Los alemanes by Sergio del Molino

Madrid. Alfaguara. 2024. 322 pages.

Spanish writer Sergio del Molino won the Alfaguara Novel Prize for 2024 with Los alemanes. The title refers to Germans who had been living in Cameroon, a German colony in Africa, until 1916. To escape from advancing Allied forces during the First World War, they had sought refuge in Equatorial Guinea, a Spanish possession at the time. From there, they made their way to Spain, where many settled in Zaragoza. In his afterword, del Molino notes that the saga of the Germans of Zaragoza inspired him, and uprootedness and identity have been recurrent themes in his works.

Del Molino’s fictional work presents the lives of two German immigrant families in Zaragoza with the historical backdrop of the two world wars and the Spanish Civil War. Some of the Germans had supported and fought with Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s during World War II. The novel explores the complexities of this history and how it impacts the lives of the novel’s fictional characters in the present. 

The story is told in first person by four narrators whose stories overlap one another. The two main voices are those of Fede Schuster, a literature professor in Regensburg, Germany, and his sister Eva, a rising local political figure in Zaragoza with national aspirations. Berta Klein, a terminally ill physics professor in Hanover, Germany, is the third voice. A childhood friend of the Schuster siblings, she had a special relationship with their recently deceased brother, Gabi, who in life had been an iconoclastic rock star. Gabi, who bucked societal norms throughout his life, had been physically abused as a teenager by his father, Juan Schuster. The fourth voice in the novel is that of Ziv Azoulay, an Israeli speculative investor and Nazi hunter. Ziv, along with his brother Gal, tries to blackmail influential local politicians of Zaragoza so they will approve their purchase of the city’s soccer club. The brothers have unearthed compromising information about Juan Schuster’s past.

The novel opens with Gabi’s burial ceremony at the German cemetery in Zaragoza, where Eva, Federico, and Berta reflect on their relationship with Gabi and revisit their roots and past friendship. What follows is a series of events that makes them take stock of their lives, their family histories, and the histories of their original and adopted homelands, something that will change them forever. 

Sergio del Molino has produced a thought-provoking, suspenseful, and moving novel that critically examines national, family, religious, and academic narratives, illustrating the complexities of human history and identity.

Edward Waters Hood
Northern Arizona University