ABSTRACT
November 1949 found Josselson on the road again, bound for the European Cultural Congress in Lausanne with Lasky and his Der Monat co-editor, Hellmuth Jaesrich. Their goal: to figure out how a Berlin congress would work – and what approach would appeal to European intellectuals.1 Organized by Swiss writer and philosopher Denis de Rougemont, attendees at Lausanne opposed Communism principally as a threat to the survival of Western culture, not as a political phenomenon.2 The theme worked as a unifying principle; there was, at least, none of the fractiousness and political bickering that had doomed previous efforts to failure. To the legal scholar and German politician Carlo Schmid, Lausanne was thus the “first round in the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom . . . and the first step toward what would become a more cultural orientation.” And, he told Josselson, “I know how much we are all indebted to you” for its founding.3 By December, Lasky and Josselson were approaching possible patrons about a “Congress for Cultural Freedom” to be held in spring 1950. “I have meaning to write to you for a long time of a little dream of ours that was just always on the point of taking on reality,” Lasky wrote to Hook. “Ever since Paris last April we have been playing with the idea of a ‘Monat’ Congress – and in Berlin.” Now, “I am trying to raise enough funds for a Berlin Congress – for ‘peace and liberty’ or better perhaps for ‘cultural freedom,’ ” which Lasky anticipated would culminate in the formation of a permanent “International committee for Cultural Freedom.” Lasky envisioned, “If we can manage to invite and bring over 50 prominent ‘foreign’ (i.e.,, non-German) persons I think we will have a political show on our hands which will mean something.”4 He hoped for “the widest possible front” among “non-Communist intellectuals.”5 He begged for Hook’s help so that “[i]t would, finally, take the initiative on the political-cultural front – as we have been hoping and planning for so long.”6 Josselson simultaneously sought the kind of backers who could pay for extensive travel, lodging, publicity, and logistical expenses in an array of foreign currencies without blinking an eye: his new bosses at OPC. His strikingly similar proposal for a “Congress for cultural freedom” in Berlin envisioned that the congress would promote “the fundamental ideals governing cultural (and political)
A Berlin “Congress for cultural freedom,” Josselson urged, could powerfully counter the messages of the Soviet peace campaign by championing “the fundamental ideals governing cultural (and political) action in the Western world and the repudiation of all totalitarian challenges.”7 Prominent scholars in Berlin could co-sponsor the event with an informal committee of American and European intellectuals. Invitations would go to the most prominent (and politically desirable) names, with the aim of establishing a permanent organization. While Josselson awaited word from Washington, Lasky plowed ahead and set the date for late June 1950. As Josselson’s proposal made its way to OPC in Washington that January, Lasky enlisted James Burnham, Hook’s New York University colleague, to help with the planning.8 By February, Lasky had taken a leave of absence from Der Monat, titled himself “General Secretary, the Berlin Congress,” and sent invites to Der Monat’s roster of contributors. “The Congress,” Lasky assured prospective delegates, “will be prepared to cover all expenses for travel to and from, and stay in Berlin.”9 By March, Arthur Koestler – perhaps the most eminent anti-Communist of all – had enthusiastically joined the informal planning committee.10 By April, Josselson had received the welcome news that Wisner and OPC had signed off on the project and had allocated a $50,000 budget. Indeed, to OPC, Josselson’s proposal finally looked like their best hope of realizing Wisner’s dream of “a little DEMINFORM.”11 The AFL’s Irving Brown was dispatched to
handle financial arrangements and to serve as the Congress’s putative (and quite plausible) backer. But Wisner added an unwelcome instruction: to make Lasky less visible. With Lasky – technically an American official – as its main organizer, the Berlin Congress looked like an official American production, and thus a ripe target for hostile press. Josselson demurred: “No other person here, certainly no German, could have achieved such success” in enlisting delegates.12 Wisner’s order went nowhere. With the Congress two months away, Lasky was too central, and too enmeshed in planning, to drop out of sight. Berlin in spring 1950 was ground zero of the Cold War. Show trials were sweeping the new Soviet satellites. A month before the Congress, German Communist leader Walter Ulbricht proclaimed May Day 1950 as “the signal for national uprising.” Some 20,000 youths slept in tents outside the Lustgarten before a “spontaneous demonstration of the peace-loving people’s identity with the great Soviet state and our glorious Stalin.” Half a million attended an opposing demonstration at the Tiergarten, where Berlin’s mayor, Ernst Reuter, declared, “We Berliners are not afraid of anything.”13 The Berlin Congress, the New York Times reported, was to be “the first major offensive against Soviet propagandists” boasting “literary and scientific personages of international repute.”14 Former Comintern agent Gerhard Eisler, the new head of East German radio propaganda, denounced delegates as “literary monkeys and spies for the
