Even before arriving at the Lichtenberg studios, I see a blue banner on the side of the road:
“Rent your seal!” – Advertising for a well-known car rental company in the city.
The following day I visit the Lichtenberg polar bears in the zoo. Tonja and her four-year-old daughter Hertha.
“The Seal’s Dread – Horror of the Seals,” is what sailors used to call polar bears in earlier times.
When the pack ice still reached to the horizon.
Hertha plays in the murky water with a thick roller made of hard foam. Again and again she turns her toy, bites off small pieces of it, dives underneath. Tonja sits on an artificial rock on the shore and watches her daughter.
A white plastic ice floe rocks lazily in the pool, covered in algae, a piece of fake Arctic for the park visitors.
Polar bears are carnivores, seal eaters, and if need be they will also take fish or anything else, such as berries, honey or the contents of rubbish bins.
Rent a seal – for as little as 3.50 an hour, and all around the roaring traffic, Siegfriedstraße corner Herzbergstraße.
Here seals have four wheels and a lot of loading space.
Lichtenberg, the seal paradise, where the predator turns a plastic roller and sweats in the summer sun.