One of his most impressive talents was showing up silently. Then suddenly he was standing in front of you, mostly wrapped in shades of gray and sand, and smiled as if he had intended just that. He was not exactly inconspicuous with his body length of around two meters and a similar size. Like a gray giant suddenly emerging from the shadows; and one is surprised not to have noticed it earlier.
Gray giant, that fit. After all, he had just done it rhinos and elephants, these so-called pachyderms. The name pachyderm is misleading. Your skin may appear thick, but it is by no means dull or numb. He wasn’t either.
Catholic and scientist
Bernhard Blaszkiewitz had bought a tank over the years. Because he was hostile like no Berlin zoo director before. Presumably he was – on the one hand an arch-conservative Catholic, on the other hand a sober natural scientist – a little suspicious of the often animal-obsessed and sentimental Berlin society. But it was certainly also due to the fact that Blaszkiewitz was able to dish out like no other. Regardless of etiquette and losses.
In a personnel list, he gave the employees the abbreviation “0.1” – as is customary in livestock lists to identify the number of males (before the decimal point) and females (behind). He called the criticism ridiculous. He never made a mistake, he crushed it.
As a result, he felt the full broadside: In 2008 he had to answer to the Berlin House of Representatives for breaking the neck of young feral domestic cats 17 years earlier. After a chimpanzee bit off his right index finger in 2009, he met with malice. And when the zoo enjoyed worldwide attention and sympathy thanks to the polar bear Knut, he drew public anger because he did not want to participate in the personality cult around the animal.
One of his confidants, the former Daily mirror-Editor Werner Philipp, once called it a “living fossil”. It was a relic from the time when zoos still collected animals like other followers nowadays. When the zoo director was still a life’s work and not just a profession. And as those who held that office seemed inviolable.
For a living fossil, Bernhard Blaszkiewitz was not very old. He died unexpectedly in mid-December at the age of just 67. A piece of zoo history comes to an end with his death. He was the last of his kind.
Life in the zoo
He was born on February 17, 1954 in Berlin and grew up with three brothers in a strictly Catholic home in Rudow. After graduating from the Canisius College, he studied biology at the Free University from 1974 and worked as a zoo keeper at the West Berlin zoo. At that time, Heinz Georg Klös, one of the most powerful men in the Walled City, ruled there in the manner of a manor.
After studying and working at the zoos in Frankfurt am Main and Gelsenkirchen, he returned to West Berlin in 1984 as a curator. His passion for collecting was already reflected in his doctoral thesis: in 1987 he did his doctorate at the University of Kassel on the development of the mammal population in the Berlin zoo after the Second World War.
In the zoo’s internal pecking order, Blaszkiewitz was not very high up. Nevertheless, Klös proposed him as the new director of the zoo in 1991. Klös had just won the decades-long competition with his East Berlin opponent Heinrich Dathe and was looking for a willing governor in the east. From Blaszkiewitz he expected neither opposition nor miracles. But it turned out differently.
Hardly anyone answered me. Blaszkiewitz does
Blaszkiewitz revitalized the ailing zoo. Under his direction, the area the size of Heligoland was completely fenced in for the first time. But despite all the renovations, time still seemed to have stood still there. The new buildings were functional, but they neither corresponded to the zeitgeist nor were they eye-catching: Green bars dominated the site. The stables for ungulates exuded the charm of wooden huts at the Christmas market. Sometimes the impression arose that the zoo was aesthetically declining. The monkey house from 2000 with its tiled rows of cages looked like a reminiscence of the sterile buildings of the seventies.
It was around this time that I discovered my passion for zoos. In one of the then still rare TV documentaries, I found out about the job of a zoo designer – and from then on I only wanted to design animal enclosures. However, at the turn of the millennium, before the Internet, there was hardly any information about this profession. So I wrote a dozen or so letters to the directors of the major German zoos asking what I should do.
Hardly anyone answered. Bernhard Blaszkiewitz does. After two days. This profession does not exist in Germany, he wrote. The designation probably refers to “a professional group from the architecture industry”, which dealt “especially in the zoos of the United States with the construction of artificial rocks”. Instead, he recommended that I become a curator.
Little did I know at the time that artificial rocks and everything that required effects in the zoo was sacrilege for him. He himself later once spoke up in an interview with the taz referred to as the “old school zoo gardener”. Halligalli have no place in the zoo, he said, the event is the animal. To be precise: For him, the focus was on the person looking at the animal. Experiencing animals should be enough. There was no need for an amusement park around. I give him great credit for the fact that he answered me to an unsuspecting 16-year-old at the time.
Although he was probably the most controversial Berlin zoo manager of all time, he lasted a surprisingly long time. He shaped the Berlin zoos for more than two decades. He successfully led the zoo through the post-reunification years and also took over the management of the zoo in 2007. From 2008 onwards, allegations regarding his leadership style grew louder. Some journalists and regular guests personally blamed him for the sudden death of the polar bear Knut in 2011. But it wasn’t until 2013, after the zoo’s commercial director Gabriele Thöne resigned, that the mood changed. The supervisory board, which had previously supported him, no longer extended his expiring contract. Blaszkiewitz had to go, the adventure globetrotter Andreas Knieriem came for him. The total opposite of him.
I have tried several times to get an interview with Blaszkiewitz. But I wrote for a newspaper he avoided. The many fights had made him suspicious. We met for the first time to say goodbye in March 2014 when he opened the renovated tropical hall of the Alfred Brehm House in the zoo. On that occasion I showed him the letter. He read it, smiled slightly, and gave it back to me with a casual wave of the hand. As if that wasn’t anything special.
After saying goodbye, Bernhard Blaszkiewitz aged quickly
He left without resentment, but not without disappointment, he said at the time. I later learned from his circle of friends that the premature end of his career at the age of 60 had hurt him more than he showed to the outside world.
Two years after he left, in the spring of 2016, I called him. At the time I was writing my book about the history of the two Berlin zoos during the Cold War. Again I got a rejection. He could say a lot about it, but decided not to talk to journalists anymore. “Much luck. Do it well, ”he said and hung up.
It took some time before he recognized me. In spring 2019 he gave a lecture at the Magdeburg Zoo; it was about the history of the zoo. A bunch of old companions had come, and an aged bear keeper had come from Leipzig. That evening Bernhard Blaszkiewitz was in his element again. He didn’t need a microphone to fill the room with his voice. He greeted his acquaintances one by one and, incidentally, also mentioned “the present author of the exciting book ‘The Zoo of Others'”.
Then it became quiet around him. I learned from someone who knew him better that he had lost a lot. In the years after his departure, he visibly aged.
I met him for the last time in August 2019. The Berlin Zoo celebrated its 175th anniversary that evening. On the steps of the zoo restaurant he suddenly stood in front of me in an elephant-colored windbreaker, smiled and held out his hand to me. We talked for a moment, then parted ways. When night fell and the celebration was slowly coming to an end, the gray giant set out on his own. With a heavy step he staggered towards the elephant gate and disappeared into the darkness.
.