Literature of Warning: the State-Private Network, Cultural Patronage, and the Emergence of Foundation Literature During the Cold War

Literature of Warning: The State-Private Network, Cultural Patronage, and the Emergence of Foundation Literature during the Cold War

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY

Amanda Niedfeldt

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Under the supervision of Dr. Paula Rabinowitz

February 2021

“But how impossible it must have been for them not to budge either to the right or to the left. What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism…to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.”

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (74)

i Acknowledgements

I must first thank Paula Rabinowitz for her support and patience through the journey of this project, especially for understanding, better than I, that all aspects of our lives shape our work and our ability to see it through. Thank you for supporting me throughout the process, even going the extra mile to help me access archival sources out of my physical reach. Thank you also for encouraging me to push against bureaucratic boundaries from day one and supporting me in spreading my net wide both intellectually and professionally, by doing so I have been able to grow not only academically, but also as a person. Thank you also to my committee members Siobhan Craig, Leslie Morris, Jani Scandura, and Frances Vavrus for your questions, feedback, and particularly your patience as the end date of this project was shifted around the calendar while 2020 unfolded. Each of you has provided insightful and thought-provoking discussions at crucial points of my graduate education, which have helped me develop and strengthened this project. I would also like to thank my high school English teacher Mr. Jim Keeney, undergraduate mentors Dr. Audrey Fessler and Dr. Patricia Quinn, and the prudent opportunities of the Ronald E. McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program. Without all of them, I likely would not have begun my first degree or endeavored to complete this one. Many thanks to the University of Minnesota English Department for consistent support through travel grants and also to the Rockefeller Archive and Modernist Studies Association for their generous financial support. Without these grants the project would have been impossible. I would also like thank all of the archives and archivists that hosted me, especially the late Thomas Rosenbaum at the Rockefeller Archive, who pointed me to the most useful files, many of which I did not even know I would need. Many thanks also to Michael P. Hehl and Gregor Baszak at the Literature Archive of Sulzbach-Rosenberg for the generosity of their time and attention not only in helping me navigate Walter Höllerer’s papers, but also in showing me the charm of Sulzbach-Rosenberg and welcoming me to my first ever Stammtisch. Thank you also to the British Library for existing. The ease of accessing such a range of necessary texts made it not only possible, but also affordable to finish my dissertation in the United Kingdom. Many thanks to the estates of Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll, Walter Höllerer, Henry Miller, Andrzej Wirth, and the Rockefeller Archive Center for particular permission to include quotations from their materials. Every effort has been made to secure all rights of included sources. Finally, I would like to thank my dearest loved ones for their support throughout this long journey. Thank you especially to my parents and my sister for always encouraging me in my interests and trusting me in my decisions. Your enduring support and love have made all of the difference in my ability to choose adventure and challenge again and again in my life, in all its forms. Und vielen, vielen Dank to my partner and wife, Gisela. Thank you for patiently answering my unending questions on German vocabulary and for advising on and improving many of my translations, though of course all errors and oversights are my own. Thank you for supporting me through this multi-year journey, for your patience in my absences both physically and mentally, and for artfully convincing me, more than once, that I must finish this. You were right and I am grateful.

ii Abstract

The literature on the cultural Cold War acknowledges that American philanthropic foundations provided funding to various Cold War projects, but does not provide a close analysis of the foundations’ involvement or examine how philanthropies and government agencies coordinated their funding, let alone consider the influence it had on writers and their work. This gap in analysis overlooks the intricacies of the foundations’ relationship with the American state and the role philanthropies played in circulating culture and building artistic networks throughout the Cold War. This dissertation begins to close that gap by examining the establishment of the Berlin Artists-in-Residence program by the Ford Foundation in 1963, focusing on its first two years of writing residences before the program was transferred to the German Academic Exchange Service, which still runs it today. Analyzing the function and influence of foundations within international artistic affairs during the Cold War period establishes that foundation personnel played key roles in connecting government policy to results on the ground. More broadly, this project explores how foundations built artistic networks and institutionalized art with a range of residency programs, grants, and accolades, setting a precedent, which still functions to this day. Analyzing the participation of Ingeborg Bachmann, Walter Höllerer, Witold Gombrowicz, Piers Paul Read, and W.H. Auden in the Berlin program shows that this new arrangement and the work it propelled resulted in mixed consequences for artists, extending prestige and visibility to certain artists and creating complications for others. Close attention to the Berlin projects elucidates how philanthropic foundations and Cold War networks played an essential role in connecting writers, while also allowing for exploration of how those writers utilized the opportunity in pursuit of their own goals. Ultimately, the analysis of writers’ texts illuminates their awareness of how the political-economic environment was working to shape them into suitable public intellectuals for the postwar age. The writers’ attention to and discussion of their artistic, social, and financial predicaments within their work defines a new subgenre of mid-century twentieth literature: foundation literature.

iii Table of Contents

Abbreviations and Translations……………………………………………………...V

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter One

Men with Money: The Ford Foundation………………………………….…………28

Chapter Two

Longer Walls and Higher Rooms: Ingeborg Bachmann……………………….……69

Chapter Three

Well Formed: Witold Gombrowicz……………………………………………...... 116

Chapter Four

The Ideal Candidate: Piers Paul Read…………………………………...... ….….156

Chapter Five

Cashing In: W.H. Auden…………………………………………………………...203

Conclusion

Swindling the Devil………………………………………………….………….…246

Archives Consulted………………………………………………………………...255

Works Cited………………………………………………………………………..256

iv Abbreviations and Translations

In the interest of brevity and the ease of reading and reference, archival sources are listed in the footnotes. Each footnote lists the specific item location along with an abbreviation of the appropriate archive in which it is resides, as listed below.

French and German quotations included in the body of the dissertation are translated into English with the original language appearing in a footnote. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

LIT Ingeborg Bachmann Archive, Literature Archive of the Austrian National Library, Vienna (LIT), Austria.

FF-RAC Ford Foundation Archive, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York, USA.

GFK German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Germany.

GLA German Literature Archive, Marbach am Neckar, Germany.

LASR Walter Höllerer Archive, Literature Archive Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Germany.

PPR Papers of Piers Paul Read. Special Collections, Leeds University Library, Leeds, United Kingdom.

WGA Witold Gombrowicz Archive. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

v Introduction

In autumn 1961, Walter Höllerer, a writer and professor at the Technical

University of Berlin, was busy scheduling a slew of public readings for the upcoming months. As literary impresario of Berlin, Höllerer hoped that an influx of intellectual life would embolden the city’s spirits and the West’s resolve to support it. The lineup he assembled was impressive, including Nathalie Sarraute, John Dos Passos, Max

Frisch, Salvatore Quasimodo, Ingeborg Bachmann, and, he hoped, Henry Miller, whose banned works from the 1930s had finally been published in the United States.

Miller was not convinced he could play the role Höllerer imagined. Replying to

Höllerer’s impassioned request, Miller wrote:

There is one thing I must speak of in connection with your ardent words. Nobody is indispensable! Especially in these times. Even if I were a Mahatma Gandhi I could not change the course of events. And you greatly overestimate, I fear, the influence of “poets” or the literary breed in toto. In these sad times writers come last. The public does not want to listen to writers, but to men of action, to would-be “miracle workers”…I will come, eventually. But it is foolish to believe that I can offer any comfort to the people of Berlin. I am glad to hear that things are quiet there, despite the daily sensational items in the newspapers. I hope and pray that all will turn out well. But with all the horses pulling in different directions, it seems to me we are asking for nothing short of a miracle.1

Höllerer and Miller were diametrically opposed in their belief of the sway a writer might have with the general public and on the political situation of the 1950s and 1960s. They were not alone in their disagreement. By 1961, a large majority of writers and artists had sided with Höllerer’s camp and jumped on the bandwagon of festivals, publications, and tours brandishing the flag of intellectual and artistic freedom for the West. It was surely a cause dear to the many participants. What is more difficult to tell is what motivated these writers and artists: the political cause or

1 Henry Miller to Walter Höllerer. 03WH/AA14,8, LASR. 1 the economic opportunities. The cultural Cold War, the struggle between the Soviet

Union and the United States to win hearts and minds to their causes, normalized institutional, corporate, and non-profit sponsorship of culture in the West ensuring that a corporate and governmental presence within artistic life would last far beyond the 1960s, often creating lucrative opportunities for participants. Miller may not have agreed with Höllerer, but there were many rich and powerful people who did.

Joel Samoff has convincingly demonstrated how powerful entities can create an agenda and through various institutions, policies, and personnel, institutionalize priorities from one location or group and spread them into another context (2012). To illustrate the principle, Samoff examines how the concept of “educational for all,” once the idea of a small group, became a United Nations-promoted aim that was then institutionalized in global and local structures ingraining flows of influence and resources. He shows that this happened through an array of developments including: the spread of modernization theory, development aid, United States dominance in the

1980s and 1990s, shifts in UN structures and voting rights, the emergence of global educational standards, the corporatization of educational institutions and the concept of the learner as a product, along with the dominance of Western research standards.

The spread of ideas that Samoff so convincingly elucidates is not an isolated incident. Since the mid-twentieth century, philanthropies, flush with cash, promoted a model of investment that aimed to perpetuate foundational structures and elite leadership both within the U.S. and abroad (Arnove et al., Berman, Parmar). Within the sphere of the cultural Cold War this took the form of trickle-down thought. US government officials and philanthropy executives postulated that if they could influence intellectual leaders and opinion builders, a majority of the population of a

2 given area would follow on their desired path. This was not an original idea. The

Soviet Union had been pursuing this effort for decades through the Communist

International (Wilford, White). The US-led coalition, in its attempt to catch up, wanted to replicate Soviet results with a much subtler touch, leading to a wide variety of initiatives often funded through covert means. These sprawling projects engendered an array of government and philanthropic funded opportunities for artists and writers alike. Just as “education for all” was institutionalized on a global scale in

Samoff’s study, the cultural Cold War began a process of institutionalizing artistic creation in the West.

The Cold War put culture front and center. Government-sponsored activities such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), State Department Tours, festivals, and publications such as Encounter have been well documented by scholars. The opportunities and resources they offered to the hands of willing artists were unprecedented and hard to ignore. The immediate aims of the US government’s cultural Cold War battle were just one facet of an emerging patronage landscape. The

United States’ spoils of war lined the heavy pockets not only of the government, but also of philanthropic and corporate interests. Run by men who wanted to shape the new world they had fought for, this money was put to work to fulfill their vision.

This spread of funding for cultural opportunities helped to institutionalize literature and artistic production from the 1950s onward. Independent productions were challenged as widely circulated and financially well-fed publications appeared and lavish conferences, offices, and stipends were offered for artists to continue their work without censor or often even any obligation. Artists undoubtedly thought they were getting a good deal: money and luxury simply to keep working on the project

3 they were desperate for funds to finish. It was a win-win by all counts. Through this process, institutional spaces, fellowships, and residency programs were further normalized and, in due course, valorized. Artists may have thought that they were going to take advantage of funding bodies for their own purposes by accepting money and playing along just enough. To a large degree, in the immediate moment, they were right. The literature produced, however, evidences the larger change and influences afoot. Literature by people associated with foundation funding or activities exhibits a high awareness of the foundation man in his smooth suit and black glasses, carrying a briefcase full of cash. The foundation man is never the focus of a narrative, but he is often present, turning up in a café, at a presentation, sending a check.

Beyond this figure, persistent concerns about cultural patronage and political and financial influence undulate through the texts raising questions and issuing warnings regarding tightening structural influences on the creation of art. While artists in the

1950s and 1960s may have been dismissive of any potential influence the money carried, the work they created exhibits a pre-occupation with the changing landscape and witnesses the institutionalization of creative production.

The Ford Foundation programs discussed here continue to live on in and were precursors of institutions such as the National Endowment for the Arts. They were a first step in the normalization of corporate patronage and corporate oversight of artistic creation and knowledge production. It was no longer strictly speaking the writers, artists, publishers, and publics determining artistic success or value, but anonymous selection committees meeting behind closed doors. The grants and fellowships offered by both public and private institutions traced in the writings comprise an environment we now take for granted: a world in which academics and

4 artists alike compete for fellowships and grants to secure funding, create time, ease the birth of the project, but also to build a resume, garner accolades, get one more step up the ladder. With ever-new fantastically rich philanthropies being created by technology companies whose power and reach into our lives is already ubiquitous, it behooves us to contemplate how philanthropies became accepted patrons and how their patronage influences the creation, circulation, and success of art.

The Cultural Cold War in Scholarly Literature

Focused scholarly attention on the cultural Cold War began with Frances

Stonor Saunders’ historical exposition of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the

Cultural Cold War (1999). The themes she discusses, including the network of influence, the relationship between art and politics, the role of patronage, and the nature of intelligence agencies, are all key foci addressed throughout the studies that have followed. Saunders’ central argument is that during the early and mid-Cold War, the CIA funded a powerful network of influential cultural figures to try to shape intellectual and wider cultural thought in a direction favorable to American foreign and domestic policy. Her extensive archival research and first-hand interviews proved this without refute and laid the groundwork for further research. There is little doubt that the CIA funded certain intellectuals to try to influence opinion in their preferred direction. Other questions raised by Saunders are answered less satisfactorily. How did the network function? Was the CIA the main operator that gave commands and everyone followed? How influential was the CIA’s funding in shaping intellectual debate? Did it promote or enable certain views and effectively smother others? As

Saunders herself asks, “How many of those writers and thinkers who acquired an 5 international audience for their ideas were really second-rater, ephemeral publicists, whose works were doomed to the basements of second-hand bookstores?” (Saunders

5). And further, beyond the key leaders of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, what happened to all of the participant artists and writers? How did this episode affect their work and their trajectory after involvement?

At roughly the same time Saunders’ book went to press, Scott Lucas published

Freedom’s War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union (1999). In his book,

Lucas challenged US diplomatic history on the Cold War arguing that far from just

“being right” and defending freedom with a diplomatic, economic and political fight, the U.S. had a clear ideology that it aimed to shape and bolster through what Lucas coined as the state-private network. The Truman Doctrine laid out precedence for expanded and interventionist American foreign policy. It was underpinned by and thrived on both covert operations and private, citizen groups who “joined the good fight.”2 These small private groups and citizens, along with CIA cultural covert action, Lucas argues, actually shaped much of the Cold War through psychological and cultural elements. Lucas uses a myriad of examples to demonstrate how the state- private network functioned and influenced the Cold War. The US ideology was based on individual freedom and as a result, the country’s elite argued, this naturally superior culture could not be promoted by groups and individuals openly subsidized by the government. Instead, all cultural activity had to appear as the spontaneous action of free citizens. Thus, Lucas asserts that the state-private network developed partially from remnants of WWII, with returning service people taking their passion for the cause of freedom abroad and US internationalism into their businesses,

2 For more on American citizen groups and their role in American foreign policy in the twentieth century, see Lucas 1999; Laville 2002; Wilford 2003 and 2008. 6 organizations, and charities to both urge their fellow citizens to join the cause and inspire local organizations to support the government abroad.