Lasky, with discreet input from Josselson and an active steering committee – Burnham, Koestler, Aron, and Irving Brown – had assembled a formidable group.16 From America came Hook and various alumni of Hook’s Americans for Intellectual Freedom, including Farrell, Nicolas Nabokov, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The British delegation comprised MP Julian Amery, the abrasive historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, philosopher Freddie Ayer, and Cambridge don and American historian Denis Brogan. The French contingent had Rousset, and his FrancTireur co-editor Georges Altman. Among the Italians were Silone, Chiaromonte, and writer Carlo Levi. De Rougemont and Bondy, the Swiss representatives, were straight from the Lausanne congress.17 Berlin Mayor Ernst Reuter was an enthusiastic Congress proponent from the beginning. Five philosophers – Bertrand Russell (English), John Dewey (American), Jacques Maritain (French), Benedetto Croce (Italian), and Karl Jaspers (German) – served as the Congress’s honorary chairmen, though none came. All the delegates were non-Communist; what exactly this meant would prove contentious.18 As the delegates checked into the Hotel am Steinplatz, the Congress’s selfappointed steering committee rushed to finish its work.19 Lasky and Burnham asked Koestler to prepare a “short opening address to round off the somewhat too ceremonial opening program with a political-keynoting speech,” as well as a manifesto for the Congress. The committee had sorted out everything: the invitations, the format of the Berlin Congress, the advance publicity, and the tentative structure of a permanent congress organization.20 Once the Berlin Congress began, they met every morning and night for a “housekeeping” session to “plan for exigencies,” as Hook put it.21 Josselson consulted from the sidelines, but was so unobtrusive that he later claimed “Koestler did not even know of my existence in Berlin.”22 On June 25, 1950, exactly fifteen years since the Mutualité Congress, a hundred delegates arrived for the Congress’s opening session. Few remembered the anniversary; the news that Communist North Korea had just launched a surprise invasion of the South overshadowed everything. During the opening session, Koestler spontaneously “leapt onto the platform and called in impassioned tones for the formation of an international brigade of writers similar to that in the Spanish Civil War,” recorded Hilde Spiel.23 For the next few days, Hook recalled, “it seemed uncertain whether the Russians would march in Germany too.”24 In his opening speech, Koestler argued there was no time left to equivocate, only time to answer “Yea, Yea, Nay, Nay.” In a later session, he argued that the Soviet Union’s claims to represent the “left,” “peace,” and “democracy” had emptied the “old antimonies” of meaning. “Socialism” as practiced in Russia was no longer a progressive creed compared to American capitalism. The only dichotomy that mattered now, Koestler concluded, was between “total tyranny and relative freedom.” But the fight for “relative freedom” was necessarily constrained: “Democracy, by its very nature, can create no conspiratorial instrument comparable to the Cominform, nor produce a counter-phantom to the communist
agitation and sow the seeds of dissent both in the West and behind the Iron Curtain.25 Echoing Koestler, Burnham argued that the Soviet peace offensive “weaken[s] the will and the relative ability of [its followers] to survive.” To sign petitions to abolish nuclear weapons is “to provide a recruiting list and ground for the Communist parties.” He added, “I am not, under any and all circumstances, against atomic bombs . . . I am, yesterday and today at any rate, for those bombs made in Los Alamos, Hanford and Oak Ridge.” And “I should think that Europeans would join me in being for, not against, those latter bombs . . . For five years, those bombs have defended – have been the sole defense of – the liberties of Western Europe.” The only hope was that “[t]hrough a moral, psychological, and political counteroffensive, through a worldwide anti-Communist Resistance, we can disintegrate the Communist power without the last desperate resort – which otherwise will surely come – to atomic bombs.”26
