What a beautiful sunday!

The novel What a beautiful Sunday! by Jorge Semprún presents the author's experiences in the Buchenwald concentration camp in literary terms and, against this background, reflects on the development of National Socialism, communist resistance and the totalitarian traits of Stalinism . The work was published in French in Paris in 1980, the German translation in 1981.

In 1943 , Jorge Semprún was arrested by the Gestapo as a member of the French Resistance and a member of the Spanish Communist Party and, after torture and interrogation, transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp . In his novel The Great Journey (Paris 1963, German 1981), Semprún has already impressively described this transport. With the renewed reflection on the events in the concentration camp and the post-war years in France, he wants to deepen these topics and work on his political biography after he turned away from communism . The book offers insights into the conditions in Buchenwald concentration camp as well as into discussions and politics of communist parties in Europe at that time.

Gate building of Buchenwald concentration camp

The title of the novel goes back to the sarcastic utterance of fellow inmate Fernand Barizon. In the darkness, the prisoners stand at 5 o'clock in the morning in the driving snow during roll call: "What a beautiful Sunday!"

“ He said that with an exaggerated laugh, like saying 'Merde!' But he didn't say merde. He said, 'What a beautiful Sunday, buddy!' In French, looking at the black sky at five in the morning. "

The roll calls, sometimes standing for hours in the icy cold, are a central image for Semprún for the camps, not only for the concentration camps, but also for the GULAG , as Solzhenitsyn describes it. There are moments of being at the mercy with a view of barbed wire, watchtowers and guards, with the knowledge that there are people who are sitting in the warm at this moment. But there are also moments of camaraderie, the secret solidarity of the “buddies”, moments for dreams of beautiful Sundays in the past.

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A December Sunday 1944 in the Buchenwald concentration camp

The opening scene depicts a December Sunday in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944. Smoke stands over the crematorium. The first-person narrator , alias prisoner 44904 alias Gerárd alias Jorge Semprún, illegally left the path on the Ettersberg to admire a snow-covered tree. When SS Sergeant Kurt Kraus caught him doing it, his life seemed forfeit. Unlike his guardian, Semprún knows that there was a meeting place for the intellectual elite of Weimar on the Ettersberg. Eckermann documented Goethe's wanderings there and Semprún repeatedly reminds of these conversations, against the background of which the founding of the concentration camp in 1936 appears doubly monstrous. One of the prisoners, the former French Prime Minister Léon Blum , had written the “Nouvelles Conversations de Goethe avec Eckermann” long before. In his novel, too, Semprún lets Goethe appear and tour the concentration camp, taking on Eckermann's role. At the same time, his Goethe lacks real understanding, indulging in conservative sentences.

The Buchenwald concentration camp crematorium

As the son of a middle-class Spanish family, Semprún knows German culture very well, much better than his guards. One of the levels of reflection in the novel is therefore the confrontation of the great Weimar Classics with the reality of the concentration camp. Goethe wandered here, deep in conversation with Eckermann. How was that possible, the complete brutality in Weimar in view of the city's history? In the middle of the camp stands the charred Goethe tree, a memorial to German culture that has perished under fascism.

“ Even though the SS men spared him when he was building Buchenwald, an American phosphorus bomb set him on fire in the 1944 air raid. Goethe and Eckermann are said to have carved their initials into the bark of this tree. "(Chapter" THREE ")

But back to Sunday in December 1944: The SS man leads prisoner 44904 back to the camp, where Hauptsturmführer Schwartz takes matters into his hands. He is impressed by Semprún's knowledge of Goethe and his interest in the Goethe tree, involuntarily sifts the doomed prisoner and lets him go.

Semprún also describes everyday life in the labor statistics. Here, prisoners, on behalf of the SS, organize work in the industry and transports close to the camp. The prisoners, mainly German Communists who have been in the camp for a long time, are given the freedom to make decisions: Who is being held in the main camp, who has to go on dangerous transport?

The illegal camp management

The power of the communist Kapos in the Buchenwald concentration camp is also reflected . The communists had organized themselves systematically, gradually and forcibly eliminated the criminal kapos and had begun to make themselves indispensable for the SS by organizing the administration of labor in the camp. It is the mentality of the SS in Buchenwald that was dominated in 1944 by the fear of having to go to the front after all if the camp did not function economically; the self-administration of the camp proves to be successful and labor-saving in this sense.

