Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there’s been little publicity for the Tierpark, and its lack of playgrounds and its long pathways have kept many families with children away. On weekends, even families who live close to the Tierpark prefer to travel to the town of Eberswalde, twenty-five miles away, where a former Heimattiergarten has been transformed into a small, family-friendly zoo. Some residents of Berlin, especially newcomers, don’t know that the Tierpark even exists, or confuse it with the public park that bears a similar name (Tiergarten) and borders on the Zoo.
Unlike the Tierpark, which relies on public funding, the Berlin Zoo draws profits—and three million visitors—every year. Andreas Knieriem, who replaced Bernhard Blaszkiewitz as director in 2014, intends to modernize both zoos over the next fifteen years. Even he, however, had to wonder whether Berlin really needed two zoos.
But while the Zoo may be home to more species than any other, its limited space makes it feel like something of a holdover from the old West Berlin. There isn’t much room for expansion, and on public holidays its paths and buildings feel congested. “If Berlin had only one zoo,” Knieriem concluded shortly after taking his new post, “we would now have to build a second one.”
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With the fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War, state gifts of animals became a rarity. In 1991, Chancellor Helmut Kohl brought the Berlin Aquarium Komodo dragons from Indonesia, and in 2007 President Horst Köhler gave the Zoo an aye-aye, a rare nocturnal species of lemur from Madagascar. But the days of panda diplomacy are gone. Today, any animals that China places with foreign zoos are loans for which the People’s Republic gets an annual fee of about one million euros.
Within zoos, the emphasis has shifted from political systems to ecosystems. Zoos have set themselves the task of presenting animals as representatives of their species in the wild, housed in something close to their natural habitat. It’s no longer enough to display pandas in a simple glass pavilion. Today everyone knows what a panda looks like; people come to zoos to learn about their endangered habitat.
The zoos of our time are no longer self-contained fiefdoms, with autocrats at their heads; most work collaboratively with peer institutions. And a majority of animals are no longer sold. Animal trapping has been all but eliminated, and animal traders merely handle the logistics of transporting species shared between zoos. Modern zoos breed their own endangered species, and even try to release them—if possible—back into suitable reserves, whether in Mongolia (for Przewalski’s horses) or the Alps (bearded vultures). Nevertheless, zoos do remain competitors when it comes to finding new funding and devising attractive ways of displaying animals. But the competition is economic now, not political. Everything revolves around catering to visitors’ tastes.
Neither Man Nor Bear
Heinrich Dathe was convinced that zoos were “primarily for people,” and on this issue he and Heinz-Georg Klös likely saw eye to eye. Today’s zoogoers learn about the destruction of the environment and how to better protect nature—but at the end of the day, they should also feel good. And they do. According to the German Federation of Zoo Directors, more than 65 million people visited Germany’s zoos, animal parks, and game reserves in 2014, making them some of the country’s most popular recreational facilities. Even so, they’ve never before been subjected to so much criticism by animal rights activists—criticism that Dathe and Klös hardly ever encountered. The only zoo critics at their time were the occasional irate visitors who complained about admission prices or about not being allowed to feed the animals.
The sad case of a polar bear named Knut illuminates many of the issues zoos grapple with today. For more than thirty years, there were no polar bears born in the Berlin Zoo. At last, Knut was born in December 2006. But his life got off to a troubled start when his mother abandoned him shortly after his birth, and zookeeper Thomas Dörflein was assigned to care for him around the clock for several months.
From 1986 to 2006, seven polar bears had been born in the Tierpark Berlin—but none of them attracted nearly as much attention as Knut, the first animal to become an Internet celebrity. Just as Berliners had once come to Friedrichsfelde by the thousands to catch a glimpse of Chi Chi the panda, polar bear enthusiasts and journalists from across the world now crowded around the bear enclosure at the Berlin Zoo. Knut brought in a stampede of visitors that lasted for months, and increased the zoo’s revenue for that year to five million euros. The zoo secured the rights to Knut’s name, and tried to use all the hoopla surrounding the bear to do some good: Knut was named ambassador for wild polar bears and their endangered Arctic habitat. Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s minister for the environment, showed up in person for an official petting, wearing a brownish yellow parka. The idea was to get people thinking about melting polar caps.
