Memory of Evil

Abstract

In May 2003 the twelfth edition of the «Aranguren Conferences» was held. Jorge Semprún gave three keynote speeches titled «Kant and the Maquis’ rucksack», «The radical evil and the Buchenwald latrines» and «Literature and memory of the evil: from Sartre to Paul Ricoeur», all of them grouped under the generic denomination Memory of Evil. The thread running through the three speeches was Semprún’s experience as a political deportee at Buchenwald concentration camp, so close to the Weimar camp of Schiller and Goethe. There, he could experience the radical evil, but also the brotherhood through the antifascist resistance groups who coordinated the various clandestine political groups at the camp. This experience helped him review some of the philosophical readings he had done as a philosphy student at the Sorbonne, as well as those readings he took an interest in following the end of the war. In this way, Semprún went over various authors (Immanuel Kant, André Malraux, Edmund Husserl, Jacques Maritain, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, Jean Paul Sartre, Paul Ricoeur or Primo Levi) arguing their relationship with the issue of Evil.