Berlin, February 24, 2025
Dear Pamela,
Last Sunday at noon, we went as a family to vote at the school I can see from my balcony. It’s a concrete block — several three-storey buildings linked by walkways, taking up a whole block of Kreuzberg, here in Berlin. The school opened early, and by nine at night, when we put the kids to bed, its windows were still lit.
Germany’s parliamentary elections have just ended with a victory for the CDU/CSU, the Christian Democratic party led by Friedrich Merz. And now comes the hard part — la vaina, as we used to say in raw Caraqueño — because from today onwards he’ll need to form alliances with one or two other parties to stand against the second-largest force in the Bundestag: the far-right party AfD, heirs to National Socialism.
Sometimes, chatting with other parents at the playground, I’m surprised to hear how many are already thinking about their escape plans, should things go south.
It won’t be easy, especially with the storm Germany is facing: economic recession, skyrocketing unemployment, increasing migration, and Putin’s looming invasion of Ukraine. To make matters worse, Donald Trump’s first diplomatic gestures have been to openly support the AfD and threaten to withdraw American troops stationed here.
In this landscape of uncertainty, our “colleagues” — the other families in the neighbourhood — move about. Sometimes, chatting with other parents at the playground, I’m surprised to hear how many are already thinking about their escape plans, should things go south. Portugal, Réunion Island, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay are all on the list.
This April — the cruellest month — will mark ten years since I last set foot in Venezuela, apart from the occasional news clip, which I now consume in ever smaller doses for the sake of my health. I didn’t want to know, but I still learned that Venezuela’s National Electoral Council has called for new regional elections. By doing so, without properly validating the July 28, 2024 presidential election results before international bodies, they are essentially draining the electoral process of all meaning. Not for the first time in the country’s recent history, of course.
A couple of years ago, my closest friends from the School of Literature at the Central University of Venezuela added me to a WhatsApp group. Of the fifteen people there, only three still live in the country. There are forms of impunity in life that crush you… I don’t know.
Post-truth, “alternative facts,” the falsification of History from the heights of political power — these have devastating effects. We’re already seeing them. It’s like an eclipse that swallows both public and private spaces into a single shadow. And even though impunity is something we grapple with daily, it’s slippery, hard to pin down with words.
In Germany, we are constantly confronted with the past of World War II and the Holocaust. It lingers in the Stolpersteine embedded in the sidewalks, in street signs, in books, TV series, and films. From the day of capitulation to today, it seems to have worked. But the far-right populists see it differently — they treat it as a burdensome weight and offer an easy detour toward paradise: break with the past. That era, they claim, is just a splash of “bird shit” on the pristine page of German history. But the past is never dead, as William Faulkner wrote in a short story — it’s not even past.
All best wishes, Hensli.
Caracas, March 1, 2025
Dear Hensli,
Apologies for the delay — sometimes the days just slip away, one after the other. Thinking about voting, the first image that comes to mind is a line of Venezuelans waiting. Old, young, people in wheelchairs — all of them holding on to the unbroken faith that maybe, just maybe, this time will be different. But the line is nothing more than a ritual of defeat. A mechanical gesture that perpetuates the trap.
You mentioned a party heir to National Socialism, and immediately Venezuela faded into the background. A cold fear took hold of me. Could Nazism really return? Or something like it? I always thought that after so much pain, Germany would never go back there. But as Hannah Arendt writes in Eichmann in Jerusalem, the worst kind of evil is that of fools who follow orders without fully understanding the harm they’re perpetuating.
Maybe literature — this Ort der Erinnerung, this “place of memory” — is the only space left where we can pin down what others are trying to erase.
We know that in Latin America — and especially in Venezuela — the disillusionment with the left has led to a profound conservatism, particularly among the upper middle class. A conservatism propped up by the Christian values of private schools, by homophobia, and by classism. Sometimes I’m afraid that here the tide could completely turn — that resentment might drag us to another extreme. Because, after all, our government was never really socialist — it’s always been a farce much closer to the most voracious form of capitalism.
Speaking of Nazism — do you know the story of SS lieutenant Otto Wilhelm Rahn? He was a writer who worked for Hitler, not out of ideology but driven by his obsession with the Holy Grail. He was gay, and they say he either killed himself or was killed, caught between the pressures of the regime and his own ambition. I wonder if he could be one of our relatives.
Did you have any connection to Germany in your childhood? Any family story that made you wonder about other Rahns? In my case, I didn’t grow up with German culture at home, but I did grow up with tales of my grandfather Eduardo Rahn’s old wealth — his estates, his eccentricities. We still have some black and gold glasses with the words Los Rahn engraved on them. My favorite story is that Eduardo looked so much like Walt Disney that, once, he and my uncles and my dad walked into Disneyland as if they were the children of the dream-maker himself.
