Customer Reviews

Escape Via Berlin: Eluding Franco In Hitler'S Europe (The Basque Series)

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The average Joe has never heard of Jose Antonio de Aguirre and likely would never hear of him unless he had an interest in the Basque people and culture. However obscure he is to most, Aguirre is an important figure in the modern history of the Basque people because he was their elected leader at the time of Franco's Falangist rebellion in Spain and he was one who managed to escape with his life and to publicize the Basque struggle in the west.
To me, the Basques are the Irish of the Latin world. All through their history, they have fought for liberty against one oppressor after another. And like the Irish, millions of them fled overseas to become people of substance and influence in their adopted countries. The Irish diaspora has produced many great men and women in the Anglo-Saxon world and beyond. The Basque has done likewise in the Latin world and beyond. The Irish finally got their own state in the twentieth century, but the Basques are still waiting for theirs.
Escape Via Berlin sounded to me like it would be an exciting book, full of intrigue and harrowing escapes, and in some ways it is. But in other ways it plods along and gets bogged down in minutiae that occasionally exasperated me.
The book is really three-in-one, with a series of unconnected dissertations at the end. Part One sets the scene, gives the background of the Spanish/Basque conflict, and finds Aguirre trapped in Belgium after the German occupation. I found this section maudlin, preachy, and repetitious.
Part Two is the meat of the story and shows that in addition to being earnest and whiny, Aguirre could often be very funny. In this section, Aguirre assumes the persona of the Panamanian Dr Alvarez with the help of a score of sympathetic Latin American diplomats and after much bureaucratic finagling, is able to leave Germany and its occupied territories via Sweden. Aguirre recounts many incidents during his residence in Berlin and Hamburg that leave the reader wondering just how he ever managed to get out without being discovered. There is the added benefit of Aguirre's first hand observations of ordinary life in Nazi Germany under wartime conditions.
The third part recounts his escape to Sweden, conditions in Sweden, the difficulty of leaving Sweden, then finally getting passage on a ship and having to undergo one last brush with the Gestapo on the way into the North Atlantic and onward to South America. Here he resumes his preachy hand-wringing but manages a few nice slaps at bureaucracy wherever he encounters it.
The reader can stop after Part Three unless he/she wishes to read through Aguirre's musings on a variety of topics, most of which touch on the postwar political dispensation in the world, but especially Spain. The Basque President is quite the thinker, naive in some ways but realistic and original in many others. When reading of Aguirre's thoughts on the role the spread of liberty will play in bringing world peace, I thought of George W Bush and the neocons. When he wrote of some of the reforms he was able to effect in the Spanish Basque provinces before he was exiled by the Falangist victory in the Spanish Civil War, I thought of socialism at its core ideal: a hand up, not a hand out. When he wrote of a meritocratic society with minimum standards of living for the working poor, I thought of a man who was in many ways ahead of his time. But at the end of that appendage I was left wondering why it is that any talk of Basque autonomy never includes those Basque provinces controlled by France?
Though I enjoyed Escape Via Berlin overall, I found that it lacks a unifying theme. Part of that may be the fault of the translators and part of it is surely the fault of the editors who freely admit in notes to bowdlerizing many passages to avoid offending certain unnamed groups. Despite the book's many faults,it should be of interest to anyone who is interested in the Basques.