Simone de Beauvoir

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Simone de Beauvoir (1967)

Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir [ si: ˈmɔn də bo: ˈvwa: ʀ ] (born January 9, 1908 in Paris ; † April 14, 1986 ibid) was a French writer , philosopher and feminist . The politically active author of numerous novels, stories, essays and memoirs is considered a representative of existentialism . With her two existentialist novels L'Invitée (1943; German: She came and stayed ) and Le Sang des autres (1945), filmed in 1984 by Claude Chabrol as The Blood of Others , Simone de Beauvoir gained recognition as a writer. The world success The Other Sex (1949) is considered a milestone in feminist literature and made her the best-known intellectual in France. Her essays are also considered to be important contributions to the respective subject.

Live and act

Childhood, adolescence and study time

Simone de Beauvoir was born the elder of two daughters of the couple Georges and Françoise Bertrand de Beauvoir in Paris, 103 Boulevard du Montparnasse . Her great-grandfather Bertrand was a senior official in the financial administration of Normandy , had married rich, bought the Meyrignac estate in Limousin as a family seat and began to use the aristocratic -looking suffix “de Beauvoir”. The grandfather, who had also married a wealthy bourgeois daughter, had gone to Paris and had held higher and ultimately high posts in the city administration before retiring to the estate in old age.

De Beauvoir's father had studied law to become a lawyer, since the estate was to go to his older brother. He practiced this profession for a while as an employee in a renowned law firm, but without ambition, because he was able to make a living from the inheritance that was paid out to him. His real interest was literature and even more the theater. As a young man he recited poems in the middle-class and some aristocratic salons that had opened up to him, and was active in private theater groups.

At almost 30 years of age, he got to know the 20-year-old daughter of the private banker Brasseur from Verdun and then married her with affection, whereby she was supposed to bring in a good dowry, while he mainly contributed the noble-sounding name. According to his origins and his environment, he was a conservative and a nationalist . From a religious point of view he was, like many educated men in his milieu, an agnostic , but he took it for granted that his wife was very strictly Roman Catholic and that his daughters were also raised piously. De Beauvoir later attributed her development to an intellectual not least to the fact that as a child she had to learn to move in divergent spiritual worlds.

Together with her sister, Hélène , who was two and a half years younger , she attended a Catholic girls' institute, the Cours Désir on Rue Jacob, when she was five and a half years old . She was a good student, read a lot early on and also enjoyed writing. The holidays on the estate of her grandfather and her father's sister, who had married a country nobleman, were times of freedom and contact with nature for her.

De Beauvoir was confronted early on with the hardships that the First World War brought on the French. Her parents became impoverished at the end of the war. On the one hand, this was due to the fact that her grandfather Brasseur lost his fortune and could no longer pay off the dowry. On the other hand, it was due to the fact that her father's fortune, which was largely invested in Russian papers, was lost as a result of the October Revolution in 1917 or was decimated by inflation.

After the war, which he had spent in Paris as a desk soldier who was unfit for the front, her father had to be content with only moderately well paid and frequently changing jobs, so that the family moved to a cheaper apartment and the mood worsened. Since it was clear to him that he could not give his daughters an adequate dowry, but rather an education, he prepared them, albeit reluctantly, for the possibility of remaining single and having to work. The future prospects seemed to suit de Beauvoir: at first because she was thinking of becoming a nun, and later because her ideal image of herself was that of a constant learner and creator and not that of a middle-class housewife and mother.

In addition to the very close relationship with her sister, the friendship with a classmate from a rich family, Elisabeth Lacoin (called Elisabeth Mabille or Zaza in her autobiography), was very important to her (between the ages of ten and twenty). However, she did not dare to initiate them when she lost her deep faith at the age of 14. Rather, she continued to pretend piety to those around her for years. In fact, her mother was horrified when she finally found out the truth, and her father was not happy either , because in his eyes atheism was not appropriate for a young girl. At some point in her Catholic school she was also seen through and even regarded as a victim of the devil when she decided between the first and second part of the baccalaureate (which she passed before a commission in the Sorbonne ) to teach philosophy at state level to strive for secular high schools.

