Germans from Zaragoza – Tradition Masks

46

The wonderful Alfaguara Novel Prize 2024, Los Alemáns (322 pp.), by Sergio del Molino (Madrid, 1979), via the Schuster – protagonist of the work – and Klein households, completely different in lots of elements (thus avoiding the generalizing schematism concerning the German idiosyncrasy), focuses on the existence in Zaragoza of a neighborhood of descendants of Germans, who, in 1916, shaken by the First World Battle, migrated to Spain from Cameroon.

First, she devoted a report back to that neighborhood in 2009. Now she has resorted to the ability of artistic creativeness to disclose the load of the German heritage. Its sinister hyperlink with Nazism and neo-Nazism acts totally on father Schuster, the reason for mom Schuster’s evasive self-absorption. An inheritance that Eva and Fede Schuster and Berta Klein attempt to course of, and/or blow up Gabi Schuster. Observe that the Schuster siblings and Berta domesticate fields through which the Germanic inhabitants has excelled: music (Gabi), politics as a civilizing mission (Eva, whom the seditious Gabi taunts by calling her Eva Braun: a department of the Holy Roman Empire, abominably deformed by the Nazi Third Reich), philosophy (Fede) and physics (Berta).

It’s essential how Fede feedback on Arendt’s well-known essay on the banality of evil: “Eichmann: you knew completely effectively what you have been doing and you probably did it with pleasure (…) the terrifying factor, says Arendt, was that each one this horror got here from a banal man (…) a man as formidable as he was mediocre” (pp. 96-97). And banal, mediocre and dehumanized (with out the inside wealth of his spouse)
and his youngsters), is the daddy Schuster. Not mediocre, but in addition banal and manipulative is the mayor Alfonso, a paternal determine, supposedly democratic and humanizing, with whom Eva meant to exchange her abominable father. However, the fanatic Zin, a hunter of Nazi criminals prepared to do something, as racist as a Nazi, is banal: “I consider that Nazism is transmitted via blood. (…) And I consider that guilt is inherited and that the crimes of our ancestors are ours too” (p. 179).