Dr. Gerda Wever-rabehl

Inside the Parrot Cage: Dialogues and Reflections on History, Trauma and Memory Dr. Gerda Wever-rabehl

Inside the Parrot Cage begins with the stories Joachim tells Jean as his life nears its end. His earliest memory is that of playing and getting trapped inside a parrot cage at his aunt's hotel. This early confinement forms a powerful metaphor for his life of imprisonment, isolation and displacement. Sent into the war at the age of sixteen in a desperate attempt by the Germans to avoid defeat, Joachim quickly thereafter ended up in a Soviet camp for four years. Upon return in 1948, three years after his home and home-town had been invaded and handed over to Poland, he was officially a 'DP', a displaced person. Ending up in North-America many years later was no salvation. Though he was a child at the time with little choice but to become a soldier in the German army, people saw him as a 'nazi', a criminal. Joachim's narrations center around his ceaseless alienation, his lost humanity and the way in which the deliberate cruelty of the Soviet Gulag found a future. Yet in the process of chronicling these painful narrations, Jean and Joachim meet as equals. And in this egalitarian position, humanity can be restored.