The Gift

From one day to the next, Berlin is swarming with elephants. It soon transpires that the animals are not from the zoo but a gift from the president of Botswana. He has given the Germans 20,000 elephants as a present, a ‘thank you’ for tighter legislation governing the import of hunting trophies. The president is not happy with this ‘imperialist measure’, which will deter Western trophy hunters, meaning his country will miss out on the much-needed income from expensive hunting licenses. Germany’s federal chancellor Winkler is confronted with a major challenge: to deal with the crisis and with any luck take advantage of it, because elections are due and the extreme right is hot on his heels in the polls.

Living with elephants causes chaos and upset: flattened cars, plundered shops and elephant turds. But it also produces intense moments of happiness – there’s the live-streamed birth of a baby elephant, an explosion of greenery, yoga sessions with elephants in the park. And economically, too, the mastodonts present opportunities: their turds are a nuisance, but on further inspection they represent a fertilizer goldmine.

The measures taken to keep the situation somewhat under control are reminiscent of those of the Covid crisis (social distancing; curfew) and those of the refugee crisis (arguments over dispersal; an ‘elephant quota’). The populist right gains from it all. Federal chancellor Winkler faces a choice: should he turn rightwards and dump the elephants, or opt for a long-termist approach that creates a way of living harmoniously with the animals? The analogy with how we address the climate crisis is obvious.

With her novella ‘The Gift’, Gaea Schoeters has written a political satire that can be seen as a companion piece to her successful hunting novel ‘Trophy’. Like that book, it interrogates the way the West treats Africa, but unlike ‘Trophy’ its tone is humorous and light. At the same time, ‘The Gift’ is a plea for ecological seriousness. Characters like Winkler and his State Secretary for Elephant Affairs Hannelore Hartmann show how hard it is to marry politics with concerns about long-term outcomes.