This 2024 Roberto Ampuero reappears on the literary scene with the novel “I will never return to Berlin” (Penguin Ramdon House), which although it is fiction, could be considered part of a trilogy along with “Our Olive Green Years” (1997) and “Behind the Wall” (2014)although these two are closer to memory and non-fiction.
To talk about “I will never return to Berlin” Roberto Ampuero was with Ana Josefa Silva and Marco Antonio de la Parra in the program “From the End of the World”, from TV BioBio.
According to him, he was working at a news agency in Bonn when the incident occurred. The fall of the Berlin Wall and all the relevant events that happened after it, and they told him: “‘You are the right person to go and report what is happening in Berlin: the communist countries are falling.’ I take the Bonn-Berlin plane and suddenly find myself on the other side of history, being able to cross the Wall freely and I have to describe what I had experienced, but in the process of ruin, of the end of that communist socialist ideal of Honecker, for rejection of the people; “That always marked me.”
In the novel he imagines Erich Honecker, along with his wife, Margot, in his exile in Chile, in his daily life in the Queen’s house, which is where they spent their last days. The story is in three voices: that of the former leader; that of Patricio Dupré, a Chilean and former refugee in East Germany, who becomes Honecker’s translator; and Valentina Bode, a former love of Patricio, linked to the PSUA (Unified Socialist Party of Germany).
During the program, Ampuero and the panelists drew attention to the fact that in those years in which the novel takes place, two dictators out of power shared the same city, living a few blocks away: Honecker and Pinochet.
Ampuero’s work has been translated into fifteen languages. He currently lives between Chile—outside Santiago—and the United States. But his eventful life has taken him to different latitudes: after completing his school education at the Deutsche Schule in Valparaíso, where he lived with his parents, he moved to Santiago to study in the U of Chile. That was in 1972, the time when he joined the Communist Youth, which, when the coup d’état occurred the following year, led him to exile. First he went to the GDR and then to Cuba. Disillusioned with “real socialism” (in Cuba he met Heberto Padilla, censored by the Castro regime), he renounces the PC. But his journey would not end there (he would later live in Sweden and Mexico).
Upon returning to Chile in 1993, he published his first novel in Spanish: “Who Killed Cristián Kusterman?”, with which detective Cayetano Brulé was “born,” the protagonist of what would be a police saga, and who won the “El Mercurio” Book Magazine.
From then on his literary career has not stopped.
