2023-06-22 14:41:32
the danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard He once said that life can only be understood if one looks back and reviews the past, but that to be lived one must always go forward. This little mantra is the ignition point of the suspense novel with which the writer and journalist Monica Subietas debuted in the genre of fiction: ‘the forest in silence‘, which has just landed in its Spanish format after reaping great success in its publications in German (already in its second edition) and Polish.
The history, fragmented into three temporal acts (past, present and future), revolves around Gottfried Mesmermanager of a small place called Coffee luck. Despite being presented as a very calm character, his life hides a series of tragedies that left a great emotional mark on him, including the suicide of his father, Herman Messmerwhen he was only seven years old. His past and present come together the day he receives an unexpected inheritance from his mother: a cane along with a canvas and a letter. The letter details Herman’s last will, who asks his son to find the rightful owner of the work and the cane to return what is his.
Gottfried’s search will lead to an emotional exploration of his past, moved by his father’s last wishes and by the fear of not being able to close a wound that is eating away at him. But as the author makes clear, he “he needs to conclude that chapter of his life. Because the past always returns if it is not well closed».
The artistic looting of World War II
The main plot that occupies the protagonist will be accompanied by a series of substories that will end up causing a latent dispute that is never without tension, greed and suspense. Enlivened by Kafi Glück, inspired by El Local de Zurichas the link that intertwines them, all these conspiracies will end up leading to Gottfried’s journey, putting into play the true role of the canvas and the mystery surrounding the death of his father, directly related to the great looting of more than 600,000 works that the Nazis carried out during the Second World War. “A full-fledged degenerate art: the little that has been found is located in private collections, while the rest of the works ended up lost or burned,” the writer confesses. The reader thus enters the history of the canvas ‘Waldinneres‘, which serves as an excuse to revisit some of the facts of the war.
And it is that the element that gave inspiration to this novel was the Inform Bergercommissioned by the Swiss government to a commission of experts to investigate the true role that Switzerland had taken in World War II, hitherto unknown and the main cause of the social confusion of his fellow citizens. After an exhaustive investigation, the commission determined that although Switzerland had not mobilized an army during the war, it did negotiate with the Germans to close its borders to Jewish refugees from 1942 to 1944.
More than 600,000 works of art were looted by the Nazi army in World War II
Know the past to understand the present
However, what shocked the author was “the liberation process that Switzerland went through after discovering the truth. They did not excuse their past, but they didn’t regret it either. but they left it behind, that message was what I wanted to make clear to the readers ». “They know that what was possible was done, given the context, and they went on with their lives without seeing it as something taboo but telling it to the current generations so that they have an open mind and prevent history from repeating itself», he concludes.
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