Looking to flee from the postwar Germany hell, a beautiful, intelligent, bold woman, longs to move to his own in the proclaimed country of freedom, but that is not what he finds in the United States. Drama, romance, espionage and politics are mixed in “Victory” (Planet) of Paloma Sánchez-Garnicawinning novel of the Planet 2024 award, endowed with one million euros. In her visit to Buenos Aires we dialogue with the Spanish writer.
Journalist: When four years ago he was a finalist of the planet award, did he say they don’t come with 200,000 euros, I’m for the million? Now he had his “victory”, and conquered them.
Paloma Sánchez-Garnica: With “Last days in Berlin” I was to a vote. I felt that I had to try again. In that novel he had the consequences of war through the eyes of German women, Berlin. There he had dealt with the consequences of Nazism, the Holocaust, the violation of the essential rights to the Jews, the Semites, Slavs and Gypsies. Having followed those Berlinas gave me a site. I positioned myself to start from them. Victoria Kiesler, her sister Rebecca, and her little girl Hedy. Horror survivors tried to rebuild themselves as human beings in a dehumanized territory. A Berlin occupied and divided by the victors and where the German survivors were abused and criminalized.
Q.: Victoria seeks to survive and protect her daughter and sister with the miserable salary she wins singing at the Kassandra cabaret, looks for something else.
PS-G: I long to go to the United States, go out with Rebecca and Hedy of the living conditions. Victoria is known with plenty of abilities, she is beautiful, ambitious, intelligent, but she does not decide to escape towards freedom. Until an unscrupulous blackmail of the Russians will force him to travel alone to the United States.
Q.: Any woman served as a model for Victoria?
PS-G: Hedy Lamarr, very intelligent and bold woman. Actress, dancer, pianist, scientific. He made the first nude in the commercial film “Ecstasis”, where he also showed the infidelity of a woman. He developed the first steps of what today is Wi -Fi, a type of encrypted language, the radial driving of torpedoes, among other scientific technical inventions, which would lead her to be in the Hall of Fame in the United States, after there were robbed of the rights of her creations. His real name was Hedwig Kiesler, that’s why my victory is Kiesler, and his daughter is Hedy.
Q.: His novel is romantic …
PSG: Neither romantic, nor just of espionage, nor just historical, that less. Victoria enjoys the unconditional love of Robert Norton, an exagent of the FBI, who keeps the pain of the murder of her daughter and her sister for the Ku Klux Klan, and that will help you discover what is after the democratic facade of her country.
Q.: Is it a political novel?
PS-G.: It has some politics because politics influences our way of living. Our life is determined by politics, and in democracy citizens are the ones who choose who directs us. When Hitler came to power, the Aryans were not anti -Semitic. The Nazis used the radio to enter the homes and turn their ideology. They poisoned a vulnerable population. That can happen to us now with social networks. You have to prepare, screen and analyze the information. Edward Murrow, who has its moment in the novel, warned that “a nation of sheep engenders a wolves government.”
Q.: The novels, through the “certainty” of fiction, can show us how feelings are managed according to the time we have to live, ”is said in his novel, which confirms it both in Nazism and in the United States.
P. sg.: At the time when Victoria enters the country of freedom, democracy, the most powerful in the world. The kingdom of that happiness seen in the movies. And it is found that there was not only racism, but it was protected by law. And that was until 1964, in which the Civil Rights Law is approved, at the time of Lyndon Johnson, who then enters the United States into the Vietnam War.
Q.: Victoria Presence Racial segregation, macartism and witch hunt, and comes to know about a racism that persists in time and refers to Mengele’s experiments and looks like a conspiracy fiction.
PSG: But it is real, absolutely real. It deals with a society that existed in the city of Tuskegee, Alabama, from 1934, with the authorization of the Government, where an experiment began using men as guinea pigs to observe how syphilis develops, which causes the disease and the result of the treatments that were applied. 400 black men were chosen, some infected and others not. They are told that they have bad blood and are treating them. That lasted until 1947. In the second trial of Nuremberg, doctors who had done experiments with the Jews in the concentration camps were judged, and the Nuremberg code of protection was issued to those who enter a clinical trial, who must give their consent and be clear to what they submit. That was not done with the 400 blacks of Tuskegee. In 1969 a health leader told a journalist what he was still happening. The news of a local newspaper goes to The New York Times, and opens an investigation in the United States Congress and only in 1974 the supposed medical study is paralyzed. About twenty years later Bill Clinton apologizes to the survivors and compensates for something that lasted decades, that those human guinea pigs, of being sick transmitted their suffering to their wife and their children.
Q.: What are you writing now?
PSG: A new novel with the tranquility that gives me the million euros. When I finished “Victoria” I was already thinking about another, which will be the tenth.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
