Sergio del Molino, winner of the Alfaguara Prize for 'The Germans': “In today's world it seems to be seen worse to be a charcutero than a Nazi”

Life imitates art, although not in everything.

At the entrance to the secluded German cemetery in Zaragoza, a piece of the inscription that indicates the place is missing, but it is not the same as in Sergio del Molino's wonderful and full of exciting novel

The Germans,

with which he won the latest Prize Alfaguara and which has just been published.

Here, on the gate, it says only Freidhof (peace courtyard, cemetery) and Deutscher (German) is missing.

While in the novel it is the other way around.

There are also no linden trees but cypresses and oleanders, and one will look in vain for the grave of Gabriel (Gabi) Schuster, or those of his grandfather and his great-grandfather, Pablo and Hans, respectively.

There are, however, the three tombs of members of the Condor Legion who fell during the Civil War described in the novel, and the phrase “Für Spaniens Freiheit” can be read on them, for the freedom of Spain.

The German cemetery, separate from Torrero's general cemetery, is a fundamental setting of the novel and serves to open and close the book, but the author has adapted it to his own style.

He has done the same with the history of the Germans who arrived in Zaragoza in 1916, emigrating from Cameroon when the Second Reich lost the colony during the First World War, and he also soaked in literature the subsequent relationships of that group with the Nazis.

Most of what Sergio del Molino explains in

The Germans

has a documentary basis (even about the Schuster family fortune made with sausages), not in vain did he tell the story of the Germans of Cameroon in several newspaper articles, in the essay

Soldiers in the Garden of Peace

(2009) and in an exhibition at the Zaragoza History Center.

But the specific plot is, the writer emphasizes, absolutely invented.

He explains it during a lively visit to the cemetery with this diary in which he has joined us - fortunately, because he is the one who has the keys - the architect Alberto Haering, friendly custodian of the place.

The cemetery is still in use (two burials have been carried out recently) although it lives (if the word can be applied to a cemetery) in a legal vacuum.

Granted (but there are no papers) by the City Council during the Civil War to bury the dead of the Condor Legion, it became that of the entire German colony and the remains of the previously deceased were moved here.

There are about 65 tombs and in theory those of the Cóndor, taken to the German cemetery of Cuacos de Yuste, are no longer there.

In theory, because, according to Haering, there could be some left.

In fact, a German army colonel and his assistants recently visited the place to investigate the matter.

In short, it cannot be denied that it is a romantic place, and, curiously, conducive to conversation.

More information

Sergio del Molino wins the Alfaguara 2024 Prize

In the cemetery, as we said, begins

The Germans

, which is about three brothers, two men, Gabi and Fede, and a woman, Eva, from the German colony of Zaragoza, marked by the tyrannical father, Juan Schuster, heir to an industry. sausage shop built in the Aragonese capital by the ancestor Hans, “master butcher of the Reich”, and centered on the popular Schuster Sausage, “one hundred percent German” (a great metaphor for sausage, stuffed and secret meat, of what is hidden in families) .

The Schusters meet on the occasion of the death of their first-born Gabi, a popular, successful, homosexual and controversial

underground

musician , who reflects the Zaragoza movement (in the German cemetery, by the way, you can see the tomb of Mauricio Aznar , the leader of Mas Birras to whom the film

The Blue Star

has been dedicated ), and the tensions accumulated throughout their lives, and new ones, appear.

Especially the blackmail to which Eva is subjected—a political right-hand woman of the mayor of Zaragoza about to begin her takeoff on the national level—and which has to do with parts of the family's dark past related to Nazism.

Sergio del Molino has the two surviving siblings speak and incorporates two other narrators, Berta, a childhood friend of the older brother and herself a member of another of the original Cameroonian German families, and Ziv, an Israeli businessman involved in money. dirty and involved in a shady urban scandal that includes the local soccer club.

Ziv has also dedicated himself to hunting Nazis in the wake of his father, who tried to lay his hands on several brown refugees in Franco's Spain.

Del Molino is not worried that it could be ugly to turn Jewish characters into the bad guys of the film.

“They are the bad guys and at the same time they are right, corrupt and Nazi hunters, a very fictional ambiguity.”

Throughout the plot—with a

thriller

edge —obsessions characteristic of the author resonate that find a very good place in the novel: uprooting, identity, legacy, how inheritance conditions us, the idea of ​​the imaginary homeland, or the role of intellectuals in today's world, how humanists have lost the battle of contemporary thought against scientists;

also the loneliness of love and affections.

“I am very interested in the novel as a vehicle for thought,” says Sergio del Molino.

Grave in the German cemetery of Zaragoza.

“I have spent many hours of research on it,” he says of the issue of the Germans in Cameroon that forms the backbone of his novel Del Molino, which he recalls that his interest began when he found old Nazi propaganda papers, with speeches by Goebbels and other leaders. , published in Zaragoza and which were intended for that colony about which he knew nothing at the time.

He began to enter that universe, he met the families, their stories, their myths (that they came in an Anabasis plan from an Out of

Africa

-type world ), the cemetery… “The fact is that there were many references to the arrival in Zaragoza And from their life here, the Germans from Cameroon or Cameroon were very popular, they appeared in the newspapers, songs were dedicated to them.

They were a very powerful and striking colony.

