Les Séquestrés d'Altona Reading Order

Les Séquestrés d'Altona (The Condemned of Altona, 1959) by Jean-Paul Sartre is the most historically specific of his major plays: a German industrialist family, the Gerlachs, is gathered in their Hamburg mansion for the dying patriarch to announce his succession, and the drama reveals that one son, Franz, has been living locked in his room on the upper floor for thirteen years, since his return from the Eastern Front, conducting imaginary tribunals with the crabs who will inherit the world after humanity has destroyed itself. Franz is haunted by what he did during the war — he participated in or ordered atrocities against partisans — and his self-sequestration is both punishment and evasion. The play is Sartre's engagement with the question of German guilt and with the French guilt over the Algerian War, which was at its peak when the play was written (1959 was the year of the Battle of Algiers). It is also a play about the relationship between an individual life and historical circumstance: Franz chose his actions in the specific context of the Eastern Front and of Nazi ideology, and the play asks whether he bears personal moral responsibility for choices made under those conditions. Les Séquestrés d'Altona is the most Faulknerian of Sartre's plays in its structure — secrets revealed layer by layer, a family destroyed by what it has hidden — and is now generally considered his greatest dramatic achievement.