Andreas Agocs, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of History
University of the Pacific
Abstract
The Cold War at the Congress: German Cultural Unity and International Conflict
in Postwar Berlin
The First German Writers’ Congress, which was held in October 1947 in occupied
Berlin, has been described as the last manifestation of intellectual unity among German
writers at the beginning of the Cold War. Organized by the Kulturbund zur
demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ), the
congress exhorted writers and intellectuals to demonstrate unity and to lend their voices
in the struggle against the looming political division of Germany. The historiography of
the congress usually emphasizes the event’s failure in the face of the evolving Cold War
tensions, thereby separating the intellectual concerns of the congress’s participants from
the political objectives of the Cold War rivals. According to many interpretations of the
congress, well-meaning but naive intellectuals and writers engaged in the futile attempt to
stem the political current by espousing an alternative model of German cultural unity, an
attempt that ultimately broke down in the face of the more powerful, divisive forces of
the Cold War political order.
However, as this paper shows, intellectuals debating German culture during the
congress were not innocent victims of the Cold War politics of Western Allied and Soviet
occupation powers but paved the way for the event’s political instrumentalization. In
particular, the paper argues, the officially non-partisan Kulturbund’s concept of
antifascist humanism—propagated during the congress by, among others, Günther
Weisenborn and Wolfgang Harich—constituted an unacknowledged cultural nationalism
that ran counter to the political trends of the Cold War but could also be transformed into
the divisive rhetoric of the East-West confrontation. Even before the well-publicized
speech by the American writer Melvin Lasky, the congress exposed rifts and unresolved
conflicts within Germany’s cultural scene that reached back to at least 1933. Therefore,
the congress and its failure need to be interpreted not just as an episode in the Cold War
but need to be placed in a long-term context of German intellectuals’ political role in the
twentieth century.