth, or one of the animals escaped, his father generally sent him on ahead to check up on things. He savored the moments when Klös took him along on walks through the animal garden, told him about his plans, and gave him the feeling that he was letting him in on his musings. “Young man,” Klös would say to Coppenrath, who would remember these words forever, “you always need to have a vision.”

  Klös, in turn, was flattered that the teenager listened so attentively and looked up to him—figuratively, at least, as the two were of roughly equal height. Klös may have been short and skinny, but he was able to stand his ground and get his ideas heard. He was persistent and well-spoken, and a fine strategist; he knew how to win people over and use them to his best advantage. If need be, though, he had no problem raising his voice to get his way.

  Klös imposed order and hierarchy on the animal garden, as was evident during his morning rounds, which struck Coppenrath as remarkably similar to an attending physician’s hospital rounds. The young director seemed like a doctor as he ambled through the park every morning with his flock of animal keepers and veterinarians.

  Two years went by, during which Klös refashioned the animal garden into a full-fledged zoo. The number of visitors rose from 120,000 to 200,000, and word got around in Osnabrück and beyond. One day a man with the surname Schmidt-Hoensdorf from faraway Berlin introduced himself to Klös and together they strolled through the grounds. The young director thought nothing of it; an encounter of this sort wasn’t unusual. After the tour, the two had lunch.

  “By the way, Klös, I wanted to ask you,” Schmidt-Hoensdorf said at some point, acting quite casual. “Would you like to come to Berlin? We could use a young man there.” He conveniently neglected to mention that Klös was the fourth choice for the job in question.

  Klös had heard that Katharina Heinroth had b
een imploring her supervisors for years to get her an assistant. But he had no intention of being second in command, and he told Schmidt-Hoensdorf so.

  Schmidt-Hoensdorf had been expecting this reaction. “Herr Klös,” he said, looking the man straight in the eye, “if you say yes now, you’ll come to Berlin as the director.”

  Klös was taken aback; he had not been expecting that. It had been a major feat to get his appointment in Osnabrück at the age of twenty-eight. But what Schmidt-Hoensdorf was now offering him would be hard to beat. He’d had a similar offer from Leipzig sometime back, but had turned it down because of both the political situation and his fiancée, Ursula. He’d met her in Frankfurt, where she was the first woman to volunteer at the zoo. But she wouldn’t have gone with him to Leipzig. “One doesn’t go east!” his future father-in-law had insisted. And West Berlin was in the middle of the GDR.

  “Of course I’ll have to ask my fiancée,” he replied, once he had taken a moment to gather his thoughts.

  “Do talk it over with her,” Schmidt-Hoendorf said as he rose—adding, as they parted, “But I’m quite sure we’ll be seeing each other again in Berlin.”

  So West Berlin it was. When Klös told his friends, they advised him against going. “West Berlin,” they would say, with furrowed brow, “that’s almost in Siberia.” But Bernhard Grzimek, whose advice he had always greatly respected, advised him to seize the opportunity. Ursula also agreed to the move, and so Klös asked the board of the Osnabrück Zoo to release him from his contract. The board members weren’t happy to hear the news, but they knew that they couldn’t match the offer, and so they gave their consent.

  In late June 1956, when Klös traveled to Berlin to sign his contract, the general public took little notice of the young blond man. The International Film Festival was running at the same time, and media outlets were busy pouncing on actors staying at the Hotel am Zoo. Klös was “almost overlooked,” the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel noted. Once he had signed the contract, he headed back to Osnabrück. His new job wouldn’t start until the beginning of the following year.

  * * *

  Katharina Heinroth had counted on being able to train the new director for half a year, as the supervisory board had promised, but now they withdrew their support. “The zoo doesn’t have the money to pay two directors,” Arno Weimann, the chairman of the board, told her.

  Heinroth was miffed. Even though she knew that she would soon be departing, the zoo still felt like hers, and its future mattered greatly to her. “How shortsighted can you be?” she said to Weimann. “Herr Klös isn’t even thirty years old. Do you actually think that a single one of the old zookeepers will suddenly agree to be bossed around by a newcomer?”

  “Any zoologist fresh out of college ought to be able to run a zoo,” Weimann snapped back. “But if it matters to you that much, you can coach him later. You still have the right to remain in your apartment.”

  Her contract gave her the option of staying on in her zoo apartment for another three months, but because so many buildings in Berlin had been destroyed and there were not enough apartments to go around, her move had to be delayed. It took her and her mother until the following July to relocate to an unfinished apartment in a high-rise building in the new Hansaviertel district, at the edge of the Tiergarten yet still in the West. Werner Schröder made space for her to store her books in the aquarium, but when the board found out, Heinroth was ordered to clear them out immediately.

  The ongoing battles took a toll on Katharina Heinroth. She suffered through bouts of pneumonia, angina, and lumbago. Sometimes she regretted not having accepted one of the offers in years past from other cities because she was loath to part with her own zoo. The quarrels had done their damage. When she left the Berlin Zoological Garden after more than twenty years, she was a little relieved.

  A Very Young Badger

  When Katharina Heinroth said goodbye to the zoo staff on December 30, 1956, her successor had already been in Berlin for three days. Even during the move, Klös could see that this relocation was unusual. He and Ursula, who was now his wife, owned an extensive collection of reference works, each of which they’d had to obtain permission for before transporting their luggage through the GDR.

