![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
The article deals with the intellectual and philosophical background of Sartre's thought, which made him susceptible to the influence of left-wing totalitarian structures in general and to left-wing terrorism in particular. Consequently it is argued that Sartre's identification with Stalinism in his younger years, and his later sympathies with the infamous German Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang, were more than mere expressions of his personality, but rather part and parcel of his special blend of existentialism and philosophy. At the end of the article, Sartre's position in this matter is contrasted with the position of another existentialist French thinker, Sartre's contemporary, Albert Camus.
Notes
Rote Armee Fraktion.
Baader-Meinhof Bande.
Cf. Daniel Cohn Bendit, “Ce qu'il est con ce Baader,” Libération, March 11, 2005, http://www.liberation.fr/culture/0101630683-ce-qu-il-est-con-ce-baader.
See Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence and Identity (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Camden House, 2009), 188.
See Ian H. Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 216.
The following brief summary is based on the book by Stefan Aust, Baader-Meinhof —The Inside Story of the R.A.F. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
It has recently become known that the policeman who did the shooting was an undercover agent of the Stasi, the secret police in communist East Germany at the time. This makes it probable that East Germany had heated up the student protest in capitalist West Germany so as to embarrass and weaken the West German authorities. See the head article in the leading Germany weekly Der Spiegel: Dirk Kurbjuweit et al., “Verrat vor dem Schuss” [Treason before the Shot], Der Spiegel, May 25, 2009, 42ff.
“Konzept Stadtguerilla” in Martin Hoffmann, ed., Rote Armee Fraktion. Texte und Materialien zur Geschichte der RAF (Berlin: ID-Verlag, 1997), 27–48.
Rasterfahndung.
Isolationsfolter.
Der deutsche Herbst.
Schleyer's three bodyguards and his driver were killed during the kidnapping.
Their suicide actually constitutes a further stage in the struggle, seeing as their sympathizers immediately began spreading the account according to which Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe had been murdered. The fact not with standing that a number of unresolved questions remain, most researchers of the events (with Stefan Aust foremost among them), support the official version of the story.
Thus, for instance, Sartre adopted without any confirmation (other than Baader's own words) the group's claim that they were undergoing sophisticated forms of torture in prison. See Sartre's article: “La Mort Lente d'Andreas Baader,” Libération, December 7, 1974, http://www.liberation.fr/cahier-special/0101521930-1973-1975-sartre-ecrit-dans-libe.
See John Gerassi, Talking With Sartre: Conversations and Debates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 205–214. Sartre's principal criticism of the Baader-Meinhof Group had to do with the fact that their actions did not enjoy sufficiently widespread support among the West German public. Compare also the interview in Der Spiegel 49, December 2, 1974, 166ff. Albeit, Sartre decries the murder of the West German Judge Drenkmann as a crime, he in the same breath also says that, had it been a case involving a judge who was taking part in the terrorists’ trial, violent action against him would have been justified. Sartre grounded his basic solidarity with Baader-Meinhof in their belonging to the leftist anti-capitalist wing of the political spectrum, a circumstance which automatically outfitted them with revolutionaries’ haloes in his eyes. This approach of Sartre's, who was undoubtedly a complex thinker, is surprising in its simplistic bent. Bernard Henri Levy, the author of an overly sympathetic biography of Sartre, describes Sartre's penchant for leftist terrorism as giving in to the “totalitarian temptation.” See Bernard Henri Levy, Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003), 204. Cf. ibid., 342–345, as well.
Ibid., 328–329.
Ibid., 331–334.
See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 20. What follows is based on this small but influential pamphlet of Sartre's.
Ibid., 28–29.
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 28–29. It is generally well known that this problem of the origin of the ethical demand with which the human being is faced, is what forced Kant to cast God as a “postulate” (a requirement), since, without Him, morality cannot be obligatory in practice. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956), 128ff. The existentialist Sartre obviously cannot accept a solution of this kind.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt a.M.: Akademie Verlag, 1995), 12, 19. Sartre is also aware of this problem; see his Existentialism is a Humanism (see note 18 above), 35–37.
This finds its expression as early as the writings of Franz Rosenzweig, a thinker who is considered to be a harbinger of existentialism. Rosenzweig abandoned the teachings of Hegel because of their excessive stressing the collective at the expense of the individual; see my article “Ha-Yahadut ke-Tofaah a-Historit be-Tefisato shel Franz Rosenzweig” [“Judaism as an Historical Phenomenon in Franz Rosenzweig's Conception”] in Dov Landau, ed., Sefer ha-Mikhlalot: Minchah le-Shenat ha-Yovel shel Medinat Yisrael (Jerusalem: Department of Publications at the Ministry of Education, 2000), 125–126.
See Sartre (see note 18 above), 22ff.
Ibid.
Kurt Oesterle, Stammheim. Die Geschichte des Vollzugsbeamten Horst Bubeck (Tübingen: Kloepfer & Meyer, 2003), 16–17.
Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove /Atlantic Press, 2005).
Something that, taken in its own right, is thoroughly rare in an existentialist setting.
Ibid., lv.
In his introduction to the collection of essays in Albert Camus, Actuelles III, Chroniques Algériennes 1939–1958 (Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 1958), 14–15 (translator's English rendition of the original).
Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 292.
Levy (see note 15 above).
Ibid., 347.
See ibid., 344–347, where Levy has collected a number of particularly striking instances of the extremism and the verbal violence that Sartre was willing to employ.