Remains of the camp fence 1999

Semprún was the only Spanish communist in the camp who spoke German well - thanks to the German governesses of his childhood - and was therefore included in the party's labor statistics. Willi Seifert is the name of the communist prisoner who heads the labor statistics and dares to take on the SS in the interests of the prisoners, Herbert Weidlich is his assistant. With all due respect for the performance of the illegal party work, Semprún reflects on the central moral question: Was it justified to assign another prisoner to one of the fatal commands to rescue a party member? Semprún later met Weidlich and Seifert in communist East Berlin, the former commissioner of the criminal police, the latter major general of the people's police. Semprún sees Seifert's career as a continuation of the forced world of the camp, which he entered at the age of 15 through his first arrest, cheated of all sexual experiences and of his youth.

“ Shortly after his release from Buchenwald, he joined the police established by the Russians in their zone of occupation. He had stayed in the same world of coercion. ... But in order to make a career in East Berlin under Ulbricht's discipline and the Russian secret services, you really had to be ready for anything in the midst of the intrigues, conspiracies and purges of the last period of Stalinism and then the tricks of bureaucratic de-Stalinization the lazy compromises in order to stay on the side of the stronger so as not to fall off the car in a sudden curve. " (Chapter one")

The Sword of Damocles of the Stalinist "purges" hung over the careers of all the former communist camp inmates in the Warsaw Pact's sphere of influence until the 1950s , which Semprún documents in view of the show trials of Josef Frank and Rudolf Slánský in Prague in 1952. Semprún knew Frank as a comrade in the labor statistics in Buchenwald, later the Czech advanced to the position of deputy general secretary of the Czech Communist Party. Semprún cites Frank's forced confession, which leads to the death sentence in the Slansky trial , and Frank mentions the name of an “accomplice”, Willi Seiferts, with which the next show trial could be prepared. The death of Stalin prevented further persecution, Niethammer documented the careers of former Buchenwald prisoners in the GDR and the power struggles within the SED (see references).

The continuation of Stalin's persecution of the Russians imprisoned in Buchenwald is one of the darkest chapters in the history of communism. Semprún experiences these events as the "dance of death" of the Russian revolution. The Stalinists met the concentration camp prisoners with extreme suspicion, for too long they were “outside the fraternal reach of Soviet power” (Chapter “TWO”). The doctrine that the Soviet soldier must fight to the death also places her in the role of the deserter.

After the war, Semprún tried to suppress the events in the concentration camp. In a bar, however, he gets into a discussion with leading phenomenologists , including the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty . The question of the responsibility of the prisoners who had to decide between life and death in the camps was discussed. Semprún clearly takes sides with the resistance in the camp: Under the extreme conditions in Buchenwald, he thinks it is right to save a comrade and to send a spy on the threatening transport. The starting point of any resistance in the camps, Semprún argues following Solzhenitsyn, is the physical annihilation of the informers. Merleau Ponty replies with a quote from André Malraux :

“ There are just wars, there are no just armies! "

Semprún has already discussed the quote and the question of morals in a conversation with Barizon, in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Even with the justification of the power strategy of the resistance, the individual question of morality remains. Do you have courage at the crucial moment? Do you use the power you have won humanly or do you allow yourself to be corrupted?

The hierarchy of prisoners

Semprún also reflects the question of morality on the basis of the prisoner's hierarchy. First of all, there are the Reich Germans, who have been in the concentration camp for a long time, in Buchenwald with the communist leadership at the top; they have won privileges that they do not share with anyone. They survived in the madness of the concentration camp, their closest friends ended up in the crematorium, some of the survivors became freezing over it, close to madness. They have the privilege of visiting the camp brothel and organizing solitary feeding orgies. Below are the Europeans, followed by the Russians and, at the lowest level, the racially persecuted, especially the Jews.

Semprún condenses the resulting conflicts in an impressive scene. Towards the end of the war, transports arrive from the camps in the East, and labor statistics have developed an idea to save the lives of at least some of these people. You want to look for skilled workers and they should stay in the warehouse. This puts the resistance in the labor statistics in the precarious position of having to carry out a selection.

