The speaker was once again in a good mood: “This whole thing was a huge scandal,” she reports to her husband from Milan, where politicians and scientists met for an international conference. Among the guests were Willy Brandt, Raymond Aron and Czesław Miłosz, some had come from Japan and Indonesia to discuss the “future of freedom”. “Everything lives in a luxury that is hard to understand. All corrupted completely and in the most primitive way. It drives and eats and buys itself stupid and stupid.”
Hannah Arendt was there too, of course. As the author of a book on totalitarianism, she was a sought-after speaker in the staunchly anti-communist fifties, but that did not prevent her from finding the Milan symposium “boring to die for”. “One could almost assume that they did it all on purpose to deliver propaganda to the communists.”
Naturally, the intention was different. “All of this” was organized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CFF), a post-war foundation that aimed to weaken the pull of communist ideology through a cultural counter-offer. Former communists like Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone warned the West of Stalin’s reign of terror. But Bert Brecht went to East Berlin from exile in the USA, where a theater was made available to him. Pablo Picasso also threatened to slide into the opposing camp with his dove of peace. At the founding event in June 1950, Koestler announced: “Friends, freedom has taken the offensive.”
The congress subsidized artists and acted as an exclusive travel agency
In autumn 2017 the exhibition “Parapolitics” in the Berlin House of World Cultures showed with a wealth of materials how committed this freedom offensive was. There were a dozen copies of the Month, of Preuves (Paris) and Encounter (London) from. The organizers have succeeded in delivering the catalog that was urgently needed at the time, now, three and a half years after the exhibition ended. As beautiful as it has become, it is also decidedly English, and that is why it was not financed by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, but by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. The House of World Cultures was built in 1960 at the instigation of the government commissioner Eleanor Dulles, whose brother Allen Dulles was head of the CIA and who, in the name of freedom, organized many overturns in Iran and Latin America, and most recently blocked the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Of course, the Congress for Cultural Freedom also acted on behalf of the American government, even if it was as hostile to culture as any other. Unbeatable therefore the picture of Sigmar Polke, who holds a corner of the canvas black and writes under it with a typewriter: “Higher beings ordered: paint the upper right corner black!”
The higher beings sat with the CIA and meant well with the artists. For a decade and a half, the CIA subsidized nearly fifty magazines around the world through Congress. The first, The month, Founded by the former Trotskyist Melvin Lasky, it paid the highest fees in the Federal Republic and was therefore able to attract the best authors from Karl Jaspers to Theodor W. Adorno. By exchanging articles with sister magazines such as Partisan Review (New York) and Tempo Presente (Rome) an incomparable educational program came to the Federal Republic. As a contraband the month smuggled into the GDR and eagerly read there too.
Exhibition catalog “Parapolitics”. Cultural Freedom and the Cold War. Sternberg. 618 pages, 34 euros.
The literary colloquium in Berlin, the meeting of Gruppe 47 in Princeton in 1966, half of the Kiepenheuer & Witsch publishing program was financed in this way. Louis Armstrong was sent on tour. Other cultural ambassadors brought Abstract Expressionism to Europe in order to demonstrate the cultural superiority of the West over the supposedly backward socialist realism prescribed for the Eastern Bloc.
The congress not only subsidized painters, writers and musicians, it acted as an exclusive travel agency and also invented the chivalrous jet intellectuals. Hannah Arendt liked to see her dear colleagues only as “stupid ignoramuses and gossips”, the congress celebrated itself and the freedom of the West at conferences all over the world. The offensive announced by the former Spanish fighter Koestler brought the freedom warriors (there were hardly any women warriors apart from Arendt) to Stockholm, Hamburg and New York, but also to Rangoon and Tunis, to Dakar and Santiago de Chile.
When it became known in 1967 that they had all traveled indirectly on the ticket of the CIA, that is, the luxurious reflection on freedom and totalitarianism was financed by the American secret service, the shame was great. Supposedly nobody knew about it, they only used funding measures, received scholarships and were happy about nice fees.
The CIA also indirectly promoted the slow end of apartheid
An essay by James Baldwin on a meeting of black writers and artists in Paris, 1957 in Encounter published, was prominently in the showcase in 2017, now it can or could be read. He presents a model of the “repressive tolerance” that the former secret service employee Herbert Marcuse identified as a hallmark of Western societies. At this conference, which was not hosted by the CFF, a greeting from the black sociologist and civil rights activist WEB DuBois, who had once studied with Max Weber in Heidelberg: “I cannot attend the conference because the American government does not give me a passport Those who travel abroad as blacks these days are either indifferent to blacks or they have to say what the foreign ministry tells them to. “
Baldwin writes in the language of his time, so he speaks of American negro, he of the blacks in Africa and that in general people of color distinguishes, and advocates re-examining the history of the various black cultures that have been “systematically misunderstood, underestimated and sometimes destroyed”. He does this in a congressional organ that is financed in a roundabout way by the very government that, like the contemporary communist states, refused DuBois to travel abroad and does everything to refuse access to education for blacks in their own country to prevent their ascent as best they can.
Nobody was prepared for this dialectical volte, not Koestler and Lasky, and certainly not the CIA: The American secret service not only brought culture into post-war Europe, it also promoted the slow end of apartheid. While the American southern states were still holding on to racial segregation with all their might, Congress agitated more or less covertly against apartheid in South Africa through its tireless work. When the longstanding cultural work of the CIA finally became known, the civil rights movement in the USA could no longer be stopped either. If corruption, then right.