Hamburg: Hagenbeck Tierpark

 

1.

Why would you go to a zoo in a foreign country?  An animal is an animal.  A German lion confined in Hamburg’s Hagenbeck Tierpark is no different from a lion on display in Minneapolis or San Diego or, for that matter, Lima or Beijing.  You don’t need to travel to view exotic animals.  They are exhibited at the Minnesota Zoo in Eagan.  

But a month in Hamburg is a long time, enough days and weeks to see just about everything in that city, and, so, Angelica and I took the red line subway (U-Bahn) to Hagenbeck Tierpark, a famous zoo located about seven stops north of Dammtor Station.  

The zoo occupies a large, more or less, level park with its main gate accessed across an open plaza near the train-stop.  An elaborate Japanese pavilion constructed on pads of concrete islands in a koi pond is near the entry kiosk.  A huge shrouded gate, wrapped like a Christo installation, marks the zoo’s historic entrance.  This structure was being renovated when Angelica and I visited and, therefore, was hidden under suspended, drooping acres of canvas drapery.  Postcards show the gates to be thirty feet high, a complicated superstructure built from brown and white terracotta, highlighted with Pompeiian red.  The gate is a rococo fantasy with ornate columns and curved pediments, echoing the shapely s-curves of the trunks of bronze elephants embedded above the entry.  Atop the high towers supporting the wrought iron entrance gates, a bronze polar bear faces its counterpart, a huge lion, on the opposing red-capped pillar.  Outlying domed pavilions adjacent to the central gated entrance support an American Indian, one-and-a half times life-size with war bonnet and tomahawk and a bellicose-looking Mongolian warrior.  (These bronze figures refer, circumspectly, to the zoo’s somewhat sinister history with respect to human exhibits.)  None of this was visible to Angelica and I; we passed between great, slumping cascades of tarpaulin, water cupped overhead in the folds of the construction shrouds.

In the distance, a range of crags towered over a knoll, a skyline of manufactured mountains, also grey and brown about the height of a grain elevator in a lonely one-street village somewhere out on the prairie.  The concrete and plaster crags form the backdrop to one of Hagenbeck’s “panorama” exhibits, that is, his innovative habitats for whole ecosystems of exotic animals – in this case, flamingos, hippos, lions, and wildebeeste in the Serengeti exhibit.  The crags have a theatrical aspect, a sawtooth range of rocky heights, and they can be accessed (I discovered) from the rear via a scary set of winding steps inset in the concrete that leads in a fissure up to an overlook across the lagoon and the habitat.  This habitat with its artificial spires and pinnacles is the zoo’s trademark.  Of course, the ostentatious gate and the Serengeti cliffs were all bombed to rubble in World War Two and had to be rebuilt from the ground up.  

The park is overrun with some kind of rodent that is about the size of a poodle, an animal that looks like a cross between a deer and a guinea big.  These creatures range along the paths nibbling on the shrubbery or browsing the dry leaves.  (I wrote down the name of the species in my notebook but can’t read my handwriting to report to you on that animal.)  The most impressive part of the zoo is the large and complex habitat called “Eismeer” (the sea of ice – a title that invokes the famous Friedrich picture of polar ice entrapping a sailing vessel).  The exhibit is glacial white and blue, another range of fissured concrete and fiber-glass cliffs that abuts a huge lagoon.  You enter the exhibit on a ramp that slopes imperceptibly downward until you find that you under the water in concrete tunnels, facing beluga whales, porpoises, seals, and enormous walruses swimming in the depths of man-made lake.  Blue light suffuses the walkways and the huge animals sweep majestically along the glass walls.  The walruses are particularly remarkable, pink as boiled shrimp and with shaggy, raw-looking faces of whisker and tendril above their large, radiant eyes.  The animals are superb swimmers and they burst through the water like torpedos, moving effortlessly among the blue shadows.  Penguins dive beside the walruses and seals, lithe projectiles piercing the gloom.  At the lowest point in the exhibit, seemingly forty feet below water, a glass wall the size of old-time movie palace screen shimmers with dim blue radiance – sharks are cutting through the cold water among banner-like pennants of colorful fish and huge ominous rays that carry shadow and darkness in their wake.  At one point, I looked up to a skylight and saw tons of walrus hovering overhead, a strange marble cylinder with flippers hanging in the water.

