A memória viva de Jorge Semprun

Abstract

Only after more than fifty years of his liberation from the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald, Germany, that the Spanish writer Jorge Semprun will be able to narrate his experience in the field, or rather, the experience of the horror. In 1994, therefore, Semprun publishes the novel Literature or life, that fulfills this paper. Both in the novel and in subsequent interviews, Semprun reports that the book was written in part thanks to the authorial option of fictionalizing his experience in the concentration camp. In Jorge Semprun's case, would narrating the trauma mean the destruction of his language capacity? Was fiction the author's alternative to preserve this memory of horror? We propose, in this article, a work of reflection on the so-called "literature of trauma", based on the theory of Henry Bergson and Maurice Halbwachs, among others, on individual and collective memory, from the critical reading of the novel Literature or life of Jorge Semprun.