The Party's over now
David Caute
LITERATURE OR LIFE by Jorge Semprun Viking £16.99, pp. 320 Krematorium ausmachen!' the SS Sturmfiihrer bellowed over the loud- speakers in the middle of the night, when the Allied bombers came. The glow from the crematorium chimney at Buchenwald made an ideal target. Not far away, Leon Blum, former premier of France, a Jew and, miraculously, a future prime minister, was held in an SS barracks he knew not where; the vile, sickly odour from the burn- ing corpses was not explained to him. Jorge Semprun, a 20-year-old Spanish refugee whose brilliant powers of observation sur- vived a year's encounter with absolute Evil, knew all about the crematorium chimney; close friends, who died in his arms, had gone up it.
Typically, he quotes Wittgenstein on death: 'Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. One does not live one's death.' This is the point about Semprun: every experience of his life, including the ultimate in cruelty and degradation, passes back and forth through the poets and philosophers he has read, the books he has written, like clear water seeking the ultimate filter of pollu- tion. This can be irritating, the pretentious- ness of an intellect determined to validate itself through the totality of European cul- ture from St Augustine and Kant to Kafka, Malraux and Primo Levi. A writer who enjoys fluency in so many languages may be hard pressed to find his own voice, his own langage within the langues. Add to that the filmscript mannerisms of the mid- century, the uneasy bridge between literature and cinema, between Malraux's machine-gun expressionism and the slicker affectations of post-modernism, and you have Jorge Semprun, Spain's Minister of Culture from 1988 to 1991.
After the Nazis arrived in Paris, the student Semprun found Martin Heidegger in the new bookshop. Joining the Resistance, he shot a blue-eyed Wehr- macht motorcyclist — an incident lengthily described, back and forth, through the German version of 'La Paloma' that the victim sang as he bathed by the river. Arrested, Semprun reached Buchenwald. Memory later told him that he had stated his profession as 'philosophy student' when the camp bureaucracy took down his details. Das ist doch kein Beruf — that's no profession', came the reply. Semprun replied cleverly (he says), exploiting his knowledge of German: Wein Beruf aber eine Berufung — not a profession but a vocation', bringing a faint smile to the edge of the German's eye. But when Semprun returned to Buchenwald in 1992, with a film crew and fame, a functionary from the communist era showed him his card from the files. Written against his name was `Stukkateur' (stucco worker). One may make of this what one will; Semprun not only spins stories about his life but stories about his stories.
On that occasion, in 1992, Semprun was shown something else which he had not witnessed while a prisoner. It brought back to me my own ignorance when I first visited Buchenwald in 1965 as a guest of the German-British Friendship Society. The camp I was shown ended with the Nazis, there was no further history to it beyond the patient creation of a museum, the diligent archiving of the atrocities. I went away with merely a glance at the woods a wood is a wood in Thuringia or anywhere else. Returning earlier this year, one was pointed by the post-communist manage- ment to the same woods, where elegant steel rods now rise over the graves of the prisoners whom the KGB and their Ger- man underlings killed between 1945 and 1950.
Semprun walked into the woods in 1992 and observed the little memorials and crosses left in a huddle by the families of the second generation of victims, among them (I noticed) a mayor of Weimar, a Catholic. 'I already knew this, I was aware of the fact,' Semprun recalls, adding that he had been told about the communist camp in 1980. This is reassuring: until 1964 he was a very active communist indeed, a clandestine Resistance leader in Madrid and a courier who changed identities in Zurich on his way to Prague.
Admiring Andre Malraux, he had never- theless embraced the Stalinist cause which Malraux had so decisively rejected at the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Returning to Paris (Franco's Spain was naturally impos- sible), the ardent young man had been charmed by Louis Aragon, by the painter Boris Tazlitsky, a fellow inmate at Buchen- wald, and by the broad equation of Stalin with Picasso's dove of peace. Out of it came The Long Voyage and Semprun's film script for La Guerre est finie, starring Yves Montand. At a grand dinner in Salzburg 12 Western publishers took it in turn to repre- sent their own edition of the book to the author, months after his expulsion from the Spanish Communist party. Semprun describes these paradoxes and conver- gences brilliantly, if you can live with his addiction to narratives sliced like film takes.
His story about Lieutenant Rosenfeld does not escape, but survives, the constant collisions between chronological time and narrative time, the morbidly exuberant dis- mantling of mind and memory. When you go to Buchenwald you are shown in the museum a remarkable US Army film of the good citizens of Goethe's Weimar being dragged up to the camp in their best clothes, on pain of going without ration cards if they refuse. How could they explain their 'ignorance' of this place of death sited on their own doorstep through the entire Nazi era? During the few days between liberation and his own repatria- tion to Paris, Semprun struck up a friendship with the young American lieu- tenant who hectored these citizens of Weimar in perfect German. This was Rosenfeld, born in Germany and a Jew, a brilliant fellow who knew about Heideg- ger's association with the Nazis and who took Semprun into Goethe's locked house in Weimar over the protests of the old Nazi janitor. Semprun says that the exasperated Rosenfeld finally locked the pursuing jani- tor in one of Goethe's cupboards; he may still be there, but what became of Rosen- feld?
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