After being released, he went on to write No Exit, The Flies, Being and Nothingness, and many others. He was sent to the camp after being captured in 1940, and was released, due to his ill health, in April 1941.
Did Sartre’s experience in Stalag 12D, sometimes cited as Stalag XII-D, have any effect on the content of his philosophical writings?
In 1980, one of Sartre’s fellow prisoners, Father Marius Perrin, published a memoir of his time with Sartre in Stalag 12-D. Many of the prisoners there were French priests, and Sartre became friends with them, because many of them had thoroughly studied philosophy and literature. Sartre was born and baptised a Roman Catholic, but spent most, if not all, of his adult life as an explicit atheist.
Sartre enjoyed literary and philosophical conversations with the priests. While it seems that he did not change his beliefs, he did write a Christmas play in December 1940, titled Bariona. The work is in tune with New Testament sensibilities.
Reviewing Perrin’s book, Alfred R. Desautels writes:
Sartre has provided little information on his months of captivity in Germany during World War II. Simone de Beauvoir apparently knows little more than we do, judging by the sketchy bits disseminated in her autobiographical books, especially in La Force de l’age. Either Sartre had been laconic with her on this chapter in his life or she chose to imitate his reticence. However, in November 1980 a fellow prisoner of his at the camp near Trier, Father Marius Perrin, published a book that seeks to fill the gaps: Avec Sartre au stalag 12D (Paris: Jean-Pierre Delarge, 1980).
The play, Sartre’s only significant written output from the POW camp, is multilayered. Set in ancient Palestine or Judea, it deals with the theme of Roman occupation - a reference to the German occupation of France. Sartre develops the theme of resistance, and shows that resistance is predicated upon hope. Bariona is a work of hope. The birth of the Messiah is a call to resistance, inasmuch as both the Roman authorities and their puppets, the Herodian dynasty, would oppose the Messiah. The hope found in the Messiah is the hope upon which some resistance would be built.
From the pen of an atheist, the play is surprising.
Desautels surveys Sartre’s career, and casts it into four phases: the earliest phase was one of despair; the second phase, Sartre’s time in Stalag 12-D, was a phase of hope; the third phase, most of Sartre’s productive post-war career, was a relapse into despair; the fourth and final phase was one of hope.
Certainly, other scholars will analyze the chronology of Sartre’s career differently, and perhaps with justification. But Desautels does at least address the question of if, and how, the time at Stalag 12-D effected Sartre’s writing.
