European Legacy

ISSN: 1084-8770 (Print) 1470-1316 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cele20

Sartre after Auschwitz

T. Storm Heter

To cite this article: T. Storm Heter (2007) Sartre after Auschwitz, European Legacy, 12:7,
823-833, DOI: 10.1080/10848770701671326
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770701671326

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The European Legacy, Vol. 12, No. 7, pp. 823–833, 2007

Sartre after Auschwitz

T. STORM HETER

ABSTRACT This essay investigates Jean-Paul Sartre’s reaction to the Holocaust. While Sartre dealt frequently
with Jewish themes, he did not explicitly address the question of why the Holocaust occurred or whether and
how Western culture would be different in a post-Holocaust world. I claim that although Sartre never addressed
the Shoah directly, his Marxist Existentialism provides valuable resources for understanding modern
antisemitism. In his major postwar writings he developed the concepts of political engagement, authenticity and
responsibility for systematic social harms. Sartre’s importance in Holocaust studies is defended against the claim
that Existentialism lacks the theoretical resources to grasp modern, systematic evil. Sartre’s approach is briefly
compared with that of other Western Marxist like Adorno.

Should we hold a writer accountable for what he has not written? Yes, we must, wrote
Jean-Paul Sartre in his classic defense of littérature engagée, Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (What
is Literature, 1947): ‘‘If a writer has chosen to remain silent on any aspect whatever of the
world, or, according to an expression which says just what it means, to pass over it in
silence, one has the right to ask him . . . ‘Why have you spoken of this rather than that,
and—since you speak in order to bring about change—why do you want to change this
rather than that?’’’1 Of the many difficult questions Sartre probed while struggling for his
own existential authenticité, the meaning of the Holocaust was not among them. What is
the significance of Sartre’s silence? As one of the most public and political of philosophies
in the twentieth century, Existentialism demanded individual accountability for
systematic oppression of all kinds. One would expect the existentialists to have said
more about the profoundest of modern social horrors.
Sartre’s 1945 exposé of French antisemitism, Réflexions sur la question juive, is an
acknowledged masterwork and yet, as Enzo Traverso notes, it is strikingly mute about the
Jewish genocide.2 Jonathan Judaken’s recent Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, which
brilliantly traces the figure of ‘‘the Jew’’ throughout Sartre’s work, defends the choice in
Réflexions to discuss French antisemitism but not the Shoah.3 I agree that Sartre was not
‘‘wrong’’ to enter the topic of antisemitism, as he always did, by going back to a

East Stroudsburg University, Dept. of Philosophy, 428 Normal Street East Stroudsburg, PA 18301, USA.
Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1084-8770 print/ISSN 1470-1316 online/07/070823–11 ß 2007 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
DOI: 10.1080/10848770701671326
824 T. STORM HETER

