27. Juni 2006

My life with bears

Bruno is dead! Probably, there are few people outside of Germany and Austria who are aware of his demise. But in these two countries, and in particular in Germany, it has provoked a fierce debate and much emotion.

As you will guess from the title of this article, the deceased Bruno was a bear. A bear who had, for some weeks, strolled around along the German-Austrian Border, which is not quite as well guarded as the border between the USA and Mexico, offering plenty of opportunities for a clever bear to shift back and forth.

And clever he was, Bruno, despite his youth. He was probably an offspring of brown bears who had been "resettled" by the efforts of the Austrian Section of the WWF, in an attempt to make the Alps once again a home for bears, who had largely vanished from there during the 19th century. Bruno (meaning "brown" in Italian; Italy was his original homeland) lived on a lavish diet of sheep, chickens and goats, with honey from beehives as his usual dessert.

All efforts to catch him had failed. Even Finnish hunters specialized in bear catching had been recruited, complete with their equally specialized hounds. With no success at all. So it was "fire!", and the bear's fate was sealed. His mortal coil will be exhibited in a Bavarian museum.

I fully share my fellow countrymen's mourning. Like many Germans, I have lived with bears since my early childhood.

My first, indeed my only, non-human companion as a young child was a bear. I had inherited it (no, I should say "him", for I regarded him as a full-fledged person, more human than many people) - I had inherited him from a deceased uncle, and when I got the Große Bär (his name was simply Der Große Bär, the big bear), he was already a war veteran. Indeed a war invalid who had received a grenade splinter in his breast, in the First World War. I could, at an age of three or four, feel the splinter when I touched him. And I still can, because he is still alive and well, sitting on a cupboard, looking down on this crazy world.

He was my only non-human companion, because it was the time after the Second World War. My parents' family had been "bombed out" by an Allied air raid that had destroyed the house, leaving nothing of what they had possessed, and they had been lucky to find shelter in a small school building in the countryside, where we all lived in one single room.

It was there that I learned to read at the age of four, because I had nothing better to do. Unfortunately, there was not much to read for a child in our humble household, so I read the daily newspaper. But then, my parents somehow acquired a children's book: "Winnie the Pooh", translated into German as "Puh, der Bär" (Pooh, the bear). There were a lot of illustrations that showed Pooh's adventures, and he indeed looked very much like my Großer Bär. In a way, the two merged into a single personality in my infantile mind.

In one episode, Pooh tried to find the North Pole. It turned out to be exactly this - a pole, with a notice attached to it. In the German translation, only the "Nordpol" was mentioned, which word refers to the geographic pole, but not to a stick. So I kept wondering why the North Pole looked like a stick.

About twenty years later, I met the girl that is now my wife, and one of my first little presents to her was, of course, a bear. I sent it to her in a parcel. She lived in Berlin, several hundred miles away from my place. So the little bear had to travel through Communist Germany, and the Communists used to sift through parcels to find out if they contained something interesting.

Hence, the little bear arrived in a rather battered state. My girl friend wrote back: "Apparantly, he went on the rampage during his journey".

Now he sits on his cupboard, flanked by Großer Bär. The Communists are gone, and I guess he no longer feels like rioting. And of course we have not told him about Bruno's sad fate.