Jorge Semprún and His Heteronym Federico Sánchez

Abstract

Jorge Semprún had expressed in writing how he wished to be buried and where. The wish revealed the double contradiction that traversed his complex life: between his Spanish and French identities, between the memory of exile and the post-Franco reconciliation. Biriatu is a small Basque-French town along the shore of the Bidasoa river, a watery frontier flowing toward the Cantabrian Sea that Semprún often used as a rest stop on his clandestine trips between France and Spain during the Franco dictatorship. Semprún chooses that border site, possible homeland for those in lack of one, as the most appropriate final resting place, one which testifies to his double sense of belonging: Spanish by birth, French by choice. He also expressed his desire to have his body covered by the flag of the Second Spanish Republic, as a symbol of his fidelity to the exile and suffering of his compatriots, despite his belief that the current parliamentary monarchy in Spain is the best way to develop the res publica.