{"id":359,"date":"2023-04-12T17:20:13","date_gmt":"2023-04-12T15:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stiftung-ettersberg.de\/en\/wer-wir-sind\/wie-alles-begann\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T14:08:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T13:08:09","slug":"wie-alles-begann","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/stiftung-ettersberg.de\/en\/about-us\/wie-alles-begann\/","title":{"rendered":"How it all began"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A great European<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The idea for the Ettersberg Foundation came from a passionate European: the Spanish writer Jorge Sempr\u00fan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early 1940s, when he was still a university student, Sempr\u00fan fought in the French Resistance against the German occupiers and was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944. There, the 20-year-old became prisoner number 44904. He was interrogated, tortured, and spent 15 months in the camp. As a committed Communist, Sempr\u00fan was given a post in the Labour Statistics Command, which presumably saved his life because he was thereby spared from life-threatening work assignments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp by the US Army, Jorge Sempr\u00fan returned to his adopted home of France. There he joined the exile organization of the Communist Party of Spain (Partido Comunista de Espa\u00f1a, PCE). He quickly rose to the highest level of the Party, the Politburo, due to his talent for writing. On behalf of the party, the native Spaniard returned to his homeland several times under a false name. In his native Madrid, he was the linchpin of the Communist opposition to the Franco regime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite being a committed Communist, Jorge Sempr\u00fan underwent a process of alienation after the death of Stalin in 1953 and the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union in 1956. Although the PCE followed the new party line out of Moscow, the necessary democratisation remained incomplete from Sempr\u00fan\u2019s perspective. In order to defeat Francoism, he believed that a broad alliance of parliamentary-democratic opposition groups was required. Sempr\u00fan\u2019s often nonconformist and pragmatic attitude increasingly frustrated the Politburo of the PCE. When he learned about the existence of the GULag, the system of Soviet forced labor camps, through the literature of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he fell into a deep crisis and broke with his Communist positions. Finally, in 1964, Jorge Sempr\u00fan was expelled from the Communist Party of Spain for his \u201cideological deviation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Living Democracy <\/div>\n
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\u201cI do not know what plans the political and intellectual community of Germany has for the historical space of Buchenwald. It would be apt [\u2026] if the hill of the Ettersberg were to be the seat of a European institution that would commit itself to this memory work and this development of democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/div>\n

Jorge Sempr\u00fan, acceptance speech, Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Frankfurt am Main (1994).<\/div>\n