There is no doubt that this effort was led by government agencies such as the

Department of State, the CIA, and the Psychological Strategy Board. While the State

Department funded several initiatives on its own, a crucial way that the agencies operated was to identify groups already in existence or to find loose groups of individuals who could create an organization that aligned with the correct political spectrum and then subsidize them to continue carrying out their work. These organizations included groups such as the CCF, the Committee on the Present

Danger, the Committee for Free Asia, the National Committee for a Free Europe, and

Radio Free Europe, down to local organizations like the Lions Club and the American

Legion, not to mention labor unions, universities, and academic organizations such as the American Historical Society. Lucas traces how the government, particularly CIA officials, targeted large foundations and urged them to fund projects supporting the government’s efforts, including CIA efforts to identify wealthy individuals who could set up shell foundations through which the government could funnel money to desired causes. Through these channels, film and TV productions, book and journal publishers, art exhibits, and performances were all supported in the name of US supremacy in the Cold War. By documenting such a wide range of examples, Lucas makes an impressive argument for how the state-private network formed and functioned as a main and impervious force in the United States throughout the Cold

War and beyond.

Lucas’s study established how the US government approached the propaganda war and outlined ways its efforts permeated the private sphere. It did not look very

7 closely at how the public and private areas of the state-private network melded and worked together in practice, which was primarily through elite leadership. Inderjeet

Parmar successfully conceptualized how state-private networks functioned through elites using a Gramscian based analysis of power to explain more precisely how

“cooperative state-private elite networks played a powerful role in mobilising for US global expansionism during the Cold War” (2006, 13). One example that illustrates how the state-private network Parmar outlines was embodied can be glimpsed through the life of Shepard Stone, a key contributor to the creation of the Berlin programs. Volker R. Berghahn’s book America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in

Europe (2001) focuses on Stone to show what Berghahn sees as the cultural, political, and socioeconomic factors that shaped the trans-Atlantic cultural Cold War and in doing so illustrates exactly how the state-private network was engendered through

US-American elites. Berghahn does not describe Stone’s life and scope of activities using the terminology of the state-private network, but there is no doubt that Stone and his story are a prime example of what Lucas, Saunders, and Parmar describe.

Stone was a fascinating character who played key roles in the United States’ efforts of

German reconstruction, including re-building the press and funding journals such as

Der Monat. He was also a journalist for The New York Times and a director at the

Ford Foundation, where he helped facilitate several grants to cultural projects in

Europe. A bulk of Berghahn’s book focuses on Stone’s time as a Ford Foundation director and his efforts to funnel money to the CCF. Stone ran into several problems with this effort including push back from other Ford Foundation executives who did not want to be in bed with the CCF and thus the CIA.

8 While Berghahn remains focused on the European and American cultural collision, his main contribution to cultural Cold War studies is arguably the way he astutely outlines how networks of artists, intellectuals, US-American corporations, philanthropies, and governments worked together throughout the Cold War conflict.

Berghahn illustrates with a range of archival evidence how these trans-Atlantic networks rose from a variety of connections and shared interests and highlights how tensions and disagreements strained relationships and efforts. He outlines the Ford

Foundation’s debates about whether or not to fund organizations that were also known to receive covert government funding and recounts the demise of the CCF, expounding Stone’s and his contemporaries’ views that the funding stream did not matter because the cause was so valuable. The lack of critical analysis on this point leaves the study insightful, but dissatisfying.

While Saunders, Berghahn, and Lucas all identified and documented trans-

Atlantic post-WWII networks as key sites underpinning US ideology, Giles Scott-

Smith in The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the

CIA and Post-war American Hegemony takes a sustained look at how and why supposedly apolitical culture represented by the CCF, became an ideological and inherently political force and how the cultural Cold War tied together the cultural, political, and economic spheres of Western society. Scott-Smith explains this emerging state-private network of political, economic, and cultural elites on an international scale via Antonio Gramsci’s conception of hegemony. As Scott-Smith summarizes:

For Gramsci, the ‘bridge’ between political and civil society…was provided by the alliances of leading groups, and the coordination of their interests, in the political, economic and cultural realms. The result, in certain specific historical periods, can be referred to as the hegemony or ‘intellectual-moral 9 leadership’ of a particular group based upon a ‘historic bloc’…Above all, Gramsci considered that this concept of hegemony depended on the transformation of sectional interests, via influence and compromise, into a ‘general interest’ for society as a whole that could overcome conflicting interpretations of the world. Hegemony thus operates as a kind of ‘umbrella of interpretation’ and not as a simple integrated system…The key participants in the elucidation of a ‘general interest’ were ‘the intellectuals’ (Scott-Smith 4– 5).

Within this useful explanation, the CCF becomes a major factor in helping to create a trans-Atlantic hegemony in the post-WWII period, a Marshall plan for culture. An important point Scott-Smith makes is that the CCF and other similar organizations were only possible because the concerns of the government, economic leaders, intellectuals, and artists were broadly shared in the late 1940s and 1950s: to contain totalitarianism and Soviet aggression. Scott-Smith argues that intellectuals and artists were happy to team up with the political and economic elite because it “gave their opinions greater effect” (5). There is no doubt this was the motivation for many participants, particularly in the early days and throughout the height of the CCF in the

1950s. The formation of the organization was a part of its particular historic moment and support for it could not survive the changing times of the 1960s. When the CIA funding was revealed in 1967, there were a range of reactions from denying any knowledge of the funding source, to explaining the shared purpose, and an outright,

“So what?”

Andrew N. Rubin supports Scott-Smith’s assertion of the creation of US hegemony by tracing how the cultural Cold War, particularly formations such as the

CCF and foundation sponsored cultural activities, was a process through “which imperial authority was transferred from Britain and France to the United States” (17).

This process was tied up with and aided by new technologies that, when coupled with investments and backed by state-power, re-positioned the writer within society and 10 changed his or her relationship with the public. Through organizations such as the

CCF and its many global publications, the US authorities could effectively circulate and promote emissaries of Western culture they approved of and silence those they did not. Rubin outlines cases in which critical pictures of the U.S. were minimized or revised into more favorable impressions and lists a number of writers who were excluded entirely from the new possibilities of rapid translation and global circulation. As Cedric R. Tolliver has argued, cultural Cold War efforts ensured that criticism that directly challenged the status quo in relation to the mode of production and economic structure, were stifled. Other forms of criticism, for examples those related to civil rights, were encouraged (16-18). Tolliver and Rebecca M. Schreiber both investigate how such exclusions enabled and demanded criticism be developed in exile and through diaspora communities, particularly in relation to questions of race and between the Global North and South as opposed to the trans-Atlantic. While distance from the U.S. and from state-backed funding apparatuses surely required and sometimes aided artists to develop critical perspectives, particularly in a transnationalist lens, my analysis shows that participation in and the milieu of the dominant Cold War culture also engendered striking critiques to the developments of institutional culture specifically and Cold War culture more generally.

While the CCF must be understood within its historical context, it is important to take stock of the lasting effects and influences this artistic and intellectual collaboration with the power elite had on works made in the period. As Scott-Smith acknowledges, funding always comes with some strings attached. In the case of the

CCF, this meant that the CIA had some level of control. How much control they exercised is an open debate, but it would be disingenuous to believe they had no

11 influence, if not in published content and final conference participants, at least in the personnel who edited the journals and made selections (Rubin, Saunders, Scott-Smith,

Wilford). Beyond this debate about selection and editorial control is the simple fact that artistic works were produced within this context and under state-private funding.

A close look at the texts created within the environment illustrates a clear awareness and even anxiety on the part of the artists about this new cultural-economic development.

Not enough attention has been paid to non-governmental actors and the influence and struggle of recipient intellectuals and artists. Hugh Wilford and Helen

Laville both call into question the idea that the CIA and other US agencies were pipers that could simply play a tune and make artists and intellectuals dance along as they believe is implied in the title of Saunders’ book. In the first instance, it is hard to find evidence that Saunders suggested artists and intellectuals simply followed orders given by the CIA. She has clearly outlined that the agency and other funding bodies would have liked it to be that way, but does not make robust arguments that it was ever the case. That aside, Wilford, Laville, and their colleagues make a clear point that up until their work, little attention had been given to the wide range of citizen groups the CIA funded and to the complex relationships recipients of government funding had with their patrons. Their work highlights the agency of recipient groups and casts doubt on the power and effectiveness of the US government. They provide insight into the various ways cooperation came about, whether through subtle back channel grants to support already existing work, direct relationships, or seed funding

12 to create a new effort. They also capture the breadth of CIA funding efforts across virtually every area of American and European society.3

A robust analysis of how state-private network patronage has influenced literature, particularly the trajectories of careers and the works created within this environment, is lacking. Institutional critique, such as the work of Hans Haacke, and studies such as Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, have shed light on how art institutions, corporations, foundations, and governments have all crossed boundaries and played pivotal roles in shaping the direction of conceptual and performance art along with physical arts, such as painting and sculpture. When it comes to literary affairs, analysis has centered primarily on publications. There is clear evidence that the CIA and its subsidiaries did indeed have preferred tastes.

Through his research on the New York Intellectuals and CIA funding for the magazines Encounter and Partisan Review, Wilford argues that in the realm of literature, the CIA had a penchant for highbrow, high modernist literature. While the agency supported a mix of low, middle, and highbrow projects in the performing arts and music, when it came to literature and visual arts, it had clear preferences. Wilford attributes this to basic shared values of formalism, internationalism, and elitism shaped by similar backgrounds, educations, and lived experiences. Ultimately, he argues that through the CIA and its allied funders, high-modernism was shored up and enjoyed a longer life through publications such as Encounter and Partisan Review than it would have on its own.

Greg Barnhisel in Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American

Cultural Diplomacy furthers this argument with his excellent analysis of a range of

3 For more on the CIA’s Cold War funding and the state-private network see Lucas 1999; Laville 2002; Scott-Smith 2002; Wilford 2013 (2003); Laville and Wilford, Eds. 2006; Wilford 2008. 13 Cold War literary and artistic activities, supporting Wilford’s claim that cultural Cold

War efforts lionized high-modernism. Barnhisel investigates how modernism went from being a cultural and political cause to a style in the Cold War period, focusing on what he defines as “Cold War modernism”: programs in the 1940s and 1950s “that used modernism for pro-Western propaganda as well as the politically driven reinterpretation of the modernist movement that undergirded” them (Barnhisel 3).

Cold War modernism in this definition has little to do with the content of the literature or art produced, but is focused primarily on how it is used and what meanings certain, usually government groups, wanted to imbue it with to make it a useful cultural-diplomatic weapon. While Barnhisel’s volume provides some new, further analysis and examples of how private and public bodies worked together to publish magazines, circulate books, and expand radio programing, it provides little room for the acknowledgement or maneuver of the artists and authors involved.

The CIA and its allies may have had clear ideas of what type of art and which artists they preferred to fund, but the amount of control and influence over what was produced, circulated, and performed was a rather different question. Wilford’s work on Encounter is insightful on this count. While Rubin shows that a couple of articles were questioned by the editors of Encounter, Wilford convincingly establishes

Stephen Spender’s influential editorship and more broadly outlines how several

British writers used the magazine much to their advantage, shaping it as a literary magazine first and edging out the CCF’s and CIA’s desired focus on politics (Wilford

262–296). His analysis makes the important point that all recipients had their own aims, ideas, and priorities and used the CIA largess to their own clear advantage.

Penny von Eschen in Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold

14 War (2004) provides a similar insight. Through her work on the State Department’s funding of jazz tours, she clearly shows that patronage did not equate to artistic control, much to the consternation of, in her case, the State Department. As she suggests, it is in these open spaces of performance and production, where control cannot be maintained, that meanings, discourses, and policies can be contested.

Picking up on von Eschen and Wilford’s suggestions of artistic autonomy, my dissertation takes a closer look at what writers actually produced while being funded by the West’s cultural Cold War patrons. The works and career trajectories of second- level participants, who received funding administered by the non-governmental organizations, has not been given due attention. The CCF was one organization, a major organization, but only one that funneled funding to and assisted a range of projects. The participants and the literature they produced in this wider field can provide useful insights into the broader cultural implications and lasting effects of this new hegemonic formation. It also shows that though the CIA and its sprawling network may have preferred high-modernism, the second-level recipients, particularly those abroad, had wider cultural interests.

Additionally, while the CCF was an organization born of its historical moment, the state-private network it was a part of did not simply disappear in the mid-1960s. The collaboration morphed. The CCF is just one example of a wider change in cultural patronage during the mid-twentieth century. A look at the Berlin programs, spawned from links to the CCF, can demonstrate how private-public funding arrangements normalized the government and philanthropic funding of artists and enlighten us as to how the state-private network continues today. The works of the early participants also provide testimony about the wider literary influences

15 participation in this new hegemonic cultural formation had, above all reminding us that while writers and artists participated and were shaped by the environment, they also maintained their independence and ability to contribute to its creation.

Critical Perspectives on Philanthropy

While cultural Cold War scholars have given little attention to philanthropies, scholars of education and social sciences have looked critically at them, specifically

US-American philanthropy and its influence domestically and internationally. The fields of International Relations and International Development and Education began paying attention to the role and extent of US-American philanthropy both within the

U.S. and without in the early 1970s. The scope of the developing critique solidified in the early 1980s with a range of publications that questioned the motives and roles of

American philanthropies in development economics focused on educational, engineering, and social science-based projects. The outcome of this body of work was a lucid critique of how US philanthropies use their wealth and positions to influence knowledge production and knowledge networks and, in turn, reinforce the liberal capitalist socioeconomic system that they lead and from which they benefit. Evidence from these studies has substantiated four key points about the way that US-American philanthropic foundations go about their work and in doing so shape society:

1. American philanthropies are run by elite networks that are closely tied to the US government through mutually shared interests. 2. American philanthropies have a strong belief in elite leadership, which they seek to re-create and extend across the globe by establishing elite leaders funded and trained in their own programs. 3. As a result of this belief, they primarily fund educational and cultural programs and research that reinforces the current socioeconomic system and their position within it.

16 4. Foundations have played a key role in shaping the US government including its national and foreign policy in order to reinforce and strengthen the state capitalist system (Apple, Arnove, Berman, Parmar).

