Chris Maisano
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-living-fraternity-of-militants/
Jorge Semprún viveu uma vida incomumente agitada, mesmo pelos padrões extremos do século XX. Quando tinha apenas 22 anos, Semprún já havia sido exilado da Espanha republicana, lutado na Resistência Francesa, sido preso pela Gestapo e deportado para Buchenwald, onde sobreviveu por dois anos até que os Aliados libertaram o campo. Aos quarenta e poucos anos, ele já havia se tornado um líder da organização clandestina do Partido Comunista da Espanha (PCE) na França, atuado como agente secreto viajando entre os dois países, publicado um romance premiado sobre sua angustiante jornada de trem até Buchenwald, e sido expulso do PCE por ousar discordar da linha partidária. Já na casa dos setenta, desfrutava de uma longa carreira como romancista e roteirista renomado internacionalmente — foi ele o roteirista dos clássicos filmes políticos Z e A Confissão, entre outros — e atuado como ministro da Cultura no segundo governo do Partido Socialista da Espanha, após o fim da ditadura de Francisco Franco. Continuou a escrever e a falar de sua casa adotiva na França até morrer, em 2011, aos 87 anos.
Em 2007, Semprún deu uma entrevista à Paris Review que ilumina muitos dos temas, ideias e obsessões que caracterizaram sua obra. O entrevistador lhe perguntou se havia alguma forma literária nova que gostaria de perseguir antes que o tempo se esgotasse em sua vida e carreira. “Já pensei em escrever livros futuristas, ficção científica baseada na antecipação de eventos políticos no distante futuro”, respondeu ele. “Mas não sei se consigo fazer isso. Sempre volto, de forma cautelosa, para a memória.” Dado o número de situações intensas e traumáticas pelas quais passou, não é difícil entender por que Semprún não conseguiu escapar da atração gravitacional da memória. Ele era, no jargão da psicologia pop, um homem com muito a processar. A memória também tinha um valor instrumental para Semprún em sua época como militante comunista. Agentes clandestinos não podem manter um calendário ou uma lista de afazeres enquanto se organizam para derrubar uma ditadura. “Eu não podia anotar todos os compromissos que tinha”, Semprún lembrou pouco antes de morrer. “Se tivesse anotado e fosse preso, estaria arriscando dar à polícia uma lista de vítimas para futuras prisões. Isso significava que eu tinha que memorizar tudo. E por muitos anos, em Madrid, eu começava o dia recordando as reuniões do dia enquanto me barbear.”
A memória de Semprún lhe serviu bem durante seus anos como agente do PCE. Ele foi um operário altamente eficaz, capaz de escapar da polícia secreta de Franco com relativa facilidade. O mesmo não se pode dizer de alguns dos camaradas de Semprún na clandestinidade espanhola. Um deles foi Julián Grimau, membro do Comitê Central do PCE que se destacou como um agente enérgico e muitas vezes brutal da polícia republicana durante a Guerra Civil Espanhola. Nessa função, ele caçou e reprimiu não apenas os opositores nacionalistas da República, mas também os esquerdistas antistalinistas como os do POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista). Considerando o histórico de Grimau, alguns militantes do PCE, incluindo Semprún, achavam que ele nunca deveria ter sido empregado como agente na Espanha; uma prisão significaria tortura e morte certa. No entanto, a liderança do partido no exílio o enviou mesmo assim. A polícia de Franco prendeu Grimau em 1962, o julgou em um processo judicial farsesco e o executou em 1963.
Semprún estava bem encaminhado para uma ruptura com o PCE quando Grimau morreu. A liderança do partido o afastou de suas funções clandestinas em 1962 e expulsou ele e o dissidente Fernando Claudín, principal teórico e historiador do PCE, em 1964. O caso Grimau cristalizou muito do que Semprún veio a detestar no movimento comunista. Líderes do partido como Santiago Carrillo ignoraram os alertas que Semprún e outros levantaram sobre a designação de Grimau, apenas para usá-lo como mártir após sua morte — uma morte pela qual eles compartilhavam uma significativa parcela de responsabilidade.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-living-fraternity-of-militants/
Jorge Semprún viveu uma vida incomumente agitada, mesmo pelos padrões extremos do século XX. Quando tinha apenas 22 anos, Semprún já havia sido exilado da Espanha republicana, lutado na Resistência Francesa, sido preso pela Gestapo e deportado para Buchenwald, onde sobreviveu por dois anos até que os Aliados libertaram o campo. Aos quarenta e poucos anos, ele já havia se tornado um líder da organização clandestina do Partido Comunista da Espanha (PCE) na França, atuado como agente secreto viajando entre os dois países, publicado um romance premiado sobre sua angustiante jornada de trem até Buchenwald, e sido expulso do PCE por ousar discordar da linha partidária. Já na casa dos setenta, desfrutava de uma longa carreira como romancista e roteirista renomado internacionalmente — foi ele o roteirista dos clássicos filmes políticos Z e A Confissão, entre outros — e atuado como ministro da Cultura no segundo governo do Partido Socialista da Espanha, após o fim da ditadura de Francisco Franco. Continuou a escrever e a falar de sua casa adotiva na França até morrer, em 2011, aos 87 anos.
Em 2007, Semprún deu uma entrevista à Paris Review que ilumina muitos dos temas, ideias e obsessões que caracterizaram sua obra. O entrevistador lhe perguntou se havia alguma forma literária nova que gostaria de perseguir antes que o tempo se esgotasse em sua vida e carreira. “Já pensei em escrever livros futuristas, ficção científica baseada na antecipação de eventos políticos no distante futuro”, respondeu ele. “Mas não sei se consigo fazer isso. Sempre volto, de forma cautelosa, para a memória.” Dado o número de situações intensas e traumáticas pelas quais passou, não é difícil entender por que Semprún não conseguiu escapar da atração gravitacional da memória. Ele era, no jargão da psicologia pop, um homem com muito a processar. A memória também tinha um valor instrumental para Semprún em sua época como militante comunista. Agentes clandestinos não podem manter um calendário ou uma lista de afazeres enquanto se organizam para derrubar uma ditadura. “Eu não podia anotar todos os compromissos que tinha”, Semprún lembrou pouco antes de morrer. “Se tivesse anotado e fosse preso, estaria arriscando dar à polícia uma lista de vítimas para futuras prisões. Isso significava que eu tinha que memorizar tudo. E por muitos anos, em Madrid, eu começava o dia recordando as reuniões do dia enquanto me barbear.”
