Paloma Sánchez-Garnica, writer: "Totalitarian regimes change their faces, not their souls"

Paloma Sánchez-Garnica (Madrid, 1962), winner of the Planeta Prize with 'Victoria' and author of 'La sospecha de Sofía' and 'Últimos días en Berlín', returns to the German capital to celebrate the joint publication of these three novels that share the same setting. "Berlin is Europe's moral thermometer," says the author as she walks through its squares and avenues, reflecting on the historical legacy that fuels her fiction. She believes we have not learned the lessons of the past and that Joseph Goebbels' eleven principles are still present, recycled by politicians and cyber activists through social media and artificial intelligence.

Berlin was the epicenter of World War II and the Cold War chessboard. A territory divided into four zones by the Allies and a dual showcase of capitalism and communism. "For Stalin - and later for Khrushchev - the prosperity of West Berlin, bolstered by the Marshall Plan, was an intolerable provocation," the writer asserts. This led first to the blockade of 1948-49 and then to the wall erected from nothing on August 13, 1961. "Berlin encapsulates everything that should not have happened: the rise of Nazism, the devastation of bombings, the totalitarian fracture, and the subsequent propaganda race for world supremacy," Sánchez-Garnica states.

This landscape of moral and vital devastation is the backdrop for the three novels that Planeta republishes together, which have significantly expanded Sánchez-Garnica's readership. 'La sospecha de Sofía' (19 editions) showcased the Stasi's control over intimacy; 'Últimos días en Berlín' (Planeta finalist, with 17 reprints) narrates the fall of the Reich and the arrival of the Red Army, and 'Victoria' (8 editions) completes the trio with an escape from Nazism that leads to another authoritarianism, the American racism and witch hunts. "Totalitarian regimes change their faces, not their souls, and their fuel remains propaganda," the writer summarizes.

And the lethal magician of propaganda that many emulate today is Joseph Goebbels, "the Nazi minister who popularized cheap radio receivers to inject messages of hate." Today, the "loudspeakers" are free and fit in a smartphone. "The platforms change, not the tactics: appealing to emotions, incessant repetition, creating enemies, extreme simplification, and generating fear," enumerates Sánchez-Garnica, who left X after the Hamas attacks on October 7 upon realizing how viral hate mirrored Goebbels' manual to the letter. "The current speed and reach would have delighted Hitler's minister," she quips.

This parallel serves her to warn about the fragility of memory: "We have spent too many generations in a comfortable bubble; we believe another catastrophic conflict in the heart of Europe is impossible, but history proves otherwise," she says. Ukraine and Gaza are examples of that barbarity being normalized. "We continue with our lives while bombs fall on people who until yesterday lived like us," she laments. She believes that information saturation anesthetizes us and makes us uncritical. "When everything is immediate, nothing is digested, and where there is no digestion, manipulation grows," she warns.

She identifies today's "fascisms of all colors": Trump's 'orange' in the United States and the 'red' in Putin's Russia "of the Stalinist tsar" and in Xi Jinping's China "anti-Western capitalist communism." "Today there are no clear blocks like in the Cold War. The world is led by very crazy, egotistical, and unpredictable leaders with nuclear weapons and formidable propaganda systems." "We live in a precarious balance, in a global conflict whose outcome we do not know. A poorly calibrated algorithm is enough to inflame the mood of millions with the fuel of hate and fear," she laments.

She resists novelizing this tumultuous present. "I need distance. With current events so close, my perspective would be very subjective," she says. She prefers to scrutinize the past to illuminate the present, convinced that fiction is an ethical simulator. "When the brain barely distinguishes between real and narrated experience, putting yourself in others' shoes awakens empathy that a headline cannot achieve," asserts an author who spends months visiting archives, collecting testimonies, and walking the settings of her novels. "The streets speak if you listen to them carefully," she says, walking through the former Stalin Avenue of East Berlin, the legendary Unter den Linden from the Brandenburg Gate to Alexanderplatz, or the roof of the imposing Tempelhof Airport.

The city still offers uncomfortable lessons about freedom, memory, and propaganda. "Berlin is a mirror that reflects an image we do not want to see. And literature, a light that forces us to look at ourselves without filters," she affirms. In times of all-powerful algorithms, reading that image is the first step to not repeating the history that Goebbels, under other names and channels, still insists on dictating "and that so many politicians buy into."

Her fascination with Berlin is not exhausted. She does not rule out another novel centered on the 1920s, with the Weimar Republic humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles oscillating between libertarian creative euphoria and fear of collapse, a prelude to Nazism that would export its "scientific" propaganda. "That decade of unbridled freedom, inflation, poverty, and conspiracy was an extraordinary breeding ground," she notes.

"What we see today on social media was already incubated there, only in cafes instead of screens," she says, acknowledging the educational virtues of social networks but warning of their risks. "Anonymity protects haters and covert propaganda." To counter manipulation, she urges to inform and think. "Cross-checking data requires effort, but it is the only defense against false and interested messages. If we don't do it, others will decide for us." For her, writing and reading "are complementary acts of intellectual resistance." "Writing is jumping to the other side of the mirror" and reading, "standing in front of it."

She remains tight-lipped about her tenth novel. She has written a hundred pages that not even her husband and trusted reader has been able to peek at. After the summer, the film adaptation of 'La sospecha de Sofía', directed by Imanol Uribe and starring Álex González and Aura Garrido, will arrive. "Cinema condenses into an image what I develop in four pages. I only ask the producers to keep the title and the essence."