Zoological gardens were certainly not the only urban sites or locations where ‘exotic’
animals could be observed in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. Travelling menageries, circuses, itinerant animal trainers, the private homes or palaces of aficionados, even pubs, all exhibited various kinds of animals on a regular if not always permanent basis. ‘Towards the middle of the nineteenth century’, as David Wilson has noted, ‘the favoured locales for the kind of entertainment involving easily portable exhibits of the sort that formerly occupied booths at the now declining or extinct fairs were taverns and assembly rooms in working-class neighbourhoods’.6 Though the nature of these neighbourhoods will not be explored in detail here, it is noteworthy that quite a few of these earlier animal exhibitions were positioned further away from city centres than the zoological gardens familiar in modern times. There were pragmatic as well as cultural reasons for this, of course: a lack of space, real or perceived, in the heart of the city;
the fact that many exotic animals were kept in country house menageries; the desire to keep carnivals and their dubious characters outside the city walls; the objectionable
Betwixt and Between 183 sounds and smells and other ‘nuisances’ that came with animals’ permanent presence in human neighbourhoods. We should resist the temptation to conclude that the zoo marked a decisive move of animal shows into the heart of the city, however, simply achieving a bourgeois respectability that the fairs and travelling menageries never could. Sure enough, a zoological garden and a fair are categorically very different institutions, most obviously in terms of the former’s permanence and institutional character. Focussing on actual practices, including the activities of keepers and their animal charges, reveals that zoos had much in common with the other sites of ‘popular tradition’, since the zoo like the fair brought together the exotic and the familiar, the villager and the townsman, the professional performer and the bourgeois observer.7
As Helen Cowie remarks,
Menageries have typically been portrayed as promoting entertainment rather than providing education. This was the view put forward by the directors of the newly established zoological gardens, who contrasted the spacious, genteel atmosphere of their own institutions with the cramped, sometimes unseemly conditions of the travelling wild beast show. It has also been the general view of historians, who have tended to draw a sharp distinction between the menagerie and the zoo.8
In this regard it makes sense to speak of liminal periods and spaces rather than a simple substitution or replacement of the traditional fair by the modern zoo. The utility of liminality as an analytical framework is especially obvious when it comes to the zoo as an innovation since, for all that they have been seen as a ‘tribute to bourgeois self-confidence’,9 zoos were highly fragile and insecure institutions, not least financially.
‘Betwixt and between’, ‘no longer classified and not yet classified’,10 as Victor Turner put it, applies equally well to the animals exhibited: for captive zoo animals remained in a threshold-status, caught between science and spectacle, education and entertainment, taxonomy and amusement, exotic and familiar, the near and the distant. The zoo’s claim to provide a space of rational and cultivated leisure was also pointedly asserted by way of comparison to its urban competitors, either specific, in terms of animal exhibitions, or general, in the developing spaces of leisure in the city.11 The zoo could not simply be a site of elevating knowledge about the animal kingdom; to make zoo visits interesting and popular (and to ensure that zoos were viable economically), animals and the environments in which they lived and performed (park, enclosures and cages) had to affect visitors in an emotional register. Zoos were no different from other forms of recreation in the city that mobilize desires, hopes and fears, pleasure, relief and satisfaction: the familiar effects of entertainment and enjoyment.12 Rather than representing a sharp break with a liminal past, the development of a zoo culture for the masses reproduced the characteristic forms of liminal ambivalence. Harriet Ritvo has even suggested that this liminality may be the most interesting thing about zoos.13
As an example of the latter, Gustav Friedrich Werner from Stuttgart, began to earn his nickname of ‘Affenwerner’, by exhibiting animals in and around his tavern in the 1840s.14 In much the same manner, the founder of Leipzig Zoo was the enterprising landlord Ernst Pinkert, who developed his zoological career by enlivening his restaurant with animals in 1874. In the Leipzig quarter of Lindenau, the pub owner
Jahn complemented his restaurant with a ‘zoological yard’.15 Similar examples can be found in the menagerie owned by Berg, in Horn near Hamburg,16 and the private business of Franz Leven, who in the 1850s ran an animal park in addition to a ‘cabinet’
of stuffed wild animals.17 Related businesses existed in Munich (run by the family of the showman Schröll), and with the animal trader Lossow’s ‘new zoological garden’
in Berlin.18 At the same time, many itinerant animal shows travelled throughout Europe, often pitching their tents and waggons at various fairs, as they would do up to the 1930s.19
