Jan Mohnhaupt was born in 1983 in the Ruhr. He is a freelance journalist and author for various magazines and newspapers such as Spiegel Online, 11Freunde and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
For several years he has regularly reported on the two Berlin zoos in the Tagesspiegel. For this book, he visited zoos from Thale to Chemnitz, mucked out enclosures and scoured archives for a whole year – and even found a former zookeeper at Berlin Zoo who secretly preferred East Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde.