Leipzig lion hunt
The Leipzig lion hunt is an event that took place on the night of October 19-20, 1913, in which six circus lions that had escaped were killed in Leipzig .
course
On the occasion of the inauguration of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal on the centenary of the Völkerschlacht near Leipzig , the Circus Barum had been a guest in Leipzig for several days. The tent was set up at the Messplatz on Frankfurter Wiesen, where the Leipzig Small Fair ( map ) had also taken place since 1907 . Today the Arena Leipzig is located here .
Immediately after the evening performance on October 19, the animals were brought to the freight yard for loading by horse and cart. The journey went via Auenstrasse (today Hinrichsenstrasse) in the direction of Berliner Strasse to get to the Prussian open loading station north of Roscherstrasse. ( Map ) The coachmen of the lion and bear wagons parked their wagons unattended in front of the Graupeter beer bar in Berliner Straße 42 and visited it. ( Map ) The horses in the rear wagon with the bears became restless and with the wagon drawbar pierced the back wall of the lion wagon , whereupon eight of the ten lions escaped into the open because - it was foggy - there was also a tram and the wagons that were now on the rails rammed.
The patrol officer Bruno Weigel and other police officers summoned, mainly from the 8th police station in Yorckstrasse ( map ) (now Erich-Weinert-Strasse), opened fire on the animals and killed five of them in a short time. The circus director Arthur Kreiser and the director of the Leipzig zoo Johannes Gebbing and his head caretaker Hermann Fischer, who had meanwhile arrived with other employees, decided to catch alive the three remaining lions that had tried to save themselves from the shooting. The lioness Polly got into the nearby Hotel Blücher at Blücherstrasse 20 (now Kurt-Schumacher-Strasse) ( map ), where she was locked in a toilet. The hotel later used this process in its advertising. With a box trap , Polly in the hotel and another lion in a courtyard on Berliner Straße could be easily caught. One of the bystanders threw a stone at the last lion already circled by the catchers - it was Abdul - so that it started to move, whereupon the police opened fire again and shot him. At the autopsy of Abdul, 165 hits were counted.
The six killed lions could be viewed for a week in the depot of the Leipzig Zoo ( map ). In a court case, one of the coachmen was sentenced to five days' imprisonment or a fine of 25 marks, which corresponded to about a week's wages, and the circus director Kreiser was sentenced to ten days or a fine of 100 marks for "failure to take the necessary precautionary measures to prevent damage when keeping vicious or wild animals “(Section 367 Item 11 StGB ). The loss of the six lions worth 30,000 marks hit him harder.
Since the lion is Leipzig's heraldic animal , the incident created a good opportunity for advertising measures, especially in tourism and gastronomy. The traditional restaurant Auerbachs Keller ( map ) used the event for advertising purposes. A “lion food menu” was created there with lion's tail soup, lion schnitzel, etc., but these were all fancy names because real lion meat was not processed. In the Aeckerleins Keller wine bar on Markt 11 ( menu ) a musical and literary gourmet meal was even held. Other hosts and hoteliers also used the Leipzig lion hunt for their marketing. Even in GDR times there was a nut parfait called "Polly" in the Interhotel Zum Löwen ( map ) .
The Hotel Blücher was destroyed in the Second World War , and the Graupeter pub was demolished after 1990.
Trivia
The writer Hans Reimann wrote the following about the lion hunt in his humorous Das Buch von Leipzig from 1929: “On October 19, 1913, several full-grown, handsome lions were walking on Blücherstrasse. [...] She wobbled in the Blücherstraße around, and a lion Rich entered when it was agreed so, the hotel Blucher, was walking down the corridor of the hotel along and opened by virtue of his intelligence the wicket to the closet in which an unsuspecting Reisiger sat, who had forgotten to lock. Nothing bad happened. Nevertheless, you should always cordon off. "
The Leipzig writer Erich Loest processed the event fictionally in his novel Völkerschlachtdenkmal (1984), here it was anarchists who wanted to disrupt the inauguration of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal with the lion hunt .
Lesser known authors also dealt with the event - mostly on caricature postcards.
The Leipzig lion hunting is also action in the detail of the comic magazine MOSAIC together with the Museum of City History Leipzig issued Abrafaxe album no. 27 emperors, warriors, lion-hunter (published in September 2011). In it, Califax releases two circus lions at the inauguration of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in order to free Abrax and Brabax, who were arrested as alleged assassins by Detective Inspector Otto Pranke, in the ensuing tumult.
In the museum of the company Weck in Öflingen there is boiled-down lion meat, which is said to come from the Leipzig lion hunt and which was still edible years later.
literature
- Walter Fellmann: Lion hunt in Leipzig. In: Leipziger Pitaval. Military Publishing House of the GDR, Berlin 1982, pp. 174–180.
- Mustafa Haikal : The Lion Factory. CVs and legends. Pro Leipzig, Leipzig 2006, ISBN 3-936508-15-1 , pp. 91-113.
Web links
- Brief description: Great lion hunt in Leipzig in 1913 by Hildegard Deubel
- Sarah Levy: When the lions were loose in Leipzig for one day, Spiegel Online, October 20, 2013
- Directory of advertising stamps for the Leipzig lion hunt (veikkos archive)
Individual evidence
- ^ Helmut-Henning Schimpfermann : Wirtliches on the Pleiße. A gastronomic compendium of Leipzig. Verlag Die Quetsche, Hanau 1991, ISBN 3-9802743-0-6 , p. 66
- ↑ a b c Mustafa Haikal, Jörg Junhold: On the track of the lion. 125 years of Leipzig Zoo. Pro Leipzig, Leipzig 2003, ISBN 3-936508-95-X , pp. 100, 108 f.
- ↑ a b Herbert Pilz (Ed.): Well get's and good appetite. Leipzig gastronomy history (s). Leipziger Medien-Service, Leipzig 2011, ISBN 978-3-942360-04-3 , pp. 112-115
- ↑ Criminal Code for the German Reich, § 367 (Wikisource)
- ↑ Mustafa Haikal: The Lion Factory. CVs and legends. Pro Leipzig, Leipzig 2006, p. 104
- ^ Hans Reimann: The book of Leipzig. What is not in Baedeker, Volume VI. R. Piper & Company, Munich 1929, p. 24 f.
- ^ Postcard with a poem about the lion hunt
- ^ City History Museum Leipzig: Emperors, Warriors, Lion Hunters. The Abrafaxe and the Monument to the Battle of the Nations.
- ↑ MosaPedia : Mosaic - Emperors, Warriors, Lion Hunters.
- ↑ Oliver tent: Lion meat or pineapple. In: Berliner Zeitung from September 16, 2005
- ↑ Manuscript of the radio show Preserved Lion Meat - The History of Awakening (PDF; 54 kB) by Hans-Peter Frick, SWR2 Wissen, first broadcast on May 31, 2011, p. 5. Contrary to the presentation in the program “From the Leipzig Zoo are five Lions broke out ” , only the dead lions were on display in the Leipzig Zoo.
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