Stefanie Kremser: “It took me a long time to confront my family’s big secret”

Barcelona"I'm only a chameleon on the inside, not on the outside," Stefanie Kremser writes in If this street were mine, which has just been published by Edicions de 1984. Readers have been able to discover the virtues of the author of Postcard of Copacabana (Club Editor). This time, he has written a memoir in which, through all the houses he has lived in—in Europe, North America, and South America—he reflects on the "constant formation and reformation" of his identity. The chameleon who has lived and transformed himself in Germany, Brazil, Bolivia, and the United States has lived since 2003 in Barcelona, ​​"a capital without its own state," with the writer Jordi Puntí, his husband.

A If this street were mine There are moments in his life that seem straight out of a magical realism novel. At first, he receives a postcard from a childhood friend, Swen, which had been sent to him in Munich in 1993... but it arrives in Barcelona in 2015.

— I grew up with my grandmother Adelina's stories. In Bolivia, people saw life with that magic; they were able to bring together elements you wouldn't normally put side by side. Even with exaggerations, they were believable. Besides all this, I read a lot of Gabriel García Márquez and, in Brazil, João Ubaldo Ribeiro.

Another surprising moment is the meeting with Klaus Barbie, who had been the head of the Gestapo in Lyon during World War II.

— For a long time, I dreamt that I used the peach jam tins I carried in a bag to kill old Klaus Barbie. When I met him in Cochabamba, I was 14 years old, and shortly afterward [in 1983] he was arrested and put on trial. Immediately, Barbie became a taboo in my family: no one spoke of her; she was a total disgrace.

It wasn't the only taboo in the house.

— The reason for taboos is shame. You have to overcome it to break the taboo. It took me a long time to confront my family's big secret. But I can't talk about it... I tell it in the book!

He discovered it by chance, while doing a bureaucratic procedure.

— Yes, shortly after flying to Brazil and discovering I'd lost my permanent residency permit. It was in the early 90s. Now that I'm 52, I've finally been able to talk about it.

She studied at the Film School in Munich and went on to direct several documentaries. In one of the book's funniest anecdotes, she introduces herself as Stefania di Brasile...

— We were preparing a documentary about an Italian duke who ended up saying The Last LeopardWe were telling the story of the last feudal family in Apulia. While we were filming, the duke's virgin was baptized, and the town filled with aristocrats from all over Europe. We were invited to the banquet because the documentary's director was also from a good family, and I, who wasn't dressed well, bumped into a boy more or less my age who said to me:Please. Nicola di Grecia"I replied: "Piciare. Stefania, from Brazil"I didn't realize I was speaking to the son of the King of Greece, and that's why he introduced himself like that. When they told me later, I must have blushed furiously. Nicola must have been offended, and thought, 'Poor peasant girl...' [laughs]"

The book begins in 2011, in the apartment on Princesa Street where he still lives, and from there travels through the houses and countries where he has spent time. But it does so discontinuously, like a jigsaw puzzle.

— There's a continuity in the book, which is that of identity, the story of someone growing up and learning who they are until they discover they aren't who they thought they were. The other thread is discontinuous, that of the houses and countries. The order is as I wrote it, but it's not chronological. Memory doesn't work linearly; it's associative, and one thing led to another until I realized that in each place I'd had two homes: the one before discovering the family secret and the one after.

She crossed through the looking glass like Alice from Lewis Carroll.

— But in a different sense. On the other side there were no wonders.

One of the questions she asks in the book is: Where am I from? She struggles to identify as German.

— I was German until I was seven, when we went to Brazil. There I put down roots, like many around me: I grew up among a group of European immigrants. When I returned to Germany, I spoke the language and seemed like I was from there, but I couldn't hear myself. I was and wasn't an immigrant.

She is a writer, in part, because of an illness.

— I had never spoken about this before writing the book. I had a tropical virus that made me very ill.

He was 25 years old, but they gave him a life expectancy of five to fifteen years.

— That's when I thought I should do something that would last, even though it might seem ridiculous in hindsight... But I started writing, and the change of language, from Portuguese to German, brought me luck, because I began Postcard of Copacabana, which I published in 2000, and during a stay in Bolivia at my grandmother Adelina's house I was cured.

He grew up with his stories.

— Thanks to her, I learned to blend reality and fiction. She was a great storyteller. She told stories to buy time, to avoid talking about the truth. Writers invent stories around their own truth.

Because?

— For not getting completely naked.

The only family home he recognizes was the house in Sao Paulo where he lived for a few years with his parents.

— It's the only room I've gone back to. I haven't wanted to go in again, because I'd miss the past. But there's also a certain magic to knowing that someone else with a different story lives in your old room.