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to decide sovereignly whether, within it, there would be something more
than the reign of the animal. They refused
to
talk, and man was born
of their silence."
(I should like, in passing, to remind my placid countrymen who
sneer easily at Sartre's multiform and hurried career that it is precisely
by virtue of his "anti-serious" attitude, by choosing to live and write
as he does, that Sartre has recreated the very notion of the French man
of letters.)
But how, after the camps, can we conceive of the extreme situation
as a desperate solitude? The decisive choice-was it really made "with–
out witnesses, without help, without hope, even without faith"? Here
Sartre interpolates into our history the fundamental "founding" act of
the existentialist, the m:m for whom existence
is prior
to essence. But
our
extreme situation involves, not a single act of heroism, but a long be–
havior, the determinations and ends of which are as subtle and complex
as social man himself. The story of the camps, in Germany and elsewhere,
is wrought in very large part of men who did not break under torture
but who,
in the camp,
in the diabolic mesh of decision and consequence,
insensibly became the torturers of their fellow-prisoners.
The French, incorrigibly literary, complacently stewing in their
glorious rhetorical traditions, were unprepared for the camps. They
reacted, by and large, in moral-exclamatory terms. What has been pub–
lished here leaves one with a series of terrible, shadowy
tableaux,
dantesque
visions
of human horror and grandeur, circle after
circle
of
torment and despair. Only a few survivors of the camps see them as
an enterprise and as a society; and only one,· so far as I know, fully
grasps their central relevance to the whole situation of modern Western
man. David Rousset went to Buchenwald with a thorough training
in Marxism (he had been a dissident Communist) and in Sociology
(the French species, which seems to ignore the work which has been
done since Freud on the psychodynamics of personality). He is a man,
moreover, of considerable literary gifts and, above all, possessed of
a personality bursting with health, humor, and power: his first book,
L'Univers concentrationnaire,
begins with a quotation from
Ubu en–
chaine,
by Alfred Jarry, and blandly-in the form of an epigraph-de–
clares : "There exists a Goering ordinance for the protection of frogs."
I do not propose here to go into a detailed analysis of
L 'Univers
concentrationnaire,
which is a brief "theoretical' statement of the social
structure of Buchenwald, the organization of living quarters, of work,
of the camp bureaucracy; still less do I wish to give a protracted ac–
count of Rousset's immense novel,
Les f ours de notre mort,
which takes
us through a dozen different camps by means of a rather confusing tech–
nique of simultaneity. Drawing upon his own experience, and on much
of the material published in France and Germany, this remarkable
