Alfredo Valenzuela I Sevilla, (EFE) that of Otto Engelhardt that the writer Julián Granado has fictionalized in “Todos los Engelhardt”.
“It is more a novel than anything else,” Granado warned in an interview with EFE about his fourteenth book -he has also dedicated novels to historical figures such as Mendizábal and Ferrer Guardia-, entitled “Todos los Engelhardt” (Pábilo) because he does not stop in the figure of “Don Otto of the tram”, as he was known in Seville before the War, but deals with the family saga that the German engineer founded in Seville.
“It is a family that had its curiosities,” said Granado, referring to Otto’s son, Conrado Engelhardt, who was presumed dead in the trenches of the First World War and who, on his return to Seville, would found the Sana Vida laboratory, where, among other products, they manufactured a famous restorative syrup.
Otto Engelhardt was consul of Germany in Seville
Granado has explained that Otto Engelhardt arrived in Seville in 1896 when he had just turned thirty, to direct the Sevillana company, at the head of which he built the Prado de San Sebastián power station, now defunct but which was an emblematic building of the electric company.
During World War I he was consul of Germany in Seville and carried out spy work, although he refused to carry out a clandestine operation to blow up a ship in the Port of Seville with the idea of breaking Spanish neutrality.
That refusal marked the beginning of his decline and cost him until his dismissal as director of the Sevillana company, according to Granado, who points out that the engineer was literally digging his own grave with the articles he wrote in “El Liberal”, directed by the journalist José Laguillo, against Hitler and the rise of Nazism in his country.
The new German consul in Seville who replaced him in office always had him in his sights and at the outbreak of the Civil War demanded his head from General Queipo de Llano, who nevertheless took a few months to satisfy the German demand, since he did not It was not until September 1936 when a picket took Engelhardt out of the hospital where he was convalescing from thrombophlebitis.
In this way he was shot and his remains ended up in the mass grave of Pico Reja, about which the documentary “Pico Reja, the truth that the earth hides” has recently been made, awarded at the Malaga Film Festival.
A neumudéjar-style mansion
Among the biographical curiosities of the engineer, Granado has highlighted that his first wife, a German named Anna, was a friend of Rosa Luxemburg and that Engelhardt himself maintained a correspondence with her, whom he admired to the point of attending the trial against her parents in Germany. murderers, after which he said he felt ashamed of being German, in what was one more step in the distance he had from his country for political reasons, until he ended up renouncing his German nationality.
A well-visible vestige of Engelhardt’s life remains in Seville, a ruined Neumudéjar-style mansion that, under the name of Villa Chaboya, was the engineer’s family home, located opposite Seville on the slopes of the San Juan de Aznalfarache hill. , a town that, together with Camas, connected the tram whose route he designed himself.
Although he has ended up building a novel, Granado has documented Engelhardt’s life and, as part of that investigation, has maintained a relationship with his great-granddaughter Ruth Engelhardt.
Otto’s second wife, a Sevillian with whom he had no offspring named Mercedes Granado, bore the same last name as the author, a coincidence that Julián Granado has also used to introduce himself into his own narration, establishing a self-fiction game. . EFE