For the last school year (1926/27) she had chosen mathematics and philosophy as major subjects. She continued the latter at the private institute Sainte-Marie, but also attended lectures in literature (lettres) at the Sorbonne. To get some freedom from her mother's strict regiment, she was active in a Catholic educational and charity association. In addition, she got to know various young Parisian intellectuals and began to write a novel. Her first relationship experiences fall during this time: she had a frustratingly changeable, naturally chaste relationship with a cousin, whom she certainly intended to marry until he got engaged to a girl behind her back - now almost to her relief - with a dowry. A teaching position in psychology , which her philosophy lecturer at Sainte-Anne had given her, brought her first experience as a teacher and a small salary, which she used, among other things, to secretly frequent Parisian bars. Overall, she lived through adolescence - at least as she remembers it - as a time of many inner conflicts and phases of depression, mainly because she felt that she was disappointing the expectations of those around her by reluctant to take on the role of a decent and decent middle-class young girl internalize, a “jeune fille rangée”, as she ironically calls herself in the title of the first volume of her memoir. After all, her excellent school and examination results gave her a certain stability, because she saw that both her parents and the devout teachers adorned themselves with it.

Beginning of working life

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at the monument of Balzac

After she had obtained her license in 1928, again at the Sorbonne, with the best results (comparable to our current Bachelor's degree ), she began to prepare for the agrégation (the recruitment test for high school professors ) with increased self-confidence . To this end, she attended the courses offered for this purpose at the Sorbonne , but also at the École normal supérieure , the elite university for teaching subjects. At the same time she wrote a diploma thesis on Leibniz in philosophy with a Sorbonne professor . At the same time, she established and maintained friendly relationships with young people in her now predominantly intellectual environment, including several Normaliens (students of the École Normale Supérieure ) , now mostly at peace with herself . In doing so, she came into closer contact with a college friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and through him finally with Sartre himself, whom she had known from sight and hearsay for a long time and to whom she was already a household name. Together they were now preparing for "l'Agrég" , which he had failed the previous year.

After successfully leaving the Agrégation , in which she was second behind Sartre of the 13 accepted candidates, she tried in vain to get a job in Paris. She therefore refrained from immediately entering the school service, instead contenting herself with teaching assignments at Paris high schools and with giving tutoring. She moved out of her home, rented a furnished room from her grandmother and enjoyed her new independence. She did this together with Sartre, whom she now met almost every day and with whom she harmonized so well that she agreed to enter into a "lease" ( bail ) with him for an initial two years, during which their relationship should be a "necessary" one which, however, should not rule out “accidental” further relationships. De Beauvoir was silent about the sexual aspects of her relationship with Sartre, but it is certain that they were not satisfied with a mere intellectual symbiosis .

She gave up her previous friendships largely in favor of Sartre's friends, including Raymond Aron and Paul Nizan . The fact that Sartre was drafted for 18 months of military service in November was easy to get over because she could often meet him in Paris or at his place of work near Tours .

More out of a sense of duty, she began to write another novel, but her varied life did not leave her the necessary leisure. After two years of reading, discussion and experience of all kinds, including a first trip abroad to Spain, she began her service as a philosophy teacher in Marseille in autumn 1931 . Sartre worked in Le Havre from the summer of 1931, immediately after completing his military service . Since it was possible for married couples in the public service to be employed in close proximity to each other, Sartre offered her the marriage, which she refused.

Marseille was more of an exile for de Beauvoir, where she took her role as a teacher seriously, but showed little interest in her school or her colleagues, but used her excess energies for long walks in the area. The following year she was transferred to Rouen, almost in the neighborhood of Sartre. In 1936 she was able to return to Paris to teach at the Lycée Molière and later at the Camille Sée. Sartre also managed to get to Paris via the Le Havre and Laon stages in 1937, which in the meantime had remained their common center of life.

The first short story Quand prime le spirituel (Marcel, Lisa, Chantal) submitted by Simone de Beauvoir was rejected by two publishers.

The National Association of Writers

After the Hitler-Stalin Pact , many, especially the communist intellectuals, were initially as if paralyzed. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin announced in 1942 that "this was the beginning of the great campaign that would drive the enemy from Soviet soil". The French press, which was controlled by the German National Socialist occupation authorities , changed its tactics and now implored its readers to “ save Europe from the Bolshevik danger” instead of calling on them to stand up for the creation of a “new Europe”.

The resistance became increasingly organized, and numerous intellectuals followed Sartre's ideas. Members of the communist intelligentsia asked him to join the National Writers' Union (CNE). De Beauvoir was not admitted because she had not yet published a novel. When a member of the CNE was arrested in 1943, Sartre and de Beauvoir had to leave the city. De Beauvoir's first novel was published in 1943 under the title L'invitée ( She came and stayed ). In the same year she was dismissed from school and she became a programmer at Radio Nationale. The following year she published her philosophical essays Pyrrhus et Cinéas (Pyrrhus and Cineas). Simone de Beauvoir made her breakthrough as a writer with her two existentialist novels L'invitée (She came and stayed, 1943) and Le Sang des autres (The Blood of Others, 1945).

