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The article discusses the life and legacy of Jorge Semprún, highlighting his remarkable experiences from fighting in the French Resistance to surviving the Buchenwald concentration camp and later becoming a Communist leader and cultural figure in Spain. Topics discussed include Semprún's reflections on the importance of memory in both personal and political contexts, the tragic fate of fellow militant Julián Grimau and the broader implications of memory manipulation within Communist politics, and the relationship between historical remembrance and the forward-looking aspirations of socialism, emphasizing the necessity of acknowledging past struggles to foster future successes.

Elios Mendieta, Memoria y Guerra Civil en la obra de Jorge Semprún, Madrid, Guillermo Escolar Editor, 2023, 242 pp. ISBN: 978-84-197-8213-7.

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Contemporary Western society has taken its ideas and representations of resistance from the French resistance in World War II. But these are more often evoked than elucidated. Participation in the resistance in France and at Buchenwald and in the Communist underground in Franco's Spain shaped Jorge Semprún. Analysis of what he took from these experiences is revealing. Semprún began with resistance as an existential choice that challenged individuals' identities, a question he explored in the resistance of Jews and, in his case, of a bourgeois man of letters in the making. Semprún came to see that to resist meant to join with others, to put one's life in their hands and to take responsibility for their lives. This is why the torture of resisters to make them reveal information about others is so central to his thought on resistance. When Semprún left the Communist party, he developed his ideas on torture and resistance. After the war, the Communists tortured some of his Communist concentration camp comrades, not to obtain information, but to get those being tortured to learn what they wanted them to recite in show trials. Semprún came to feel that as a former Communist, he developed a resistance to references to the fraternity at the heart of resistance when they were was used as an element of control by the Communist party. He wrote in an effort to spread that immunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do militants expelled from the Communist Party ever leave it behind? Jorge Semprún was a Communist resister captured and sent to Buchenwald, where he worked in the sui generis Communist organization there. He spent almost two decades in the party, half of those years organizing the Communist underground in Franco's Spain. Expelled in 1964, he became an anti-Communist who held on to what he valued as a Communist at Buchenwald and in the underground. In the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Semprún came to see in what he had learned at Buchenwald a harbinger of the European project he was making his own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance to Jorge Semprún of confronting Holocaust denial in Vichy Syndrome France is not central to analyses that have been done of La Montagne blanche. To detect it, we must do what Semprún never stops asking readers to do: visit the external worlds to which his text directs us and reread his corpus so as to return with new insights and questions to pose to the text at hand. This essay examines La Montagne blanche in light of Semprún's presentation of Jewish characters in Le grand voyage ; his adaptation of Rolf Hochhuth's Le Vicaire ; his critique of the Communist party's belated acknowledgment of the gulag; his relationships to the Holocaust denier and severe critic of the Communists at Buchenwald, Paul Rassinier, and to Nadine Fresco, the most penetrating analyst of Rassinier; and his attention to Holocaust denial when he wrote fiction rooted in historical situations. Holocaust denial is an erasure. La Montagne blanche draws our attention to that erasure in a novel in which the subject is hardly mentioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing the psychoanalytic concepts of the crypt and the cryptonym as developed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, I argue that various recollections of his late mother can be analyzed as examples of the maternal crypt in the writing of Jorge Semprún. The crypt, as a space in which a subject incorporates into the self a lost love object that could not be appropriately mourned, becomes the site for the veiled expression of contradictory drives that juxtapose life and death, possession and loss in an erotically charged manner. Cryptonyms are textual clues that allow one to decipher the presence of the crypt in a text. I analyze how various cryptonyms echo each other in Semprún's 1976 screenplay Une femme à sa fenêtre (written with the director, Pierre Granier-Deferre), his 1981 novel La algarabía, and his 1998 memoir Adiós, luz de veranos..., establishing the maternal crypt as a sustained reflection on the loss of his mother at an early age and a foundational trauma underlying all later losses in the author's life. I connect this analysis to Laura Mulvey's study of the filmic gaze as a mechanism for the satisfaction of male desire, which underscores the patriarchal undertones of Semprún's maternal crypt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La intertextualidad es una característica clave en la obra de Jorge Semprún que ha sido abordada en gran cantidad de estudios a través de diferentes enfoques. No obstante, se observa un vacío en la profundización del papel que cumple la poesía española en sus novelas. Este estudio tiene como objetivo analizar las diversas funciones de la poesía española, en concreto de Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti y César Vallejo, en la producción concentracionaria de Jorge Semprún. Se observará que, para el sujeto que vive una experiencia traumática, la poesía es sustento moral, ayuda a comprender y a reconstruir la identidad, llega incluso a ser un personaje más en las novelas.

