Oh, is he controversial! He likes to sleep with three females at a time, all of them clad in fur. (And this after a notorious separation from what was supposed to be his exclusive mate.) He’s been the subject not only of lawsuits but also full photo-spreads in Vanity Fair (by Annie Liebovitz, no less) and parody on the Colbert Report. Meanwhile, both his obsessive need to ingest things that are not good for him and to always be the center of attention have made most observers very concerned about his welfare.

And rightly so, for now he is dead, and way too young . . . what’s that? No, I was never talking about Charlie Sheen, this is about the celebrity that was Knut the Polar Bear, whose adventures at the Berlin Zoo this weblog has occasionally covered over the years. Maybe to make myself clear I should have brought up Knut’s being featured on his own postage-stamp, or even the public calls in the past for his castration, but frankly, all of that and more seems well within the capability of the out-of-control 2 1/2 Men once-and-future star.

No, this is about Knut, and I guess I can take a sort of bittersweet pride in having realized, from the very beginning of my coverage, that “it is perhaps the life of a child movie star that provides an even more-exact template to what has been happening with Knut.” You’ll surely know by now that last Saturday, as he was lounging on an island in his Berlin Zoo enclosure (which he shared with the aforementioned three female polar bears – who somehow seemed to want little to do with him) the lumbering grayish bear suddenly stood up, spun around a couple of times, fell into the water and was gone. Well, at least you probably heard that he died; those additional details I got from having the fortune to hear an interview on the BBC World Service with the Berlin Zoo Bear Dept. Head Heiner Klös. The interviewer put Klös on the spot (as BBC interviewers are increasingly wont to do with their subjects in recent years), accusing him of feeding Knut too many of the infamous croissants he was mad about. Yes, OK, there were croissants, Klös stammered in his reply, but mostly the keepers made sure he received the sort of wholesome meat-and-vegetables diet a still-growing young polar bear requires.

Anyway, while Knut was never in what you could call polar bear athletic shape, it’s unlikely it was anything in his diet that caused his death at age 4 – untimely, as polar bears in captivity are routinely known to live forty years or more. Just what it was remains something of a mystery; it was not a tumor, for example, as Christina Hucklenbroich of the FAZ let us know in an article of yesterday, although it did seem to involve some disease in his brain. Nothing in the environment provided to him at the Berlin Zoo was at fault, either – despite calls from no less than the Financial Times Deutschland for polar-bear enclosures across Europe to be subject to “stress tests.” (For real – although I suspect the piece is written tongue-in-cheek.) Nor did it have anything to do with any sort of in-breeding – Knut’s mother was a full-blooded wild polar bear out of Canada, Zoo Director Bernhard Blaszkiewitz assured the assembled press hordes.

Of course, it was that very same mother-bear who started Knut off on his celebrity adventure in the first place by rejecting him and thus making it necessary that he be raised in a rather more public fashion by the zookeepers. And although that life is now at an end, the legend (and, possibly, the need for further coverage here – whatever the traffic will bear, you might say) will surely live on. They want to raise a statue to him; his fur is already in the hands of expert taxidermists at a museum; and, inevitably, you know there is going to be a movie. For – relative to his species, at least – Knut lived fast and he died young: may I suggest “Polar Without A Cause”?

Although the fascinating story of the celebrity polar bear named Knut, resident in the Berlin Zoo, got its start together with the animal himself back during the period that this weblog was taking a multi-year break, we’ve tried to cover subsequent developments of interest concerning this media star who has been visited more than 9 million times, been the object of affectionate comments from high German government officials ranging up to the Bundeskanzlerin herself, and has even featured on a postage-stamp.

The latest Knut developments have unfortunately taken a somewhat bizarre turn, verging on the gothic. As might be expected, there’s a woman involved. Her name is Giovanna, Gianna for short, and she was introduced into Knut’s cage-complex a while back to provide him with a little companionship – and, in particular, to further the fond hope that the two might do some great things together tending towards an enlargement of the stock of polar bears held in captivity. Giovanna, though, revealed a nasty streak in an incident reported by the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel a month ago, when a cormorant (a seabird) found its way into Berlin’s polar bear compound and Giovanna gave it a hit with her paw that left it wounded. Then again, perhaps she was merely defending her man: that same report states that the bird first had “pinched” (gezwickt) Knut’s nose.

Anyway, by that point it was clear that Giovanna was no shrinking violet. Now the German news-magazine Focus is reporting that she is also Knut’s cousin – the two share the same grandfather! Suddenly the thought of those two bearing some polar-bear cubs is no longer so desirable. This from PETA Deutschland spokesman Frank Albrecht: “Knut fans should be aware that only Knut’s castration will allow a lengthy life together with Gianna. All other hopes and desires bring the population of polar bears in captivity even faster to the end that is pre-programmed for them anyway.” This from an organization that is supposed to have Knut’s happiness at heart! (As you may gather, PETA Deutschland advocates simply not holding any polar bears in captivity, at all.)

She was set to be his lover – but she is also his cousin! And now he risks castration! I remarked before on these pages how interest in Knut (and the money resulting from it) understandably started to wane once he stopped being a cute baby polar bear and became a somewhat slovenly-looking teenage one – did Berlin Zoo officials go off in search of a publicist to tell them how to resuscitate interest in Knut and wind up with Tennessee Williams?

EuroSavant belatedly caught up with the Knut-the-polar-bear story last December here. I observed then that Knut’s life seemed to be careening along the path usually only followed by Hollywood child film stars (e.g. family tragedies; cover shoots; problems with excessive weight).

Sure enough, as the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reports today, the struggle over the Knut-millions is now occupying the courts. Those millions are of course the millions of euros that the (at one time) cute little abandoned polar bear earned for the Berlin Zoo, through the flood of visitors he inspired, souvenir sales, those above-mentioned photo-shoots, and the like. The point of the news-piece is that the Newmünster Zoo (up in northern Germany, which owns Knut’s father and therefore claims an ownership interest in Knut) has now run out of patience with attempts to come up with some agreement with the Berlin Zoo to split up this Knut-money – they’re heading off to the federal court (Landgericht) in Berlin to settle this, as of tomorrow. And step one is to demand that the Berlin Zoo make an accurate accounting of just how much they have earned off of the erstwhile polar bear baby. That amount is alleged to be around €6 million.

It looks like the pressures of the holiday season are flipping some people out already. Der Spiegel has a report up now about an incident in Berlin’s zoo: Man jumps into polar bear Knut’s enclosure.

You were aware of the Knut-the-polar-bear sensation of 2007, right? (Yes, that’s the link to his very own fairly-long Wikipedia page; feel free to go there and review!) EuroSavant was basically inactive for most of that time, and so remiss in its task of bringing to you all the German-press Knut coverage that you were dying to read about. Oh, and there was plenty of such coverage, believe you me. No less than Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel was crazy about Knut, along with everybody else. (more…)