Biography

Jorge Semprun was born on 10 December 1923, the fourth of seven children of the family Semprun-Gamazo. He spent his childhood in Madrid. His family belonged to the establishment: grandfather Antonio Mauro was several times minister and president of the conservative party in Spain. Father was a law professor, liberal politician and writer. Semprun inherited his political interest, the love for language and culture from his father, but his mother too predicted a literary or political future for her son.

Semprun's mother died in 1932, when she was 38.  Five years later, the family left Spain, the country ravaged by civil war. They settled in France. In 1939, Jorge was sent to a prestigious lyceum in Paris, together with his brother. In 1941, he was a brilliant student philosophy at the Sorbonne, a course abruptly interrupted when he and his friend Michel joined a resistance movement linked to the French Communist Party. On 8 October 1943, he was captured by the Gestapo in Epizy, tortured in Auxerre and deported via Compiègne to Buchenwald. There he worked in the department Arbeitsstatistik, until Buchenwald was liberated, on 11 April 1945.

After the liberation, he returned to Paris, where he indulged in fleeting adventures and became a member of the Communist Party. At the same time, however, he was plagued by memories of Buchenwald, and clearly felt that writing about them would be tantamount to dying. That is why he chose to remain silent about it, and to focus on the future. His family did not dare ask him questions either, and so Semprun was able to keep quiet until he published Le grand voyage 16 years later.

In 1947, Semprun had a son, Jaime, with the actress Loleh Bellon. At this time, he began working as a translator for UNESCO, using that job as a cover for his clandestine work in the Spanish Communist Party - using various aliases. In 1963 he married Colette Leloup; later he would adopt her daughter Dominique.

Meanwhile, he began to write about what he had been through : in 1963 he wrote, in one week, “Le grand voyage”, followed by a whole series of novels – including “L'Évanouissement” (1967), “Quel beau dimanche!” (1980), “L'écriture ou la vie” (1994), “Le mort qu'il faut” (2001), “Exercices de survie” (2012, unfinished).

When he returned to Madrid after an absence of almost 20 years, he realised that the Spanish Communist Party, which had fled to France, had little connection with daily life in Franco's Spain. More and more he criticised the ideological rigidity and the abuse of power within the party. In 1964, he was dismissed together, with a colleague. Not until 1988 he would return to Madrid to become Spanish Minister of Culture for a socialist government.

Semprun died in 2011, and was buried, as he wished, with a flag of the Second Spanish Republic, symbolising his fight against Franco's Spain, Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy and Pétain's France, the fight against totalitarianism, a basic theme in his work.

Semprun's work can be read in different ways. We will discuss a number of themes that he himself considers as of central importance in his life.