A memória de Semprún lhe serviu bem durante seus anos como agente do PCE. Ele foi um operário altamente eficaz, capaz de escapar da polícia secreta de Franco com relativa facilidade. O mesmo não se pode dizer de alguns dos camaradas de Semprún na clandestinidade espanhola. Um deles foi Julián Grimau, membro do Comitê Central do PCE que se destacou como um agente enérgico e muitas vezes brutal da polícia republicana durante a Guerra Civil Espanhola. Nessa função, ele caçou e reprimiu não apenas os opositores nacionalistas da República, mas também os esquerdistas antistalinistas como os do POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista). Considerando o histórico de Grimau, alguns militantes do PCE, incluindo Semprún, achavam que ele nunca deveria ter sido empregado como agente na Espanha; uma prisão significaria tortura e morte certa. No entanto, a liderança do partido no exílio o enviou mesmo assim. A polícia de Franco prendeu Grimau em 1962, o julgou em um processo judicial farsesco e o executou em 1963.
Semprún estava bem encaminhado para uma ruptura com o PCE quando Grimau morreu. A liderança do partido o afastou de suas funções clandestinas em 1962 e expulsou ele e o dissidente Fernando Claudín, principal teórico e historiador do PCE, em 1964. O caso Grimau cristalizou muito do que Semprún veio a detestar no movimento comunista. Líderes do partido como Santiago Carrillo ignoraram os alertas que Semprún e outros levantaram sobre a designação de Grimau, apenas para usá-lo como mártir após sua morte — uma morte pela qual eles compartilhavam uma significativa parcela de responsabilidade.
Na sua memória de 1977, A Autobiografia de Federico Sanchez e a Clandestinidade Comunista na Espanha, Semprún reflete sobre os usos e abusos da memória que eram endêmicos à política comunista. "A memória comunista", escreve ele, "é uma forma de não lembrar: não consiste em recordar o passado, mas em censurá-lo. A memória dos líderes comunistas funciona de maneira pragmática, de acordo com os interesses e objetivos políticos do momento. Não é uma memória histórica, uma memória que testemunha, mas uma memória ideológica." O comunismo era, é claro, longe de ser o único projeto político do século XX com uma relação pragmática e ideológica com a verdade. Para os esquerdistas democráticos, o que tornava o comunismo tão pernicioso era o modo como seu cinismo sem limites, seu uso implacável das vidas humanas, era justificado em nome do socialismo e da emancipação universal.
“Se você não tem um senso de memória, então acaba não sendo nada!” Semprún disse isso em referência aos indivíduos, mas o mesmo vale para movimentos políticos. Adeptos e detratores há muito tempo veem o socialismo como um projeto voltado para o futuro, por vezes teleológico, com os olhos fixos no horizonte. O advento do socialismo, segundo Marx, encerraria a pré-história da humanidade e inauguraria o início de sua verdadeira história. Em A Cidade Ameaçada, escrito nos dias mais sombrios da Petrogrado revolucionária, Victor Serge bradou que os opositores dos bolcheviques "mal contam, porque representam o passado, pois não têm nenhum ideal. Nós — os Vermelhos — apesar da fome, dos erros e até dos crimes — estamos a caminho da cidade do futuro." Ao mesmo tempo, o movimento socialista estava conscientemente imerso em sua história de lutas e na memória de suas derrotas. Em seu testamento final, escrito na véspera de seu assassinato pelas mãos dos Freikorps, Rosa Luxemburg insistiu que a história do movimento de "derrotas inevitáveis se acumula como garantias para a vitória final futura." Em Literatura e Revolução, Leon Trotsky insistiu que "nós, marxistas, vivemos nas tradições, e não paramos de ser revolucionários por causa disso."
Trotsky certamente conseguiu transmitir esse senso de memória histórica aos seus descendentes políticos — talvez até demais. Em um encontro malfadado no início da década de 1960 com Tom Hayden, Irving Howe, o editor fundador da Dissent e trotskista em sua juventude, formou rapidamente uma opinião negativa sobre o novo esquerdista, baseado em sua sensibilidade anti-Stalinista. Como Howe disse no documentário Arguing the World, "Hayden era alguém que nós sentíamos ter uma veia autoritária, manipuladora muito forte. Víamos o comissário nele. E isso nos afastou." Michael Harrington, companheiro de Howe na corrente shachtmanista e presidente fundador dos Socialistas Democráticos da América (DSA), repreendeu infamemente os redatores jovens da Port Huron Statement por estarem dispostos demais a permitir que comunistas se juntassem às suas fileiras. Harrington viria a se arrepender de sua abordagem excessivamente pugilista com os jovens idealistas, que não tinham experiência nos "estufas ideológicas" da Velha Esquerda. "Saindo do movimento shachtmanista", Harrington explicou mais tarde, "onde a questão era a questão russa — era uma linha de sangue. Eu conhecia pessoas que conheceram Trotsky pessoalmente. Os comunistas eram as pessoas que enfiaram um picareta em seu crânio." A Nova Esquerda teve a chance de recomeçar, imune das associações com o que o socialismo realmente existente se tornara. Howe, Harrington e seus camaradas estavam tão ansiosos para alcançar esse resultado — e tão traumatizados pelo encontro com o stalinismo — que alienaram aqueles que deveriam ser seus protegidos. Sua sensibilidade política profundamente histórica os impediu, ironicamente, de cumprir seu encontro com a história.
A atual esquerda socialista dos EUA, baseada principalmente em um revitalizado e transformado DSA, não sofre de tal excesso de memória. Muitos de seus quadros nasceram depois da queda do Muro de Berlim e do bloco soviético. O súbito influxo de jovens membros para o DSA após a eleição de Donald Trump reduziu a idade média dos membros de sessenta e sete para trinta e três praticamente da noite para o dia. Esse influxo de sangue novo foi desesperadamente necessário, mas também marcou uma ruptura na continuidade do movimento. A memória institucional e a tradição política não podiam, em muitos aspectos, ser efetivamente transmitidas no meio da turbulência de mudanças. Existe um aspecto positivo nisso. Muitos de nós agora não temos memória das lutas amargas entre as várias facções do socialismo do século XX e, portanto, não carregamos as cicatrizes políticas e emocionais que elas impuseram. Ao mesmo tempo, essa falta pronunciada de memória significa que corremos o risco de repetir erros do passado e de falhar em entender o que torna o socialismo democrático uma tradição política distinta.
