At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

by Sarah Bakewell

Even now, many insisted that it was more worthy of defence than the ultra-capitalist model of the United States. The US also lost some of its moral high ground after the government’s extreme fear of Communism led it to crack down on any vaguely leftist organisation, and to surveil and harass its own citizens. Anyone suspected of being a ‘Red’ risked being fired, blacklisted, and denied a passport to travel. In 1951, the naive couple Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death for handing atomic secrets to the Russians. The executions, carried out in 1953, shocked many inside and outside the country. Sartre fired off an angry article for the newspaper Libération. In the States, Hannah Arendt wrote to Jaspers that she feared such incidents portended a national catastrophe comparable to the one seen in Germany. ‘An unimaginable stupidity must have taken hold in the USA. It frightens us because we are familiar with it.’