  As long as Heinroth was still living in the director’s apartment, the Klöses had to make do with a minimally revamped apartment in the newly constructed hippopotamus house. Klös had to haul the heavy moving crates himself, and he slipped and hit his nose on the corner of a crate.

  At his first press conference with Berlin journalists, just under a week later, a scab adorned the bridge of his nose. To add insult to injury, the lion cub that a zookeeper had placed on his arm for the press photo shredded his new suit. With his short stature and boyish face, Klös looked like the epitome of an inexperienced whippersnapper.

  Sensing that brash behavior wouldn’t go over well, Klös held back any announcements of change. Instead, he stated modestly, not wanting to arouse false hopes, that he’d first “have to get to know every last inch of the premises. After all, the Osnabrück Zoo is quite tiny in comparison with the Berlin Zoo.”

  This wasn’t the whole truth. Klös had already had a look around a few weeks earlier when he’d come for the opening ceremony of the aquarium’s new crocodile hall. Even then he was struck by how many temporary enclosures there still were. It was particularly evident at that time of year, when the hedges and trees had barely any leaves and so could no longer conceal the haphazardly constructed postwar cages and stables. Needless to say, Klös already had plans for improvement in mind: he wanted to replace the emergency housing with modern buildings and enclosures and expand the collection of animals. His goal was to return the zoo to its former status as the world’s most biodiverse.

  But he preferred to keep all this to himself for the time being, along with something else he’d noticed during his visit the previous fall: one of the two giraffes, a female named Rieke, was suffering from tuberculosis. Other than Knautschke the hippo, Rieke was the most popular animal in the zoo. During the war she had been evacuated to Vienna, and was the only animal—apart from a few garpikes that were later moved back into the aquarium—to have been returned. Rieke had been a symbol of hope for Berliners in the postwar era. But as a veterinarian, Klös saw right away that she didn’t have long to live. Instead of telling Heinroth, he hoped that Rieke would die before he took over as director. He feared the public wouldn’t forgive the newcomer for the death of a favorite animal.

  * * *

  People recalled little of Klös’s first public appearance in Berlin, apart from his young age, and many associated his youth not with fresh ideas, but with a lack of experience. The next morning, Klös opened the newspaper to find an article stating that a “very young badger” was running the venerable zoo.

  Things did not get easier. Two days after his arrival, there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, and shortly afterward, Rieke died. When the first offspring of the hippos Knautschke and Bulette died one day after its birth, Klös’s debut was officially deemed a failure. Journalists, visitors, and shareholders doubted that Klös had been the right choice for director.

  From the start, it had been difficult for him to gain the animal keepers’ respect. The Berlin Zoo had traditions stretching back 110 years and rigid protocols; Klös couldn’t simply turn everything inside out the way he had in the backwoods of Lower Saxony. And the animal keepers, some of whom had been working there since before the war, weren’t about to be told what to do by some thirty-year-old newcomer with nothing but a diploma. Gustav Riedel, for example, who cared for the predators, had made a habit of driving his lions into their cage with a whip. When Klös raised the dangers of this approach with him, Riedel waved him off, insisting “Oh, they won’t do anything to me!” Klös was even more dismayed to observe Gerhard Schönke at work. Schönke fed his seals and penguins by hand, and his brown bears too.

  When Klös chided the animal keepers, they generally just whispered among t
hemselves—but sometimes they griped right back at him. This took some getting used to. He’d never encountered this sort of behavior in Osnabrück, where the zookeepers, with their Lower Saxon upbringings, would think over what they’d say for a full half hour before opening their mouths. If he didn’t want to make himself look ridiculous, he would have to come to an understanding with the older staff members, so he had Riedel and Schönke sign a waiver stating that they would assume responsibility for their actions.

  Still, his long-term aim was to rejuvenate the zoo, so he was pleased when a gangling youth from Berlin’s Moabit neighborhood dropped by to introduce himself a few weeks later. Ralf Wielandt had always wanted to work with animals. He’d already applied for a job at the zoo the previous year, but Katharina Heinroth had turned him down. She had no money to pay for his training, not to mention vocational school. For a while Wielandt trained as a painter to stay off the streets and contribute at least a little to his family’s income. Then, a year later, he decided to try the zoo again.

  “Well, why not?” Klös told the boy at his interview. “I’m young, and I want to have young people around me.” He knew the old zookeepers would leave at some point. And with young employees there would be fewer problems—of this Klös was certain—because he’d be able to mold them himself. So Klös accepted without hesitation that Wielandt would have to miss one day of work a week to attend vocational school.

  On April 1, just three months into Klös’s tenure as director, Wielandt began his stint as a seasonal worker in a field officially termed “animal care.” There was such a thing as state-approved zookeeper training in the GDR, but in the West older keepers were expected to pass along their knowledge and experience to new hires informally. Wielandt was sixteen years old, and Klös barely thirty, so Klös used the informal du form of address when speaking with him—most of the time, anyway. As he explained to Wielandt with a grin, “If you do good work, you’ll be Ralf. If you mess up, you’re Herr Wielandt.”