The Condemned of Altona by Jean-Paul Sartre. Short summary

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The mad former Nazi Franz von Gerlach calls his son Werner and his daughter-in-law Giovanna to the Villa Altona. He wants his son to continue his business of telling the crab people about the past.

1 minute

The protagonist of the play is the former Nazi Franz von Gerlach. He became rich, but his guilty conscience played a cruel trick on him — his mind became clouded. He made it his life’s work to tell people who would live in the twentieth century about the tragedy of World War II.

According to Franz, these will not quite be human beings. Evolution would develop their bodies so that they would look like crabs. Franz, in his secret room, records messages to the crabs on a tape recorder. But the idea of suicide, previously subtle, increasingly grips him.

But Franz wants his son Werner and daughter Lenny to continue his work. He invites them to stay at his Villa Altona. Werner arrives with his wife Giovanna. Gradually, a terrible truth is revealed to them.

Werner vacillates between his love for his father and his horror at his misdeeds. He is ready to atone for him.