Amir Valle, a writer seduced by “historical anomalies”

MIAMI, United States. – Amir Valle has just published his last two books. Both, from different literary genres, are united in a topic of which there is much left to explore: the political police of socialist Germany, the Stasi.

Your most secret facehis latest novel, addresses a real case of a descendant of German soldiers and investigates the relationship between the Stasi and the birth of the Cuban State Security Organs in the 1960s.

The breath of the wolf. The Stasi, the Berlin Wall and our livesfor its part, takes the journey from the History, with capital letters, of the Stasi, through non-fiction.

Without exhausting his strength to work, Amir researches and writes while leading a prolific company like Ediciones Ilíada since 2016. In addition to the distance of exile, his name does not stop ringing in contemporary Cuban literature.

―In your case, what made you look towards the Stasi with a narrative like Your most secret face?

―For anyone who has lived in a dictatorship, whether left or right, it is almost impossible to live in Germany and not delve into history or not visit those places where the horror of those two monstrosities that were Hitler’s National Socialism materialized. and the communism of the former German Democratic Republic, with its respective political police, which of the two most sinister.

Meeting Cubans who were victims of the Stasi was, perhaps, the first step. Then my human curiosity prevailed: how was it possible that, in a nation that has generated so much humanism and so much beauty in culture, philosophy and universal thought, these two such irrational, inhuman and horrendous phenomena would emerge?

All of this motivated the journalist who lives in me, who was the one who decided to investigate, taking advantage of the fact that those files, those testimonies, and the victims of that perfect political control of a town that the Stasi achieved between 1950 and 1989 were there, at hand, year in which the Berlin Wall fell and, with it, that oppressive system.

―Your book has also come out The breath of the wolf. The Stasi, the Berlin Wall and our lives, which is a historical investigation into the German repressive body. What historical discovery impacted you the most during the research process?

That in pursuing this idea of ​​a better world, horrendous crimes have been committed, very serious violations of human rights and the destruction even of the economic, social, historical and cultural framework that had been consolidated in a natural and organic way for centuries in many countries whose leaders bet for that model of society.

That is, investigate Stasi documents, listen to the testimonies of the victims, delve into those dark intricacies of the history of communist Germany (and its truly sinister connections between the communist parties and the political police of the countries that were called Campo Socialista has allowed me to reaffirm myself in the horror and lies with which that ideology and that system model has been built that, fortunately, until today has convinced a large part of the world of its ineffectiveness precisely through the most effective means: of its absolute failure.

―As in other cases in your literature, the most recent novel has a real character at its center. Did his story find you or did you find it?

―I came across that story in a summary of the content of the files that I reviewed during the months when I was a guest writer at the Stasi Central Prison Museum in Hohenschönhausen: there was talk of German citizens who, when they were able to review the files that the police policy had prepared for them, they discovered that they had been born in Cuba, almost all of them in the 60s, and, for various reasons, they had ended up and grown up in the GDR.

It seemed to me a very seductive historical anomaly, in addition to how Machiavellian it seemed to me that their true origin was hidden for decades, so I started to ask and search in that sense, and one of the researchers from the federal office for the archives of The Stasi gave me the key to locate one of those files.

What came next was meeting that man, a young Stasi officer, who believed he was the legitimate son of one of those senior officers who advised Cuban State Security in the early 1960s. And here I must be honest, because It was the easiest moment of my research: that man opened the door to his life and his memory to me without many obstacles because he seemed desperate not to take his very unique story to the grave, I think under pressure from the cancer from which he would die some time later. , in 2018. And that life story demonstrated to me the old thesis that reality often surpasses any fiction.

―In Germany, where you have resided during your years of exile, how is that repressive force of socialist Germany perceived among the new generations?

―That is one of the aspects to which I dedicate the most time in The breath of the wolf. The Stasi, the Berlin Wall and our lives, the book resulting from my research on the subject. Even today, more than 30 years after the fall of the wall, the supposed “German reunification” is a national trauma with many issues to be resolved, essentially in the economic differences between the territories that were in communist Germany, the GDR, and the who were in what was then called RFA.

The same thing happens with the Stasi: there is consensus about the horror it imposed, but unfortunately, to give just one example, while the laws protect the majority of former repressors by preventing their personal stories as executioners from being used publicly to denounce that horror, The victims have been involved in endless trials for years seeking justice and even more bureaucratic processes to receive the compensation that the State promises for this type of case.

This rarifies the panorama, makes research difficult and, I believe, prevents this enormous wound in Germany’s historical memory from being completely closed. Even so, there is historical awareness about the need not to lose memory.

―You have just published in two very different publishing houses: Verbum, one of the publishing icons of the Cuban exile, and Anaya, a powerful Spanish language publisher. How healthy are Cuban publishing houses in the diaspora?

―I think we are in one of the best moments; and here I speak as editor of Ilíada Ediciones, which I founded in 2016 and where nearly 200 titles by Cuban, Latin American and Spanish authors have already been published, with a single standard: literary quality.

Basically, in the United States and Europe, publishing labels that are very different from each other have emerged in recent years, in an attempt to provide coverage to the incessant literary production both on the Island and in the diaspora.

Each editor, as is known, has his own little book, and each of us who have dared to get involved in this madness in a world where we barely read anymore, we are observed and criticized from many sides. Some of us are branded as elitist, others as too inclusive in terms of quality, several of us for hasty editions, some for publishing books outside of Cuba and taking them to the Island, a few for publishing only writers who are outside of Cuba. cultural circuits within Cuba. Criticism rains down and many times it does not take into account the risk we run or the challenges we must overcome simply to exist.

But the important thing is that today hundreds of authors, many of them of great quality and with excellent literary proposals, are there, visible, and we just need to get closer to them. That, in any case, is a sign of good health.

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