generalization of his own lived experience. The results of politicizing the Cogito were
provocative: a diagnosis of the psycho-pathologies of the French antisemite and the
sympathetic but nonetheless antisemitic ‘‘democrat.’’ There is overwhelming agreement
that Réflexions mobilizes a shallow understanding of Yiddishkeit and Jewish history, yet as
Judaken demonstrates, multiple generations of French Jewish–and we can safely add
European and American Jewish–intellectuals found Réflexions an inescapable touchstone
for probing the meaning of Jewish identity.4 While Sartre was wrong that Jewish identity
is always an alienating pour-autrui, a mere projection of the antisemite, he did capture an
essential truth about social identity: we are not radically free to constitute who we are; the
look of others, whether hostile or sympathetic, creates an ontologically real dimension of
the self. Being a Jew means something different in an antisemitic culture than it does in a
non-antisemitic culture. Had Sartre known more about Jewish history, his analysis of
being-for-others would still stand, although its details and contents in the case of Jewish
identity would need modification. Antisemitic cultures are stifling because they allow
only caricatured, cookie-cutter public identities for Jews, identities which are not
determined by the inner, communal and intergenerational meanings of Judaism among
Jews. Due to its insight into the social, recognitive dimension of self-identity, Réflexions
remains a classic and will be read, likely and hopefully, for many generations to come.
Still, I share Traverso’s sentiment that ‘‘What is most striking—in any case what is
most striking to me—about reading Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew today is his almost total
silence about Auschwitz.’’5 What I would like to show, however, is that Traverso is
mistaken when he writes that ‘‘Sartre is incapable of seeing in Auschwitz a sinister triumph
of modernity.’’6 Sartre’s turn to Marxism in the late 1940s, his obsession with the theme
of dirty hands, his theory of political engagement, and not least his life-long interest in
Jewish themes, suggest that he was well-situated to address the Shoah, if not in 1945–46,
then certainly by 1950–55 when he was writing Critique de la Raison dialectique. Sartre is
relevantly compared to Western Marxists like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
and to existentialists like Hannah Arendt, as well as to phenomenologists like Emmanuel
Levinas, all of whom deeply absorbed into their philosophical categories the significance
of the Shoah. By his own admission, he is accountable for what he might have said, but
didn’t. So while Traverso helpfully situates Sartre in the French postwar culture where
silence about Auschwitz was the norm, situating him relative to his own later works
shows a close conceptual kinship with the broad themes of those philosophers mentioned
above, especially with Arendt and Adorno, for whom the Holocaust was of central
philosophical importance. So, given his intellectual resources and proclivities, why did the
phenomenon of the Shoah not enter and alter radically Sartre’s philosophical and political
categories, the way it did for other thinkers who shared his theoretical temperament?
While I do not propose a positive answer to this question, I believe that a negative answer
can be established: Sartre did not remain silent because he lacked the intellectual,
theoretical resources to address the systematic, institutional nature of the violence which
culminated in the gas chambers. His discussion of some ‘‘Jewish questions,’’ but not
others was a choice.
The fact that Arendt, Levinas and many members of the Frankfurt School were
Jewish and Sartre was not, only goes so far towards explaining the absence of the Shoah in
his thinking. He was intellectually, if not personally, invested in Jewish themes, returning
to ‘‘representations of Jews and Judaism,’’ as Judaken’s work aptly shows, at most of the
 Sartre after Auschwitz 825

major points of his intellectual trajectory.7 From his earliest writings, like the short story
L’Enfance d’un chef, to his later theater-like Les sequesters d’Altona, Sartre questioned the
hostile forces of antisemitism which constructed an image of ‘‘the Jew’’ which Jews were
neither free to utterly reject nor utterly accept. It would not have been surprising at all,
I think, had Sartre written a piece like Karl Jaspers’ 1946 ‘‘Die Schuldfrage’’ (The Question
of German Guilt), which articulated four distinct senses of responsibility among Germans
for the crimes of the Nazis.8 And, as I hope to show, it would not have been surprising
had Sartre fleshed out his interpretation of history and his sociological categories through
an extensive examination of the Holocaust. His sporadic comments on institutional
antisemitism are like the scattered notes of an uncomposed song. They suggest the
possibility of a rich account of antisemitism and the Shoah.

FROM ‘‘THE JEWISH QUESTION’’ TO ‘‘AFTER AUSCHWITZ’’: SARTRE’S

DIAGNOSIS OF INSTITUTIONAL ANTISEMITISM
To understand that Sartre was in fact well-positioned to grapple with Auschwitz as the
logical outgrowth of instrumental reason and institutionalized antisemitism, we must
appreciate his intellectual shift from pre-war to post-war. It is widely acknowledge that
his apolitical, psychological categories absorbed political, historical and sociological
content. His outlook shifted seismically. Les Temps modernes was born and would become
the instrument for his situational pieces. While Réflexions is representative of this moment,
in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? we find the clearest statement of his wartime epiphany: the
inescapable political responsibility of the intellectual. The wartime plays Huis Clos and Les
Mouches, as well as his contributions to Les Lettres françaises convinced him of the validity,
indeed absolute necessity, of littérature engagée. Can we compare this shift—from
psychology to politics, from art-for-art’s sake to political art, and from abstract to concrete
philosophy—to the famous statement of Adorno that to write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbarism? In a sense Sartre was addressing the question of how to write after Auschwitz.
His answer: one must choose oppression or liberty. Literature would never be a neutral
tool, but would inevitably take sides in the major conflicts of our era. Réflexions applied
this maxim to racism, and more specifically to French antisemitism, claiming that ‘‘good’’
antisemitic literature is impossible and excoriating collaborationists as ‘‘guilty and even
criminal’’ in their tacit support for Nazi brutality.9
The implications of Sartrean littérature engagée for writing after Auschwitz did not
escape Adorno. In a 1962 essay entitled ‘‘Commitment’’ Adorno would write the
following powerful lines. ‘‘I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires
committed literature. The question asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts Sans
Sépulture, ‘Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones
break in their bodies?’, is also the question whether any art now has a right to exist;
whether intellectual regression is not inherent in the concept of committed literature
because of the regression of society.’’10 The first sentence of this quote has been
anthologized widely, but not the second. This praise for Sartre’s theater, though qualified,
is of deep importance. Adorno, the theorist who most forcefully advanced the concept of
a post-Holocaust culture, states that existential engagement expresses the same sentiment
826 T. STORM HETER