As time went by, Knut grew into an awkward adolescent. His white fur was now the same color as Gabriel’s jacket. The cult of Knut continued nonetheless, especially after his keeper, Dörflein, died of a sudden heart attack. Some visitors claimed they could see the grief in Knut’s eyes.
When the polar bear was moved to a larger installation, the females there bared their teeth to him. Outraged fangirls loudly demanded protection for Knut, whom they called a “victim of mobbing.” Then, in March 2011, Knut dropped dead in front of zoo visitors. Scientists spent four years investigating the cause. “The pressure was enormous,” said Alex Greenwood of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research at the concluding press conference.
The most tragic part of Knut’s brief life was the way it ended. The polar bear, whom many idolized like a pop star, died of a brain disease that had previously been observed only in humans.
Passing into Memory
On the face of it, Heinz-Georg Klös came out ahead in his rivalry with Heinrich Dathe. Well into the new millennium he remained the éminence grise on the supervisory board that governed both the city’s zoos. “Father had no other life,” Heiner Klös, his son, has said. “He had only the Zoo.” The statement sounds at once like forgiveness and a reproach.
Klös was unable to get his son to succeed him as director, even though the board had promised years earlier to offer the position to Heiner when his father was ready to step down. Nothing came of the dynasty he had hoped for. Privy councilor Ludwig Heck, and then his son Lutz, had led the Berlin Zoo for more than six decades. But that was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—times had changed.
Klös’s influence ebbed—as did his strength in his final years. He kept a low profile. When an old acquaintance, a professor of veterinary medicine at Berlin’s Humboldt University, visited him in the spring of 2014, Klös bore little resemblance to the man who had once been able to pull rabbits out of hats and talk anyone into donating money to his zoo. Klös, who even in middle age still had something boyish about him, now looked old. He had trouble recognizing his guest, but tried to gloss over his inability to figure out whom he was talking to.
They chatted about rhinoceroses, his favorite animal. He had retained a keen interest in zoology, and they talked for quite a while until Klös eventually said, “I’m getting tired.”
Half a year later, on July 28, 2014, Heinz-Georg Klös died at the age of eighty-eight.
Klös, who had spent his entire career vying for the recognition that seemed to have simply fallen into Dathe’s lap, outlived his old rival by more than thirteen years. When his time came to go, the public paid little heed to his death; it received barely more attention than his arrival at the zoo had fifty-seven years earlier. There were a few brief statements by the zoo staff and the mayor, a couple of bureaucratically worded obituaries—and that was that.
Heinz-Georg Klös had headed the Berlin Zoo for over three decades, but his status never rose above that of one more director in a long line. Klös had brought the Berlin Zoo back to prominence after World War II, reclaiming its title as the world’s most biodiverse, but he himself never became as great as his zoo.
Heinrich Dathe would always
be more than just an episode in the story of Friedrichsfelde. He was its first director—he built the Tierpark over nearly four decades. But while his sad end led some to glorify him as a martyr of the sinking GDR, and while the manner in which he was pushed out was thoughtless and shameful, the truth is that things got to that point because Dathe stayed on too long.
Klös—the consummate manager—may have prevailed in the power politics of the war between the zoos, but the way Berliners remember it, Dathe—the educator—was the victor. A local secondary school and a square have been named after him; only a foundation that Klös himself created bears his name. Today, Dathe is regarded as the godfather of modern German zoos. Klös is, simply, a zoo director from sometime in the Cold War.
But not so long ago, and for a great many years, the two men were equals—major figures who made their zoos famous beyond the borders of the two Berlins. They were Cold Warriors in an era of confrontation, a time when Berlin’s two zoos were political arenas, and everyone in the divided city had a stake in the zookeepers’ war.