In black rooms simulating caverns swarms of bats clamber over bananas pinned on spikes.  The air stinks of pneumonia.  In an elephant house, the big animals stand in showers gushing down from the trunks of terracotta elephants – the air in that building is also suffocating with the rank, intense odor of the pachyderms.  Tiles porticos display Ganesha above their arches, openings by which the animals access their exterior pens – it’s too cold for them to be outside today.  In the orangutan environment, a vertical maze of tree-trunks the size of pipe organ cylinders, the beasts are hanging like huge, hairy bait from slack-looking tires and overhead cables.  The orangutans all have names and displays characterize their personalities: for instance, the female Salmi is described as “dreamy, solitary, and likes to sit alone or build elaborate nests.”  The mandrill baboons have neon-red rumps, great spongy excrescences on the back side of their bodies.  The males strut around and, sometimes, try to mount the females who push them away in a desultory way.  The baboons are like sit-com characters: the young bucks posture and the old males brood in out-of-the way niches and the young mothers, with their rabble of babies, clutch nervous-looking infants to their breasts.  A dominant male with a grizzle of grey around his mouth defends his territory, bellowing and chasing away rivals but he seems on the brink of a nervous break-down, twitching with a harried expression.  

Of course, feeding the animals is strictly forbidden (“streng verboten”) but there is moat near an exterior pen for the elephants and a half-dozen of the big animals have come to edge of trench, extending their trunks over the ditch so that visitors can feed them dry leaves.  The elephants have sensitive moist tips to their trunks, fist-sized that are like pale pink hands.  Angelica wants to extend a bouquet of dry leaves in the direction of the elephants but I don’t think she should disobey the big signs prominently displayed and warning against exactly what everyone else is doing.  A slight drizzle is clouding the air.  The elephants are strangely expressive.  You have the illusion, even more than in the case of the rather cartoonish baboons, that you can read their minds and, even, somehow communicate with them.      

2.

Klaus Hagenbeck, the father of Carl, the man who founded the zoo, was a fishmonger.  He kept a half-dozen trained seals and fed them herring down at the fish market in Altona to advertise the freshness of his wares.  Exotic animals were often on show in Hamburg.  The city was once full of sailors who had sailed around the world and, often, they brought back chimpanzees and marmosets and, even, tigers and lions with them from their travels.  Klaus Hagenbeck acquired a small polar bear.  Polar bears also like fish and he fed the animal with herring and cod caught in the North Sea and its estuaries.

Carl inherited the family fish business around 1870 and he quickly discovered that his exotic animals were more valuable as zoological specimens then as props to advertise fresh fish.  Accordingly, he expanded his menagerie and began showing the animals in the zoo that he built in north Hamburg.  

During the 19th century, panoramas were popular forms of entertainment.  A large canvas surface, forming a house-high circular scroll, was painted with elaborately detailed images, often battle scenes or cityscapes.  In order to enhance, the illusion presented by the 360 degree panorama, the foreground to the picture, occupied by the viewers on a sort of panopticon platform (similar to surveillance towers in prisons) was embedded in an artificial landscape consistent with the painted image; for instance, if the battle portrayed took place in a desert, sand and barren stone and a few cactus might be arranged between the panopticon and the enormous canvas; similarly, a painting of the Arctic might feature a white-flocked landscape simulating snow between the viewer and the panorama.  Hagenbeck, who was attuned to all forms of spectacle, operated a few panoramas and he transferred that technique to his animal park, creating “panorama-like” displays in which the terrain around the animal habitats was transformed into a simulacrum of the creature’s natural environment.  This innovation initiated the so-called “Hagenbeck Revolution” – that is, the concept of showing exotic animals in landscapes separated from the public by embankments or moats; this approach to zoological gardens persists until the present day.  

