Founded in 1844, the Berlin Zoo has always been a public institution, its gates open to all. That is not true of its archive, whose doors and documents were closed to Gary Bruce when researching his new book. Institutional denial of access has consequences for an archival project such as this one. Even so, Through the Lion Gate offers the first English-language history of Germany's flagship zoo, as told in relation to the changing city of Berlin, the daily lives of its inhabitants, and their shifting attitudes about the natural world.

According to Bruce, Berliners saw in the zoo more than just a reflection of their bourgeois selves, though they certainly saw that, too—hence, the zoo's status as a joint-stock company and its role as a social hotspot, as a place to stroll, hear music, attend lectures, smoke, and dine outdoors, a place to see and be seen. Building on the widely known work of David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, who argued against the Sonderweg thesis about the rise of Nazism in Germany, Bruce calls attention to the diversity of ideological views, beliefs, and mentalities that have shaped the zoo since its founding. But he goes even further to suggest that, by the late nineteenth century, the Berlin Zoo and many of its millions of visitors demonstrated a powerful sense of sympathy for the natural world, a worldly attitude of openness to foreign peoples, even a certain criticism of European civilization—sentiments that complicate our received ideas about the zoo as merely a form of imperialism and about Germans supposedly predisposed to conquest and authoritarian rule.

The zoo, according to Bruce, both reflected and expressed a growing awareness of the world beyond Germany. Inspired by the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, modeled on the animal houses of the London Zoological Society, spurred by the financial success of a new zoo in Amsterdam, and supported in so many ways by the proliferation of German explorers, scholars, merchants, and diplomats, the Berlin Zoo's founding was both an urban and a global endeavor. The story begins with the most eminent and well-traveled German naturalists of their day, Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein, who proposed the zoo and became its first director; and Alexander von Humboldt, whose support and friendship with the Prussian king were crucial to the zoo's establishment. Biographies of later directors—including Heinrich Bodinus, Ludwig Heck, his son Lutz, and Katharina Heinroth—also take up significant space in this book, which is helpful for readers who are new to the material. Choice anecdotes about these and other notables of German society help flesh out the author's claim that the zoo has played a central role in the lives of Berliners.

While the zoo got off to slow start financially, Bruce explains, its fortunes changed in the 1870s with the arrival of a new entertainment: the ethnographic exhibition. This practice was closely associated in Germany with Carl Hagenbeck, the Hamburg entrepreneur who organized hundreds of “foreign people shows” (Völkerschauen) between 1874 and 1913. These itinerant performances took place in pubs, museums, fairgrounds, and variety theaters, as well as in zoological gardens. At first, the Berlin Zoo refused to open its gates to such shows. Ironically, Bodinus feared that popular entertainment like this would tarnish the zoo's reputation—a point not mentioned anywhere in the book—but, by 1878, he could no longer afford to resist. The zoo needed additional revenue, and Hagenbeck's entertainment pointed the way. Bruce seems almost to treat the ethnographic exhibition as unique to Berlin, but it was not. After all, traveling shows are, by definition, just “passing through,” en route to the next stop on the tour. Berliners were open to and fascinated by the presence of foreign performers, as Bruce contends, but they were not alone in this. One can make a similar criticism with regard to the book's claim about shifting attitudes toward animals. One example would be the reasons for the Berlin Zoo's existence: over time, they changed from “acclimatizing” exotic animal species and thus demonstrating the “conquest” of nature, to advocating the need for their “protection” and “preservation.” This is a profound reversal, as Bruce makes clear, but it did not originate in Berlin; it spanned the international discourse on zoos.

Bruce observes such social changes, but he does not consider their relation to visual forms of representation. At any given moment, the Berlin Zoo combined and integrated many different (even contradictory) approaches to display. Bruce discusses the architecture of its iconic animal houses, for example; he has a chapter on the ethnographic exhibition, a show that put emphasis on context and cultural performance; he notes that, as a rule, nineteenth-century zoos arranged animals taxonomically, and that the Berlin Zoo later swapped its animal cages for scenic forms of display. But the reader is left wondering about the greater significance of these different approaches, about how they worked in the context of the Berlin Zoo, and about how they shaped the visitor's perception of the natural world.

The strength of this book can best be seen in its account of the Berlin Zoo as a Nazi institution. Lutz Heck, who succeeded his father as director in 1932, not only joined the Schutzstaffel (SS), but also ran the Nature Protection Division in the Reich Forestry Office, reporting directly to Hermann Göring. During his tenure, Heck led initiatives in support of Nazi policies, from “aryanizing” the zoo's board of directors, to “breeding back” primeval species of extinct animals, to looting the Warsaw Zoo of its collection, to developing a German nature reserve in eastern Poland and Ukraine. These activities have previously been discussed elsewhere, but Bruce gathers them up in one place and makes them an integral part of the zoo's history—a most important contribution, given the institution's own failure to deal with its Nazi past.

Finally, this book makes a case for the zoo's powerful social-therapeutic function. According to Bruce, it was no coincidence that attendance reached an all-time high when the Berlin Zoo and its animals were devastated by war and hunger in the early 1940s. The same was true in Halle, Leipzig, Hannover, and Frankfurt am Main. This surprising observation suggests that, “once the fine line between civilization and savagery had been crossed, Germans headed to the zoo not only as a refuge and distraction from wracked nerves and the devastation around them but also to take comfort in the presence of animals, which were blameless in the disaster” (201). This continued during the postwar period: attendance doubled and even tripled by 1960, in fact. The chapter on the zoos of divided Berlin, the friendship of their directors (Heinrich Dathe in the East, Heinroth in the West), the phenomenal success of both, and the surprising connections between them is especially strong. Through the Lion Gate attests to the enduring fascination of zoos in Germany and its many big cities, Berlin foremost among them. “At numerous points in the zoo's history,” Bruce concludes, “Berliners came to relate deeply with the animals (and peoples) on display, visibly craving a reconnection with nature .… Those animals, in their pacifism, seemed to satisfy, even partially, a longing for a simpler time and a more tranquil world” (235-36). If there is a direct correlation between the attraction of zoos and a widespread sense of sociopolitical anxiety—a dubious proposition at best—then one might expect zoo attendance to spike at any moment now.