“Berlin is a city where everything has happened”

The writer Paloma Sánchez-Garnica, winner of the 2024 Planeta Prize with the novel ‘Victoria’, places the action in Berlin after the Second World War and in the south of the United States in the 1960s: “Berlin is a city in the that everything has happened.”

At a press conference after the 2024 Planeta Prize gala, he explained that after ‘Last days in Berlin’, a Planeta finalist in 2021 and which ended with the end of the Second World War, he wanted to explore what happened to the citizens in that Berlin prior to the construction of the wall.

“Every corner of Berlin has a story,” stressed Sánchez-Garnica, who combined his passion for the history of the German capital with the history of the United States and what happened in Tuskegee with a clinical study of the black population on the evolution of syphilis marked by racial prejudices.

He has stated that, once the Nuremberg code on experimentation on human beings was established, “terror continued” at Tuskegee, with a study in which the patients did not know that they were infected with syphilis and in which they were not treated but who watched how they evolved.

Sánchez-Garnica has explained that New York in the 60s also appears in the novel to show “the cracks in the cradle of freedom and rights” with racial segregation and McCarthyism.

NOVEL FROM 1946 TO 1961

The Madrid novelist traces the story through three women, two sisters and the daughter of one of them, who try to survive in a destroyed Berlin occupied by the victors, and who encounter two men who determine “her life and destination”.

The arc of the novel goes from 1946 to 1961, with the construction of the wall in Berlin, he has stressed that the characters are “very powerful” and the love story, also the filial one, that happens in the novel is a path of healing and redemption.