A ghostly scene ensues: a group of 15 Jews from one of the transports, more dead than alive, clench their heels in front of the statistics prisoners and show the Hitler salute. One of the Jews tells the absurd story of the transport. The SS had already given up guarding the camp near Czestochowa , but on the run from the feared Russians they were again taken into German captivity. Semprún decides to send two hopelessly exhausted men on one of the transports and saves a younger man by registering him as an electrician. It is the oppressive encounter with these people who can no longer defend themselves against the ascribed identity, who have no self-respect or strength to resist, which Semprún cannot forget.

Landscape in the Kolyma region, Arctic Siberia

Confrontation with Stalinism

A central motif of the novel is Semprún's demarcation from the Communist Party. He describes his past in the organization, his version of the slogan: “The party is always right!” In spite of all doubts, the loyal party soldier “dialectically” justified every trick of the leadership, be it the fight against social democracy, against anarchists and the bourgeois left in the emerging fascism of the 30s - up to its own party exclusion. He describes Stalin's betrayal of his own comrades in the concentration camp during the period of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact in 1939, the betrayal of the Greek communists at the end of World War II, and the show trials up until the 1950s.

It is the destruction of one's own critical reason that enables party soldiers to immediately condemn even old comrades in arms when the party decrees:

“ We said it was better to be wrong with the party than to be right outside of it or against it. Because the party embodies global truth, historical reason. "(Chapter" TWO ")

It was not until 1963 that Semprún realized his mistake; his gaze opens up to the history of the GULAG when he sees snowflakes dancing in the headlights at the Gare de Lyon train station and feels transported back to the warehouse. But he does not succeed in classifying this feeling as a memory of Buchenwald, and he has to realize that he is more reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich . This becomes the starting point for a comparison between National Socialist and Stalinist camps.

He reads Warlam Shalamov's book "Kolyma - Insel im Archipel" in London in 1969 . Faced with the reality of the Soviet camps, he discovers “ that the myth of the new man was one of the bloodiest in the bloodthirsty history of historical myths ” (chapter “THREE”). As in Semprún's memories of Buchenwald concentration camp, Shalamov depicts the image of snowflakes in the light of the searchlights.

It is the “ common essence of the Nazi and Soviet terror systems ” (chapter “THREE”), “ the deep identity between the two systems ” (ibid.) That occupies Semprún, the terror of 'education for work'. Semprun shows that Dzerzhinsky and Hitler's interior minister justify the camp system almost word for word, and both sides praise the system of repression. Semprún does not see the real mausoleum of the Russian Revolution on Red Square in Moscow, but in the graves of the victims of the GULAG in the eternal ice of Siberia.

The camps, the concentration camp and the GULAG, appear to Semprún as “a very faithful mirror of the respective society” (chapter “SEVEN”).

Narrative technique

Semprún originally wanted to work on the subject of the novel, Sundays in Buchenwald, as a play. Around 1950 he began with the paperwork, the story of an informer, his discovery and destruction (see chapter "FOUR") should be presented, but the project was not completed.

The novel is a document of memory work . Semprún mixes episodes from different time levels. In view of the saying about “nice Sunday”, he remembers the Sundays of the youth from the perspective of the camp inmate, describes the dreams of fellow inmate Barizon of happy days on the Marne . The memory of the red kapos in Buchenwald is mixed with thoughts of later encounters in the GDR or of the work in the illegal CP in Spain. In the background of all the scraps of memory, Semprún largely chronologically develops the history of the December day in Buchenwald. This common thread of the individual day maintains the tension and arranges the material.

Despite the continuous first-person form, there are different perspectives that Semprún takes, even if the prisoner's perspective is a central point of view. But time and again different perspectives create distance from the events, the perspective of the communist in illegal work after the war, the view of the son of rich parents from all entanglements, the distant view of the excluded from the Communist Party, the critical attitudes and work the party reconsiders.

Another element are quotes from European cultural history, especially from Weimar Classicism and German philosophy, which he contrasts with the language of the National Socialists and their victims. But German also appears as the language of the camps, as an instrument of Nazi terror. Nevertheless, it is also the prisoners' lingua franca and remains a means of communication. The resistance fighter's good knowledge of German saved the life of the resistance fighter, because the German officer decided not to search the suitcase full of Sten-Guns due to his knowledge of the language, also in the camp after deviating from the street.

