Even in times of war, artists and writers continued to create. They wrote and painted about hunger, death, and pain. Some of them were works that will go down in history that we know and remember even today. How did this happen?

Picasso’s Guernica, Anne Frank’s Diary, and the works of Sartre and Beauvoir all show how artists and writers shared their ideas and feelings. Brecht’s views on existential themes and Viktor Frankl’s Search for Meaning also highlight this. They preferred to speak because it was a time when talking was more important. What kept them going even in these times of fear, brutality, and oppression?

1. Remembering who you are.

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl said he valued collecting small pieces of paper to write on while in a concentration camp. He wanted to write a book; he wanted to tell people. Even in the camp, as a psychiatrist, he asked curious questions. How did people continue to live in all these challenging conditions?

When life takes everything away, even those tiny pieces of paper become very valuable. This space belongs to us, even if it is small. Through that space, we try to achieve a small but great control. A space that reminds us who we are and that not everything in us is dead, that something is still alive.

2.Limitations during that time.

During the war, artists lacked proper tools, materials, and spaces. They created with what they had: scraps, soot, and pencil stubs. Imagine how painful and disappointing it is for an artist not to reach any material.

In 1937, Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in response to the bombing of a Spanish town. In occupied Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir wrote in cafés. They developed existentialism while under surveillance. Their questions about freedom, responsibility, and action originated from the world around them.

3. Solitude and Being Witness

Isolation wasn’t chosen. Many artists were hiding, exiled, or imprisoned.

Bertolt Brecht fled Nazi Germany. He wrote poetry and plays that challenged comfort and illusion. He asked:

In the dark times

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will be singing.

About the dark times.

Writers and artists of this era knew their work was both personal and historical. They were documenting a world on fire.

They created because they had to.

Art is not a luxury. It is to survive. To breathe.

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “There may be more beautiful times, but this is our time.”

(Il peut y avoir des temps plus beaux, mais c’est le nôtre.)

That sentence became the spirit of a generation of creators. They didn’t wait for better days. They faced what was in front of them, and turned it into art, philosophy, literature, and memory.

Art, literature, and thought during the Second World War weren’t about escape. They were about confrontation and transformation.