NB: During World War II, Albert Camus joined the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation; and worked as editor of the underground resistance journal Combat. In 1943, he began writing a series of letters to a hypothetical German friend. In a time when justice and truth seem helpless before ideology and hatred, Camus’ 81 year old writings have much to teach us. I post below the text of the first letter. DS
No victory brings retribution, while all human distortion and mutilation is irreversible
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice: Letters to a German Friend (1943)
I love my country too much to be a nationalist. And I know that neither France nor Italy would lose anything – quite the contrary – if they both had broader horizons. But we are still wide of the mark… This is why I should be ashamed today if I implied that a French writer could be the enemy of a single nation. I loathe none but executioners. Any reader who reads the Letters to a German Friend in this perspective – in other words, as a document emerging from the struggle against violence – will see how I can say that I don’t disown a single word I have written here’ – Albert Camus, Preface to the Italian edition (1948)
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First Letter: July 1943
You used to say to me, “The greatness of my country has no price. Anything is good that contributes to its greatness. And in a world where nothing any longer makes sense, those who, like us young Germans, are lucky enough to find meaning in the destiny of our nation, must sacrifice everything for it.” I loved you then, but at that point already I was distancing myself from you. “No.” I told you, “I cannot believe that everything must be subordinated to a single end. Some means are inexcusable. And I would like to be able to love my country all while loving justice. I don’t want just any greatness for my country if such is to come from blood and falsehood. It’s through upholding justice that I want my country to flourish.” You said to me, “Well, you don’t love your country.”
That was five years ago; we have been separated since then and I can say that not a single day has passed during those long years (so brief, so dazzlingly swift for you!) where I didn’t think of your remark. “You don’t love your country!” When I think of these words today, something tightens in my throat. No, I didn’t love my country, if denouncing that which is unjust about what we love amounts to not loving, if insisting that what we love should measure up to the finest image we have of her amounts to not loving. That was five years ago, and many men in France thought as I did. Some of them, however, have already been stood up against the wall facing the twelve little black eyes of German destiny. And those men, who in your opinion did not love their country, did more for it than you will ever do for yours, even if it were possible for you to give your life a hundred times. For their heroism was that they had to conquer themselves first. But I am speaking here of two kinds of greatness and of a contradiction about which I must enlighten you.
We shall soon meet again, if possible. But then our friendship will be over. You will be full of your defeat and you won’t feel shame for your former victory. Rather, you will long for it with all your crushed might. Today I am still close to you in spirit – your enemy, to be sure, but still somewhat your friend because I leave here for you all of my thoughts. Tomorrow this will be over. What your victory could not bring about, your defeat will bring to an end. But at least, before we become indifferent to each other, I want to leave you a clear idea of what neither peace nor war has taught you to recognize in the destiny of my country.
I want to tell you at once what sort of greatness sets us in motion. But this amounts to telling you what kind of courage we applaud, which is not your kind. For it is not much to know how to take up arms when you have been preparing for it for years and when the errand is more natural to you than thinking. It is much to the contrary to advance towards torture and death when you know with scientific certainty that hatred and violence are empty things in themselves. It is a great deal to fight while despising war, to accept losing everything while guarding the taste of happiness, to run towards destruction with the idea of a higher civilization. It is in this way that we do more than you because we have to confront ourselves. You had nothing to conquer in your heart, nor in your intelligence. We had two enemies, and a military victory was not enough for us, as it was for you who had nothing within yourselves to overcome.
We had much to overcome and perhaps first of all, the perpetual temptation to emulate you. For there is always something in us that yields to instinct, to contempt for intelligence, to the cult of efficiency. Our great virtues eventually become tiresome to us. We become ashamed of our intelligence, and we imagine at times some happy savagery where truth would be effortless. But to this point, the cure is easy: you are there to show us what such imagining would lead to, and we straighten up. If I believed in some fatalism of history, I would imagine you at our sides, helots of intelligence, to correct us. Thus, are our spirits reborn, and there we are more at ease.
However, we still had to conquer this suspicion we held of heroism. I know, you think that heroism is alien to us. You are wrong. It’s just that we avow heroism and are wary of it at the same time. We avow it because ten centuries of history have given us knowledge of all that is noble. We are wary of it because ten centuries of intelligence have taught us the art and beneficence of nature. In order to face you, we had to first come back from the brink. And this is why we fell behind all of Europe, which hurried toward falsehood the moment it was necessary, while we meddled with seeking truth. This is why we were defeated in the beginning, preoccupied as we were, while you were falling upon us, with determining in our hearts whether right was on our side.
