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I B E R I A N A N D L AT I N A M E R I C A N S T U D I E S
THE ARTS, LITERATURE AND IDENTITY

Daniela Omlor • Jorge Semprún: Memory’s Long Voyage

Jorge Semprún is a leading writer from the first generation of Spanish
Civil War exiles, yet studies of his work have often focused solely on his
literary testimony to the concentration camps and his political activities.
Although Semprún’s work derives from his incarceration in Buchenwald
and his expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party in 1964, limiting the
discussion of his works to the autobiographical details or to the realm of
Holocaust studies is reductive. The responses by many influential writers
to his recent death highlight that the significance of Semprún’s work goes
beyond the testimony of historical events. His self-identification as a
Spanish exile has often been neglected and there is no comprehensive
study of his works available in English. This book provides a global view
of his oeuvre and extends literary analysis to texts that have received little
critical attention. The author investigates the role played by memory
in some of Semprún’s works, drawing on current debates in the field of
memory studies. A detailed analysis of these works allows related concepts,
such as exile and nostalgia, the Holocaust, the interplay between memory
and writing, politics and collective memory, and postmemory and identity,
to be examined and discussed.

Jorge Semprún
Daniela Omlor is the Queen Sofía Junior Research Fellow at Exeter College,
University of Oxford. Memory’s Long Voyage

Daniela Omlor
ISBN 978-3-0343-0821-2

www.peterlang.com Peter Lang

I B E R I A N A N D L AT I N A M E R I C A N S T U D I E S
THE ARTS, LITERATURE AND IDENTITY

Daniela Omlor • Jorge Semprún: Memory’s Long Voyage

Jorge Semprún is a leading writer from the first generation of Spanish
Civil War exiles, yet studies of his work have often focused solely on his
literary testimony to the concentration camps and his political activities.
Although Semprún’s work derives from his incarceration in Buchenwald
and his expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party in 1964, limiting the
discussion of his works to the autobiographical details or to the realm of
Holocaust studies is reductive. The responses by many influential writers
to his recent death highlight that the significance of Semprún’s work goes
beyond the testimony of historical events. His self-identification as a
Spanish exile has often been neglected and there is no comprehensive
study of his works available in English. This book provides a global view
of his oeuvre and extends literary analysis to texts that have received little
critical attention. The author investigates the role played by memory
in some of Semprún’s works, drawing on current debates in the field of
memory studies. A detailed analysis of these works allows related concepts,
such as exile and nostalgia, the Holocaust, the interplay between memory
and writing, politics and collective memory, and postmemory and identity,
to be examined and discussed.

Jorge Semprún
Daniela Omlor is the Queen Sofía Junior Research Fellow at Exeter College,
University of Oxford. Memory’s Long Voyage

Daniela Omlor

www.peterlang.com Peter Lang

Jorge Semprún
Iberian and Latin American Studies:
The Arts, Literature and Identity

Volume 5
Edited by Professor Francis Lough
Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Birmingham

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
 Daniela Omlor

Jorge Semprún
Memory’s Long Voyage

PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-
bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet
at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014933446

Cover image: Chris Reid, Buchenwald Gate (2013).

issn 1662-1794
isbn 978-3-0343-0821-2 (print)
isbn 978-3-0353-0602-6 (eBook)

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2014

Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
[email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the
permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

Printed in Germany
Contents

Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 1

Chapter 1
Childhood, Exile and Nostalgia in L’Algarabie, Adieu, vive
clarté… and Veinte años y un día 33

Chapter 2
The Importance of Guilt and Testimony for the Evocation
of the Holocaust in Le Grand Voyage, Quel beau dimanche! and
Le Mort qu’il faut 73

Chapter 3
Memory and Writing in L’Évanouissement and L’Écriture ou la vie 105

Chapter 4
The Memory of Politics and the Politics of Memory:
Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez and Netchaïev est de retour 139

Chapter 5
Memory and Identity in La Deuxième Mort de Ramón Mercader
and La Montagne blanche 173

Conclusion 205

Bibliography 213

Index 227
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

Memory, literature and the self are three notions that are intimately inter-
twined in the writing of Jorge Semprún. Much of the timeless value of
his narratives stems from this fact and yet the mutual dependence of all
three makes their discussion dif ficult. Semprún, a prolific writer of novels
and film scripts, wrote both in French and Spanish. He was also a politi-
cian, first as an active Communist and then as the independent Minister
of Culture in the Socialist cabinet of Felipe González from 1988 to 1991.
Born in Madrid in 1923, he was the son of José María de Semprún y
Gurrea and Susana Maura y Gamazo, the fourth of seven children. His
mother was the daughter of Antonio Maura y Montaner, a statesman and
several times Prime Minister during the Restoration monarchy of Alfonso
XIII at the beginning of the twentieth century, who died in 1925. Miguel
Maura Gamazo, the first Minister of the Interior for the Second Republic
in 1931, was Semprún’s uncle. His father, a liberal Catholic lawyer, was first
made civil governor of Toledo by Maura Gamazo, before he was transferred
to Santander. Breaking with his more moderate brother-in-law Semprún
Gurrea supported the Popular Front government elected in 1936.
The death of his mother in January 1932 represented the first experience
of bereavement in Semprún’s life, soon to be followed by the experience
of exile. The outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936 surprised Semprún’s
family on holiday in Lekeitio in the Basque country, from where they f led
to France on a trawler, until the father was given a diplomatic post at the
Republic’s delegation in The Hague. Shortly before Franco’s victory the
family returned to France as refugees. Semprún, together with his brother
Gonzalo, became a boarder at the prestigious Lycée Henri IV in Paris at the
end of February 1939 and planned to study philosophy at the Sorbonne.
However, the family’s precarious financial situation meant that this was
impossible and the plans to attend university soon had to be aborted. After
the French defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1940 Semprún joined
2 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

the Communist party and later became an active member of the French
Resistance. In October 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo and tortured.
Subsequently, he was deported to the German concentration camp of
Buchenwald. As a Communist, he could rely on a secret underground net-
work of comrades in the camp and was fortunate to be given a task in an
of fice after having been registered as a skilled worker (a stucco plasterer),
even though he had insisted that he was a philosophy student. A further
advantage aiding his survival was the fact that he spoke f luent German
having been brought up by German-speaking nannies. Upon the liberation
of the camp on 11 April 1945 by General Patton, Semprún was repatriated
to France. Like many exiles he did not think the Antifascist struggle was
over and continued his involvement with the Partido Comunista Español
(PCE), the Spanish Communist Party, becoming a member of its Central
Committee in 1954. The year before he had undertaken his first clandestine
journey to Madrid, later becoming an undercover leader, an assignment for
which he used the pseudonym Federico Sánchez among others. The return
to his home country after an enforced absence of almost twenty years was in
many ways an eye-opener for Semprún. He realized that the party’s political
strategies of the pre-war period were no longer applicable to the situation on
the ground. On many levels, Spanish society had evolved, particularly due
to an improved economy. Attempts to stage a national strike, the Huelga
Nacional Pacífica, by the PCE in 1959 were unsuccessful and a new strategy
had to be sought to reach out to the masses and to respond to their concerns.
Semprún began to favour Eurocommunism instead of a Stalinist state. In
the long run this change of mind led to a divergence in opinion with his
party comrades, as a result of which Semprún lost favour with the Central
Committee of the party, in particular with the General Secretary Santiago
Carrillo. This disagreement over political strategy brought about the formal
expulsion of Semprún and Fernando Claudín from the party in 1964,
although Semprún had already been recalled from his duties in Spain in
1962. Ef fectively, this constituted the end of Semprún’s Communist career
and the disappointment made him turn his back on politics; embarking
on a career as a writer instead, he published his first novel Le Grand Voyage
in France in 1963. Yet he returned to politics after the death of Franco in
1975, once the Spanish Transition to democracy had been completed, as
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 3

Minister of Culture from 1988 to 1991. As an independent candidate in

Felipe González’s Socialist PSOE government he lost his post in a reshuff le.
Prior to this, Semprún had accused Vice-President Alfonso Guerra heavily
of corruption and nepotism. After this brief political interlude Semprún
returned to Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life, never expressing
the wish to return to live in Spain, until his death in 2011. He had become
the first foreign member of the Académie Goncourt1 in 1996.
Semprún was an extremely prolific writer. Le Grand Voyage (1963)
was followed by, L’Évanouissement (1967), La Deuxième Mort de Ramon
Mercader (1969), Autobiografia de Federico Sánchez (1977), Quel beau
dimanche! (1980), L’Algarabie (1981), La Montagne blanche (1986),
Netchaïev est de retour (1987), Federico Sánchez vous salue bien (1993),
L’Écriture ou la vie (1994), Adieu, vive clarté… (1998), Le Mort qu’il faut
(2001), Les Sandales (2002), Veinte años y un día (2003). In addition,
Semprún wrote Montand, la vie continue (1983), a biography of his friend,
the actor, Yves Montand, the play Le Retour de Carola Neher (1998), com-
missioned for the Kunstfest Weimar in 1995, and published several of his
speeches and essays, as well as L’Homme Européen (2005) together with
Dominique de Villepin. His work in film and television includes almost
twenty scripts, for example La guerre est finie (1966), Z (1968) and L’Aveu
(1970). Semprún also wrote and directed the documentary Les Deux
Mémoires (1974). Posthumously, the unfinished Excercises de survie was
published in 2012. His prose is extremely dif ficult to classify and we shall
return to the question of genre later.
Several works of criticism of fer useful takes on Semprún’s writing;
however, in addition to the lack of a thorough and global analysis of
Semprún’s works in English, another factor greatly motivated the present
study: Semprún’s oeuvre has too often been limited to the testimony of
the concentration camps.2 Although this issue is clearly at the centre of

1 This committee consists of ten elected members who award the prestigious Goncourt
prize each year. Members have to write in French but do not have to be French
nationals.
2 Exceptions are Jack Sinnigen, Narrativa e ideología (Madrid: Nuestra Cultura, 1982),
and, more recently, Gina Herrmann, Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in
4 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

his writing, the remainder of his texts have been neglected in favour of
Le Grand Voyage, Quel beau dimanche!, L’Écriture ou la vie and Le Mort
qu’il faut, which are generally considered to be autobiographical. In criti-
cal analyses these four texts have mostly been treated as a separate corpus
which could be discussed in isolation from the rest of Semprún’s production
– the emergence of Holocaust studies may perhaps have made an exami-
nation of these works particularly attractive for researchers. Yet, despite
their dif ferent nature it can be argued that the entirety of Semprún’s works
is intimately connected. Novels like L’Évanouissement and Netachaïev est
de retour deserve as much critical attention as other books and need to
be related to the overarching principles of Semprún’s published writing.
Additionally, what stands in the way of this comprehensive survey of his
works is, in most cases, a preoccupation with national canons and genre.
On the one hand, critics invariably find that they need to discuss Semprún
either as a Spanish writer or as a French writer. On the other hand, the
generic classification of his writing is by no accounts straightforward. Given
the centrality of these issues they deserve some commentary.
So far, Semprún’s work has been the object of several literary studies in
German and French. María Angélica Semilla Durán in 2005, for example,
set out to examine his autobiographical works ‘dans le triple but de décrire
sa mise en forme, de rétablir et d’expliciter les liens entre la vie et la représen-
tation, et de dévoiler sa signification symbolique’.3 In order to do this she
draws on a particular psychoanalytic framework of interpretation in which
the relationship between Semprún and his mother plays a highly significant
role. In German, Wilfried Schoeller has produced a classic monograph,4
updating Lutz Küster’s more exhaustive work, which forms a good start-
ing point but, due to its publication date of 1989, does not incorporate

