Argentinian writer living in New York. In her new novel Berlin Atomized, set between 2004 and 2063, the three Goldstein children travel from their gated community in Buenos Aires to Uruguay, Gaza, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo.
SP
You’re a writer from Argentina living in the US. Milei and Trump: has their popularity changed your view on what a human being is and needs?
JK
That a great question, but the answer, weirdly, with Milei at least, not so much. Maybe I’m a little self-deluded but I think there’s a lot of racket in the intellectual, literary and academic world in Argentina, and some of my peers seem to think that we are under some kind of threat as a community. But the material — like, strictly Marxist — reality is that the upper and upper-middle classes seem to be doing as good as ever, precisely because Milei is implementing policies that benefit them and their interests. The people who are actually under attack are the middle and lower classes who rely heavily on the state for support and who these intellectual classes, for the most part, seem to care very little about. I felt (and feel) that literature has to be subversive to that kind of upper-class conformism, so I tried to mock it through my characters’ development and worldview as well.
With Trump, it’s a little different. Although I don’t really expect the bourgeoisie to be affected by this at all either — famous last words, remember this if I ever get deported — there seems to be a total reconfiguration of the global geopolitical order that makes me uncertain about where we are heading. People are reimagining borders and talking about population transfers in a way that makes it seem like history is moving somewhere new. And this, maybe is exactly what fundamentally changed for me in terms of writing about the world: the threat of nuclear war and rearmament. It’s an existential fear, and it’s very new.
SP
In Berlin Atomized current geopolitics and popular culture is present and mixed with fictional events set in a near future: scary! Do you remember the first thoughts that led to this book?
JK
I don’t remember my thoughts precisely, but I do know that I wanted to create a world that was a slightly exaggerated version of our present. When I veer into speculative fiction, I do so not in an effort to predict how bad the world is going to be, but maybe to reflect or refract on our contemporary situation. It’s not so much a prophecy, but a personal diagnosis. At the time, some horrible reports were coming out about migrants, about Guantanamo, about certain crimes of war… and I thought it would be a safe bet to point out that these things will probably exist, and get worse, in the future. When you explode reality in a certain way within fiction, it allows you to see it and consider them in a much more direct way.
SP
Your characters, the children of the Goldstein family, grow up in a gated community in Buenos Aires, and then drift over the world, the US, Israel, seeing and experiencing all current crises that have only grown much bigger — is that your personal diagnosis? I am afraid you might be right. When the character Mateo joins the IDF and is in Gaza it is bad, but today the situation seems worse…
JK
I think these characters are seeking out history — being in their position, they could’ve easily stayed home, marry, have children, and play golf. But they sought out a bit more from life, and I would go as far as saying that they move away from the gated community to seek out History, the sense that something can happen around them. As far as what actually happens in the book, it’s definitely more a diagnosis than a prediction. With the Gaza chapter I was thinking about the war of 2014, which was the first one I followed closely, and with the later European chapters I was thinking about the crumbling institutions, the palpable identity crises many of these countries were in. And now here we are — it’s 2025, and we have two very grim, very horrible wars going on, with very little relief in sight. I’d love to be proven wrong, but so far pessimism seems to prevail.
SP
In the book a lot of the danger comes from inside: revolution, rebellion. Why is that, you think?
JK
I’ve been thinking about that question a lot. I think part of this danger comes from the fact that these characters are so bored, living at the end of history, when nothing ever happens, while also striving to recognize something changing in the world around them. Rebellion and violence works here as a kind of response to the flatness of our times, a violence that is very palpable for me, and that I recognize in a lot of young people too — in all sides of the political spectrum. With the kind of disappointment in traditional politics and political structures, the classic channels for youth to have a voice are sort of lost. There’s a desire to set things on fire, to make the world anew, but an uncertainty of what that’s going to look like. Where is this violence going to go? I’m not sure.Sometimes it’s scary.
SP
Why Berlin?
JK
I chose Berlin for many reasons, one of them being that I imagined the Goldstein family to have migrated from Germany to Argentina, and I liked the idea of there being some kind of self-feeding loop of immigration in their history (from wherever they were originally from to Germany, from Germany to Argentina, and then, in the case of Nina and Jeremías, back to Europe and Berlin). There’s also a personal affinity — it’s a city I really love, I’ve studied German my whole life and I felt like I could make a literary claim to it in a way that was harder for me to do with any other city in the world, save maybe Buenos Aires and New York. Finally, I think I was interested in placing the ending of the book in a place that felt both like a crumbling capital of Europe and a threshold between East and West.