WHAT BECAME OF THEM
Jörg Adler was sitting in his study on one of his first days at Münster’s all-weather zoo when he suddenly realized that everything had gone quiet. He looked at the clock: it was a quarter after five in the afternoon. Where was everyone? He must have missed an important meeting—and he was still so new at his job! Feeling uneasy, he ran through the other offices to see what was going on, but he couldn’t find anyone. Unlike in Leipzig, where the workday dragged on into the evening, everyone had already gone home. In the early years, Adler missed the chummy familiarity of the East, but he did appreciate the fact that all the doorknobs worked and the roofs weren’t leaky. In 1994 Adler was named director of the Münster Zoo. He remained in this position until his retirement in 2015.
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Bao Bao was sent to the London Zoo on honeymoon in 1991, but he didn’t get along with his bride and was returned to Berlin, now overweight, two years later. In 1995 he got a new partner, Yan Yan, but no offspring resulted from this liaison. After Yan Yan’s death in 2007, Bao Bao remained alone. When he died in 2012 at the age of thirty-four, he was the oldest panda in any zoo in the world. In 2017 the Berlin Zoo was lent a young pair of pandas from the People’s Republic of China. The female’s name is Meng Meng (“Little Dream”), the male Jiao Qing (“Little Darling”).
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Chi Chi once again caught the attention of the international press after moving to London in 1958. It was hoped that the female panda would bear cubs once sexually mature, but there was only one other member of her species in Europe—a male named An An, who was living in the Moscow Zoo. The wish for rare panda offspring proved stronger than any political misgivings, so the two zoos agreed to send Chi Chi to Moscow in March 1966. She stayed there for seven months, and gave An An quite a few scratches, but that was the extent of their contact. In October Chi Chi returned to London, where she eventually died at the age of sixteen.
* * *
Falk Dathe rejected an offer to become director of the Dresden Zoo and chose to remain at the Tierpark as head of the reptile section. He went on to serve as the Tierpark’s zoological director until his retirement in 2016.
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Lothar Dittrich requested early retirement from the Hanover Zoo in 1993. He felt that he had no way of helping the zoo out of its crisis: the enclosures were old and in want of repair, but there was no money for improvements and no visitors. So he heeded the advice his father had once given him: “When you can’t make any more good moves, it’s time for you to move on.” He wanted to spare himself Dathe’s fate. Dittrich promised his wife that they would do whatever she liked, as she’d spent so long taking care of things for him. Together they wrote a book, Animals as Symbols in Painting from the 14th to the 17th Century.
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Wolfgang Gewalt also retired in 1993. Eleven years later the last white whale left the Duisburg Zoo for San Diego. Gewalt died on April 26, 2007, at the age of seventy-eight, at his retirement home in the Black Forest; the official cause of death was an accident. In 2010, the bust that had been displayed in his honor at the Duisburg Zoo was stolen. The bust of his predecessor, Hans-Georg Thienemann, remained in place. Two years later, a cleaning woman stumbled across the missing bust in the broom closet of a men’s residential facility in the neighboring town of Mülheim an der Ruhr. The question of whether it was stolen in a belated protest against Gewalt remains a mystery. It’s certainly true that while zoologists are held in high regard among experts, they face frequent hostility from the public.
* * *
Katharina Heinroth came close to experiencing the fall of the Berlin Wall. The former director of the Berlin Zoo died on October 20, 1989. In accordance with her will, she was buried on zoo grounds, next to her husband, Oskar.
* * *
Heiner Klös had been approved by the board to succeed his father as director of the Berlin Zoo, but this approval was later overturned when doubts rose about his lack of experience. Klös remained in Berlin anyway, not wanting to subject his children to a move. He is currently responsible for the zoo’s predators.
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Kosko, the Tierpark’s oldest female elephant, had her tail bitten by Angkor, an adolescent male, in 1994. The wound became infected and required surgery. Kosko couldn’t be revived from the anesthesia and died at the age of thirty-eight.
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Mao, the China alligator who arrived at the Tierpark in 1957, is the only animal from Dathe’s era that still lives in the Friedrichsfelde crocodile house.
