Qualla: Tierpark Hagenbeck

Tierpark Hagenbeck: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carmelo Bayarcal, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 24 September 1880, a schooner called the Eisbar tied up in Hamburg carrying eight people from Hebron, on the coast of Labrador. Abraham Ulrikab was thirty-five. His wife Ulrike was twenty-four; their daughters Sara and Maria were three and a half and ten months old. Tobias, unmarried, was twenty. With them came Tigianniak, Paingu and their daughter Nuggasak. Carl Hagenbeck's agent had recruited them to be looked at. Within four months every one of them was dead of smallpox, a disease they had not been vaccinated against, and Abraham had left a diary in Inuktitut describing what was happening to his family. The zoo that stands in Stellingen today grew out of the same business.

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Image: Carmelo Bayarcal | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tierpark Hagenbeck: From the Fish Shop to the Docks

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian0918, CC BY-SA 2.5. Carl Hagenbeck Sr., born in 1810, sold fish in Hamburg and kept exotic animals as a sideline - seals, and once a polar bear, arriving on ships from everywhere the port reached. His son took over that side of the trade at fourteen. By the 1870s the animals were worth far more than...

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Image: Brian0918 | CC BY-SA 2.5

Tierpark Hagenbeck: The People He Displayed

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MamandImmi, CC BY-SA 3.0. Alongside the animals, Hagenbeck exhibited human beings. From 1874 he showed Samoan and Sami people, the Sami staged with their tents, weapons, sledges and a group of reindeer, presented to paying crowds as specimens of the natural world. From 1876 he toured a Nubian group across...

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Image: MamandImmi | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tierpark Hagenbeck: Hiding the Ditch

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Gonzalez (TheCoffee), CC BY-SA 3.0. The shows lost their pull as photography spread and his tableaux began to look staged by comparison, so he set about making his displays more convincing - and that pursuit of realism is what changed zoos. In the 1890s he built the Northern Panorama: seals and walruses in a pool a...

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Image: Mike Gonzalez (TheCoffee) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tierpark Hagenbeck: Stellingen, 1907

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit An-d, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 7 May 1907 Hagenbeck opened a whole park built on the principle, at Stellingen beyond the city limits, where the Tierpark still stands. Nothing was behind bars. He argued that animals from warm climates did not need the expensive, stifling glasshouses zoos had been putting the...

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Image: An-d | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tierpark Hagenbeck: Two Wars and a Requisition

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kevin1086, CC BY-SA 3.0. The First World War took the keepers into the army. With the military requisitioning civilian horses for the front, Hagenbeck's animals were hired out as draught power - elephants and trained bears hitched to heavy wagons, hauling coal and firewood through Hamburg. The zoo shut f...

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Image: Kevin1086 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tierpark Hagenbeck: Antje, and the Pavilion

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit H. Zell, CC BY-SA 3.0. Post-war Stellingen produced its own small legends. In July 1956, forty-five rhesus monkeys got out and spent a memorable day in Hamburg's bathrooms and treetops before police, firemen, keepers and schoolchildren rounded them up. A Pacific walrus named Antje arrived in 1976, beca...

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Image: H. Zell | CC BY-SA 3.0