'My German Father', a family chronicle between a Nazi grandfather and a father in flip-flops in Spain

The tone of My German Father, a son's book about his father, is magnificent. But it's not just the tone: it's the cunning of introducing the central nerve of twentieth-century Europe into the family story of a relationship between father and son, knowing that this family history has very powerful and bitter vectors and burrs: from the surprise discovery of a Nazi grandfather without palliation or contemplation in the family (whose past Ricardo Dudda's father completely ignores) to the controlled eccentricity of a father today he lives peacefully in a small coastal town in Murcia with murrias, mandangas and selective memory about his past of his own volition (and excluding his erotic-emotional adventures, although not entirely).

The Nazi soldier Richard Dudda, a key figure in the book 'My German Father' (Libros del Asteroide), by Ricardo Dudda.

But the key lies in the tone and the humble calm will to explore the past of a family through regulated interviews about the biographical experience of the father to talk in reality about the present and about Ricardo Dudda's own murrias, about his indecisions and his perplexities as a writer, as a columnist and as an adult. The exoduses, the invasions, the brutal crimes and the mass rapes of women sneak into the material memories and in the documents and photographs of her German childhood among the sweet gauze of the domestic like unbreathable bombs that remind us that none of it is far away in the past. Even more: too much of that experience of the Second World War told at ground level and drama, still alive in the childhood of Dudda's father, is being reproduced at this moment in Ukraine and Gaza, when Dudda could not have known that Gaza would once again be the scene of horror that it is and the dirtiest currency in the recent political history of the EU.

The link is tremendous because it is Jews who today massacre Palestinians who live in the purest material misery

The link is tremendous because it is Jews who today massacre Palestinians who live in the purest material misery, while Jews were industrially massacred while Dudda's father was growing up, that man who decided in 1963 to travel to Burgos with a towel and flip-flops thinking about the sun and the beach and discovered that it is colder in Burgos than in his German town of origin. If that is the beginning of his philo-Hispanism, imagine the rest of the time until he gets to play the trombone in the village band, going through high executive responsibilities in the world of advertising, wearing a favesteco or the rejection on principle to drink something as boring as water.

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