Franz Gerlach

Franz Gerlach is the central character of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play The Condemned of Altona, where his self-imposed confinement and elaborate imaginary world illuminate the difference between imagining that events are real and mistaking imagination for perception. For thirteen years he remains in the attic of his father’s house after fighting for the Nazis on the Russian front. His case gives dramatic form to Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of the imaginary attitude and its role in Bad faith.

Identity and Background

Franz’s defining circumstance is the long retreat into the attic: he has kept himself locked there since his wartime service on the Russian front. The duration matters. His imagined world is not a passing fantasy but a sustained way of inhabiting his isolation, maintained across thirteen years.

Within that world, Franz imagines that Germany has gone to ruin. He records speeches in which he attempts to justify humanity to a future courtroom of crustaceans. The imagined tribunal makes his isolation outwardly theatrical: he addresses a future audience and casts himself as a speaker charged with defending humanity.

The Attic and Its Imaginary World

Franz actively arranges his surroundings to help preserve the world he imagines. He dresses in his old uniform, decorated with medals made of chocolate, and refuses to let time-pieces or newspapers into the loft. The uniform supplies the visible signs of a role; the chocolate medals make those signs part of an unusual, carefully maintained performance. Keeping clocks and newspapers away also limits reminders of ordinary time and events beyond the attic.

He swallows large quantities of champagne and amphetamines as part of this effort. These measures show how much work goes into sustaining the imaginary world, but they do not establish that Franz has confused it with reality. Jean-Paul Sartre’s account emphasizes that, despite his strategies, Franz remains aware of the imaginary character of his world and can move in and out of his role at will.

Attitude, Performance, and Bad Faith

Franz’s conduct illustrates Jean-Paul Sartre’s distinction between perceiving the world and adopting an imaginary attitude toward it. In this account, behaviour that appears appropriate to belief in an imagined situation need not arise from mistaking the imaginary for the real. It can instead belong to a form of make-believe, accompanied by imaginary beliefs and feelings. Franz’s speeches, costume, and carefully controlled attic belong to this enacted relation to his imagined world.

The example also connects Franz to Bad faith: strategies through which a person deceives himself about the surrounding world and presents himself to himself as someone of great historical importance. Franz’s imagined Germany and his speeches to the crustaceans’ future court give that self-presentation a public, historical scale, even though his audience is imaginary. His ability to slip in and out of the role complicates any simple account of the performance as either wholly deliberate deception or unconscious confusion.

Significance in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Account

Franz’s case supports a broader point in Jean-Paul Sartre’s discussion of hallucinations and dreams: the imaginary is not simply a faulty perception. An episode may involve an inability—or, in some cases, an unwillingness—to leave the imaginary attitude, without thereby proving that its contents have been mistaken for perceptions. The distinction leaves room for experiences that constrain a person without treating every imaginative engagement as a deliberate choice.

The play makes this distinction concrete through Franz’s prolonged confinement and the routines by which he sustains his imagined world. His example shows how an imaginary attitude can organize behaviour and self-understanding while remaining recognizably different from perception. It also exposes the tension in his performance: he presents himself as a figure of historical consequence, yet the means of sustaining that identity—chocolate medals, excluded newspapers and clocks, and speeches to an imagined court—reveal how dependent it is on a world he must continually maintain.