THE PERFECT GIFT FOR RIGHT-WING NATIONALIST ACQUAINTANCES? LETTERS TO A GERMAN FRIEND

By Sarah Edgcumbe

“I love my country too much to be nationalist.” – Albert Camus, First Letter: July 1943.

The collective Letters to a German Friend were clandestinely written and published by Camus during the Nazi occupation of France. The context must be taken into account here: these letters do not discuss Germany as it stands today, but rather what it represented under the Third Reich – fascism and the intolerance of diversity and dissent. Camus himself states that the letters should be viewed as “contrasting two attitudes, not two nations, even if, at a certain moment in history, these two nations personified two enemy attitudes.”

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