The moved reader of
The Violet Hour
or
The Skin
by Sergio del Molino, columnist and collaborator of this newspaper, will not be surprised by the commitment unleashed by fiction that
The Germans
embodies because in those two books and in some others a yeast of undeveloped or contained novel. This time he did it after searching for a long time for the makings of fiction, according to what he himself says in a final note, to freely recreate the fictional experience of a family linked to a minor episode in contemporary history: in 1916 just over 600 Germans settled in Cameroon surrendered to the Spanish authorities in Guinea, instead of surrendering to the Allies during the Great War, and have lived since then in various cities. It is quite a clue as to where they were going to continue in the following decades, while Nazism became hegemonic in the 1930s in Germany and while many of its leaders took refuge after the debacle of 1945 in Franco's Spain with notable placidity, as happens with Léon Degrelle, a secondary character in the plot.
More information
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”
But no, it is not a historical novel nor does it aim to faithfully reconstruct that episode. The fictional plot arises by putting together, from the voices of a few characters - and in just two months - the complexity of the relationships between the parents and the three children of one of those families of Germans from Cameroon, settled in Zaragoza. and owner of a thriving sausage industry. I'm not going to hide it because it's not worth it: grandfather and father, lost Nazis, although discreet and not very exhibitionist.
And the sons? The moral conflict of a novel focuses on the different reactions to the information they learn about that affiliation, which sometimes strains the credibility of the characters' soliloquies in long conversations or meditations that narrate episodes from the past to explain a matte, pale present. or vitamin for the rebellious son, famous and recently forgotten, the politician with a rising career and the misplaced university professor who emigrated to Regensburg. In one way or another, the shadow of the family's laborious Nazism leads to a life of privileges for the three children (and grandchildren of the founder) while sooner or later plunging them into the ethical mud of doubts and uncertainties, of hesitations. and questions: how far does the responsibility of children go in relation to their parents? Or better yet, to what extent are human beings capable of shielding themselves against the truth with self-deception or more or less selective confusion?
Fortunately, Sergio del Molino does not resort to didactic doctrine and does not resort to any variant of the sermon, although some of the meditations alone or in conversation reveal the hand of the novelist who needs those words and those cogitations put into the mouth of the characters to direct the novel where it needs to take it. There is some explicit homage to Germanic high culture, particularly in relation to music - and especially Schubert - but there is also unspoken concern about the current emergence of neo-Nazi groups that seem to reproduce the support that the father of the family gave. in his time to Nazi groups that today already attract hundreds of thousands of votes. The reader may not feel fully alive to the characters who monologue in its chapters, but he does participate, involved and attentive, in the anxieties, doubts and recapitulated pain that the novel delivers as a central proposal: families lie, and they always lie. The rest is up to each individual.
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