Maybe literature — this Ort der Erinnerung, this “place of memory” — is the only space left where we can pin down what others are trying to erase. I agree with you that impunity and post-truth are devastating forces. In Germany, memory has been institutionalized; in Venezuela, meanwhile, it’s fragile terrain, barely sustained by those still trying to preserve it.
T.S. Eliot wrote in his Four Quartets:
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.”
History is not a static archive, but a contested territory. In that sense, literature doesn’t just bear witness — it resists the imposed forgetting.
I hope your children will never have to experience a forced and hurried migration, like so many of ours have. I remember that when I was in Iowa, I’d watch the news from Ukraine on the hotel TV while having breakfast with other writers. Especially at the beginning of the war, when the horror hadn’t yet been swallowed by routine. Later, in Pittsburgh, I read at Alphabet City alongside a Ukrainian poet. He had a poem about his father and John Lennon — it was beautiful — and when he signed a paper with his verses for me, I noticed he had written the correct English pronunciation above some words. It struck me as something so vulnerable and private, as if he was offering me not just his poems but also a small part of his world. He was a sweet and quiet man, sheltered in his past.
Sending you my warmest regards and best wishes.
Pamela
Berlin, March 7th 2025
Dear Pamela,
I hope this message finds you well. Here, winter has left, and the Spree River is rising — but the horizon remains uncertain. The conservative party has begun negotiating its coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), and just two days ago they announced their first big idea: to reform the German constitution in order to invest 500 billion euros in Defense and Infrastructure.
All of this comes as U.S. military aid to Ukraine draws to a close amidst the Russian invasion. For Friedrich Merz, Trump’s televised altercation with his team and Zelensky was a herbeigeführte Eskalation — a provoked escalation. So much money on the table has brought back an issue we thought long buried: mandatory military service.
The cashier wore a name tag over her heart. It read: Rahn. What could she possibly have in common with a foreigner like me?
Until now, I had only met one active member of the Bundeswehr. It was last summer, on a clear day, at a birthday party. After exchanging greetings with complete strangers, I ended up chatting with a kind man, sporting a well-groomed beard and a Hawaiian shirt. Born male in the 1980s, he had been drafted when he came of age. But unlike others who rushed through their service just to get it over with, he had stayed on, building a military career.
He told me he had served in Afghanistan — one of the most recent, and longest, wars involving German soldiers. When I said that with all that experience he could write a book, his face darkened. Soon afterwards, his wife, heavily pregnant, and his daughter called him from across the room, where the music was loudest and most joyful.
I arrived in Berlin in 2015, and I still remember the first time I shopped at a discount supermarket. The cashier wore a name tag over her heart. It read: Rahn. She was a small, soft-featured, blue-eyed young woman with pimples. What could she possibly have in common with a foreigner like me? Probably nothing — and yet, perhaps everything.
On the one hand, there was this local girl, with her whole life ahead of her, working in the capital of her country. On the other, a migrant, already an adult, starting over — for the second time — in a city and a language he didn’t know. Maybe if we traced our family trees back far enough, we’d find a shared ancestor. But for now, it’s just a common surname, mostly found in German-speaking countries.
I packed my groceries into my backpack. The young Rahn held out her hand for my debit card. She worked with swift efficiency, carefully avoiding eye contact. Along with the receipt spat out by the register, she handed me back my card. She didn’t notice that on that tiny piece of plastic, of all the names in the world, was written her own.
Last week, I got a message from a Venezuelan friend who also lives in this city and runs a book club. They meet every two months in an apartment in Charlottenburg — the same district where Nabokov lived in the 1920s and 30s, like so many other émigrés fleeing the Bolshevik revolution.
My friend had bought, in the bookstore of an Argentine émigrée, the anthology 266 Microdoses of Bolaño (Ed. La Conjura, 2024). There, he read my “Homage” to the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, and invited me to the next session of the club, where they’ll be discussing Nazi Literature in the Americas. I gladly accepted.
In that book — a kind of fake encyclopedia — there are two Nazi writers who supposedly lived in the Venezuelan capital. It’s well-known that after WWII, many Nazis crossed the Atlantic and hid in Latin America under false names. Some were even captured.
I hate to be the party pooper, but the name Rahn appears in Venezuelan records dating back as far as 1911. I imagine that the harsh tropical sun has long since eroded the sweet sounds of the German language within the family and its many branches.
I treasure my first memories of social media precisely because they’re tied to discovering Venezuelan relatives with that same surname — even though I’ve never met them in person.
To answer your question: I don’t know if Nazism can really be thought of in terms of departure or return. The year I arrived in Germany, one of the highest-grossing films was the satire Er ist wieder da (Look Who’s Back), based on the bestseller of the same name. Wikipedia sums up the plot: “Adolf Hitler wakes up for the first time since April 1945 in today’s modern, multicultural Berlin, specifically on October 23, 2014, after hibernating for nearly 70 years between earth and hell — perhaps preferring that to suicide.”
