Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo by Gary Bruce (review)

"On a night train from Nice to Berlin in 1928, two men sat mesmerized by the companion who shared their compartment" (1). With this, a line that seems crafted more toward a work of historical fiction than a sober history of a significant cultural institution of the German capital, Gary Bruce begins his fast-paced and fascinating account of the history of the Berlin Zoo from its beginnings to today. Within a few more sentences, we discover that the "companion" was a three-year-old gorilla who would become famous as "Bobby," one in a series of celebrities exhibited at the zoo, including the elephant "Rostom," the hippopotamus "Knautschke," the polar bear "Knut," and a group of Greenland Inuit, who provide milestones in this historical journey. Bruce, who has previously written about the Stasi (The Firm, 2010), follows the reception of these personalities and also tells a broader institutional and cultural history by structuring his account around both the changing leadership of the zoo and larger historical developments in Berlin and Germany. Bruce's central contention is that a history of the Berlin Zoo can also be a history of modern Germany; that the visions of the institution's leadership as much as the fascinations of the broader public tell us a great deal more about the world outside the zoo's gates than we may have anticipated.

In Bruce's hands, the broad strokes of a history of the Berlin Zoo reflect the history of the city more generally. A small cultural institution founded in the early 1840s by a group of rising intellectual leaders (including Martin Heinrich Lichtenstein, the first director, and Alexander von Humboldt), it struggled to get a foothold until the city's wealth and population rapidly expanded in the second half of the century, especially after the establishment of the empire in 1871. By the 1890s the zoo had quickly grown to a position of predominance in Germany, with arguably only one international rival, its counterpart in London. Devastated by the shortages of World War I and the struggling Weimar economy, the zoo was beginning to rise again by the 1930s when the Nazis took control of the government. Led then by Lutz Heck, a figure who found in Nazi ideology resonances with his own beliefs and interests, the zoo initially benefitted but was ultimately all but completely destroyed by that ideology. Only ninety-one animals remained alive at the zoo when the Red Army entered its grounds. Out of the rubble, the zoo began to rebuild quickly and greeted over a million visitors in the first year after the war. Soon, though, the zoo would be dragged into a new ideological conflict as it was promoted against its eastern counterpart, the Tierpark Berlin. Finally, with the crumbling of the Wall, both institutions would enter a period of new uncertainties and incomplete collaborations.

If the general trajectory of this history isn't surprising, Bruce's account, the first full-length history of the Berlin Zoo in English, offers intriguing and important details that have been neglected in existing German accounts. The description of the zoo from 1844 to World War I is especially strong with nuanced treatments of the intentions of the founders, the exhibitions of exotic peoples, and how the zoo became a focus for the public and the government in the wake of the founding of the empire and the assertion of colonial ambitions. Arguably the most needed and controversial section of the book deals with the enthusiasm of the leadership and staff of the zoo for Nazi ideas and the relationships between Hermann Göring and the Heck family—Ludwig Heck, director of the zoo from 1888–1931, and his sons Lutz Heck, director from 1932–1945, and Heinz Heck, director of the Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich from 1927–1969. This part of the book is welcome because ongoing efforts by the zoo's...