Two books from the early 1980s distilled this critique and focus, Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad, a collection edited by Robert F. Arnove and The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller

Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy by Edward

H. Berman. The chapters in Arnove’s book take a critical structural view and analyze the role foundations play in the production of culture and the creation of public policy both domestically and globally in the post-WWII era. The basic argument is that philanthropies are highly influential, but unaccountable bodies that erode democratic principles, maintain the current social order that benefits the rich elite (themselves), and play a powerfully formative role in society generally and in the United States specifically. Philanthropies use their resources to shape knowledge and the cultural and political agenda to reinforce the system that secures their status. In other words, they do exactly the opposite of what they claim to be working for: the spread of democratic principles.

In 1983, Edward H. Berman wrote an intriguing study on the ideology of philanthropy and the influence the Big Three (Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford) have had and continue to have on American foreign policy. Berman outlines a comprehensive view of the role foundations played in shaping and supporting US foreign policy from the early twentieth century to the 1980s. Like Arnove’s collection, Berman establishes that while the foundations talk about the humanitarian aims of their work, their internal records clearly show how their programs and efforts were designed to support US foreign interests and their own interests within state

17 capitalism. He elaborates that they do this not through overt efforts, but by supporting certain ideas and institutions that align with their goals and in doing so underpin the blunter forms of American foreign policy while maintaining the social system and reality that support their advantage within the system of state capitalism. He emphasizes that philanthropies overwhelmingly invested in education and knowledge production in order “to train individuals who not only share their perspectives, but who will use their influence to ‘sell’ it to others who are less convinced of its merits”

(Berman 13).

Inderjeet Parmar has revitalized the critique of these earlier scholars and brought them into prominence within the field of international politics. His contribution to their groundwork is a number of case studies that demonstrate exactly how philanthropies have led the US government in shaping and executing its foreign policy in the post-WWII period, in effect building the intellectual infrastructure required to carry out the Truman Doctrine. In Foundations of the American Century:

The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power, he makes the convincing argument that the three major foundations played a central role in pushing the United States out of isolationism in 1930s and 1940s by building up

American international capabilities and intelligence through support of internationalist and interventionist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations and funding International Relations and Areas Studies programs throughout the nation’s universities. He further establishes how the foundations promoted

Americanism throughout the Cold War by supporting American Studies, challenging anti-Americanism, and, most importantly, building elite international networks.

Parmar particularly looks at the Big Three’s financial support of associations, study

18 programs, and elite exchanges to show how they established American Studies networks in Europe and Asian and African studies networks primarily in the United

States. He outlines how Ford played key roles in influencing personnel through education and incentives in support of the Suharto regime in Indonesia and Augusto

Pinochet’s rise in Chile. While Parmar has the tendency to strip agency from program participants and funding recipients, his argument nevertheless clearly establishes that

American philanthropies have played an influential role in not only supporting government aims, but in leading and shaping the US government in their image through the funding of projects, the building of networks across the globe, and by influencing knowledge creation that suits the foundations’ views. Philanthropies were not and are not instruments of the State, but rather play a formative role sometimes steering the government and its programs.

The Ford Foundation and the Berlin Programs

By 1961, the Ford Foundation had a history of sponsoring artistic programs and supporting government valued initiatives. Through the 1950s, Ford had provided funding for New Directions publishing, Chekov publishing, the Harvard International

Summer School, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the magazines Der Monat,

The New Leader, and Perspectives USA (Saunders 139–43 and 339; Barnhisel, Ch. 5;

Wilford, Mighty Wurlitzer 126). It also ran two programs that funded individual writers. The first iteration supported writers for two years to simply write. In order to focus the results and return on investment, the second iteration supported writers to work with a specific theater company to understand their needs. The programs had impressive recipients including James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Anne

19 Sexton, e.e. cummings, Katherine Anne Porter, and Flannery O’Connor. Throughout the 1960s, Ford also supported dance companies, theaters, and other domestic art initiatives, while internationally it took over funding the CCF and provided support to its successor organization the International Association for Cultural Freedom, along with providing grants to Pugwash and American PEN (Berghahn, 250–264; Saunders

366; White 486; Wolfe 131).

The Ford Foundation proudly stated on its 2019 website that in “the US, Ford began supporting arts and culture before any government agency did so” (Ford

Foundation). Ford’s claim that they beat the government is correct in an official and open sense, but, as outlined above, the US government funded several cultural initiatives covertly during the same period as Ford’s proliferation of cultural activity.

Outside of the United States, Ford and the US government generally worked towards the same goals of promoting American culture to strengthen American interests and the West’s hand in the cultural Cold War. This does not mean that they were always coordinating their efforts or agreed on how to best support cultural activity.

Ford’s website also declares that “Worldwide, Ford’s arts programs have focused on cultural preservation and supporting diversity…Ford has promoted diversity and post-conflict reconciliation through museums, cultural festivals, and documentary films” (Ford Foundation). They have surely done positive and productive work in all of these areas, but during the cultural Cold War, they were also on the front lines of conflict, particularly in Berlin. Out of all of Ford’s cultural projects, the Berlin Artist-in-Residence program presents the best access point for examining public-private patronage and its various effects during the mid-twentieth century. It offers a concentration of artists paid to be present in a politically charged

20 and controversial project. The range of artists who took part and their particular social, economic, and political positions offers a petri dish of exploration and insights.

Importantly, the involvement of the biggest philanthropic organization in the world at the time and the location in the center of the all-consuming Cold War, created a unique moment when a wide range of artists had to grapple with ever-present questions of financial and political engagement. The variety of compromises and answers they came up with is instructive.

Where money comes from and who decides to pay matters. The literature created within the Berlin project particularly and under the guise of foundation funding more generally shows that the emerging vast state-private patronage network put creative production in a new environment, one that could not be outside of the

State and one that, no matter how ambivalent artists were to the source of their funding, could not be ignored. It may have been easy for CCF participants to brush aside their collaboration or claim ignorance, but there is no doubt the public-private patronage of the Cold War affected artistic production and instigated lasting change.

In some cases, it raised artists’ fortunes or helped them at least muddle through. In others, it was just another gig in a string of many. Examining the Berlin Projects as a pivot point makes clear how state-private patronage reached across the artistic world weaving in and out of, in this case, writers’ lives. Studying a handful of writers brings to light why this new network of public-private patronage was embraced by some, establishing how it influenced their career trajectories, work, and legacies. While all of these writers had their own motivations for taking up the Ford Foundation’s offer, many of them monetary, there is no doubt that participation shaped their literary focus. In one way or another, they all engaged with the matter at hand, putting Berlin,

21 Germany, the state of the Cold War, and the essence and problematic nature of the over-simplified conflict and its propagators into their creative production. The depictions were certainly not all complimentary, but all of the writers were employed in thinking about the situation in which they found themselves. More broadly, the emerging state-private network, the new form of cultural patronage birthed by the

Cold War conflict was only set to grow. While funding waxes and wanes based on political imperative, the institutions established in the hour of ideological need live on, enforcing the importance of patronage and the influence of political and capital enterprise in creative endeavors.

The aim of this dissertation is not to argue that patronage is negative. On the contrary, some form of patronage is necessary. No matter if money comes from a corporation, a government, or a group of fans, artists need money to live and create.

The main point is that where that money comes from matters and it is important to understand how and why it does to better grasp the influences and pressures funding and political circumstances put on the production of art. It is easy for artists to say, and many of them in the cultural Cold War did, that they will just take the money and then do what they like, but the evidence suggests that in subtle ways the origin of the funds has consequences. Looking at how four artists from different backgrounds navigated these decisions provides insight into how we might think about our own options.

Overview

Chapter one details the origins of the Berlin Artist-in-Residence Program and

Berlin Literary Colloquium (LCB). The institutions were born of acute political

22 necessity. While President John F. Kennedy is remembered for his triumphant visit to

Berlin in 1963, his handling of the Berlin Wall’s construction had left Berliners deflated and the American and German governments concerned that citizens would abandon the island city. Economic and cultural support substituted for the political and military interventions that would not be supplied. In order to rally the Cold

Warriors, elements of the state-private network were put into action. Among a flurry of economic and culture initiatives, the Berlin, German, and US governments coordinated with the Ford Foundation, the CCF, and local cultural influencers to bolster Berlin’s cultural life: the Artists-in-Residence program and LCB were born.

The creation of these programs evidences the state-private network, as expounded by

Lucas, Wilford, and Parmar, in action and furthers Wilford’s and Barnhisel’s point that coordination was not always smooth and took much more effort than a mere direction of resources. The key involvement of German author and literary critic

Walter Höllerer exhibits how the state-private network intertwined with and was used by local cultural leaders to their own advantage highlighting that local recipients were also necessary for success.

The chapter further looks at how the Berlin projects were distinctly different from other cultural Cold War initiatives and examines how the various parties involved fought to shape the narrative of the programs. The majority of cultural Cold

War projects were publications, conferences, and tours. They were focused on the circulation of ideas and people, with short stays, entrances, and exits. Establishing a residential program was a different kind of initiative. It facilitated the circulation of people, art, and ideas, but also required investment and integration to enable the institutions to thrive. In addition, the programs were established when the cultural

23 Cold War in Europe was already won by the West. By 1960, the West’s cultural and economic efforts had shifted to so-called Third World countries. The initiative in

Berlin therefore was not aimed at winning over European intellectuals, but was intended to make Berlin a cultural capital of the world; it was to be the West’s showpiece, literally on the frontline of battle, and a node in the network of Western cities beckoning to the southern and eastern hemispheres. These two factors shaped the programs’ trajectories and also the selection of participants. In addition, they gave

Berliners and the German press a different stake in the process. The American financers, the German government, and the German administration on the ground tried to shape the narrative of the program amid a critical public: who was doing the selection was just as important as who was selected or overlooked.

Chapters two, three, four, and five focus on specific writers who took part in the initial years of the program when Ford was in charge, 1963 and 1964. Chapter two explores Gruppe 47’s connection to the trans-Atlantic state-private network and the cultural Cold War through a focus on Walter Höllerer as a literary impresario and the work of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Bachmann’s involvement and her relationship with Höllerer serve as a window into the wider connections the project had with Gruppe 47 and fulfills the argument begun in chapter one that Höllerer, in securing the project, played a key role in shaping German postwar literature by creating institutions more permanent than Gruppe 47 and selectively curating involvement. Bachmann’s residency in Berlin signaled both a turn in her work from poetry towards prose and also her departure from the cultural Cold War network.

Though her involvement in Berlin did not create these shifts on their own, they seem to have facilitated the transition and confirmed her decision. Bachmann’s deeper

24 involvement in the cultural Cold War’s state-private network could have only solidified for her, her now famous assertion that fascism starts between individuals. It is evident to see from Bachmann’s writings in and after Germany that the milieu of the cultural Cold War, particularly as experienced through the German-American nexus, was a new historical experience that reflected and refracted the recent fascist past, continuing the abuse and manipulation of people in a different way. The masculinist political discourse that dominated the 1950s and 1960s attempted to harness its subjects to its effort and in the process distorted them through financial influence. Bachmann rejected this effort. The first time she publicly announced a shift was in her 1964 Georg Büchner Prize speech “Ein Ort für Zufälle.” Her work after this point, her Todesarten Project, focused on the themes and concerns outlined in her speech. Her 1971 novel, Malina, solidifies her critique of the cultural state-private network and the role it plays in continuing the domination and destruction of individuals.

The third chapter peers over the Iron Curtain with a focus on Witold

Gombrowicz. The Ford grant enabled Gombrowicz to return to Europe from his impoverished self-exile in Argentina. While far removed from the European continent, he was always engaged through publications and his return was celebrated.

He was one of only two participants and the only writer to be from the other side of the Wall. Gombrowicz quickly became a lively and key member of the institutes, creating a sense of community. However, his experience also shows the complex position of being within Europe, but far from home. His diaries and his final novel

Cosmos, written on his return to Europe and partially in Berlin, encapsulate the complexities of the moment and the many divides both sides of the cultural Cold War

25 conflict attempted to obfuscate, but often only deepened. If from a distance

Gombrowicz appeared he could be an archetypal Cold Warrior, in his writing he showed he was equally critical of both sides and more focused on reaching over the newly etched border than proving which side was right, creating complications for himself and his funders.

Chapters four and five focus on Piers Paul Read and W.H. Auden respectively. Auden and Read both were invited to Berlin as a result of tenuous connections to the CCF and state-private network. They also had independent connections to Germany, which only aided their participation. Auden was well established and brought literary star power to the programing. Read was yet to write his first book. The son of famed British communist literary critic Herbert Read, he aspired to be a writer and had previously lived in Germany. His time in Berlin enabled him to write his first novel; it had a clear influence on the literature he produced and the trajectory of his early career. Both Auden and Read exemplify the effectiveness of the state-private network: Auden exhibits the ease and luxury it offered to artists and how they could use it to their advantage, while Read shows how being connected enabled success. Auden’s flourishing publications in Germany in the

1960s and the themes of Read’s subsequent books further illustrate that Berlin provided the continued connections and focus on the topic that the funders had intended. Yet each writer also provides targeted critiques of the new cultural economic system within which they found themselves enmeshed.

By analyzing both the institutional formation and the individual decisions and reactions, we are able to understand how the institution and writer interact and intertwine in complex ways. Institutional patronage elevates and enables writers, but

26 it also attempts to construct the bounds of acceptable thought. Participants negotiate their presence and have diverse motivations, but all of them are put into similar circumstances. During the Cold War, institutional patronage flourished and was inseparable from the political. Personal involvement therefore meant it was impossible to uncouple one’s self from the political, especially in such a controversially charged location as Berlin. The four writers’ works show that this set of circumstances forged a new kind of literature: foundation literature. Cutting across genres—experimental, satirical, middle-brow—this new subgenre directly incorporated the presence of foundations and the state-private network of patronage and exchange. In most cases, it did so in order to issue a warning about the creeping danger of boundaries and borders institutional patronage attempted to set around creative work. Ultimately, it left writers, even those who now had financial stability, longing for what Virginia Woolf articulated as “a room of one’s own” (1989).

