The frequently mentioned ‘existentialist wave’ in the years following the end of World War II was not a wave, but rather a tsunami. It was a tsunami that went around the world. It started in December 1944 with the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Republic of Silence (La république du silence) in the U.S. Thereafter it reached countries like Italy, the U.K., Sweden, and Germany, as well as East Asia and Latin America, particularly Japan and Argentina. In the 1950s even communist countries like the Soviet Union (Betschart 2018a) and the People’s Republic of China (Zhang 2008) could not elude the tsunami. In this decade, existentialism became one of the dominant intellectual currents in the Middle East, too. Turkey, Brazil, and South Vietnam were hit by it in the early 1960s. There had been other waves before, such as Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis; however, none had spread as quickly around the globe as the existentialist tsunami and none was as broadly positioned as the existentialist movement. Existentialism was not only a philosophical, but also a literary movement. Particularly in the Third World, it had a significant political impact through its concept of engagement. And the existentialist tsunami reached out to the arts, too, and, with its black turtlenecks, even to fashion. William McBride’s declaration that “few if any other modern Western philosophical movements have had as strong an impact on the general culture as has existentialism” (McBride 2012, p. 50) is an understatement.
The existentialist tsunami was caused by Sartre and his friends, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. Although philosophers such as Gabriel Marcel, Martin Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers partly figure among the existentialists—an error caused by Sartre in his most widely read philosophical essay Existentialism Is a Humanism (L’existentialisme est un humanisme)1—they never took part in the existentialist tsunami. The rehabilitation of the Nazi Heidegger started to gain a real foothold only in the 1950s, and Jaspers was rather a phenomenon of the German-speaking countries. Since the literary opus, via novels and plays, was more important than the philosophical oeuvre in the spread of the existentialist tsunami, Heidegger and Jaspers, who were only philosophers, had a significant disadvantage in comparison to Sartre and his friends. Only Marcel published a literary work, too. However, it never reached as large an audience as his French fellow citizens’ works. Marcel, the Catholic, neo-Socratic philosopher, was rather used by critics as an argument against Sartre.
The focus in this book lies—in Sartre’s terminology—on the French atheist existentialists, although there are certain references to philosophers and writers who did not strictly adhere to this current. Søren Kierkegaard’s reception partly preceded, partly ran parallel to Sartre’s and played an important role in preparing the field for French existentialism. At the same time, Kierkegaard was an important Christian alternative to French existentialism for those who opposed the atheism of Sartre and his friends (Boria2). Among artists and writers, but also among psychologists, there were important currents that ran parallel to French atheist existentialism, partly influenced by Sartre’s version, partly as developments in their own right. What according to Sartre is valid for Gustave Flaubert (Sartre 2006, p. 25) is valid for the existentialists too: they not only influenced their time in many ways, but they were also an expression of their time. Many important examples of parallel developments can be found in literature. Richard Wright, Allan Ginsberg and other beatniks, Iris Murdoch, Hanoch Levin (Klein), and many Italian and German authors could be mentioned. One of the most intriguing examples is Max Frisch’s play Andorra, which seems to be a theatrical version of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflexions sur la question juive ). However, although this play was published only in 1961, its sketch dates from 1945, when Sartre was writing his Anti-Semite and Jew . Similar correspondences can be found in the relationship between Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis and the psychotherapies of Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, Erich Fromm, and Viktor Frankl. When investigating the reception of existentialism in Latin America, many parallel developments can be detected, partly due to the influence of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, partly due to local circumstances such as the question of commitment in the fight against the indigenous élite and the dictators, and the question of mestizaje and the relationship of the Latinos to the Other.
With regard to time, our focus is on the period between 1944 and 1968. Of course, the first existentialist texts were translated before 1944: Sartre’s The Wall (Le mur ) was published in English and German in 1938, in Japanese in 1940, his short story The Room (La chambre) in Spanish in Argentina in 1939. As a global cultural event, however, the existentialist tsunami started only with the end of World War II approaching, and in the 1960s, the tide was already falling. The support Sartre lent to Israel after the Six-Day War led to the complete breakdown of Arab existentialism and impaired existentialism in other countries of the Third World too. Frantz Fanon’s wife no longer allowed Sartre’s introduction to be published together in new editions of The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre). In the years before 1968, there was discussion between Sartre and the structuralists (Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault) about the importance of man in history.3 The events in Paris in May 1968 proved that Sartre was right against the structuralists that (wo-)men can make history; even Michel Foucault became a political activist thereafter and collaborated with Sartre on several occasions. Nevertheless, structuralism and postmodernism quickly supplanted existentialism as the leading non-Marxist philosophies in the 1970s. Already during the 1960s, existentialism had lost ground to Marxism, which became for about ten years the philosophy à battre. Even the Sartreans lost interest in Sartre. Sartre’s move away from Marxist to anarchist political philosophy in the 1970s went almost unnoticed. It Is Right to Rebel (On a raison de se révolter), an important work for Sartre’s political philosophy in the last ten years of his life, was translated into English forty-three years after its French publication in 1974.
Evidently, 1968 was not the end of existentialism as a philosophy. In some countries like the People’s Republic of China and Russia, where existentialism had for a long time been banished to the poison cabinet, existentialism saw a wider reception only in the 1980s and 1990s. Several Americans—Mark Poster, John Lawler, Thomas Flynn—tried to find a synthesis of Marxism and existentialism after 1975. Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (Le deuxième sexe ), the historically most important work ever published by an existentialist, became the theoretical base of feminism, although Beauvoir’s existentialist feminism was soon superseded by an essentialist version (Moi 2008, pp. 200–202). Questions of identity (gender, ethnicity, sexuality), which have been dominating politics more and more since the 1970s, have their theoretical foundations with Sartre and Beauvoir. However, even Judith Butler—she wrote her doctoral thesis about desire with Alexandre Kojève, Jean Hyppolite, and Sartre—prefers to keep her existentialist heritage at a distance.
Our focus on this quarter of a century between 1944 and 1968 has its implications with regard to the subjects treated in this book. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre’s close political collaborator between 1945 and 1950, was virtually nonexistent on the international scene during the time of the existentialist tsunami. His reception as a philosopher—he did not write any literary works—began only slowly with the first translations in the 1960s.4 The reception of Beauvoir and Camus, too, was significantly behind Sartre. Beauvoir suffered for a long time, until the 1970s, from the neglect The Second Sex experienced. Betty Friedan, with her The Feminine Mystique (1963), always kept herself at a distance from Beauvoir, although acknowledging that it was The Second Sex that introduced her to what later was called feminism (Friedan 1985, p. 304). Only after Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (both 1970) did Beauvoir stand more in the limelight. In the time before, Beauvoir was rather perceived as ‘la Grande Sartreuse’, whose major works were of a biographical character.
Not very different was the situati...