Vivir es resistir

In March 2002, Jorge Semprún delivered three lectures at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, each dedicated to a great European intellectual: the philosopher Edmund Husserl, the historian Marc Bloch, and the writer George Orwell. In these masterful presentations, Semprún takes us back to the cultural, social, and political upheavals that Europe experienced in the 1930s and, as the aforementioned authors did in their time, argues that only by relying on critical reason and faith in democratic values ​​can our continent escape the labyrinth into which it seems to have entered in the 21st century. This volume also includes the moving speech that Jorge Semprún delivered at the Appelplatz in Buchenwald, on the occasion of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of that concentration camp. Following that speech, and over the course of several months, Semprún engaged in illuminating dialogues with his friend, the French filmmaker Franck Appréderis, in which he recounted the milestones of his eventful life. Published posthumously, with a preface by Bernard Pivot, these conversations offer the final and insightful portrait of one of the greatest European intellectuals of the 20th century.