On a sunny May morning in 1992, with Germany just reunified after decades of division and the Cold War, a call from her boyfriend Stephan rushing to see her set Julia Franck on a bicycle. and quickly headed to the rendezvous in a Berlin neighborhood. The German writer was then 22 years old. Only at the end of his captivating autobiographical book La extraña soy yo, just published in Spain by Tusquets, do we discover what fate offered the two young people.
On the way to that outcome we delve into a fresh personal, family and historical account of the growth of a girl born in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in a complicated family. Her mother, an actress, had four daughters (two of them, twins; one is Julia) conceived with three men, but she chose to go ahead alone. He cared for them and neglected them; attended to them and neglected them. In 1978 he obtained permission from the communist authorities to emigrate to West Germany.
They lived for a while in the Marienfelde Berlin reception center for East German refugees (where he set his novel Transit Zone, published in Germany in 2003 and in Spain in 2007), and then in a battered country house that be assigned to the northern land of Schleswig-Holstein.
“Several times I had to explain to my children that Germany was divided into two countries, what life was like in Berlin in the nineties after the fall of the Wall, or the relationship between East and West, all of this intertwined with our own family ; for them it was a very exotic story, and at a certain point I understood that I had to write this book”, explains Julia Franck in a cafe in the Berlin neighborhood where she lives. The writer also felt the importance of conveying the impact of the Nazi persecution of the Jews in a family like hers, “Jewish, but not religious, in which the Jewish tradition had almost disappeared”.
Franck defends that his book – translated from German by Belén Santana – is an autobiography that reads like a novel, “because its dramaturgy is of a literary nature”, and because of the “subjective perspective of the facts”. Not all characters appear identified.
With these purposes, La extraña soy yo narrates an unusual childhood and youth, between ruptures and uncertainties, which becomes a story of self-affirmation and love. Julia’s arduous journey to adulthood is marked by two female presences: the mother, always dependent on social assistance to survive in the West, and the grandmother, a convinced communist sculptor who does not never wanting to leave the GDR.
“My memories appear flanked and ratified by documentation that I had access to only much later, such as the Stasi records on my grandmother, or family documents with information about the Nazi persecution,” explains Franck. “Fortunately, I was able to know my grandmother for a long time, because she died at an advanced age, and she was a very important oral source about her story of survival.” As the mother had not escaped from the GDR, but obtained official authorization to emigrate, the family could safely cross the Berlin Wall to visit relatives in the East.
In her new world in West Berlin, where the teenager Julia manages to move to attend high school (a couple friends of her mother take her into their home), she discovers the West Germans’ disdain for the new arrivals of the GDR. His good grades arouse disbelief in his classmates. Almost all the elderly people around him in the West were East Germans who had fled or emigrated. “They were part of the intellectual circle of my mother, or my grandmother or my father, whom I knew before he died; and they contributed more to my education than the West Germans I came to know”, reflects the author.
Working in various trades, Franck studied Literature and Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin and traveled throughout the United States, Mexico and Guatemala. Another of his novels, La dona del migdia, set in the two world wars, earned him the German Book Award in 2007, and arrived in Spain two years later. His works have been published in Spanish by Tusquets; Edicions 62 published La dona del migdia in Catalan. In 2022 he received the prestigious Schiller prize in his country.
