Lettres à un ami allemand
One of 2,250 copies on alfa Navarre paper, this copy hors commerce (no. 160).
Inscribed and signed: “à Renée Sylvère, son ami inconnu, A. Camus.”
This collection published by Gallimard brings together four letters, three of which had previously appeared in periodicals: in La Revue libre in 1943, in the third issue of Cahiers de la Libération in 1944, and in Libertés in 1945. Written as 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 team of Combat, of which he became editor-in-chief in Paris.
As an epigraph to the fourth letter, Camus placed a line from Senancour’s novel Obermann: “Man is perishable. That may be so; but let us perish resisting, and if nothingness is what awaits us, let us not make it a form of justice.”
A good copy, presented to an unidentified correspondent whom our research has been unable to trace.