Taking a critical approach to Slavoj Žižek's reading of Jorge Semprún's novel Le Grand Voyage, the paper treats Žižek's observations as being exemplary of a historically inexact usage of the term Holocaust (Literature) that strives to underpin the claims made by a normative poetics of Modernism by implying the existence of a more or less unquestionable interrelationship between Modernism and the Holocaust (experience) that hinges upon the idea of 'trauma.' Reconstructing the political experience behind – and the political ethics prevalent in – Semprún's novel, the paper sets out to question this particular line of reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Jorge Semprún's wish, first expressed in 1963, to see Buchenwald consumed by nature. It contextualises this desire first in relation to Semprún's wider corpus and the distinction that he draws between being on either the 'inside' or the 'outside' of the traumatic experience, and second in relation to Charlotte Delbo's articulation of the difference between 'looking' and 'seeing'. Through this exploration, this article demonstrates the evolution of Semprún's thought and argues that both his original desire and the eventual contrary stance that he adopts, are equally symptomatic of his humanist beliefs, his commitment to the preservation and transference of memory and his desire for an ethical and empathetic approach to the site of trauma, the politics of remembrance and the ruins of memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Le présent travail porte sur le genre du témoignage littéraire et explore son double statut historique-littéraire, ainsi que sa position unique à la croisée de la mémoire et de l’imagination. L’étude analyse la spécificité des témoignages littéraires de Jorge Semprún et se focalise sur le phénomène des souvenirs imaginaires et sur l’image de la neige, en considérant les examples emblématiques de la fusion des facultés mnémonique et imaginaire.

The present work deals with the genre of literary testimony and explores its double literary-historical status, as well as its unique position at the crossroads between memory and imagination. The paper analyses the specificity of Jorge Semprún's literary testimonies and focuses itself on the phenomenon of the imaginary memories and the image of snow, considering emblematic examples of the fusion of mnemonic and imaginary faculties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at analyzing the hiatus between the physical return of the survivors of the Nazi concentraUon camps and the psychological bond they keep on feeling deep inside with the Ume and place of their detention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artículo analiza la política cinematográfica llevada a cabo por Jorge Semprún como Ministro de Cultura (1988–91); particularmente, el conocido como Decreto Semprún, promulgado en 1989. Mientras que la denominada Ley Miró ha sido ampliamente estudiada por la historiografía especializada, el Decreto Semprún apenas ha recibido atención académica. Esta falta de historiografía sobre el mismo es notable, ya que el Decreto Semprún no solo se diseñó para cambiar los criterios establecidos por la Ley Miró para la protección, financiación, y promoción del cine español, sino que sentó las bases para la posterior política cinematográfica desarrollada hasta los años 2000. Por tanto, este artículo explica el papel clave que tuvo el Decreto Semprún en la reconfiguración de las políticas cinematográficas del estado español en los años 90 enmarcándolo en el contexto de las políticas cinematográficas europeas del periodo para intentar, así, aportar nueva luz sobre esta ley fundamental del cine español. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The subject of review is a collective work Unfälle der Sprache. Literarische und philologische Erkundungen der Katastrophe [“Language Accidents. Literary and Philological Explorations of Catastrophe”] published in 2014 and edited by German Romanicists: Ottmar Ette and Judith Kasper. The book deals with the events recognized as catastrophes and their philological-literary representations. The articles, discussed on the selected examples, depict–on the one hand–a theoretical aspect of struggling with catastrophe itself, as well as with extreme experiences and feelings connected with it. On the other hand, the authors concentrate on the analysis of the literary works dealing with the question of the Shoah, as discussed by Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, David Grossman, and Jorge Semprún.

