“Whoever wants to remember must trust in forgetting, in this risk that is absolute forgetting and in this beautiful chance that memory then becomes. » This thought of Maurice Blanchot, Jorge Semprun took it up as an epigraph to L’Ecriture ou la vie, his master book (Gallimard, 1994). Despite this masterpiece, in May 1995 the French Academy refused the candidacy of this Spanish writer (in the chair of Henri Gouhier) whose books nevertheless testify to his deep belonging to our language, with elegance and rigor. Because his communist past bothers him? Or that he lacks the legal nationality then required?
Who cares! The one who lost “his” nation at the advent of Francoism – he was not 13 years old –, lived in exile, clandestinity and resistance out of ideological conviction, stateless with no destination of return when the camps were liberated – he was deported to Buchenwald -, will find a final address with the Goncourts, elected under the cover of Hervé Bazin in 1996.
In the venerable literary brotherhood, the charm of Semprun, which linked him so deeply to Yves Montand, Costa-Gavras – he was the screenwriter of the films Z and L’Aveu – or Bernard Pivot (who regularly hosted him on his show “Apostrophes “), operates once again. And when Jorge Semprun died in June 2011, Edmonde Charles-Roux saluted “a magnificent, warm and generous companion”. However, the man had never recovered from his childhood ideal, a republican world with humanism steeped in a cosmopolitanism encouraged by his parents, progressive Catholics, and shattered in the horror of the civil war.
European commitment
Winner of the General Competition in Philosophy at the age of 17, the young reader of Hegel, educated at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, established himself as an implacable opponent of Nazism, rebellious, ultimately dropping out of school, resistant and saboteur even to himself to adopt for a time the communist line, that of the comrades in the struggle. Before his European commitment – he who from adolescence drew equally on Iberian, French and German cultures – earned him a resounding expulsion from the Spanish Communist Party in 1964 for the “crime” of Eurocommunism.
To commemorate the centenary of the birth (December 10) of the committed man who renounced the mirage of politics by reinventing his life through fictions which always started from his biography, taken up in bursts of autofiction, Albert Solé dedicates to him a documentary with an eminently romantic takeoff.
Resistance fighter, deported, host of clandestine networks, but also translator, screenwriter, Oscar nominee, director, writer and for some time minister of culture in the socialist government of Felipe Gonzalez in the country he had lost half a century earlier, there was material…
Sober and informed, the evocation uses the relevant archive, the words of witnesses as well as biographers and relatives, the quotation of texts, supported by convincing animated sequences: Le Grand Voyage mainly (Gallimard, 1963 ), where, after nearly twenty years of silence, number 44904, survivor of Buchenwald, finds the words to speak of the “past that does not pass”.