The Zookeepers' War by J.W. Mohnhaupt

Author:J.W. Mohnhaupt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

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In the GDR, any mention of environmental pollution was taboo, and reporting on it was forbidden. Economic progress was the top priority and so, according to the government, socialism simply had no smog. Only capitalism produced such a thing.

“Products from Leuna bring bread, prosperity, and beauty….” The advertising slogan could be read on the wall of a building in East Berlin. But Leuna Works, located south of the city of Halle, was also spewing tons of sulfur dioxide into the air; a black fog that burned in people’s eyes and noses was making its way through the streets. Wastewater full of mercury and lead from the so-called chemical triangle (the cities of Halle, Merseburg, and Bitterfeld) was contaminating the Elbe River and its tributaries. A popular ditty went like this: “Bitterfeld, Bitterfeld, its dirty air is unexcelled.” In 1970, the GDR would pass a comprehensive conservation law, one of the most progressive environmental protection acts in Europe—but the only real change was the introduction of higher chimneys, which meant that factories would now spread their toxins even farther. For many years state propaganda created the impression that smog came to a halt at the “anti-imperialist protective wall.” But over time the air pollution in the GDR increased so drastically that it could no longer be denied, and so a harmless-sounding phrase, “industry fog,” was coined to describe the mess, in the press and on the radio.

In the smog-plagued West, Willy Brandt, who was running for chancellor as a Social Democrat, had decried pollution as far back as 1961, insisting, “The sky over the Ruhr must become blue again.” At first he was showered with what he’d later term “bucketfuls of scorn” from within his own ranks. His party reproached him for promising “the blue of the sky” while standing in front of two hundred power plants, blast furnaces, and refineries. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, went the conventional wisdom in the region spanning Dortmund and Duisburg; economic progress was well worth a little smoke in the skies. Hardly anyone really knew what fine dust was, anyway—if anything, it was what housewives wiped off the cupboards once a week. It wasn’t until public interest in cleaner air was aroused that the federal government also took up the cause.

But in spite of some changes in the law, the situation did not improve. There was still hardly any talk of an environmental movement, even though people had streamed into movie theaters just a few years earlier to watch Bernhard Grzimek’s nature documentaries No Place for Wild Animals and Serengeti Shall Not Die. To many West Germans in the mid-1960s, conservation was something that happened off in Africa.

And so, to some people, it seemed like an act of divine providence that this white, innocent creature had turned up out of filthy floods, in the shadow of the blast furnaces. It swam up the Rhine, and came to them! To help them become aware of just how badly the river stank.

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