This essay addresses the instable meaning of the term catastrophe over the course of history. The first part takes leave of the “the tiny fissures” in the continuous catastrophe noted by Walter Benjamin to develop a philology of the cata/strophe. This philology does not only register a given meaning (for instance, of the catastrophe), but intervenes actively as disruption. It insists on the strophe in the catastrophe, transforming catastrophe into cata/strophe that, in fatal situations, permits the poetic potential to become a dynamic force that can, at least on the linguistic level, open toward other dimensions without denying the catastrophe itself. The second part is dedicated to a reading of Jorge Semprún’s autobiographical novel L’écriture ou la vie from the perspective of this philological concept. It seeks to show how Semprún’s citing and reciting of Baudelaire’s strophes in the putrid atmosphere of the Buchenwald concentration camp literally produce, on the level of the signifiers, fresh air to breathe.

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar el recurso sistemático a la referencia literaria en la obra narrativa de Jorge Semprún, tomando como objeto de estudio L’écriture ou la vie (1994). Lejos de ser una mera ilustración su propio capital cultural, la alusión y cita a otros autores será conceptualizada como una expresión del trauma propio de la experiencia concentracionaria por cuanto evidencia una necesidad de diluir su individualidad en la voz ajena. El resultado es una obra escrita a diversas manos en la que la referencia literaria intertextual se convierte en la marca de un silencio personal y en un ejercicio narrativo contra la memoria. The aim of this paper is to explore Jorge Semprún’s systematic use of literary references in his oeuvre, particularly in L’écriture ou la vie (1994). Far from being a mere illustration of the author’s cultural capital, the quotation and allusion to other authors evinces a personal trauma that reflects his own experience in a concentration camp and his need to dissolve his subjectivity in the voice of otherness. The result is a literary work written by multiple hands; one in which the intertextual literary reference becomes the sign of a personal silence as well as a narrative mechanism against memory.

La poética intercultural es una línea de investigación que responde a la pregunta de cómo se comporta la lengua literaria en aquellos autores que en el momento de la creación no solo tienen una lengua a su disposición, sino dos o más, qué recursos poéticos priorizan y si dichos usos implican una redefinición de conceptos literarios tradicionales. En publicaciones anteriores se han explicitado algunos de los procedimientos relativos a las llamadas lengua de escritura y la lengua latente. En el presente artículo nos centramos en el uso específico de una tercera lengua en obras literarias interculturales con configuración multilingüe. En concreto ejemplificaremos a través del estudio de Le mort qu´il faut (Viviré con su nombre, morirá con el mío; Der Tote mit meinem Namen) de Jorge Semprún la función otorgada al alemán concentracionario como uso característico de la presencia de una lengua vivida (erlebte Sprache).

Este trabajo surge ante la muerte del escritor español Jorge Semprún, en 2011, y quiere ser una revisión de su vida y su obra, y un análisis de las relaciones de su discurso con la situación política y cultural de su tiempo.

