The lives of Jorge Semprún

Jorge Semprún’s life itself is a great novel, intersecting with historical events. A republican exile, member of the French Resistance, deportee to a Nazi concentration camp, communist leader, secret anti-Franco agent, acclaimed novelist, successful scriptwriter, Spanish Minister of Culture, leading Europeanist, and defender of memory: all of these lives in one shaped Jorge Semprún’s long voyage, with its constant and often unforeseen twists and turns and comings and goings, in which resistance was a form of radical engagement.

Jorge Semprún Maura (Madrid, 1923 - Paris, 2011) was one of the most influential European intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century. Semprún was born in Madrid in December 1923. His mother, Susana Maura, who died prematurely in 1934, was the daughter of Antonio Maura, five times head of Spanish government, and president of the Spanish Royal Academy. His father, José María Semprún Gurrea, was a lawyer, professor of law at the Central University (Universidad Central) and a conservative politician in the service of the Spanish Republic from 1931.

Exiled with his family at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, a fighter in the anti-Nazi resistance, arrested and deported to the Buchenwald camp (Thuringia, Germany), these experiences deeply marked his destiny, and after the end of the Second World War, he joined the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) in exile. As an active militant in 1953, he was sent as a clandestine agent to Spain under various identities with the aim of organising the anti-Franco struggle from within. A member of the PCE executive, over the years he distanced himself ideologically from the theses defended by the Political Bureau and its top representatives, to such an extent that, together with Fernando Claudín, they were expelled from the party in 1964.

After leaving the PCE, Jorge Semprún turned to his great passion, writing. From those years onwards, his abundant literary and cinematographic work, in French (secondarily in Spanish), became a reflection and critical review of the experiences of the past, a voice that enlightened his European contemporaries in the face of the abysses of 20th century totalitarianism, while encouraging them to continue the struggle for justice and freedom within the framework of the democratic system. In 1988 he returned to politics as Minister of Culture in the Socialist government of Felipe González. He died in Paris on June 7, 2011.