Dhis is the story of Pascha and Klara. Klara was probably not yet born when Pascha came to the Wiesbaden Museum five years ago. Until then, he had lived with six or seven of his own kind in nearby Ingelheim, in a small private zoo run by a club. He had promised Pasha to the museum; the animal was already quite old at seventeen, and its death was foreseeable. Normally, dead zoo animals go into the incinerator, but what’s normal about a dead tiger? No other land carnivore is larger, and Pasha was a Bengal tiger, a member of the subspecies commonly known as the Bengal tiger. Pascha measured more than three meters from the snout to the tip of the tail, a wonderful sight. Tigers are traditionally one of the most popular zoo attractions, of course for Klara too. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was so enthusiastic about the elegance of these animals that an old friend gave him a special birthday surprise: Borges, who had gone blind in the meantime, was given a tame tiger so that the poet could at least feel the admired body.
In Wiesbaden, however, tiger lovers like Klara did not get their money’s worth, because Pascha was not to be seen. Since this week, however, he has been standing in the entrance to the museum’s natural sciences department, greeting visitors and allowing himself to be viewed as the new star of the museum. Touching is forbidden, of course, we are not Borges, and Pascha is freshly groomed. It’s so easy to say, but when you let Susann Steinmetzger and Felix Richter tell you the story of this taxidermy, it becomes clear what a stroke of luck the tiger is for the house.
