What a Beautiful Sunday! by Jorge Semprun

First published:Quel beau dimanche, 1980 (English translation, 1982)

Type of work: Social criticism

Time of work: World War II

Locale: The Buchenwald death camp near Weimar, Germany

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator (Gerard Sorel), a man who, like the author, Jorge Semprun, survives Buchenwald and who matter-of-factly recalls life there as an interned Communist
• Fernand Barizon, the outspoken Spanish Communist inmate of Buchenwald who one winter’s day exclaims, “What a beautiful Sunday,” a remark which the narrator always remembers
• Willi Seifert, the imprisoned German advocate of the Communist Youth Movement who is given some authority over fellow prisoners
• Henk Spoenay, another Buchenwald prisoner and the friend of the narrator, who works as a liaison between the inmates and the German SS
• Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, the eighteenth century German writer who described the wooded region in which the Buchenwald camp was later established
• Josef Stalin, the Russian dictator whose bloody villainies make the narrator reconsider his dedication to Communism

The Novel

What a Beautiful Sunday! takes its name from a startling remark uttered by prisoner Fernand Barizon on a clear winter’s day in the Buchenwald death camp, one of the Nazis’ most infamous human slaughterhouses. Looking back on his time at Buchenwald from the perspective of several decades, the narrator, known among other names as Gerard Sorel, remains fascinated by Barizon’s remark and tries to discover why he finds it so insightful. The novel is author Jorge Semprun’s attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible: his youthful infatuation with Communism, his increasing involvement in international struggles to make Europe communistic, his internment in Buchenwald, and his subsequent realization that Communism is as much a sham as any other human institution. It is a novel of one man’s education and coming to maturity.

Slowly, even obliquely, through anecdotes and snatches of recalled conversation, Semprun re-creates the hell of Buchenwald. It is not Semprun’s intention to add another journalistic treatise about death camps to the collection of such reports. He wants to establish what it was like to be one of the better-favored camp residents whose lot was not as terrible as that of the Jews, Gypsies, Russians, and other hated races or nationalities. A secondary purpose is to superimpose the madness of mass killings upon the sylvan woodland of Buchenwald, a place made famous by the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the eighteenth century.

The story begins with the depiction of a lone oak tree. Self-contained, aloof, an emblem of God-supplied beauty, its slender branches framing the smoking crematorium, the tree, spared by the Nazi camp creators out of respect for Goethe, is both a thing whose beauty separates it from the camp and an integral part of camp life. To gaze upon it allows the prisoners to realize that a higher power is at work in the universe and can be found even in Buchenwald. The tree, which at first glance appears ordinary, takes on a supernatural glow when the narrator recalls Goethe and the lost world of his Germany which the tree symbolizes. The violence and horror of the twentieth century, so concentrated in camps such as Buchenwald, are never far from him. As he looks at the tree one day, he is nearly killed by an SS guard waving a pistol. The guard apparently is ready to shoot him when the narrator asks the guard to look at the tree and think about its connection to the revered Goethe. For a moment, even SS terror is overcome by civilized impulse as the guard puts away his gun.

Goethe’s strolls through the woods, often referred to by the narrator, supply an ironic contrast to the strolling machine-gun carrying guards of Buchenwald. Nature, which Goethe saw as a companion to man, is reduced to a helpless onlooker, a mute observer of man’s cruelties toward others. Yet nature is as mute in Russia, to which escapees from Buchenwald often flee only to find death in one of Josef Stalin’s concentration camps. Forests and steppes which seemed to be a refuge cannot hide or sustain returning Russians from their countrymen. The power of evil is simply too strong and all-pervasive.

Gradually, the reader is introduced to the inmates of Buchenwald, several of which, by word and deed, challenge the narrator’s communistic faith in man’s ability to rise out of his bestial nature and become concerned with the rights and needs of others. Along with camp heroism is exhibited treachery and greed with one inmate using his fellow inmates to achieve selfish ends. At times, prisoners mirror their guards’ worst traits, so much so that it is easy to imagine them treating prisoners as badly as they themselves were treated if they could trade places with their captors.

The daily indignities of life in the camp lead some prisoners to come to terms with the SS in charge of their unit. Henk Spoenay, a Dutch inmate, and Willi Seifert, a German, join with the narrator in helping the Nazis administer their section. Unlike some prisoners with responsibilities, however, they become camp assistants because they want to aid fellow prisoners. True to their Communist ideals, they believe that by cooperating with the SS guards they will be able to make life more tolerable for the prisoners under their jurisdiction by getting them more food or an occasional creature comfort. Their sector is helped principally because the internees are Communists rather than Jews. Jews, at the bottom of the camp’s pecking order, are marked for early death; they are systematically slaughtered in gas chambers and then thrown into vast ovens for burning. The narrator and his fellow prisoners at least have hopes that they may last long enough to escape annihilation; the hated minority prisoners have no such hopes. As soon as they get off the trains coming from the West, they are separated into groups, gassed, and burned.