Socialisme et Liberté

When fascism was triumphing everywhere and Germany had taken control of Europe from Norway to the Mediterranean, from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic states and planned to conclude a non-aggression pact with Japan. At the same time, Franklin D. Roosevelt began his third term in the United States . In France, Marshal Pétain and his Prime Minister Pierre Laval not only declared their readiness to show restraint, but also imitated German National Socialism in the hope that France would be treated with leniency by the German rulers. Collaborators , who liked to call themselves realists, now appeared openly and gained more and more political weight. At that time, Sartre and de Beauvoir organized a resistance group. The first session was in Simone de Beauvoir's room. Present were Merleau-Ponty , Pierre Bost , Dominique Desanti . Soon they cooperated with the resistance group of Alfred Péron , who sympathized with the partisans General Charles de Gaulle . The basic goals of the program could be expressed by the name of their movement, Socialisme et Liberté (“Socialism and Freedom”). When Sartre and de Beauvoir tried to work with André Gide and André Malraux , that movement was tacitly abandoned.

Café de Flore

Café de Flore in Paris

De Beauvoir was a regular guest at the Café de Flore in the Paris district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés . There she worked, made appointments with friends like Fernando Gerassi and met Albert Camus here in 1943 after reading his novel The Stranger . Camus was working at Gallimard at the time . He was involved in underground activities and was involved in the design, printing and distribution of the underground newspaper Combat . Shortly before the liberation of Paris, Camus and his people took over the printing works and the offices of the collaborative press, and the first open sales of the Combat and Liberation began on the streets . One evening in the Café de Flore de Beauvoir , Luise and Michel Leiris also introduced Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso , who had just written a small play that they read publicly in assigned roles. It was on these evenings that de Beauvoir met the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan and his girlfriend Sylvia Bataille, an actress, and met Lucienne and Armand Salacrou for the first time. Jean Genet also belonged to her circle .

In 1945 de Beauvoir traveled to Portugal and then wrote in Combat . In the same year Sartre and de Beauvoir met Alexandre Astruc through Raymond Queneau . Also in 1945 her play Les bouches inutiles (The useless mouths) premiered , and the first editions of Temps Modernes and the novel Tous les hommes sont mortels ( All people are mortal ) appeared .

Les Temps Modernes

In 1945 de Beauvoir and Sartre completed the first edition of Les Temps Modernes . The editorial team consisted of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Leiris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Olivier , Jean Paulhan and Jean-Paul Sartre. In the journal three chapters of the book The opposite sex and in 1947 a diary of de Beauvoir were published, which later appeared under the title America Day and Night .

Trip to the USA

In 1946 Simone de Beauvoir met Philippe Soupault at Café de Flore, a friend of André Breton , who was then working in the Foreign Ministry's cultural department. In 1947 he gave her a lecture tour to the USA, where she met the American writer Nelson Algren . About these memories she wrote the diary in Les Temps Modernes , in which she criticized the material abundance in the USA. Between 1947 and 1952, de Beauvoir had a love affair with Algren.

Nelson Algren, 1956

In New York , where she was already known to Stépha and Fernando Gerassi , she met Ellen and Richard Wright , Dwight MacDonald and Mary McCarthy .

After three weeks in New York, she went to Washington and on to Georgia and Ohio, where she attended integrated and co-educational universities. She then traveled on to Detroit , Pittsburgh , St. Louis, and Chicago , where she met Algren. She then went to California and lectured at the University of California and Berkeley. She was also able to see Henriette Nizan again. In Los Angeles and San Francisco she met William Wyler and Darius Milhaud . De Beauvoir spent a month in New Mexico and then traveled back to New York. There she met Miró and Carlo Levi . Before returning to France, she spent the remaining time with Algren in New York.

After this trip to the USA, she published her essay Pour une morale de l'ambiguité (For a morality of ambiguity ) . The following year her travel diary was published under the title L'Amerique au jour le jour ( America - day and night ). In 1947 she flew back to Chicago to see Algren again.

1947-1956

In 1947 de Beauvoir and Sartre traveled to Scandinavia, via Copenhagen and Stockholm further north to close to the Arctic Circle. From there they continued their journey by ship and finally came to a small Sápmi village .

