 These biographical facts are relevant to Camus’s philosophical development after The Myth of Sisyphus. Moving to France and eventually becoming engaged in the resistance to the German occupation, in two “Letters to a German Friend” published clandestinely in 1943 and 1944, Camus pondered the question whether violence against the occupiers was justified. He spoke of the “loathing we [French] had for all war,” and the need “to find out if we had the right to kill men, if we were allowed to add to the frightful misery of this world” (RRD, 8). Despising war, suspicious of heroism, he claimed that the occupied French paid dearly for this detour “with prison sentences and executions at dawn, with desertions and separations, with daily pangs of hunger, with emaciated children, and above all, with humiliation of our human dignity” (RRD, 8). Only when we were “at death’s door,” and “far behind” the Germans, did we understand the reasons for fighting, so that henceforth we would struggle with a clear conscience and “clean hands.” In other words killing was morally permissible only within strict limits and after great provocation. Our moral strength was rooted in the fact that we were fighting for justice and national survival. The subsequent letters continued to contrast the French with the Germans on moral grounds drawn directly from Camus’s evolving philosophy, and suggested the transition from The Myth of Sisyphus to The Rebel: if both adversaries began with a sense of the world’s absurdity, Camus claimed that the French acknowledged and lived within this awareness, while the Germans sought to overcome it by dominating the world.