Communism is continuously examined throughout What a Beautiful Sunday! Its failure as a doctrine upon which people can build their lives is evident in Buchenwald where most Communists, upon accepting the lot of prisoner, turn to the selfish pursuit of power and influence rather than to activities which would ease the sufferings of their friends. Their betrayal of Communist ideals only serves to illuminate the greater betrayals of the Ukrainian camp guards who help the SS push innocent people into the gas chambers, and the still greater betrayals of Josef Stalin’s henchmen against a huge number of fellow Russians condemned as enemies of the state. Semprun speaks of the camps of the gulag, which he learned about when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (1962; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1963) was circulated in the West, and of his ensuing total disillusionment with the Communism of his youth. The pain he endured at Buchenwald is secondary to the pain he felt when confronted by his advocacy of a false cause. He recalls the brave Russian soldiers—boys for the most part—who found their way out of Buchenwald and sought refuge in their homeland, only to be killed when they arrived. Betrayed, Semprun is compelled to tell the terrible story about a failed creed in an evil century.

The Characters

What a BeautifulSunday! focuses on Jorge Semprun’s personal reminiscences about his incarceration in Buchenwald, but also deals with postwar experiences in France and, to a lesser extent, in Spain. The narrator is a thinly veiled version of Semprun. Those characters who, like the narrator, not only try to survive in Buchenwald but also improve the existences of other inmates are seen in retrospect as complicated individuals, each displaying his own blend of courage and cowardice, openness and deceit, subjection to authority and defiance of that authority.

The narrator is often in awe at the everyday deportment of Henk Spoenay, his highly organized, clever, and at times brave Dutch friend, of the wit and intelligence of Willi Seifert, the wily German Communist who understands the workings of the guards’ minds, and of the outspoken nature of Fernand Barizon, fellow Spaniard whose good humor and nonchalant attitude help others overcome fear.

All of the main characters are members of the Communist Party or are sympathizers with its aims and, as such, provide readers with a variety of opinions about the directions the Party takes. Some, like the narrator, will give up their belief; others, like Barizon, will cling to it despite all evidence suggesting that it has failed to live up to its ideals.

Yet all the characters share a certain cardboard cut-out appearance. One learns little about them and next to nothing about their inner life, so it is often difficult to envision them “in the round.” They appear to be devices by which Semprun can discuss the effects of concentration camps upon those interned or prove points about Communism and its failure as a creed. The most memorable characters are not differentiated at all: The Russian inmates of Buchenwald have a wild, colorful attitude toward life, yet the reader does not learn about any of them individually. Their love of freedom and their disdain for mere survival is admirable; their escape from Buchenwald is miraculous.

Another admirable and memorable character is not really part of the novel’s action, yet has a great effect upon the prisoner. Goethe is more spirit than mortal, his ghost stalking the novel, haunting every character who ever wanted to believe in his lofty vision of humankind. The lone oak tree serves as a repository of his spirit and asks many questions, chief among them, “How could man have done this to his fellow man?” Goethe’s is a gentle voice, amid the horrifying cries of victims and tormentors. The oak tree’s nobility of spirit and its silent beauty remind the reader that despite these horrors there is a supernatural presence which infuses the lives of people such as Goethe, who open themselves to beauty and wonder and spurn the debased pursuits of money, fame, and power.

Critical Context

Because the novel functions brilliantly both as a condemnation of a false political system and as a novel of education, it has much in common with several germinal twentieth century novels, including Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), with its emphasis upon disillusioned youth and lost faith; James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), with its protagonist who rejects both his native Ireland and Catholicism; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), in which Jay Gatsby learns too late about the shallowness and destructiveness of materialism; and Gunter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (1959; The Tin Drum, 1961), in which a midget learns at firsthand the horrors of nationalism run amok. Though the novel gives the reader a picture of cultural disintegration from the perspective of a victim of man’s cruelty, its essentially gloomy assessment of life in the twentieth century is at odds with its praise of the courage, audacity, inventiveness, and playfulness of man under siege. In this, the author joins with a number of modern writers, including Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, Heinrich Boll, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Samuel Beckett. What a Beautiful Sunday! is a unique and important addition to Continental fiction dealing with World War II and its aftermath.

Bibliography

Booklist. Review. LXXIX (October 1, 1982), p. 190.

Boyers, Robert. “The Voyage of Jorge Semprun,” in Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945, 1985.

Kirkus Reviews. Review. L (August 1, 1982), p. 898.

Library Journal. Review. CVII (September 15, 1982), p. 1771.

Publishers Weekly. Review. CCXXII (September 17, 1982), p. 104.