Del Molino’s Los alemanes: memory, Heimat, and the shadow of history

Sergio del Molino won the Alfaguara Prize for Novel with Los alemanes, a work now distributed across the entire Spanish-speaking world. Its core fabric traces the lives of six hundred Germans who lived in Cameroon and then moved to Zaragoza when World War I broke out. Yet the narrative speaks to how that unusual migration later connected with the Germany that rose before and after Hitler, and the Nazis who tried to seize global power. The jury, chaired by Sergio Ramírez, and including Laura Restrepo, Rosa Montero, Juan José Millás and Manuel Rivas, delivered a unanimous verdict that included a question echoing the novelistic heartbeat of Del Molino’s story: “Do children inherit their parents’ guilt?” The novel, drafted in Zaragoza, where Del Molino has lived since early childhood, gathers around its central history a generation of those survivors of the Cameroon journey who, throughout the tale, never ceased feeling Germany’s pulse and what it meant for the 20th century. From that relevance and from the shiver the Nazi era still casts over the world, this conversation takes shape.

Sergio del Molino offers an intensely sentimental novel that feels like it tells a life of its own.

R. Every worthy novel is a personal story. Writing a book is a strong commitment, and this work channels many of the author’s obsessions and preoccupations. It’s fitting that the author embraces the word sentimental, a label he herself defends with conviction.

P. At the end, Pablo Bieger, a descendant of those Germans, appears and dies before the book is published. How did that relationship influence the novel’s protagonist role?

R. When the author began researching the Cameroon Germans, Pablo surfaced as a living bridge. He reached out, saying, “I am a grandson of the Cameroon Germans; I know everything, and I’m writing a book I’m willing to share with you.” Pablo, a sharp writer with a profound family history obsession, added emotional gravity to the tale. He played a crucial role in shaping the original essay, Soldiers in the Garden of Peace, and his death provided a powerful emotional impulse for the later novel’s development.

P. The book is full of national loyalties: Cameroon, Spain, Germany, Zaragoza. The term heimat, meaning homeland in German, surfaces as a recurring concern among the German characters everywhere.

R. Today, patriotisms feel intensely relevant again, a revival that was once thought to be behind us. A generation earlier, such loyalties did not steer daily life as they do now. Heim at carries strong associations with Nazism and provincial pride; it was used to describe a local homeland. When romantics spoke of heimat, they spoke of Weimar and their province rather than Germany itself. The word’s echo, connecting languages and boundaries, suggested to the author ideas about what translates across tongues and what does not.

Todavía estamos paralizados acerca del horror que supuso Auschwitz, el horizonte moral, la idea que seguimos teniendo de lo que es el infierno…

P. The discussion about ‘heimat’ continues: “The word would have remained merely a poet’s rhyme if Adolf Hitler had not intervened. Nazis extracted it from songs and stuffed it into their loudspeakers. What echoes did you hear in that misuse?”

R. It is not something lived but a persistent intellectual obsession. The author has read extensively about the Third Reich and the Holocaust. It is a sober meditation rather than a personal fixation, a digestion of historical literature that punctuates public discourse and reflections on world events. Auschwitz still haunts moral horizons; it keeps reminding that certain questions about hell remain relevant in thought and in conversation.

P. The fiction voices one character: “After the war, heimat lingered in the vocabularies of poseurs and postcard sellers in alpine refuges…”

R. The author is moved by all facets of Nazi history because of deep cultural proximity and the ease of stepping into the shoes of those who suffered. A long reader of history, he treats Nazism as a constant reference point, not merely a distant study. He believes that the same forces can emerge again through nationalism, provincial pride, and local exaltation when a society moves away from universal human values. The Nazi horizon serves as a reminder of the hell a place can become if dangerous nostalgia and sentiment take root. The idea is to stay vigilant about those impulses and to recognize how innocuous sentiments can morph into something dangerous.

“There are many impulses that might be harmless in times of peace, but in a shadowed era they can become engines of something sinister.”

P. Do you glimpse that future?

R. We stand on the edge of dark times. The rise of an essentialist, messianic nationalism in today’s Russia bears a troubling kinship to Nazi messianism. In peaceful, democratic moments these impulses may seem harmless, yet in a looming crisis they could power something sinister. There are many who, enthralled by their own heimat, fail to sense the danger and unwittingly become accomplices in a potential catastrophe. The European project, as it has existed, may be at serious risk of transformation or disappearance.

P. All the monologues in the book carry the sense that the times are not ideal. Homosexuality, for instance, is hinted at as part of social frictions…

R. It functions as a misdirect, a driver of conflict between generations, but the deeper currents reveal themselves in silences. In a family that has lived apart from reality and built its own universe, secrets and subterranean currents abound. People rarely say what they mean; conversations are filled with unspoken meanings. The novel loves quiet, absolute silences among parents and children, siblings and friends. The subtext of Gabi’s sexuality is important because it disrupts a German family’s identity and creates a distortion-rich conflict with the father.

P. Who are these Germans who speak so much? Are they the Camerounian migrants to Zaragoza, or are they figments of your imagination?

R. They are imagination, yet inviting. If a reader accepts the fiction and steps inside it, they listen to the voices of the descendants who live under the shadow of a marginal event that shaped their families and partly defined who they are. The episode of Cameroun’s departure in 1916 would have faded, but surnames, family patterns, and connections have kept the memory alive. When asked about origins, the answer is a part of the ongoing history. The narrator notes that in his own family, questions about lineage are less common and less pointed than in others, a small anecdote that hints at regional differences in memory.

P. At first mention appears The Tin Drum, the Günter Grass novel. How has reading other authors helped you build this literature?

R. The writer is a book lover who keeps references handy and often makes connections between works, sometimes consciously, sometimes in subtler ways. The linkage is similar to how the characters in the book relate to the dead in a cemetery, keeping a living dialogue with writers who inspire them. In every book, the author visits those deceased voices who illuminate the path. It may be more apparent in a novel that is more sentimental, but the impulse is present across all works. A proper answer would require a doctoral thesis, and the author is not capable of such exhaustive analysis.