É por isso que a insistência de Semprún sobre a memória ressoa tão poderosamente comigo, um socialista "jovem-velho" que esteve o suficiente tempo no movimento para estar em ambos os lados da linha. "Lembrar constantemente" foi como ele resumiu sua motivação como artista politicamente engajado. "Temos que repetir incessantemente para que as gerações sucessivas não se esqueçam." Para Semprún, isso significava retornar constantemente às duas experiências que moldaram sua vida: o comunismo e os campos. Em seu poderoso romance autobiográfico Que Domingo Bonito!, Semprún admite que suas obras "sempre retornam, obsessivamente, como os carrosséis dos parques de diversões da memória, aos mesmos temas." Cenas primordiais retornam ao longo de sua escrita: apartamentos sujos nos subúrbios de Paris onde militantes exilados do PCE se reuniam para organizar seu trabalho clandestino; a grande avenida, ladeada por águias hitlerianas empoleiradas de maneira ameaçadora em colunas de pedra, levando aos portões de Buchenwald; o antigo castelo boêmio em Praga onde foi expulso do partido. As experiências de Semprún eram de um tempo e lugar específicos, mas formam parte de um passado pelo qual todos os socialistas têm algum senso de responsabilidade.
“Se você não tem um senso de memória, então acaba não sendo nada!” Semprún disse isso em referência aos indivíduos, mas o mesmo vale para movimentos políticos. Adeptos e detratores há muito tempo veem o socialismo como um projeto voltado para o futuro, por vezes teleológico, com os olhos fixos no horizonte. O advento do socialismo, segundo Marx, encerraria a pré-história da humanidade e inauguraria o início de sua verdadeira história. Em A Cidade Ameaçada, escrito nos dias mais sombrios da Petrogrado revolucionária, Victor Serge bradou que os opositores dos bolcheviques "mal contam, porque representam o passado, pois não têm nenhum ideal. Nós — os Vermelhos — apesar da fome, dos erros e até dos crimes — estamos a caminho da cidade do futuro." Ao mesmo tempo, o movimento socialista estava conscientemente imerso em sua história de lutas e na memória de suas derrotas. Em seu testamento final, escrito na véspera de seu assassinato pelas mãos dos Freikorps, Rosa Luxemburg insistiu que a história do movimento de "derrotas inevitáveis se acumula como garantias para a vitória final futura." Em Literatura e Revolução, Leon Trotsky insistiu que "nós, marxistas, vivemos nas tradições, e não paramos de ser revolucionários por causa disso."
Trotsky certamente conseguiu transmitir esse senso de memória histórica aos seus descendentes políticos — talvez até demais. Em um encontro malfadado no início da década de 1960 com Tom Hayden, Irving Howe, o editor fundador da Dissent e trotskista em sua juventude, formou rapidamente uma opinião negativa sobre o novo esquerdista, baseado em sua sensibilidade anti-Stalinista. Como Howe disse no documentário Arguing the World, "Hayden era alguém que nós sentíamos ter uma veia autoritária, manipuladora muito forte. Víamos o comissário nele. E isso nos afastou." Michael Harrington, companheiro de Howe na corrente shachtmanista e presidente fundador dos Socialistas Democráticos da América (DSA), repreendeu infamemente os redatores jovens da Port Huron Statement por estarem dispostos demais a permitir que comunistas se juntassem às suas fileiras. Harrington viria a se arrepender de sua abordagem excessivamente pugilista com os jovens idealistas, que não tinham experiência nos "estufas ideológicas" da Velha Esquerda. "Saindo do movimento shachtmanista", Harrington explicou mais tarde, "onde a questão era a questão russa — era uma linha de sangue. Eu conhecia pessoas que conheceram Trotsky pessoalmente. Os comunistas eram as pessoas que enfiaram um picareta em seu crânio." A Nova Esquerda teve a chance de recomeçar, imune das associações com o que o socialismo realmente existente se tornara. Howe, Harrington e seus camaradas estavam tão ansiosos para alcançar esse resultado — e tão traumatizados pelo encontro com o stalinismo — que alienaram aqueles que deveriam ser seus protegidos. Sua sensibilidade política profundamente histórica os impediu, ironicamente, de cumprir seu encontro com a história.
A atual esquerda socialista dos EUA, baseada principalmente em um revitalizado e transformado DSA, não sofre de tal excesso de memória. Muitos de seus quadros nasceram depois da queda do Muro de Berlim e do bloco soviético. O súbito influxo de jovens membros para o DSA após a eleição de Donald Trump reduziu a idade média dos membros de sessenta e sete para trinta e três praticamente da noite para o dia. Esse influxo de sangue novo foi desesperadamente necessário, mas também marcou uma ruptura na continuidade do movimento. A memória institucional e a tradição política não podiam, em muitos aspectos, ser efetivamente transmitidas no meio da turbulência de mudanças. Existe um aspecto positivo nisso. Muitos de nós agora não temos memória das lutas amargas entre as várias facções do socialismo do século XX e, portanto, não carregamos as cicatrizes políticas e emocionais que elas impuseram. Ao mesmo tempo, essa falta pronunciada de memória significa que corremos o risco de repetir erros do passado e de falhar em entender o que torna o socialismo democrático uma tradição política distinta.
É por isso que a insistência de Semprún sobre a memória ressoa tão poderosamente comigo, um socialista "jovem-velho" que esteve o suficiente tempo no movimento para estar em ambos os lados da linha. "Lembrar constantemente" foi como ele resumiu sua motivação como artista politicamente engajado. "Temos que repetir incessantemente para que as gerações sucessivas não se esqueçam." Para Semprún, isso significava retornar constantemente às duas experiências que moldaram sua vida: o comunismo e os campos. Em seu poderoso romance autobiográfico Que Domingo Bonito!, Semprún admite que suas obras "sempre retornam, obsessivamente, como os carrosséis dos parques de diversões da memória, aos mesmos temas." Cenas primordiais retornam ao longo de sua escrita: apartamentos sujos nos subúrbios de Paris onde militantes exilados do PCE se reuniam para organizar seu trabalho clandestino; a grande avenida, ladeada por águias hitlerianas empoleiradas de maneira ameaçadora em colunas de pedra, levando aos portões de Buchenwald; o antigo castelo boêmio em Praga onde foi expulso do partido. As experiências de Semprún eram de um tempo e lugar específicos, mas formam parte de um passado pelo qual todos os socialistas têm algum senso de responsabilidade.
Born in 1923, Semprún was the scion of a prominent Spanish political clan. His grandfather was Antonio Maura, a five-time prime minister, and his father was a diplomat for the Spanish Republic. His family fled the country when civil war broke out in 1936, first to France, then the Netherlands, and finally back to France in 1939. Semprún was too young to fight in the Spanish Civil War, but in 1942 he joined the Francs-tireurs et partisans – main-d’œuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI), an immigrant wing of the Communist-led armed resistance in France. The Gestapo arrested him and deported him to Buchenwald in 1943, and there he remained until Allied forces liberated it in the spring of 1945. He met future PCE General Secretary Santiago Carrillo in Paris after returning from the camp. Despite his haut bourgeois origins, Semprún’s obvious talent quickly made him an important figure in the exile party organization. By the time he began his clandestine work in Spain at age twenty-nine, he already had a lifetime’s worth of hard-won experience behind him.