Spain (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010) which concentrate on Semprún’s

Communist past and political memories.
3 María Angélica Semilla Durán, Le Masque et le masqué: Jorge Semprun et les abîmes
de la mémoire (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2005), 13.
4 Wilfried Schoeller, Jorge Semprún: Der Roman der Erinnerung (Munich: Text und
Kritik, 2006).
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 5

important later works by Semprún.5 More recently, Monika Neuhofer and

Ulrike Vordermark have presented in-depth studies of the concentrationary
experience within Semprún’s texts.6 Jaime Céspedes Gallego has also pub-
lished a first volume on Semprún’s oeuvre, with the aim of ‘desmystifying’
the author’s ‘imagen hagiográfica’.7 Only very concise critical analyses have
appeared in English. Thus Colin Davis has brief ly examined Semprún’s
literary treatment of the concentration camp experience,8 and, together
with Elizabeth Fallaize, the return of memory in Semprún’s La Montagne
blanche.9 Ursula Tidd’s articles, ‘The Infinity of Testimony and Dying in
Jorge Semprun’s Holocaust Autothanatographies’ and ‘Exile, Language,
and Trauma in Recent Autobiographical Writing by Jorge Semprun’,
provide useful insights with regard to some of Semprún’s work and its
relationship to trauma, as does Ofelia Ferrán’s chapter ‘Jorge Semprún:
Trauma and Memory’.10 Susan Rubin Suleiman highlights some of the
functions of memory in the testimonial works of Semprún in ‘Revision:
Historical Trauma and Literary Testimony: The Buchenwald Memoirs of
Jorge Semprun’.11

5 Lutz Küster, Obsession der Erinnerung: Das literarische Werk Jorge Semprúns
(Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1989).
6 Monika Neuhofer, ‘Écrire un seul livre, sans cesse renouvelé ’: Jorge Sempruns literarische
Auseinandersetzung mit Buchenwald (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2006) and
Ulrike Vordermark, Das Gedächtnis des Todes: Die Erfahrung des Konzentrationslagers
Buchenwald im Werk Jorge Semprúns (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008).
7 Jaime Céspedes Gallego, La obra de Jorge Semprún: Claves de interpretación Vol. 1:
Autobiografía y novela (Bern: Peter Lang, 2012), 9.
8 Colin Davis, ‘Understanding the Concentration Camp: Elie Wiesel’s La Nuit and
Jorge Semprun’s Quel Beau Dimanche! ’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 28
(1991), 291–303.
9 Colin Davis and Elizabeth Fallaize, ‘Recalling the Past: Jorge Semprun’s La Montagne
blanche (1986)’, in Colin Davis and Elizabeth Fallaize, French Fiction in the Mitterrand
Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61–82.
10 Ofelia Ferrán, ‘Jorge Semprún: Trauma and Memory’ in Working Through Memory:
Writing and Remembrance in Contemporary Spanish Narrative (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 2007), 66–101.
11 Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 132–158.
6 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

Regarding the matter of Semprún’s Spanish and French belonging, the

following facts have to be taken into account: Semprún’s first literary work,
Le Grand Voyage, was written and published in French. Most of his other
works have also been written in French with the exception of Autobiografía
de Federico Sánchez and Veinte años y un día. Federico Sánchez vous salue
bien, or Federico Sánchez se despide de ustedes as it is called in Spanish,
represents a special case since both the French and the Spanish version
appear to have been written by the author.12 However, this is an exception,
since Semprún has refrained from translating any other works himself.13
In terms of a linguistic preference, French is thus clearly given precedence
over Spanish. One factor was certainly that Semprún had moved to France
at a young age and underwent most of his schooling there. Nevertheless,
instead of jumping to hasty conclusions,14 the predominance of French
can also be explained by the specific historical circumstances under which
Semprún was producing his first work. As he himself has pointed out, he
began to write Le Grand Voyage while lying low in Madrid during his years
of clandestinity.15 Writing in French seemed a potential advantage to him
in case the documents were discovered by the police. Semprún revindicates

12 Semilla Durán, Le Masque et le masqué, 9. She rightly points out that neither the
French nor the Spanish version of the book mentions a translator.
13 For an in-depth analysis of this auto-translation, see Patricia López-Gay, ‘La autotra-
ducción literaria: traducibilidad, fidelidad, visibilidad. Análisis de las autotraducciones
de Agustín Gómez-Arcos y Jorge Semprún’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Université
Diderot-Paris 7 and Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 2008).
14 Thus Tidd states: ‘The impact of these losses [of the mother and of the Spanish home]
is crucial to the autobiographical narrating subject’s relationship to language and writ-
ing because they establish a traumatized relationship to the Symbolic within a largely
francophone autobiographical space. Hence Spanish, Semprun’s “langue maternelle”,
is abjected in a Kristevan sense as a symbolic system that threatens the integrity of
the francophone subject in favour of French, which he adopts from the writing of
Le Grand Voyage (1963) onwards to relate his experiences of exile and Buchenwald’.
Ursula Tidd, ‘Exile, Language, and Trauma in Recent Autobiographical Writing by
Jorge Semprun’, The Modern Language Review, 103.3 (2008), 697–714: 697–698.
15 Jorge Semprún, L’Écriture ou la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 312. This will be dis-
cussed in detail in Chapter 4.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 7

his choice of French for Le Grand Voyage in Adieu as an act of appropriation

of his foreigness, as will be discussed in Chapter 1. Regardless of whether
this ref lects an accurate judgement of the situation, other reasons may, in
addition, have pushed Semprún to choose French over Spanish. For exam-
ple, a publication of his first book in Spain during Franco’s lifetime was
unfeasible, as he himself explains in L’Écriture ou la vie.16 He also points
out that French, ‘c’était la langue de mon adolescence, dans laquelle j’avais
vécu cette histoire – là’.17 Furthermore, the French market was prepared for
works which related the experience of the concentration camps and the
readership was already familiar with the writings of other Resistance fight-
ers such as Robert Antelme and David Rousset who had started publishing
their memoirs of the camps as early as 1946.18 As Annette Wieviorka has
indicated, the 1960s mark a change of direction in public perception of the
Holocaust in France, where the coverage of the Eichmann Trial renewed
interest in the history of the victims of the Nazis.19 The same cannot be
said for the Spanish-speaking market. In order to enhance his chances of
publication, Semprún might therefore have naturally gravitated towards
the French language, and from the moment that the favourable reception
of his first publication established his name in literary circles in France, it
would have been easier to write for an audience that was already familiar
with his work. In the case of Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, it has equally
been argued that since it deals with a specific Spanish context and was not
least addressing Santiago Carrillo and other PCE functionaries directly in
its criticism, the choice of Spanish seems self-evident.20 It should also be

16 Jorge Semprún, L’Écriture, 312.

17 Jorge Semprún and Franck Appréderis, Le langage est ma patrie: Entretiens avec
Franck Appréderis (Paris: Libella, 2013), 29.
18 David Rousset’s testimonies L’Univers Concentrationnaire and Les Jours de notre mort
were published in Paris in 1946 and 1947 respectively. Robert Antelme’s account
L’Espèce Humaine appeared in Paris in 1947.
19 Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2006), 56.
20 Küster for example writes: ‘Die Wahl der Sprache erklärt sich aus dem Thema:
Semprún schildert und ref lektiert hier seine Erfahrungen in und mit dem PCE;
er wendet sich damit einem Bereich seiner Vergangenheit zu, der aufs engste vom
8 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

pointed out that critics tend to express their view of Semprún’s Spanish or
French af filiations by either accenting his surname or not, making it follow
either Spanish or French orthographical rules.
However, whether the choice of language alone should be a criterion
for the classification of an author is questionable, especially since Semprún
valued the epithet of bilingual writer. Famous examples, such as Franz
Kaf ka as a Czech Jew who wrote in German, withstand our desire for easy
categorisation. Equally, after the Second World War, poets like Paul Celan
and Nelly Sachs continued to write in German, even though they would
not necessarily have referred to themselves as German poets but perhaps
Jewish poets who wrote in German. Multilingual authors like Vladimir
Nabokov, who wrote and published both in Russian and in English, high-
light the shortcomings of the traditional convention of classifying authors
according to nationality and language use, since the only sensible way of
referring to these writers is by hyphenating their status of belonging. Thus,
Nabokov, for example, is referred to as a Russian-American writer. In the
Spanish realm, cases like Fernando Arrabal or Luis Buñuel underscore the
fact that one’s working language does not necessarily define one’s national or
linguistic identity. With specific reference to Nabokov and Kaf ka, George
Steiner illuminates this controversy by declaring that all modern writers
are characterized by a feeling of unhousedness comparable to an existential
exile, even if, like Kaf ka, they did not live in geographical exile.21 Of course,
it could be argued that this feeling is in fact linked to the factual experience
of exile, as in the case of Nabokov, and that Kaf ka experienced isolation as
a Jewish German-language writer in Prague. In our postcolonial era, when
transnationalism and multilingualism have become conscious features