A shrewd publicist (he was friends with P.T. Barnum) Hagenbeck realized that the authenticity of his animal exhibits would be enhanced by installing similarly exotic human beings in his displays.  To that end, Hagenbeck recruited Saimi (Lapplanders) to appear alongside reindeers and polar bears in his Arctic exhibits.  He acquired groups of Nubians to live alongside lions and wildebeest in his African landscapes.  A South Pacific exhibit featured a fully equipped and functioning Samoan village.  These features were popular elements of his animal exhibits.  But, of course, the result wasn’t so propitious, at least, for some of the inhabitants of his human zoos.  For instance, a group of eight Inuits imported from Labrador toured Europe with an exhibit of caribou and polar bears; unfortunately, all of the so-called Eskimos died of small-pox shortly after they were put on display.  

Hagenbeck supplied animals for many European and American circuses.  In fact, he was part-owner of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, an operation that competed with Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey in the early part of the 20th century.  (The show was beset by tragedies: a flood in 1913 destroyed many elephants, horses, and lions; in June 1918, the circus train wrecked near Hammond, Indiana resulting in a horrific kerosene-fired conflagration swept through the derailed cars and 86 people were killed with 126 injured.  In the spirit that “the show must go on,” the catastrophe resulted in only two cancellations and the circus was back on the road in Beloit,Wisconsin three days after the calamity.)  In 1910, Hagenbeck published his autobiography, Beasts and Men.  In the book, he revealed that inhabitants of Rhodesia had reported to his African agents the existence of enormous creatures “half dragon and half elephant.”  Hagenbeck interpreted these accounts as evidence for living dinosaurs in central Africa and he mounted several expeditions in the hope bringing back animals of this sort for his Hamburg zoo.  (Of course, he was successful and the iron-gated cryptosaurus display at the Tierpark remains one of its most popular exhibits; Angelica and I hoped to see the beasts but our timed-tickets had expired when we finally reached that exhibit.)

Appropriately enough, Hagenbeck died in 1913 when he was bitten by a poisonous snake.  

3. 

The curators of the Villa Borghese in Rome preserve in their museum a voluptuous sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte (Napoleon’s sister) made by Canova.  No doubt, the rule that visitors should not touch the creamy flanks and breasts of this statue are relaxed when the doors are closed.  Presumably, people caress the sculpture after-hours – indeed, for all I know, you can buy special all access ticket allowing you to touch the naked gods and goddesses in the collection.  There’s an account somewhere of Robert Hughes, the famous art critic, touring museum show and blithely reaching out to touch art on display to explore the texture of the artifact with his finger-tips.  My point is that if you own an object of art, no one can keep you from touching it or, even, playing with the object.

The same principle applied to Carl Hagenbeck.  There are many pictures showing him petting lions and tigers, for instance, hand-feeding polar bears, and, of course, his demise was related to his nonchalance about coming into close contact with dangerous animals.  In the photographs, Hagenbeck looks like a typical Hamburg merchant-prince – he could have strolled out of the pages of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.  The man had a narrow, handsome face (he looks a little like Max von Sydow) with neatly groomed whiskers on his chin and cheeks, but a bare-shaven upper lip and a clean space of an inch or so below his mouth as well.  Before I knew anything about him, several years ago, I was arrested by a remarkable painting in the Hamburg Kunsthalle (Art Museum).  The canvas is a portrait of Hagenbeck by the great Lovis Corinth and it’s, at once, beautiful and grotesque – you don’t know whether to laugh or gasp with admiration. In the large painting. Hagenbeck stands next to a massive walrus.  The animal collector is skinny and, even, looks a little emaciated.  He’s a skeleton draped in a dark suit wearing a natty fedora hat and holding a cane.  By contrast, the walrus is a mighty barrel of flesh, the focus of the painting.  The creature has a glittering oily surface that is brownish-olive colored with highlights of faint purple and red – the creature’s sides and flippers and gargantuan throat are a bravura exhibition of what oil paint can accomplish.  (Someone said that Rubens showed that oil paint was invented to depict human flesh; I would amend the statement in the presence of this Hamburg painting to say that oil paint was created to represent the slick, wet meaty surface of a walrus.)  The animal has little speck-like eyes and a great beard of tangled whiskers, also contrasting to the less prominent whiskers on Hagenbeck’s scrawny neck.  In the background, some seals sit on an artificial floe of ice and on a fake clifftop a group of reindeer are grazing.  Hagenbeck’s right hand rests familiarly on the walrus’ shoulder.