A captivating story, a fiction anchored in real events but that manages to venture into unusual and surprising situations, well-characterized characters, with distinguishable features, outlined characters and human expressions that at times move, and that they recreate in a reflective and even introspective way, the history that Chileans have lived and suffered over the last half century.
This is the latest novel by the prominent writer Roberto Ampuero, “I will never return to Berlin” (Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2024. 317 pages), which focuses on the twilight figure of the former supreme leader of the German Democratic Republic, Erich Honecker , during his Chilean exile in the 90s, when our country granted him asylum as a refugee after the unified Germany released him from the charges against him, for humanitarian considerations.
It must also be said that this is a novel of reckoning with a past full of divisions, conflicts, tragedy and drama, both in the historical development of Chilean society and in the life trajectory of the author himself, in whose development appear and Human attitudes and behaviors are concatenated away from self-examination, rigor, integrity and truth.
The figure of Honecker that the novel shows is that of a defeated, failed, disillusioned man; but not repentant. A man who in recent years has witnessed the most resounding failure of a political, social, economic and cultural system, which had the arrogant claim to transform human beings and build a society of harmony, abundance, peace and happiness, at the expense of more absolute and sibylline control of practically all aspects of people’s lives. Communism, which would also collapse in the country that had established it in 1917, and that in the following decades had promoted incessant revolutionary activism throughout the world, had become a true secular, secular, soulless or despiritualized substitute, of authentic faith and religion.
A strictly totalitarian regime, which kept millions of human beings around the world subject to its scheme and its dogmas, which in the particular case of East Germany had to incur the delirium of building an insurmountable wall to prevent the escape of the country from its citizens, and which finally succumbed not to external aggression, but to exhaustion, general demoralization and unsustainable internal fatigue. Many East Germans, and also some Chilean exiles in that country, became disillusioned when they observed and suffered the precariousness of the system, its unfulfilled promises, the general climate of suspicion in which daily life took place, the Orwellian atmosphere that invaded the spaces of coexistence, the ruthless authoritarianism of the leaders, the complete lack of freedom, the impossibility of taking control of one’s own life project and, finally, the definitive resignation to living an existence without hope.
Honecker arrived in Chile in 1993 due to different circumstances, one of which was related to the pressure exerted by the left, especially the Communist Party, on the government of the time to grant him asylum, as a sign of recognition for the reception and hospitality that the extinct GDR offered, in the 1970s, to Chileans who went into exile in that country. He lives in the capital commune of La Reina with her wife, Margot, who for years held the position of Minister of Education of the regime, where a daughter from the marriage with her Chilean husband and the grandson of the former leader lived.
In that foothills area of our capital, the final phase of his existence passes peacefully and calmly, sometimes stressed by memories, the late awareness of wrong decisions and the unexpected and uncomfortable presence of ghostly figures, who challenge him and make him see that his ideas Many times they betrayed the orthodoxy of historical materialism, and headed towards paths that strayed from sound doctrine.
For all these questions and reproaches, the already defeated and last Honecker always finds explanations, justifications that allude to the hostility and aggression of the capitalist world towards his country, the need to prevent the flight of its population, the permanent will to ensure the well-being of its citizens, and the enormous demands and sacrifices involved in the arduous task of building socialism.
The work allows us to vividly appreciate the true catastrophe that ideology can produce in people’s lives, especially when it is totalitarian in nature, conditioning worldviews and approaches to reality in such a way that they are finally sacrificed. and crushed the most important human values.
The ideological vision deforms and distorts reality, and also forces it to adapt or conform to the artificial construction of reason with which the leaders and the privileged classes of the system attempt to model, regulate, and regiment it. In this state of things, there can evidently be no room for the deployment of freedom and critical thinking, nor can any prerogatives of any kind be granted to the truth.
What matters is the model, the scheme of ideas, the abstract prefiguration of a perfect society that provides the same ideology, and then reality has to be intervened and led towards the horizon outlined in an improbable future by the ideological imagination, by force of voluntarism, tight social control, little reflection and a type of thinking bordering on the magical.
These ideological constructions ultimately affect, sometimes dramatically, the lives of ordinary people. They condition and even distort life projects, intimate desires, emotions and, of course, the authenticity and integrity of the interpersonal relationships that are established in coexistence.
In this sense, this novel also speaks of loves ruined or destroyed by ideology, with its tragic consequence of broken lives, vital tedium, absence or forgetfulness of meaning, and deep hopelessness. Sometimes, the leaders of a society, the politicians, those who have reached positions of leadership of collective affairs, are unaware, if not downright irresponsible, of the unwanted effects that can be triggered by the implementation of ideas that are far from common sense, from sense. common, of humanity.
It also happens, sometimes, that by promoting goodism, that half-adolescent, naive and well-thinking goodism that invades the public sphere, results are caused in society that directly mean affecting, diverting or destroying lives, projects and dreams.
The characters in this novel embody or are victims of these ravages: a former Chilean exile in East Germany who now serves as a translator for the former ruler in his Chilean life, and a fellow student and girlfriend from that time who became a journalist, who seeks to get closer to the deposed leader to tame and channel his own troubles.
They are beings who have found themselves in the need to reinvent their lives because the system in which they lived, the ideology that inspired it and the regime that supported it necessarily interfered with their projects, their desires, their intimacy, spoiling emotions, frustrating promises and making it impossible for their lives to follow the course that, in their youth, perhaps naively, they had planned and longed for.
The decline of Honecker recounted in this novel, based in a Chile that gradually and not without enormous difficulties, sought to recover democracy and heal the wounds still open due to the disagreements of the recent past, symbolizes the final fall of an idea, of a system, and a historical experience that claimed many human lives, destroyed illusions and ended up burying a utopia.
This novel presents a story that gives realism to that system, and that also shows a human, close, existential dimension of what it means to live in a totalitarian system that not only threatens freedom, but also inhibits the impulse and inner need. nature of people for being creators of their own destiny.