In February 1948 she went to Berlin with Sartre and both took part in the premiere of The Flies . In May of the same year, de Beauvoir welcomed the establishment of the State of Israel ; shortly before that, Sartre had written an article in which he had called for the establishment of a Jewish state to be protected militarily by the UN.

Her worldwide success The Other Sex appeared in 1949 (German 1951) and made her the most famous intellectual in France. She was invited by governments and traveled all over Europe, to North, Central and South America, the Middle and Far East, the USSR and China. She wrote about her travel experiences in reports and diaries.

Before de Beauvoir flew to Chicago to spend two more months with Algren, she decided in 1950 to go on vacation with Sartre. Michel Leiris suggested they go to Africa - first to Algeria and from there on to Equatorial Africa .

When de Beauvoir returned to Paris from Chicago, the war hysteria was at its height, and Camus advised Sartre to emigrate, fearing the Russians might occupy France.

Simone de Beauvoir lived in this house at 11 bis rue Victor Schoelcher in the Montparnasse district of Paris from 1955 to 1986

In 1951 de Beauvoir traveled with Sartre to Norway, Iceland and England; at that time she showed Sartre the first version of her novel The Mandarins of Paris .

From 1952 to 1958 de Beauvoir was with the future filmmaker Claude Lanzmann together. Lanzmann said in an interview in January 2009: “And I lived with Simone de Beauvoir for seven years. I was the only man she ever shared an apartment with. "

From the summer of 1953, de Beauvoir lived in Rome for the summer and only half of the year in Paris.

In October 1954 she received the prestigious Prix ​​Goncourt for her novel Les Mandarins ( The Mandarins of Paris ) . After her travels, she published the collection of articles Privilèges in 1955 (in Germany divided into the collections of articles Should one burn de Sade? And Eye for an Eye ). At the end of the year the conflict that would lead to the Algerian War began.

The 1956 Hungarian Uprising coincided with the military intervention of Great Britain and France in Egypt. The Suez crisis pushed the question of Hungary into the background. Together with other non-communist members of the peace movement, de Beauvoir and Sartre pushed through a resolution calling for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary.

Algerian war

In 1956 the ownership of Algeria was made a question of national honor. There were protests. Meetings, demonstrations and strikes were organized. The departure of troop transports was hindered by roadblocks. De Gaulle had come back to power two years ago . In May 1958 the demoralized and rebellious army threatened to leave Algeria to its own devices. By popular vote, de Gaulle had secured his fifth republic and offered independence to seventeen African and Caribbean countries. But the war went on.

De Beauvoir and Sartre were against the war from the start. The Temps Modernes had been seized twice for allegedly publishing “inflammatory” articles. The newspaper's offices were raided and Francis Jeanson was arrested for showing too much sympathy for the FLN .

The publicists at Temps Modernes received eyewitness reports from soldiers about torture , looting and nightly massacres . When Sartre called for a protest, de Beauvoir was threatened by a police superintendent.

Trip to Cuba

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in conversation with Che Guevara in Cuba, 1960

Sartre had a contract with France-Soir , for which he should write a series of articles about the new Cuba . De Beauvoir and Sartre met privately with Che Guevara , went on a tour of the island with Castro and had several conversations. De Beauvoir, Sartre and Castro attended the funeral of the first victims of the bombing sabotage against Castro. From Havana, de Beauvoir and Sartre first flew on to New York before returning to Paris.

The Algerian war was still not over. The Algerian pieds-noirs had responded to de Gaulle's offer of self-determination with street barricades in Algiers. De Beauvoir wrote an article in Le Monde about torture in Algiers and, together with her lawyer Gisèle Halimi, founded a committee to defend the girl Djamila Boupachas , one of the victims from Algiers. This campaign was supported by Françoise Sagan in L'Express . The publication of the book Gisèle Halimis Djamila Boupacha also made Simone de Beauvoir a target of terrorists. Actually, she just wanted to write a foreword to the book, but eventually co-wrote to share responsibility for the judiciary with Halimi. In 1971 she was one of the co-founders of the Choisir la cause des femmes association , along with Gisèle Halimi , of which she was first president until 1981.

On March 18, 1962, envoys from France and the government-in-exile of the Republic of Algeria signed the Évian Agreement , which ended the Algerian War.