and is driven by the same fundamental ‘‘impulse’’ as his own critique of culture.
In Adorno’s eyes Sartre had accepted the fundamental barbarity of modern culture.
But did Sartre’s question of how to write committed literature presuppose Adorno’s
claim that the nature of writing, culture and art would be forever different after and because
of Auschwitz? Or was Sartre proceeding on the assumption of the generic cultural
barbarism of modernity? On a psychological level, it appears that the war, rather than the
Shoah per se, politicized Sartre.11 He began deconstructing his bourgeois privileges and
allying himself with victims of oppression everywhere, the Jew, the Black, the
Homosexual, the Colonized. These categories of ‘‘others’’ shaded off into one another;
each was a victim of Hegelian misrecognition; each would attain authenticity through
rebellion. As Judaken notes, Sartre exhibited typical post-Vichy thinking by identifying so
completely as a victim that he failed to distinguish between Jewish victims of Nazism (and
Vichy) and its political victims, himself included.12 Given this tendency, it is not surprising
that the Jewish genocide is almost never mentioned in Sartre’s work. While he formulated
a new theory of literature in response to ‘‘war’’ broadly construed, there is no textual
indication, in Réflexions or elsewhere, that he believed the Shoah necessarily changed the
social function of literature. The ‘‘situation of the writer in 1947’’ was, he believed,
dominated by economic class. For the American novelist Richard Wright the dominant
feature was anti-black racism.13 We can easily imagine Sartre saying that for the European
Jewish writer (and for Jews generally) the main element of the situation was antisemitism.
And just as he thought the ‘‘Negro problem’’ was a problem for all humans, he could
have said that the ‘‘Jewish question’’ is a question for everyone, not just Jews. But none of
this takes us the distance to the theme of ‘‘after Auschwitz.’’ The ‘‘Jewish question’’
forming the title of Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive evokes the debate over the
national status of Jews and their rights under liberal democracies. It is not the question of
whether art, literature, culture, as well as democracy and reason itself can have the same
meaning given the systematic, intentional destruction of six million Jews, a destruction
carried out by the most enlightened, cultured and rational of Western societies, Germany.
‘‘After Auschwitz’’ is not the question, ‘‘What is Jewish authenticity?’’ but the question of
whether the gas chambers were an inevitable or merely contingent outgrowth of
bureaucratic rationality, institutionalized antisemitism and biological race thinking. Can
genocidal tendencies be neatly separated out from the arts and letters of modern
European cultures? While the Frankfurt School Marxists saw the critique of modern
society as departing from the fundamental gulf left by the Holocaust, Sartre’s new critical
social theory was not predicated on this assumption. Sartre thought modern culture was
barbaric, but he saw barbarism everywhere. He made no attempt to make sense of the
particular barbarism of the Holocaust and the currents that engendered it. Sartre’s critique
was not animated by the concern to articulate, interrogate or shape a post-Holocaust
culture.
If we situate Sartre’s works of the late 1940s relative to his later social theory, in
particular that of the Critique de la Raison dialectique, then some of the shortcomings of his
claims about antisemitism and Jewish identity appear as immaturities of an embryonic
social theory rather than limitations intrinsic to existential thought. Two important
criticisms of Réflexions are that it is overly psychological (reducing antisemitism to a
mental, not social illness) and that it presents Judaism as an ahistorical absence.14 The
critical social theory of the Critique provides ample opportunity to address these mistakes.
 Sartre after Auschwitz 827

