The Zookeepers' War Read online

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  Klös’s other source of support—apart from handpicked hires—was the zoo’s supervisory board, the very group that had pushed out his predecessor. Now that they had the new man they’d been demanding for so long, they fawned on Klös in a manner very different from their dismissive treatment of Katharina Heinroth. They approved his request to hire a research assistant after just six months, something Heinroth had fought for in vain for years.

  However, Klös couldn’t take the liberty of making large leaps either. With no money for major purchases, his first acquisitions were various ducks and geese, which aren’t especially pricey, nor sensitive to the cold, and have no special needs. The zoo had plenty of open meadows and ponds, which he fenced in for the time being, earning himself the punning nickname Zaunkönig, “the fence king.” (The word also means “wren.”)

  In spite of the innovations he hoped to introduce, Heinz-Georg Klös was no iconoclast. He was well aware of the Berlin Zoo’s heritage, and felt that any buildings that had withstood the war had to be preserved. Many in city hall—most notably Rolf Schwedler—weren’t pleased by this embrace of the zoo’s traditional edifices.

  Schwedler was not a man inclined to handle ruins with kid gloves. As the head of the Department of Urban Development, he’d pressed ahead in recent years with the reconstruction of West Berlin. Under Schwedler, people muttered, more buildings were torn down than had been destroyed in the war. He hoped one day to rebuild the zoo from scratch. But in this Klös prevailed. He would succeed in preserving buildings like the historical stables for wisents and bison—two low-slung, richly ornamented wooden houses that had been constructed at the turn of the twentieth century in the style of an Indian longhouse—as well as totem poles and a Russian log cabin.

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  Even though Klös sought publicity, the media circus in Berlin was very different from what he’d known in Osnabrück. At press conferences, one young journalist in particular asked questions for which Klös rarely had an answer, and could only shrug in response. And no wonder: Werner Philipp, who was only six years younger than Klös, had known the zoo since he was a small child. He’d once wanted to become a zoo director himself.

  Since fleeing the Soviet sector with his parents in the spring of 1953, Philipp had eked out a living as a private tutor, and had recently begun working at the Associated Press, where he reported on the zoo, among other topics.

  “If Philipp could be my spokesman, it would save me some work,” Klös thought to himself before long. He instructed his business director, Hans-Joachim Wilde, to make the young man an offer.

  “This would be an important stepping-stone,” Wilde told Philipp, but the latter shook his head. “No, Herr Wilde,” he said, “it would be the end of the line. I’m in my early twenties. All I’d do at the zoo is waste away.”

  Wilde was taken aback by such insolence, but he came to understand Philipp’s logic and eventually admitted he was probably right. And so Werner Philipp remained on the other side of the desk, where he continued to observe Klös and the zoo with a critical eye.

  In the years to come, Klös and Philipp would have an ambivalent relationship that went from jovial to tense, depending on how much Klös liked Philipp’s most recent article or whether he wanted something from the man, in which case Klös could be quite charming. When he saw the journalist during his bicycle rounds through the zoo, he would call out hello from a distance before coming to a screeching halt and drawing him deftly into conversation. But if he was annoyed about an article—as he often was—he would ride by in silence.

  Even so, the two young men had several things in common, including a shared passion for the zoo and the circus. Both even collected small plastic animal figurines and paintings by Wilhelm Kuhnert, the illustrator of Brehm’s Life of Animals.

  Western Donkey for Eastern Pig

  One morning, Klös asked the chauffeur at the zoological garden to drive him to East Berlin. Before leaving, he signed out at the central office and told them where he was going, for safety’s sake, in case he was detained at the border—one never knew. He went to Tierpark Friedrichsfelde to discuss an important matter with Heinrich Dathe, his counterpart there. Klös was visibly upset and felt he had every reason to be. His predecessor, Katharina Heinroth, had made an exchange with Dathe—a donkey stud for several Meishan pigs—without the knowledge of the West Berlin city government or the zoo’s supervisory board. At some point, however, a journalist found out and published the story under a headline that Klös was now holding up to his counterpart. It read, “Western Donkey for Eastern Pig.” Klös was worried that he could get in trouble with the board.

