Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

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Berlin’s polar bearcub superstar Knut

Sep 12th, 2007 by Paul Moor

Berliners’ love for animals - especially dogs - has long since become legendary in this country. Most recently this city-state has gone stark, raving mad over a polar bear cub, rejected by his mother at birth and bottle-fed every two hours by an Ersatz mother named Thomas Dörflein, a personable staff employee of western Berlin’s Zoölogical Garden, whose association with Knut has won him quite a following of his own.

Other Germans have traditionally regarded hip big-city wisecracking Berliners as the New Yorkers of this country, and Berlin humor - which not only does indeed exist but also has a sometimes almost savagely cutting edge - hit some kind of high point in a postwar satirical Kabarett here when a cast member said that Nazi Germany had murdered six million Jews in cold blood, then wondered aloud how the German nation would have reacted to word - had that topmost top secret become known - that Nazi Germany had launched a program to exterminate six million dogs….

Like virtually everyone else who caught Knut in his infancy - and local media, especially television - documented him to a mind-boggling extent - I completely lost my heart to the clumsy little snow-white fluff-ball, but baby animals soon grow up, and any bear past the cub stage becomes considerably less cuddly before very long.

During Knut’s infancy, Thomas Dörflein temporarily abandoned his own bipedal family and took up emergency quarters on a cot in his visibly beloved charge’s succession of cages. Knut’s public appearances, which had attracted throngs from every corner of the globe (and coincidentally had the Zoo’s cash-registers jingling more merrily than ever before, not only for admission tickets but also for the teddy-bear versions of Knut, which have sold like hotcakes), in time became ever less frequent, and Knut himself, even for his male foster-mother, became an increasingly carnivorous threat all concerned had to take with total seriousness. Naturally that development reduced the attention and multi-faceted Tender Loving Care Knut had become accustomed to reveling in, and when he made an extravagantly big thing out of an only slightly hurt paw, Dörflein coolly accused him of simply simulating - hardly unknown also among bipeds in that approximate stage of childhood.

But rather than my paraphrasing this updater on Knut, let me turn you over to an authoritative report just made available in the on-line Anglophone version of Germany’s top-notch weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel; by clicking here you not only can read that, uncut, but also get a glimpse of that rascal Knut himself.

And here, for good measure, some related earlier reports on Knut’s various stages of development from the same source:

Polar Bear Told to Stop Snacking: Fatty Knut Put on Strict Diet (07/31/2007)
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,497487,00.html