27 Chapter One Men with Money: The Ford Foundation

“The struggle for Germany is one of the epic conflicts of our time…The observation of that shrewd old Bolshevik, Molotov— ‘What happens in Germany, happens in Europe’ –still holds much truth.”– Deane & David Heller, 1962

On August 12, 1961, the lines of the Berlin Wall were first scratched on the earth with rolls of barbed wire, makeshift fences, and paint. It was a shock for everyone in West Berlin and on the Western side of the Cold War. Berlin had been simmering as a flashpoint for some time, but no one thought a wall would be built, especially not in the summer of 1961.4 The first reaction was surprise followed by silence. The Western reply was absent, leaving Berliners exasperated. They took to the streets in protest. The CIA reported to Washington that “West Berlin crowds on

15 August criticized Brandt for making ‘high-sounding statements but failing to take concrete measures.’ …West Berliners waved banners saying ‘Better dead than Red’;

‘We demand countermeasures’; ’90 hours without doing anything’; and ‘Betrayed by the West?’” (CIA History Staff 530). The CIA report suggested the protest was allowed and managed by the West Berlin government to help citizens let off steam and avoid any escalation of events, but there is no doubt Berlin’s mayor, Willy

Brandt, felt the pressure and was also wondering where his allies were.

On the other side of the Atlantic, President John F. Kennedy had been on holiday at his family compound in Cape Cod. It was early afternoon on August 13 by the time he knew about the East German actions, twelve hours after the operations had begun. After consultation with his advisors, everyone agreed it was best to take a

4 Most U.S. intelligence reports pointed to the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 as a key event and had plans for acting or intervening around this time. This early activity truly did take Washington by surprise. See Taylor 2006; Kempe 2012. 28 measured response—no one wanted a war. By August 16, the West had barely made a peep. Under pressure, Brandt wrote to Kennedy expressing Berlin’s disappointment, highlighting the risk for the Cold War and requesting American reinforcement to help clarify the situation and sustain morale. While the letter was a leap for a mayor and also a political move, as Brandt was running for Chancellor against Konrad Adenauer, it did trigger a reaction. Forty-eight hours later, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and famed WWII general Lucius D. Clay brought Kennedy’s reply in person along with a reinforcement of American troops. Berliners celebrated their arrival wildly and the city’s spirit lifted (Kempe, Taylor).

Johnson soon returned to Washington, but Clay stayed on as a special advisor to the President and a symbol of American commitment to the city. Clay had been the military governor in post-war Germany and had directed the Berlin Airlift of 1948.

He was widely known and admired in the city. He was also committed to the post-

WWII order his work and time serving in the US military had helped establish. Clay himself had wished for a stronger American response of force, but slowly accepted that the result was one of the best possible outcomes: West Berlin was reinforced and determined to prosper while direct conflict was avoided (Frederick 226-256, Kempe,

Dean and David Heller). After the tank standoff at Friedrichstrasse in October 1961, the division of Berlin was entrenched. The American response to the Wall was measured to boost Berlin’s morale and establish that the U.S. was going to stay in the city, while also clearly demonstrating that they did not want to fight and would not risk war over a few million Berliners.

With the status of the divided city clarified, its potential as a hot point of the

Cold War waned, but the danger that West Berlin would slowly be engulfed by the

29 German Democratic Republic (GDR) increased. The East German government invested in strongly fortifying the Wall and building it into a permanent structure, while the West promoted investment and cultural activity to create a showcase for all capitalist society had to offer. Clay was well connected to Wall Street and just the man for the job. In a 1962 interview for a book by Dean and David Heller, authors of a number of books on Kennedy-era politics, Clay included a typical plug for investment in Berlin:

The Soviet Union would like to create a situation of apprehension and tension whereby business firms and young people would hesitate to locate in Berlin. In this, they have failed badly, I believe…The economy of the city has fully recovered from the shock of The Wall and is moving forward again. The economic progress made by West Berlin has been amazing…West Berlin is today the greatest industrial center between Paris and Moscow. It is a pleasant place in which to live. It has forests and lakes accessible within the city. West Berlin has developed a highly skilled labor force. Its plant and equipment are among the newest and most modern in the world. Of course, part of its success is due to the lower taxes in Berlin than in the Federal Republic. Because of its importance as an outpost of freedom, West Berlin has been heavily subsidized by the Federal Republic and helped by the United States. There is a problem of attracting young people, since the population is growing older. But a vigorous program of attracting new industry and young people to Berlin has been highly successful. Berlin has enough to offer to compete on even terms (Heller 238–239).

Clay paints Berlin to be an attractive site for investment: low taxes, a strong economy, room for development, government backing and protection, and the public relations advantage of being on the edge of the Cold War. Clay’s campaign also included direct invitations to leading American business leaders and investors to rally support for the walled city. On May 8, 1962, The Wall Street Journal reported the US government’s call for private American investment to support Berlin. While the US and Soviet governments were meeting to discuss the city’s future, the article reports “a surprising number of people in and out of Government [were] quietly doing a wide variety of things to bolster that Communist-encircled city against the threat of Red pressures 30 over the next decade or more” (Geyelin). The flurry of investment in Berlin was tacit acknowledgement that the city and the country were likely to remain divided for the foreseeable future, necessitating long-term support to stave off further Soviet encroachment and ensure West Berlin remained firmly rooted in the Western alliance.

One State Department official declared, “What we want is simply as many new American signs going up in the city as we can get” (Geyelin). To support the campaign, Clay sent letters to over seventy US corporations. Philip Geyelin, the writer of The Wall Street Journal article, gets to the crux of the matter stating, “The

Clay sales pitch begins with a patriotic appeal, but dwells heavily on the practical business advantages of a West Berlin installation…[including] the public relations potential of a Berlin plant or office.” As infamously satirized in Billy Wilder’s 1, 2, 3, companies like IBM, Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith were prime examples of corporations that saw the advantage, wasting no time to highlight their investments as symbols of Western unity and brave first plunges behind the Iron Curtain.

The emphasis of Clay’s campaign was not only on attracting business, but also on building up Berlin’s cultural and educational role to, as one US official said, give

“West Berlin more things to do” (qtd. in Geyelin). This was a call to action for the cultural resources of the Cold War. As of May 1962, the newly established inter- agency Berlin Viability Committee in Washington was sifting through “a wide assortment of proposals to strengthen confidence in Berlin’s economy, enrich the city’s cultural and intellectual assets, and strengthen its sense of purpose over the long haul.” One official commented, “We’ve got so many ideas that the problem is to sort them out” (qtd. in Geyelin). In actuality, by this time several projects were already singled out and underway. On April 5, 1962, Clay wrote to John J. McCloy at the

31 Ford Foundation concerning the cultural sustainability of West Berlin. Clay assured

McCloy that the Germans were hard at work strengthening existing institutions, but felt “that there is a requirement for a few really fruitful new projects upon which we can concentrate considerable energy and resources.”5 He suggested two projects for immediate consideration by the Ford Foundation: a Center for Advanced Study in

Arts and Sciences and a Center for Urban Development. Clay reported that the Berlin

Senate was supportive of the proposals and he expected the exchange of personnel for the projects could begin for the academic year of 1962-63.

Clay could be sure his letter to the Ford Foundation would fall into supportive hands. He was writing to the man who had in fact replaced him as High

Commissioner of Germany in 1949 when the role transitioned from military to civilian hands. Following his appointment in Germany, McCloy had served as the

Chairman for Chase Manhattan Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Council of

Foreign Relations, and the Ford Foundation. He was also a presidential advisor to

Kennedy. Clay’s outreach to McCloy as Chairman of the Ford Foundation was both natural and calculated; both men knew Germany and Berlin well and were committed to the Western Cold War cause.

Clay and McCloy also had a key mutual colleague and friend, Shepard Stone.

By 1962, Stone was the director of the International Division at the Ford Foundation with a focus on Europe. He had an extensive history with Germany and a hand in shaping its postwar future. Stone completed his PhD in Weimar Germany, married a

German, and then wrote for The New York Times as primarily the German and

5 Clay, Lucius D. Letter to John J. McCloy. April 5, 1962. Ford Foundation History Project Files – Regional. Europe-Correspondence, Board of Trustees Mtg Program Docket (1958), Article Re: Artists- In-Residence & Free University of Berlin Foundation Programs. Folder 10, Box 61, FF-Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York, hereafter RAC. 32 European correspondent until WWII. During the war, he worked on intelligence while his wife worked in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. After the war, he became the “Chief of Intelligence” based near Frankfurt and was in charge of establishing a free German press, including radio stations and publishing houses. He later served under McCloy as the Public Affairs Director in the High

Commission of Germany and then followed him to the Ford Foundation (Berghahn).

Clay, McCloy, and Stone shared the same values and priorities regarding Germany’s future and the United States’ potential role.

The Ford Foundation itself was also not a new presence in Berlin. By 1962, the Foundation had invested $5,000,000 in Germany with about half of this spent in

Berlin. In one sense, the new cultural projects could be seen as shoring up this investment. Within the next decade, Ford would grant about $5,000,000 more to

Germany, most of which was also spent in Berlin. In the final recorded figures of

Ford grants in Germany from 1951-1978, the foundation had given $10,446,586 to projects within Germany, $6,166,248 of which was spent in Berlin. The majority of this funding was granted to educational and cultural projects. For example, the Ford

Foundation played a key role in the founding of the Free University of Berlin in 1948 when the University of Berlin, now known as Humboldt University of Berlin, located in East Berlin, was taken over by Soviet forces. The Ford Foundation donated over

$1,000,000 to early resources at the Free University such as buildings and a library.

By the mid-1960s, they had granted the university over $3,000,000. Further educational grants were given to the Technical University of Berlin and provided to

American universities to support faculty exchange to Berlin’s and other German

33 universities. The 1960s cultural programs themselves received over $2,000,000.6

From these figures, it is clear to see that the Foundation was committed to rebuilding

Germany and keeping it in the Western camp.

The Origin of the Ford Foundation

The experiences and connections of McCloy and Stone certainly played an important role in the Foundation’s propensity for supporting the United States’ Cold

War cause. It did not mean though that directions were merely received from the government and then fulfilled word for word. The affiliations that bound Ford’s efforts to US interests were often more subtly intertwined and stemmed from the point of the philanthropy’s establishment and the personnel that set its mission. In

1956, Dwight MacDonald wrote about the Ford Foundation that, “Since bigness does not bore the American public, the Ford Foundation has been chronically in the headlines. It is becoming the kind of folklore symbol the Ford car once was—the first thing that pops into many people’s minds when philanthropy is mentioned”

(Macdonald 5). In relative terms, by mid-century the Ford Foundation dwarfed all other major funding bodies with its monetary resources.

Ford’s dominance stemmed from the Ford Motor Company’s massive wealth.

When Henry Ford died in 1947, he left approximately 90% of the company’s stock to the Foundation, amounting to a half-billion dollars in assets by 1950, outstripping

Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other private entities to make Ford the largest and most powerful philanthropy to ever exist in the United States, up until that time (Rosenfield

6 All investment figures are taken from Summary of FF Grants and DAPs re Germany 1951– March1978. Folder International Affairs – Grants – 1951–1978 – Grants Involving France and Germany, Box 4, Series III: Grants, FA748, International Affairs, FF-RAC. 34 and Wimpee 3). The foundation had a clear, if grandiose, idea of how it aimed to use its cash reserves to influence the world. As Ford’s commissioned history states,

“Foundation president Henry Ford II and other family members were acutely aware that with great wealth came great public responsibility” (Rosenfield and Wimpee 4).

Therefore, with the influx of assets, the head of the foundation, Henry Ford II, commissioned H. Rowan Gaither, attorney and co-founder of the RAND Corporation, to lead a planning process for how to best use the foundation’s resources. The result was the Report of the Study for the Ford Foundation on Policy and Program, more commonly referred to as The Gaither Report. The report had an influential role on the

Ford Foundation, determining initial programmatic efforts and structures. Its underlying principles based on “human welfare with democracy at its core” still guide

Ford’s work today (Rosenfield and Wimpee 5, The Ford Foundation “Our Origins”).

The 1949 report recommended that the foundation take up activity in the sufficiently broad areas of the establishment of peace, strengthening of democracy, strengthening of economics, education in a democratic society, and individual behavior and human relations, with the main aim to improve human welfare (Gaither Study Committee,

Rosenfield and Wimpee 5).

The scope the newly adopted mission statement provided was ideal for emerging Western Cold War aims. Ford’s placement of democracy at the center of its efforts made its work essentially political. The study defined human welfare as having fundamental physical needs met, emphasizing the dignity of the individual so that all men have equal rights and opportunities and each person has the maximum amount of liberty possible within society including freedom of speech, freedom to worship, and freedom of association, with all people instilled with a sense of social responsibility

35 (Gaither Study Committee, Rosenfield and Wimpee 16–18). This definition of human welfare, the report suggests, is closely related to democratic ideals, which come not from a specific form of government, but are a way of life that must permeate every level of society in order to succeed; they are a set a principles, not a set of rules or laws. The careful language framing democratic ideals as a way of life instead of a form of government opens up the Foundation’s aims to influence a wide range of pervasive cultural activities, while pulling the Foundation back from direct political work or interference. In its mission statement, the Gaither Committee therefore concluded that

A great new foundation can thus most appropriately make its entrance into human affairs with a reaffirmation of democratic ideals and with the expressed intention of assisting democracy to meet the challenge and to realize its ideals. The crisis in the world today requires that democracy do more than restate its principles and ideals; they must be translated into action….National conduct based solely upon the fear of communism….is defensive and negative. If such a defensive attitude is allowed to control our planning and thinking, our national effort will be diverted unduly to expedient and temporary measures from the more important tasks ahead, and we may grow like the thing we fight. When democracy is threatened by war we must be prepared to defend it by military action. But military strength is not enough. We must at the same time press democracy forward by reaffirming its principles in action (Gaither Study Committee, Rosenfield and Wimpee 21–22).

The report places the foundation clearly within the American national picture and effort, aligning its work and intentions closely to the state, staking out its opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations into communist infiltration of the US government and their contribution to the Red Scare, and calling for non-military action to strengthen democratic principles at home and abroad as a complementary alternative or support to governmental military action.7 In just a few pages, the Ford

Foundation established itself as a wielder of cultural policy in the name of the United

7 For more on the founding of the Ford Foundation and its anti-McCarthy stance, see Thomas C. Reeves, 1969, especially chapter one. 36 States, clearly outlining the contours of the cultural Cold War taking shape and staking out a claim to be active within them.

Ford’s declaration to use its wealth in the name of democracy came just as the

US government was setting out new Cold War military policy with the passage of

NSC-68, authorizing the build-up of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, and taking cultural diplomacy more seriously with the passing of the Smith-Mundt act in 1948. 8

This was hardly a coincidence. The Gaither Report was created by consulting dozens of government and private leaders, including state and federal officials, United

Nations representatives, business executives, professional and military leaders, and the heads of labor organizations and small businesses. While members of the government were consulted, the report itself directly explains the difference between government and private policy stating that the role of philanthropy is unique because

It has no stockholders and no constituents. It represents no private, political, or religious interests…This freedom from entanglements, pressures, restrictive legislations, and private interests endows a foundation with an inherent freedom of action possessed by few other organizations…This very nonpartisanship [sic] and objectivity gives to the foundation a great positive force, and enables it to play a unique and effective role in the difficult and sometimes controversial task of helping to realize democracy’s goals (Gaither Study Committee, Rosenfield and Wimpee 23).