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Bernd Matern began working at the Frankfurt Zoo as a trainee in the mid-1960s, after he was released from prison and allowed to settle in the West. He later became an animal keeper and a veterinarian. In 1991 Heinz-Georg Klös offered him the directorship of the Berlin Zoo, but Matern turned him down. He still knew too many of the zookeepers from his days in Friedrichsfelde.
* * *
Patric Müller stayed with the Tierpark’s elephants until 1992, when, after wrangling with the new director, Bernhard Blaszkiewitz, he was transferred to the hoofed animal section and forbidden from entering the pachyderm house. Müller eventually left for Carl Hagenbeck’s zoo in Hamburg, where he worked as an elephant keeper for another two years. Today he trains apprentices in the art of zookeeping at the Peter Lenné School in Berlin.
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Tuffi was sent to Cirque Alexis Gruss in France when Zirkus Althoff ceased operations in 1968. The female elephant lived with the circus until her death in 1989 at the age of forty-three.
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Ralf Wielandt was in charge of the Berlin Zoo’s rhinoceros section from 1966 to 2005, during which time sixteen calves were born. His colleagues claimed he had a sixth sense when it came to female rhinoceroses, and knew when they were in heat even before the males. Wielandt always laughed off that idea. In 2005, Wielandt, the longest serving keeper at the Berlin Zoo, retired after forty-eight years on the job. These days, he shows up in his old section just often enough for his colleagues to say, “It’s nice to have you with us again,” and not, “What are you doing here?”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would first like to express my thanks to Falk Dathe and Heiner Klös, both of whom agreed to tell me about their fathers, Heinrich Dathe and Heinz-Georg Klös, in such great detail. I am also grateful to Andreas Knieriem, the director of the Berlin Zoo and Tierpark, for generously supporting this book project right from the start.
There is never just one truth, especially in the case of the explosive relationship between the two Berlin zoos, which has remained emotionally charged to this day. All the way through, it was my aim to depict both their relationship and that of the two main characters in the most multifaceted mosaic I could create. Numerous people helped me in this process by sharing their diverse recollections, perceptions, and suggestions. I would like to thank:
Jörg Adler, Lars Brandt, Reinhard Coppenrath, Lothar Dittrich, Walter
Encke, Theodor Hiepe, Helmut Höge, Jürgen Jahr, Manfred Kofferschläger, Jürgen Lange, Bernd Matern, Resi Mohnhaupt, Gerd Morgen, Patric Müller, Werner Philipp, Mieke Roscher, Carsten Schöne, Ulrich Schürer, Inge Sievers-Schröder, Martin Stummer, Heinz Tellbach, Frans van den Brink, Ralf Wielandt, and Reiner Zieger.
I would also like to thank Martina Borchert and Klaus Rudloff for making photographic material from the archives of the Berlin Zoo and Tierpark available to me, Katrin Passens of the Berlin Wall Memorial for providing helpful insights about the Stasi, and Clemens Maier-Wolthausen for information on the role of the Berlin Zoological Garden in National Socialism. I thank Bruno Treu for pointers about everyday life and animal keeping in the GDR as well as for proofreading and revision suggestions. Special thanks go to Christiane Reiss, Bruno Hensel, and Dirk Petzold for facilitating contacts and initiating interviews.
I have Grit Thönnissen and Claus Vetter to thank for the fact that I did not have to languish in hotel rooms at the end of long days of research in Berlin libraries and archives; they took me in, and also helped me obtain archival materials.
I would like to thank my editors at Hanser Verlag, Nicola Bodman-Hensler and Christian Koth, for their trust in and support of my work. I thank my agent, Thomas Hölzl, for his foresight and critical judgment about the book proposal and texts, which greatly improved them. I would also like to give my thanks to Annette Kögel, whose collegiality and generosity made it possible for me to report about zoos in Der Tagesspiegel, and especially to Jens Mühling, who ultimately gave me the idea for writing a book on this subject.
The Zookeepers' War Page 21