Under the alias Federico Sánchez, Semprún’s job was to serve as the exiled leadership’s liaison to anti-Franco intellectuals and students in Spain. By all accounts, he was perfectly suited for the role and carried out his tasks with aplomb. In Federico Sánchez, he remarks that “everyone who knows anything about me knows very well that clandestine political work is what has most excited, pleased, interested, amused, and passionately attracted me in my entire life . . . above all for the very good reason that it was precisely that: clandestine.” His affinity for false identities, secret apartments, and furtive meetups is a revealing reflection of his personality. Semprún, in many ways, was never more himself than when he was pretending to be someone else. He vividly depicted the clandestine life in his screenplay for the 1966 Alain Resnais film The War Is Over. Diego Mora (the film’s stand-in for Semprún, played by the great Yves Montand) explains that it’s the details of his false identities—the assumed names, phone numbers, and addresses—that are true. “I’m the only thing false in the whole story.” It’s a lightly humorous moment in the film, but Montand’s delivery hints at the melancholy beneath Diego’s smile.
Semprún’s biographers, friends, and friends-turned-enemies all commented on the protean quality of his personality. One of the hallmarks of Semprún’s work is the use of baroque, sometimes disorienting narratives and a recurrent blurring of the line between fiction and nonfiction. In Federico Sánchez, Semprún sheds light on how, in his own estimation, the twists and turns of his life were bound up with the fictionalized doubles that populate his literary work. He contends that the main character of one of his early works was the imaginative vehicle that allowed him to inhabit the real-life character of Federico Sánchez. In writing The War Is Over, the character Diego fulfilled “an identical function, though in reverse,” enabling him to process his traumatic expulsion from the Communist Party in 1964.
Under the alias Federico Sánchez, Semprún’s job was to serve as the exiled leadership’s liaison to anti-Franco intellectuals and students in Spain. By all accounts, he was perfectly suited for the role and carried out his tasks with aplomb. In Federico Sánchez, he remarks that “everyone who knows anything about me knows very well that clandestine political work is what has most excited, pleased, interested, amused, and passionately attracted me in my entire life . . . above all for the very good reason that it was precisely that: clandestine.” His affinity for false identities, secret apartments, and furtive meetups is a revealing reflection of his personality. Semprún, in many ways, was never more himself than when he was pretending to be someone else. He vividly depicted the clandestine life in his screenplay for the 1966 Alain Resnais film The War Is Over. Diego Mora (the film’s stand-in for Semprún, played by the great Yves Montand) explains that it’s the details of his false identities—the assumed names, phone numbers, and addresses—that are true. “I’m the only thing false in the whole story.” It’s a lightly humorous moment in the film, but Montand’s delivery hints at the melancholy beneath Diego’s smile.
Semprún’s biographers, friends, and friends-turned-enemies all commented on the protean quality of his personality. One of the hallmarks of Semprún’s work is the use of baroque, sometimes disorienting narratives and a recurrent blurring of the line between fiction and nonfiction. In Federico Sánchez, Semprún sheds light on how, in his own estimation, the twists and turns of his life were bound up with the fictionalized doubles that populate his literary work. He contends that the main character of one of his early works was the imaginative vehicle that allowed him to inhabit the real-life character of Federico Sánchez. In writing The War Is Over, the character Diego fulfilled “an identical function, though in reverse,” enabling him to process his traumatic expulsion from the Communist Party in 1964.
In a scene set in the early 1960s in What a Beautiful Sunday!, one of Semprún’s old comrades from Buchenwald asks, “Why are we still Communists?” So much of Semprún’s post-expulsion work is dedicated to answering this question, to explaining to himself and his audience why he was part of—and in certain respects, was still sympathetic to—a project whose history he came to regard as “the most tragic event of the twentieth century.”
Semprún investigated one sordid scene of this tragedy in The Confession, the 1970 film he wrote for the Greek-French director Costa-Gavras. Semprún’s screenplay is based on a book of the same name by Artur London, a high official of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) who was swept up in the infamous 1952 Slánský trial, the last major show trial of the Stalin era. London was sentenced to life in prison (he was freed in 1955 amid a relaxation of Stalinist terror), but eleven of the fourteen accused, including KSČ General Secretary Rudolf Slánský, were hanged for allegedly conspiring against the state. The trial was totally absurd—the accused were all loyal Communists, not “Trotskyists,” “Titoists,” or “Zionists” in cahoots with the Americans, as the prosecution claimed. But it served the perceived interests of the Kremlin, whose agents instigated the proceedings and literally wrote its script.
After being arrested in the film’s first act, the character based on London (known as “Gérard,” Semprún’s Resistance alias, once again played by Yves Montand) is repeatedly slammed face-first into the wall by two guards. They spin him around, and the camera assumes Gérard’s point of view. The hammer and sickle on a guard’s hat takes up most of the frame, which dissolves into a montage of archival footage of scenes from Communist history. They all show episodes of violent conflict: the armed uprising of 1917, the vicious civil war between Reds and Whites, Red Army tanks, and troops on the move during the Second World War. The montage then dissolves back into the guard’s stern young face. “Walk!” he barks at Gérard, who’s forced to pace the floor of his dank cell for hours between beatings and trips to the interrogation room.
The scene artfully conveys Semprún’s conception of Communism as an essentially militaristic project, one that found more success in fighting wars and building states than in promoting progressive social reconstruction. In What a Beautiful Sunday! Semprún argues that “it’s on the terrain of war, civil or otherwise, that the Communists have been most effective. . . . As if the military spirit were consubstantial with twentieth-century Communism.” The movement, he contends, “has ruined all the revolutions that it has inspired or taken over after they have taken place, but it has made a brilliant success of several decisive wars,” above all the titanic struggle against fascism in the Second World War.
For Semprún, Communism’s military spirit, with its tendency toward authoritarianism and the use of terror, had ideological roots. “The Gulag,” he insisted, “is the direct, unequivocal product of Bolshevism.” And to the extent that Marxism itself bore responsibility, it was in its conception of the proletariat as a universal class armed with the task of transforming the world. In the name this “historic mission,” Semprún writes in What a Beautiful Sunday!, “they have crushed, deported, dispersed, through labor—free or forced, but always corrective—millions of proletarians.” Marxism remained a valuable intellectual framework for understanding the mechanisms of capitalist society, but as a theory of revolutionary practice it could only lead, in Semprún’s estimation, to “the barbaric excesses of Correct Thought . . . the lethal, frozen dialectic of the Great Helmsman.”