I say ‘‘opportunity’’ to make it clear that Critique does not pursue antisemitism as a central
theme, though it might well have. Sartre had, by the mid 1950s, when Critique was being
written, the historical and sociological tools to address the criticisms above. His attempt at
synthesizing Freud and Marx, of providing as he called it in Question de Méthode a
‘‘historical and structural anthropology,’’15 put him in a theoretical space strongly akin to
the Frankfurt School Marxists, whose critiques of post-Holocaust culture and analyses of
antisemitism in late capitalism set the standard for such inquiries. The theme of diffuse,
institutionalized violence permeates Sartre’s thinking in the 1950s, but the major cases on
his mind were class oppression and colonialism, especially French colonialism in Algeria.
He was well-positioned to think structurally about antisemitism, if not to take on more
directly the topic of the Nazi genocide.
In particular, Sartre’s discussion of racism as ‘‘other-directedness’’ in the Critique
suggests the possibility of a structurally rich, historically informed diagnosis of modern
European antisemitism. If the psychological account of antisemitism of Réflexions was
ineffective for grasping the whole of French antisemitism, it would be doubly ineffective
for coming to terms with the Jewish genocide. But Sartre acknowledged these limitations
in the Critique when he ‘‘differentiated a racist exis . . . from an antisemitic movement.’’16
‘‘[T]here is the seriality of racism, which I have explained: it is always the attitude of the
Other. But seriality—though it may cause lynching or pogroms—is not a sufficient
explanation of, for example, the active antisemitism of the German petty bourgeoisie
under the Nazi régime.’’ His new social-structural approach to antisemitism could
incorporate the psychological insights of Réflexions and contextualize them in wider social
forces. The German state, he says, turned its public into a ‘‘series’’ of ‘‘massified
individuals’’ whose social relations were ‘‘other-directed’’ and where each person
attempted to mimic his neighbor.17 Sartre compares institutionalized antisemitism to the
‘‘top ten’’ lists of popular songs in America where each person’s values become a
reflection of what he believes other people value. Significantly, Sartre ends his short
discussion of antisemitism in Critique with one of the very few references to
‘‘responsibility’’ in the entire work. The passage is worth quoting at length.
[T]he arrest or execution of a Jew on government orders passively realized the same
ceremony of alterity in the masses; every act of violence was irreversible, not only
because it destroyed human lives, but because it made everyone an other-directed
criminal, adopting the leader’s crimes in so far as he had committed them elsewhere and
as an other in an other . . .. [The] looting and firing of undefended shops are in
themselves dispersive acts of destruction: they have nothing to do with unity of agents
(on the contrary, violence in engendered by disorder) and, from outside, they make
everyone into the other who is responsible for the maximum violence committed in
the gathering by an other. At the level at which ‘collective responsibility’ is serial
responsibility, its acceptance or rejection by a given other are simply two contradictory
expressions (in discourse) of one and the same fact. And this serial responsibility—as the
projection of a precise, totalizing policy in the milieu of alterity—increases the power
of the sovereign group to precisely the extent that it deepens everyone’s impotence
while sustaining the misleading scheme of the totalizing ceremony.18

Was Sartre thinking of the Kristallnacht pogrom? Perhaps. It is provocative to think

he might have developed this example as a parallel to his long discussion of the storming
828 T. STORM HETER

