Suchergebnisse

In the fifth volume of his collected essays, Jean-Paul Sartre has brought together thirteen pieces written during the last ten years and dealing with the problems of colonialism and decolonization. They range from prefaces or reviews of books to polemical articles and interviews on the Algerian question and French politics; as is to be expected, they vary widely in quality as well as importance. Some of them are perhaps better seen as documents, testimonials of Sartre's courageous stand against the policies of successive French cabinets toward Algeria. At a time when the majority of the French people and of their leaders were striving to avoid seeing or acknowledging the profound moral issues confronting them, Sartre's voice was among the few raised to point out the real problems, to remind Frenchmen of their own recent experience under the Nazis, and to warn them against imitating those Germans who "did not know" what was happening at Dachau and Auschwitz. At the time of the Hungarian revolt of 1956, Sartre did not let his commitment to Marxism and to the left still his voice or his conscience. During the Algerian war, in the late 1950's, he became once again the conscience and the voice of French humanism and French culture. He and his collaborators and friends kept up the intellectual (and sometimes material) contact between France, as a nation and as an idea, and her rebellious colonial subjects.