Semprún’s harsh judgment of Marxism was overly categorical. He was right to reject the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a dangerous idea that could be, and certainly has been, used to justify the most awful repression. It empowered party leaders at the expense of the popular masses and extinguished whatever democratic rights and freedoms working people were able to win for themselves under capitalist rule. Rejecting this idea, however, does not necessarily entail rejecting Marxism in toto. The challenge is to overcome the tendency among socialists to turn it into a comprehensive worldview, a kind of talisman capable of answering all questions—and therefore of preempting critical thought.
Semprún investigated one sordid scene of this tragedy in The Confession, the 1970 film he wrote for the Greek-French director Costa-Gavras. Semprún’s screenplay is based on a book of the same name by Artur London, a high official of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) who was swept up in the infamous 1952 Slánský trial, the last major show trial of the Stalin era. London was sentenced to life in prison (he was freed in 1955 amid a relaxation of Stalinist terror), but eleven of the fourteen accused, including KSČ General Secretary Rudolf Slánský, were hanged for allegedly conspiring against the state. The trial was totally absurd—the accused were all loyal Communists, not “Trotskyists,” “Titoists,” or “Zionists” in cahoots with the Americans, as the prosecution claimed. But it served the perceived interests of the Kremlin, whose agents instigated the proceedings and literally wrote its script.
After being arrested in the film’s first act, the character based on London (known as “Gérard,” Semprún’s Resistance alias, once again played by Yves Montand) is repeatedly slammed face-first into the wall by two guards. They spin him around, and the camera assumes Gérard’s point of view. The hammer and sickle on a guard’s hat takes up most of the frame, which dissolves into a montage of archival footage of scenes from Communist history. They all show episodes of violent conflict: the armed uprising of 1917, the vicious civil war between Reds and Whites, Red Army tanks, and troops on the move during the Second World War. The montage then dissolves back into the guard’s stern young face. “Walk!” he barks at Gérard, who’s forced to pace the floor of his dank cell for hours between beatings and trips to the interrogation room.
The scene artfully conveys Semprún’s conception of Communism as an essentially militaristic project, one that found more success in fighting wars and building states than in promoting progressive social reconstruction. In What a Beautiful Sunday! Semprún argues that “it’s on the terrain of war, civil or otherwise, that the Communists have been most effective. . . . As if the military spirit were consubstantial with twentieth-century Communism.” The movement, he contends, “has ruined all the revolutions that it has inspired or taken over after they have taken place, but it has made a brilliant success of several decisive wars,” above all the titanic struggle against fascism in the Second World War.
For Semprún, Communism’s military spirit, with its tendency toward authoritarianism and the use of terror, had ideological roots. “The Gulag,” he insisted, “is the direct, unequivocal product of Bolshevism.” And to the extent that Marxism itself bore responsibility, it was in its conception of the proletariat as a universal class armed with the task of transforming the world. In the name this “historic mission,” Semprún writes in What a Beautiful Sunday!, “they have crushed, deported, dispersed, through labor—free or forced, but always corrective—millions of proletarians.” Marxism remained a valuable intellectual framework for understanding the mechanisms of capitalist society, but as a theory of revolutionary practice it could only lead, in Semprún’s estimation, to “the barbaric excesses of Correct Thought . . . the lethal, frozen dialectic of the Great Helmsman.”
Semprún’s harsh judgment of Marxism was overly categorical. He was right to reject the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a dangerous idea that could be, and certainly has been, used to justify the most awful repression. It empowered party leaders at the expense of the popular masses and extinguished whatever democratic rights and freedoms working people were able to win for themselves under capitalist rule. Rejecting this idea, however, does not necessarily entail rejecting Marxism in toto. The challenge is to overcome the tendency among socialists to turn it into a comprehensive worldview, a kind of talisman capable of answering all questions—and therefore of preempting critical thought.
The War Is Over dramatizes Semprún’s struggle against the party’s peremptory insistence that a popular uprising would soon, like a deus ex machina, overthrow the Franco regime. Like the fictional Diego, Semprún and other PCE dissidents thought their party had become dangerously out of touch with the realities of Spanish life. The war was well and truly over. They lost, and the party needed to face the fact that by the mid-1960s, Franco’s dictatorship was enjoying a period of stability and economic growth underwritten by American investment and military cooperation.
The eschatological touchstone of PCE exile life was the idea of the Huelga Nacional Pacífica (HNP, or National Peaceful Strike), the “three charismatic initials,” as Semprún sardonically called them in his memoir, “that for so many long years . . . had made the Communists live in the phantasmagorical world of dreams.” The HNP was a failed attempt to generalize a wave of strikes that swept Spain’s industrial areas and major cities, including Barcelona and Madrid, in 1957. When a popular boycott shut down Barcelona’s public transportation, clandestine PCE agents in Madrid called for a two-day boycott of Madrid’s streetcars as well. The exile leadership in Paris was skeptical of the call, but the massive boycott paralyzed the capital’s public transport system. Santiago Carrillo and the exiles swung wildly from their initial wariness to extreme optimism, concluding that the time had come for the PCE to organize a broad social alliance to topple the dictatorship. They conveniently overlooked the fact that the strikers acted independently of the PCE.
Blinded by self-deception, Carrillo declared a national day of action for May 1958 that completely flopped. Undaunted by reports of its failure, Carrillo fixed a date for the HNP on June 18, 1959. Semprún was among those tasked with organizing the strike, which he feared would be yet another embarrassing miscalculation by the PCE leaders in exile. He was right. According to the historian Paul Preston, “Not a single major factory stopped work and there was only random participation by isolated individuals by some other parties.” In trying to demonstrate its strength among Spanish workers, the PCE only discredited itself. But Carrillo shamelessly insisted that the impotent HNP struck a great blow against a doomed regime. “It was,” Preston concludes, “an indication of one of his obsessions—the maintenance of optimism within the Party,” which in turn required the suppression of politically inconvenient facts and criticisms.
In Federico Sánchez, Semprún writes that one of the main themes of The War Is Over is “the critique of the orders for a General Strike that is conceived of as a mere ideological expedient, destined to unify the consciousness of the militants religiously rather than to have any effect on reality.” For Semprún, mendacious politicians like Carrillo reduced Marxism to an article of faith instead of, as he put it, “an instrument for procuring objective knowledge of reality, with a view to transforming that reality.”
Semprún described his passage through the Communist movement in explicitly religious terms. His childhood was steeped in the traditions of Spanish Catholicism, and he writes that his “subsequent adhesion to Communism cannot be fully explained without taking into account the diffuse religiosity that played an intimate role in it.” The capital-P Party was the “eucharistic representative” of the working class, so expulsion from it was akin to excommunication—an experience he describes in his memoir as being cast “into the obscure oblivion of outer darkness.” PCE leaders in exile spoke to the Spanish workers not in their own language, but in the “singsong voice of the missi dominici of Moscow,” to whom they were so many pieces on a grand chessboard. From the eschatological quality of the HNP to the cult of veneration that surrounded Dolores Ibárruri—the Communist leader better known as La Pasionaria, often portrayed as a kind of Red Virgin Mary—Spanish Communism, in Semprún’s estimation, “expressed all the religious cliches of the leaders cult characteristic of a Catholic and peasant culture that has come to fuse with Marxist culture and hence pervert it.”
