Colloquium on the occasion of the visit of Her Majesty Queen Sofía of Spain to Exeter College
29 April 2014, Daniela Omlor
It’s a great honour to be here today, in the presence of her Majesty, the Queen
of Spain, and the distinguished guests. Not in my wildest dreams did I think this
would ever happen. Sitting in the main hall as a student, listening to many of
the scholars present here today, all experts in their field, as they lectured on a
wide variety of topics, felt already like an unsurpassable opportunity, daunting
and exciting at the same time. A bit like today…. When I was elected to the
Queen Sofía Research Fellowship I was elated but did not anticipate that it
would culminate in an actual encounter with her Majesty.
I had always loved reading, and languages were one of the many subjects I
enjoyed at school. When I came to Oxford as an undergraduate studying
Spanish and French I learned, above all, different ways of reading a text.
But how did I end up a Hispanist? At first glance, it doesn’t seem obvious: I was
born to a German father and a Korean mother and grew up in Germany. Rather
than a grand master plan it was chance that pushed me in a specific direction.
Like many teenagers I wanted to travel and live abroad, far from home, and
studying at Oxford gave me a convenient excuse. In spite of an initial out-ofplaceness I tremendously enjoyed the study of literature, particularly, engaging
directly with texts through essays and tutorials. One day I came across a book
Colloquium on the occasion of the visit of Her Majesty Queen Sofía of Spain to Exeter College
29 April 2014, Daniela Omlor
cover which bore the name Jorge Semprún as the author together with a
French title. I cannot recall whether it was Le Grand Voyage or L’Écriture ou la
vie, but I was strangely intrigued by the combination of French title and very
clearly Spanish name, and I could not spot the mention of a translator. Having
never heard of Semprún before, I read the book and rather liked it and then
my obsession with Jorge Semprún began. I was attracted to the versatility of
his writing, but also his command of several European languages, Spanish and
French among them. Then there were the fascinating events that constituted
his life: going into exile with his family as a result of the Civil War, fighting in
the French Resistance and being deported to the Nazi concentration camp of
Buchenwald. After the war he rose to a prominent position in the Spanish
Communist Party, working in Madrid in the underground under a fake identity,
until he fell out with the party and was expelled. Semprún made an unlikely
political comeback as Minister of Culture under Felipe González in the late
1980s and early 1990s. His life struck me as a very European biography. And
perhaps I recognized parts of myself in that fluidity of identity and a being at
home across different languages.
Semprún’s work really foreshadowed a big topic which has become fairly
prominent in Spain in the last decade or so and that’s the importance of
memory. We can probably all agree that memory is intimately intertwined with
Colloquium on the occasion of the visit of Her Majesty Queen Sofía of Spain to Exeter College
29 April 2014, Daniela Omlor
our sense of identity. Paul Ricoeur pointed out how this is reflected in many
languages by making the verb to remember reflexive:1 thus in Spanish we have
acordarse. Not only is our self connected to what we remember, but also our
collective sense of belonging. And yet we know from Borges’s ‘Funes el
memorioso’2 that an excess of memory can be equally damaging.
Remembering all the details makes it impossible for Funes to accept an
overarching category like dog for all different breeds that exist. Thus
remembering automatically entails forgetting. Jorge Semprún claims that he
had to forget what he lived through in Buchenwald in order to be able to carry
on living.3 And yet that forgetting is also suspicious. After all, Freud defined
trauma in terms of these forgotten or repressed memories that resulted in the
patient re-enacting rather than working through catastrophic experience.4
Semprún provides a literal example for this stasis, describing in Veinte años y
un día ‘aquella especie de auto sacramental que […] se había inventado para
perpetuar el recuerdo del asesinato de 1936; para inmortalizar aquella muerte
absurda y prolongar, de generación en generación, una mala consciencia de
culpabilidad entre los braceros de la finca’.5 On the anniversary of the death of
his brother, who was killed mistakenly during the taking up of arms in 1936,
1
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 96.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Funes el memorioso’, Ficciones (Madrid: Alianza, 2001), pp. 123-136.
3
Jorge Semprún, Mal et Modernité (Paris: Climats, 1995), p. 71.
4
Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (London:
Penguin, 2003), pp. 43-102: 51.
5
Jorge Semprún, Veinte años y un día (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2004), p. 167.
2
Colloquium on the occasion of the visit of Her Majesty Queen Sofía of Spain to Exeter College
29 April 2014, Daniela Omlor
the landowner forces his farm labourers to restage and re-play the killing as it
happened. And the vicious circle can only be broken once both the brother and
a labourer, who was also killed, are reburied side by side on the land, where
the murders took place.
In his Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez Semprún berated the desmemoria,
literally unremembering, from which some of his former party comrades
suffered after the transition to democracy.6 They were no longer haunted by
Marx’s spectre of communism but by ‘los fantasmas de un pasado que no
termina de morir’ [the ghosts of a past that simply won’t die].7
The Queen Sofía Research Fellowship not only allowed me to work extensively
on Semprún’s oeuvre and complete a monograph on his writing,8 it also let me
explore other fields related to those ghosts of the past that hound us
collectively and to the contested memories of historical events. The Spanish
memory boom of the new millennium indicated that there was a taste for
recovering the Civil War in literature and investing it with imaginative meaning.
Some authors fared better than others at doing this and I would say that it was
often those that looked beyond the borders of Spain to think about memory as
a global agent, who were most successful at doing so. Well-known writers like
6
Jorge Semprún, Autobiografía de Federico Sánchez (Barcelona: Planeta, 2002), p. 96.
