The Great Journey (novel)

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The Great Journey is an autobiographical novel by Jorge Semprún , published in Paris in 1963 under the title Le grand voyage . The German translation by Abelle Christaller was published by Rowohlt-Verlag in 1964 and as a paperback by Suhrkamp in 1981 .

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“The journey” initially refers to Semprún's five-day journey from a French internment camp to the Buchenwald concentration camp . “Great journey” is also the metaphor for the years of deportation of a resistance fighter to the German camps.

As is usual in Semprún's books, there is no continuous plot, only the erratic chains of thought of a first-person narrator, created by vague associations. The focus is on the Spanish emigrant's years of school and study in Paris , his time in the Maquis and the confrontation with the apparently peaceful outside world after the horror of the camp has ended. The conclusion of the narrator is that he never wants to become a former fighter, he will continue fighting against fascism in Spain.

Reality and fiction

Semprún has largely processed his own experiences in the novel. It is interesting, however, that in his other books he explains over and over again what was fiction and what was reality in the previous novels about his experiences on the “great journey” (especially What a beautiful Sunday! And writing or living ) .

Among the friends from the Maquis, Hans and Michel, the German Hans seems to be a fictional person with whom Semprún wanted to remember the German emigrants in France who gave their lives for the freedom of their country of exile, while Michel was concerned the real Michel Herr, whose father Lucien Herr was once friends with Léon Blum .

The “boy from Semur”, a friendly proletarian , is also a fictional person. The first-person narrator, despite his combat experience, is still more of a philosopher who gladly accepts the help of the more practical boy from Semur. At the end of the journey, however, it is the boy who dies in the railroad car. Semprún later writes that he invented this companion so that he could better bear the loneliness of the journey in memory.

expenditure

  • The Great Journey , Paris 1963, German 1964; 1981 (translation: Abelle Christaller)