It is telling that the Foundation did not present itself as a private interest, but as an objective and benevolent entity. As the Ford Foundation leaders saw it, they were taking action that others could not or would not take always in the interest of what was objectively right and good. They were of course correct in the fact that, unfettered by constituents or investors, foundations were free to invest and influence

8 For more on the slow formation of U.S. government agencies and policies in the early post-WWII period, see Lucas Scott, 1999. 37 groups and locales as best they could without appearing political and without being hampered by many obligations to justify or explain their actions.

This new wealth and claim to benign do-gooding did not go unnoticed.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating studies on the Ford Foundation and the role of

American philanthropy generally in the mid-twentieth century is Macdonald’s The

Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions published in 1956. The book was originally a series of articles published in The New Yorker throughout 1955.

Macdonald sought to discover exactly what the Ford Foundation, as the largest foundation in the world, was doing with all of its millions. As Macdonald establishes, while there was a lot of discussion and news about the Foundation, few knew what it actually did. Rumors ranged from thinking it was a front for communists on American soil to being a cover for American spies determined to wreck the Soviet Union, among more benign ideas that it supported important research in the fields of medicine and education. Macdonald suggests the actual activities are far more mixed and the functioning of the Foundation itself quite slippery with cooperation occurring between academics, government agencies, and Ford’s immense cash reserves. Where it is presented as common practice for trustees of foundations to be removed from the daily running of the philanthropies, at Ford, Macdonald declares, “trustees have been known to promote their pet causes, give friends introductions to the staff, and otherwise behave in an undisciplined manner” (18). Macdonald astutely outlines how the foundations, particularly Ford, more often serve the “values of the professionals who run them and of the academic community on whose borders they operate” than the values or interests of their founders (24). It is an interesting claim that places the

Foundation’s spending and influence in the liberal internationalist camp, often

38 promoting socialist groups, and rarely supporting or espousing free-reign market capitalism.

It is clear from the formation of the Ford Foundation’s general policy that it was working in tandem with government efforts. It is a mistake though to think that

Ford simply took orders or acted as a hidden arm of the government.9 This deserves more attention. It is essential to understand how, where, when, and to what extent philanthropies worked with the government in order to conceptualize how the relationship between public and private patronage of the arts developed through the

Cold War and continues to affect artistic funding today.

The State-Private Network and the Cultural Cold War

The general scholarly consensus on US government funding of cultural activities in the Cold War is that the US government and its Western allies embraced art forms of dissent, disruption, critique and rebellion such as jazz, modernism, or abstract expressionism to showcase the strength of democratic societies that valued the individual and personal freedom. These government patrons intended cultural support to prove American culture existed and was sophisticated, while also building the idea of “the West” through trans-Atlantic movements and challenging what was seen as the dreary socialist realism of Stalinism. There is no doubt that US agencies and their allies abroad and in the private sector sought to use artistic groups, journals, and movements to their advantage. It is also clear that this was quite a change of

9 The following scholars all add valuable insights to the cultural Cold War, as are discussed within this dissertation, but unfortunately do not interrogate the involvement and relationship of philanthropic foundations beyond stating their involvement and at times a personal connection between a foundation and a government agency: Barnhisel 2015; Wilford 2008; Saunders1999; Lucas 1999; Berghahn 2001; Scott-Smith 2002. 39 perspective for the government generally, which, from the early twentieth century through the early 1950s, primarily focused on monitoring, discounting, and isolating writers and artists through FBI surveillance (Culleton, Maxwell, Washington). The onset of the Cold War changed the governing agencies, their abilities, and their aims.

The newly established CIA employed a cadre of agents with differing perspectives than J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.

Since Macdonald’s book appeared in 1956, little research has been done on the role of philanthropic foundations during the cultural Cold War. The scholarly literature on the cultural side of the conflict generally views private foundations as secondary players or mere conduits of government objectives, focusing instead on government agencies and specific private groups, such as the CCF, National Student

Council, etc. While this work has not focused on philanthropies, it does provide insight into how collaboration between the government and private organizations proceeded and offers suggestions for theoretical approaches that are useful when thinking about the role of philanthropies and the writers who received funding.

The majority of studies focused on the cultural Cold War draw on Antonio

Gramsci, whose work is helpful as an entrance point to analyzing the state-private network in the case of the CCF and the cultural Cold War more broadly. As Scott-

Smith states, Gramsci is particularly insightful because of his “insertion of the role of intellectuals within the construction and maintenance of hegemony. This recognizes cultural-intellectual activity as essentially connected to, and crucially involved with, the material conditions of society” (Scott-Smith 13). Just as Scott-Smith argues that the CCF was a Marshall Plan for trans-Atlantic cultural connections, the Berlin programs were an attempt of the state-private network to establish a strong Western

40 presence in Berlin and to ensure artists were working on the correct side of the Cold

War cultural divide.

Gramsci’s work, written under Italian fascism, is instructive for understanding the position the state-private network was trying to create for intellectuals within the divided city. He reaches his definition of the intellectuals’ purpose by defining the group not by the nature of their activities, but by their position within the larger complex of social relations opening a space for analysis of the forms this collaboration might take in particular historical contexts. Gramsci articulates the role of intellectuals in creating a hegemonic culture through “active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator” (Gramsci 10). The intellectuals are the dominant group’s deputies and serve to organize and connect the hegemonic group to the various strata of society, the superstructures, most generally divided by Gramsci into two areas: private and political (the State). Hegemony is therefore not “a relationship of oppressive dominance…but a ‘process of continuous creation’ in all areas of society (Scott-

Smith 29). It is maintained by consensus through established norms and shared views across a variety and a majority of groups, though not necessarily incorporating all of the groups all of the time.

Gramsci names two types of intellectuals: organic and traditional. Organic intellectuals are individuals of a social group that “give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields” (Gramsci 5). The organic intellectuals emerge as the social group comes into existence, such as entrepreneurs for the bourgeoisies and labor organizers for the working class; each social group will have its own intellectuals. Traditional

41 intellectuals are those intellectuals who are carried over from a previous economic structure, such as ecclesiastics, philosophers, and scholars. Through their

“uninterrupted historical continuity and their special qualification, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group”

(Gramsci 7). Any emerging group of organic intellectuals must therefore find a way to ideologically dominate and incorporate the traditional intellectuals. Scott-Smith argues that the political-economic elite of the post-WWII were the organic intellectuals of a newly emerging hegemony. Philanthropies and their fellows were and are key organic intellectuals in the postwar American hegemony. They “mediate the concerns of the state, big business, party politics, and foreign policy-related academia; articulate a divided system; and constitute and create forums for constructing elite expertise, consensus, and forward planning” (Parmar 5, italicized in the original).

The CCF was a place for the organic and traditional intellectuals to coalesce under the auspices of the US government. Scott-Smith asserts that the “Congress can therefore be seen as a kind of ‘institutionalisation’ of the traditional intellectual for distinct political purposes in relation to American foreign policy at the time” (31). He stipulates that it was only successful because the aims of the CIA and the aims of the intellectual participants were shared: they needed to defend their cultural values and freedom of expression. Scott-Smith examines the CCF in depth, but leaves his analysis at the demise of the Congress, suggesting that the end of the CCF signaled the end of this type of traditional and organic intellectual cooperation. He bases his claim that the institutionalization of the traditional intellectuals occurred for only a brief period because of their association with the CIA. This is accurate for the limited

42 scope of the CCF, but wider changes were afoot that made several tenuous connections between traditional intellectuals and the emergent hegemony with lasting effects. Scott-Smith rightly asserts that the new generation of intellectuals in the

1960s “were not prepared to fight the same battles as before” or side with the US government in support of the Truman Doctrine and US internationalism; the threat was no longer the same and the policy was being used to what many viewed to be catastrophic ends (Scott Smith 165).

It would be wrong to think that the US state-private network simply stopped collaboration with intellectuals in 1967. They did not continue in the same covertly funded ways, but under new guises. The Berlin cultural programs are one such example of how the structure of state and corporate funding normalized through the early cultural Cold War adapted and continued into the 1960s and beyond. The Berlin programs were birthed of the same connections and motivations that led to the CCF, but Ford’s involvement, the structure of the residencies, and the foci of the programing around it illustrate how state and corporate funding came out in the open under a relatively acceptable guise, testing out the sustainability of foundation and residency funding for the changing future. By analyzing philanthropies and their role in connecting intellectuals to the State, we can more fully understand how the role of intellectuals was institutionalized far more permanently then the fleeting years of the

CCF.

Approaching the Berlin Programs

Critical approaches to the cultural Cold War, primarily through studies of the

CCF and of philanthropies, have found Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and the concepts of organic and traditional intellectuals useful in describing intellectual 43 cooperation with the government and philanthropies. Gramsci’s idea of intellectuals’ role also matched the government and philanthropic thinking that motivated them to target intellectuals in the first place. Philanthropies and Cold War government programs wanted to influence elites and intellectuals because, they strategized, if they did, they would be influencing the opinion builders and so in turn shape public opinion in the preferred way. Within the field of Education, Michael W. Apple, in

Ideology and Curriculum, also draws on Gramsci to establish how educational institutions play key roles in maintaining and ensuring an all-encompassing hegemony. Schools, he writes, are not only “one of the main agencies of distributing an effective dominant culture…they help create people (with the appropriate meanings and values) who see no other serious possibility to the economic and cultural assemblage now extant” (Apple 5–6). Apple’s work emphasizes the political nature of education and its relation to knowledge production and the exercise and re- enforcement of power. This is important because, as Arnove has pointed out, philanthropies invest most heavily in education and knowledge production, expending the highest proportion of their grant making on education, the bulk of it on higher education and research (2–4). This is not a coincidence, but a calculated aim by foundations to shape the new elite and thought leaders who will in turn reinforce the system that benefits the leaders and wealth that create and sustain philanthropic foundations. As Tim B. Mueller has argued in his exploration of the Rockefeller

Foundation’s Cold War funding of the Social Sciences and Humanities,

The key players organizing and controlling this ‘co-production’ of hegemony were the brokers of knowledge and power in intelligence and philanthropic institutions. The strategic rationale was thus reinforced with a high-modernist concept of scientific progress. Good science and scholarship and Western liberal values were conceived of as mutually interdependent. In the long run,

44 both would converge, thus greatly minimizing the need to promote Western values by force (117).

Philanthropic foundations had a similar theory for modernization and for how to create an advantageous intellectual hegemony for American dominance: build a network of artists and institutions, who will in turn influence their local society and shape it in the same image.

In the case of Berlin, the state-private networks wanted to once again reinforce the trans-Atlantic community, but they also wanted to tie Berlin to new fronts of the global Cold War, making it an important node in the vision of the cosmopolitan

Western coalition. The entire focus of the Berlin programs was to bring artists to the city to ensure it was international, cultured, and lively. The first decade brought participants from Korea, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Israel, Uruguay, and a range of artists from the Soviet Republics often reflecting recent events. For example, 1969 saw an influx of Czechoslovakian artists to the residency program following the

Prague Spring events. Even in the early 1960s, the focus was not on specifically trans-

Atlantic connections, but more broadly on making sure West Berlin remained tethered to the wider world and an access point to global culture for radio and later TV programs that could be beamed into the Soviet Union.

In light of this, Gramsci’s description of hegemony is powerful because it explores how politics and power are exercised outside of the realm of direct force, explaining how ideas and practices are, as Scott-Smith articulates,

“…institutionalized and presented as norms of social thought and behavior” (4).

Scott-Smith adds to our understanding of how trans-Atlanticism was normalized in

US foreign relations. The cultural Cold War and its widespread affiliations and projects also institutionalized philanthropic and government residences and grants 45 both within Europe and, throughout the second half of the twentieth century, in the rest of the world by encouraging residences from across the globe and inspiring similar programs. What was done for artists is just one aspect of a wider normalization of the practice across all types of intellectual activity.10 While it is important to show the efforts made to create and sustain hegemony, it is also important to understand how the intellectuals and artists themselves interact with and make sense of their place within this constellation of economic and political forces. In the broader picture, the CCF is an exceptional instance of state-private collaboration.

It functioned as well as it did because at the time the intellectual and governmental values and immediate aims were more-or-less shared. More often than not, this is not the case. Nevertheless, artists still take up residences and researchers accept grants.

Economic need is clearly the highest motivation, but what is the outcome of these awkward associations and how do artists and, in this case, writers make sense of their participation and reflect it in their work?

Before turning back to Berlin, it must of course be acknowledged that foundation personnel were and are not only scheming to create a world that benefits them or fulfills US foreign policy goals. They also aimed and continue to support projects that they believe will create a better world. Foundation personnel certainly did often work closely with the US government, particularly during the mid-twentieth century. It was not always or even often a coordinated process. Most of the time, similar efforts emerged from shared values and perspectives working to form a new hegemony. In addition, philanthropies did not simply follow government orders or subscribe to all government policies. As Mueller has shown in the case of

10 For more on how this practice was institutionalized in various fields, see: Arnove 1982; Berman 1983; Apple 2004; Parmar 2014; Wolfe 2018. 46 Rockefeller, “Close cooperation with government agencies was not equivalent to accommodating anti-Communist pressures. Instead, the story involves a complex set of sometimes conflicting and sometimes converging professional and political, epistemological and strategic rationales and practices” (123). Policy draws outlines and suggests action, but individual motivations, priorities, and relationships matter.

The State-Private Network in 1960s Berlin

Competing narratives generated from the collaboration of American agencies, allied governments, powerful organizations, and writers underscore their wider cultural implications and enduring effects on politics, culture, and individuals. To be sure, some participants agreed with the government perspective and gladly supported it, but there was also a great deal of jumping on the bandwagon and going along for the ride. The Berlin projects, because of their prominence and focused, political charge, provide a unique opportunity to look at these competing motivations and narratives through various participants’ accounts, both artistically and administratively, illuminating the complex ways in which individuals and institutions collaborated and confronted each other. The example of the Berlin programs shows precisely how shared interests and particular personnel could be key to the creation and success of a project while also demonstrating that foundations were neither lockstep in line with the government nor did they have clear control over their local collaborators and participants. Yet, this state-private network patronage pervasively had a unique influence on the creative works produced, even if the writers issued critical accounts.

