The Zoo becomes a place of encounter with the past on this day. Seven people with dementia take an excursion to the sprawling park in the east of the city. They are accompanied by caregivers and relatives who know that animals often open doors that otherwise remain closed.
In front of the prairie dog enclosure, one of the visitors stops short. “Look, the little fellows – they used to be in our garden,” he says quietly. His daughter, who accompanies him, looks surprised. He never told her about a garden. But the upright, curious ground squirrels have awakened an image in him that seemed buried for a long time.
The group has a similar experience in front of the bison. A woman begins to tell how her father took her as a child to a farm where there were cows – and an old bison that always stood by the fence. “It grunted so funny,” she says and laughs. For a moment, the dementia is forgotten, the present clear.
But not all memories are gentle. In front of the polar bear enclosure, a man pauses and becomes quiet. “The white fur – it reminds me of something bad,” he says haltingly. The caregiver places her hand on his arm, gently guides him toward the seals. The zoo is also a place where repressed things can surface – and where empathetic guidance is needed.
The excursion is part of a project that shows how animals can act as a bridge to lost memories. Similar offerings now exist in several German zoos. At the Zoo, for example, guide Flavia Zangerle has been offering special tours for people with dementia since 2018 – with penguin feathers and koala droppings as tactile objects. The project received the Alzheimer Focus Prize in 2023.
For the Berlin group, the afternoon continues. At the end, everyone sits in the café, flipping through photos they took themselves. A woman holds a picture of a zebra in her hand. “That was nice,” she says. “That was really nice.”
Source: www.tagesspiegel.de
