Recommendations
Books Like Les Séquestrés d'Altona by Jean-Paul Sartre
Books for readers who loved Franz's crabs and Sartre's exploration of war guilt and self-sequestration
Les Séquestrés d'Altona (1959) is Sartre's most complex dramatic work — a German industrialist family, a son locked in his room for thirteen years since the Eastern Front, and a question about historical guilt that applies equally to German war crimes and French atrocities in Algeria. These 8 books share its family secret structure, its study of complicity, and its exploration of how individuals bear responsibility for collective crimes.
- 1
Buy on AmazonThe Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
Grass's Oskar Matzerath chooses not to grow and beats his tin drum through the rise of Nazism and the destruction of Danzig — the German novel most comparable to Les Séquestrés in its use of a distorted narrative consciousness to approach the question of German guilt.
- 2
Buy on AmazonDog Years
by Günter Grass
Grass's companion novel to The Tin Drum, following two German boys from Danzig into the war and its aftermath — the most explicit of Grass's studies in how ordinary Germans were complicit in the Nazi project.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Reader
by Bernhard Schlink
A German man discovers that the woman he loved as a teenager was an SS guard at Auschwitz — the post-war generation's confrontation with the previous generation's crimes, which is exactly the family dynamic in Les Séquestrés.
- 4Buy on Amazon
Family Secrets
by Alexander Stille
An American journalist investigates his own Italian Jewish family's wartime collaboration — the model of family secrets and historical guilt that Sartre fictionalises through the Gerlachs.
- 5
Buy on AmazonA Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
A Russian count sentenced to permanent house arrest in a Moscow hotel — the most charming exploration of the voluntary exile and sequestration that Franz practises out of guilt rather than political punishment.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A butler who served a pro-German English lord and whose narration is the most precise English-language study of the mechanism of self-deception that allows a person to maintain dignity while participating in something they should have refused.
- 7
Buy on AmazonSuite Française
by Irène Némirovsky
Written during the Occupation by a Jewish French writer who died at Auschwitz — the most directly personal French testimony to the historical events that Les Séquestrés addresses from the German side.
- 8
Buy on AmazonThe Anatomy Lesson
by Philip Roth
A novelist locked in his apartment by back pain, unable to write, conducting conversations about his life and work — a comic American cousin of Franz's sequestration, sharing the claustrophobic self-examination and the crisis of identity.
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