Sep\u00falveda presents this book (translated from Spanish by Denise Kripper) as a memoir written by someone identified as Ilse, a woman raised and brutalized inside Colonia Dignidad, the real-life Chilean cult and torture camp founded by the German Chilean minister Paul Sch\u00e4fer. Ilse recounts her removal from Germany as a child and her transport to the colony, where Sch\u00e4fer and his accomplices dissolved family bonds and enforced obedience through forced labor, surveillance, confessions, and physical and sexual torture. Sep\u00falveda renders daily life with exacting, excruciating detail. Central to the account is the colony\u2019s medical regime, mostly overseen by Dr. Str\u00e4tling, a former Nazi doctor with a wooden leg. She drugged women and men, forced gynecological procedures, and carried out sexualized torture under the guise of treatment (\u201cDr. Str\u00e4tling applied electricity to a part of my body I didn\u2019t know existed\u201d). Ilse recounts the relentless violations of her body and those of other women in a flat, clinical register that offers no relief. The narrative tracks the colony\u2019s deep complicity with Augusto Pinochet\u2019s dictatorship and its shifting relationship to the outside world, including its role as a weapons manufacturer and a detention and torture site for the regime. The narrative ends with Sch\u00e4fer\u2019s arrest in 2005, when Ilse was 54. Only in the acknowledgments do readers fully grasp that this harrowing testimony is fictional, framed by the author as a memoir. As an artistic project, the book is devastating in its depiction of suffering, but its power raises ethical questions\u2014the degree to which it draws on specific historical testimonies is unclear from the brief acknowledgments, risking a manipulation of readers\u2019 trust and an appropriation of survivors\u2019 authority. Comparisons with works such as Leila Guerriero\u2019s The Call (2024), a rigorously reported portrait of torture survivor Silvia Labayru under Argentina\u2019s military dictatorship, are unavoidable and unsettling.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sep\u00falveda presents this book (translated from Spanish by Denise Kripper) as a memoir written by someone identified as Ilse, a woman raised and brutalized inside Colonia Dignidad, the real-life Chilean cult and torture camp founded by the German Chilean minister Paul Sch\u00e4fer. Ilse recounts her removal from Germany as a child and her transport to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5712,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5711"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}