A Critical Companion to Jorge Semprún

Buchenwald, Before and After

O. Ferrán, G. Herrmann, O. Ferrán, G. Herrmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137439710
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Presenting the first English-language collection of essays on Jorge Semprún, this volume explores the life and work of the Spanish Holocaust survivor, author, and political activist. Essays explore his cultural production in all its manifestations, including the role of testimony and fiction in representations of the Holocaust.

PART I

HISTORICAL CONTEXTS AND CALLINGS

CHAPTER ONE

JORGE SEMPRÚN AND THE WRITING OF IDENTITY: FAMILY ORIGINS AND FICTIONAL CONSTRUCTION

Françoise Nicoladzé

Translation by Antoine Bargel

Introduction

Jorge Semprún’s “recherche,”¹ “cette chronique du temps retrouvé qui sommeille en chaque romancier” (the chronicle of time regained that lies dormant in every novelist) (FSS 288), is the ongoing process of interrogating an identity structured by both political engagement and literature. From among the many elements comprising this plural identity, the present chapter is concerned with one of crucial significance: Semprún’s connection to his family as well as his Spanish roots. Linked to the family milieu, a connection to Spain traverses Semprún’s writing, and his narrators make liberal use of his cultural and political heritage.

The memorial work of the author has been, he explains in Adieu vive clarté . . . , deepened by “ces vestiges du passé” (these vestiges of the past) (132)² recovered through writing. The return to his origin on the part of the Semprúnian narrator “mutilé de son enfance” (severed from his childhood) (L’alg 343)³ allows him to reconquer it. This rememoration folds back onto the author, that errant of history who has tried, “dans le déracinement” ([within the] “sign of deracination”) (EV 161; LL 151)⁴ to recover a bedrock of identity. This nostalgic attention for that which came to him from Spain should not be confused with a traditional form of “casticismo,” rejected by Semprún. His roots thus interpellate the readers of this “écrivain français d’origine espagnole” (French author of Spanish origin)⁵ who considered himself to be “traversé” (traversed) (AVC 135) by his mother tongue.

Details related to the family are not transparent throughout Semprún’s work. The reader is invited to collect the scattered pieces of a puzzle that only slowly come together, up through the posthumous Exercices de survie (2012). After the publication of Federico Sanchez vous salue bien, a work that marks the triumphant return to Spain of Jorge Semprún, who, in 1989, was named minister of culture in Spain’s socialist government, much of the uncertainty related to the hesitant unveiling of such details is eased. It is then that Semprún fully assumed autobiography as a genre within his work, a political version of which was first outlined in the original Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez (1977).⁶ It is then, also, that the criss-crossing between the said and the unsaid diminished, giving way to a new literary stage. In 1994, L’écriture ou la vie, in which the “I” presented is also that of the author, is an unambiguous affirmation of the autobiographical pact.⁷ The reader, who has been hunting like a bloodhound for clues about the author’s identity since the publication of L’évanouissement in 1967, is now reassured. Yet, in Semprún’s last novel, Veinte años y un día (2004), the reader is once again confronted with the troubling superposition of real and fictional characters and the ways in which they are seamlessly woven together. The magnificent intertwining of truth and artifice increases the pleasure of reading, but it also demands critical vigilance.

Through the specificity of writing—a temporal compression, a distancing of narrative voices—we shall attempt to identify the nucleus of the Semprúnian narrator’s identity, an identity pursued by a century of violence. Our focus shall be on the reconstruction of a subject in crisis. Starting from formative aspects of his childhood and adolescence, both marked by the Spanish Civil War, Semprún chose a destiny for himself. The writer refused to be dominated by his roots. But he also recognized their influence, paying homage to his father, José María de Semprún Gurrea, and offering a literary tombstone to his mother, Susana Maura Gamazo. Other elements, like the enchanted places of his childhood, “lieux géométriques du souvenir” (geometric sites of remembrance) (L’alg 198), and his maternal tongue, Spanish, also erected themselves “against Time’s faces” (Durand, Les structures 466). The memories called forth by the writer, which keep the author’s dereliction at bay, allow the reader to insert himself or herself into this wonderful memory.

