Mass Murder in the Context of the Absurd

The Second World War was not fought on any conventional level. The war itself was the very redefinition of the aims and rules of warfare in the 20th Century. Torture, Slavery, Mutilation, and other words that invoke almost a medieval feeling became the norms of this very dark and unconventional war. The Nazi project was a war against the mind. When Camus writes his reaction to Nazi aggression in his four “Letters to a German Friend”, he decides resolutely “there are means that cannot be excused.”1 Camus resolutely stands against the Nazi belief in their superior destiny. For Delbo the absurd reality of the war is felt in her body unlike Camus she was not outside of the absurd machine of horror, but she was engulfed within it. The pain of her experience is felt in the line “and now I am sitting in a café, writing this text.”2 She is plagued with survivor’s guilt in this line after recounting a few of the horrors of her camp experience. The two resisters one on the outside (Camus), one on the in (Delbo) both articulate their pain and suffering in a war of disproportionate murder and horror that changed the very concept of humanity.
When Delbo says “no one ever thought of not conforming to the absurd”3 she is talking about the insanity of the suffering these people have gone through. It becomes impossible to believe that other humans are going through all of this. Delbo’s suffering is her honesty; the calm clarity of the victim assures us of their strength. During her account she clearly understands what has really happened here; she is living in a new world. The Nazi project was a reorganization of the boundaries of reality. Those caught up in its machine were left to suffer unspeakable atrocities. When she talks of struggle she says “defeated, yet there conscious minds still refuse, keep on denying, steeling themselves, wishing to protest, to keep on struggling.”4 The painful absolutism of her reality is still steeled in a implacable will to resist. For the people in the camp where there lives no longer meant anything. Resistance was living. In the camp where you were part of the very machinery of your own death, to go on living was a victory against your murderers. She describes the change of reality very calmly, “Only an outsider would detect insanity, since we had gotten used to the fantastic, forgetting the reflexes of the normal human being face to face with the preposterous.”5 In this new irrational warfare the preposterous, the very boundaries of human existence were stretched so far that humanity became the articulation of suffering.
In Camus’s “Letters to a German Friend” we here a systematic rejection of a certain way of thinking. First he sets out to address how France in all her majesty could fall to the barbarians to the east. He explicates the German way of thinking about the nation with “You said to me: “The greatness of my country is beyond price.”6 When he talks of France he says “I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive”7 Camus cannot agree that those Germans, “lucky enough to find meaning in the destiny of (there) nation must sacrifice everything else.”8 His letters then set out to articulate the resisters will and through this there assurance of victory. For Camus the assurance of his victory is that “man is that force which ultimately cancels all tyrants and gods.”9 For France’s loss Camus feels its victory will be all the greater, and “mankind, despite its worst errors, may have its justification and its proof of innocence.”10 France took her time to articulate its resolution to fight, in Camus’s second letter his German states, “In all her intelligences, France repudiates herself. Some of your intellectuals prefer despair to their country-others, the pursuit of an improbable truth. We put Germany before despair.”11 He laughs at this nonsense claim by the band of murderous thugs who accuse French intellectuals of not loving their nation. Camus responds “this is because we simply wanted to love our country in justice, as we wanted to love her in truth and in hope.”12 In Germany where politics of the irrational have take taken over it is sufficient for Camus to define truth in radical opposition to what the Nazis are, “at least we know what falsehood is; that is just what you have taught us.”13 Nazis have murdered the spirit, and if the world really had no meaning at all that would be enough they would be right. Yet, there is something of justice left in the world of the absurd, and “it took only a dead child for us to add wrath to intelligence, and now it is two against one.”14 The Nazis cannot stop this two against one because they are merely “a single impulse” fighting with nothing but “the resources of blind anger.”15 He acknowledges the “bitter joy of fighting with agreement with ourselves, but Camus cannot believe Nazi Tyranny can be the end.
Delbo wrote that “The thought of running away did not cross anyone’s mind. You must be strong to wish to escape. You must be able to count on all of you muscles, all of your senses.”16 Escape was only possible through death and death betrayed resistance. (If living was the strongest articulation of revolt) For Camus, and those resisters on the outside of the camps it is “that hopeless hope is what sustains us in difficult moments; our comrades will be more patient than the executioners and more numerous than the bullets.”17 Camus’s resistance rests on the fact that all of his resisters are neatly balanced between “sacrifice, and our longing for happiness.”18 If there was no more hope in the world, if there was no more ways to resist it than the Nazi truth could have won. The multiple routes of resisting the Nazi atrocity proved its destiny to fail. When an ideology of that scale exists, and when its final articulation can only be the total negation of humanity, then it cannot be victorious. As long as the will to resist continued than the Nazi abhorrent reliance on a new world meaning could not be victorious. For Delbo it was living which became resistance every day that her body continued to live proved the impossibility of the Nazi project. Life, hope, and reason became the inescapable horde that crushed National Socialism. Camus had merely to hope for happiness to unravel Nazism, Delbo merely to draw breath.