Rome

The Italian capital became de Beauvoir and Sartre's second home. They spent four months of the year in Rome, usually staying in a double room in the Albergo Nazionale in Piazza di Monte Citorio. Sometimes they ate at Carlo Levi's and occasionally met the leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti . Carlo Levi introduced de Beauvoir and Sartre to Alberto Moravia .

Last years

Gravestone of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at Cimetière Montparnasse (2014)

In 1977 de Beauvoir signed, like around sixty other intellectuals, an appeal for the decriminalization of pedophilia , which appeared in the Liberation and Le Monde newspapers. The appeal was initiated by the pedophile writer Gabriel Matzneff . She cared for her partner Sartre during his long illness until his death in 1980. That year she adopted the philosophy teacher Sylvie Le Bon to take care of her estate. In 1981 she published The Ceremony of Farewell (La Cérémonie des adieux) , a painful review of the last years of Sartre's life. Simone de Beauvoir died on April 14, 1986 and was buried next to Jean Paul Sartre on the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.

plant

The works of Hegel and those of Sören Kierkegaard , who placed the will above reason and demanded that no one should be too scientific when dealing with humans, influenced Simone de Beauvoir's thinking. Science, which deals with general phenomena, can only illuminate things from the outside, said Kierkegaard. Her philosophical works are strongly linked to Sartre's existentialism. Simone de Beauvoir is also considered one of the founders of feminism after 1968.

After the death of Simone de Beauvoir, the American feminist Kate Millett wrote : De Beauvoir was repeatedly exposed to violent hostility. In addition to the expected criticism from the bourgeois-conservative camp, she also fought with the left because she was convinced (especially in later years) that the oppression of women would not automatically dissolve in communism . She was also attacked by feminists. Her descriptions of the female body and her “demystification” of motherhood were mostly at the center of criticism.

“If you tell us: 'Always stay a beautiful woman, just leave all these annoying things like power, honor, careers to us, be satisfied that you are like this: earthy, concerned with human tasks ...' If we are told that, we should we should be on our guard! "

- Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir's first novel She Came and Stayed , written during the war years 1938 to 1941, as well as the following novels The Blood of Others and All Men Are Mortal are her existentialist novels, in which characters and actions are carriers of moral and philosophical questions. Theories such as those of the English philosopher couple Kate and Edward Fullbrook in their book Sex and Philosophy: Rethinking de Beauvoir and Sartre , published in London in 2008 , assume - not least after careful study of the late published letters by de Beauvoir and Sartre from this period - that that de Beauvoir thought ahead of Sartre's existentialism, just not abstractly, but integrated into literature. One of the evidence for this thesis is the following opening scene of the novel She came and stayed :

"I'm here, my heart is beating."

- Simone de Beauvoir

It came and stayed

De Beauvoir already found her tone with this first published novel: a linguistically unpretentious style, closely oriented towards spoken language, aimed at information and communication. According to her own statement, the young author is influenced by Hemingway among others and shares about her method in the memoir:

"My heroes don't know anything beyond the moment, and so the episodes often seem as puzzling as in a good Agatha Christie novel ."

- Simone de Beauvoir

The fact that the book is strongly autobiographical was easy to decipher for her immediate environment when it was published. The real references were only revealed to the general public posthumously, after the two protagonists' letters were published.

The other's blood

De Beauvoir tried to express the concept of "the other" in new novels, such as in Le Sang des Autres ( The Blood of Others ). “My new hero, Jean Blomart, did not, as Françoise came and stayed in you , insist on being the only feeling person when meeting others,” wrote de Beauvoir in her work In the prime of life . The hero of this novel, Jean Blomart, refuses to be a mere object for them, to intervene in their existences with the brutal opacity of a lifeless thing. The heroine of the book this time was a dying woman, Hélène. Originally, de Beauvoir hadn't planned to associate Hélène and Blomart with the Resistance, but when she began her novel in October 1943, she realized that assassinations and retaliatory acts give the underlying issue more context and a forward-looking moment would. In 1945, when the book was published, it was called a "Book of the Resistance ".

All people are mortal

While Blomart was a man of great responsibility in The Blood of Others , her hero was reflected in All Men Are Mortal , which in the XVI. Century plays a pessimistic picture of the powerlessness and the futility of human life. The main character of the novel is Fosca, an Italian nobleman who drinks a magic potion that makes him immortal. De Beauvoir wanted to prove that immortality would be meaningless because it would deprive every individual of the meaning of life and hope. The book is a gloomy description of the end of the Middle Ages with its devastating wars, rebellions and massacres.