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Within a field loosely termed as ‘trauma studies’, the question of closure for the ‘revenant’ or survivor of the camps has become a favoured trope of the academy. In an exploration of this area, this paper shall ask whether through the act of imitiation, cultural convention can be restored, and the potentially cathartic benefits of writing and testifying can be actively facilitated. This question shall be posed through a consideration of the influence that Primo Levi would have on Buchenwald deportee, Jorge Semprún, and in particular their shared sensation that life after the camps was but a dream. Though originally first penned by Levi, Semprún makes reference to this idea, explicitly and implicitly, time and again in works stretching from 1967 through to 1994. This paper examines the relationship between the quasi-canonical Levi and the lesser known Semprún and explores the influence, and the implications there-of, of the former on the latter, via the following questions: is Semprún's imitation of Levi an example of ‘mere’ empathetic identification with another deportee, or is it an altogether more aggressive assumption of identity? What are the implications of imitation within testimony for the possibility of ‘working-through’ and ‘acting out’? Is it possible for an uninfluenced, original and subjective voice to testify to the concentrationnary experience, when a writer such as Levi has, albeit against his wishes, come to be recognized as the authoritative voice of the univers concentrationnaire? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This piece of work analyses the process of memory construction in the work of Jorge Semprún, focusing in his novel Literature or Life. In this article, we explore the connection between the building of a collective identity that could be used as the basis of an Europeanspirituality represented in the political project of the European Union. Our article tries to disclose the literary strategies that Semprún uses to establish this identification while proposes a criticalanalysis of its political implications.

Beginning with a preliminary reflection on the concept of ‘fluid cartography’, this article addresses the topos of the journey in the literature of the Holocaust. The article analyses three novels, by Jorge Semprun, Albert Drach and H.G. Adler, and concludes that the radical inversion of one of the central topoi of modernity in these works points to modes of representing space which bear paradigmatic witness to the prevalence of frontiers which it is impossible to cross.

Este artículo analizará la construcción del discurso autobiográfico de la literatura de Jorge Semprún estudiando como sus obras surgen siempre como una respuesta a la palabra ajena, como un diálogo con la alteridad. En una materialización de la concepción bajtiniana de la creación verbal, cada enunciado nace como respuesta a un enunciado previo, como un eslabón más que entreteje un diálogo infinito. La escritura, a pesar de su matriz autobiográfica, se desarrolla como un viraje constante hacia la alteridad que avanza mediante citas, discusiones y referencias literarias o filosóficas. Todo ello nos llevará a comentar la función que desempeña el recitado poético en el relato del encierro concentracionario, así como el sentido de la intertextualidad de la obra de Semprún. Por último veremos como la redefinición de la textualidad en términos intertextuales comporta, también, una redefinición de la identidad en términos intersubjetivos.

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Copyright of Revista de Filología Alemana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Jorge Semprún (Madrid, 1923 - Paris, 2011) wrote novels in two languages, French and Spanish. His schizophrenic bilingualism led him to say that his homeland was language in general, not a language (his particular phraseology may be interpreted as a symptom of his illness). In both French and Spanish his fiction is deeply autobiographical. Indeed, literature seems to have been the writer’s lifesaver, the context in which he affirmed his at least double identity (without forgetting, however, the importance of German). This double identity he proudly affirmed both in politics and writing, which alternate and nurture each other throughout his life and by means of which he struggled to change the world, passionately committing himself to the making of Europe.

Este trabajo analiza el proceso de construcción de memoria en la obra de Jorge Semprún, partiendo de su novela La escritura o la vida y explora su vinculación con la construcción de una identidad colectiva que sirva como base de una espiritualidad europea representada en la formación política de la Unión Europea. Nuestro artículo es un intento de revelar las estrategias literarias a través de las cuales Semprún lleva a cabo esta identificación al tiempo que propone un análisis crítico de los alcances políticos de la misma.

