Schönbrunn Zoo

This guide to Schönbrunn Zoo, the world's oldest zoo still open, opens in 1945, when its director took his own life as Soviet troops reached Vienna and bombing left barely three hundred animals alive. It reaches back to the zoo's founding in 1752 by Emperor Franz Stephan, whose Baroque breakfast pavilion still stands at the center of the grounds, and to earlier hardships: wartime food shortages, a starving soldier's shot at a polar bear in 1918, and a single giraffe that sent all of Vienna into a frenzy in 1828.