Everyone knows Zoologischer Garten – it’s among the world’s oldest zoos, founded way back in 1844. The zoo provided the name for a long-distance train station and gained infamy as a hangout for heroin-addicted teens in the 1980s. But you might have to be an animal enthusiast or an Ossi to know that Berlin has a second world-class zoological garden in Friedrichsfelde. The modest name Tierpark (literally, animal park) evokes a petting zoo with a few sheep and perhaps a llama.
Tierpark, a product of Cold-War competition between the two halves of the city, is Europe’s largest urban zoo. As journalist Jan Mohnhaupt put it in his history of both zoos: “The Stasi learned to love spectacled bears and [West German Chancellor] Helmut Schmidt upgraded with pandas.” (The book is available in English as The Zookeepers’ War.) An entire state, even the entire Warsaw Pact, was committed to getting the best animals to Tierpark.
The enormous garden – almost five times the size of its Western competitor – houses 632 species of animals, as well as many layers of Berlin history. This month, the animal park is celebrating its 70th birthday, meaning it’s now existed under capitalism longer than under socialism.
A New Zoo
On July 2, 1955, dignitaries brought loads of children to the ruins of Friedrichsfelde Palace in Lichtenberg. Wilhelm Pieck, the rather corpulent president of the DDR, cut the ribbon of the new zoo. He was accompanied by Friedrich Ebert Jr, the bald, bespectacled mayor of East Berlin, and Heinrich Dathe, the similarly bald and bespectacled director of this new institution.
The polar bear enclosure was assembled from the ruins of the Reichsbank.
In the early 1950s, the DDR leadership had decided they needed a zoo in their capital – it was no good to have working-class families traveling to the Western zoo and admiring the shop windows full of shiny American, consumer goods on the way. East Germany’s zoo directors were sceptical; the country already had a number of established zoos, after all. Yet as soon as Dathe, then the young vice-director of the Leipzig Zoo, saw the sprawling palace grounds that were on offer, he took the job immediately. This one man would define every detail of Tierpark until his death in 1991, living on the grounds and becoming an East German national hero.
The idea for a Volkstierpark (“people’s zoo”) for the downtrodden proletarians of the city’s eastern districts went back to the 1920s. Leftist artists like Alfred Döblin and Käthe Kollwitz had campaigned for an alternative to the zoo in swanky Charlottenburg, which was too expensive and insufferably bourgeois.
The conditions to make this happen only came about after the city was bombed – just 90 zoo animals survived World War II – and then divided. The aristocratic family that had owned Friedrichsfelde Palace for over a century, the House of Treskow, fled their ancestral seat as the Red Army approached (although the family cemetery is still accessible, right next to the polar bear enclosure). The Soviet-led land reform expropriated the Treskows in 1945.
The palace grounds were now public property, and the decrepit Schloss was set for demolition – until Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Berlin’s most famous trans woman, moved into the ruins and began restoring them by hand. As a lover of “old junk” in her words, she dedicated her life to saving Berlin’s old buildings from socialist wrecking balls.
In her moving autobiography, she recalls an official telling her: “We are going to destroy all these [Prussian aristocratic] palaces; there’s no way of getting around that.” Mustering her most Leninist tone, she replied: “Comrade, all of it now belongs to us, the people. It was taken away from the [Prussian nobility] long ago, and we could make this palace into something useful for workers, a children’s home for example.” Without waiting for official permission, von Mahlsdorf saved the palace, which within a few years was integrated into the new zoo. In early years, it served as a provisional monkey house. Now, the representative building at the entrance of Tierpark hosts concerts.
From the Ruins
Tierpark “rose from the ruins” – a line from the East German national anthem that captured the post-war spirit. According to official statistics, 162,000 East Berliners offered a total of 690,000 hours of volunteer labour to build the new zoo. The polar bear enclosure, still in use, was assembled from the ruins of the Reichsbank. The artificial canyon for spectacled bears – otherwise known as Andean bears – was sponsored by the Stasi. Ho Chi Minh dropped by in 1957, and sat on a bench chatting with Pieck and Dathe in French. The North Vietnamese head of state offered a baby elephant as a gift; Kosko arrived the following year and enchanted East Berlin’s kids.
The two countries’ diplomatic corps were in a never-ending war for pandas, komodo dragons and kiwis.
The Western press made fun of the “propaganda zoo”, but even the Frankfurt zoo director had to admit that Dathe’s facility was on track to become the world’s biggest and most modern. Due to East Germany’s chronic shortages of metal, many enclosures were made of wood or concrete, with water-filled moats instead of bars. The white-handed gibbons, for example, were put on an artificial island instead of in a cage. This innovative design, inspired by scarcity, is still in use today.
Even the statues were products of clever recycling. The bronze lions that still stand in front of the Alfred-Brehm-Haus, where large cats are kept, had been preserved from the Kaiser Wilhelm National Monument when it was taken down in 1950. The sabre-tooth tiger opposite the red panda enclosure was cast after the giant statue of Stalin on Stalinallee was removed and melted down in 1961. Yes, a little bit of Stalin is in that extinct cat!
Over time, Tierpark added some of the world’s biggest and most spectacular animal houses, like the Alfred-Brehm-Haus in 1963, recently refurbished as the Rainforest House. Its indoor Tropical Hall is still impressive. Tierpark set another record when it opened the Pachyderm House in 1989, which is currently closed and being rebuilt as the Savanna House. The metro line now called U5 was extended in 1973, giving Tierpark its own station – the only underground subway station that the DDR ever constructed. The station, like the rest of Tierpark, has wonderful animal mosaics.
A source of East German national pride, Tierpark served as a diplomatic tool. The first time the DDR’s flag flew in the United States was when Dathe went to an international zoo directors’ meeting in San Diego. Both of Berlin’s zoo directors, Dathe in the East and Heinz-Georg Klös in the West, understood how to stoke fears among their respective governments that the other side could pull ahead in the exotic-animal arms race. The two countries’ diplomatic corps were in a never-ending war for pandas, komodo dragons and kiwis.
Into the Future
As the DDR collapsed, many East Berliners feared their beloved Tierpark would be forced to close its doors. Dathe was fired in 1990 and even kicked out of his on-site house – at this point he was in his 80s. Yet closure was never really on the table – no politician dared to attack such a beloved public institution. Instead, the Tierpark was made into a subsidiary of Zoo Berlin, and both now function under a common director.
The last few years have seen extensive remodelling projects, such as the transformation of Tierpark’s massive rubble hill into a Himalayan area, where visitors can now see snow leopards and red pandas. A new elevated walkway allows people to encounter giraffes at eye level. It’s increasingly hard to find remnants of the old Tierpark, like typical East German design or Russian signs, though not impossible.
Thanks to the division of Berlin, the city got two of almost everything. Even if many have never heard of the second zoo, Tierpark still sees almost 2 million visitors each year. With its endlessly sprawling gardens, Tierpark offers space to admire animals and trace the quiet outlines of a divided city’s shared past.
- Tierpark, Am Tierpark 125. details