47 By 1961, most people felt the US had won the cultural Cold War in Europe.

After the initial crisis passed and armed conflict was avoided, the Berlin Wall was, to the two superpowers, a way to tie up loose ends and call it settled on the European continent. To the Germans on the ground and Berliners particularly, the new division of the city, the vast changes to their daily lives, the deaths of desperate people trying to escape, and the severing from loved ones, jobs, and homes, was devastating.

Between these two spaces, different parties participated in the spectacle that was divided Berlin; there was no appetite for conflict, but there was plenty of room for cultural and economic elbowing.

The Berlin Crisis had actually given Kennedy an opportunity to revive his administration. When he was inaugurated in January 1961, the U.S. was arguably on the losing side of the Cold War. In 1957, the Soviet Union had leaped ahead in the

Space Race with the first intercontinental ballistic missile and the launching of

Sputnik. Kennedy’s first months in office saw complications of the conflict in Laos, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, along with a weak performance at his summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961 (Gaddis, Kempe, Taylor,

Westad). While in no way eager for armed conflict, Kennedy certainly found in

Berlin an opportunity to show the commitment and strength of the U.S. to Germany and Europe in any way short of military engagement. His eventual reaction, sending

Johnson and Clay, along with reinforcements, did the trick and the promise of investment to shore up the island city gave the US administration a renewed showcase of Western culture literally in the middle of communist territory, an open-air museum of sorts. Thus Clay and company’s investment pitch went out to economic and

48 cultural figures alike and the rally cry was a welcome sound to hardened Cold

Warriors.

Clay could be sure that Stone and McCloy at the Ford Foundation, both with lengthy experience in Berlin, were motivated and committed to the city. Berlin itself was also ripe for cultural investment. The very same month the Wall went up, Willy

Brandt wrote to the CCF. They responded on August 29, 1961 saying, among other things:

It is one thing for a social order to force its citizens, by the millions, to seek asylum elsewhere. It is still more reprehensible to cut off their escape by means of walls and barbed wires across city streets, to threaten them at the point of bayonets, to shoot at them in flight as if they were runaway slaves. This is not a matter of politics or ideology or of social philosophy. It is a matter of the most elementary respect for a human right—and one which all the nationals of the civilized world are on record as having recognized. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, states this right unequivocally (Clause 13, paragraph 2): ‘Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own…’ (International Commission of Jurists 44).

The CCF supported Berlin’s efforts to refute this encroachment and enslavement. As a sign of their support, they sent Nicolas Nabokov, the CCF secretary general, to

Berlin to advise and aid Brandt.

By the time McCloy received Clay’s letter with funding requests, Stone had been working separately for a few months to try to secure Ford funding for the CCF or for an Atlantic Foundation to build trans-Atlantic cultural ties. His efforts were to no avail. His initial requests to Henry Heald, the president of the Ford Foundation, were resisted. Heald was focused on funding domestic projects and, perhaps more importantly, was a strong adherent to the Foundation’s rule of not funding projects or groups that were known to be funded by the CIA (Berghahn 240).

49 Nabokov had a different project to propose to Ford via Stone: a series of cultural projects and festivals in Berlin, ideally with himself in charge of them.

Nabokov proposed the project to Brandt, Stone, and J.E. Slater, another Ford administrator, and found that the new status of Berlin worked to his advantage

(Berghahn 234). Clay’s letter was aptly timed to put more weight into Stone’s and

Nabokov’s argument and urge the project along. Wary of getting bogged down in years of funding, it also helped that a terminal grant request with a coalition of participants (Ford, the U.S. government, and the German Government) was far more desirable to Ford’s board of trustees and to Heald as well, showing that public collaboration with the government could sometimes be advantageous for the philanthropy. It was also a way to satisfy the ever-persistent Stone and give funding to a widely supported cause, the plight of Berlin.11

When Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed the Berlin Senate on

August 19, 1961, he confidently declared, “To the survival and to the creative future of this city we Americans have pledged, in effect, what our ancestors pledged in forming the United States: ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor’”

(Stenographischer Bericht Band III, Nr. 16). Johnson not only attempted to reassure

Berliners about American commitment to the city, tying his country’s success to the city’s future, but also clearly reiterated the cultural Cold War’s premise that free, democratic capitalist societies, were creative. Moreover, by protecting Berlin with

11 Berghahn claims the funding for the CCF was not forthcoming, but The New York Times reported on 10 January 1963 that, along with the Berlin allocation, the Ford Foundation gave $1,000,000 to the CCF for activities in Paris. Further archival research would be required to corroborate either version. See Berghahn, 237–240 and Hechinger, Fred M. “Ford Foundation Aids West Berlin” The New York Times. January 10, 1963, pp. 5. 50 their fortune, might, and honor, Americans would also ensure their own creative freedom continued to live on.

Despite Johnson’s rallying and Brandt’s keen interest to reestablish Berlin as a world-class cultural city, as it had been in the 1920s, the Berlin Senate took more convincing. On September 22, 1961, Brandt led a discussion in the Senate of Berlin’s cultural future. All political factions were behind plans to develop the city’s cultural resources and both the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic

Union (CDU) emphasized that cultural institutions should inherently be independent and not influenced by the state. During his remarks, Brandt announced that General

Clay authorized him to say that Berlin’s cultural activities have US support. In a targeted response, the CDU stated that institutions outside of Berlin should not have more influence over cultural developments in the city than Berliners have themselves—a concern that proved to be well founded. During the meeting, a number of cultural developments were proposed including an educational institute, increased professor and student exchanges, and expansion of the Technical University and other institutions already in existence, including a radio studio for Sender Freies Berlin.

The Senate eventually funded new construction projects and a version of the educational institute came to fruition via the Ford Foundation grant (Stenographischer

Bericht Band III, Nr. 19).

On June 7, 1962, Professor Joachim Tiburtius, the Senator of National

Education (Volksbildung), presented the collected cultural plans for Berlin to the

Senate. He announced that a Max-Planck Institute would be built in the city and that the other German states have committed funding to assist Berlin. He further confirmed the American commitment to support young artists in Berlin and suggested

51 that the city must be made accessible for young people with more studios and working spaces. He welcomed the coming of many writers to Berlin and particularly championed the open reception of all kinds of artists. He concluded by saying, “Here is the place and should be the place, where the challenge to the East, who wish to defeat the West in the realms of education and science, will be thwarted. In which we show democratic life is more successful in fulfilling these tasks (Stenographischer

Bericht, Band IV, Nr. 9).12 The other parties found this rallying cry quite compelling.

Mostly they agreed with the general proposals, but Senator Werner Stein of the SPD was concerned about creating centers without developing the artistic scene first. It was an insightful worry as eventually the artists arrived to a rather unwelcoming

Berlin. Nevertheless, by the time the Ford Foundation approved funds for the cultural development projects, the ground was cleared and strategic motivation was present on all sides to make the funding opportunity a success.

In early December 1962, the Ford Foundation allocated $2,000,000 to cultural projects in Berlin under direction of the board with approval by President Heald.13 It appropriated approximately $2,000,000 to “help strengthen educational, scientific and cultural institutions in Berlin” focused primarily on three cultural projects: the

International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation ($300,00), the Literary Colloquium Berlin ($340,000), and the Artists-in-Residence Program

($500,000), with additional appropriations provided to the Free University, a

12 Original text: “Hier ist der Ort und soll der Ort sein, wo insbesondere die Herausforderung des Ostens, die Absicht, den Westen auf bestimmten Gebieten der Ausbildung und Wissenschaft zu schlagen, durchkreuzt wird, indem wir zeigen, daß im Rahmen demokratischer Lebensformen solche Aufgaben erfolgreicher gelöst werden können.” 13 Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63–351A. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 52 pedagogical center, and a center focused on developing countries.14 Its justification noted that

on the assumption that the German, American, and other allied governments continue to be committed in Berlin politically, militarily, and economically, there is a significant opportunity for the Foundation to help make the city a more stimulating international center. The need in Berlin is to develop institutions which will attract to the city the type of people who are the carriers and leaders of culture and enterprise and who arouse hope in the future…In the areas where the Ford Foundation can give the impetus, what is required is the establishment of a few new centers which would hold promise of becoming leading and permanent institutions in their fields attracting talent and students from all parts of the world…As a result, Berlin, though it may remain an island geographically, would become otherwise a more vigorous part of the mainland of Europe and the world.15

With the immediate goal of ensuring Berlin became and remained a cosmopolitan,

Western city, Ford waded into the Berlin crisis. It proceeded under the clear caveat that they would remain only if their efforts were supported and protected by the allied governments, which they were. Clay’s invitation and the flurry of American activity ensured that the U.S. was fully on board and that the Berlin Senate and the government of the German Federal Republic also supported the plans.16

The actual projects that were approved differed from those that were discussed by the Berlin Senate and proposed by Clay. In one major change, Nabokov was not put in charge of the Artists-in-Residence program. Also, instead of a center for urban development or the funding of a new university, the Foundation opted to fund centers focused on art and research, more along Nabokov’s and Slater’s wishes. This is a significant shift from the original proposal, which was primarily focused on pedagogy

14 Stone, Shepard to Dr. J.A. Stratton. December 8, 1965. RE: IA Programs in Berlin. International Affairs – Grants 1951–1978. Grants Involving France and Germany. Ford Foundation Int. Affairs, FA 748, Series III: Grants, Box 4, FF-RAC. 15 “Strengthening of Institutions in Berlin.” Ford Foundation Int. Affairs. FA748. Series V: Exchanges. Box 7. Folder: Exchanges 1963–1965 Berlin Artists in Residence – General, FF-RAC. 16 First Meeting of the Advisory Group for the Ford Foundation’s Program in Berlin. June 7, 1963. Ford Foundation Int. Affairs. FA748. Series V: Exchanges. Box 7. Folder: Exchanges 1963-1965 Berlin Artists in Residence – General, FF-RAC. 53 and development both within and outside of Berlin. Peter Nestler, the DAAD’s administrator in Berlin for the Artists-in-Residence project, outlined in his final grant report that the origins and early months of the program were arranged mostly through conversation and rather sporadically.17 The arrangements between the City of Berlin, its Senate, the cultural institutions, DAAD, and the Ford Foundation were loosely organized, but ultimately the creation of the project trumped planning and process.

The available evidence suggests that this shift in priorities and the ad hoc nature in which it was done was likely a result of Nabokov’s influence, Stone’s involvement with the CCF, and opportunities presented by capable people in Berlin.

Nabokov saw the new centers as ways to support his work already underway with the annual festival weeks and other musical and cultural festivals. Stone himself was keen to support CCF activity in general, which enabled more cultural opportunities in

Berlin. He also believed in Berlin as a great cultural city, as he had first experienced it as a student in the 1920s and 1930s, and wanted to play a role in revitalizing its historic legacy (Berghahn, ch. 1).

Further, connections on the ground provided opportunities. Stone’s brother-in- law was Walter Hasenclever, not to be confused with the German expressionist of the same name. Hasenclever lived in Berlin and was involved in its cultural scene as one time editor of Der Monat and a reader at Fischer Verlag. Eventually, Hasenclever became the director of the Literary Colloquium, which caused some problems with the press when an unidentified contributing writer implied that Hasenclever had the

17 Nestler, Peter. The Berlin Cutlural Progarm “Artists in Residence” 1963–1966. 1970. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 54 job only because he was Stone’s brother-in-law.18 There is no doubt that his family connections did not hurt him, but Hasenclever did have a wider network in the Berlin community and was actually suggested for the job by Höllerer. Hasenclever knew

Höllerer and was sure that Höllerer, keen for institutional development in his new position at the Technical University Berlin, would be enthusiastic and able to implement a grant to a desirable end. Höllerer jumped at the opportunity and met with

Stone on one of his visits to Berlin, eventually securing the investment for his long desired literary colloquium.19 The final cultural appropriation coalesced through a mix of personal connections and wishes, high-level conversations, and insight from those in Berlin who could instill confidence of capability and longevity.

An appropriation of $500,000 was allocated to the Artist-in-Residence

Program at $250,000 each year for 1963 and 1964. The payments were made directly to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which became the main administrative body, though not its decision maker, at least for the first two years of the program. As the appropriation outlines, the Artists-in-Residence program was intended to support the other projects and festivals going on throughout the city by providing them with a continuous flow of participants, the idea being that over three years about fifteen renowned artists and sixty students would be in Berlin. The program was publicly announced in a press release the following year. On January 10,

1963, The New York Times reported on the Foundation’s cultural projects in Berlin stating, “the new support of Berlin as an outpost of Western culture…will include

18 See the article, “Writing School in Berlin.” The Times Literary Supplement. January 14, 1965. See also the following correspondence: Stone, Shepard to Walter Höllerer. January 22, 1965. And Walter Höllerer to The Times Literary Supplement. Febraury 2, 1965, LASR. 19 For first outlined proposal see Höllerer to Stone July 27, 1962, LASR. See also correspondence between Höllerer and Nicolas Nabokov from December 10, 1962 and December 14, 1962; and also correspondence from Höllerer to Stone December 10, 1962, LASR. 55 awards to about 20 outstanding composers, conductors, painters, dramatists and writers from many parts of the world to enable them to work in Berlin. In addition at least 60 younger artists and writers from Europe and elsewhere will be given opportunities to study in Berlin” (Hechinger). The programs were approved and would soon be set in motion.

A report after one year outlined Ford’s working relationship with the DAAD and heralded its success: “After the Foundation staff notifies DAAD of the person selected, DAAD works out such details as travel, moving expenses,” and further administrative concerns. The DAAD made all of the payments and helped liaise with the federal and city government to make sure all obligations and operations were in order.20 The initial report makes the running of the program sound smooth and untroubled. In actuality, the first year of the program saw many hiccups, including lack of clarity on the process of selecting artists to participate in the program. The

Ford Foundation seems to have had a final say on an individual’s participation, but there was an effort at creating an ad hoc consultative process. Ford administrator F. F.