  Neither of them suffered any consequences from this incident, but it does highlight the fraught nature of their interactions. Heinroth’s departure fundamentally altered the relationship between the Berlin Zoo and the Tierpark. Gone were the days when animals could be swapped while bypassing both boards. And there was no love lost between Dathe and Klös. Dathe held it against Klös personally that he had profited from Heinroth’s dismissal—all the more so because he had unhesitatingly assumed her post. Dathe felt that such a thing was just not done, that it was an indicator of Klös’s bad character. He made his feelings abundantly clear to Klös, who at thirty was sixteen years his junior.

  Officially, Dathe and Klös would continue to work together: in the fall of 1958 they would organize the annual meeting of the German Federation of Zoo Directors, and a two-day symposium of zoo veterinarians the following year. But behind the scenes, a competition had long since flared up between them.

  Dathe tried to use the existence of the zoo to obtain advantages for his Tierpark. In a letter to Johanna Blecha, the East Berlin cultural councilor, he pushed for the construction of a heated enclosure. “I have no intention of getting involved in a building competition, because our strength lies in a different area,” he wrote. Up to this point, the Tierpark had opted for species that could be kept outdoors year-round, getting by without heated stables. “But I would regret,” he went on to say, “not having demonstrated with at least one building that we know how to feature heated enclosures as well.” Dathe went to great lengths to gain approval for his request, and he succeeded. A few weeks later, when he learned no cement was available, he went directly to Walter Ulbricht, East Germany’s head of state, and asked him for 1,600 tons of supplies “so that we don’t fall behind the zoo in West Berlin, which at the moment has been putting in the utmost effort to compensate for its loss of prestige.” Later in the letter he reiterated, “I would like to avoid the outcome, esteemed prime minister, of the West, which is watching our development like a hawk, noting triumphantly that after a year we are running out of steam.”

  There were already unmistakable signs that the new Tierpark was not just an innocuous supplement to the zoo in West Berlin: in 1956, the first year after it opened, 85,000 fewer visitors came to the old zoo than in previous years. Even though Dathe would continue to emphasize in public speeches and in newspaper articles that the Tierpark was not meant to compete with the Zoo, Klös knew that hadn’t been the case for some time. He did not even need to travel to East Berlin to find evidence of this, but only to leave his office in the building next to the elephant house and walk a few steps across Hardenbergplatz to the nearest train station. Some three hundred feet away a billboard forty feet wide and thirteen feet high announced, “Visit Tierpark Berlin.” Klös could do nothing to stop this publicity nor could he post advertising of his own there, because throughout Berlin, the train stations and the railway network were under East German control.

  And as if that wasn’t enough, Dathe was arranging an event for August 1958 that would bring masses of Berliners to Friedrichsfelde as never before.

  CHAPTER 4 PANDAS AND PRESTIGE

  With a show of nonchalance, Heinrich Dathe leaned on the nondescript round cage, his left hand on his hip, his right holding on to the bars. He was standing in front of his zookeepers like a schoolboy proudly re
counting how he’d pulled off a prank. Behind him his latest acquisition was busily exploring its enclosure. This newcomer was such an extraordinary attraction that it needed nothing more than a simple cage with a concrete floor, a washing trough, a seesaw, and a tree stump in the middle.

  Although an economic miracle was in full swing in the West, East Germany didn’t do away with ration cards until May 1958, eight years later than the Federal Republic. After all the destruction and privations people had experienced, it was hard to shock them anymore—but fairly easy to ignite their interest, as long as there was anything at all to see that moved, that breathed, that lived. Thirteen years had elapsed since the war, and a new generation had grown up, but the zoos had lost none of their appeal, especially not the new Tierpark in the capital of the GDR. It was something special to see an elephant or a lion, but the animal now in the cage behind Dathe was far more intriguing—it was a sensation.

  The children of the 1950s may have known this phenomenal creature as a drawing in Brehm’s Life of Animals, or from the few existing photographs. But they had never actually seen one. Before the war, their parents recalled, there had been a panda in Berlin for just a brief time, over at the Zoo. Its name was Happy. You get to see an animal like that just once in a lifetime, they said. But now, after almost two decades, there was a giant panda in Berlin once again.

