D. Raja Ganesan Reviews Gerda Wever-Rabehl's book
INSIDE THE PARROT CAGE: Dialogues and Reflections on History, Trauma and Memory

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This book belongs to a new, emerging genre of writing both in content and format: content-wise it blends an exquisite literary sensibility with profound psychological insights into the unique psychodynamics of suffering and humiliation experienced by the Prisoners of War who belong to the belligerent nations. Because they have been vanquished their suffering is now meaningless; because they have been vanquished their suffering and humiliation are accorded no sympathy by the larger world around, not to speak of the victorious; and, because they have been vanquished they are obliged to swallow, bottle up and conceal for ever, in guilt and shame, their unforgettable bitter experiences even in their own home and community. It is different from books like Eric Kahler’s The Tower and the Abyss, Victor Frankl’s documentation of his experiences as a Prisoner of War under the Nazi regime: The world was willing to listen to the latter because they were the victims of belligerence –though not, perhaps, for the reason that they belonged to the side of the victorious. The world was willing to share their trauma and sympathise with their suffering. Thus there was scope for catharsis for the haunting and unbearable memories of their suffering and humiliation. This genre calls into question what Britzman has aptly described in her epilogue to the book as the ‘apathy of history’ to the suffering and humiliation of those who are willy nilly thrown into a war by the despotic regimes of the belligerent states, captured by the defending and ultimately victorious armies and tortured and humiliated and sought to be indoctrinated in some cases and who eventually manage to survive but find that the world is not willing to listen to them and history, as it has been unfortunately conceived hitherto, is not willing to give space to their travails. Such a partial view of history sows the seed for another war in the collective psyche of the vanquished. The suffering and humiliation of a generation, thus blacked out, make it easy for another despot to groom another generation for war. That war means suffering and humiliation for both the victorious and the vanquished is a strong and powerful reinforcement to the lesson of peace that must be learnt if mankind is to survive. While the massive volumes of documentation of the war experience, hitherto from the viewpoint of the victorious, help us to ‘learn about it’, they do not help us to ‘learn from it’. This is the message for education this book draws our attention to.

Format-wise, the book is in the form of a series of dialogues Jean, one who belongs to BeWell, a charitable organization that takes care of the poor and the destitute, has with Joachim, a seventy nine year old man, who had been thrown into the German army for the Second World War as a boy of seventeen and had been captured and tortured and humiliated by the Russians, and who managed to survive and reach Canada.

The factual historical details provide a thin but firm framework for the presentation. The descriptions of the landscapes have a literary power that brings home the climate of the scenes. The most valuable part of the story is, however, the presentation of insights into human nature in extreme situations that convinces how the oddities evinced in such ‘boundary’ situations are a part of its natural makeup. They recall some of the situations in Doestovsky’s novels. An example is the frequency of self-description of Joachim as ‘lucky’. Jean explores and exposes the ways in which the experiences as a Prisoner of War ruined forever Joachim’s capacity for love –for his wife and for his children and for humanity in general. Though Joachim survived the experienced he has not at all lived thereafter

The probing questions raised by Jean in the conversations are pertinent and penetrating and yet delicate, circumspect and inevitable from the perspective and for the purpose of the project. They reach for the ultimate ontological depths of Joachim.

The title’ Inside the Parrot Cage’ is metaphorical. It refers to a parrot cage Joachim entered and played with as a boy of two or three, which locked him in and crashed downwards.

The author had a three-fold aim: to seek a form congruent with the content, intimacy with tragic knowledge and seek some implications of this knowledge. Her success is most pronounced in the second one. It is a book that merits the attention of everyone interested in history as it should be treated, written and presented to the younger generation from a trans-human (to avoid the cliché ‘humanistic’) perspective, and in peace and in the man-made tragedy of war and the trauma of humiliation that follows it on a large scale inexorably on either side.

D.Raja Ganesan

Professor D.Raja Ganesan Ph.D
Former Professor and Head
Department of Education
University of Madras