About the work
“Dirty Hands” (“Les Mains sales”) is a political drama in seven tableaux by Jean-Paul Sartre. It premiered on 2 April 1948 at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris, directed by Pierre Valde with the collaboration of Jean Cocteau, with François Périer as Hugo and André Luguet as Hoederer; the text appeared the same spring in the journal “Les Temps modernes”. The first German-language performance took place on 6 November 1948 at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, and a new German translation by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel has been available since 2024.
Plot
The play is set in Illyria, a fictional Eastern European state, during the Second World War. Hugo, a young intellectual from a bourgeois family, is ordered by a faction of the Communist Party to kill the party leader Hoederer, who wants to strike a deal with the party's political opponents to avoid civil war. Posing as a secretary, Hugo moves into Hoederer's house with his wife Jessica, but keeps putting off the deed because he is increasingly fascinated by the man; he only shoots when he catches Hoederer and Jessica in a kiss. Two years later, after prison, he tells Olga the story, learns that the party has since adopted Hoederer's line, and chooses death rather than falling back into step.
Cultural significance
At its heart is the question of whether political ends justify any means, and whether Hugo killed out of conviction or jealousy. After the premiere, the right welcomed the play as anti-communist, while the left and the Communist parties attacked it for the same reason. Sartre then withheld permission for new productions for a long time and in 1954 travelled to Vienna trying to stop a staging at the Volkstheater; in France the play was not staged again until 1976, and it was first performed in a socialist country in Prague in November 1968.