The thread that runs through The War Is Over is the conflict between, as Semprún put it, “the reality of discourse,” in which the exiled PCE leadership was trapped, and “the discourse of reality,” which the underground agents, through their direct contact with life in Spain, could access. One scene in the film takes Diego out to the Paris suburbs, where he’s scheduled to meet with the Chief (Carrillo’s stand-in) and other exiled leaders. As he approaches their safe house, the narrator—in the voice of Diego speaking to himself in the second person, a favorite Semprún technique—says, “You’re going to find once again this irreplaceable fraternity which, nonetheless, is being eaten away, often by lack of reality.” Despite their distance from Spanish life, they tell Diego that he is the one who’s lost his perspective, precisely because he is engrossed in the daily situation inside Spain. The fictionalized Carrillo declares that the fictionalized Semprún “has given us a completely subjective appraisal of the situation,” that his insistence on “taking into account the realities of the situation” is “mere opportunism, purely and simply.” Such stubborn ideological cocooning repelled Semprún.
Near the end of the film, Diego explains why his comrades are convinced that the fall of Franco is imminent: “no one can resign himself to dying in exile.” The prospect is too painful to bear. Despite his severe misgivings about the party’s situation, Diego doesn’t quit. He accepts his assignment to return to Spain and help prepare the ground for the strike. “You think there won’t be any strike in Madrid,” the narrator, Diego’s double, tells himself and the viewer. “But you’re caught up again by the fraternity of long combatants, by the stubborn joy of the action.”
Though Semprún was harshly critical of the Stalinist religiosity that pervaded the PCE, he was fiercely loyal to a different conception of political spirituality: the living fraternity of militants. In a tender post-coital scene, Diego and his romantic partner Marianne discuss the difficulties of being apart for months at a time. Marianne would like him to end his clandestine activities and to serve the cause in another way in Paris, but Diego can’t fathom the possibility of being separated from his comrades. “I would miss Spain, yes I would. Like something you really miss, truly and deeply, whose absence becomes unbearable. . . . The unknown people who open a door when you knock and who recognize you, as you recognize them. You’re part and parcel of something.” In Federico Sánchez, Semprún mourns his former comrades of the underground in a bit of nonstandard prose: “They have burned up their lives in clandestine work They live covered with the ashes of their souls set on fire.” Semprún identified intensely with a community of genuinely true believers, the Red apostles hiding in the upper rooms of Franco’s Spain.
By the time of Spain’s transition from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy, Semprún had arrived at a complete rejection of “Communist parties of the Comintern tradition.” But even then, he insisted that the “objective truth” of the camps, the cynicism, and the obliteration of memory “does not cover the entire reality of the party.” And he still expressed loyalty to the “flesh-and-blood Communists” who toiled, often in obscurity and at great personal expense, to change their country: “You will always remember Communist fraternity You will remember the strangers who opened the door to you and looked at you a Stranger And you gave the password and they opened the door to you and you entered their lives and you brought the risk of the struggle Of prison perhaps You will remember the unknown militants who incarnated Communist freedom. ...”
The eschatological touchstone of PCE exile life was the idea of the Huelga Nacional Pacífica (HNP, or National Peaceful Strike), the “three charismatic initials,” as Semprún sardonically called them in his memoir, “that for so many long years . . . had made the Communists live in the phantasmagorical world of dreams.” The HNP was a failed attempt to generalize a wave of strikes that swept Spain’s industrial areas and major cities, including Barcelona and Madrid, in 1957. When a popular boycott shut down Barcelona’s public transportation, clandestine PCE agents in Madrid called for a two-day boycott of Madrid’s streetcars as well. The exile leadership in Paris was skeptical of the call, but the massive boycott paralyzed the capital’s public transport system. Santiago Carrillo and the exiles swung wildly from their initial wariness to extreme optimism, concluding that the time had come for the PCE to organize a broad social alliance to topple the dictatorship. They conveniently overlooked the fact that the strikers acted independently of the PCE.
Blinded by self-deception, Carrillo declared a national day of action for May 1958 that completely flopped. Undaunted by reports of its failure, Carrillo fixed a date for the HNP on June 18, 1959. Semprún was among those tasked with organizing the strike, which he feared would be yet another embarrassing miscalculation by the PCE leaders in exile. He was right. According to the historian Paul Preston, “Not a single major factory stopped work and there was only random participation by isolated individuals by some other parties.” In trying to demonstrate its strength among Spanish workers, the PCE only discredited itself. But Carrillo shamelessly insisted that the impotent HNP struck a great blow against a doomed regime. “It was,” Preston concludes, “an indication of one of his obsessions—the maintenance of optimism within the Party,” which in turn required the suppression of politically inconvenient facts and criticisms.
In Federico Sánchez, Semprún writes that one of the main themes of The War Is Over is “the critique of the orders for a General Strike that is conceived of as a mere ideological expedient, destined to unify the consciousness of the militants religiously rather than to have any effect on reality.” For Semprún, mendacious politicians like Carrillo reduced Marxism to an article of faith instead of, as he put it, “an instrument for procuring objective knowledge of reality, with a view to transforming that reality.”
Semprún described his passage through the Communist movement in explicitly religious terms. His childhood was steeped in the traditions of Spanish Catholicism, and he writes that his “subsequent adhesion to Communism cannot be fully explained without taking into account the diffuse religiosity that played an intimate role in it.” The capital-P Party was the “eucharistic representative” of the working class, so expulsion from it was akin to excommunication—an experience he describes in his memoir as being cast “into the obscure oblivion of outer darkness.” PCE leaders in exile spoke to the Spanish workers not in their own language, but in the “singsong voice of the missi dominici of Moscow,” to whom they were so many pieces on a grand chessboard. From the eschatological quality of the HNP to the cult of veneration that surrounded Dolores Ibárruri—the Communist leader better known as La Pasionaria, often portrayed as a kind of Red Virgin Mary—Spanish Communism, in Semprún’s estimation, “expressed all the religious cliches of the leaders cult characteristic of a Catholic and peasant culture that has come to fuse with Marxist culture and hence pervert it.”