It reflects de Beauvoir's opinion after the war that the death of most or all of the Resistance fighters, if not entirely in vain, was at least very insignificant for further historical development. The only hope was that these lost lives had meaning in themselves. The memory of the living of the victims was short-lived. As a counterbalance to Fosca, de Beauvoir created Régine, which tries to conquer his immortal heart in order to gain a piece of uniqueness and immortality. But that also fails. All of their actions and virtues merely mask their absurd , existential endeavors identical to those of everyone else. She sees with horror how her life turns into a comedy and sinks into madness.

The opposite sex

Best known, however - besides her multi-volume autobiography - was her study of the role of women in The Other Sex , published in 1951 (original Le Deuxième Sexe , 1949): In it she referred in detail to the oppression of women in patriarchy and created one of the theoretical ones Foundations for the growing new women's movement .

In this work she advocates the thesis that the oppression of women is socially conditioned. For them there is no such thing as an essence of woman:

"On ne naît pas femme, on le devient"

"You are not born a woman, you will be"

- Simone de Beauvoir

De Beauvoir also says in this work that women were made "the opposite sex" by men. In de Beauvoir's existentialist terminology, this means that the man posits himself as the absolute, the essential, the subject, while the woman is assigned the role of the other, the object. It is always defined depending on the man. That is why she has to struggle with stronger conflicts than the man. If she wants to do justice to her “femininity”, she has to be content with a passive role, but this contradicts her wish to design herself as a free subject through activity.

De Beauvoir presents an extremely complex analysis of the situation of women. It discusses biological, psychoanalytic and historical “facts and myths” (the title of the first part) and the “lived experience” of women. Strongly influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's existentialist phenomenology , she assumes that no scientific consideration can explain “women”. She only considers individual experience to be decisive.

It influenced and initiated many of the later discussions in feminism and pioneered gender studies .

“Who would have written a book that would change the fate of all people? It will take time to fully appreciate what impact the opposite sex has had on social history, on private life, everyday consciousness and perception. "

- Kate Millett

The opposite sex appeared between two women's movements (that of the first wave up to the First World War and that of the second from 1970) and is in the tradition of feminists such as Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) or Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), to which Beauvoir also refers, and it goes far beyond that. Beauvoir's comprehensive cultural-historical and sociological treatise on the situation of women in a world dominated by men is a radical and visionary contribution to the emancipation of women in the 20th century.

The opposite sex is essentially a dialectical-materialistic study of the existence of women. It does not explain the woman as a mysterious being, but from the point of view of her social and economic situation. De Beauvoir says that there is enslavement of women and their liberation from it and that they are the consequences of their economic dependence and economic emancipation.

The mandarins of Paris

The novel, published in 1954, was Simone de Beauvoir's greatest literary success to date. She received the prestigious Prix ​​Goncourt and called the reactions from the audience and critics a “dream” that has come true.

The book is considered a key novel on the situation of left-wing intellectuals in post-war France. The National Socialists, the common enemy who had previously united all, were defeated. The left split into different and even hostile factions. The shadow of Stalinism had long since fallen over communism , the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire , co-founded by Sartre , quickly perished, and the question of personal responsibility and meaningful collective political commitment now arose.

De Beauvoir developed her expressionist style in this novel . Their literary language hardly differs from that in the letters and diaries. De Beauvoir and Sartre can easily be recognized in the pair of novels Anne and Robert Dubreuilh, even if the characters are of course not congruent with the real people. The daughter of the two, Nadine, seems to be the sum of the “immanent” young women who swirl around the couple in life.

The world of beautiful pictures

Like all the others, the book does not take place in the intellectual, but in the Nouveaux-Riches milieu of Paris. Its central theme is a conflict that emerged in the 1960s - and broke out virulently in 1968: the discomfort with increasing materialism and the widening gap between rich and poor - with a simultaneous loss of all values.

De Beauvoir does not only address her criticism of consumerism and conformism , but also the bitter realization that the generation of mothers can no longer be saved - but the fight for the daughters is worthwhile.

memoirs

Simone de Beauvoir published five books as her memoir, in which she changed several names. Most of the people behind these names could later be identified.

Memoirs of a daughter from a good family

De Beauvoir describes in great detail how the little girl born in Paris on January 9, 1908, became the young woman she was - and what the adult woman made of it. Your memories are rich in images, sensual and passionate. This first part of the memoir ends with the death of her friend, the encounter with Sartre - and the writing of her first novel. Zaza, the best friend, is broken by the half-heartedness, the “mauvaise foi” ( insincerity ) of her environment, the class arrogance of her family and becoming a woman.

