20. Jorge Semprun

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Semprun is widely recognized as one of the foremost intellectual witnesses of living history in Europe’s dark 20th century. Starting as a young boy whose family had been shattered by the Spanish Civil War, he spent his early years of exile in France as a Communist and a member of the underground resistance movement during World War II, as a result of which he was arrested and sent to, and somehow managed to survive, the Buchenwald concentration camp. After liberation, he continued as one of the major leaders of the Spanish Communist Party, and some time after being expelled by the Stalinist faction, he became Minister of Culture in 1988 in Prime Minister Gonzales’s Socialist government. In between, he had started converting his life-experiences into various interesting and influential novels, as well as his autobiography plus famous film-scripts like Z (dealing with the Lambrakis murder in Greece), La guerre est finie (on the contradictions of underground work from exile in Franco’s Spain), and many others. In a commencement talk (or Closing Lecture), Semprun might be expected to reflect on the 20th century with very strong philosophical arguments, as well as to try and delineate the future in the context of Europe -- a notion or issue which he has addresses in one of his most beautiful novels that has also been translated into Turkish as Beyaz Dağ.