Schönbrunn Zoo is a setting where the histories of Vienna, its inhabitants, and its animals meet. For Garp, its partly restored war ruins make the past visibly present and help shape his reflections on death and memory; in Procrastination, the zoo becomes the scene of two attempted animal liberations, one ending in catastrophe and the other in futility. Its changing condition gives the novel a concrete measure of political and personal loss.

Setting and Garp’s historical imagination

Garp visits the zoo as a respite from writing, among the extensive grounds around Schönbrunn Palace. Many zoo buildings appear to him to be war ruins, three-quarters destroyed and only partly restored for their animal residents. Their condition makes the zoo seem caught in Vienna’s wartime past, even as the surrounding city has rebuilt its homes. Garp becomes interested in that history and reads accounts of Vienna during Nazi and Russian occupation before sleep.

The zoo’s visible damage feeds into the death themes of “The Pension Grillparzer.” Garp comes to understand that, in the act of writing, seemingly separate things can become related: the fate of a city, the history of a family, and the eventual separation brought by death. Memory, in turn, can keep the dead present. The bullet holes he notices in the stone walls of the lobby of his Schwindgasse apartment sharpen that historical connection; the zoo is not simply a backdrop, but one part of the landscape through which he learns to imagine the past personally.

The zoo in Procrastination

Garp’s first novel, Procrastination, is set in Vienna from the 1938 Anschluss through the war years and the subsequent Russian occupation. Its young anarchist protagonist works as a zookeeper at Schönbrunn. As Vienna’s population faces severe hunger and people raid the zoo for food, he decides to free the remaining animals, who are innocent of the country’s political inaction and acquiescence to Nazi Germany. But the animals are starving too, and they eat him. A starving crowd then kills the animals for food as Russian forces approach.

The novel returns to the zoo after the war. The anarchist’s mother survives and later visits the partly rebuilt grounds, remembering her secret visits to her son there during the occupation. After the Russians leave and Vienna settles back into complacency, the Hungarian Revolution brings hundreds of thousands of refugees into the city. The mother tries to repeat her son’s gesture, hoping to rouse Vienna from passivity by releasing the animals. The changed conditions make the effort ineffectual: the zoo’s animals are now well fed, few leave their enclosures, and those that do are easily contained in the paths and gardens and returned unharmed. The episode turns the earlier release inside out: the same act, attempted in a different political and material world, cannot produce the same consequences.

The mother is arrested, and a police doctor discovers that she has cancer. Her death dream imagines a couple of young Asiatic Black Bears escaping and establishing a celebrated new species in the Danube valley. That imagined future is explicitly distinguished from what happens at the zoo: the novel ends after her death with the death of an elderly bear who had suffered an illness during the failed release. The contrast leaves the imagined escape alive only in the mother’s dream, while the actual ending returns to an animal’s death.

Duna and the cost of displacement

The zoo is also the final home of Duna, the bear associated with the Pension Grillparzer. After the bear is outlawed there, he is kept in a courtyard cage, where dogs and children taunt him and residents drop food and other things into the enclosure. He becomes wary of eating after being poisoned twice, and his condition leaves his eventual transfer to Schönbrunn uncertain: he is toothless and ill, possibly contagious, and his long treatment as a human-like companion has not prepared him for the zoo’s routine.

The move does not restore what Duna has lost. His outdoor sleeping quarters at the pension have aggravated his rheumatism, and he can no longer ride his unicycle. When he falls during an attempt to perform the trick at the zoo, someone laughs; according to Theobald’s sister, once Duna is laughed at for doing something, he never does it again. He becomes a charity case and dies two months after arriving. His fate gives the zoo a second, intimate history of displacement: a place that shelters animals also receives one whose former life and abilities cannot be recovered there.

Narrative significance

Across Garp’s writing and the events recounted around it, Schönbrunn Zoo holds together historical research, memory, and animal vulnerability. Its war-damaged structures make Vienna’s past tangible to Garp; in Procrastination, changing conditions transform animal liberation from a disastrous act into an ineffectual one. Duna’s transfer adds a different kind of loss, as a bear removed from his former home cannot regain the capacities tied to it. The zoo thus serves not as a simple emblem of refuge or freedom, but as a place where the meaning and consequences of human action change with history, circumstance, and the lives of the animals themselves.