Condemned of Altona — Jean-Paul Sartre

“The Condemned of Altona is a reminder that moral problems are real, irreducible and vital even when they are insoluble. It is, therefore, an event of first-rate importance. It is the work of one who is both a moral philosopher and a dramatist, of a writer who can present philosophical questions in the flesh and bones of concrete human situations.” ―Heinz Lubasz, The New Leader

The Condemned of Altona is an act of judgment on the twentieth century, which might have been an admirable era (the closing lines tell us) if man had not been threatened by ‘the cruel enemy who had sworn to destroy him, that hairless, evil, flesh-eating beast―man himself. ‘All the characters in the play are defendants, trapped inside the frame of the proscenium as securely as Eichmann within his glass cage in Jerusalem; their judge is the past, and its verdict is without mercy. Two death penalties are imposed, and one sentence of solitary confinement for life. The stage, as so often in M. Sartre's hands, becomes a place of moral inquisition, at once a courtroom and a prison.