  Chi Chi was the name of the one-and-a-half-year-old female who’d been causing quite a stir in the press in East and West. The summer before, Chinese animal trappers had captured the cub in the mountain forests of the province of Sichuan. Their dogs chased away her mother, and when the six-month-old couldn’t follow quickly enough, she sought refuge up the closest tree; one of the men had no trouble getting her down. She was brought to the Beijing Zoo, where Heini Demmer, an Austrian animal trader, acquired her in exchange for a shipload of zebras, giraffes, hippopotamuses, and rhinoceroses and brought her to Moscow, where he housed her temporarily in a zoo. Demmer intended to sell Chi Chi to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, but at the last minute Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stopped the import because of a U.S. trade embargo involving 450 types of merchandise from the People’s Republic of China, live animals included.

  Chi Chi translates to “sassy little girl” if pronounced correctly; if the intonation is off, it can also mean “whore.” But the name was the least of Demmer’s problems. While he was waiting for a special permit from the United States to exempt the young panda from the embargo, he had to make up for the loss he had incurred in purchasing her. He also had to house her somewhere, so he offered her to several European zoos. She was sent to Frankfurt in a cramped wooden crate bearing her name and that of her owner, where she became the main attraction for the zoo’s centennial celebration. Afterward she was shipped to Copenhagen.

  Heinz-Georg Klös could have brought Chi Chi to the Berlin Zoo, which would have been an apt follow-up to Happy’s stay there twenty years earlier. But Klös, who had held his position for just eighteen months, hesitated. He sensed something fishy about Demner’s offer. Although in public he claimed that the problem was the trader’s excessive fee, he confided to journalist Werner Philipp, “If the animal dies on me, everyone will say she died on Klös’s watch at the Berlin Zoo. I’m not about to let that happen!”

  Dathe, however, accepted the enticing offer on the spot. Although he was unable to pay the purchase price of 200,000 marks—no European zoo director could—he had known Demmer for a long time, and they quickly reached an agreement. In a guest contribution to the East German trade journal Gärtnerpost, Dathe wrote, “Quite apart from the fact that Heini Demmer is exhibiting the animal in the new Tierpark Friedrichsfelde to express his gratitude for the support he has received, his offer may also be regarded as a way of bestowing honor on the Tierpark. Despite being only three years old, the Tierpark has already achieved a reputation that extends beyond the borders of the GDR. Had it not, an offer of this kind would scarcely come our way.”

  Chi Chi arrived in Friedrichsfelde late in the evening of August 2, 1958. Unlike her predecessor, Happy, who apparently almost went through Germany’s entire supply of bamboo on his journey through the country’s zoos, she was used to dietary substitutions, and so was fed three times a day on cooked rice fortified with eggs, bananas, apples, oranges, carrots, powdered milk, dextrose, vitamin drops, salt, lime, yeast, or bonemeal, according to the time of day.

  The lengths to which the zookeepers went to ensure Chi Chi’s well-being paid off. Over the following three weeks, Friedrichsfelde drew 400,000 visitors, who crowded in front of the circular enclosure to catch a glimpse of the rare animal. Decades would pass before another bear attracted such a storm of visitors to the zoo.

  In the Tierpark, every move that Chi Chi made was noted down. After all, when had people ever had the opportunity to study an animal like this in such detail? Fur samples were taken, individually or in tufts, and collected in small yellow envelopes. A research associate made drawings of how Chi Chi ate—in a sitting position and with both paws, almost like a human—and how she stretched, relieved herself, and licked between her legs.

  On one occasion, a few men came to Friedrichsfelde from the Zoological Society of London to study the panda for several days. Then they took Chi Chi to London for a three-week trial, and eventually the zoo there purchased her from Demmer for approximately 120,000 marks. In England, too, the young panda became a crowd pleaser. Peter Scott was so taken with Chi Chi that he modeled the emblem of his new conservation organization—the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)—on her.

