Camus: Das Ideal der Einfachheit. Eine Biographie
Bottom line – Camus as hardly anyone knows A man who becomes a murderer because the sun blinds him – The Stranger is still one of the most famous literary figures in the world today. Albert Camus, its creator, is the philosopher of the absurd in which man is placed, the thinker of the revolt that defines man – and always the advocate of simplicity, which for the Algerian French is the fundamental given under the sun and at the same time the most endangered was. “More topical than ever,” is the conclusion of Iris Radisch, one of the leading German-language literary critics, who takes us on a fascinating journey on the occasion of his 100th birthday: from Belcourt, the poor district of Algiers where Camus grew up with a mute mother, to gray Paris, which under German occupation challenges the morals of the young existentialists. Dismissed as an “Algerian street boy” by the competing bourgeois Sartre, Camus, the declared anti-fascist, anti-communist and European, is a stranger himself – and more clairvoyant than anyone. Iris Radisch emphatically conveys to us this man, shaped by the barren Mediterranean landscape, in all his struggles in life, as a lover of women and a thinking that is committed. “Iris Radisch has mastered the great and rare art of presenting and evaluating her subject appropriately, precisely and differentiated, and her language is characterized by a creative choice of words, originality and wit.” Klaus Harpprecht “Eloquent, quick-witted and without any ideological know-it-alls.” Southgerman newspaper
About Author:
Iris Radisch is a German literature-journalist. Since 1990 she has written for the mass-circulation weekly newspaper, Die Zeit. More recently she has come to wider prominence through her television work.
