Jorge Semprun was born in Madrid in 1923. His father, a diplomat for the Spanish Republic, was part of the great diaspora that occurred when the Republic fell to Franco's forces. The family settled in Paris and there began the young Semprun's assimilation into French society and culture. While still a student in the Ecole Normale Superieure, Semprun joined the French Resistance. Arrested in 1943, he was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he remained until the camp was liberated at the end of the war. Since then he has devoted himself to writing novels and film scripts as well as to politics (he was Spain's Minister of Culture from 1988 to 1991).
It has taken Semprun many painful years to write this book. His fear was that anything he would write about his experiences in Buchenwald would misrepresent the reality of his own lived experience (the Spanish word is vivencia). Nor did he want to repeat or be lost in all those other narratives of the Holocaust. For some time he thought of casting his experience in fictional form. But that, too, he considered might result in a lie. Finally, he settled for a kind of associative sequence of memories, moving backwards and forwards in terms of time, place and person, and whatever else he has done he has not simply produced another Holocaust book.
Perhaps changing or to and in the title of Semprun's book would more accurately reflect the nature of the work he has written. Literature and Semprun's love of literature permeate this book. The names of Kafka, Vallejo, Brecht, Rene Char, Leon Blum seem to predominate, but these are only a few among many. Even Goethe shows up, though in a bizarre context: the cottage he received in 1776 as a gift from Duke Karl August was next door, so to speak, to the ovens of Buchenwald.
There is philosophy as well. Heidegger is put in his place as a shifty collaborator with the Nazis. And there is a good deal of politics, mainly concerned with the expression of Semprun's disillusionment with state totalitarianism (especially of the Stalinist variety). Where Semprun now stands politically is not easy to say. Perhaps he is a Christian Democrat. It doesn't really matter. Literature or Life is not an ideological book. The central question that the book confronts is Radical Evil (in German, das radikal Bose). That phrase resounds throughout the book. And Semprun, like us all, has no answer. Another terrible phrase that is heard again and again is Krematorium, ausmachen! (Crematorium, shut down), which was blasted over the camp when Allied bombers were sighted or anticipated.
And there is love, too. Not sex or lust or lechery, but love incarnate, two bodies sharing the joy of being alive, of sharing life together in the body and in the spirit. Semprun treats all of this with great delicacy and tact and thereby denies the prurient reader any voyeuristic thrills. And he is right, too, as he is when he avoids the obscenity of exploitative sensationalism in his treatment of camp life.
At least one incident from the book is worth relaying. On Semprun's first day at Buchenwald, when he was being registered, the German civilian who was registering his details asked Semprun what his profession was. Semprun answered with some arrogance: "Philosophy student". But the German insisted that he should put down something else. Semprun persisted until the German finally shrugged his shoulders and told Semprun to pass on. It was not until a long time later that Semprun discovered that the German had put down "Stucco worker" instead of "philosophy student", and that it was only by having a trade of some sort that he was saved from being sent off to a munitions factory where death was a certainty. In that, I suppose, there is some answer to das radikal Bose.
Literature or Life is no reportage, as Semprun desperately wanted it not to be. This is not, of course, to denigrate reportage. But Semprun wanted to produce something else: literature that would not betray, by aesthetic contrivance of one kind or another, the sheer horror of human evil. And he has done that. He has been well served by his translator, Linda Coverdale. Literature or Life is a deeply moving testimony of one man's triumph over the dark forces of the human soul.
Michael Smith is a poet, translator and publisher