Umgang mit der spanischen Sprache geprägt war’ [The choice of language can be
explained through the topic: Semprún describes and ref lects on his experiences in
and with the PCE, he thus turns to a sphere of his past, that was intimately inf luenced
by the uses of the Spanish language]. Lutz Küster, Obsession der Erinnerung: Das
literarische Werk Jorge Semprúns (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1989), 145; all trans-
lations are the author’s, unless otherwise stated.
21 George Steiner, ‘Extraterritorial’ in Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the
Language Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 14–21: 21.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 9

of many art forms, it should be obvious that Semprún cannot simply be

pigeonholed as a further francophone author, particularly if this categoriza-
tion is at odds with his own view of himself. Interestingly, Ángel Loureiro
discusses Semprún’s French texts precisely in the context of ‘replacing the
subject in modern Spain’ and sees no contradiction in doing so.22
In spite of a preference for French over Spanish, Semprún always
rejected the tag of a ‘French writer’, preferring to identify as ‘un écrivain
européen et un écrivain de langue française’.23 Semprún never applied for
French citizenship. He asked to be recognized as a bilingual writer in his
own right and his prose in Spanish and French is frequently interjected
with expressions in other languages. The polemic surrounding his appli-
cation for a seat in the Académie Française in 1995 shows that he is not
unequivocally accepted as a French writer in France either. As Ofelia Ferrán
explains: ‘he had to forsake his candidacy to the French Academy of Letters
because of his unwillingness to renounce his Spanish nationality’.24 At the
same time, he has been accused of being an ‘afrancesado’ by the Spanish. As
Semprún explains, ‘afrancesado est un terme qui sert à disqualifier comme
étranger tout partisan des idées modernes’.25 The connotations and his-
torical implications of this term are further illustrated by him in Federico
Sánchez vous salue bien wherein he comes to the conclusion that ‘[i]ls [les
journalistes d’une certaine presse] l’employaient uniquement sur le plan de
l’invective, dans un contexte d’exclusion et d’intolérance, qui leur évitait
d’avoir à juger mes paroles et mes projets en fonction de critères objectifs.
Ils prétendaient uniquement m’enfermer dans l’enfer supposé de mon être-
autre, être-dif férent’.26 Semprún’s sense of belonging is clearly informed

22 Ángel G. Loureiro, The Ethics of Autobiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern

Spain (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 1.
23 Semprún, Le langage est ma patrie, 31.
24 Ferrán, Working Through Memory, 68. See also Ángel Díaz-Arenas, ‘Jorge Semprún:
retrato de una movida vida’ (2010), 1–12: 7 <http://toulouse.cervantes.es/imagenes/
file/biblioteca/autores/semprun.pdf> accessed 23 September 2010.
25 Jorge Semprún, Federico Sánchez vous salue bien (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1993),
118.
26 Semprún, Federico Sánchez vous salue bien, 119.
10 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

by an af finity with Spain and its history, even if he is more inf luenced by
French literature and has lived in France for most of his life. Nonetheless,
he refrains from choosing one over the other and claims for himself the
right to form part of both cultures or to be an ‘apatride’.27 With reference
to Thomas Mann’s understanding of the German language as his true
fatherland in exile, Semprún wrote: ‘En fin de compte, ma patrie n’est pas la
langue, ni la française ni l’espagnole, ma patrie c’est le langage. C’est-à-dire
un espace de communication sociale, d’invention linguistique: une pos-
sibilité de représentation de l’univers. De le modifier aussi, par les œuvres
du langage, fût-ce de façon modeste, à la marge’.28 For Semprún this chosen
statelessness is the point of departure for his writing. As Azade Seyhan’s
points out: ‘Transnational writing can potentially redress the ruptures in
history and collective memory caused by the unavailability of sources,
archives, and recorded narratives.’29
Nonetheless, as the writer Ha Jin explains, the physical absence of the
exiled writer from the homeland and his acquisition of a new language are
mostly viewed as a form of ‘betrayal’. Jin elucidates:

Yet the ultimate betrayal is to choose to write in another language. No matter how
the writer attempts to rationalize and justify adopting a foreign language, it is an
act of betrayal that alienates him from his mother tongue and directs his creative
energy to another language. This linguistic betrayal is the ultimate step the migrant
writer dares to take; after this, any other act of estrangement amounts to a trif le.30

Yet Jin also rightly remarks that not only does the individual betray his
country; at times, the tables are turned: ‘The worst crime the country
commits against the writer is to make him unable to write with honesty

27 Jorge Semprún, ‘“… Une tombe au creux des nuages …”’ in ‘… Une tombe au creux
des nuages …’: Essais sur l’Europe d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Flammarion, 2010),
129–146: 134.
28 Semprún, ‘“… Une tombe au creux des nuages …”’, 135.
29 Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001), 13.
30 Ha Jin, The Writer as Migrant (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 31.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 11

and artistic integrity’.31 While ‘desertion’ of one’s mother tongue is usually

accompanied by guilt and the wish to prove one’s loyalty this ‘estrangement’
can also act as a liberation, setting free the writer’s imagination.
Like the problematics connected to the national-linguistic catego-
rization, the question of genre is a taxing one with regard to Semprún’s
works and critics do not always agree in their assessment. The most une-
quivocal cases are represented by Netachaïev est de retour, L’Algarabie, La
Montagne blanche, La Deuxième Mort de Ramon Mercader and Veinte años
y un día which are generally regarded as novels, for example by Küster and
Schoeller.32 In the case of Semprún’s remaining texts the issue becomes
more convoluted. On the one hand, Semilla Durán limits her research to
Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, Quel beau dimanche!, Federico Sánchez
vous salue bien, L’Écriture ou la vie, Adieu, vive clarté… and Le Mort qu’il
faut, since, she argues, ‘nous comptons six textes que nous pouvons recon-
naître, en vertu d’un pacte autobiographique explicite, comme respectant
plus au moins rigoureusement les lois du genre’.33 Neuhofer, on the other
hand, focuses on Le Grand Voyage, Quel beau dimanche!, L’Écriture ou la
vie and Le Mort qu’il faut because she identifies in these thematically close
works the will to testify and the referentiality required of testimony which,
according to her, is lacking, for example, in L’Évanouissement.
Although Semilla Durán picks up the prominent term ‘pact’ coined
by Philippe Lejeune, formally not all the works chosen by her conform
to the guidelines set out by his theory. The identity of writer, narrator
and protagonist is not confirmed explicitly in most of the works listed.
Indeed, Lejeune points out that he would categorize as ‘autobiographical
novel’ ‘all fictional texts in which the reader has reason to suspect, from
the resemblances that he thinks he sees, that there is identity of author
and protagonist, whereas the author has chosen to deny this identity, or
at least not to af firm it’.34 In addition, the use of dif ferent narrative voices

31 Jin, The Writer as Migrant, 32.

32 Küster, Obsession der Erinnerung and Schoeller, Jorge Semprún.
33 Semilla Durán, Le Masque et le masqué, 8.
34 Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989), 13, italics in the original.
12 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

in Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez and Quel beau dimanche! hints at a

more ambiguous positioning by the author than Semilla Durán might have
hoped for.35 The texts she groups together focus closely on the experience
of the concentration camps, but Le Grand Voyage was initially published
as a novel and names the first-person narrator as ‘Gérard’ before revert-
ing to the third person in the final chapter, thereby throwing up doubts
regarding the ‘referential’ markers. Neuhofer underlines both the fact that
‘Gérard’ was a pseudonym employed by Semprún during the war and the
communicative situation in which these texts have to be read.36 According
to Neuhofer, Semprún’s writing underwent a development, moving from a
more fictional plane to a more factual one over time. She further remarks
that these nuances in perspective can still be traced but that, in spite of
this, they refrain from undermining the factuality of that which is told.
Moreover, she cites Semprún’s comment: ‘Mes livres sont presque tous des
chapitres d’une autobiographie interminable’.37 Neuhofer adds the caveat
that linguistic creation always comprises a degree of fictionalization and
that language is incapable of bridging the gap between experiencing and
remembering an event.38
Ulrike Vordermark is convinced that none of Semprún’s books rep-
resent autobiography in the ‘classic sense’, yet all of them rely on auto-
biographical elements and characters.39 She holds that all of his works
are very dif ferent and creates the sub-categories of ‘Autobiographical
writing about the experience of the Lager’, ‘Autobiographical writing
about other stages of life’ and ‘Further novels containing autobiographi-
cal references’.40 She defines all of the texts dealing with Buchenwald or

35 Lejeune remarks: ‘Autobiography does not include degrees: it is all or nothing’,

Lejeune, On Autobiography, 13.
36 Neuhofer, Écrire un seul livre, 38.
37 In Gérard de Cortanze, L’Écriture de la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 264.
38 Neuhofer, Écrire un seul livre, 42–43.
39 Vordermark, Das Gedächtnis des Todes, 9.
40 Vordermark, Das Gedächtnis des Todes, 24, 38, 43.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 13

another stage of Semprún’s life as ‘autobiographical novels’.41 Nonetheless,

Vordermark seems to imply that the Lejeunian autobiographical pact is
valid in the case of Semprún’s Buchenwald testimony, expressed by the
desire to represent the past truthfully, which is not to be confounded with
factual accuracy.42 For Vordermark, the persistence of extratextual refer-
ences and the fact that it would be morally reprehensible to misuse the
pact with the reader in the case of the Shoah, fundamentally strengthen
the testimonial intentions of Semprún’s texts. Ursula Henningfeld also
believes that part of the success of Semprún’s concentrationary writings
is due to the fact ‘dass er keinen Erlebnisbericht, sondern autofiktionale
Romane schreibt’ [that he is not giving a report of his experience but
writing autofictional novels].43
The matter of genre is no less confusing with regards to Autobiografía
de Federico Sánchez which Liliana Soto-Fernández reads as an ‘autobiografía
ficticia’,44 described as follows:

[…] es, al igual que la autobiografía auténtica, un recuento en prosa con enfoque
retrospectivo que un autor hace de su existencia pero en el que se combinan realidad
y fantasía por medio de la introducción de un ente de ficción que comparte el papel
con el personaje principal sirviendo como una especie de ‘otro yo’ y a través del cual
se exploran realidades alternas en el mundo del autor.45

Essentially, this genre exploits the parameters of autobiography for a fic-

tional goal.