  Dathe’s Rise

  Chi Chi’s stint in the Tierpark only increased the zoo’s—and its director’s—already considerable prestige. In 1956, just one year after the Tierpark opened, a survey revealed that Dathe had quickly become Berlin’s best-known resident. Every Sunday morning, just after 8:30, his weekly broadcast, Overheard at the Tierpark, had half of East Germans gathered around their radios. He was acclaimed abroad as well, having been accepted into the International Union of Directors of Zoological Gardens. He soon set up a zoological research center, affiliated with the German Academy of Sciences, on the grounds of the Tierpark.

  The GDR had recently become the first country in the world to officially recognize the profession of zookeeper, as distinct from zoologist or veterinarian. Karl Max Schneider, the now deceased director of Leipzig’s zoo, had instituted formal training courses for animal keepers in the 1930s, but it was Dathe who’d made the case for creating a specific university curriculum. The 1955 academic year started with six students enrolled to study the art and science of zookeeping at an institution in Saxony, several hours south of Berlin: two were from Leipzig, two from Dresden, and one each from Halle and Berlin.

  As support staff for his Tierpark Dathe brought to Berlin two assistants he had known and admired for quite some time. Hans-Günter Petzold and Wolfgang Grummt had attended his lectures at the University of Leipzig in their student days. Grummt was an ornithologist, like Dathe, while Petzold focused primarily on lower vertebrates, although he’d written his dissertation on swans, and would, in the Tierpark, also work with bears. For Dathe, friendships were formed less on the basis of affection than on a shared professional outlook. As far as he was concerned, a friend was someone whose viewpoints in matters pertaining to zoos closely resembled his own.

  By 1958 the Tierpark covered more than two hundred acres, making it the largest zoo in the world, and three times the size of the old zoological garden in the West. Since its opening three years earlier, extensive facilities for wisents, bisons, and wolves had been added to the first enclosures for deer, boar, and antelopes. The year 1956 saw the opening of a “snake farm,” which housed tortoises, crocodiles, and poisonous snakes that were milked in order to produce serum from their venom. At the other end of the grounds, workmen had built a peninsula made of dark gray granite from the ruins of the city’s central bank, a habitat for polar bears that was surrounded by a 280-foot-long moat. Some visitors joked, “The
installation looks so grim because the Stasi financed it.” Sure enough, the adjacent enclosure, housing American black bears, bore a discreet metal plaque that read: “The bear ravine was built with a donation by the staff of the ministry for state security”—in other words, by the secret police.

  By and large, though, Dathe was successful at keeping the political slogans and banners that had become typical in East Berlin away from the Tierpark, something Western media noted approvingly.

  The Tierpark was now the number one recreational attraction in the eastern part of the city and a popular destination for visitors from the West as well. Both the millionth and the two millionth visitors were West Berliners. In the first six months after the Tierpark opened in the summer of 1955, 550,000 visitors passed through its gates; by 1958 that number had swelled to 1.7 million—200,000 more than visited the Berlin Zoo and the aquarium combined.

  These throngs from the western part of the city tended to annoy East Berliners. Municipal authorities noted that some East Germans complained that visitors from the West “snap up all the food and drinks,” and that “the way the locals see it, West Berliners get to the Tierpark in the early morning hours in order to lay claim to most of the restaurant seats for themselves.”

  But not everyone in the West saw the Tierpark in such an exciting new light. In March 1959, a letter from the Berlin Zoo to the president of the West German House of Representatives stated frankly, “Tierpark Friedrichsfelde represents a danger for us.” Heinz-Georg Klös had seen what had sprung up in the East out of the void. While he’d had to slowly clear his zoo of its many run-down and makeshift postwar solutions, Dathe appeared able to draw on ample resources to plan and build a modern zoo from scratch. Large sections of the huge grounds had barely been developed, it was true, but Klös saw volunteers and construction crews busily digging trenches and clearing out undergrowth to prepare for new enclosures. One construction site was particularly alarming: just a few years earlier, there had been nothing but a set of randomly placed bungalows, but now these had been replaced by a huge skeleton of concrete slabs and steel fins rising high into the sky. This huge predator house, on a patch of land more than fifty thousand square feet in size, was designed to offer space for as many as seventy big cats.