In the prime of life

This second volume of memoirs, published in 1960, deals with the years 1929–1944, up to the liberation of Paris, that is, the time that came and stayed in you and is the focus of her letters to Sartre.

The course of things

In 1963 Simone de Beauvoir published her third volume of memoirs. It begins with the liberation of Paris . She also describes the reactions to The Other Sex , which appeared in the months in which Nelson Algren visited her in Paris. The aggression on the street or in the cafes and restaurants against the author of the scandalous book was extremely annoying, so that de Beauvoir left Paris with Algren. As in the second volume of her memoir, there are important things next to unimportant things, haunting descriptions of social conditions next to private anecdotes. Travelogues take up a large part of the book, some of which are so fond of detail that they appear unpretentious on the one hand, but on the other hand take themselves too seriously. This way of presenting oneself was one of the reasons why the reactions to her volumes of memoirs from the critics (unlike the vast majority of readers) have not been consistently positive.

All in all

In this fourth volume of memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir describes her life from 1962 to 1972, from the end of the Algerian war to the beginning of the women's movement.

The farewell ceremony

The fifth and final volume of her memoir covers the last ten years with Sartre. In addition to descriptions of the course of the disease, this book contains conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre, August - September 1974 .

bibliography

Novels

Stories, short stories

Essays

  • Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944)
  • Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté (1947)
  • L'Existentialisme et la Sagesse des nations (1948)
  • Le Deuxième Sexe (1949), ( The opposite sex ) Translated by Uli Aumüller, Grete Osterwald, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag August 2000, ISBN 3-499-22785-1 .
  • Privilèges (Eng. Should you burn de Sade ?, an eye for an eye) (1955)
  • La Longue Marche (1957) ( China. The ambitious goal. Millennia - decades . Translated from the French by Karin von Schab and Hanns Studnicka, Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1960)
  • La Vieillesse ( The Age ) (1970) Ger. by Anjuta Aigner-Dünnwald and Ruth Henry, ISBN 3-498-00433-6 .

Memoirs and memories

Travel report

  • L'Amerique au jour le jour , ( America day and night ) (1950) Rowohlt Verlag Hamburg. Travel diary from January 25 to May 20, 1947, with its own foreword

theatre

  • Les Bouches inutiles ( The Useless Mouths ) (1945)

Posthumously published works

  • Lettres à Sartre (Briefe an Sartre) (1990), edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, RoRoRo, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-499-22372-4 .
  • Lettres à Nelson Algren (A transatlantic love. Letters to Nelson Algren), edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir from the English by Judith Klein; Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-499-23282-0 .

Prices

In 1975 de Beauvoir was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the freedom of the individual in society and in 1983 the Sonning Prize of the University of Copenhagen .
In 1978 she received the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

See also

Filmography

literature

  • Kate Kirkpatrick: Simone de Beauvoir. A modern life. Piper, Munich 2020, ISBN 978-3-492-07033-1 (with references, notes and index of persons).
  • Ingrid Galster : Simone de Beauvoir and feminism . Argument Verlag, Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-86754-501-3 .
  • Deirdre Bair: Simone de Beauvoir. A biography. btb / Goldmann, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-8135-7150-5 .
  • Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann: Simone de Beauvoir and the opposite sex. dtv premium, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-423-24648-4 .
  • Florence Hervé ; Rainer Höltschl: absolute Simone de Beauvoir . orange-press, Freiburg 2003, ISBN 3-936086-09-5 .
  • Christiane Zehl Romero: Simone de Beauvoir . 15th edition. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 2001, ISBN 3-499-50260-7 .
  • Claudia Card: The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Cambridge University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-521-79429-3 .
  • Sylvie Chaperon; Christine Delphy: Cinquantenaire du Deuxième sexe. Syllepse, Paris 2003, ISBN 3-936086-09-5 .
  • Toril Moi: Simone de Beauvoir. The psychography of an intellectual. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-596-13557-5 .
  • Claudine Monteil: The sisters Helene and Simone Beauvoir . Nymphenburger, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-485-01086-3 .
  • Alice Schwarzer : Simone de Beauvoir today. rororo, Reinbek near Hamburg 1983, ISBN 3-462-03956-3 .
  • Alice Schwarzer, Simone de Beauvoir: a reading book with pictures . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg, 2007, ISBN 978-3-498-06400-6 .
  • Gerlinde Kraus: Important French women - Christine de Pizan, Émilie du Châtelet, Madame de Sévigné, Germaine de Staël, Olympe de Gouges, Madame Roland, George Sand, Simone de Beauvoir. Schröder Verlag, Mühlheim am Main 2006, ISBN 3-9811251-0-X .
  • Ingeborg Gleichauf: Being like no other. Simone de Beauvoir. Writer and philosopher. (Hanser series). dtv, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-423-62324-7 .
  • Hazel Rowley: tete à tete - life and love of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Parthas Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-86601-667-5 .
  • Susanne Moser: Freedom and appreciation from Simone de Beauvoir . Edition Diskord, Tübingen 2002, ISBN 3-89295-727-4 .
  • Susanne Moser: Freedom and Recognition in the Work of Simone de Beauvoir . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-50925-8 .
  • Yvanka Raynova, Susanne Moser: Simone de Beauvoir: 50 years after the opposite sex. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-631-50866-2 .
  • Walter van Rossum : Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. The art of closeness. rororo, 2001, ISBN 3-499-23042-9 .
  • Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, The Story of an Unusual Love. Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 1982, ISBN 3-499-14921-4 .
  • Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926/27. Edited and edited by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Margaret Simons, Marybeth Timmermann. University of Illinois Press, Urbana / Chicago 2006, ISBN 0-252-03142-3 . (English, posthumous)