41 Vordermark, Das Gedächtnis des Todes, 11.

42 Vordermark, Das Gedächtnis des Todes, 14.
43 Ursula Henningfeld, ‘“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann”: Sprache der Macht
und Macht der Sprache: Jorge Semprúns Buchenwald Tetralogie’, Europäische
Geschichtsdarstellungen: Diskussionspapiere (2006), 3, 2–16: 5 <http://docserv.
uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-892/06_04_Hennigfeld_
Semprun.pdf> accessed 27 June 2012.
44 Liliana Soto-Fernández, La autobiografía ficticia en Miguel de Unamuno, Carmen
Martín Gaite y Jorge Semprún (Madrid: Pliegos, 1996), 143.
45 Soto-Fernández, La autobiografía ficticia, 14.
14 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

Similarily, Alicia Molero de la Iglesia insists on calling Autobiografía de

Federico Sánchez a ‘novela autobiográfica’,46 ‘La función poética va a preva-
lecer por encima de los elementos de realidad en una novela autobiográfica,
cuya fabula goza de absoluta autonomía respecto al supuesto referente, y
donde el protagonista, pese a llevar el nombre del autor, será tomado siempre
como personaje de ficción que, como tal, disuelve su identidad en ese todo
cultural que es el hombre’.47 In contrast to the concentration camp narra-
tives, referentiality is again seen as a mere coincidence or a stylistic device.
Pepa Novell revindicates an interpretation of Autobiografia de Federico
Sánchez as autobiographical,48 even though she accepts that other labels
may be applied.49 In a similar vein, Michael Ugarte simply acknowledges
the dif ficulty of categorizing the work.50 Strikingly, the book itself actually
won the Premio Planeta in the year of its first publication, an award which
was normally only made to works of fiction.
The dif ficulty in situating Semprún’s works in definite generic catego-
ries can be seen in the context of a wider debate regarding genre, specifi-
cally in relation to the Holocaust. Robert Eaglestone, for example, argues
in The Holocaust and the Postmodern that ‘Holocaust testimony needs to
be understood as a new genre, in a new context, which involves both texts
and altered ways of reading, standing in its own right’.51 For Eaglestone,
Semprún’s Buchenwald books represent ‘modernist testimonies’, testimony

46 Alicia Molero de la Iglesia, La autoficción en España: Jorge Semprún, Carlos Barral,

Luis Goytisolo, Enriqueta Antolín y Antonio Muñoz Molina (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000),
42.
47 Molero de la Iglesia, La autoficción en España, 31.
48 Pepa Novell, La memoria sublevada: autobiografía y reivindicación del intelectual
ibérico del medio siglo (Madrid / Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana / Vervuert,
2009), 30.
49 Novell, La memoria sublevada, 120.
50 Michael Ugarte, Shifting Ground: Spanish Civil War Exile Literature (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1989), 100.
51 Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 28.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 15

being characterized by its refusal of ‘the very strong and often taken-for-
granted power of identification’.52
However, the creation of the new genre of testimony is not unprob-
lematic in itself. In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive,
Giorgio Agamben links the word ‘witness’ back to its original legal context
but also underlines its theological connotations, derived from its etymo-
logical origin in Greek, which is ‘martyr’.53 Agamben particularly stresses
the dif ference in the legal context where a distinction is made between the
neutral, by-standing, witness of a crime (‘testis’) and the victim who has
lived through an event and can therefore bear witness to it (‘superstes’).54
In the case of the Holocaust, the term ‘witness’ always designates the sur-
vivor of the camps. This involved position of the witness creates tension
between the juridical objectivity required of a legal testimony and the
subjective experience of the victim. According to Agamben: ‘It is obvious
that [Primo] Levi is not a third party; he is a survivor [superstite] in every
sense. But this also means that his testimony has nothing to do with the
acquisition of facts for a trial (he is not neutral enough for this, he is not
a testis)’.55
Although this legally required neutrality should fade into the back-
ground in the case of literary testimonies, the potential unreliability
of these eye-witness accounts still represents a major source of discom-
fort for many historians. Yet other scholars, such as Paul Ricoeur, give
particular emphasis to the witness’s historical reliability since, for him,
‘[w]ith testimony opens an epistemological process that departs from
declared memory, passes through the archive and documents, and finds its
fulfilment in documentary proof ’.56 The witness declares himself witness by

52 Eaglestone, The Holocaust, 39.

53 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York:
Zone Books, 2008), 26.
54 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 17.
55 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 17.
56 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2004), 162.
16 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

employing a ‘triple deictic’ which guarantees the verifiability of his account

and links ‘point-like testimony to the whole history of a life’.57
It is also noteworthy that even in legal contexts the unreliability of
witnesses is a well-known phenomenon that can simply be accounted for
by the ways in which the human brain processes memories. Ricoeur cites
the example of a test consisting of comparing the video-recording of an
event with the witnesses’ declarations concerning that same event.58 He
reasons that it is not the idea of the reliability of the witness which should
be scrutinized but blames in Renaud Dulong’s words: ‘the “paradigm of
recording”, that is, the video camera, and, on the other, the idea of the
“disengaged observer”, a prejudice to which the experimental subjects are
submitted’.59
Doubts regarding the witness’s reliability are clearly infused by a
concern with truth, as Eaglestone indicates. He signals that the polemic
surrounding testimony, in fact, expresses a deeper concern regarding the
nature of truth. Critics of testimony hold ‘that truth is the agreement or
correspondence of a judgement, an assertion, or a proposition with its
object’.60 This type of truth is commonly regarded as positivist truth or truth
of correspondence and can be proved or disproved. Eaglestone, however,
distinguishes such truth from another type of hermeneutic and existential
truth which does not fit the scheme of logical correspondence. This second
notion of truth is largely indebted to Heidegger and understands truth as
revelation, as ‘unveiling’, as aletheia.61 This view opens up the possibility
for a work of art to reveal something that was hitherto unseen and to make
visible a hidden, buried truth. It is echoed by the re-evaluation of autobi-
ography provided by Loureiro who contends that ‘[i]t would be erroneous
to measure that reproduction [autobiography] from the point of view of

57 Ricoeur, Memory, 164. Chapter 2 discusses this ‘triple deictic’ in more detail.
58 Ricoeur, Memory, 162.
59 Ricoeur, Memory, 164.
60 Eaglestone, The Holocaust, 141.
61 In Eaglestone, The Holocaust, 145. Suleiman refers to a similar distinction made by
Tzvetan Todorov who separates both types of truth as ‘vérité-adéquation’ and ‘vérité-
dévoilement’ Suleiman, Crises of Memory, 171.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 17

truth as correspondence, since such representation is always going to be

aleatory and provisional, and will always fall short of its presumed goal of
faithfully representing the past’.62 Measured with the yardstick of positivist
truth, most of Semprún’s works on the concentration camps would fail to
pass the test, on the basis of their factual inaccuracy. Yet within the larger
picture of a truth that is to be unveiled in order to convey an ethical truth
that surpasses the mere reporting of facts as aletheia, literally the ‘“un-
forgotten” or the “not-to-be-forgotton”’,63 as ‘a revelation of the other’,64
some of Semprún’s works would qualify as testimony.
Despite its originality, Eaglestone’s definition of testimony is not too
far removed from new understandings of the genre of autobiography, as
we shall see. Eaglestone makes the following passionate plea for testimony
to exist as a genre in its own right:

A testimony is an encounter with otherness: it is this encounter precisely because

identification – a grasping or comprehension which reduces otherness to the same,
events outside one’s framework reduced to events inside one’s framework – cannot
(or should not) happen. It is a witness to these events and should not be reduced
simply to a historical account or a ‘documentary novel’ (these are both ways of reduc-
ing that otherness to the same): it is part of a genre of its own. And it is this genre
– one that is strange not least because it denies the commonly accepted process of
identification – that holds best the memory of the Holocaust.65

In his definition, Eaglestone picks up some points already made by Ricoeur,

who regards testimony as an institution not only because of the witness’s
readiness to reiterate his testimony but also because: ‘[t]his stable structure
of the willingness to testify makes testimony a security factor in the set of
relations constitutive of the social bond. In turn, this contribution of the
trustworthiness of an important proportion of social agents to the overall

62 Loureiro, The Ethics of Autobiography, 16.

63 Harald Weinrich, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Univeristy Press, 2004), 4.
64 Eaglestone, The Holocaust, 171.
65 Eaglestone, The Holocaust, 71.
18 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

security of society in general makes testimony into an institution’.66 A similar

proposition regarding autobiography is made by Loureiro who develops
the notion of autobiography as an ethical gesture out of the philosophy
of Levinas and argues the following:

While the discourses that compose an autobiography can be questioned and, with
enough temporal perspective, ultimately show their conventional nature, the ethi-
cal structure of address inherent to autobiography as saying guarantees that auto-
biography is never a fiction, no matter how distorted the narrative can be or how
wrong or naïve the writer’s assumptions are about the nature of language and the
restorative ef ficacy of the autobiographical enterprise. At any rate the writer’s illu-
sion about referentiality should not become the critic’s delusion. The past cannot be
reproduced by means of language, but the constitutive alterity of the subject requires
that it respond to the other, and in autobiographical writing that response cannot
be measured in terms of truth or mimetic restoration because as ethical gesture it
remains outside the domain of thematics and epistemology.67

Semprún is clearly not a writer who suf fers from a comparable delu-
sion concerning referentiality or the limitations of language. However, he
defends language as one of the most powerful tools at our disposal. All
three theorists, Eaglestone, Ricoeur and Loureiro explicitly link the pro-
ject of testimony and autobiography to the ethical call of the other. This
‘“interpellation” denotes the process whereby a subject takes on its discrete
identity in response to being addressed in particular terms by the dominant
ideological forces in a society. […] We are thus singled out, identified in
responding.’68 The dif ferences in Eaglestone’s and Loureiro’s classifications
do not necessarily touch upon the ‘how’ but the ‘what’ of the written texts.
An autobiography locates the narrated subject at the heart of the text
whereas a testimony places the event above the individual. However, neither
of these genres need necessarily exclude the other. Essentially, both attempt
to wrestle autobiography and testimony free from the grasp of over-literal
referentiality and positivist truth. With regard to autobiography Loureiro

66 Ricoeur, Memory, 165.

67 Loureiro, The Ethics of Autobiography, 20.
68 James Loxley, Performativity (London: Routledge, 2007), 168.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 19

claims that ‘one should examine the productive workings of mimesis not as
re-presentation but as a desire and belief in representation that, as such, is not
a re-creation but a discursive creation of reality’, maintaining that ‘there is
no objective reality outside discourse’.69 Far from denouncing all linguistic
constructs as fiction though, this standpoint places a greater emphasis on
the framing of a text. Metatextually, it should be made clear what kind of
literary pact the writer is of fering to the reader. The idea of the Lejeunian
pact is here interpreted in a broader sense as the author’s intention of being
read in a certain way, rather than describing the formal requirements that
need to be fulfilled by a text in order to belong to a certain genre.70 In any
case, the reader needs to be aware of the author’s intentions or lack thereof
before ‘reading’ a work as referential, autobiographical or fictional.
In Semprún’s case para-textual markers, for example generic subti-
tles, are absent, a fact which increases the ambiguity, as the classifications
proposed by dif ferent critics have shown.71 Autofiction, a term originally
coined by Serge Doubrovsky, if taken as the broadest denominator – as
in the case of Molinero de la Iglesia – simply reveals itself as the most
convenient label since it covers various degrees of fictionality and auto-
biographical intention and can more or less absorb any vaguely autobio-
graphical work.72 Regardless of this convenience critics are reluctant to
include the more fictional novels in this category, although they all con-
tain autobiographical material to a varying degree. Thus, the commissive
illocutionary act that Semprún of fers his readers is always ambivalent and

