Zookeepers' War

The unbelievable true story of the Cold Wars strangest proxy war, fought between the zoos on either side of the Berlin Wall. ¦The liveliness of Mohnhaupts storytelling and the wonderful eccentricity of his subject matter make this book well worth a read. Star Tribune (Minneapolis)Living in West Berlin in the 1960s often felt like living in a zoo, everyone packed together behind a wall, with the world always watching. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, East Berlin and its zoo were spacious and lush, socialist utopias where everything was perfectly planned... and then rarely completed. Berlins two zoos in East and West quickly became symbols of the divided citys two halves. And so no one was terribly surprised when the head zookeepers on either side started an animal arms race: rather than stockpiling nuclear warheads, they competed to have the most pandas and hippos. Soon, state funds were being diverted toward giving these new animals lavish welcomes worthy of visiting dignitaries. West German presidential candidates were talking about zoo policy on the campaign trail. And eventually politicians on both side of the Wall became convinced that if their zoo were proved to be inferior, then that would mean their countrys whole ideology was too. A quirky piece of Cold War history unlike anything youve heard before, The Zookeepers War is an epic tale of desperate rivalries, human follies, and an animal-mad city in which zookeeping became a way of continuing politics by other means.