“LITERATURE OR LIFE” by Jorge Semprun

By Rolland Doukhan

Why it is urgent to read a book that came out more than a year ago.

“I look around me, there is no one. There is only the murmur of the wind that blows, as always, on this slope of the Ettersberg. In spring, in winter, mild or icy, always the wind on the Ettersberg. Wind of the four seasons on Goethe’s hill, on the smoke of the crematorium.”

A single sentence, and already, in the two words “crematorium” and “Goethe,” appear the two axes that give the whole book its spine: horror and culture. Death and life. And to say the one and the other, to say the one or the other, in a sense, between the one and the other, writing. Three hundred and nineteen pages almost all written in the present tense, but in that strange present, as if already lived, that one finds in the first line of Camus’s The Stranger: “Today, my mother died.” How many books have already been published on what has been demurely called “the camps”? I could not say. All these books — excluding, of course, those of Primo Levi, of Elie Wiesel, or even The Last of the Just by A. Schwarz-Bart, which are no longer books but moments of our history — all these other books, I say, recount, describe horror, take sides, denounce. Jorge Semprun’s book, for its part, puts all things back at the just level of relativity where they stand in relation to the essential. The essential, the universal, that which makes each of us linked to all the others, ineluctably, is death. Death in that it defines life as much as birth can. “No doubt death is the exhaustion of all desire, including that of dying. It is only from life, from the knowledge of life, that one can have the desire to die. This deadly desire is still a reflex of life.” Immersed in Jorge Semprun’s book, I could not help thinking, on almost every page, of S. Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List. Something was questioning me, tormenting me. Why was this film that had overwhelmed me suddenly becoming different to me, why was it drawing away from me, like someone who apologizes after having jostled you? It was only at the heart of the chapter titled “The Kaddish” that I understood. This chapter begins with five words, quite bare, on a single line: “A voice, suddenly, behind us.”

Why this force in these five words? Quite simply because this “behind us” is a barrack entirely filled with corpses, a barrack that I, the reader, discover “behind” my eyes, and not in front, like an imposed image. Semprun and his friend Albert, a Hungarian Jew, remain transfixed because this voice, this lament behind them, seems to come, comes from the corpses, comes “from death.” Could it be that death is speaking? They will realize that among all the bodies, piled up in the bunks, there is still a survivor, better, a living being. The lament was the “Kaddish,” that prayer murmured by Jews over their dying, at the hour of the final hour, and this Kaddish was being recited for himself by this last Jew remaining alive in the barrack. He knew that he was going to die, he knew that there was no longer a single Jew to recite it for him, and so he “said” to “himself”: the Kaddish. Having reported these facts contained in chapter 2 of Literature or Life, I am suddenly ashamed to have written them. And it is in that shame that I find my answer to this questioning concerning Schindler’s List. Spielberg attempted to write, to describe horror with images, that is to say in a continuum, an almost logical sequence in which he wished to explore the birth, the functioning, and the culmination of evil. In doing so, he set life aside, marginalized it at the very least. Semprun, a man imbued with culture to the point, I suppose, of sometimes discomfiting the average reader, weaves life and death into a single tapestry, intertwines them one with the other into a work, I was going to say a woolen, unspeakable: “I knelt down beside the surviving Jew. I do not know what to do to keep him alive, my Christ of the Kaddish. I speak to him softly. I end by taking him in my arms, as lightly as possible, for fear that he might break between my fingers. I implore him not to do this to me, Albert would never forgive me for it.”

Throughout this admirable book, which is neither a novel, nor a poem, nor a narrative, nor an autobiography, but a saying of the unspeakable, we shall go from astonishment to emotion, from the beauty of men to their collapse, from history to History, from tenuous recollection to immense memory, and always in that calm, almost gentle, never resigned tone in which is steeped that first sentence of The Stranger that I quoted above. Semprun took a month, I believe, to return from Buchenwald to Paris, but fifty years to return from Paris to Buchenwald. This time is a distance. It allowed him not to separate death from life, but to link them. We have seen, of late, campaigns against forgetting flourish, pilgrimages organize themselves with greater or lesser felicity, if I may permit myself that word on this occasion. We have seen commemorations, celebrations. What do you expect, from the most uncouth man to the most sophisticated intellectual, each of us, before the unfathomable, takes up such arms as he can. Semprun, for his part, with a genius at which the novelist that I am marvels, was able, with this book (but is it a book of words and paper or a pound of flesh and bone?), to bring the France of the 1940s, the streets of the Paris of the Liberation, the encounters at Saint-Germain, the words of Claude-Edmonde Magny or of Pierre-Aimé Touchard, the poems of Aragon or of Éluard, into the barbed geometry of the watchtowers.

The flea-hops of memory, that apparent disorder which is the life within, we touch them with our finger throughout these pages. It is enough for Semprun to hear a voice, to see a cloud pass, a silhouette, and he finds himself 40 years behind “us,” I mean behind “the reader,” or 5 years behind a Buchenwald just left. Life slips into death like those threads that seamstresses leave in the cloth to hold in place the future form of the body to be clothed. And it is the Semprun of this end of century, the Semprun the former anti-Francoist Spanish militant, former minister, writer, screenwriter, who nonetheless ends his book on this Germany he had fought in 1936, this Germany of which Bertolt Brecht says: “O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter.” O pale mother. Yes, this Germany that built Buchenwald at the gates of Weimar, at the foot of Goethe’s hill. It is this revenant, who knows so well how not to be a ghost, who offers us, in the final lines, that night when snow had fallen upon his sleep: “Suddenly, I was twenty years old and I was walking very fast in the whirlwinds of snow, here in this very place, but years earlier. That distant Sunday when Kaminski had summoned me to the meeting of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando. I was no longer dreaming, I had returned into that dream which had been my life, which will be my life. The world offered itself to me in the radiant mystery of an obscure lunar brightness. I had to stop, to catch my breath. My heart was beating very hard. I shall remember all my life this mad happiness, I had said to myself. This nocturnal beauty. I raised my eyes. On the crest of the Ettersberg, orange flames rose above the top of the squat chimney of the crematorium.” I stop quoting. I too need to catch my breath. For this book, one would have to quote it in its entirety, that is to say publish it “within” each of us.

Rolland Doukhan Paris, February 2, 1996.