“All homelands are actually imaginary”

The last words of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust and the Final Solution, were these; “Long live Germany! Long live Austria! Long live Argentina! I will never forget you!”. The quote that the writer and journalist Jorge Fernandez Diaz chose to open the talk with his Spanish counterpart Sergio del Molino (Madrid, 1979) in the 48th Book Fair It was not at all extemporaneous: the book that the Iberian author came to present this Saturday is titled, precisely, Germans and, as Del Molino himself gracefully explained three months ago, when he won the Alfaguara Award: “If it is titled Germans and no Nazis appear, give me my money back.”

Also in January, upon winning the XXVII Alfaguara Novel Prize, the author said that Germans deals with one “of the most shameful and least disclosed episodes in the history of Spain”. Del Molino took a real event which I had already addressed years ago in the essay Soldiers in the Garden of Peace: the arrival at the port of Cádiz in 1916, in the middle of the First World War, by two ships with more than 600 Germans coming from Cameroon.

Tonight, in front of the Adolfo Bioy Casares room with its 80 seats occupiedrecovered that story: “During the First World War, German settlers living in Cameroon took advantage of the border with what was then Spanish Guinea to surrender to the Spanish authorities, which was a neutral power in the conflict. This is how they are taken, under the figure of boarding schools and military jurisdiction, to the peninsula and the city of Saragossawhich is where I live.”

Del Molino said that, although it was “a very small communitywas however very influential and developed a relationship with Nazism which is very little studied.”

The novel Germans, Thus, its protagonists are Fede and Eva, two descendants of one of those families that “are actually a fictional story although it could be the story of any of those families who I actually met about 15 years ago,” he noted.

The writer was interested in these references from Spanish history because they concentrated, he said, two topics that are especially close to him: dislocation and that feeling of being an intruder, on the one hand, and the creation of imaginary homelands: “Although I have to say that for me, all homelands are actually imaginary,” he clarified. But these Germans certainly lived in an imaginary Germany and fostered a feeling of caste by maintaining the language and customs.”

Furthermore, he indicated that he was interested in analyzing How a family’s past can influence the present: “This is what happens to these characters, whose traumas have nothing to do with their actions but come from their ancestors to ruin their lives without them being able to do anything to prevent it,” he said.

“There are two ways to write a novel,” explained Fernández Díaz: “the improvisation to advance line by line or the methodical study of all the available material and planning: what is yours?” he wanted to know. Del Molino considered that both at different moments in the process: “I think by writing, that is, to know what I think, I need to write. But then, I break, I remake and I have no problem reformulating,” he described.

The author who lives in Zaragoza also reported other of his books. The violet houran autobiographical essay he wrote shortly after the death of his son Pablo“which is not a diary but rather some things that I wrote very anarchically until my wife convinced me that it would be good for me to give it the form of a book,” he pointed out.

The book won the Tigre Juan Award and the Ojo Crítico de Narrativa among others. With The Violet Hour, extraordinary things happened: “First, he found a very enthusiastic editor. Then, he found readers, awards and a literary receptionwhich was what interested me,” the author recalled.

The second book about which Fernández Díaz wanted to know details was The skin: “Since the age of 20 I suffer from psoriasis, which is an autoimmune disease that in my case appears to a degree that, for doctors, is ‘interesting’. I am controlled but over time I realized that this picture was conditioning my relationship with the world,” he explained.

Therefore, in The skin, explores the link that other writers before him had with this same evil: from Stalin, John Updike, or Nabokov: “I tried to understand how it affected me by exploring the lives of other patients,” said.

At the end of the dialogue, the Argentine writer wanted to know what it was like Del Molino’s relationship with Buenos Aires. He recalled that the Argentine capital was the first Latin American city that he knew, twenty years ago because he had developed with this metropolis a “cultural relationship”, for what the discovery of Julio Cortázar represented for a young man who was just beginning to write.” Furthermore, he said that he listened to Charly García in a Spain where no one knew who the musician with the two-color mustache was. “Buenos Aires is part of my sentimental education,” he concluded.