Semprún, Autobiografía, p. 168; my translation.
8
Daniela Omlor, Jorge Semprún: Memory’s Long Voyage (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014).
7
Colloquium on the occasion of the visit of Her Majesty Queen Sofía of Spain to Exeter College
29 April 2014, Daniela Omlor
Antonio Muñoz Molina, Javier Marías and Javier Cercas have managed to
integrate the themes of memory and coming to terms with the past, both for
the individual as well as for society, compellingly in their novels.9 They all draw
attention to the fictionality of narrative and invite the reader to question the
accessibility of truth, the reliability of memory, the manipulative power of
language and do not forego issues such as guilt and complicity. As critical
readers we need to refrain from consuming this kind of literature in the hope
of catharsis. Instead we need to work through it and critically assess how
empathy and identification are utilized as tools in narrative.
This becomes obvious when we consider that novels in Spain are increasingly
inspired not just by the Civil War, but other historical traumas. Novelists like
Adolfo García Ortega and Juana Salabert have turned their attention to the
Holocaust. García Ortega’s protagonist explains: ‘Me he sentido judío, ruso o
cualquiera de las víctimas perseguidas, humilladas, borradas, eliminadas como
seres humanos, trituradas sin más motivo que su existencia. Asesinados por
existir. Me he sentido víctima, una cualquiera de esas víctimas’.10 Solidarity
with the victims should not lead to over-identification however. Being
persecuted and assassinated is not the same as ‘feeling’ that one forms part of
the universal history of victimization. So, increasingly the question that informs
9
Examples are Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Beatus ille (1986) and El jinete polaco (1991), Javier Cercas’s Soldados
de Salamina (2001) and Javier Marías’s trilogy Tu rostro mañana (2002-2007).
10
Adolfo García Ortega, El comprador de aniversarios (Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2008), p. 14.
Colloquium on the occasion of the visit of Her Majesty Queen Sofía of Spain to Exeter College
29 April 2014, Daniela Omlor
my research has been how to represent trauma in fiction and what to do when
in Juana Salabert’s words: 'no nos alcanzan las palabras para asilar en ellas
tamaños horrores’ [words are not enough to give shelter to such horrors].11
Looking at other histories can be fruitful and cross-fertilizing. Some authors,
like Salabert, are able to create a palimpsestic memory that can speak of the
Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, as well as the expulsion of Jews in 1492. This
‘multidirectional memory’12 is also activated when Juan Goytisolo and Adolfo
García Ortega incorporate the wars in the Balkans in literature in terms that
echo the Spanish Civil War and connect the trial of Karadžić with personal
stories of immigration and the quest for an identity.13 There is also a
burgeoning literature that attempts to come to terms with one of the most
recent traumas of Spanish history, namely the Islamist bombings at Atocha
station in Madrid 2004, known as 11-M in Spain.14 Finding an adequate
response to incomprehensible atrocities that we would like to think of as
inhuman and inhumane, but that are, unfortunately, committed by humans
time and time again, is perhaps one of the largest challenges that Spanish
literature and literature as such faces today. Why do I enumerate all these
11
Juana Salabert, El velódromo de invierno (Madrid: Alianza, 2009), p. 147, my translation.
Michael Rothberg coined this term for memory ‘as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and
borrowing; as productive and not privative’ Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the
Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 3.
13
See Juan Goytisolo’s El sitio de los sitios (1995) and Adolfo García Ortega’s Pasajero K (2012).
14
For example: Blanca Riestra’s Madrid Blues (2008), Adolfo García Ortega’s El mapa de la vida (2009) and La
vida antes de marzo (2009) by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón.
12
Colloquium on the occasion of the visit of Her Majesty Queen Sofía of Spain to Exeter College
29 April 2014, Daniela Omlor
horrors on this truly joyous occasion? It is not out of some morbid fixation. It is
out of a firm belief in the valency of literature. Semprún stressed that an
unlivable experience does not equal an unrecountable experience, and argued
for a new way of writing characterized by a ‘densité transparante’ [transparent
density].15 He also advocated the need for literature to take over from
memory.16 One of García Ortega’s protagonist remarks: ‘He recorrido el siglo,
me he adentrado en el horror del siglo, y he imaginado su gris epicentro […].
Pensarlo, saberlo, decirlo me ha cambiado, claro que me ha cambiado’. [I’ve
travelled through this century, I’ve penetrated the horror of this century, and I
imagined its grey epicentre. To think about it, to know it, to speak of it
changed me, of course, it has changed me].17 And while literature fulfils many
different roles, in order to make evident its significance for society in our age,
it is important that it doesn’t shy away from engaging with our most conflicted
and traumatic histories, so that the choice for the reader no longer lies
between La escritura o la vida [literature or life].
15
Jorge Semprún, L’Écriture ou la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), pp. 25-26.
‘No hay otra posibilidad de memoria viva, capaz de enriquecerse sin cesar, si los futuros novelistas no se
apoderan, con imaginación creadora de verdad, de aquella materia histórica. De todas maneras, el recurso a la
ficción narrativa para prolongar una memoria testimonial agotada, bien pronto clausurada, sólo sería un
retorno a los origenes’ Jorge Semprún, ‘El Holocausto: 60 años después’ El País Semanal (23 January 2005), p.
34.
17
García Ortega, Comprador, p. 215.
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