The thread that runs through The War Is Over is the conflict between, as Semprún put it, “the reality of discourse,” in which the exiled PCE leadership was trapped, and “the discourse of reality,” which the underground agents, through their direct contact with life in Spain, could access. One scene in the film takes Diego out to the Paris suburbs, where he’s scheduled to meet with the Chief (Carrillo’s stand-in) and other exiled leaders. As he approaches their safe house, the narrator—in the voice of Diego speaking to himself in the second person, a favorite Semprún technique—says, “You’re going to find once again this irreplaceable fraternity which, nonetheless, is being eaten away, often by lack of reality.” Despite their distance from Spanish life, they tell Diego that he is the one who’s lost his perspective, precisely because he is engrossed in the daily situation inside Spain. The fictionalized Carrillo declares that the fictionalized Semprún “has given us a completely subjective appraisal of the situation,” that his insistence on “taking into account the realities of the situation” is “mere opportunism, purely and simply.” Such stubborn ideological cocooning repelled Semprún.
Near the end of the film, Diego explains why his comrades are convinced that the fall of Franco is imminent: “no one can resign himself to dying in exile.” The prospect is too painful to bear. Despite his severe misgivings about the party’s situation, Diego doesn’t quit. He accepts his assignment to return to Spain and help prepare the ground for the strike. “You think there won’t be any strike in Madrid,” the narrator, Diego’s double, tells himself and the viewer. “But you’re caught up again by the fraternity of long combatants, by the stubborn joy of the action.”
Though Semprún was harshly critical of the Stalinist religiosity that pervaded the PCE, he was fiercely loyal to a different conception of political spirituality: the living fraternity of militants. In a tender post-coital scene, Diego and his romantic partner Marianne discuss the difficulties of being apart for months at a time. Marianne would like him to end his clandestine activities and to serve the cause in another way in Paris, but Diego can’t fathom the possibility of being separated from his comrades. “I would miss Spain, yes I would. Like something you really miss, truly and deeply, whose absence becomes unbearable. . . . The unknown people who open a door when you knock and who recognize you, as you recognize them. You’re part and parcel of something.” In Federico Sánchez, Semprún mourns his former comrades of the underground in a bit of nonstandard prose: “They have burned up their lives in clandestine work They live covered with the ashes of their souls set on fire.” Semprún identified intensely with a community of genuinely true believers, the Red apostles hiding in the upper rooms of Franco’s Spain.
By the time of Spain’s transition from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy, Semprún had arrived at a complete rejection of “Communist parties of the Comintern tradition.” But even then, he insisted that the “objective truth” of the camps, the cynicism, and the obliteration of memory “does not cover the entire reality of the party.” And he still expressed loyalty to the “flesh-and-blood Communists” who toiled, often in obscurity and at great personal expense, to change their country: “You will always remember Communist fraternity You will remember the strangers who opened the door to you and looked at you a Stranger And you gave the password and they opened the door to you and you entered their lives and you brought the risk of the struggle Of prison perhaps You will remember the unknown militants who incarnated Communist freedom. ...”
The twentieth century was a time of failed revolutions and lost utopias, of historical trauma on a scale that defies repression. We cannot simply forget it and move on. The experience must be remembered and worked through if new departures are to be made and predictable mistakes avoided. The socialist historian Enzo Traverso attempts to set the terms of such an exercise in his stimulating book Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory. What distinguishes the present from the last two centuries, Traverso observes, is that it is “a time shaped by a general eclipse of utopias.” He argues for the development of a melancholic Marxism that aims to “rethink socialism in a time in which memory is lost, hidden, and forgotten and needs to be redeemed.” It does not, he insists, “mean nostalgia for real socialism and other wrecked forms of Stalinism,” but rather a “fidelity to the emancipatory promises of revolution, not to its consequences.” Traverso investigates this possibility largely through consideration of left-wing art, literature, and cinema, so it is surprising that his book does not include a single mention of Semprún’s work, which is saturated with these themes.
Perhaps Semprún was not considered because he does not offer the possibility of choosing so easily between the dream and the nightmare. “There is no such thing as an innocent memory,” he reminds us in What a Beautiful Sunday! This is especially true considering what has been done in the name of socialism, which despite everything is still the name of our desire. Irving Howe once contended that “most of what we need to learn from the movements of the past is how to avoid repeating their mistakes. And not to acknowledge the magnitude of those mistakes would be a form of disrespect.” Everyone on the twentieth-century left, from democratic socialists like Howe and Harrington to Communists like Semprún, made serious mistakes whose ramifications are still felt today. Traverso is right to insist that left-wing political commitment in the present entails a fidelity to the emancipatory promises of the past. But the catastrophes are part of our history too, and we have a responsibility to admit them and process them. Why should anyone entrust us with power otherwise?
Later in life, Semprún adopted some views that many on the left would disagree with, like his support for U.S. intervention in the first Gulf War. But it is not quite accurate to claim, as Soledad Fox Maura claims in her biography of Semprún, that he “had swung decidedly to the political right.” In one of his final interviews, Semprún admitted that he abandoned many of his former beliefs. But he still insisted that “the world doesn’t have to be unfair and unbearable, and we can fix certain things. I still have those illusions, perhaps more than ever.” He never became a conservative in the vein of France’s nouveaux philosophes, who were often quite bilious about their former comrades on the Marxist left, and he maintained that he would call himself “a social democrat if it were not a party definition.” When his Paris Review interviewer asked him, more than four decades after he was expelled from the PCE, if he was an anticommunist, he said: “No, I wouldn’t go that far. I would say that I have become a stranger to communism.” In 1994’s Literature or Life, a novelistic memoir on his time in Buchenwald, Semprún credits the German Communist who admitted him to the camp with saving his life. In steering Semprún toward a relatively comfortable work assignment in the camp, “my German Communist had acted like a Communist. What I mean is, in a matter befitting the idea of Communism, whatever its rather bloody, suffocating, morally destructive history has been.”
Maura describes Semprún’s body of work as an exercise in “autofiction,” an ambiguous mélange of historical fact and literary invention that evokes the vertiginous times he lived through. This approach was not uncontroversial, particularly in connection with his writing on Buchenwald. Semprún freely acknowledged that some of the scenes he describes in his works did not actually take place, but he defended his use of literary invention as a means of expressing historical truth. “I believe ardently,” Semprún insisted, “that real memory, not historical and documentary memory but living memory, will be perpetuated only through literature.” One could argue that his conception of memory bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the ideological and pragmatic uses of memory he criticized elsewhere in his work. But is it possible to convey the enormity of the events he lived through only using the protocols of professional historical writing? “Reality often needs some make-believe,” Semprún contends in Literature or Life, “to be made believable” to those who didn’t experience it. The moral and literary force of Semprún’s finest works, both on the screen and on the page, attests to the strength of his case.
