Ghosts of War: Oradour-sur-Glane - the cultural context of Beckett's pessimism in Waiting for Godot

 French and German Presidents stand together at the very site of a Nazi massacre in France in 1944.
These atrocities and the general state of despair after two world wars in the first fifty years of the twentieth century contributed to the feelings of pessimism or at least scepticism in European intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s. We see this mood in the work of Beckett, Camus and writers.
Students should look at Theatre of the Absurd and Existentialism and also Beckett's own use of the word 'Tragicomedy' to describe his play "Waiting for Godot".
Here is John Minihan's famous photograph of Samuel Beckett.