Remembering the Father

Given his moral and political stature, Semprún’s father, José María de Semprún Gurrea, is crucial to his son’s identity. A Christian Republican, his father is absent from Le grand voyage (1963), a book “articulé sur une vision communiste du monde” (“articulated . . . according to a Communist vision of the world”) (QBD 384; WBS 426).⁸ Although Semprún’s commitment to this vision eroded after he read Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) and he realized that “l’horizon du communism, incontournable, était celui du Goulag” (“the horizon of Communism was, inescapably, that of the Gulag”) (QBD 385; WBS 427), he was still in the slow process of leaving the Communist Party when he first began to write, in 1961, about his deportation to Buchenwald. Consciously or not, he was at the time still addressing his fellow Marxist militants. Writing from such a perspective, Semprún would not have been interested in remembering the aristocratic milieu of the Semprún-Maura family, but in engaging the difficult memory of a saga, that of the communist “copains” (friends) (QBD 47), “les nôtres” (our own) (QBD 218). This saga narrates the story of the hero, a man in the Résistance, who manages to survive the concentration camp’s tragic universe. Through an inventive use of writing, Semprún goes beyond the strictly political motivations of the novel. If he makes no references to the biological, Catholic father in this first text, the omission is replaced by an ideal and ideological father: Brecht’s “Party with a thousand eyes.” Indeed, the Party served as the “sein maternel ou paternal” (“maternal or paternal bosom”) (QBD 34; WBS 38) during the cruel hours in the camp and became embedded in the deportee’s memory. Semprún evokes his Spanish comrades in Buchenwald’s clandestine, insurgent organization. They embody the continuity of the antifascist struggle after the Spanish Civil War. Thus, Diego, speaking in Castilian, says, “Bueno, Manuel, has visto?” (“Well, Manuel, did you see?”) (LGV 179; LV 151).⁹ The question arises as the two are strolling outside the liberated camp. They are contemplating their experience, from the perspective of “cette vie au dehors” (“from the outside”) (LGV 181; LV 153), a life about which they had been dreaming for so long behind the barbed wire.

The aural memory of his childhood in Madrid will often emerge, for instance, with the song La paloma, connected to his concentration camp memoirs (EV 41; LL 37) but it is his father’s remembrance that is dominant. In L’évanouissement, the author undertakes a literary task of mourning, in response to the death of his father (1965). While many readers will recall Semprún’s memory of the day his mother proudly brandished the Spanish Republican flag from the balcony of the family’s Madrid apartment, the father too becomes symbolically associated in several instances with the flag of the Spanish Republic. The flag, “rouge, or et violet” (red, gold and violet) (EV 137), hung on the wall of the Saint Prix house in France, where the family took precarious refuge from 1939 to 1945. The vibrancy of its colors were “fané” (faded) (FSS 146) in the Rome apartment where José María de Semprún Gurrea spent his last days. His hope had been to turn Italian Christian democracy against the Francoist regime. Jorge Semprún sees the Republican symbol “lourd de soie brodée” (heavy with embroidered silk) (FSS 148), which he conflates with the memory of his father, unfurl during his first cabinet meeting in his position as minister of culture (1989). It was the flag of Manuel Azaña’s presidential guard brought to Montauban by this lucid democrat on his road to exile and retrieved 40 years later. José María de Semprún Gurrea had, precisely, admired Azaña’s last book.¹⁰

The author who always asserted his specific identity—“le Rouge Espagnol que je n’avais jamais cessé d’être” (the Red Spaniard I never ceased to be) (AVC 217)—to the point of never requesting French citizenship, poignantly wishes one thing in his old age: “Par fidélité à l’exil et à la douleur mortifère des miens” (Faithful to the exile and the mortifying sorrow of my people) (AVC 220), he should be wrapped in the flag of the Spanish Republic after his death. This desire expresses better than any long speech ever could the tension felt over a lifetime and the closeness Semprún ultimately felt to his father, whose attitude he was able to accept in old age.¹¹

The Semprúnian narrator recognizes points of ideological error, as, for example, in the case of José María de Semprún Gurrea’s painful incomprehension of his son’s commitment to the Communist Party. These points can be read implicitly in the characters from Prague in La montagne blanche. In 1938, in his library full of “l‘odeur de la vraie vie” (real life’s fragrance) (213),¹² Karel Képéla’s father offers an analysis of “les deux totalitarismes” (both totalitarianisms) (214) to the impatient and unhearing ear of his Marxist son. This fictional father is “rejeté” (denied) (215) because of his humanist values. He will commit suicide before “le hideux monument” (the hideous monument) (215) of Stalin which dominates the city of Prague from the horizon. As for José María de Semprún Gurrea, he categorically refused to return to Spain as long as Franco lived: his son’s writing recalls this fact with pride. In the father, the reader can see a model for the son and his political engagement. And although their relationship is specular, as if they are mirror images of each other, their differences are not erased.

The father-son relationship resurfaces in Federico Sanchez vous salue bien. The author reuses a variety of elements from other books to describe a riot scene in Madrid that took place during the Asturias Revolt in 1934, which the right-wing government quelled. The author evokes a shooting in Plaza de Cibeles: “fauchant en pleine course l’ouvrier en fuite” (mowing down the fleeing worker mid-stride) (30). That night, José María de Semprún Gurrea comments on the revolt to his sons, rejecting violence of all kinds. However, he also considers it a moral imperative to “se tenir aux côtés des humiliés et des opprimés” (to stand by the humiliated and the oppressed) (31). On Jorge, immersed in this politicized family, the injunction left an indelible mark, recognizable and explaining his future engagements.