69 Loureiro, The Ethics of Autobiography, 18 (italics in the original) and 19.

70 Yet the notorious case of Binjamin Wilkomirski highlights that it is not the author’s
intention alone that justifies the generic classification of a text. Wilkomirski’s imag-
ined Holocaust memories were ultimately rejected by a public that felt it had been
deceived into believing that they were authentic.
71 The explanatory subtitles ‘novel’ or ‘autobiography’ have been removed from all
Semprún’s books by his publishers in subsequent editions regardless of whether they
existed in the first edition at all.
72 ‘Bajo el rótulo de novela autobiográfica incluimos toda narración que, si bien señala
al autor, presenta un estatuto ficticio que impide buscar su sentido indagando la
mentira del contenido’. Molero de la Iglesia, La autoficción en España, 42.
20 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

his ‘desire and belief in representation’ vary.73 Interestingly, this constant

being between two genres can be associated with Ugarte’s idea of the
exiled writer’s liminal position, trapped between the here and the there.74
Semprún’s writing cannot exist outside the realm of referentiality and few
readers will read his work as completely detached from it, yet somehow the
appropriate framework is suspended and a decision is forever postponed
while the text oscillates between fact and fiction. More than in traditional
autobiographies and other works of testimony, Semprún vindicates the
need for art and literature, as the following statement demonstrates: ‘Seul
l’artifice d’un récit maîtrisé parviendra à transmettre partiellement la vérité
du témoignage’.75 Even if this declaration only appears in L’Écriture ou la
vie, from the outset none of the concentration camp accounts given by
the author resemble in the slightest an attempt at realist depiction and
report writing. Indeed, Semprún displays a truly Aristotelian view, since
Aristotle, according to Ricoeur, ‘pronounced the superior nature of the
epic and the tragic over mere history in the order of truth’.76 What follows
from this view is that what is true is not always automatically truthful and
mimesis may be understood as rendering the truthful rather than factual
truth. The intention in this study is, therefore, to examine Semprún’s
works as the literary texts that they are, without leaving aside referential
matters whenever their inclusion enriches the discussion, but also without
granting too much room to biographical data. Nonetheless, the problems
associated with the classification of Semprún’s work, together with the
adjoining dif ficulties concerning testimony and autobiographical writing
that have become apparent in the exposition above, will not be forgot-
ten nor will they come to dominate the literary discussion. Ultimately,
the reader’s awareness of these issues can only enrich his reading of these
texts. As Barbara Foley concludes:

73 Loureiro, The Ethics of Autobiography, 18.

74 Ugarte, Shifting Ground, 7.
75 Jorge Semprún, L’Écriture ou la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 25.
76 Ricoeur, Memory, 308.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 21

[T]he study of Holocaust literature inevitably gravitates toward a discussion of ‘truth’-

historical, testimonial, and fictional ‘truth’. When we read about the Holocaust, we
do not want to read lies or evasions. Yet we become critical of the ways in which
writers approach the truths at the heart of their narratives. If they propose that the
Holocaust can be accounted for with no qualitative break from inherited moral
categories, then their truths strike us as shallow, and the content of their discourses
seems to press against the limitations of their traditional forms. If, conversely, the
writers imply that the Holocaust represents a total break with received conceptions
of human behavior, then the truth at the center of the texts is shrouded in an ahis-
torical mysticism, and we are left dissatisfied and uneasy. If the writers suggest that
it is impossible to align the truth of the text with the truth of history – since all
truths, regardless of historical moment, are inherently subjective and unknowable
we are more uneasy still. Holocaust narrative thus furnishes a delicate instrument
for investigating the cognitive powers available in various modes of discourse at
various historical moments. It reveals that narrative forms tend to be conventionally
bound by sets of ideological assumptions, and that the propositional adequacy of
these forms can vary with changes in the historical world. In other words, our urgent
need to discover the contours of the world prompts us to examine and evaluate the
representational strategy of the works.77

It might be worthwhile to bring this discussion to a close with some

remarks drawn from Peter Middleton and Tim Woods’s introduction of
Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing. They
remind us that genre ‘[l]ike language, […] exists only as it is practised, and
its codes are no more than partially articulated recognitions of its more
sedimented forms’.78 In addition, they point out that

Genre is too often treated as a formalism, as if it were no more than a form of prosody
that could be copied out of a manual. It is better thought of as a code of practice
constantly under negotiation between texts and their readers, listeners, publishers,
academics and reviewers, which advises them how they are expected to respond to
the text. Genre is a projected biography of a text’s circulation.79

77 Barbara Foley, ‘Fact, Fiction, Fascism: Testimony and Mimesis in Holocaust

Narratives’, Comparative Literature, 34.4 (1982), 330–360: 359.
78 Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, ‘Introduction’ in Literatures of Memory: History,
Time and Space in Postwar Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000),
1–16, 8.
79 Middleton and Woods, ‘Introduction’, 7.
22 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

With these uncertainties, potentials and debates in mind, the appeal

of memory as an approach to Semprún’s oeuvre becomes evident. Although
neuroscience has prof fered some answers to the workings of memory,
cultural and literary theories compete in their explanation of memory as
a social, cultural and literary phenomenon. Unfortunately, the scope of
this work makes it impossible to consider them all in detail. Yet, within
the Humanities, it can be said that Pierre Nora’s ‘rediscovery’ of memory in
his inf luential Les Lieux de mémoire, has certainly played its part in turn-
ing memory into one of the most studied topics today across a range of
domains and academic disciplines. Nora mourns the end of living memory
which has been taken over by history and now only resides in specific sites
as a spectre of its former living function.80 Symbols and places imbued with
collective memory, however, allow the individual to participate in this
act of identity-forging and ensure the continuity of the group. This new
exaltation of memory places, too pathetic in tone, has created conf licts in
the field of historiography where the popularity of memory seems to have
usurped the place of history. Many critical stances towards memory can
be understood in relation to the preoccupation with positivist truth and
referentiality which arises in the debate regarding genre. Establishing the
primacy of the one over the other is fruitless since this argument mirrors
exactly the generic concerns about truth as correspondence and truth as
revelation. One belongs to the realm of history and one to that of memory
but they are by no means interchangeable even if they cannot be separated
into clearly divided binary oppositions. Consequently, Jacques Le Gof f
argues convincingly that memory is the raw material of history and that
memory and history do not exclude each other.81 He also reminds us of
the mythical origin of memory which makes Mnemosyne the goddess of
memory as well as the mother of the muses and the presider over lyrical
poetry.82 For him memory should therefore be assigned to the realm of the

80 Pierre Nora, ‘La Fin de l’histoire-mémoire’, in Les Lieux de mémoire. Vol. 1: La répub-
lique (Paris: Gallimard 1985), xvii–xlii.
81 Jacques Le Gof f, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992),
xi.
82 Le Gof f, History and Memory, 64.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 23

poet and not the realm of the historian. As we have seen above, Semprún
adopts a similar vantage point and establishes his writing within the ambit
of literature rather than history. Thus he clarifies: ‘Ça se joue à un tout
autre niveau, bien entendu, la véracité d’un récit. À un niveau de cohé-
rence interne, qui est de l’ordre de l’écriture, donc de la morale; à un autre
niveau d’exactitude factuelle, externe, qui est de l’ordre de l’histoire. C’est
une question de style et de vérité, la véracité’.83 Suleiman even argues that
Semprún deliberately transgresses the referentiality he creates and plays
with the reader’s wilful suspension of disbelief, confronting the reader
thereby not with a reconstruction of the facts but with an interpretation
of them, hence perhaps the dif ficulty in framing his works adequately.84
For the purpose of this study, which is, after all, a literary one, theo-
ries of memory serve as a framework to enlighten the primary texts. The
importance of memory in Semprún’s work has been noted by some crit-
ics. Küster, for example, called his monograph Obsession der Erinnerung
[Obsession of Memory] and Stefan Hesper writes about the ‘Taumel des
Gedächtnisses’ [the Vertigo of Memory] in Semprún’s works.85 While
Küster sees memory as a unifying factor in Semprún’s works, or, at least,
the title of the monograph leads the reader to believe this, he does not
discuss how this particularly af fects the creation of his texts or how it
inf luences their form, except when he comments on the temporal struc-
ture of Le Grand Voyage and the ambivalence of memory with reference
to Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez. He also prefers to discuss the works
in chronological isolation rather than interdependently. Hesper singles
out one particular description of how the protagonist is overwhelmed by
traumatic memory. An obsession with memory can, in ef fect, be detected

83 Jorge Semprún, Federico Sánchez vous salue bien (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1993),
188.
84 Suleiman, Crises of Memory, 160.
85 Stefan Hesper, ‘Man kann alles sagen – man kann alles vergessen: Der Taumel des
Gedächtnisses bei Jorge Semprun’, in Reden von Gewalt, 346–362.
24 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

in Semprún’s texts and his style has been linked to that of Marcel Proust,86
often to the author’s amusement and incomprehension.87
However, in spite of Semprún’s reaction, Proust’s À la Recherche
du temps perdu is a useful point of contrast for several reasons. Firstly,
the generic instability of the work resembles that of Semprún’s writing.
Although a work of fiction, À la Recherche is not free from extratextual
points of reference linked particularly to the biography of the author, and
many readers and critics try to trace episodes described by the narrator,
Marcel, back to experiences made by the author, Proust. Secondly, the
trigger to the search for lost time in Proust is the famous episode of the
madeleine. Its taste evokes involuntary memories of the past in the protago-
nist’s mind and sends him on his hunt for things forgotten. A similar key
moment is alluded to in Le Grand Voyage, where the taste of black bread
evokes the hunger of the camp.88 As Brett Ashley Kaplan underlines, ‘in
reproducing while radically transforming Proust’s madeleine, [it] once
again underscores Semprun’s argument that after the camps memory –
involuntary or not – can no longer of fer the comforts of Proust’s “immense
edifice”’.89 Harald Weinrich also holds that ‘writing means carrying out the
“memory’s work of mourning”. And that presupposes, in contrast to what
happens in Proust (whom Semprun does not much like), a constant effort
of will on the part of memory.’90 The ef fort of will, however, is applied to
the act of forgetting, since Semprún relates that wilful oblivion was neces-
sary for him to be able to write at all. Therefore, prior to the publication of
Le Grand Voyage, he had to remain silent for sixteen years in order to be
able to speak about the concentration camp. This matter is mentioned by
almost all critics, yet the contradiction inherent in this statement has not

