Postwar

Worried that in the cultural battle Stalin would win by default, they set about establishing a cultural ‘front’ of their own. The founding meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was held in Berlin in June 1950. The Congress was planned as a response to Moscow’s Peace Movement initiative of the previous year, but it coincided with the outbreak of war in Korea, which gave it added significance. The decision to hold the meeting in Berlin rather than Paris was deliberate: from the outset the Congress was going to take the cultural battle to the Soviets.

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was formed under the official patronage of Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers and Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher. These old men conferred respectability and authority upon the new venture, but the political drive and intellectual energy behind it came from a glittering middle generation of liberal or ex-Communist intellectuals—Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, A. J. Ayer, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Ignazio Silone, Nicola Chiaromonte and Sidney Hook. They, in turn, were assisted by a group of younger men, mostly American, who took responsibility for the day to day planning and administration of the CCF’s activities.

The CCF would eventually open up offices in thirty-five countries worldwide, but the focus of its attention was on Europe, and within Europe on France, Italy and Germany. The goal was to rally, energize and mobilize intellectuals and scholars for the struggle with Communism, primarily through the publication and dissemination of cultural periodicals: Encounter in Britain, Preuves in France, Tempo Presente in Italy and Der Monat in Germany. None of these journals ever reached a large audience—Encounter, the most successful, boasted a circulation of 16,000 copies by 1958; in the same year Preuves had just 3,000 subscribers. But their contents were of an almost unvaryingly high quality, their contributors were among the best writers of the post-war decades, and they filled a crucial niche—in France especially, where Preuves provided the only liberal, anti-Communist forum in a cultural landscape dominated by neutralist, pacifist, fellow-traveling or straightforwardly Communist periodicals.

The Congress and its many activities were publicly supported by the Ford Foundation and privately underwritten by the CIA—something of which nearly all its activists and contributors were quite unaware until it became public many years later. The implications—that the US government was covertly subsidizing antiCommunist cultural outlets in Europe—were perhaps not as serious as they appear in retrospect. At a time when Communist and ‘front’ journals and all sorts of cultural products were covertly subsidized from Moscow, American backing would certainly not have embarrassed some of the CCF writers. Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron or Ignazio Silone did not need official American encouragement to take a hard line against Communism, and there is no evidence that their own critical views about the US itself were ever toned down or censored to suit the paymasters in Washington.

The US was a newcomer to culture wars of this kind. The Soviet Union established its ‘Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Nations’ in 1925; French, Germans and Italians had been actively underwriting overseas ‘cultural diplomacy’ since before 1914. The Americans did not begin to budget for such activities until just before World War Two, and it was only in 1946, with the establishment of the Fulbright Program, that they entered the field seriously. Until the autumn of 1947 American cultural and educational projects in Europe were directed towards ‘democratic reorientation’; only then did anti-Communism become the primary strategic goal.

By 1950 the US Information Agency had taken overall charge of American cultural exchange and information programs in Europe. Together with the Information Services Branch of the US Occupation authorities in western Germany and Austria (which had full control of all media and cultural outlets in the US Zone in these countries), the USIA was now in a position to exert huge influence in Western European cultural life. By 1953, at the height of the Cold War, US foreign cultural programs (excluding covert subsidies and private foundations) employed 13,000 people and cost $129 million, much of it spent on the battle for the hearts and minds of the intellectual elite of Western Europe.

The ‘fight for peace’, as the Communist press dubbed it, was conducted on the cultural ‘front’ by the ‘Battle of the Book’ (note the characteristically militarized Leninist language). The first engagements were undertaken in France, Belgium and Italy in the early spring of 1950. Prominent Communist authors—Elsa Triolet, Louis Aragon —would travel to a variety of provincial cities to give talks, sign books and put on display the literary credentials of the Communist world. In practice this did little to promote the Communist case—two of the best-selling books in post-war France were Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (which sold 420,000 copies in the decade 1945-55) and Viktor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom (503,000 copies in the same period). But the point was not so much to sell books as to remind readers and others that Communists stood for culture—French culture.

The American response was to set up ‘America Houses’, with libraries and newspaper-reading rooms, and host lectures, meetings and English-language classes. By 1955 there were sixty-nine such America Houses in Europe. In some places their impact was quite considerable: in Austria, where the Marshall Plan years saw 134 million copies of English-language books distributed nationwide, a significant percentage of the population of Vienna and Salzburg (the former under Four Power administration, the latter in the US Zone of Occupation) visited their local America House to borrow books and read the papers. The study of English replaced French and the classical languages as the first choice of Austrian high-school students.

Like American-supported radio networks (Radio Free Europe was inaugurated in Munich one month after the outbreak of the Korean War), the America House programs were sometimes undermined by the crude propaganda imperatives emanating from Washington. At the peak of the McCarthy years the directors of America Houses spent much of their time removing books from their shelves. Among dozens of authors whose works were deemed inappropriate were not only the obvious suspects—John Dos Passos, Arthur Miller, Dashiell Hammett and Upton Sinclair—but also Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Alberto Moravia, Tom Paine and Henry Thoreau. In Austria, at least, it seemed to many observers that in the ‘Battle of Books’ the US was sometimes its own most effective foe.

Fortunately for the West, American popular culture had an appeal that American political ineptitude could do little to tarnish. Communists were at a severe disadvantage in that their official disapproval of decadent American jazz and American cinema closely echoed the views of Josef Goebbels. While east European Communist states were banning jazz as decadent and alien, Radio Free Europe was broadcasting into eastern Europe three hours of popular music every weekday afternoon, interspersed with news on the hour for ten minutes. Cinema, the other universal medium of the time, could be regulated in states under Communist control; but throughout western Europe the appeal of American films was universal. Here, Soviet propaganda had nothing with which to compete and even Western progressives, often drawn to American music and cinema, were out of sympathy with the Party line.

The cultural competition of the early Cold War years was asymmetrical. Among European cultural elites there was still a widespread sentiment that they shared, across ideological divides and even bridging the Iron Curtain, a common culture to which America posed a threat. The French in particular took this line, echoing the early post-war efforts of their diplomats to trace an international policy independent of American control. Symptomatically, the head of the French Cultural Mission in occupied Berlin, Felix Lusset, got on much better with his Soviet counterpart (Alexander Dymschitz) than he did with the British or American representatives in the city and dreamed, like his masters in Paris, of a restored cultural axis reaching from Paris to Berlin and on to Leningrad.

The US spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to win over European sympathies, but many of the resulting publications and products were heavy-handed and counter-productive, merely confirming the European intelligentsia’s innate suspicions. In Germany, America’s excessive attention to Communist crimes was seen by many as a deliberate ploy to forget or relativise the crimes of the Nazis. In Italy the lurid anti-Communist campaigns of the Vatican undercut the anti-Stalinist arguments of Silone, Vittorini and others. Only in art and literature, where the absurdities of Stalinist cultural policy impinged directly upon the territory of painters and poets, did Western intellectuals consistently distance themselves from Moscow—and even here their opposition was muted for fear of offering hostages to American ‘propaganda’.[72]

On the other hand, in the struggle for the sympathies of the large mass of the Western European population, the Soviets were rapidly losing ground. Everywhere except Italy the Communist vote fell steadily from the late 1940s, and—if opinion polls are to be believed—even those who did vote Communist often saw their vote either as a symbolic protest or else as an expression of class or communal solidarity. Well before the cataclysms