of the Bastille, which would form the conceptual center of his account of ‘‘group praxis’’
in the Critique. Sartre could have shown that the organs of the German state fostered
antisemitism among its public by creating the feeling in each German citizen that every
other German citizen was wary of ‘‘the Jew.’’ His analysis of mass media would go some
distance in explaining the effects of propaganda. Just like the top ten lists of American
radio, caricatures of Jews, endlessly repeated, would give the impression that someone
believed them to be valid. Antisemitic beliefs would be just as self-fulfilling and
fraudulent, not to mention as effective in driving behavior, as top ten lists. Record
promoters could declare a song to be popular, have it played repeatedly on the radio, and
thereby cause it to be purchased by listeners who thought they were consuming the
music every other American loved. Had Sartre developed this example further, he might
have used his group vs. collective distinction to shown how the German state propagated
the illusion that Jews were organized into a vast group not a mere collective, which was
necessary for fostering the antisemitic fear of a Jewish conspiracy. This atmosphere (or
‘‘exis’’ as he says) of antisemitism provided the material conditions for the possibility of
‘‘dispersed’’ public violence against Jews in the form of pogroms.
Sartre’s social-structural explanation of antisemitism would also provide an analysis
of the responsibility of those agents participating in climates of violence. Ironically, the
collective nature of responsibility allowed particular individuals to simultaneously condemn
and accept discrete acts of aggression. These acts, carried out by particular hands (whether
the hands of governmental bureaucrats or private citizens) were anonymous. But the
anonymity of violence was not due to an organic solidarity between all members of the
German public; quite the opposite. The German public did not form a genuine
community; it lacked a sense of solidarity; it was a mere series. Each was acting on what he
thought his neighbor would do; each adopted the values he believed his neighbor valued;
and each claimed (and denied) the crimes of his neighbor. Thus Sartre writes
paradoxically that the acceptance or rejection of ‘‘collective responsibility’’ by each
German is simply a ‘‘contradictory expression (in discourse) of one and the same fact.’’
This version of ‘‘collective responsibility’’ depends upon dispersion, not unity. Just as the
‘‘unity’’ of Americans regarding top selling records is paper thin and absurd, antisemitism
required the impression that each individual’s personal convictions about ‘‘the Jew’’
bound him to a German volk. Serial responsibility was, in a sense, a very honest expression
of each individual’s thought that he or she had a place in the bureaucratic order of society.
The ethos of the series destroyed personal accountability and mutual recognition,
perverting collective responsibility into its opposite: a culture which could come to
believe in crimes without criminals.
Had Sartre continued this analysis it would have been necessary to go a step further
and discriminate the ‘‘spontaneous,’’ purely serial eruption of pogroms, from the carefully
orchestrated techniques of mass murder. Sartre’s concept of ‘‘the Institution,’’ parallel to
the Frankfurt School’s critique of bureaucratic rationality, would have provided useful.
‘‘Institutions’’ are rigidly hierarchical social formations which give the appearance of
group praxis, but which in truth destroy reciprocity through the maintenance of strict
chains of authority, conformism and objectification.19 Sartre might have shown that
petrified ‘‘obligations,’’20 typical of Institutions, were invoked by many accused Germans
in the form of the ‘‘just following orders’’ defense. Sartre would have been able to turn
this mantra into an analysis of the Order of German society, which was characterized by
 Sartre after Auschwitz 829

excessive bureaucratic rationality. Contrasted with the face-to-face reciprocity and

accountability of the democratic ‘‘group-in-fusion,’’ Institutions are, he said, ‘‘degraded
forms of community.’’21 Although Critique was a work of social, not moral theory,
Sartre’s valorization of the democratic group-in-fusion and his preference for community
over society carries significant ethical weight. There is no moral accountability within
Institutions, only one’s subjection to the command of the organs of authority. What
replaces individual ethical conscience is perpetual alienation expressed by the constant
desire to ‘‘rat out’’ those who fail to meet their bureaucratic obligations. Under such
conditions, we can easily see how routines of faceless brutality could be built up and
perpetuated.

POSSIBLE SARTREAN RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCAUST: AUTHENTICITY,

COMMUNITY AND RESPONSIBILITY
These thoughts, which might well have been Sartre’s, provide fecund starting points for
an analysis of the Holocaust. And if his critique of Institutions is incisive, as I think it is,
then the face-to-face accountability and reappropriation of subjectivity inherent in
existential authenticité is one antidote to the bureaucratization of modern culture. The
standard accusation against existentialist authenticity is that it would license and indeed
champion all kinds of individual pathologies as long as they were chosen by a reflective
individual. But given the particular historical context under consideration—the
institutional nature of modern, especially Western culture—this objection loses force.
The creation of a genocidal Order in Germany was not predicated on millions of sadists
who had made the reflective choice of antisemitism. Réflexions might have suggested as
much through its claim that antisemitism is a ‘‘free and total choice of self.’’22 But as
Sartre saw by the 1950s, this psychological insight taken alone does not explain
antisemitism as an institutional phenomenon. The social theory of the Critique meets the
structural analysis of Marxism halfway, thereby retaining a place for the subject within
the movement of society. If Critique’s valorization of the group-in-fusion is a retreat to
the subjective, it is nonetheless a social and intersubjective retreat, based on the collective,
inner experiences of a population. That this interiority had little to no place in the early
work of the Cartesian phenomenologist was noted precisely by the first generation of
Jewish intellectuals reading Réflexions. Where was Jewish history from the inside? Where
was the collective sense of identity from among and within Judaism? But by the time of
Critique Sartre would have been able to rectify this shortcoming by returning to an
extensive analysis of antisemitism and Jewish history, although he, in fact, did not do so.
Could he have used the Jewish community as an example of solidarity against institutional
seriality? Do not Jews destroy seriality through the telling of the Passover story and the
asking of the four questions? Is not the Jewish family the site of the renewal of the
covenant? In the last interviews of his life Sartre admitted that ‘‘there is a real unity of
Jews in historical time, and that real unity is due not to their being gathered together on a
historical territory but to actions and writings and bonds that don’t derive from the idea of
a homeland, except for the last few years . . .. [F]or the Jew the essential thing is that for
several thousand years he has had a relationship with a single God.’’23 The motives and
sincerity of Sartre’s messianic message and recantation of parts of Réflexions are debated to
830 T. STORM HETER

