during the 1960s , a context politically marked by Communism , building a testimonial recreated in both film and literature that focuses on the hero who strives to embody a morally unsullied resistance figure in the deportee survivor . It is in this context that Le grand voyage was published , which was translated into Spanish under the title El largo viaje , published by Seix Barral first in Mexico in 1965 due to the imperatives of Franco ’ s censorship , and later in Spain in 1976 .
Notably , Le grand voyage appeared in France shortly after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem , in 1961 , an event of great impact because it raised the survivors of the Nazi camps as central testimonial figures . It was also an event from which Spain was quite left out .
L ’ Écriture ou la vie appeared in France in 1994 at a time of social fear of the resurgence of neo-Nazi groups not only in France , but in Europe . Therefore , the book resonated greatly among readers who considered it necessary to be informed about the Nazi camps and to use this knowledge of containment to prevent it from happening again . The book soon became required reading in French schools , while in Spain it defined Semprún as an author dealing with the subject of concentration camps . We remember that it was only in the 1980s that Primo Levi ’ s first texts became known in Spain . The delay in discovering these two authors led to entangled memories , making it harder to distinguish between the Jewish experience of the extermination camps ( Levi ’ s case ) and the experience of the political deportee ( Semprún ’ s case ). Jorge Semprún always made this distinction and in fact demanded it , almost as a moral imperative .
The construction of memory in Semprún ’ s work can be reminiscent of Proust . In other words , he makes use of a dynamic moving back and forth between the past and the present that is not done through leaps in time , but by seeing relationships between the reality of the present , with the past , so that the world is seen through the various layers that one ’ s own experience has built up . However , Semprún ’ s work is not about recovering a “ lost object ”. According to the experience of the camps , there is no nostalgia for the past , only pain . Hence the construction of the dichotomy between writing or living .
At least as a literary construction , this tension explains Semprún ’ s late entry into the world of testimonial writing , though we know that there are also political reasons , as he wrote in Autobiografia de Federico Sánchez . As I mentioned above , the Communist Party was interested in building an image of the resistance figure , and not the destitute image of the Nazi camp survivor .
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Observing Memories Issue 7