86 Peter Egri, Survie et réinterprétation de la forme proustienne: Proust – Déry – Semprún

(Debrecen: Kossuth Lajos Tudományegyetem, 1969).
87 Jorge Semprun, L’ Algarabie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 39.
88 Jorge Semprún, Le Grand Voyage (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 150.
89 Brett Ashley Kaplan, ‘“The Bitter Residue of Death”: Jorge Semprun and the
Aesthetics of Holocaust Memory’, Comparative Literature, 55.4 (2003), 320–337:
330.
90 Weinrich, Lethe, 195.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 25

gained much attention. An act of forgetting that is voluntary cannot be

considered to be forgetting at all. If one forces oneself to forget, the thing
to be forgotten is ever-present in that ef fort of forgetting. Wilful oblivion
can be seen as a parallel to the mechanisms of repression and latency which
are prominent symptoms of trauma, hence the connection to ‘memory’s
work of mourning’ made by Weinrich. Although this does not in itself bring
‘comforts’ it enables the writer to mourn. Involuntary memory which is
traumatic in Semprún’s case or nostalgic, because it predates the experience
of the camps and exile, is mastered through narrative, in the same way that
Proust transforms occurences of involuntary memory into the thousands
of pages of the carefully crafted À la Recherche du temps perdu. Whereas
Proustian memory has undergone voluntary recreation, Semprún’s volun-
tary forgetting is perhaps not as deliberate as he likes to represent it, but
merely a survival mechanism based on the repression of traumatic recall.
Remembrance of things past is always tainted for Semprún, as the
concentration camps constitute the pivotal event that marked Semprún’s
understanding of memory, mirroring a general tendency in Western culture.
As Anne Whitehead points out: ‘The Holocaust has thus commonly been
seen to mark a radical break in memorial consciousness.’91 The atrocities
committed and the necessity of remembering them opened up space for a
re-evaluation of memory. More reservedly, Andreas Huyssen wonders why
memory has so markedly emerged now as a ‘key cultural and political con-
cern in Western societies’.92 He even considers that ‘memory has become a
cultural obsession of monumental proportions across the globe’93 and cor-
relates this emergence to the technological advancement which enables us
to store more ‘memory’ but equally makes us more prone to forget.
Specifically with regards to the Shoah Huyssen writes: ‘Although
the Holocaust as a universal trope of traumatic history has migrated into
other, nonrelated contexts, one must always ask whether and how the trope

91 Anne Whitehead, Memory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 84.

92 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia’, in Present Pasts: Urban
Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2006), 11–29 (11).
93 Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts’, 16.
26 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

enhances or hinders local memory practices and struggles, or whether and

how it may help and hinder at the same time’.94 Furthermore, he expresses
concern about the musealization of the world.95 But memorials and muse-
ums do not only aim to achieve ‘total recall’,96 as Huyssen maintains, they
also represent an attempt to create ‘sites of memory’, which, for contem-
porary society, in Ricoeur’s view are ‘real places inscribed in geography
– [they] can be considered the most recent heir to this art of artificial
memory coming from the Greeks and the Latins, for whom the places were
the sites of a mental script’.97 Referring particularly to Jewish culture, James
E. Young reminds us that these physical places are mirrored by the ‘most
ancient of Jewish memorial media: word on paper’, thus ‘the site of reading
[is turned] into memorial space’.98 A book can accordingly become a site
of memory. Semprún, as his own reader, returns to this memorial space
over and over again and what he finds is never identical to what he has
left behind because he himself changes. In book form though the mental
script has been turned into a physical site. Ricoeur stresses that the verb ‘to
remember’ is employed as a ref lexive in most European languages,99 and
that the act of remembering always consists of the memory of a specific
period of time as well as the awareness of the self remembering: ‘Moreover,
the memory of “things” and the memory of myself coincide: in them I also
encounter myself, I remember myself, what I have done, when and how I
did it and what impression I had at that time’.100 In laying down his memo-
ries on paper, Semprún thus catches a glimpse of himself at the moment
of writing and this image of himself has to be adjusted over time together

94 Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts’, 16.

95 Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts’, 15.
96 Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts’, 15.
97 Ricoeur, Memory, 63. The French original reads ‘écriture mentale’ in Paul Ricoeur,
La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 75.
98 James E. Young, ‘Introduction: The Texture of Memory’, in The Texture of Memory:
Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993),
1–16 (7).
99 Ricoeur, Memory, 96.
100 Ricoeur, Memory, 99.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 27

with the memories, according to the priorities of the present identity. Even
if the gaps in knowledge cannot be filled, Ricoeur maintains that to tell
is to explain and that every representation of the past already contains its
own interpretation.101 As Semprún revisits the past in his books, his vision
of it changes.
Ugarte holds that exile writers suf fer from an ‘obsession with memory’
and that most of the time testimony and autobiography seem to be the
vehicles most suited to capturing it.102 He points out that Semprún finds
himself in exile ‘three times removed from the powers which cast him out:
first, as an accompanying member of a family of exiles, second, as a sur-
vivor of a German concentration camp at Buchenwald, and finally, as the
victim of expulsion from a party whose principles he upheld for twenty
years’.103 While he interprets Semprún’s Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez
as an ongoing dialogue with the self,104 I would argue that the whole of
Semprún’s writing can be interpreted as an ongoing reworking of memory.
These two aspects are intertwined, given that the understanding of the self
is predicated on a specific set of memories that ensure the coherence of
identity. In contrast, when suf fering trauma a second self is created, lead-
ing to a doubling.105
Given that Semprún experienced some of the most extreme events
in the history of the twentieth century, it appears logical to apply trauma
theories to his works. In spite of the stylistic means prevalent in Semprún’s
writing that appeal to association with trauma, such as the lack of chronol-
ogy, the lack of closure and the frequency of f lashbacks and f lash-forwards,
the author’s calculated decision to forget constitutes an impediment to the
acceptance of traumatic writing. In her study, Vordermark discounts the
application of trauma theories to Semprún’s works on the basis that she

101 Ricoeur, Memory, 340.

102 Ugarte, Shifting Ground, 31.
103 Ugarte, Shifting Ground, 99.
104 Ugarte, Shifting Ground, 100.
105 Robert Jay Lifton, ‘An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton’ in Caruth, Trauma, 128–147:
137.
28 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

finds the separation into traumatic memory and normal memory too exclu-
sive.106 For the same reason she does not consider that Maurice Halbwachs’s
notion of collective memory is workable in the Semprunian context, since
it relies entirely on the memory of the group and rules out the possibil-
ity of individual recollection.107 The objective of the present analysis is
not to set out to diagnose Semprún’s trauma but these theories are useful
and enriching and can be applied f lexibly rather than rigidly, employing
them as interpretive rather than diagnostic tools.108 Regardless of whether
Semprún was suf fering from a trauma or not, he may have chosen to inte-
grate a depiction of trauma into his works because it suited his style which
is driven by the associative mechanisms of memory in general. Therefore, in
this discussion, trauma is not considered in isolation from ‘normal’ func-
tions of memory but rather as a very specific facet of them. At any rate, the
usefulness of pathologizing literature is in itself questionable.
Collective memory will likewise not be treated within Halbwachs’s
strict theoretical framework, although it should be noted that Halbwachs
did not leave a definitive version of his work behind. Moreover, collective
memory is seen as the set of memories shared by a specific social group
that exist in a dialectic relationship with an individual’s recollections. As
will become evident from the reading of Semprún’s texts that I propose in
the following chapters, the worth of a life lived is partly measured in the
transmission of memories for Semprún, mirroring the extent to which one’s
understanding of the self and memories are mutually dependent. The pass-
ing on of his own memories af fords the author the opportunity to leave his
mark on collective memory, a process which Jan and Aleida Assmann have
called the creation of a cultural memory.109 If he sees himself as a witness,

106 Vordermark, Das Gedächtnis des Todes, 178.

107 Vordermark, Das Gedächtnis des Todes, 178.
108 It is to be noted, however, that literary texts are sometimes used as diagnostic material
for trauma. See, for example, the use that Nigel C. Hunt makes of Erich Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front in Nigel C. Hunt, Memory, War, Trauma (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 19 and 105.
109 Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen
Gedächtnisses (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1999). Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis:
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 29

he is a witness not only to the concentration camp but also to the history
of the PCE and Spain’s transition. Similar to his earlier belief in political
action’s capacity to change the world, by ultimately culminating in revo-
lution, Semprún’s writing is driven by the will to deposit his memories in
his reader and to inf luence collective memory in this manner so that his
beliefs might not die with him.
In order for this specific focus on memory as the common denomi-
nator of Semprún’s works and the representation of memory processes
to function, this book concentrates on the following primary texts: Le
Grand Voyage, L’Évanouissement, La Deuxième Mort de Ramón Mercader,
Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez, Quel beau dimanche!, L’Algarabie, La
Montagne blanche, Netchaïev est de retour, L’Écriture ou la vie, Adieu, vive
clarté…, Le Mort qu’il faut and Veinte años y un día. It seemed appropriate
to leave out Semprún’s only published play, Le Retour de Carola Neher, his
biography of Yves Montand, Montand: la vie continue and Federico Sánchez
vous salue bien, as well as the erotic short story, Les Sandales. Due to their
publication date and unfinished state the Excercises de survie did not find
their way into this study either. Instead of analysing Semprún’s works in the
chronological order of their appearance, I have chosen to group them the-
matically with the aim of highlighting the dif ferent discourses of memory
and other, memory-related, aspects. The chapters are thus arranged in the
following manner:
In Chapter 1 the interplay between the notions of exile, nostalgia and
childhood memories is investigated within L’Algarabie, Adieu, vive clarté…
and Veinte años y un día. The exploration of Semprún’s oeuvre thereby
starts with his earliest memories even if these only became the object of
his writing later on in his career. This is particularly relevant since the ide-
alization of childhood and the fabrication of its idyllic vision imbued with
nostalgia can be interpreted as retroactive inventions by the author who
posits them in opposition to the traumatic experience of the concentra-
tion camp. Exile and the death of the mother are seen as foreshadowing

Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck,

1999).
30 Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self

the deportation and incarceration in Buchenwald. This focus on childhood

automatically reveals some of the mechanisms of memory that are, at first,
playfully explored in L’Algarabie in order to be given a firm literary shape
in Adieu, vive clarté…. Allusions to Proust and Baudelaire and reference to
classical metaphors of memory are particularly interesting and continue
into Veinte años y un día. Most importantly, Semprún derives from these
early memories a view on the importance of language for the writer and
the writer’s ideal condition as stateless.
Chapter 2 examines the evocation of the Holocaust and its represen-
tation in Le Grand Voyage, Quel beau dimanche! and Le Mort qu’il faut.
Specific emphasis is placed on the notion of ‘guilt’ and the role of the wit-
ness, in order to demonstrate how the depiction of Buchenwald and the
memories linked to the concentration camp evolve over time. Semprún’s
dissociation from the Communist party profoundly changes his vision of
Buchenwald and solidarity and brotherhood are no longer at the centre
of his description of the camp. At the same time, the writer sees himself
increasingly as a witness. Agamben’s idea that the Muselmann incarnates
the aporia to testimony of the concentration camps can be found at the
centre of this discussion since it is implicitly, albeit very firmly, rejected
by Semprún.
In Chapter 3 the dialectics of memory and writing are explored in
relation to L’Évanouissment and L’Écriture ou la vie. L’Évanouissment,
which to date has received little critical attention, is read as the fictionali-
zation of the failed attempt to put one’s memories on paper. More than
any other book it captures the trauma which imprisons the survivor. The
question of the unspeakable is raised by Semprún himself when he refers to
Wittgenstein’s call for silence in the face of that which cannot be uttered.
Taking this proposition as their starting point, Semprún’s texts set out to
illustrate the dif ficulty of finding and creating a listener that can share the
experiences of the writer. Semprún is shown to rely on the metaphor of
‘life as a dream’ which he borrows from Primo Levi. Ultimately, the focus
shifts thus from the dif ficulties of writing to the problems of creating an
addressee. This discussion will draw on theories devoted to the workings
of testimony and the working through of trauma.
Introduction – Memory, Literature and the Self 31

Chapter 4 then turns to a new subject, namely Semprún’s relation-

ship with the Communist party and his own Communist past, by focusing
on Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez and Netchaïev est de retour. In the
light of the former’s publication during the transition period the notion
of collective memory and countermemory play an important role in the
discussion. Semprún not only opposes memories which diverge from his
own, such as those of Santiago Carrillo, he also accuses the Communists
of being voluntary amnesiacs, desmemoriados, who rewrite history as they
see fit. Parallels are drawn between Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez and
Constantin Costa-Gavras’s L’Aveu, for which Semprún wrote the screen-
play, in terms of the militant’s inability to leave the party and his illusions
behind. This sentiment is echoed in Netchaïev est de retour which illustrates
how misleading ideology can be and how dif ficult it is to repress the past.
Finally, Chapter 5 concentrates on the relationship between memory
and identity. Instead of linking identity back to the question of genre,
the self will be scrutinized as it appears within the mise en intrigue, the
emplotment, in La Deuxième Mort de Ramón Mercader and La Montagne
blanche. The character of Ramón Mercader illustrates how disconcerting it
is to take on someone else’s identity. The novel itself provides examples of
postmemory which Semprún integrates into the fictional spy drama. In La
Montagne blanche dif ferent characters seem to be dissociated personalities
of the same self that has been traumatized by various incidents in the past.
In both works Semprún underscores the belief that identity is dependent
on memory and vice versa, a position which symbolically stands in for his
own motivation to write.
Chapter 1

Childhood, Exile and Nostalgia in L’Algarabie,

Adieu, vive clarté… and Veinte años y un día

In previous critical works, Jorge Semprún has mostly been discussed in the
context of Holocaust literature, his af finities (and later fallout) with the
PCE, and within the framework of his political engagement. An interest
in his writing of childhood memories may thus come as a surprise. Since I
would like to identify memory as the common denominator of the entirety
of his writing, the reconstruction of his earliest memories, even if they
are expressed mostly in his later works, will be of vital importance. From a
Freudian perspective the emphasis on childhood would not be suprising;
however, I would simply like to expose how Semprún tries to attribute
a redemptive function to his memories. Yet, while he looks back on his
life with a retroactive telos in mind, he does not employ linear narratives
in any of his works. On the one hand, avoiding narrative linearity might
have been the result of artistic ambition; on the other hand – bearing in
mind the complex content of Semprún’s memories – such avoidance also
disallows a sense of closure and coherence.1 Saul Friedländer argues that
this is to be welcomed and that the nature of the Holocaust, for example,
requires such a literary treatment: ‘The commentary should disrupt the
facile linear progression of the narration, introduce alternative interpreta-
tions, question any partial conclusions, withstand the need for closure.’2
Thus, Semprún manages to resist narrative desire and portrays traumatic
memory, as it is experienced by him, even when the trauma is not in every
case linked to the experience of the concentration camps. The experiental

1 Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 119.
2 Friedländer, Memory, History, 132.
34 Chapter 1

chronology is reversed: in early works, the memories of childhood are

overshadowed by the much more powerful trauma of the concentration
camp, and by the political agenda of the author. What, then, could be the
interest in his later works in putting childhood memories on paper, and
what do they become when he recalls them at the moment of writing,
after Buchenwald and at the end of his political career? In order to find a
possible answer to this question this chapter will focus on the memories
of exile and the nostalgic vision of childhood that prevail in Semprún’s
writing. Semprún’s later position that language is the writer’s home and
that the true writer’s preferred condition is that of statelessness is rooted
in the representation and condensation of these early memories which
retroactively make his convictions seem innate.
In her recent article ‘Exile, Language, and Trauma in Recent Auto­
biographical Writing by Jorge Semprún’, Ursula Tidd detects Semprún’s
wish to write a Bildungsroman free of the burden of Buchenwald that
expresses itself in his Adieu, vive clarté…. This attempt fails, however, as
she argues that ‘the traumatic quality of his exile represented in Adieu, vive
clarté… is fundamentally linked to the formal aesthetics of his Buchenwald
testimonies and to the staging of a melancholic patriarchal maternity in his
writing’.3 By proposing to further investigate L’Algarabie, Adieu and Veinte
años y un día in this chapter, I would like to relate to and work with, some
of the ideas expressed in Tidd’s article while at the same time paying atten-
tion to other characteristics expressed in these three works. My intention
is to argue not only that these works are inf luenced by the aesthetics of
trauma inherited from Semprún’s more well-known Buchenwald writing
but also, conversely, how these relatively late works (published in 1981, 1998
and 2003 respectively) reveal a trauma that is already associated with the
realm of childhood and which is, naturally, aggravated by the experience
of the concentration camps. The importance of memory that is seizable in
Semprún’s testimonial writing will be shown to be the motivation of all of
his work, as he himself attempts to demonstrate via the memories of child-
hood that the value granted to memory by him predates his imprisonment

3 Tidd, ‘Exile, Language, and Trauma’, 697.

Childhood, Exile and Nostalgia 35

at Buchenwald, and can be traced back to the loss of his mother, his mother
tongue and his native country due to exile in the aftermath of the Spanish
Civil War. Only because Semprún lived through the concentration camp
can his childhood, in contrast, be seen as truly idyllic. And only because
he chose to become a writer after his political activities had been limited
due to his exclusion from the PCE are his childhood heroes presented as
a variety of French writers. The childhood with which the reader is faced
is a retrospective creation in the light of the author’s previous writings.
Throughout the dif ferent works discussed in this chapter the presentation
of these early memories also changes.
L’Algarabie is Semprún’s most imaginative novel, since the plot develops
on the background of a counterfactual, second Parisian commune approxi-
mately at the time of Franco’s death in 1975. Paris’s left bank is a contested
area in which Spanish Anarchist exiles, Maoists and Leninists attempt to
obtain control over an area named the ZUP.4 The reader follows a host
of characters in a number of narrative strands, but particularly the life of
Rafael Artigas5 who has decided to apply for a passport and return to Spain
now that Franco is in his death throes. Artigas turns out to be unable to
outlive the dictator, as he senselessly dies at the hand of a group of young
louts. His memories survive, however, as they inexplicably invade the mind

4 ‘[…] la Deuxième Commune de Paris, devenue au fil des ans, et assez tristement, celle
de la seule Rive Gauche et désignée aujourd’hui, dans le langage courant, par les trois
majuscules Z, U et P, sigle dont la signifiation réelle a été détournée et confondue
par toute une série d’interprétations fantaisistes, bien que non dépourvues de sens’.
Dif ferent political groups designate the ZUP as ‘Zone d’Utopie Populaire’, ‘Zone
où s’Unifiera le Peuple’ and ‘Zone Urbaine Prolétarienne’, although of ficially it is
the ‘Zone Urbaine de Pénurie’ (Semprún, L’Algarabie, 84).
5 The name is one of the pseudonyms under which Semprún was known in the
Communist underground. Others include Juan Larrea, Gérard, Manuel, Bustamante,
the most famous one being Federico Sánchez. According to Jaime Céspedes Gallego,
Semprún was known as Gérard or Manuel by dif ferent people in Buchenwald. The
last two names are given to the protagonists of Le Grand Voyage and L’Évanouissment
respectively. In L’Algarabie itself Rafael Artigas is only a ‘pseudonyme, sous laquelle
il avait désiré ef facer son passé’. Jorge Semprún, L’Algarabie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996),
26.
36 Chapter 1

of another character, Carlos Bustamante. Prior to his demise, Artigas was

writing a novel called L’Algarabie. Semprún’s novel presumably represents a
reconstitution carried out by Bustamante and Artigas’s lover, Anna-Lise. For
this purpose, they employed the manuscript left behind by Artigas, as well
as a series of recorded conversations that took place between Artigas and
Anna-Lise.6 This is an obvious mise-en-abyme through which Semprún
intends to lure the reader into the setup of this literary game.
Adieu is quite a dif ferent text, conceived as a childhood biography
that recounts particularly Semprún’s years in Paris, prior to his depor-
tation. The title is taken from the second verse of Baudelaire’s ‘Chant
d’automne’,7 whose themes are the transitoriness of life and the nearing
of death. Semprún’s intellectual trajectory is traced much more clearly
than his political one and the inf luence of literary role models and exile is
underlined as the author creates a literary genealogy for himself, center-
ing on his individual coming of age rather than historical circumstances.
Veinte años y un día is Semprún’s last fictional work published during
his lifetime and was written in Spanish. Set in Spain in 1956 it centres on
the ritualistic repetition of the killing of the youngest of the landowing
Avendaño brothers during a peasant revolt in 1936. This event is staged
every year with the local families forced to play a role in the purifying
ritual, whereas Lorenzo, Josemari Avendaños’ posthumous son, is obliged
to impersonate his own father. The US historian Leidson, himself the
descendant of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, seeks out the Avendaño
finca in order to chronicle the last enactment of the murder, having been
alerted to it by a conversation between Ernest Hemingway and the torero
Domingo Dominguín. However, when he realises that it would take a
novelist to put the family history of the Avendaño’s on paper, he suggests
to Federico Sánchez in Madrid that he might like to consider taking on
this task. The family history ends with the double suicide of Lorenzo and