Ramon, one of Diego’s exiled comrades in The War Is Over, wasn’t in the party leadership, and he didn’t call general strikes. He specialized in the mundane arts of tradecraft: “rigged cars, false-bottom cases. This obscure work for over fifteen years,” the narrator explains, as a quick cut of Ramon, smiling unassumingly with his hands in his pockets, flashes on the screen. Ramon dies near the end of the film, and Diego pictures his funeral in his mind’s eye. The scene is gray and grim; a small procession of comrades file past his grave, gloomily dropping flowers one by one. The film cuts back to a pensive-looking Diego, and then to a new vision of Ramon’s funeral. The scene is more dignified, almost triumphant. The comrades are marching together behind the red, yellow, and purple tricolor of the Spanish Republic, the hallowed repository of anti-fascist memory. Perhaps the first vision shows the funeral Ramon will get, and the second shows the one Diego thought he really deserved. Upon returning from his reverie, a comrade we haven’t seen before picks Diego up to drive him to Barcelona. In Semprún’s screenplay, “They laugh, both of them, already fraternal, already accomplices, already together,” even though they don’t know each other. It’s a moving depiction of what kept him in the Communist movement for so many years and continued to arouse his admiration long after his separation from it.
Semprún’s memory was capacious enough to hold a lasting appreciation for socialism’s emancipatory promise and community of comrades. But he also had the capacity to look squarely and unflinchingly at the grim reality of what socialism had too often become. The cadres of today’s socialist movement may, in many cases, be young and innocent, but the idea of socialism is not. It carries not only the legacy of romantic struggles, heroic self-sacrifice, and resolution in the face of overwhelming odds, but the weight of the realities Semprún insisted we see. As he put it in a speech shortly after his expulsion from the PCE, “We cannot refuse this past. We can only deny it in the present, that is to say, understand it through and through in order to destroy what remains of it, in order to create a future which will be radically different.”
Chris Maisano is a trade unionist and Democratic Socialists of America activist. He lives in Brooklyn, New York
Perhaps Semprún was not considered because he does not offer the possibility of choosing so easily between the dream and the nightmare. “There is no such thing as an innocent memory,” he reminds us in What a Beautiful Sunday! This is especially true considering what has been done in the name of socialism, which despite everything is still the name of our desire. Irving Howe once contended that “most of what we need to learn from the movements of the past is how to avoid repeating their mistakes. And not to acknowledge the magnitude of those mistakes would be a form of disrespect.” Everyone on the twentieth-century left, from democratic socialists like Howe and Harrington to Communists like Semprún, made serious mistakes whose ramifications are still felt today. Traverso is right to insist that left-wing political commitment in the present entails a fidelity to the emancipatory promises of the past. But the catastrophes are part of our history too, and we have a responsibility to admit them and process them. Why should anyone entrust us with power otherwise?
Later in life, Semprún adopted some views that many on the left would disagree with, like his support for U.S. intervention in the first Gulf War. But it is not quite accurate to claim, as Soledad Fox Maura claims in her biography of Semprún, that he “had swung decidedly to the political right.” In one of his final interviews, Semprún admitted that he abandoned many of his former beliefs. But he still insisted that “the world doesn’t have to be unfair and unbearable, and we can fix certain things. I still have those illusions, perhaps more than ever.” He never became a conservative in the vein of France’s nouveaux philosophes, who were often quite bilious about their former comrades on the Marxist left, and he maintained that he would call himself “a social democrat if it were not a party definition.” When his Paris Review interviewer asked him, more than four decades after he was expelled from the PCE, if he was an anticommunist, he said: “No, I wouldn’t go that far. I would say that I have become a stranger to communism.” In 1994’s Literature or Life, a novelistic memoir on his time in Buchenwald, Semprún credits the German Communist who admitted him to the camp with saving his life. In steering Semprún toward a relatively comfortable work assignment in the camp, “my German Communist had acted like a Communist. What I mean is, in a matter befitting the idea of Communism, whatever its rather bloody, suffocating, morally destructive history has been.”
Maura describes Semprún’s body of work as an exercise in “autofiction,” an ambiguous mélange of historical fact and literary invention that evokes the vertiginous times he lived through. This approach was not uncontroversial, particularly in connection with his writing on Buchenwald. Semprún freely acknowledged that some of the scenes he describes in his works did not actually take place, but he defended his use of literary invention as a means of expressing historical truth. “I believe ardently,” Semprún insisted, “that real memory, not historical and documentary memory but living memory, will be perpetuated only through literature.” One could argue that his conception of memory bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the ideological and pragmatic uses of memory he criticized elsewhere in his work. But is it possible to convey the enormity of the events he lived through only using the protocols of professional historical writing? “Reality often needs some make-believe,” Semprún contends in Literature or Life, “to be made believable” to those who didn’t experience it. The moral and literary force of Semprún’s finest works, both on the screen and on the page, attests to the strength of his case.
Ramon, one of Diego’s exiled comrades in The War Is Over, wasn’t in the party leadership, and he didn’t call general strikes. He specialized in the mundane arts of tradecraft: “rigged cars, false-bottom cases. This obscure work for over fifteen years,” the narrator explains, as a quick cut of Ramon, smiling unassumingly with his hands in his pockets, flashes on the screen. Ramon dies near the end of the film, and Diego pictures his funeral in his mind’s eye. The scene is gray and grim; a small procession of comrades file past his grave, gloomily dropping flowers one by one. The film cuts back to a pensive-looking Diego, and then to a new vision of Ramon’s funeral. The scene is more dignified, almost triumphant. The comrades are marching together behind the red, yellow, and purple tricolor of the Spanish Republic, the hallowed repository of anti-fascist memory. Perhaps the first vision shows the funeral Ramon will get, and the second shows the one Diego thought he really deserved. Upon returning from his reverie, a comrade we haven’t seen before picks Diego up to drive him to Barcelona. In Semprún’s screenplay, “They laugh, both of them, already fraternal, already accomplices, already together,” even though they don’t know each other. It’s a moving depiction of what kept him in the Communist movement for so many years and continued to arouse his admiration long after his separation from it.
Semprún’s memory was capacious enough to hold a lasting appreciation for socialism’s emancipatory promise and community of comrades. But he also had the capacity to look squarely and unflinchingly at the grim reality of what socialism had too often become. The cadres of today’s socialist movement may, in many cases, be young and innocent, but the idea of socialism is not. It carries not only the legacy of romantic struggles, heroic self-sacrifice, and resolution in the face of overwhelming odds, but the weight of the realities Semprún insisted we see. As he put it in a speech shortly after his expulsion from the PCE, “We cannot refuse this past. We can only deny it in the present, that is to say, understand it through and through in order to destroy what remains of it, in order to create a future which will be radically different.”
Chris Maisano is a trade unionist and Democratic Socialists of America activist. He lives in Brooklyn, New York
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