this day.24 But giving positive content to Jewish history would have been a logical
application of the analysis of group praxis in Critique.
Sartre did not develop his thoughts on community and seriality through an
interrogation of Judaism, antisemitism or culture after the Holocaust. Why not?
A biographical answer to this question might be gained by interviewing those closest to
Sartre and familiar with his feelings on these issues. An obvious pick would be the current
editor of Les Temps modernes and long time Sartrean cohort, Claude Lanzmann, known
widely for his engagement with Jewish themes, in particular his path-breaking
documentary film Shoah. But whatever the psychological answer, it is clear that by the
1950s Sartre was quite capable ‘‘of seeing in Auschwitz a sinister triumph of modernity.’’
His muteness on the Holocaust cannot be attributed, as Traverso claims, to the fact that
‘‘The ‘banality of evil’ escapes Sartre’s phenomenology of antisemitism.’’ His analysis of
antisemtisim as seriality is sufficient to grasp ‘‘a genocide presupposing, to be sure, racial
hatred as an ultimate motivation of those who conceive it, but implying in its function an
administrative, bureaucratic, technical and industrial machine whose operation depends
not on hatred but on routine.’’25 The striking similarity of Sartre’s work to the Frankfurt
School has fortified my claim that he could have, but didn’t, attempt to come to
theoretical terms with the Shoah. These similarities include a critique of analytical
(instrumental) reason, a synthetic psychological-social approach to critical theory, an
explanation of the institutional dimensions of antisemiticism, and an emphasis on the
collective nature of responsibility.
Sartre’s last major play Les sequesters d’Altona (Condemned of Altona, 1959), written in
the same period as the Critique, qualifies much of what I have said regarding Sartre’s
silence about Auschwitz. Condemned depicts a family’s collective guilt for their father’s
economic profiteering under Nazism, and most poignantly his act of selling land which
he knew was to be used for a concentration camp. The play ends with a tape recording of
the son ‘‘Franz’’ (usually thought to represent France) speaking to an imaginary tribunal:
‘Oh, tribunal of the night—you who were, who will be, and who are—I have been!
I have been! I Franz von Gerlach, here in this room, have taken the century upon my
shoulders and have said: ‘‘I will answer for it. This day and forever.’’ What do you
say?’26

The main moral message of this play—that we are answerable not just for those
crimes we have directly committed, but also for those crimes which have been
committed in our name, by our fellow countrymen, leaders, and friends—was already in
Réflexions. But Condemned extends the collective guilt of the French (and the Germans) to
the Nazi death camps. Is this an attempt to comprehend the meaning of the Shoah?
Surely. But the allegory falls short for one main reason. Without attempting to
understand the particular nature of the Shoah, it reiterates the iconic existential formula
for collective guilt: the moral distance between bystanders and perpetrators is slender; all
parties must accept the entire weight of the crimes committed. Though valid, this
formula is hollow. Sartre would repeat it so often and in so many contexts (colonialism,
racism, class oppression) that it would have the effect of making all crimes equivalent and
all types of oppression instances of the same universal form. As Stuart Z. Charmé has
shown, ‘‘Sartre’s discomfort and embarrassment regarding his own bourgeois background
led him to idealize marginal groups and others who are seen as outside the normative
 Sartre after Auschwitz 831

