Introduction

Abstract

A Critical Companion to Jorge Semprún: Buchenwald, Before and After is the first English-language collection of essays on the life and work of Spanish Buchenwald survivor, author, and communist leader turned apostate, Jorge Semprún (Madrid, 1923-Paris, 2011). Semprún led an extraordinary and risky life; he suffered and actively fought against Stalinism, Nazism, and Francoism (Figure 0.1). His oeuvre transcends national borders, speaks to different cultural and linguistic traditions, and grapples with the difficult responsibility that surviving and deciphering paradigm-shattering historical events entails. He is considered a major European public intellectual, one who criticized the totalitarian regimes that ravaged Europe throughout the twentieth century and called for a united, multicultural Europe respectful of difference.

En fin de compte, ma patrie n’est pas la langue, ni la française ni l’espagnole, ma patrie c’est le langage. C’est-à-dire, un espace de communication sociale, d’invention linguistique: une possibilité de représentation de l’univers. De le modifier aussi, par les oeuvres du langage, fût-ce de façon modeste, à la marge.

(Finally, my homeland is not a national tongue, neither French nor Spanish, my homeland is language. That is, a space of social communication, of linguistic invention; a possibility of representing the universe, of changing it, also, even if in a most modest, marginal way, through the work of language.) (Mal et modernité 102)¹