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  • A human zoo: The dark colonial history of Zoologischer Garten

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A human zoo: The dark colonial history of Zoologischer Garten

Berlin’s oldest zoo has a dark history. Not even 80 years ago, it was still displaying people.

Lutz Heck, the director of Zoologischer Garten, pictured with a group of people arriving at Anhalter Bahnhof in April 1931. Photo: Bundesarchiv

Zoo Berlin is one of the oldest zoos in the world. Opened in 1844, it was also the first one in Germany. Today it features over 1,000 species, but one species is no longer on display: Homo sapiens.

For almost 75 years, Berliners could gawk at humans from far-off lands, right next to the animal enclosures. This was known as a Völkerschau – a “people’s show” or ethnological exhibition. At the end of the 19th century, impresarios toured groups of people around Europe. Zoo Berlin started hosting these shows as a source of enormous revenue. One Sunday in 1878, for example, 62,000 people came to see Nubians, a people indigenous to the central Nile valley, alongside elephants and rhinos.

Today, not far from the zoo’s main entrance, behind the concrete cliffs of the takin enclosure, a plaque marks the spot where a special exhibition pavilion stood from 1926 to 1936. This is where humans were on display. The zoo hosted a total of 25 Völkerschauen between 1878 and – astoundingly – 1952.

They included people from the northern and southern ends of the Americas, northern Europe, the Caucasus, different corners of Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the Pacific Islands – the entire colonised world, basically. A share of the people put on display were professionals who came to perform, but many were tricked into coming and mistreated. Some even died.

Human Animals

On March 9, 1878, the very first Völkerschau opened with six Inuits (known at the time as Eskimos) from Kalaallit Nunaat, or Greenland. The “Eskimo Show” put on by the entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck had been such a success in Paris that the Berlin zoo wanted a piece of the action. For a few weeks, a couple, their two kids and two young relatives would take a kayak onto one of the zoo’s lakes, or ride a dog sled across a sandy embankment. Even Kaiser Wilhelm II came by with his court. Half a year later, Hagenbeck was contracted to bring 11 Nubians to Berlin, along with an enormous entourage of five elephants, four rhinos, eight giraffes, three cows, three zebus, two ostriches, five young lions, two monkeys and more.

Against all the myths about “cultural exchange” based on “fair contracts”, this was nothing but human trafficking.

Today there is very little doubt about the immense immorality of putting people in a zoo, and even back then, not everyone agreed. To assuage critics and give everything a “scientific” veneer, the German doctor Rudolf Virchow and the Berlin Anthropological Society came to measure the exotic bodies, classifying their races at “lower” and “higher” stages of development. As the historian Joachim Zeller explains, the colonised peoples were not exactly considered animals; “they were placed on a level between animal and human” and were presumed to show how people in Europe had lived thousands of years ago.

Many Berliners had never seen a person from another part of the world, and their curiosity was extreme. Yet the Völkerschau was not about learning from these visitors – quite the opposite. The people behind fences were expected to present a “fantasy world bursting with stereotypes, as white people imagined life in the colonies”, Zeller says. One reason for the barriers: polite society was extremely worried that impressionable young white women could fall in love with “noble savages”.

German Colonialism’s “Pseudo-Fraternisation”

In the summer of 1900, 20 Samoans were sent on a tour through different German zoos. Their island had been put under the so-called “protection” of the German Empire a few months earlier. The Samoans were presented as Germany’s “New Compatriots”, as one promotional poster put it, next to a bare-shouldered young woman with a snake wrapped around her neck – although no such snakes live on the island. Another poster showed a giant warrior with a headdress and two German imperial flags. These “compatriots”, however, were not treated as equals; the journalist and author Jan Mohnhaupt calls this a “pseudo-fraternisation” intended to establish hierarchies.

In 1901, however, the authorities banned displays of people from German colonies. The Empire feared that this could undermine colonial subjects’ respect for the white man. Even though the “Samoa Show” was the only one directly promoting German colonialism, as the historian Clemens Maier-Wohlthausen argues, the whole enterprise was “only possible in colonialism’s power structures and ways of thinking”.