model of selfhood.’’27 By universalizing oppression, Sartre sometimes trivialized the

particular struggles he supported. The totalizing responsibility Franz advocates by ‘‘taking
the century upon his shoulders’’ echoes the non-political credo of L’être et le néant that
‘‘man is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being.’’28 There is little
content to the claim ‘‘take responsibility for your century’’ in lieu of a specific diagnosis of
the evil of the Shoah. In order to give existential authenticité traction in a post-Holocaust
world, we would need a sober, non-polemical analysis of the genocide.
However, among Sartre’s works there is almost no discussion of genocide, and his
main essay on the topic is problematic. In the index of Contat and Rybalka’s invaluable
Les Écrits de Sartre, the term génocide has one entry, Sartre’s 1967 essay ‘‘Le Génocide’’
written for the Russell Tribunal.29 He claims American policy in Indochina constitutes
genocide. The war ‘‘meets all of Hitler’s specifications. Hitler killed the Jews because they
were Jews. The armed forces of the United States torture and kill men, women and
children in Vietnam merely because they are Vietnamese. Whatever lies or euphemisms the
government may think up, the spirit of genocide is in the minds of the soldiers.’’30 The
problems raised by this analysis are significant. The US war in Vietnam, unjust both in
bello and ad bellum, only incidentally required the massacre of the Vietnamese. The Shoah,
on the other hand, was a necessary extermination of European Jews, insincerely veiled
behind the language of ‘‘war.’’ Even forgiving Sartre’s rhetorical purposes and his passion
for hyperbole, his claim is irresponsible. The inapt choice to develop the concept of
genocide with respect to Vietnam, but not the Holocaust, takes on greater significance
against the background of Sartre’s expressed desire to ‘‘take sides against all injustices,
wherever they may come from.’’31 In his best moments, Sartre was sensitive to the fact
that ‘‘injustice’’ is not a monolithic force, nor does it name a single phenomenon. Yet he
tended to reduce social conflict according to two basic strata of society: oppressors and
oppressed. Once placed into the ‘‘victim’’ category there was little difference among
types. The Vietnamese, victims of a brutal war no doubt, became equivalent to the Jewish
victims of an unprecedented attempt at total cultural and ethnic extermination. Perhaps
more than any other factor Sartre’s tendency to conflate different kinds of oppression led
him to neglect the significance of the particular form anti-Jewish oppression took during
the Holocaust.

CONCLUSIONS
In reflecting upon Enzo Traverso’s question ‘‘Why did Sartre not write about
Auschwitz?’’ several important considerations have come into focus. First, it has been
shown that Sartre was in fact well-positioned to understand the institutional dimensions of
radical evil. By the 1950s Sartre had the sociological concepts necessary to grasp
antisemitism as a social phenomenon, not just a psychosis of the individual mind. And
while Sartre did not analyze the Holocaust at length, his criticisms of neo-colonialism and
modern capitalism address the systematic, bureaucratic nature of modern social evil. The
incorporation of Marxism into Existentialism would allow Sartre to express the complex
relation between individual consciousness and impersonal social forces. As a result, evils
like modern antisemitism could be addressed at both the psychological and the
sociological level.
832 T. STORM HETER

