Albert Camus on “The Human Crisis”
Lessons from the French Resistance against Nazi Germany
“The morning after a great historical crisis, you feel as sad and sick as after a heavy night. But there is no aspirin for historical hangovers.” — Albert Camus
Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1957 “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times,” Albert Camus (1913–1960) wrote to an elementary school teacher that he didn’t “make too much of this sort of honour” but “at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil.”
Camus was a French Algerian author, journalist and philosopher who contributed to the rise of philosophical absurdism in opposition to nihilism. But in the United States in 1946, he was better known as the voice of the French Underground and the author of a “terrible little book [1942], wonderfully well written” (Chicago Tribune) by the “new generation Frenchman you’ve had a chance to read…
