Paloma Sánchez-Garnica: "Goebbels' principles are still being followed today."

At 37 degrees, the metaphor is inevitable: Berlin rose from the ashes and now burns like a phoenix amidst the remains of the most famous wall of the 20th century, airplanes turned into museums, and a traumatic memory transformed into a tourist attraction, a democratic and cultural attraction, all together and at the same time. Paloma Sánchez-Garnica (Madrid, 1962) arrived here for the first time in 1989, when the city was still split in two. In the western part, they spoke of freedom, and in the eastern part, of the people, although by then the border was already cracking and the world was beginning to resemble itself. "I remember it was September when we arrived. People were out on the streets, the weather was good, the shops were overflowing, like the terraces; Berlin seemed to me a beautiful and vibrant city. Afterwards, we left the car, took the metro to the Zoo station, and in one stop, we arrived at the Friedrichstraße station. We crossed that absolutely suffocating and quite disturbing border." It was like traveling back in time. I discovered a city that had stopped 30 years earlier, a gray, monochromatic, slow city. There was nothing in the shop windows; we couldn't afford to spend the five thousand or so pesetas they forced you to exchange for GDR marks to get a visa. There was nothing to buy. It was all very surprising. I remember that on the way back, next to the Brandenburg Gate, we touched the western side of the wall. And my husband said something that stuck with me: "Our children will see this wall fall."

And she continues: "Then, on November 9th, on my youngest son's fourth birthday, at around 9:30 p.m., as I was putting the kids to bed, my husband called me: Paloma, the gates are opening, the wall is falling. I had the historic good fortune of having been there before, just as I had the historic good fortune of being in the Twin Towers in New York two years before the attacks... I would have loved to experience the fall of the wall firsthand, being there, in that city, that night. I would have liked to feel that explosion of freedom, of joy, those sensations that so many people felt on both sides, especially on the East Coast. The shops were open all night so they could see the businesses, so they could see the things they couldn't on the other side." Of that border today, graffiti and a distant murmur of the Cold War remain, fueled more by guides than by bricks and mortar.

Sánchez-Garnica has been linked to this city ever since, to which she owes much of her success. She has dedicated three of her nine novels to it. She began with "Sofia's Suspicion" (2019), continued with "Last Days in Berlin" (2021), which was a finalist for the Planeta Prize, and completed the trio with "Victoria" (2024), which ultimately earned her the award. "I believe Berlin is the example of everything that shouldn't have happened in the 20th century. Not only with Nazism and totalitarianism, but also during World War II. It was a city absolutely devastated by bombs, with a dying population that was later blamed for all the evils of the war. That happened all over Germany, but the focus was here," explains the author.

After the war came denazification, which was a social change. "It was about reestablishing the moral principles that Nazism had shattered. In Berlin, victors and vanquished, the humiliated and those responsible, lived side by side. Fraternizing with the German people was prohibited; treating them with distrust and coldness was encouraged, but that was gradually being relaxed." And there were differences here too. In the West, they thought of the individual. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, "they identified Nazism as an element of capitalism, of fascism. They tried to reeducate society, not so much the individual," he comments.

History, he continues, teaches us what we insist on ignoring: this is who we are. “We are not exempt from the evils of the past, as Primo Levi said. Any threat, any conflict that has happened before can happen to us. We have lived for many generations in a very comfortable, almost docile, bourgeois society, especially in the West. And we can come to believe ourselves free from any brutal conflict. But those conflicts happened here just eighty years ago, in the center of Europe. We have a very fragile memory. We tend not to see the reality of a conflict that is happening a few thousand kilometers from here, in Ukraine. At first it alarmed us, but it has now become normalized, and bombs continue to fall in Ukraine. And civilians continue to die. And they are human beings like us.”

—Is today's propaganda anything like it was then?

—Goebbels' principles are still being followed. It's the basic formula for propaganda, for manipulation. Sometimes it's more perverse and sometimes less so, but in the end, it's the same. And it's not just politicians who use it. There are many who try to lead society in certain directions, and they do so through Goebbels' principles. And this is where the responsibility of citizens comes in to avoid being swayed by easy messages. You have to make the effort to sift through and analyze the information you're receiving. That requires effort, but if we don't do it, we become victims of manipulation.