Stylistically, the narrative report dominates, interrupted by brief moments of scenic narration, by small dialogues or individual quotations. Winterly nature and the winterly frozen surroundings of the Ettersberg become a metaphor for the historical situation, in which, however, at the same time the approaching spring is dialectically canceled.

The novel also documents historical developments and biographical details from the history of the communist parties in Europe with provocative openness. This openness, which earlier comrades-in-arms certainly saw as treason, opened up new insights into the inner workings of a powerful political movement on the date of the novel's publication.

Semprún addresses his long-standing inhibition to even deal with the time in Buchenwald, to tell about it, to write about it, in the novel itself. It is not just about the elitist trait of an aestheticized report on the events, the unreliability of memory, that inevitably Mixes memories from different phases of life.

“ What am I basically telling you? From a December Sunday 1944 in Buchenwald, while the British troops crush the communist Greek resistance under the yellowish and callous gaze of Stalin? Or about that travel day in 1960 with Barizon, on which I drove from Paris to Nantua and from Nantua to Prague with everything that it can evoke in my memory? "(Chapter" TWO ")

Semprún justifies his literary memory work as the only way to convey what he has experienced and thus make it real.

“ But is it possible to process any experience without mastering it linguistically more or less? That is, the story, the stories, the narratives, the memories, the testimonies: life? The text, yes the texture, the fabric of life? "(Ibid.)

Still, the doubts remain. Don't you always write from the survivor's perspective? Is that appropriate in view of the thousands of deaths in the camps? In his dark hours, the narrator experiences the memory work as notes of a dead person, a 20-year-old prisoner who died in Buchenwald.

There are numerous books about Buchenwald and other concentration camps, from a scientific or literary perspective, from the point of view of the victims or from the distance of sober analyzes.

But Semprún is probably the only author who reports in a very reflective manner about the relationship between the red kapos and the other prisoners. For him they are not heroic resistance fighters, but men who came to power and then took advantage of it and who nevertheless helped many. This makes this work an important historical source. Semprún's political history of the camp and its inmates initially dealt with only one facet of possible modes of experience and representation, essentially that of the politically conscious opponents of the Nazi regime. The political perspective in its unreserved honesty finds its strength where it shows possibilities for action, ways of resistance despite all errors and mistakes.

Reviews and Comments

The discussion about Semprún's work primarily takes up the novel's harsh criticism of the left's blindness to the crimes of Stalinism. Ulrike Ackermann writes in the TAZ:

“'The Nazi camps were not a caricature of capitalist society, they were a very faithful mirror of Stalinist society,' wrote Jorge Semprún in 1980 in 'What a beautiful Sunday', his autobiographical examination of Buchenwald. On the occasion of the German historians' dispute in 1986, he opposed the German left - in a variation of the famous Horkheimer sentence, 'Those who talk about fascism must not be silent about capitalism' -: 'Whoever does not want to talk about Stalinism should keep silent about fascism.' Semprún attacked a far-reaching consensus of the left: namely with the imploring appeal to the uniqueness of Auschwitz to prevent any attempt to compare National Socialism and Stalinism, right and left totalitarianism. "

- TAZ No. 5396 : December 1, 1997, page 12

Lutz Niethammer highlights the achievement of Semprún, who, against the one-sided heroization of the communist resistance in the GDR, opened a glimpse of the complexity of the situation in Buchenwald:

“What makes this book so believable is its complexity of perception, regained through many layers of memory. With which other communist prisoners could you find a sentence like: 'And after all, Buchenwald was not really Buchenwald without Zarah Leander' (p.53)? For the historian, his book is also useful insofar as he describes the camp constellations (e.g. labor statistics) with real names. "

- Lutz Niethammer (ed.) : The 'cleaned' antifascism, The SED and the red Kapos von Buchenwald, documents, Berlin (Akademie Verlag) 1994, p. 26f.

expenditure

Jorge Semprún, what a beautiful Sunday! , Paris, 1980 ( Quel beau dimanche! ), German 1981, ISBN 3-937793-16-X