Lettres à un ami allemand
Signed presentation inscription: “à M. L. D. Hirsch avec la cordiale sympathie d'Albert Camus.”
Publisher's wraparound band preserved.
This collection, published by Gallimard, brings together four letters, three of which had previously appeared in periodicals: in Revue libre in 1943, in the third issue of Cahiers de la Libération in 1944, and in Libertés in 1945. Occasional pieces, they form an exercise in political reflection as much as an act of engagement in the struggle: from 1943, Camus, who had met Francis Ponge and René Leynaud, took part in the Resistance by joining the Combat team, of which he became editor-in-chief in Paris.
In the issue of 21 August 1944, Camus signed the editorial entitled “Le Combat continue,” calling for a vision extending beyond the Liberation: “It would not be enough to reconquer the appearances of freedom with which the France of 1939 had to content itself. And we would have accomplished only a tiny part of our task if tomorrow’s French Republic found itself, like the Third Republic, closely dependent on money.”
For the epigraph of the fourth letter, Camus chose a line from Senancour’s novel Obermann: “Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and if nothingness awaits us, let us not make it a justice.” In the body of the letter, one reads: “We must prove that we do not deserve such injustice.”
Louis-Daniel Hirsch had been the commercial director of Éditions Gallimard since 1922.
A fine copy.