"The Bitter Residue of Death": Jorge Semprun and the Aesthetics of Holocaust Memory

Abstract

IN HIS FASCINATING HOLOCAUST NOVEL Le grand voyage (1963), Jorge Semprun juxtaposes the pleasure of reading the childhood memories offered in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu with the painful and deferred memory of his arrival at the Buchenwald concentration camp. By turning to Proust's layered representations of childhood desires and fears, Semprun illustrates how both his memory of Proust's peaceful (if neurotic) novel and his postwar consciousness have been colored by his experience of the camps. Semprun's treatment of Proust -both through the voice of his narrator, Gerard, in the scene of incarceration itself, and through the literary and stylistic appropriations of Proust that pepper his text-prompts us to examine how aesthetic pleasure can offer an important survival mechanism. Indeed, by analyzing how Semprun's use of Proust helps him survive Buchenwald, the first section of this article demonstrates how aesthetic pleasure affords a mode of coping with traumatic memory. In the second section I focus on Semprun's rewriting of the past through his use of Ilse Koch, the infamous Nazi commandant suspected of perpetrating sexual crimes against the inmates of Buchenwald, and Sigrid, the young woman who acts as Koch's counterbalance in the narrative. By redrawing Koch in the much more palatable form of Sigrid, Semprun manipulates aesthetic pleasure notjust to survive but to transform a painful past into a more tolerable present. Taken together, these two sections demonstrate how Semprun seeks comfort in aesthetic pleasure in order 1) to survive the Holocaust; 2) to come to terms with his painful memories of it, and 3) to rewrite his experiences of the Holocaust as a literary reflection on the brutality of history. Semprun, a Spaniard from a Catholic family, was born in 1923 and emigrated to France in 1938 after Franco became dictator. Adopting the pseudonym Gerard Sorel, he joined the French Resistance in 1941 and in 1943 was arrested, tortured, and deported to Buchenwald. Semprun's bourgeois family, deeply rooted in Spanish politics and culture, prepared him well for the appreciation of the shimmering density of Proust's prose. His grandfather, Antonio Maura, whom Semprun describes as an authoritarian but reformist man' was the Prime Minis-