Jorge Semprún’s political engagement takes root two years later, with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In 1936 the Semprún family is forced to leave Lekeitio, where they summered, when Gambara’s Italian troops were “piétinant le Pays Basque” (“devastating the Basque Country”) (LGV 239; LV 202). The climate of popular excitement fed the precocious teenager’s interest in politics. As he leaves for France, on the Basque boat called Galerna, he feels he is abandoning the struggle, whereas his compatriots are fighting to “faire l’impossible” (do the impossible) (Soledad 16), despite improbable odds.

Slipping into the general pronoun “on” (“one,” “we”), which perhaps includes both his family and Spanish exiles in general and may also reflect the shame of fleeing, the narrator recalls his oath: “on s’est promis, alors, dans un terrible désespoir enfantin, de rattraper le temps perdu . . . avant de pouvoir tenir sa place . . . dans le même combat non encore terminé” (“and we promised ourselves, in a confused way, in our terrible childish desperation, to make up some day for being so far behind, to recapture somehow or other this lost time . . . to take our places . . . in the same unfinished combat” (LGV 240; LV 203).¹³ The pledge, which the author fulfilled with his activities in the French resistance and his anti-Francoist struggle of the 1950s, is rooted in a political consciousness aroused in him by his father and his circle of friends. The hero-narrator of Le grand voyage thus states that he had to do what he had to do in his 20s. The same idea is echoed in L’espoir: “je savais ce qu’il fallait faire et je l’ai fait” (I knew what had to be done and I did it) pronounced by Manuel, a fictionalized Malraux character and the name Jorge Semprún gave to his resisting hero in L’évanouissement.

José María de Semprún Gurrea, a professor at Madrid’s law school, was named civil governor of Santander by the Republican government. After Franco’s pronunciamiento, he read a passionate address against the rebels over the radio. In La deuxième mort de Ramón Mercader (1967), the author offers a laudatory description of his father. His “haute silhouette au profil aigu et osseux” (“tall gaunt figure, that sharp, bony face”) (283; SDRM 201)¹⁴ is described during a reception on April 11, 1938, anniversary of the Spanish Republic. The event took place at the Hague Legation, Plein 1813. Two wars later, the narrator will try to remember “la trace de cette blancheur évanescente” (the trace of that vanishing whiteness) (AVC 27): the white house surrounded by fragrant magnolias whose pleasant and night-flowering scent his 15-year-old self had so loved. The narrator underscores “la sombre angoisse” (“that anguished melancholy”) (DMRM 283; SDRM 201) felt by the Republic’s chargé d’affaires, that is to say, his father, who held that position, with his family reunited around him, until the fall of Madrid in March 1939.

Elsewhere, the author speaks of the father’s disappointment in the face of the Republic’s defeat, evoking a man broken “sous la violence fasciste et l’indifférence suicidaire des démocraties” (under fascist violence and the democracies’ suicidal lack of concern) (FSS 275). He sees it in an old photo that shows the diplomat quitting his post and reasserting to the press his ideal of “Liberty and Justice.”

The demands of the Spanish Reds, “le pain, le travail, la terre et la liberté” (“for bread, work, land, and freedom”) (DMRM 131; SDRM 101), corresponded with the evangelic message as interpreted by Semprún’s father, which justified José María de Semprún Gurrea’s political choice of backing the Second Republic as a liberal Catholic. However, he ended up being cut off from the Church, which—with the exception of a few heroic priests—sided with the Francoist regime. When Semprún was expelled from the Spanish Communist Party, he himself experienced the same icy feeling of being rejected by the group with which he had closely identified. His father’s moral solitude was somewhat relieved when the Esprit movement offered its support, first when the family passed through France and then in Geneva, where his network of friends provided housing for “the Smala” (the tribe) (AVC 65): the father, his second wife Anita L. (Litschi), and the seven children.¹⁵ Jean-Marie Soutou—Jose María de Semprún Gurrea’s secretary—embodied that fraternal solidarity by marrying Jorge Semprún’s sister, Maribel.

The author gave a speech in Vienna in which he recalled Europe’s spiritual values and mentioned Emmanuel Mounier’s Personalist group: “Mon père, José María Sem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I Historical Contexts and Callings
• Part II On Death and Holocaust Witnessing
• Part III Gender, Genre, and Art
• Part IV The Public Intellectual
• Part V Marxist Aesthetics
• Epilogue Laudatio on the Presentation of the Goethe Medal of the Goethe Society to Jorge Semprún, Weimar, February 2003
• Annotated Works Cited
• List of Contributors
• Index