Hill wrote specifically in the initial grant request from the appropriated funding on

May 17, 1963 that “[a] distinguished group of cultural leaders, the heads of the major

Berlin educational and scientific institutions, and the DAAD working closely with the

[International Affairs] staff would make the selections.”21 It does appear that there was some effort at cooperation between the various interested parties with the creation of the Berlin Advisory Council. The Council included the Senator for

20 Hill, F. F. to Henry T. Heald. Grant Request – International Affairs, June 24, 1964, pp. 3. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351A. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 21 Hill, F. F. to Henry T. Heald. Grant Request – International Affairs, May 17, 1963, pp. 3. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351A. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 56 Science and Art, the Senator for Education, the rectors of the Free University and the

Technical University, the President of the Art Academy, the directors of the

Hochschulen, the director of the Dahlem Museum, the German Opera, the Berlin

Symphony, and the Schiller Theater, along with Nicolas Nabokov.22

As the program was prepared, the Ford liaison, Moritz von Bomhard, took suggestions from Berliners and then consulted widely to make sure a suggested person was broadly agreeable before sending an invitation.23 In 1963, the Ford

Foundation sent an official representative to Berlin to assist with the project, Karl

Haas, later the host of the widely syndicated radio show Adventures in Music. Under

Haas, the selection process continued to be a consultative process, but had a bit more formality. Haas met from time to time with Nabokov, people from the Senate, and also key Berlin figures on the Council.24

The programs and the Ford Foundation’s role in general garnered some criticism. The selection process and the effort to find willing participants were not straightforward. Conflicts abounded between the various administrators and artists were not always keen to participate, as they clearly understood the political implications. In November 1963, Haas reported criticism back to Stone that perhaps a number of people think that, “we are too generous in Berlin and therefore subject to ridicule.”25 The Berlin Senate also had concerns and confirmed Haas’ comments, as questions arose about who was actually in charge of the selection and cultural

22 Unsigned report, 1963, pp. 6. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 23 Von Bomhard, Moritz to Joseph Slater. August 1, 1963. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 24 Haas, Karl to Shepard Stone. November 21, 1963, pp. 2. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 25 Haas, Karl to Shepard Stone. November 21, 1963, pp. 2. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 57 developments. Peter Nestler’s later reflection on the selection and early participation of the artists creates a clear picture of the lack of communication and underlines the suspicion by artists of the funders and organizers involved:

Much less favorable was the circumstance that those so invited learned virtually nothing of the motives and aims of the Ford Foundation and Berlin in issuing the invitations. Indicative of this were the reactions of the first guests. It was the Americans who found the whole matter most plausible. ‘Artist in Residence’ meant for them the active neighbourhood (sic) of the colleges and universities, contact with professional colleagues and students; the nature and size of the stipendia attached to the invitation seemed to speak for this. But artists and intellectuals from Europe reacted quite differently. Mostly politically of the left camp, they reacted mostly with suspicion. What had they to do with the political polarization of divided Germany, and after the creation of the Wall at that? Thus many of them feared that their famous names were being misused for political propaganda. The material circumstances of the invitations strengthened this suspicion, especially in the absence of any explanation in response to their questions. However, their subsequent actions were different in each case. There was a whole series of refusals resulting from this unclarity. Other artists accepted with the strict determination to keep out of any suspicious activities on the part of their hosts. Others again found the material lure so great that some of them accepted the invitation despite other firm engagements which would have precluded regular or even only occasional presence in Berlin (this understandably sparked off vehement criticism from the Berlin side.)26

Nestler’s comments imply that better communication could have avoided some problems and questions, but it is doubtful that it would have lessened political suspicion where American largess was on full display and the head of the CCF was involved. Nestler’s and Haas’ comments both underline the fact that political suspicion was prevalent both by the writers and the Berliners. Writers were suspicious of the political motives and the generosity of the grants, Berlin’s government officials were nervous about being used or overpowered by the Americans and their funding,

26 Nestler, Peter. The Berlin Cutlural Progarm “Artists in Residence” 1963–1966, pp. 5–6. 1970. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 58 and Berlin’s artists would soon be peeved that they were not able or invited to participate in the lucrative residencies.

Haas thought the 1963 participants were unimpressive and not conducive to making the program a success.27 He made it clear that in the future, Ford should have the ultimate say over the artists chosen with advice from the Berlin Committee and through a clear process to avoid willy-nilly invitations from Berlin Senator Adolf

Arndt and Nabokov.28 There was further criticism from the Berlin Senate on the lack of organization of the program. Senator Blacher was absolutely critical of the project and he was not alone in being suspicious of the foreign forces attempting to influence culture in Berlin and the lack of structure around the program.

During Ford’s years of oversight, money was given to artists with no guidelines or expectations, bringing artists to Berlin, but for no other purpose than to be present. As Haas wrote to the Foundation in February 1964, “I find that it is a mistake to invite artists under conditions unequal anywhere without asking of them the slightest obligation. While it is true that they should be free to create and function anyway they see fit, the resulting tendency in many instances has been to accept the money, live free of any cares for a year add the invitation by the Ford Foundation as an attractive item of their curriculum vitae and get out.”29 Haas also found that the stipends were too high, leading to wasted money and further bad stereotypes of

27 Haas, Karl to Shepard Stone. October 29, 1963. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 28 Haas, Karl to Joseph Slater. November 7, 1963. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF. And Haas, Karl to Hubertus Scheibe. November 21, 1963. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 29 Haas, Karl. General Report. February 3, 1964, pp. 5. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 59 Americans just throwing money around. Some of the artists, he claimed, had never seen so much money and would go on living off their funding for years.

Haas advised a firm guidance and direction for the residence program and worked hard to garner positive press, something he only really achieved with the influential support of Stone. Stone was a key player in the programs. Beyond securing the funding, he was also able to influence the reaction and involvement of the press.

Where Haas found it difficult to generate press, Stone was able to sweep in and use his postwar connections. Stone had served in the US occupation forces and had been in charge of creating a free and democratic German press. As a result, he had connections to most of the editors and newspapers in the country, such as Marion

Dönhoff, then deputy editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, with whom he would later work to found the Aspen Institute Germany. When the programs were in need of positive reports, as Haas suggested, Stone came to the city for a visit. Haas and Höllerer arranged key events for him to attend in order to facilitate a few useful conversations.30 After a press club dinner, held in November 1963, Haas reported several requests for interviews to inform the public about the programs.31 Haas was also keen to have Stone involved in the Press Ball in January 1964.32 By February

1964, there was so much press, or as Haas wrote, the press was “now cooperating fully,” producing several articles, that he had to employ a clipping service to keep on top of it. Even US magazines such as Time and Life were sending reporters over to

30 Höllerer, Walter to Shepard Stone. November 3, 1963. 03WH/BM/4,35, LASR. Höllerer states, after listing the impressive range of government, press, and artistic figures that will attend the event: “Ich ware Ihnen sehr dankbar, wenn Sie dabei sein könnten, weil bei dieser Gelegenheit ein paar nützliche Gespräche geführt werden können.” 31 Haas, Karl to Shepard Stone. November 18, 1963. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 32 Haas, Karl to Walter Höllerer. January 7, 1964. H521.2186, LASR. 60 cover it. 33 Nestler, the German administrator put in charge of the program for the

DAAD, later commented that this sudden press attention was actually a mistake by

Ford. It was, he said, “a regrettable and fatal error on the part of the Ford administration in Berlin to attack the press for its supposed deficient reporting of until then nonexistent activities, and this at a specially convened press conference.

Thereupon the daily press sought out most of the artists who had arrived but were not yet ‘at home’. The problems the artists, still struggling with their environment, revealed in these interviews received distorted publicity.”34 Where Haas and Stone might have seen their press meeting as a way to raise the profile of Ford’s work,

Nestler viewed it as an invitation for aggressive scolding, which created more harm than good by shining light prematurely on the developing projects, disproportionately, in his view, focusing on the negative aspects of the programs.

Another issue that plagued the early years of the program was Nabokov’s role and presence in Berlin. His job as adviser to Brandt and the SPD in general were an insistent antagonism to the residence program and brought controversy to the foreign presence in Berlin generally. He courted this trouble by elbowing in and dominating decisions, inviting people without consultation, and cozying up to the German,

American, and Russian governments. For example, in January 1964, Haas wrote to

Stone and Slater that Senator Arndt, the SPD Senator, announced in a press conference that the artists partaking in the program would participate in the

Festspielwochen in the autumn, an annual festival held in Berlin. To Haas’ dismay, he

33 Haas, Karl Shepard Stone and Joseph Slater. February 3, 1964, pp. 2. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 34 Nestler, Peter. The Berlin Cultural Progarm “Artists in Residence” 1963-1966, pp. 8. 1970. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 61 was not consulted on this move and reported that the artists were also dissatisfied with this sudden obligation. Haas wanted new and immediate plans for the artists’ activities to expand Berlin’s cultural activities and establish a new node in its network, while Arndt wanted to incorporate them in the already existent fabric of

Berlin’s cultural life. As Haas summarized, “My main concern is to create opportunities for the artists as effectively and as soon as possible, while the ‘Arndt-

Nabokov concept’ means that they will be used as tools to glorify the

Festspielwochen.”35 The conflict arose from a different motivation and view of the programs in the larger picture. On the one hand, Haas was inserted as Ford’s eyes and ears on the ground throughout the running of the project and had a mission to establish an independent program. On the other hand, Arndt and Nabokov, in particular, had other projects that were given priority and saw the Ford funded programs as convenient ways to bolster their own agendas.

Haas was not the only one to have concerns about Nabokov. Nabokov was one of the designated individuals on the Berlin Committee consulting on Ford’s project and had been in communication with Stone regarding the CCF for some time. As a result, he was involved from an early stage and in trusted communication with the

Ford Foundation.36 There were though concerns about Nabokov’s involvement and its impact on Ford’s reputation in Berlin more generally. On August 12, 1963, Frederick

Burkhardt of the American Council of Learned Societies wrote to Stone to inform him of some conversations he had in Berlin about the progress of the cultural

35 Haas, Karl to Shepard Stone. January 28, 1964, pp. 2. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 36 Slater, J.E. to Shepard Stone “Berlin Program – Additional projects and FF Berlin Appropriation. April 25, 1963. Ford Foundation International Affairs. FA748. Series V: Exchanges. Box 7. Folder Exchanges 1963–1965 Berlin Artists in Residence – General, FF-RAC. 62 programs. He reported that Hans Wallenberg was ready to leave the project because of his frustration in working with Nabokov. Burkhardt summarized it by saying,

“[Wallenberg] is not interested in relations with people who think they know everything and want only admiration (obviously Nicholas) (sic).”37 He further expressed concern that Wallenberg’s feelings were shared more widely by James B.

Conant and Ralph Brown. Burkhardt reported Ralph Brown as saying, “Berliners want to know who does the selecting. They think Nicholas Nabokov does it. Brown mentioned, as especially critical, the Reidemeisters of the Dahlem Museum.”38 The majority of the selection committee had had more than enough of Nabokov’s demands and overrides not even a year into the program.

Karl Haas also wrote to Stone and Slater to complain that Nabokov overstepped his bounds and acted damagingly as a representative of the Ford

Foundation. After demonstrably saying that he had no personal issue with Nabokov,

Haas warned:

Yet, it is only natural that in the minds of many Berliners Nicolas is closely associated with the Ford Foundation. It has come to my attention only this weekend that he still speaks out in many circles for the Ford Foundation. I must tell you also that Nicolas has made innumerable enemies in connection with his plans for the Festspiel-Wochen. Indeed, I believe firmly that, if he goes through with his plans, he will be made impossible in Berlin. This is no longer an undercurrent that I feel but there is open resentment. I mention all this in order to prepare you that somehow any resentment of Nicolas’ with or without the Festwochen will reflect upon the Ford Foundation. It is, therefore, without any malice that I warn you that, unless Nicolas is told in clear terms that he is not to identify himself or speak or write to anyone for the Ford Foundation and that the Ford Foundation has only one official representative in Berlin, the seeds that we have sown here will reap ugly fruits…I say, Nicolas is a genius but he is also the embodiment of what is called in the vernacular a big time operator. I know that he has been very helpful to you but

37 Burkhardt, Frederick to Shepard Stone. August 12, 1963. Ford Foundation Unpublished Records. FA739. Box 75. Folder 001945, FF-RAC. 38 Burkhardt, Frederick to Shepard Stone. August 12, 1963. Ford Foundation Unpublished Records. FA739. Box 75. Folder 001945, FF-RAC. 63 we can no longer afford to let him throw his weight around in our name…The fact that he is not the man he used to be does not help matters any.39

While it is tempting to read Haas’s warning as merely of personal concern with his own role as the Foundation’s representative, he had clear reason to be worried about

Nabokov’s involvement and the potential taint he could bring to the project.

Members of the Berlin Senate also questioned Nabokov’s role in the city and had concerns about his control of the Festwochen and influence generally on cultural activities around Berlin. The representatives of both the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the CDU both were critical of Nabokov’s role in Germany’s cultural scene. The

FDP Senator Lischewski thought that Nabokov’s influence was too great and that he isolated and ignored the relevant committees, creating suspicion. He further questioned Nabokov’s role in the city generally and requested answers about exactly what Nabokov was charged with doing there. Either Nabakov should run the festival,

Lischewski argued, or he should carry out his official title of International Cultural

Relations Advisor (der Berater des Senats für internationale Kulturbegegnungen), not both and not more than beyond his role. The CDU Senator Lorenz reminded the

Senate that while Berlin is a city open to the world, it also had much to share with the world and Berliners should be more involved and further featured in the festivals than they so far had been under Nabokov. Senator Stein from the SPD defended Nabokov by replying that

Without his wide-reaching international connections, which reach to the best human relationships and the most famous artists of our time, critical parts of the last festival and future festivals would not be realized... Professor Nabokov was and remains the cultural adviser to the Senate. In this role – and about this it must be remembered – after the building of the Wall he, as we ourselves

39 Haas, Karl to Shepard Stone and Joseph Slater. November 18, 1963. Ford Foundation International Affairs. FA748. Series V: Exchanges. Box 7. Folder Exchanges 1963–1965 Berlin Artists in Residence – Karl Haas, FF-RAC. 64 intensively contemplated what we must, should and can do in Berlin, created the famous Ford Foundation program, which was indeed crucial. (Stenographischer Bericht Band II, Nr. 19). 40

There was therefore clear concern about Nabokov’s dominant role and uncompromising stances.