Web links

Commons : Simone de Beauvoir  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Simone de Beauvoir  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The main source of this section are Volumes I and II of the Memoirs de Beauvoirs ( Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée or Memoirs of a Daughter from a Good House and La Force de l'âge . Cf. also the relevant chapters in Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 2007.)
  2. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, pp. 117-118, 128.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir , Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2007, p. 330.
  4. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, pp. 107-108.
  5. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, The story of an unusual love , Hamburg 1982, p. 112.
  6. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 122.
  7. ^ A b Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 124.
  8. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, pp. 126-127.
  9. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 138.
  10. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 139.
  11. ^ A b Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 143.
  12. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, pp. 144-45.
  13. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, pp. 145-146.
  14. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 148.
  15. ^ A b Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 155.
  16. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 163.
  17. ↑ Roderick MacArthur: Author! Author? In: Theater Arts 22 March 1949.
  18. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 186.
  19. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 187.
  20. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 190.
  21. ↑ "The Israelis kill, but they are not killers" . In: Berliner Zeitung , 24./25. January 2009.
  22. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 192.
  23. ^ A b Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 195.
  24. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 196.
  25. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 197.
  26. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, pp. 197-198.
  27. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, pp. 222-223.
  28. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, pp. 224-225.
  29. ^ A b c Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 236.
  30. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 216.
  31. ↑ Pascale Hugues : It was forbidden to forbid. In: Die Zeit from January 25, 2020, p. 53.
  32. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 101.
  33. ↑ Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 16.
  34. ↑ a b c d Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 69.
  35. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 120.
  36. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 152.
  37. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, pp. 152-153.
  38. ^ A b Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Hamburg 1982, p. 153.
  39. ↑ a b c d Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 161.
  40. ↑ Axel Madsen: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The story of an unusual love. Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag, Hamburg 1977, p. 171.
  41. ↑ a b Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 203.
  42. ↑ Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 204.
  43. ↑ Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 239.
  44. ↑ Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 240.
  45. ↑ Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 24.
  46. ↑ Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 47.
  47. ↑ Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 191.
  48. ↑ Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 313.
  49. ↑ a b c Alice Schwarzer: Simone de Beauvoir. Hamburg 2007, p. 331.
  50. ↑ I have no reason to hate men. Simone de Beauvoir received the Austrian State Prize for Literature 1978. Arbeiterzeitung, December 20, 1978, accessed on March 7, 2015 .
  51. ^ Simone de Beauvoir live (DVD). Production: NDR, DVD of the EMMA film edition, 2008.
  52. ↑ Script: Chantal de Rudder, Evelyne Pisier, director: Ilan Duran Cohen, production: ARTE France, France 3, Fugitive Productions, Pampa Production, TV5, table of contents  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically created as marked defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from arte.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.arte.tv  
  53. ↑ Director: Dominique Gros, Production: ARTE France, les Films d'Ici, first broadcast: January 10, 2008, table of contents  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from arte.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.arte.tv  
personal data
SURNAME Beauvoir, Simone de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beauvoir, Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie-Bertrand de (full name); Bovuar, Simona de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer, philosopher and feminist
DATE OF BIRTH January 9, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH April 14, 1986
Place of death Paris