Berlin Zoo

"Berlin’s oldest zoo has a dark history. Not even 80 years ago, it was still displaying people. [...] Today there is very little doubt about the immense immorality of putting people in a zoo, and even back then, not everyone agreed. To assuage critics and give everything a “scientific” veneer, the German doctor Rudolf Virchow and the Berlin Anthropological Society came to measure the exotic bodies, classifying their races at “lower” and “higher” stages of development. As the historian Joachim Zeller explains, the colonised peoples were not exactly considered animals; “they were placed on a level between animal and human” and were presumed to show how people in Europe had lived thousands of years ago. Many Berliners had never seen a person from another part of the world, and their curiosity was extreme. Yet the Völkerschau was not about learning from these visitors – quite the opposite. The people behind fences were expected to present a “fantasy world bursting with stereotypes, as white people imagined life in the colonies”, Zeller says. One reason for the barriers: polite society was extremely worried that impressionable young white women could fall in love with “noble savages.”"