The Living Fraternity of Militants

The Living Fraternity of Militants

Jorge Semprún’s work captures a twentieth century of failed revolutions, lost utopias, and historical trauma of a scale that defies repression.

Jorge Semprún lived an uncommonly eventful life, even by the extreme standards of the twentieth century. By the time he was twenty-two years old, Semprún had already been exiled from Republican Spain, fought with the French Resistance, and been arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Buchenwald, where he survived for two years until the Allies liberated the camp. By his early forties, he had become a leader of the illegal Communist Party of Spain (PCE) organization in France, served as a clandestine agent shuttling between the two countries, published a prize-winning novel about his harrowing journey by train to Buchenwald, and been expelled from the PCE for daring to disagree with the party line. By his seventies, he had enjoyed a long career as an internationally renowned novelist and screenwriter—he wrote the scripts for the classic political films Z and The Confession, among others—and served as minister of culture in Spain’s second Socialist Party government after the end of the Francisco Franco dictatorship. He kept writing and speaking from his adoptive home in France until he died in 2011, at the age of eighty-seven.

In 2007, Semprún gave an interview to the Paris Review that illuminates many of the themes, ideas, and obsessions that characterized his work. The interviewer asked him whether there were any new literary forms he’d like to pursue before time ran out on his life and career. “I once thought of writing futuristic books, science fiction that would be based on the anticipation of political events in the distant future,” he responded. “But I’m not sure I can do it. I always tiptoe back to memory.” Given the many intense and traumatic situations he lived through, it’s not hard to understand why Semprún couldn’t escape memory’s gravitational pull. He was, in the parlance of pop psychology, a man with a lot to process. Memory also had an instrumental value for Semprún in his time as a Communist militant. Underground agents can’t keep a calendar or a to-do list while organizing to overthrow a dictatorship. “I couldn’t write down all of the appointments that I had,” Semprún recalled shortly before he died. “If I had written them down and been arrested, I would have been risking giving the police a list of victims for future arrest. This meant I had to memorize everything. And for many years, in Madrid, I would start the day by recalling my day’s meetings whilst shaving.”

Semprún’s memory served him well during his years as an agent of the PCE. He was a highly effective operative, able to evade Franco’s secret police with relative ease. The same could not be said of some of Semprún’s comrades in the Spanish underground. One of them was Julián Grimau, a member of the PCE’s Central Committee who made his name as an energetic and often brutal Republican police agent during the Spanish Civil War. In this capacity he hunted down and repressed n...