LITERATURE OR LIFE (L'Ecriture ou la vie)

Memoir by Jorge Semprun, 1994

Literature or Life (1997; L'Ecriture ou la vie, 1994) is perhaps the most dazzling of Semprun's Holocaust memoirs translated into English. It takes the literary techniques of The Long Voyage and What a Beautiful Sunday! a stage further. Its "studied disorder" shows the difficulty, or impossibility, of describing the experience and the power of memory that disrupts both the past and the present.

The first part uses a familiar Semprun technique. Taking the days immediately after liberation as the basic time frame, the book then weaves chronologically from his life before the war to his life afterward and all points in between, with each chronological leap illustrating or developing questions about the nature of memory and writing as well as the events of the days following the liberation of Buchenwald. These "slips" in the narrative happen frequently and without warning.

As the memoir is in part about writing ("literature or life?"), Semprun tells and retells stories, often with warnings. ("Watch out—I'm fabricating.") For example he retells the story from an earlier novel of how, in the resistance, he shot a German soldier: "But I was with Julien … and not with Hans … I'd invented Hans Freiberg in order to have a Jewish friend. I'd had Jewish pals at that time of my life, so I wanted to have one in the novel as well." But he finds himself, in his attempt "to placate the god of a credible narration," unable to convey the "hell of radical evil" of the camps. This memoir is very philosophically informed: Semprun had been a philosophy student and had read, among others, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas before the war. Not only are his meditations on these thinkers fascinating in their own right, they also suggest to him that the "essential thing is to go beyond the clear facts of this horror and get at the root of radical Evil, das radikal Böse, " a Kantian term.

The second part of the book is more essayistic. Leaving the tight narrative time frame Semprun tells about his decisions to write or not to write. He begins to put down his experiences after the war but the "memory was too dense, too pitiless for me to master immediately … Whenever I awoke at two in the morning, with the voice of the SS officer in my ear, blinded by the orange flame of the crematory, the subtle and sophisticated harmony of my project shattered in brutal dissonance. Only a cry from the depths of the soul, only a deathly silence could have expressed that suffering." This tension—the need to record, the need not to record—effects Semprun deeply.

The third and final part tells of his decisions to write. A moving chapter on Levi's suicide refers to the terribly final chapter of The Truce and suggests that one "last time, with no help for it, anguish had quite simply overwhelmed him … Nothing was real outside the camp, that's all. The rest was only a brief pause, an illusion of the sense, an uncertain dream. And that's all there is to say." He returns to Weimar and Buchenwald, both actually and in memory. He is given a copy of his registration card (despite his protests at the time, he was recorded as a "stucco worker," not a student, a clearly intentional slip that may well have saved his life). This return, a mediation on Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Bertolt Brecht , and others, and a memory of the night sky, beautiful like the tree in What a Beautiful Sunday!, allow Semprun to write.

Literature or Life is a demanding, literary, fascinating, and revealing book. Its form and style make it one of the clearest prose accounts of the labyrinths of memory and of writing memory.

—Robert Eaglestone