Further, I have shown how Sartre’s articulation of a general social theory in Critique
was inspired by concerns similar to those of the Frankfurt School. The intersection of
Sartre and Adorno regarding engaged literature is especially noteworthy. Sartre accepted
Adorno’s claim that modern culture is ‘‘barbaric,’’ but he universalized the barbarism of
modernity, seeing oppression as essentially the same everywhere, whether under Nazism
or French (or American) neo-colonialism. I speculated that Sartre’s tendency to group all
types of oppression together contributed to his silence about Auschwitz. A further
contributing factor is the Critique’s argument that bureaucratic evil is a trademark of
modernity in general. If institutionalized evil is inherent in modernity, then the
Holocaust is not a qualitatively different sort of problem than Stalinism,32 American racism
and neo-colonialism. Nonetheless, Sartre’s brief remarks in Critique on the nature
of modern antisemitism suggest that he took the problem seriously, and that he was
capable of seeing Adorno’s point that the concept of culture would have to be re-evaluated
post-Auschwitz. The Critique links antisemitism to mass consumerism by showing how
imitative behavior, reinforced through the popular media, could create monstrous
phantoms (‘‘what everyone wears,’’ ‘‘what everyone likes,’’ ‘‘what Americans love’’)
which individuals might paradoxically accept and reject. In sum, while Sartre did not see
modern antisemitism and the Holocaust as unique, unprecedented phenomena, his social
theory would explain these events as logical outgrowths of the basic alienation and
objectification intrinsic to modern society.
Lastly, I have outlined existentialism’s positive ethical recommendations for
combating modern, institutional evil. Attending to subjectivity, the hallmark of
existentialism, is a healthy and necessary counterbalance to the anonymity of modern
culture. The existential assertion of subjectivity takes two different forms, one
personal (the struggle for authenticity) and one communal (the struggle for democratic,
non-serialized groups). Though existentialism was not formulated as an explicitly
post-Holocaust philosophy like that of Adorno, Arendt, and Levinas, its resources are
significant. After—even if not because of—Auschwitz, Sartrean existentialism changed.
Its orientation became historical, sociological, and concretely political. Existentialism
would place the questions ‘‘Who is suffering?’’ and ‘‘What can I do to alleviate this
suffering?’’ at the forefront of its inquiries. The unique combination of personal character
development and political conscience represents existentialism’s most important ethical
response to the evils of our era.

NOTES

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 39.
2. Enzo Traverso, ‘‘The Blindness of the Intellectuals: Historicizing Sartre’s ‘Anti-Semite and
Jew,’’’ October 87 (winter, 1999): 73–88.
3. Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska, 2006). Judaken’s book is a rich cultural history of Sartre’s Réflexions and of his
engagement with Jewish themes more broadly.
4. Ibid., 240–41.
5. Traverso, ‘‘The Blindness of the Intellectuals,’’ 73.
6. Ibid., 79, emphasis added.
7. Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, 3.
 Sartre after Auschwitz 833

8. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961).
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 136.
10. Theodor Adrono, ‘‘Commitment,’’ in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato
and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1994), 312.
11. Ronald Aronson writes: ‘‘What was it that has so transformed the once reclusive Sartre by
1945? His own retrospective answer was simple: ‘‘‘the war opened my eyes.’’’ In 1947, he
looked back on the years ‘‘from 1930 on: ‘historicity flowed in upon us; in everything we
touched, in the air we breathed, in the page we read, in the one we wrote’’’(Ronald Aronson,
Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World [London: Verso, 1980], 107–8; the Sartre quotes are
respectively from On a raison de se révolter and What Is Literature?).
12. Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, chap. 2 ‘‘Sartre’s Postwar Témoignange:
Résistancialisme and the Double Strategy of Forgetting.’’
13. Sartre, What Is Literature?, 78–79.
14. See Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question, chap. 8 ‘‘The Eternal Return of Sartre,’’
as well as Michal Walzer’s ‘‘Preface’’ to Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken, 1995).
15. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 175
16. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 2004), 654.
17. Ibid., 652.
18. Ibid., 654.
19. Ibid., 576–664.
20. Ibid., 606.
21. Ibid., 591.
22. Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive, 17.
23. Jean-Paul Sartre, Hope Now (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 104.
24. See Ronald Aronson’s introduction to Hope Now (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1996).
25. Traverso, ‘‘The Blindness of the Intellectuals,’’ 79.
26. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Condemned of Altona (New York: Vintage, 1961), 178.
27. Stuart Z. Charmé, Vulgarity and Authenticity: Dimension of Otherness in the World of Jean-Paul
Sartre (Amhurst, MA: University of Massasuchetts Press, 1991), 105.
28. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 707.
29. Contat and Rybalka, Les Écrits de Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 773.
30. Jean-Paul Sartre, On Genocide (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 82.
31. Sartre, What Is Literature?, 229.
32. Sartre chose to devote his unfinished second volume of Critique to the issue of Stalinism.
If Arlette Elkaı̈m-Sartre is correct that Sartre was answering the question ‘‘Does History have
a meaning?’’ then his choice of Stalinism, not the Holocaust, as the most significant event of
the twentieth century is revealing (Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2 [London: Verso, 1991],
ix). Can his choice be defended on the grounds that he thought the struggle between
Capitalism and Socialism was very much alive, whereas Fascism and antisemitism had been
completely discredited?