As I say in the novel, Ramon J. Sender mentions them in

Crónica del alba.

"I discovered a very interesting history, and there is also the relationship with Nazism."

“I always wanted to write a novel about this topic,” he continues, “it gave a lot of story-telling and allowed me to address those things that interest me so much;

"It is very interesting to see how the Germans from Cameroon in Zaragoza forged the idea of ​​a fictitious Germany, a homeland, a Heimat, which was not exactly the real one, and they tried to build it here."

In

The Germans

there are references to historical figures such as León Degrelle, leader of the Belgian Rexistist party and Standartenführer of the Waffen-SS who fled to Spain, and the extravagant neo-Nazi Michael Kühnen.

"It is not known if they met, I imagine that Kühnen would be fascinated by a guy that Hitler had said he would have liked to have a son like him."

Hitler congratulates the Belgian Léon Degrelle by awarding him the Knight's Cross in 1944.ullstein bild

In any case, Del Molino is connecting the dots and creating a plot worthy of an Odessa sausage network.

“In Zaragoza the Kurtz sausage actually existed, less important than the Schuster empire that I invented.

Some of the Kurtzes are buried here.

In reality, I don't mess with any family, my novel is all fiction.

I use the casing but the characters and the story I build for them are completely invented.

It would be an aberrant reading to try to see it as a

roman a clef

, it is pure fabulation.

I don't play ambiguity.

Of course, I love the story of the sausage.

It's like the Galician immigrant who gets rich selling octopus.”

The writer says that in any case, what he says, “could have happened.”

Surely, he points out, similar things happened, “but of lower intensity.”

For example, it is true that Zaragoza was a refuge for Nazis, and part of the

rat line

, the criminal escape network after Hitler's defeat, "but those who passed through here were not important leaders but rather second class."

The German colony showed enthusiasm for Nazism and placed the swastika even in the school and in the German Home, and the Third Reich was interested in the German communities established abroad, which it saw as part of the homeland, the nation.

Regarding the Civil War, “the German community did well in Zaragoza, where the Condor Legion had its main base.”

Meat industry reviled

At one point in the novel, Eva, nicknamed Salchipapa, is publicly attacked both for the family's Nazi past and for her relationship with the reviled meat industry (with a cameo by Greta Thunberg).

“It is true that today it seems that being a butcher is worse than being a Nazi,” reflects Sergio del Molino among the Kurtz tombstones, buried in their small corner of darkness in the cemetery.

“A little satire is always good.”

The Germans

show that looking at the family past is not harmless.

“When you investigate things come up, there is no family that is free from that.

Families tell lies and when you dig deeper, the dead come out.”

Regarding the technique of structuring the novel as an alternation of voices, the author says that he did not want "an omniscient narrator," he points out, but rather that the story be told from testimonies, from a choral quality.

“The truth is reached through a series of lies.

In

The Germans,

each one tells from his own point of view and the reader is the one who has the key to the whole.

Sergio del Molino in the German cemetery of Zaragoza with an old photo of the place.

An atmosphere of sadness dominates the novel, even the sex seems sad.

“It's a story, ultimately about death.

It begins and ends in a cemetery and is crossed by the German concept of death and the relationship between life and death characteristic of its culture, in which the notion of continuity and legacy is very important."

An idea appears in the book that obsesses Del Molino, that we literally walk on the dead, those who preceded us, "there are 16 for every living human being today."

The writer becomes absorbed, which is not difficult when you are almost stepping on the grave of, for example, Herr Hans Schneider (1883-1966).

“In the novel, Gabi is a ghost character who crosses the story, a kind of Rebeca who structures the plot even though he is dead from the beginning.”

To remove the solemnity, I ask him about the criticism he makes

en passant

of the intellectuals involved in sports commentators.

“You can see it as my bad behavior, a joke, or not.

We writers sneak things like that.”

And what about the rising politician who has a family scandal? What a coincidence, huh?

“It's a coincidence, of course, there are always cases like that.

As far as Eva is concerned, it is not her responsibility, but again I put there an axis of reflection on heredity and how these things call into question free will.

There are decisions made by our ancestors that condition our identity and from which we cannot escape.

“I believe a lot in destiny, understood that way.”

Del Molino affirms that it is projected in all the characters, although to the intellectual Fede “I have given some of my doubts about my life and my condition.”

He considers that intellectuals currently seem to be above good and evil and in an attitude of withdrawal or withdrawal, apart from what is happening in the world.

“The intellectual runs away today, but that does not save you, when reality begins to boil, it affects you the same.”

Along with the protagonists, there is a large gallery of secondary characters, the mother, the Romanian caregiver, the mayor, the advisor Asteri... "I am very interested in the secondary characters, if you do the complete story of each one you will get

War and Peace

."

Of Zaragoza as a setting he says: “It is a very archetypal city of the bland, there is nothing very extreme and it has little character.

One of those many medium-sized European cities that fall away from postmodernism and have not known how to reinvent themselves.

Zaragoza has long been the place where you did your military service, it has no tourism, being a two-thousand-year-old city.

Don't see this as criticism but rather as praise, it is a very pleasant and comfortable place to live, but not very exciting."

No one would say it after reading the novel.

“Under the dull patinas there often live exciting stories, they are not obvious and you have to make an effort to see them, but they are there.”

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