Just a few weeks ago, a well-known electric car and social media magnate gave a speech where he raised his arm in a salute eerily similar to that one. Maybe he meant to quote the car magnate Henry Ford, who in his time financed Hitler?
In this matter, it seems that whether we remember him for good or for ill — he’s never really gone away.
Sending you all my best, always,
Hensli
P.S. In 2016, I had the privilege of being a Writer-in-Residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Yesterday, I read with great sadness that they’ve lost a large part of their funding, victims of the new Washington administration’s budget cuts — the so-called “chainsaw” strategy.
Programs like this offer temporary refuge and stability to writers. Do you think it’s right that these kinds of programs should depend entirely on private funding? Is literature still relevant in times of crisis?
Caracas, March 11th 2025
Dear Hensli,
The atmosphere here feels heavy. Maybe it’s just the inertia of the early months of the year, when everything still seems to be settling into place. And yet, there’s something in the air that suggests a coming shift. Or maybe it’s just my own life — now mostly about imagining and moving toward the premonition of a new stage.
These days, in the present moment, watching the red sunsets clashing with a near-electric blue sky from my window — or while on the move — has become a constant gift.
Here in Caracas, everyone hates motorcycles now. They’ve multiplied thanks to countless delivery apps. But me? I love them. I think they changed the country’s economy, gave people jobs, and that there’s no better view of El Ávila mountain or the sky than from the back of a moving motorcycle. At least, that’s been my experience during the long rides I used to take with my father.
The topic of mandatory military service resurfacing in public debate is undeniably unsettling. In history, patterns tend to repeat — with slight variations. I was struck by your encounter with that soldier at the party — the image of his carefully groomed beard and Hawaiian shirt contrasting with the shadow of Afghanistan in his past. I suppose some experiences are not easily told, or telling them involves a kind of human pain that only those of us who love literature too much are willing to survive.
Your story about the cashier named Rahn felt like a scene straight out of a short story. There’s something about that everyday moment — the efficient indifference with which she served you — that perfectly captures the strange relationship between names and identity.
The fact that a surname can appear both on a supermarket name tag in Berlin and in Venezuelan records from 1911 says a lot about the wanderings of names and people. History is never as linear as we’re taught.
It reminded me of a scene in Santiago Gamboa’s novel The Ulysses Syndrome, which I’ve just started reading. In it, a Peruvian migrant in Paris tries to steal from a supermarket, but:
“When he reached the checkout, the cashier looked at him and screamed in horror because dense red drops were falling from his hair… Turns out he had hidden some steaks under the hood of his raincoat, but he waited too long and the blood seeped through the plastic.”
I still laugh when I think about it.
But coming back to your story — the fact that a surname can appear both on a supermarket name tag in Berlin and in Venezuelan records from 1911 says a lot about the wanderings of names and people. History is never as linear as we’re taught. It splinters, branches out, seeps into unexpected places. Maybe, if that young woman named Rahn had noticed the coincidence on your card, would it have changed the way she looked at you?
Speaking of Nabokov — he was one of those émigré writers who absorbed so much of the culture of the countries he lived in that he ended up writing his most famous novel in English while living in the United States.
2666, by Roberto Bolaño, was my great companion during the long blackouts that swept across Venezuela in 2019.
I’m happy to hear you’ll be joining that book club. There’s something beautiful about someone reaching out to you because they’ve read your work. The same thing happened to me with a chapbook I published in Argentina, titled Dead Flowers in Waterless Vases. They wrote to me from a reading group; they used to meet in a park to read and discuss my poems for five weeks straight. It was a reward better than any sum of money.
The truth is that Latin America’s history is marked by the shadow of those fugitives. More than a departure or a return, Nazism seems to operate like a specter that reactivates itself in different disguises depending on the era. As you said — it’s never really left.
About the budget cuts to the International Writing Program — yes, I heard. For me, having participated in 2022, it was a beautiful and enriching experience. It saddens me deeply.
A few days ago, one of our program’s beloved caretakers and assistants passed away from cancer — a curious, funny woman who loved her job. She left behind a little boy, just about five years old.
Trump also decided to cut funding for Fulbright scholarship students. Honestly, I wasn’t all that surprised. I always expect the worst from that orange-skinned, dyed-haired man. I guess now the program will have to rely on private funding — and that’s a dangerous idea because it means its value depends on whoever has the money to decide what deserves support and what doesn’t.
I believe that in times of crisis, literature isn’t just relevant — it’s essential. Not as a luxury, but as refuge, as a tool for memory and resistance.
But of course, the deeper question is: who believes in that value enough to sustain it?
At least now we know that President Trump sees “America” as a business — and that trumps (pun intended) any human right, freedom, or art.
Sending you a warm hug from this side of the world.
With affection,
Pamela
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