The Völkerschauen were such a success that in the years before World War I, Hagenbeck was planning to build a permanent human zoo in Berlin, an “ethnological garden” that would feature people year round. Germany lost the war, so the plans were never completed, but traces of the project are still visible today. The street names of the African Quarter in Wedding indicate where indigenous people were supposed to be on display in Volkspark Rehberge.

Photo: Bundesarchiv

Isolation, Illness and Death

In a 1999 essay, Ursula Klös, author and wife of the Berlin zoo director Heinz-Georg Klös, pushed back against retroactive moral judgements: “Might [the Völkerschau] also have been an expression of interest in unknown ways of life?” The hard truth, however, was that in the zoos of the Belle Époque, the lives of animals were cheap – and the people alongside them weren’t treated much better, often forced to live in simple huts in an unfamiliar climate. And while the people on display weren’t taken against their will and received some kind of compensation, these arrangements were never based on fully-informed consent.

In late 1880, another group of Inuit – this time from Labrador in Canada – spent a few weeks at Zoo Berlin. During their European tour, they all got smallpox. Lacking vaccination, some of them died in Germany, while the rest perished on their next stop in France. The following autumn, the zoo presented a group of “Firelanders”, indigenous people from Tierra del Fuego on the southern tip of South America. The 12 people were promoted as “real cannibals”, drawing 37,000 visitors in a single day, yet the “cannibals” appeared “apathetic and silent”. Against all the myths about “cultural exchange” based on “fair contracts”, this was nothing but human trafficking. They got lung infections, and two thirds of them died before they were sent back home.

These shows were supposed to emphasise the racial inferiority of colonised people, but retrospectively, they only revealed just how brutal European civilisation was. As Zeller puts it, these shows were “acts of cultural barbarism”.

The Last Völkerschauen

By 1901, 19 shows had taken place in Berlin, including ones featuring Araucanians (Mapuche) from Chile, Sinhalese from Sri Lanka, Kalmyks from Southern Russia, and Somalis. By 1895, however, the zoo administration had already noted that Berliners’ interest was waning, arguably because the shows were becoming more professional. This led to a pause of 25 years: at first, the zoo was focussed on new buildings, then a world war broke out, followed by revolution and crisis.

The colonised peoples were not exactly considered animals; “they were placed on a level between animal and human”.

It wasn’t until 1926 that John Hagenbeck, Carl’s half-brother, brought 100 people and nine elephants for a massive “India Show”. The following year, the zoo organised its own “Tripoli Show” with almost 100 people from northern Africa, for whom they built a fake city with a café and a miniature mosque. This required permission from Italy’s fascist government, the rulers of that part of Africa, and they were offended: “The Arabs are no worse than us, and they cannot be displayed in zoological gardens.” They eventually relented and agreed to show off Italian colonialism’s accomplishments. Yet no one wanted to see fake Tripoli, and the zoo lost money. A final show tried to max out the exoticism, including African women with lip plates and African men with dwarfism. But 1931 was the last Völkerschau before the Nazis rose to power – and they were responsible for their own acts of barbarism at the Berlin zoo, as keepers signed up for the SA and all the Jewish shareholders were expelled.

The End

After World War II, Katharina Heinroth – the world’s first female zoo director – was in desperate need of money to keep the bombed-out zoo running. She hosted an Oktoberfest and even one last Völkerschau. In 1952, two dozen “Laplanders” (Sámi) from Finland were presented along with their reindeer. But in the time of the United Nations, Germans finally realised that people didn’t belong in the zoo.

As an antidote to the colonial history of the Berlin zoo, you can check out its East Berlin competitor in Friedrichsfelde. Opened in 1955, Tierpark could be described as an anti-colonial zoo. In 1957, it hosted Ho Chi Minh, who sent along a baby elephant, and in the 1980s, it joined the international boycott of South African zoos to protest against Apartheid.

  • For more information, check out Berlin – A Postcolonial Metropolis: A Critical History Walking Tour of Central Berlin by Oumar Diallo and Joachim Zeller and Berlin: City of Animals – The story of Germany’s oldest and most famous zoo by Clemens Maier-Wolthausen.