There are many testimonies preserved in archives that recount the horror of the Holocaust and that have become resources for historical and social research. In addition to testimonies produced with descriptive intention or in the full awareness of becoming documents for historians, some testimony writers have signed their books with a literary intention, but the very nucleus of their work is to explain the nature of their experience in the concentration camps without resorting to describing their own cases. These works blur the boundaries between history and literature, because, while they present themselves as works of fiction, they feed on testimonial autobiography. The testimony writers want to explain the horror that they experienced by fictionalizing their own experience. These are works which contain truth and which are narrated with a literary intention, works which reach a general audience and have a profound impact. This is the case of the Spanish writer Jorge SEMPRÚN, who attempts to "invent" the truth in his literary work. His autobiographic-novelistic testimony is situated in the ambiguous no-man's-land of autofiction. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1103144

Jorge Semprún (Madrid, 1923 - Paris, 2011) wrote novels in two languages, French and Spanish. His schizophrenic bilingualism led him to say that his homeland was language in general, not a language (his particular phraseology may be interpreted as a symptom of his illness). In both French and Spanish his fiction is deeply autobiographical. Indeed, literature seems to have been the writer's lifesaver, the context in which he affirmed his at least double identity (without forgetting, however, the importance of German). This double identity he proudly affirmed both in politics and writing, which alternate and nurture each other throughout his life and by means of which he struggled to change the world, passionately committing himself to the making of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This tribute to Jorge Semprún takes into account a philosophical concern of the honored: the interpretation he makes about the treatment on the death of Nazis, based on Kant readings. For Semprún, Nazis killed, but did not allow dying, which lead to the expression "brotherhood of death", emphasizing, above all, the free act of dying and death as part of life. Also, the text shows some significant information on Semprún's life and his work on the subject of life and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jorge Semprún, who died in 2011, was a witness, chronicler and actor of the 20th Century. In his writings, his personal fate is presented with such force that it almost automatically offers a possibility for autobiographical analysis. In this approach, many of his works could have been analyzed, but Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez carries a generic designation in the title itself. This work, published in 1977, induced a major political scandal at that time because of its historical and political aspects, thus significantly less attention was turned towards the literary values of the work. The present study aims to highlight Semprún's autobiographical aspects and narrative technique in the given book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many testimonies preserved in archives that recount the horror of the Holocaust and that have become resources for historical and social research. In addition to testimonies produced with descriptive intention or in the full awareness of becoming documents for historians, some testimony writers have signed their books with a literary intention, but the very nucleus of their work is to explain the nature of their experience in the concentration camps without resorting to describing their own cases. These works blur the boundaries between history and literature, because, while they present themselves as works of fiction, they feed on testimonial autobiography. The testimony writers want to explain the horror that they experienced by fictionalizing their own experience. These are works which contain truth and which are narrated with a literary intention, works which reach a general audience and have a profound impact. This is the case of the Spanish writer Jorge SEMPRÚN, who attempts to "invent" the truth in his literary work. His autobiographic-novelistic testimony is situated in the ambiguous no-man's-land of autofiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jorge Semprun's obsession with memory is fed by a triple experience of exile: emigration from Spain, imprisonment in Buchenwald and expulsion from the Communist Party. While the notion of exile can be found at the core of his writing, it constitutes a complex construction that changes over time. Through the examination of three very different texts this article traces the meanings that exile acquires in Semprun's writing. Portrayed in partly negative terms in Autobiografia de Federico Sanchez, as the Spanish Communist Party leadership is ignorant of the true political situation within Spain due to its being outside, in Adios, luz de veranos... it comes to figure as an internalized virtue enabling the writer to pursue his vocation. In La escritura o la vida the focus on the concentration camp underlines the traumatic qualities of exile and the difficulty of creating a listener who can relate to the experience of extreme alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the reverse of the idea of 'fluid cartographies' by focusing on a modern radical experience of non-time and non-space. Taking as a starting point fictional testimonies by Jorge Semprun, Albert Drach and H. G. Adler, various spatial figurations in Holocaust literature, in particular those that centre on a dystopian inversion of the topos of travel, are analysed. The extreme constriction of the experience of space in Holocaust narratives testifies to the reaching of an uncharted finis terrae that cruelly puts into question the very idea of cartography as the utopian celebration of an intelligible world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Historia, Antropologia y Fuentes Orales is the property of Asociacion de Revistas Culturales de Espana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Historia, Antropologia y Fuentes Orales is the property of Asociacion de Revistas Culturales de Espana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)