When My Body Ceased to Be Your Home (Ilse’s memories from Colonial Dignidad)

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By Emma Sepúlveda

Translated by Denise Kripper

Literal Publishing/Hablemos escritoras

In 1961, the same year the Berlin Wall was built, a group of Germans flee their home country and form a colony in southern Chile. Among them is an eleven-year-old girl, Ilse, who leaves on a ship from the Port of Genoa in Italy with her mother, grandmother, and six of her siblings. Her experience constitutes the core of When My Body Ceased to Be Your Home, a stirring, plainspoken novel from Emma Sepúlveda imagining living in what was one of the darkest real life cults of the last century.

The book is subtitled Ilse’s Memories from Colonia Dignidad; its central conceit is that it is a German manuscript, written by Ilse, and translated into Spanish by her adopted granddaughter. While facts about the colony are peppered throughout the book, the story here is essentially told from Ilse’s perspective, like a memoir, but also dramatizes the experience of the many colony women subjugated along with her. We now have an English translation by Denise Kripper.

Ilse was convinced, she writes at the beginning of the book, that she had three fathers: her own biological dad, Holger; God; and the charismatic man who leads the colony and insists everyone call him “Uncle Paul.” Even before the family left Europe, Ilse wasn’t exactly growing up in usual circumstances. Postwar Germany, even nearing two decades since the end of World War II, was still recovering; Ilse’s family falling in with religious zealots was perhaps symbolic of a larger postwar search for belonging. Her father was the type of man who pushed to conceive a child right before sending his family overseas without him, so that his wife “remembered him at all times and carried on with her role of mother and devout wife.”

In Chile, they entered the world of Uncle Paul, an isolated community in southern Chile made up of German émigrés that, belying its name, respected the dignity of absolutely no one. “Many other Germans had made Chile their home after the First World War,” Ilse says. “But this new group was different from those previous settlers. They didn’t want to assimilate. They were there to uphold the superiority of their Aryan race. They wanted to be able to do their work freely without mixing with the natives. They wanted to live away from the world and sow more than seeds; they wanted to plant the word of God.” The roots, though, were political, rather than religious: Uncle Paul’s connections with the Chilean government allowed his colony independence. His purposes were not Godly, but to build an edifice and institution to enable his pederasty.

So despite his professed distaste for all things not Christian and Communistic, Uncle Paul separates families, keeps all the profits of their work, and at one point—unbelievably—engineers a prank killing of Santa Claus near Christmas. His system is the manifestation of the worst sorts of nightmares dreamed up to fight against Communism—forced labor, the destruction of a nuclear family, the perversion or elimination of religion, and the utter meaninglessness of an individual work ethic. Children were told that playing “was nothing but a waste of precious time,” and Ilse’s mother became just another one of her “aunts,” as all the other women in Colonia Dignidad were. Families were forbidden from speaking to one another, Ilse and Waltraud from having a mother and daughter bond. Everyone was isolated so none could question leadership. Public humiliation was the principal technique to discipline insubordination; grotesque torture was, too, including electric prods to genitals and a technique called “submarine,” which we now know as waterboarding.

“Uncle Paul” was Paul Schäfer, whose real life crimes could probably land him in a top ten list of the vilest men of the last century. Several hundred people made up Colonia Dignidad, which also became a locus for gunrunning and political corruption. Schäfer was eventually brought to justice, and convicted of sex crimes, among other felonies, although exactly how that transpired—and how it affected Ilse in the novel—constitute the main drama of the book. Also memorable were the ultimate fates of Ilse’s friends, Ute and Angelika, and the eventual arrival of her father in Chile.

The language throughout When My Body Ceased to Be Your Home,  is immediate and conversational, the kind of storytelling you would hear firsthand from a friend only after they felt comfortable—comfortable enough to tell you everything, slowly unraveling the layers of tragedy. Credit goes to Sepúlveda and Kripper for this straightforward, unpretentious tone; it feels authentic to its narrator while rendering the horror depicted that much more horrible. This reviewer had to keep reminding himself that he was reading fiction—everything felt so true to life, and so consistent with itself.

As Ilse’s story continues, and the cult happenings become more and more depraved, the reader is confronted with the question of how exactly something like Colonia Dignidad could actually happen, and continue, and why anyone would have stayed in such an environment for so long. This is an easy viewpoint to fall into. Cults or cult-like phenomena have been created time and again, and many people have found themselves enmeshed in groups whose values and practices morph and transmogrify. Nearly a thousand people lived in Jonestown. There were more than a hundred Branch Davidians holed up with David Koresh. Time and again people, in search of belonging, find themselves a part of cults, operating on the margins of society or—in the case of Colonia Dignidad—finding some kind of cozy relationship with the country’s leadership. Blame goes to both the leaders of the cult, but also, Ilse says, to the Chilean government. “Chile had been largely responsible for my tragedy,” Ilse says. “It had unknowingly adopted me and ignored my suffering, oblivious to the concentration camp standing right there. It was a country of complicit, cowardly, and evasive people who had refused to rescue me, rescue us.”

Of course, social groups have provided all kinds of evolutionary value for humanity as well as for our development as beings and for our understanding of the world—but, cults demonstrate, not always. Cults, as Sepúlveda’s book explores, are a cancerous version of these groups. Maybe we could not have banded together as we did, could not have contracted socially or built up our complex societies without such groups sprouting up, like poisonous berries in a forest. Perhaps we could not have the good in Christianity without the bad of Colonia Dignidad. Credos and catechisms can of course always be manipulated for selfish ends.

Regardless, the real tragedy is not when consenting adults form such groups on the margin, for whatever reason, but when innocent children—such as Ilse, or the boys that Schäfer molested, or Ilse’s sibling, born in the cult—are victims, and when their lives are ineluctably damaged. “Ilse’s memories don’t belong to a single woman,” the afterword notes. “They represent the stories of many, told in the voice of one.” Sepúlveda deftly captures that sadness, that sorrow, and makes one wish it had never been.

*The book is also available in Kindle

Greg Walklin is an attorney and writer living in Lincoln, Nebraska. His book reviews have appeared in The Millions, Necessary Fiction, The Colorado Review, and the Lincoln Journal-Star, among other publications. He has also published several pieces of short fiction. His Twitter: @gwalklin

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Posted: July 28, 2026 at 10:48 pm