Nancy Jachec - Böcker

Although cultural exchanges were named within the Council of Europe in the mid- 1950s as being second only in importance to the military as a tool for ensuring a stable and integrated Western Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, European-led initiatives have generally been overlooked in the historiography of art of the immediate post-war period. Popularly remembered as the era of the United States’ cultural ‘triumph’, American Abstract Expressionism in particular is commonly identified as the cultural ‘weapon’ by which that nation conquered Western European culture.Using the Venice Biennale as a case study, this book challenges the idea that there was an American cultural conquest in the 1950s through the fine arts, arguing instead that Western Europe retained a strong sense of world cultural leadership in the immediate post-war years. An institutional history that combines political and diplomatic with art history, and is informed by extensive archival research, it argues that Italian political and cultural figures actively promoted the ‘Idea of Europe’ – the Council of Europe’s cultural initiative of 1955 designed to promote the idea of a homogeneous post-war European culture – at the Biennale in the form of gesture painting as an international style, as the emblem of a culturally united Western Europe, and as the repository of universal humanist values for the international community. Scholarly but accessible, this book will be of interest not only to researchers and to students of international cultural relations during the Cold War, but to general, interested readers, too.

In 1950, nearly 300 of Europe's leading artists, philosophers and writers formed an international society intended to end the Cold War. The European Society of Culture was composed of many of Western Europe's best-known intellectuals, including Theodor Adorno, Julien Benda, Albert Camus, Benedetto Croce, Andre Gide, J. B. Haldane, Karl Jaspers, Carl Jung, Thomas Mann, Henri Matisse, Francois Mauriac, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Albert Schweitzer, among many others; over the next twenty years it would also include many luminaries from the East, such as Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, Ilya Ehrenburg and Georg Lukacs. Pioneering the earliest political discussions between intellectuals in Eastern and Western Europe that would serve as a model for the activities of the better-known CCF in its efforts to end communism, the ESC went on to create an informal but powerful, 1,600 member-strong cultural and political network across the world in pursuit of dialogue between the Marxist East and the liberal West, and in pursuit of peace and shared cultural values.Here, in this first, comprehensive history of the SEC's early years, Nancy Jachec demonstrates the influence its members had not only on preventing the isolation of Europe's eastern states, but on enabling the flow of people, publications and ideas from the West into the East, thus playing a vital role in introducing the ideals of human rights and cultural rights in the East in the run-up to the signing of the Helsinki Accords of 1975. She also shows the profound impact that the SEC had on the development of post-colonial theory through the exchanges it organised between European and African intellectuals, directly shaping the expectations statesmen like Leopold Sedar Senghor, revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon, and institutions such as Unesco would have of culture in newly emerging countries.

Based on extensive, largely unpublished material by and about Sartre from archives across Europe, this book explores Sartre’s lifelong relationship with Italy, its culture, society and, above all, its intellectual left.Starting with his dawning awareness of politics as foremost a moral responsibility during his first tourist trips to Naples in the 1930s and the poverty he encountered there, Italy, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Europe’s Cold War then examines the relationships Sartre forged with a number of Italian liberal, leftist and communist intellectuals after the war. Not only did they immediately draw him into debates over the ethical crisis that they held responsible for fascism, the war, and now, Europe’s Cold War. Several of them became lifelong friends of his, as well as collaborators in a number of efforts to address that moral crisis in Italy and, by the late 1950s, in Eastern Europe. Reconstructing the networks they established through cultural organizations they founded themselves, Nancy Jachec traces how Sartre and his ideas were brought into the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia in pursuit of a democratic socialism.Using private correspondence, press reports, memoirs, embassy dispatches, government committee minutes, and surveillance and intelligence reports from Eastern and Western sources, this book reconstructs Sartre’s activities and the impact they had in a way that he did not foresee. While his many discussions with his Italian peers on the theme of political morality led him to support the New Left in spite of its organizational problems, in Poland and Czechoslovakia his work was taken in a very different direction, where intellectuals would go on to assume real political responsibility.