Sergio del Molino (Madrid, 1979), the author of the essay La Españavacada, has won the 27th Alfaguara Novel Prize with Los Alemancos. A jury made up of Juan José Millás, Rosa Montero, Laura Restrepo, Manuel Rivas and Sergio Ramírez has unanimously chosen this novel that is based on a real event, the arrival in 1916 of 627 Germans to Spain from the German colony of Cameroon, conquered by the French and British armies during the Great War.
They surrendered at the border of Equatorial Guinea to the Spanish colonial authorities because Spain was a neutral country. And they would end up settling in cities like Zaragoza, where they would form a small community that would no longer return to Germany. From there Del Molino builds a fiction that continues to this day with dark family secrets, mutations of Nazism and urban planning blows, a past capable of destroying the present in a book that asks if children inherit the guilt of their parents.
“I want to rationally believe that we do not inherit them, it is unfair, but in real life you end up carrying it, you cannot always escape, although we have built our identities and modern life on the fiction that we do,” noted the writer, who He recalled that the descendants of those Germans “are still among us, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, their surnames can be traced in three cities, Zaragoza, Pamplona and Alcalá de Henares. They maintain the heritage and the legacy, they keep their pride very close to the surface, but my characters in the novel are neither real nor inspired by those current descendants.”
Rosa Montero, one of the members of the jury that has awarded Del Molino with the 175,000 dollars and the sculpture by Martín Chirino that the prize is endowed with – in addition to the simultaneous publication in all Spanish-speaking countries on March 21 – summarizes that “it is “a novel, a choral novel about personal and collective guilt, corruption and family, that foundational core of existence that can be terrifying. A novel about everything unspeakable that weighs on these people and that destroys them if they don’t say it.” .
In an event attended by the president of Congress, Francina Armengol, the Secretary of State for Culture, Jordi Martí, and the head of Culture of the Madrid City Council, Marta Rivera de la Cruz, Del Molino, as well as numerous writers such as Ray Loriga, Luis Mateo Díez, Ildefonso Falcones or Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Del Molino has recalled that the epic of the two ships that in 1916, coming from Cameroon, preferred to surrender to Spain rather than to the allies already led to him writing a small essay and had always wanted to do something more with the story.
And the result has been a novel “without surnames, a novel novel” that “begins in 1916 but addresses the current situation of the descendants of those families, their feeling of belonging to a caste, distanced from the normality of a country. It tells the story of “one of those families that has disintegrated. The past is always lurking to punish us as soon as we are careless, they are threatened by a past that they believe is dormant but others do not ignore and are going to ignore it.”
“The novel refers all the time to German culture. There is a devastating quote from Schubert’s diaries, we never know each other, the other is always a mystery, a stranger. And since we live in tough times, at this moment of political brawl, it is good that literature launches the fiction that the other is not such a profound mystery and we are capable of understanding it, mitigating that mystery, that the other is not someone whom we can dehumanize but rather on whose feet we can stand. “Del Molino concluded.
