The essay, Indignez-vous! – amounting to only thirty pages – is the publishing sensation of France. Six thousand copies were published in October. By year’s end, six hundred thousand copies were sold. An English version is on the way.
Now, “when the end can’t be very far away,” Stéphane Hessel argues that the French people need to get outraged again. The reasons for his personal outrage include the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, France’s treatment of its illegal immigrants, the need to re-establish a free press, the need to protect the environment, the plight of Palestinians and the importance of protecting the French welfare system. He calls for peaceful and non-violent insurrection.
Hessel is the son of the German writer Franz Hessel who inspired the character of Jules in Henri-Pierre Roche’s novel Jules and Jim and the subsequent Truffaut film. He belonged to the group of idealistic bohemians who in the decade before WWI inhabited Schwabing, the suburb of Munich, which is the subject of Eric Koch’s novel Premonitions.
His son, Stéphane, was born in Berlin in 1917. In 1939, he entered the French Army and, after the defeat, the Résistance. He was captured and deported to the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps. From there he escaped during a transfer to Bergen-Belsen by exchanging his identity with a man who was dying of typhus.
After the war, in 1948, Stéphane Hessel was involved in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He spent his life fighting for human rights, for peace and the non-violent resolution of conflicts.
In 2003, along with other former résistants, he signed the petition “For a Treaty of a Social Europe” and, in August 2006, an appeal against the Israeli air-strikes in Lebanon, published in French newspapers on behalf of the French Jewish Union for Peace.
Stéphane Hessel was made Grand Officier de la Légion d’honneur (Decree of July 14, 2006).
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Thank you Eric for bringing Stéphane Hessel to our attention so that we can celebrate his vision of the humanism.
Your description of Hessel makes me want to see “Jules et Jim” again. It’s been decades since I enjoyed that film the first and only time I saw it. And it’ll be doubly satisfying to imagine Jules as the remarkable man he turned out to be in real life.