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 not just Nationalist opponents of the Republic but anti-Stalinist leftists like those of the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification). Considering Grimau’s record, some PCE militants, including Semprún, thought that he never should have been employed as an agent in Spain; an arrest meant certain torture and death. Yet the party leadership in exile sent him anyway. Franco’s police arrested Grimau in 1962, tried him in a farcical court proceeding, and executed him in 1963.

Semprún was well on his way to a break with the PCE by the time of Grimau’s death. The party leadership relieved him of his clandestine duties in 1962 and expelled him and fellow dissident Fernando Claudín, the PCE’s leading theorist and historian, in 1964. The Grimau affair crystallized much of what Semprún came to detest about the Communist movement. Party leaders like Santiago Carrillo ignored the warnings Semprún and others raised about Grimau’s assignment, only to use him as a martyr in death—a death for which they bore a significant share of responsibility.

In his 1977 memoir The Autobiography of Federico Sanchez and the Communist Underground in Spain, Semprún reflects on the uses and abuses of memory that were endemic to Communist politics. “Communist memory,” he writes, “is a way of not remembering: it does not consist of recalling the past but of censoring it. The memory of Communist leaders functions pragmatically, in accordance with the political interests and objectives of the moment. It is not a historical memory, a memory that bears witness, but an ideological memory.” Communism was, of course, far from the only twentieth-century political project with a pragmatic and ideological relationship with the truth. For democratic leftists, what made Communism so pernicious was how its boundless cynicism, its ruthlessly instrumental disposal of human lives, was justified in the name of socialism and universal emancipation.

“If you do not have a sense of memory, then you end up not being anything at all!” Semprún said this in reference to individuals, but the same goes for political movements. Adherents and detractors alike have long viewed socialism as a forward-looking, sometimes teleological project, with its eyes firmly fixed on the horizon. The advent of socialism, according to Marx, would bring humanity’s prehistory to a close and inaugurate the beginning of its real history. In “The Endangered City,” written during revolutionary Petrograd’s darkest days, Victor Serge thundered that the Bolsheviks’ opponents “scarcely count because they represent the past, for they have no ideal. We—the Reds—despite hunger, mistakes, and even crimes—we are on our way to the city of the future.” At the same time, the socialist movement was consciously steeped in its history of struggle and the memory of its defeats. In her final testament, written on the eve of her murder at the hands of the Freikorps, Rosa Luxemburg insisted that the movement’s history of “unavoidable defeats pile up guarantee upon guarantee of the future final victory.” In Literature and Revolution, Leon Trotsky insisted that “we Marxists live in traditions, and we have not stopped being revolutionists on account of it.”

Trotsky certainly succeeded in passing this sense of historical memory down to his political descendants—perhaps too well. In an ill-fated early 1960s encounter with Tom Hayden, Irving Howe, the founding editor of Dissent and a Trotskyist in his youth, quickly formed a negative opinion of the New Leftist grounded in his anti-Stalinist sensibility. As Howe put it in the documentary Arguing the World, “Hayden was someone we felt had a very strong authoritarian, manipulative streak. We could see the commissar in him. And that put us off.” Michael Harrington, Howe’s fellow Shachtmanite and the founding chair of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), infamously berated the Port Huron Statement’s youthful drafters for being too willing to allow Communists into their ranks. Harrington came to regret his excessively pugilistic approach to the young idealists, who had no experience in the ideological hothouses of the Old Left. “Coming out of the Shachtmanite movement,” Harrington later explained, “where the question was the Russian question—it was a line of blood. I knew people who knew Trotsky personally. The Communists were the people who had stuck a pickaxe in his skull.” The New Left had a chance to start things over, untainted by associations with what actually existing socialism had become. Howe, Harrington, and their comrades were so anxious to achieve this outcome—and so traumatized by their encounter with Stalinism—that they alienated those who should have been their protégés. Their deeply historical political sensibility kept them, ironically, from meeting their appointment with history.

The current U.S. socialist left, primarily based in a revitalized and transformed DSA, does not suffer from such a surfeit of memory. Many of its cadres were born after the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Bloc collapsed. The sudden influx of young members into DSA after Donald Trump’s election reduced the average member’s age from sixty-seven to thirty-three practically overnight. This infusion of new blood was desperately needed, but it also marked a break in the movement’s continuity. Institutional memory and political tradition could not, in many respects, be effectively transmitted amid the welter of change. There is a positive aspect to this. Many of us now have no memory of the bitter fights among the various factions of twentieth-century socialism, and therefore do not bear the political and emotional scars they inflicted. At the same time, this pronounced lack of memory means that we run the risk of repeating past mistakes, and of failing to understand what makes democratic socialism a distinct political tradition.

This is why Semprún’s insistence on memory resonates so powerfully with me, a young-old socialist who has been in the movement long enough to straddle both sides of the line. “Constantly to remind” was how he summarized his motivation as a politically engaged artist. “We have to repeat endlessly so that successive generations do not forget.” For Semprún, this meant constantly returning to the two experiences that shaped his life: Communism and the camps. In his powerful autobiographical novel What a Beautiful Sunday!, Semprún admits that his works “always return, obsessively, like the merry-go-rounds of the Luna Parks of memory, to the same themes.” Primordial scenes recur throughout his writing: grubby apartments in the Paris suburbs where exiled PCE militants met to organize their underground work; the grand avenue, lined with Hitlerian eagles perched menacingly on stone columns, leading from the gates of Buchenwald; the old Bohemian castle in Prague where he was expelled from the party. Semprún’s experiences were of a particular time and place, but they form part of a past for which all socialists bear some sense of responsibility.

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.

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.

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 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.