We had to conquer our weakness for mankind, the image we had formed of a peaceful destiny, that deep-rooted conviction of ours that no victory ever pays, whereas any mutilation of mankind is irrevocable. We had to give up all at the same time: our knowledge and our hope; the reasons we had for loving; and the hatred we held for all wars. To put it in a word that I suspect you will understand, coming from me with whom you loved to shake hands, we had to silence our passion for friendship.
Now we have done that. We had to take a long detour and we are far behind. It is a detour that the regard for truth imposes on intelligence, the regard for friendship at its core. It is a detour that safeguarded justice and put truth on the side of those who questioned themselves. And, without a doubt, we paid very dearly for it. We paid for it with humiliations and silences, with bitter experiences, with prison sentences, with executions at dawn, with desertions, with separations, with daily pangs of hunger, with emaciated children, and, above all, with forced repentance. But that’s the way things go. It took us all that time to find out if we had the right to kill men, if we were allowed to add to the atrocious misery of this world. And it is this time lost and recaptured, this defeat accepted and surmounted, these scruples paid for with blood, that give us the right, we the French, to think today that we entered this war with hands clean – washed with the purity of victims and the condemned – and that we will come out of this with hands clean – but this time washed with the purity of a great victory won against injustice and over ourselves.
For we shall be victorious, you may be sure of it. But we shall be victorious thanks to that very defeat, to that long journey of reflection through which we found our justification, to that suffering from which we felt the pain of injustice and learned our lesson. We learned the secret of any victory, and if we don’t lose this secret, we shall know final victory. We learned that, contrary to what we sometimes used to think, the spirit is of no avail against the sword, but that the spirit together with the sword will always win out over the sword alone. That is why we have now accepted the sword, after making sure that the spirit was on our side. We had to first see people die and to risk dying ourselves. We had to witness the morning walk of a French worker on his way to the guillotine, down the corridors of his prison, exhorting his comrades, from cell to cell, to show their courage. Finally, to possess ourselves of the spirit, we had to endure the torture of our flesh. We paid dearly and we will have more to pay. However, we have our convictions, our reasoning, our justice: your defeat is inevitable.
I have never believed in the power of truth alone. But it is worth knowing that when given equal energy, truth wins out over falsehood. It is at this difficult equilibrium that we have arrived. It is bolstered by this nuance that today we fight. And I would be tempted to tell you that we are fighting for fine distinctions, but distinctions that are as important as man himself. We are fighting for this nuance that separates sacrifice from mysticism, energy from violence, strength from cruelty, for this feeble distinction that separates the false from the true, and the man we hope for from the cowardly gods you revere.
This is what I wanted to tell you, not above the fray, but in the midst of it. This is what I wanted to reply to your remark, “You don’t love your country”, which still haunts me. But I want to be clear with you. I believe that France has lost her power and her sway for a long time to come and that for a long time she will need a desperate patience, a vigilant revolt to recover the element of prestige necessary for any culture. But I believe she has lost all of that for reasons that are pure. And this is why I have not lost hope. This is the whole meaning of my letter. The man whom you pitied five years ago for being so reticent about his country is the same man who wants to say to you today, and to all those of our age in Europe and throughout the world: “I belong to an admirable and persevering nation which, admitting her errors and weaknesses, has not lost hold of the idea that constitutes all of her greatness and whose people always, whose leaders sometimes, search continuously to express that idea even more clearly. I belong to a nation that for the past four years has restarted the course of her entire history and which, out of the ruins, is calmly and surely preparing to make another history and to take her chance in a game where she holds no trump cards.
This country is worthy of the difficult and demanding love that is mine. And I believe now that it’s well worth fighting for since it is deserving of a higher love. And I say that your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by any old kind of love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest of victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?”
Source: Reflections of a Francophile
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LETTER TO A GERMANIST FRIEND: ON CAMUS AND HEIDEGGER – By Matthew Sharpe
The Liberation of Paris and Camus’s Letters: (photos + extracts from all four letters). By Anna Khachyan
Extract from the fourth letter: .. You never believed that this world has meaning, and you concluded that everything has the same price, that good and evil can be defined as desired. You assumed that in case of the absence of all human or divine morality, the only values are those that govern the animal world, i.e. violence and deception. And from this, you have concluded that a human is nothing, and his soul may be killed, that in this most meaningless story the individual’s problem is the use of his strength and power, and his morality is the reality of achievements. ..
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Albert Camus: Create Dangerously (1957) (Speech at Uppsala University on December 14, 1957, four days after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature)
Andha Yug (Dharamvir Bharati, 1953) / धर्मवीर भारती लिखित नाटक ‘अन्धा युग’
Albert Camus: The Almond Trees (1940)
Invincible Summer – Albert Camus
ALBERT CAMUS: by Nicola Chiaromonte
Resistance, Rebellion, & Writing – Albert Camus’s dispatches on the Algerian crisis
After the truth-shower 