Reading Recommendation: Albert Camus' Letters To A German Friend

these open letters, written under the Nazi occupation, remain incredibly powerful and relevant in the present

Jul 13, 2025

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In 1943 and 1944, Albert Camus authored a set of four open letters, “clandestinely during the Occupation” in his own words, the first two of which were published at that time in the Revue Libre and the Cahiers de Libération. They carry the title “Letters To A German Friend”, but the personage they are addressed to is imagary one, perhaps an amalgam of Germans Camus knew and had interacted with previously. After the liberation of France and the end of World War II, they were published together in a limited edition in France. It took quite some time for them to be published elsewhere in other languages, not least because Camus himself expressed a reluctance to do so.

Aside from various places online (for example here) the main place you will find them in English translation is in the volume of essays, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, a collection selected and brought together by Camus before his untimely death and then subsequently translated into English.

I recently reread these four letters in order to work through them together with a tutorial client who was reading them for the first time. Afterwards, reflecting on how timely and important these short essays are, I decided to produce a sequence of new core concept videos, one of each of the letters, setting out their key themes, arguments, and distinctions (if you’d like to watch them, you can find them in this playlist). I’ve also produced podcast versions of these lectures (which you can find here).

I also wanted to set aside the time to write this reading recommendation piece, suggesting that — and why — my own readers ought to give some study to these pieces.

I have four main reasons to offer you why it would be well worth your time to check out these four letters.

The first is perhaps the most trivial, simply that they are a quick but worthwhile read. None of them are long, and they launch you right into the midst of the ideas and experiences immediately. You could work your way through an initial read, most likely, in under an hour, and reread and reflect upon them in the course of an afternoon. So you won’t have to invest a lot of time into them in order to get quite a lot out of them.

The second is that, after all, it’s Albert Camus. Although perhaps not for everyone (what author is?), he is certainly a master of writing, and essays like these thoughtful and dramatic open letters are perhaps one of the genres that he does best. He is a master stylist whose prose cuts like a sharp knife, and these letters, more than eight decades old, still ring not only true but fresh as well. If you enjoy other writings by Camus, you will enjoy these, and if you haven’t yet read him, these provide an excellent entry point.

A third reason has to do with a usefulness they possess for avoiding, even dispelling, some unfortunately common misunderstandings and misinterpretations of Albert Camus’ philosophical conceptions and commitments, in particular to the significance and implications of the absurd. Camus himself eschewed the title of “existentialist” (and there’s a lot more to be said elsewhere about that), but it’s a bit of a mistake to call him instead an “absurdist”, since that lumps him in with a number of other quite differently oriented authors. It is more accurate to characterize him as a thinker whose work takes the absurd very seriously and engages thoroughly with its implications.

In his later and longer work The Rebel, Camus clarifies from the beginning that his views on the absurd have evolved, particularly motivated by living through the history of World War II and its aftermath. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he claimed that the key philosophical question was that of suicide. In The Rebel, it has become the question of murder, and of responsibility. Even in the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus isn’t simply endorsing “absurdism”, claims that existence lacks any meaning, or denials that justice or happiness have any value.

If one’s understanding of Camus has been derived primarily from The Myth of Sisyphus, let alone his early novel The Stranger, it is quite likely that one has a very truncated conception of Camus’ thought and views. Reading his Letters To A German friend provides an excellent supplement to those early works. In them, you’ll see Camus talking about holding one’s country responsible to demands of justice, for example.

The fourth and final reason is that the matters Camus is discussing, ostensibly contrasting the mentalities of the French resistance against the German Nazi occupiers on a number of different issues, remains incredibly relevant to our own current times, especially for Americans who have seen a veritable takeover of the government by the nationalist MAGA movement. What love for one’s country involves and requires, how to understand the demands of justice in a world in which that is a value one can’t take for granted, the meaning of Europe itself (and we might say in our present, what it means to be an American), these are all contested matters, where it is possible to go multiple ways.

I won’t say much more about this fourth reason, both because I don’t intend to go too deep into analysis of the key themes of the letters (I did that in those videos) in this reading recommendation, and because I hope to entice you to actually check these short works out for yourself (so I’ve just given you a teaser so to speak)

But I will say that Camus is an author to whom I return over and over again, and this is one of the works that has definitely grown upon me. I have actually decided to teach these letters in one of my Fall classes, which will be centered on the themes of love, friendship, and desire.

Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.