BRETT ASHLEY KAPLAN

 

"THE BITTER RESIDUE OF DEATH": JORGE SEMPRUN AND THE AESTHETICS OF HOLOCAUST MEMORY

IN HIS FASCINATING HOLOCAUST novel Le grand voyage (1963), Jorge Semprun juxtaposes the pleasure of reading the childhood memories offered in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu with the painful and deferred memory of his arrival at the Buchenwald concentration camp. By turning to Proust’s layered representations of childhood desires and fears, Semprun illustrates how both his memory of Proust’s peaceful (if neurotic) novel and his postwar consciousness have been colored by his experience of the camps. Semprun’s treatment of Proust —both through the voice of his narrator, Gérard, in the scene of incarceration itself, and through the literary and stylistic appropriations of Proust that pepper his text—prompts us to examine how aesthetic pleasure can offer an important survival mechanism. Indeed, by analyzing how Semprun’s use of Proust helps him survive Buchenwald, the first section of this article demonstrates how aesthetic pleasure affords a mode of coping with traumatic memory. In the second section I focus on Semprun’s rewriting of the past through his use of Ilse Koch, the infamous Nazi commandant suspected of perpetrating sexual crimes against the inmates of Buchenwald, and Sigrid, the young woman who acts as Koch’s counterbalance in the narrative. By redrawing Koch in the much more palatable form of Sigrid, Semprun manipulates aesthetic pleasure not just to survive but to transform a painful past into a more tolerable present. Taken together, these two sections demonstrate how Semprun seeks comfort in aesthetic pleasure in order 1) to survive the Holocaust; 2) to come to terms with his painful memories of it, and 3) to rewrite his experiences of the Holocaust as a literary reflection on the brutality of history. 

Semprun, a Spaniard from a Catholic family, was born in 1923 and emigrated to France in 1938 after Franco became dictator. Adopting the pseudonym Gérard Sorel, he joined the French Resistance in 1941 and in 1943 was arrested, tortured, and deported to Buchenwald. Semprun’s bourgeois family, deeply rooted in Spanish politics and culture, prepared him well for the appreciation of the shimmering density of Proust’s prose. His grandfather, Antonio Maura, whom Semprun describes as an "authoritarian but reformist man," was the Prime Minister under Alphonse XIII. His father, José María Semprun Gurrea, was a lawyer and poet whose readings to his children Semprun fondly remembered; Françoise Nicoladzé credits Semprun’s father’s library with offering Semprun his first experiences with the sensual relationship to literary works that is later cherished by the narrator of Le grand voyage. Before being arrested in Paris, Semprun had begun studying philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. Fluent in French and German, he survived Buchenwald through being taken in by a clandestine communist group that maneuvered him into a position in the office responsible for deportee labor assignments. After the War, under the pseudonym Federico Sánchez, Semprun returned to Paris and became active in the Spanish Communist Party in exile. He was expelled from the party in 1964, however, because of his criticisms of the Stalinist purges and other excesses of postwar communism.  After his break with the party, he took up screenwriting, working on films with Costa-Gavras and Chris Marker, and with Alain Resnais on La guerre est finie (1966) and Stavisky (1974).  He was Spain’s Minister of Culture from 1988-1991 before returning to France, where he remains an active writer and speaker. Throughout his postwar career he writes about his experience of living in two languages, as a Spaniard often writing about the Spanish Civil War primarily in French.  Having gone from Prime Minister’s grandson to Buchenwald prisoner to Minister of Culture—and from Franco to Hitler to Stalin—Semprun has been an acute witness to the vagaries of twentieth-century European art and politics. The appearance of Le grand voyage was met with great applause in 1963; Semprun was awarded the Formentor Prize, and the text was translated into multiple languages. Examining his Holocaust narrative offers insight not only into how Semprun was able to survive the worst but also into the larger question of how this important figure in contemporary French and Spanish culture portrays the relationship between aesthetics and memory. 

The narrative of Le grand voyage unfolds in many time frames, the first, and most recurrent, of which is the journey in a cramped and squalid boxcar carrying 120 resistance fighters from Compiègne, the transit camp in France, to the concentration camp Buchenwald in Germany.  But the narrative only fleetingly remains in the boxcar; via sudden, unannounced temporal switches the first-person narration lurches back and forth from the time before the war, when Semprun, as a "Red Spaniard," arrived in Paris, to various times after the war. Although many of these scenes take place at the moment of liberation in 1945, others occur two, three, sixteen, or an unspecified number of years later.  During the "present" time of the boxcar journey Semprun’s narrator conveys his memories to an unnamed companion dubbed "le gars de Semur" (the guy from Semur). Or rather, he tells some of his memories to the guy from Semur, and others he narrates as daydreams—including dreams of Proust—that carry him through the interminable and grueling voyage. As Ofelia Ferrán surmises, Semprun invented the guy from Semur because the memory of taking the grueling journey alone would have been difficult to reconstruct without an interlocutor, who in this case becomes the physical embodiment of at least some of the narrator’s memories. Gérard informs us at the outset that this man will die before the deeply ambiguous relief of arriving at the camp. By linking the narrator with a man who dies while carrying the narrator’s memories, Semprun represents a sensation shared by many Holocaust survivors—namely, that part of them is dead while another part—the rememberer—is very much alive. Because so much remembering takes place during the time and space of the journey to the camp, and because Gérard and the guy from Semur become so intertwined, when the narrator finally lays down the heavy body of the guy from Semur, he laments, "c’est comme si je déposais ma propre vie passée, tous les souvenirs qui me relient encore au monde d’autrefois" ("it’s as though I were laying down my own past, all the memories linking me to the world of the past," 216).  The body of the guy from Semur has absorbed the identity of the narrator during the last moments before that identity must be traded in for a number in Buchenwald. The implication is that memory stops at the door of the camps, that the pleasure afforded by access to the past must end there.

Semprun thus echoes Robert Antelme’s argument in his testimony L’espèce humaine, that the loss of name and therefore of identity was necessary for the dehumanizing mechanism of the camps to function. For Antelme, memory can be a hellish experience because of the difference between the pleasure of the past and the horror of the present: "L’enfer de la mémoire fonctionnait à plein. Pas un qui n’essayait de fixer une femme, qui ne sonnait à sa porte et n’entendait en même temps l’autre sonnerie, celle qui avait tout déclenché, quand il leur avait ouvert la porte" ("The hell of memory was operating full blast. There was hardly a guy who wasn’t trying to recall some woman, who wasn’t ringing at his door, and who, at the same time, wasn’t hearing that other ringing at the door, the one that, when he had opened the door to them, had precipitated everything"). Here the pleasurable memory of a lover ringing the doorbell has been indelibly colored by the painful memory of the police or the Gestapo ringing the same bell at the moment of one’s arrest. Both in this instance and, as we will see, in Semprun’s use of Proust’s ringing garden bell, survivors find that memory has been colonized by the experience of the Holocaust—that there is no way to retrieve the pleasant memory of a lover waiting at the door without simultaneously triggering the corruption of that memory by the Shoah.