The overlap between fairs and zoos is clear. Zoos have always been fundamentally dependent on modern amusement culture. To render a visit to the zoo relevant, to give meanings to animals as part of leisure activities, the new institutions had to engage with a range of other practices and institutions dealing with exotic animals besides the draw of scientific knowledge.20 If nothing else, they took part in the same wild animal trade that flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century: a global trade that linked zoos, circuses, travelling menageries, animal trainers, aficionados and private animal keepers, as well as natural history museums.21 Given the remarkable diversity and variety of knowledge, perspectives and practices involved, it is, as stressed by Emily S. Rosenberg impossible to ‘tame’ such exhibitions with a single, fixed meaning;
rather, ‘this era was characterized by a cacophony of several possible outlooks.’22 This does not mean that attempts were not made to make animal exhibition more respectable and enlightening. One way of giving animals a kind of mannered and
‘bourgeois’ meaning, for instance, was to integrate them in the bourgeois practice of promenading, Spaziergang, involving the ‘wild’ animals in tamed and themed practices and landscapes.23 Numerous reports of visits to zoos, sourced from the popular press as well as from books and journals of the time, were given such titles as ‘a walk in the Zoological Garden of…’, ‘a stroll through…’, ‘wandering in…’ and the like. They were narrated in the manner of a minor travel report, including the familiar range of safe surprises and impressive views. This genre went hand in hand with the bourgeois virtues of promenading: recreation, sociability, ease, enlivening and the series of improving sights.24 At the same time, however, the zoo tapped into narratives and forms that had long been successful in popularizing animals and their lives, presenting them as comic figures, as screens on which to project ideas and emotions, as outlets and props for displaying human sentiment or as simple objects of entertainment. In this way the zoo reached back to folkloristic staging of animals which typically contained elements of burlesque, for all that the emergent bourgeoisie or middle class promoted a display of animals that was supposed to serve educative and morally uplifting purposes.25 Animals might indeed be considered makeshifts – interim and temporary measures – in the construction of traditions whose ultimate purpose was ‘to ensure or express social cohesion and identity and to structure social relations’,26 crucially in periods of transition, for instance in the shift from the feudal and folkloric to modern ‘science’, sentiment and sociability. A sympathetic and sensuous interest in animals was not new, then, and it could barely be fulfilled by, say, scientifically educational taxidermy, where static displays of galliformes, canis latrans, ursus maritimus and their ilk hardly took the place of their respective zoo exhibits. In the context of urban leisure activities, it is living animals that had to be rendered consumable, ‘common goods’. Drawing on
Betwixt and Between 185 this traditional culture of display for the purpose of social improvement depended on whether the spectators appreciated the relevant coding at work – but the ‘set of meanings’ around the presence and use of ‘wild’ animals in the middle of mid-European cities was by no means clear, as the evidence of this chapter makes clear, drawing on examples relating to the ‘wave of foundations’ identified by zoo historiographers Annelore Rieke-Müller and Lothar Dittrich, starting with Frankfurt Zoo (1858), and including Cologne (1860), Dresden (1861), Hannover and Karlsruhe (1865).27
Most importantly, we have to critically consider the outwardly self-confident, almost missionary prospectuses of German zoo founders, which, despite being scornful of both aristocratic and folkloric exhibitions of animals, nevertheless relied on established patterns and codes.28 The zoo seems to require a different attitude towards animals, something aligned with what Lynn Nyhart has called ‘Modern Nature’.29 Devotional observation and interest in natural science were here meant to be the premises of rational recreation, the kind of ‘embourgeoisement’ made possible through the encounter with ‘book nature’30 made flesh. The nineteenth century brought about significant change:
We can hardly ignore the fact that with the emergence of mass culture and the mass production and consumption of scientific artifacts, the means and meanings of scientific display and communication have radically altered. Since
‘popularizations’ are communicative processes, their histories must attend to the history of communicative production.31
‘Book nature’ had always included much more than ‘science’ per se. To render animals and their physical presence relevant to humans they had to be edited through a variety of cultural techniques, inevitably making them hybrid and liminal in nature.
‘Advocates for the public understanding of science’ were in fact ‘merely the latest entrepreneurs in a tradition that reaches back at least 300 years’.32 It should be kept in mind, as Nigel Rothfels sums up, that ‘the new public zoological gardens, despite their rhetoric, did not differ much from the earlier collections in their commitment to science, education and public recreation; all three of these goals were also claimed by the earlier collectors.’33 In sum, zoological gardens were hybrids – neither feudal menagerie nor natural history museum, neither circus nor pub, neither diorama nor fairground booth, but containing a little bit of everything these represented. Zoo culture is liminal, in Turner’s sense: ‘it is the analysis of culture into factors and their free or “ludic” recombination in any and every possible pattern, however weird, that is of the essence of liminality, liminality par excellence’.34