6 Critics have pointed to the meaningful and deliberate irony caused by the homophony
of her name and the French pronunciation of ‘analysis’ (in Küster, Obsession der
Erinnerung, 229).
7 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Chant d’automne’, Les Fleurs du Mal (Paris: Libraire Générale
Française, 2008), 105–106.
Childhood, Exile and Nostalgia 37

his twin sister Isabel, who are caught up in an incestuous love af fair. The
title refers both to the time which has passed since the initial fatalities and
the moment of narration, as well as to the prison sentence routinely given
to those found guilty of having been involved in anti-Francoist activities.
In connection with childhood memories the problem implicitly raised
in L’Algarabie is that of the authorship of memories. The main protagonist
Rafael Artigas is at pains to re-establish a legal identity for himself. While
he walks through parts of left-bank Paris his visual perceptions remind
him of events of the past that are elided.8 He does not make mention of
them, in an ef fort to delete traces of the past. The dif ference between
L’Algarabie and Adieu can be found in Semprún’s attempt in the latter to
shape his memories, and give them some kind of literary objective whereas
the former work seems to be more akin to the nightmarish product of
automatic writing, in which memories of childhood are only dealt with
subconsciously. Yet this first unconscious dealing with these very recol-
lections allows the author to return to them at a later stage in order to
transform them.
More than fifteen years after the publication of L’Algarabie, Semprún
expresses his own puzzlement about this particular novel in Adieu:
La longueur de cette écriture ne s’explique pas seulement parce que L’Algarabie changea
plusieurs fois de langue, comme un serpent change de peau, ayant hésité longtemps
entre l’espagnol et le français. Cette lenteur s’explique aussi, je crois le deviner, par le
fait même que, pour la première fois, et quels que fussent les masques brandis, des
souvenirs enfantins et intimes af f leuraient dans l’un de mes livres.9

In addition to the writer’s struggle to find the appropriate language (an issue
that we shall come back to later), Semprún explicitly identifies the disturb-
ing nature of childhood memories, which rise to the surface unprompted,
as an obstacle to the creative process. This comes as a surprise if we take

8 Presumably this past is full of painful memories, such as the deportation to a con-
centration camp, about which the reader is only informed much later. While this
biographical data is provided Artigas’s personal memories relating to these experi-
ences do not form part of the narrative.
9 Jorge Semprún, Adieu, vive clarté… (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 56.
Another Random Scribd Document
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Transfigured in her eyes, with glory caught
From her own loveliness. She was not keen
To judge of human nature; she believed
All men were noble; and a thousand times
The poor heart would have offered up its all
On some unworthy shrine, had not the fates
Kindly removed the shrine. How could she help
Believe that God had stooped from highest heaven,
To save her from herself?
 FORESIGHT.

NBAR, O heavy clouds, the gated West!

That this most weary day, beholding so
Her goal, may hasten her sad steps; I know
She comes without fair gifts; upon her breast
Close-clasped, the pale cold hands together pressed
Hold nothing;—then let some red sunset glow
Tempt her to seek the unknown world below
The far horizon where she hopes for rest!

At last the day, like some poor toil-worn slave,

Passes, and leaves in sooth no gift for me;—
Yet I, who thought my heart could be so brave
To bear what I had wisdom to foresee,
Sob in despair, as this poor day that gave
Me nothing, sinks behind the western sea!
 TO FRANK S. R——.
WITH A VIOLIN.

HE stately trees that in the forest grow

Are not all destined for the same high thing;
Some burn to useless cinders in the glow
Of the hearth-fire; while some are meant to sing

For centuries the never-dying song

Once caught from wandering breeze or lingering bird
So clearly and so surely, that the strong
Firm wood was quickly seized by one who heard,

To fashion his dear violin;—even so

Our human souls are fashioned; some will fade
Away to useless ashes, others grow
Immortal through the sweetness they have made.
“THE EAGER SUN COMES GLADLY
FROM THE SEA.”

HE eager sun comes gladly from the sea;

Remembering that one short year ago
He rose from unknown worlds of light below
Those same far waves, to shine on you and me
Standing together on the shore;—but we
Are strangely far apart to-day; and so
The saddened sun with lingering step and slow
Climbs the horizon, wondering not to see
Your face beside mine; nor can understand
As we do, dear, that you and I to-day,—
Though million miles of ocean or of land
And centuries of time between us lay,—
Are nearer to each other than when hand
Touched hand, before we gave our hearts away!
RESERVE.
 I hear you praise
What you are pleased to call unsounded depths
Of character; a nature that the world
Would call reserved; tempting you while it hides—
Or you suspect it hides—a richer wealth
Deep in some far recesses of the soul.
As if, indeed, you should approve the host
Who with most admirable courtesy
Should throw wide open to your curious gaze
His drawing-room, his green-house and his hall;
Yet should not hesitate to let you see
Certain close-bolted doors of hardest oak,
Upon whose thresholds he informed you, “Here,
Alas! I cannot let you enter.”
You
At once are filled with curiosity
To listen at the keyhole.
So am I;
Yet much I doubt if after all those deep
Recesses of the soul are filled with aught
But emptiness. Too thick the cobwebs hang;
The master of the house can scarce himself
Feel tempted to draw back such heavy bolts;
Although he take an honorable pride,
Leaning at ease in comfortable chair,
To know there are some chambers in his soul
Unentered even by himself.
But him
I call reserved, whose clear eyes seem a well
Of frank sincerity; whose smiling lips,
Curving with hospitable gayety,
Bid you most welcome to his house and home;
Throwing wide open to your curious gaze
Each nook and corner; leaving you at ease
To wander where you will; and if at times
You half suspect some hidden sweet retreat
You half suspect some hidden sweet retreat
Where hyacinths are blossoming unseen,
’Tis not because cold iron-bolted doors
Whisper of secrets you would fain explore;
But that the tapestries upon the wall
So lightly hang, that swaying to and fro,
They half betray a fragrance from within.
You never once suspect that secret doors
Are sliding in the panels underneath;
But when you go, the master of the house
Lifts easily the soft and shining silk,
To find there sacred silence from you all.
’Tis easier
To read the secrets of a dark, deep pool
That coldly says, “You cannot fathom me,”
With unstirred face turned blankly to the sky,
Than catch the meaning of a silver spring,
Though crystal-clear, above whose bright full heart
Delicate vine-leaves flutter in the sun.
A SONG OF SUMMER.
 ADEN with gifts of your giving,
O summer of June!
With the rapturous idyl of living
In perfect attune;
With the sweetness of eve when it closes
A day of delight;
With the tremulous breath of the roses
Entrancing the night;
With the glow of your cardinal flowers
On lips that had paled;
And the coolness of silvery showers
For hands that had failed;
With geraniums vivid with fire
To wear on my breast,
Where the lilies had paled with desire
To bring to me rest;
With the joy that was born of your brightness
Still thrilling my soul,
And a heart whose bewildering lightness
I cannot control;
Ah! now that your idyl of living
Is over too soon,
What gifts can compare with your giving,
O summer of June?

Then a wraith of the winter said gently,

“I will not deceive;
Of the brightness you prize so intently
No trace shall I leave.
The glow of the cardinal flowers
Shall pass from the field,
And the softness of silvery showers
To ice be congealed;
The geraniums vivid with fire
Shall curl at the heart;
And the lily forget the desire
And the lily forget the desire
Its peace to impart;
Pale as the rose that is dying,
Your whitening cheek;
Faint as its tremulous sighing,
Words you would speak;
For a joy that was born of their brightness
I tremble with you,
When the gleam and the glory and lightness
Shall pass with the dew.
Ah! now that your idyl of living
Is over so soon,
What gifts will be left of your giving,
O summer of June?”
 THOUGHT.

PALACE richly furnished is the mind,

In whose fair chambers we may walk at will;
And in its cloistered calm, serene and still,
Continual delight and comfort find.
Not only fretful cares we leave behind,
But restless happiness, and hopes that fill
The eager soul with too much light, until
Eyes dazzled see less wisely than the blind.
So perfect is the joy we find therein,
No pleasures of the outer world compare
With the divine repose so gladly sought;
When from the wearying world we turn to win
High mental solitude, and cherish there
Silent companionship with lofty thought.
A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE.

THOUGHT to hold thy memory as the sea

Holds in its heart a pale reflected moon,
Lost when the sunny radiance of noon
Dissolves the moonlight’s tender mystery.

Lo! thou art not her semblance in the seas,

But the fair moon herself, that near or far,
Orbed high in heaven as a shining star
Or hid from sight at love’s antipodes;—

Still sways the waters with love’s restless tides;

Not by her own will; no coquette is she,—
The lovely moon to whom I liken thee;—
For high above our earthly air she glides,

Unconscious as the waves that rise to greet

Her coming, of the mystery of God’s law
Compelling her those far-off waves to draw
Forever towards her whom they never meet.
 A REMEMBERED CRITIC.
TO J. R. D.

IND words, that greater kindness still implied

From one unused to praise, for one unknown
To him and to the world where he had grown
Less wont to cheer the artist than to chide;
And always in my heart I thought with pride
Some day to know him, and for him alone
Bring the fair finished work, that he might own—
“O friend, behold my full faith justified!”
Now he is dead! a man severe, they said
Who knew the critic; but around the spot
We call his grave, by some sweet memory led
Of kindred sweetness, violets have not
Refused to bloom; and one he had forgot
Wept suddenly to hear that he was dead.
DAWN.
 AKE, happy heart, O awake!
For the mists are flitting away;
And the hawthorn boughs for thy sake
Are eager and longing to break
Into garlands of blossoming spray.
Sing, sing it, O gay little linnet!
And hasten, O glad lark, to bring it,
The beautiful Day!

O Dawn, I am hungry with yearning

For gifts thou canst give;—
The proud soul within me is burning
With new life to live.
I am strong with the strength of long sleeping;
Fill full now each vein
With rich crimson wine thou art keeping
For glad hearts to drain!
O hush! for the clouds break asunder;
Her delicate feet
Touch the hills with a reverent wonder
If earth will be sweet.
And the heart that within me was breaking
With longing for her,
Breaks utterly, now that awaking
I hear her low stir.
So frail and so dainty and tender;
What heart could foresee
That the goddess it longed for, a slender
Young fairy would be?
Empty-handed, she dreads my displeasure,
And turns half away;
’Tis for me then to give of my treasure,
O beautiful Day!
Appealing, she waits till I greet her,
With no gifts for me;
Dear Day, after all it is sweeter
Dear Day, after all it is sweeter
For me to crown thee!
If I am not a happier maiden
Because of thy stay,
Thou shalt be with bright gifts from me laden,
A happier Day!
 WITH AN ANTIQUE.

HE old, old story men would call our love;

One cannot think of any time so old
That some “I love you” was not gladly told
To some one listening gladly; each remove
Of the long lingering centuries does but prove
Its deathlessness;—and we to-day who hold
Each other dear as if young Love had sold
To us alone his birthright from above,—
Love’s secret ours alone,—turn back to seek
In the rich types of Roman art or Greek
Some fitting gift wherewith to fitly speak
A love that each heart to the other drew;—
An old, old story it may seem to you;
To us, each year more beautiful, more new.
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