The Senate and Ford representative’s animosity likely went much deeper than just an unbearable personality or divergent opinions on cultural development. Beyond his overbearing nature and large personality, Nabokov was indeed, as Haas put it, “a big time operator,” both because he loved the limelight and used the free flowing cash of the time to plan elaborate events and because he was deeply involved with the

CCF, had connections to the CIA, and was now cultivating a relationship with the

Soviets as he worked for the Mayor of Berlin. The CIA agent largely responsible for the CCF and in frequent communication with Nabokov, Michael Josselson, was not happy about Nabokov’s involvement in Berlin because Nabokov seemed to spend

CCF money there, but was putting distance between himself and the Congress while openly courting the Soviet ambassador. Nabokov was clearly ebbing away from the paradigm of conflict towards the friendliness of détente by building a more substantial relationship with the Soviet Ambassador Pyotr Andreyetvitch Abrassimov, getting him to send Soviet artists to the Berlin Arts Festival he was directing. The West

Berlin public and the Americans in Berlin were not at all comfortable or impressed with this effort, as Haas and Burkhardt noted above. Eventually Nabokov’s

40 Original text: “Ohne seine weitreichenden internationalen Verbindungen, die auf besten menschlichen Beziehungen zu den namhaftesten Künstlern unserer Zeit beruhen, wären entscheidende Teile der vergangenen Festwochen nicht zu verwirklichen gewesen und für die Zukunft nicht zu verwirklichen... , daß Herr Professor Nabokov zunächst als Berater des Senats in kulturellen Fragen tätig war und ist. In dieser Eigenschaft – und daran muß hier einmal erinnert werden – hat er auch nach dem Bau der Mauer, als wir uns sehr überlegten, was wir hier in Berlin tun müssen, tun sollen und tun können, die bekannten Programme der Ford-Foundation mit ins Leben gerufen, und zwar ganz entscheidend.“

65 connection to the Soviets became a grave concern for Josselson who wrote to him on

June 29, 1964 to deter him from traveling to Moscow with Abrassimov:

…Also, please bear in mind that you have many enemies in Berlin who are only waiting for an opportunity to knife you, and in your own interest, you would do well to cut the ground from under these people and their malicious gossip…You could become an unwitting instrument of Soviet policy in Germany… You [have] already made a first step on that direction (Saunders 351–353).

Josselson’s concern largely echoes Haas’ statement “that Nicolas has made innumerable enemies in connection with his plans for the Festspiel-Wochen. Indeed, I believe firmly that, if he goes through with his plans, he will be made impossible.”41

There was concern all around that Nabokov’s cozying up to the Soviets was going to be damaging for the American presence in Berlin, whether that of the Ford

Foundation, CCF, or West Berlin in general. In their concern over Nabokov’s behavior and the potential damage he was causing, the Foundation and CIA were in agreement. Moreover, the association of the Foundation with Nabokov points to a further connection of the Ford Foundation and the CIA. The Ford Foundation provided consistent funding to the CCF and various related magazines that were also funded by the CIA. While the Ford Foundation was open to being associated with government efforts to a degree, say in its support for Berlin, the board members clearly did not want to be tied to Nabokov and his questionable status too closely.

The funding debates and red lines at the Foundation establish the important point that allocations of money did not necessarily come at the snap of the government’s fingers. While Ford may have seemed like a shoe-in for an investment project that supported America’s Cold War efforts, recent personnel changes and the

41 Haas, Karl to Shepard Stone and Joseph Slater. November 18, 1963. Ford Foundation International Affairs. FA748. Series V: Exchanges. Box 7. Folder Exchanges 1963–1965 Berlin Artists in Residence – Karl Haas, FF-RAC. 66 shifting winds of the Cold War to the southern hemisphere meant funding allocations and priorities were not aimed at Europe. Further, the foundation had a clear sense that its independence and its clean record were key assets to its image and its success; they did not want to be muddled up with covert activities. That said, it is clear from comments by artists unwilling to participate in the program along with various administrators and government officials that suspicion about the Ford Foundation’s role and their ties to the US and German governments abounded, both in the overt and covert arenas. From the available evidence, there was clearly every reason to be wary.

The state-private network was not a smoothly run machine. Rather, it was a negotiation and alignment, from time to time, of shared interests. When opinions diverged or risks were too high, funding was withheld or shaped accordingly.

Outcomes also rested on who was in charge of the decisions and what exactly their priorities were.

Nabokov and Stone’s close association with the Berlin project and indeed their key roles in making the project happen do show the network of alliances that enabled the cultural projects to unfold. Also, while neither ever admitted to being CIA agents, they were both at least working in tandem with the agency, if not directly for it. They were essential in getting the projects off the ground and bringing together the

Ford Foundation’s money with Brandt’s influence and Clay’s wishes, at Kennedy’s behest. The Berlin projects were not just born from Nabokov’s whim and good connections. While he may have had an idea that was advantageous to his interests for a brief moment, the projects only became a longstanding success because of German involvement. The Berlin Senate was keen on reviving Berlin’s cultural life, the

DAAD took on the lead role of managing and eventually taking over the Artists-in-

67 Residence program, and Walter Höllerer was key in establishing the Literary

Colloquium, tying the programs to Berlin and Germany and securing the cooperation of local and regional participants.

68 Chapter Two Longer Walls and Higher Rooms: Ingeborg Bachmann

“....this place smells of sickness and death…” - Ingeborg Bachmann “Witold Gombrowicz” (Vol 4. 326)42

Reflecting on meeting Witold Gombrowicz soon after her arrival in Berlin,

Ingeborg Bachmann recalled, “Gombrowicz came from Argentina, I also came through a hundred detours from many countries, and if we have understood something from one another, without ever admitting it, it was that we were lost, that this place smelled of sickness and death, for him in one way, for me in another”

(Bachmann, “Witold Gombrowicz” 326).43 Bachmann’s long road to Berlin entailed her departing Austria and becoming enmeshed in the postwar German axis of the trans-Atlantic state-private network. While this served her well financially and intertwined with her rising success in the German literary world, it gradually became an untenable position. In Berlin, Bachmann shifted away from the cultural Cold War network towards more personally satisfying, but politically less palatable, explorations of the intra-generational damage of war, domination, and fascism she saw embodied in the Cold War conflict. Two of her key works, “Ein Ort für Zufälle” and Malina, exhibit her awareness of the role the Cold War conflict, particularly its cultural arm, played in extending the war into all aspects of life. Walter Höllerer was

Bachmann’s key connection to the cultural Cold War network, as he was for many

Gruppe 47 members and the German literary scene more generally.44 Understanding

42 Original text: “....dieser Ort nach Krankheit und Tod riecht…” 43 Original text: “Gombrowicz kam aus Argentinien, ich auch auf hundert Umwegen aus vielen Ländern, und wenn wir etwas voneinander begriffen haben, ohne es einander je zu gestehen, daß wir verloren waren, daß dieser Ort nach Krankheit und Tod riecht, für ihn auf eine Weise, für mich auf eine andre.” 44 Gruppe 47 was a German language literary group that existed between 1947-1967. It was formed by German writer Hans Werner Richter. The group usually met twice a year with attendance possible by 69 his role establishes a picture of the larger socio-political cultural network in which

Bachmann operated.

Establishing a Legacy: Walter Höllerer

In Transition, Peter Russell wrote a damning critique of Germany’s cultural scene and Ford’s efforts in Berlin. He did have praise for both of Walter Höllerer’s magazines, Akzente and Sprache im technischen Zeitalter, but took issue with the fact that they were both edited by the same man:

Höllerer, who simultaneously holds the posts of Head of the German Department of the Technical University of Berlin, Director of the Ford Foundation’s Literarisches Colloquium, Director of the Literary Section of the Akademie der Künste and other posts, and evidently has virtual control over the powerful but exclusive body of writers known as Gruppe 47, as well as numerous editorial and other educational posts. Höllerer is an immensely able organiser, though an indifferent poet and a rather conventional academic critic with curiously old-fashioned avant gardiste ideas typical of contemporary Germany (see the ‘poetry’ in Akezente!); and I feel that the ability of one man to hold an almost monopolistic sway over the literature of such a large country as Germany is a sign of an inherent weakness. That he is hardly challenged by other writers or groups illustrates the hierarchical, paternalistic, Regelmassigkeit (sic) of the Germans which more than anything else holds them back with all their undoubted talents from real achievement.45

What Russell overlooks is that Höllerer played a key role in bringing in the experimental and diverse work to Berlin that Russell also praises in his piece, such as the work of composer Iannis Xenakis. Höllerer supported the Korean composer Yun

Isang, published Junge amerikanische Lyrik in 1961 (in cooperation with Gregory

Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg), brought the Beat poets to

Germany in print and in person, introduced German poets to American audiences in

invitation only. The group issued its own literary prize and was a key forum for re-invigorating German language literature after WWII. 45 Russell, Peter. “Letter from Europe.” Transition, pp. 47–52, quote from pp.48. Undated article and issue number circa 1964 or 1965. Read in LASR. 70 coordination with Grove Press, and created opportunities for theater, such as the festival he held, “Modernes Theater auf kleinen Bühnen,” which included

Gombrowicz’s The Marriage under an Argentinian director by a French company, along with theater companies from Czechoslovakia. In combination with Nabokov’s

Festwochen focused on Japanese and African art, Berlin had a globally diverse art scene in the early 1960s due primarily to its Cold War position as a symbolic battleground and its able cultural managers.

Höllerer was the man in Berlin. As Hans Werner Richter described him, “[he] was, at times, a kind of Berlin institution, with whom one must come to terms with, if one wanted to achieve something in the Berlin literary scene” (147).46 Even though

Höllerer was well connected, Richter insisted Höllerer was not a political person.

Höllerer never signed any of the Gruppe 47 protest letters and stayed away from expressing political opinions. This approach made it easier to move among and work with a variety of governments. Avoiding political statements, Höllerer could establish strong relationships with political figures. As he settled into Berlin, he slowly developed a close relationship with Willy Brandt. In October 1962, Höllerer was invited by Brandt to take part in an SPD conference on the future of German cities and city planning. Höllerer expressed his support, but politely declined due to a previous commitment. His relationship with Brandt nevertheless grew so that by

1964, Brandt’s office was writing Höllerer informally to request advice on responding to cultural complaints, in particular complaints about some of the Literary

Colloquium’s aired events, such as “Modernes Theater auf kleinen Bühnen.”47

46 Original text: “Er war zeitweise eine Art Berliner Institution, mit der man sich arrangieren mußte, wenn man in Berlin etwas auf literarischem Gebiet erreichen wollte.” 47 See exchange of letters between Brandt and Höllerer 03WH/BM/15, LASR. 71 As early as 1959, Höllerer proposed the founding of an institution in Berlin focused on the study of language in the technical age. He based his idea roughly on a center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in his proposal to the Berlin

Senate and other stakeholders clearly outlined that both the United States and the

Soviet Union had such an institution, the only two in the world. Logically then, he argued, it would be most appropriate and necessary for Berlin to have one in order to build and maintain its status in the future. Even though he presented his idea in Cold

War terms, emphasizing the American model over the Russian one, his project had to wait until American money was ready to fund it.48 Höllerer continued to lay the groundwork regardless. In 1962, Höllerer utilized his connections and assisted Richter in securing a house on Wannsee for the fifteenth anniversary of Gruppe 47. As

Richter recalled:

I speak about it so extensively because later it came completely into Höllerer’s hands and the Literary Colloquium strongly influenced the literary life of Berlin. I often had the impression that he had tailored the Colloquium to himself, but, in those years after the building of the Wall, it showed its effect and contributed to Berlin being at times the literary center of the Federal Republic of Germany…These seminars were effective, you can see it today from the names of the young and, at that time, completely unknown people who visited the Literary Colloquium (Richter 144).49

When the Americans were ready, Höllerer was poised to be a reliable investment. As

Michael Kämper-van den Boogaart points out, Höllerer’s success in Berlin during the

48 Walter Höllerer. “Memorandum zur Gründung eine Instituts “Sprache im technischen Zeitalter.” December 6, 1959. LASR. 49 Original text: “Ich spreche deshalb so ausführlich davon, weil es später ganz in Höllerers Hand kam und als Literarisches Colloquium das Berliner literarische Leben stark beeinflußte. Ich hatte oft den Eindruck, als hätte er dieses Colloquium ganz auf sich zugeschnitten, aber in jenen Jahren nach dem Bau der Mauer tat es seine Wirkung und trug dazu bei, daß Berlin zeitweise so etwas wie ein literarisches Zentrum der Bundesrepublik wurde...Diese Lehrgänge waren effektiv, sieht man sich von heute aus die Namen der jungen und damals noch völlig unbekannten Leute an, die das Literarische Colloquium besuchten.“

72 early 1960s was created by a combination of the Cold War environment, the division of Berlin, and Höllerer’s own proclivity in creating both meaningful connections and fruitful cultural events in the city (109–110). From the earliest postwar days, he began building an expansive network. His role as editor of Akzente enabled him and his opinion was generally well respected. Throughout the early 1950s, he built relationships both within German literary circles and beyond, keeping up correspondence with Roland Barthes and Henry Kissinger, who trusted him to provide recommendations for the Harvard International Seminar. 50 Kissinger wrote to

Höllerer encouraging applications from people he thought would be a good fit. He urged him, “Anyone you suggest will be considered very seriously.”51

Beyond his international connections, Höllerer had also arranged a number of successful events in Berlin, giving him a positive track record of delivering on his promises. It was standing room only at the International German Language Poetry

Conference held in Berlin in 1960 because of all of the students in attendance for the

“young professor’s” gathering. Höllerer’s session featured Günter Grass, Günter

Bruno Fuchs, Helmut Heissenbüttel and others.52 He also arranged a series of readings under his role at TU Berlin from roughly October 1961–February 1962 with a number of writers. It was as part of this series that Gombrowicz was initially invited to Berlin, though he declined on this first occasion. Höllerer’s literary series kicked off with high enthusiasm. One newspaper reported that:

But when one, at the televised Berlin poetry reading, got over the first surprise of the bare equipment and spotlight, when one saw that this abstract technical world operated quietly and without disruption, and when one eventually

50 Walter Höllerer to Roland Barthes, August 30, 1956. B23 5594, LASR. 51 Kissinger, Henry to Walter Höllerer. November 22, 1962. 03WH/AA/5,24, LASR. 52 Urbach, Ilse. “Zwischen Sachliteratur und neuer Lyrik.” Deutsche Zeitung. November 1960. No. 272, pp.12, LASR. 73 turned around and caught sight of the two-thousand breathless, young listeners in the amphitheater, one wondered if such a poetry reading did not correlate better with the second half of our century and the performed works. Since generally only soccer matches, ice hockey and political events emerge as signals for our time, it seems that here the literature offered does not want to be a decoration for our lives, for consecrated moments, but rather a part of our being, our familiar everyday lives, on which such poetry can have a direct influence. …Certainly, in Germany there are similar events like this poetry reading…But Professor Höllerer’s program with the twelve poetry events opens a show window on the young literature of the world, it has a unique, distinctive, independent character and in its way it is thoroughly artistically revolutionary.53

Connected to academia, the publishing industry, and the government with a reputation for cultivating international ties, Höllerer was the type of local counterpart

Ford had hoped to find. Höllerer states in his opening to Autoren im Haus: Zwanzig

Jahre Literarisches Colloquium Berlin that, “In the time immediately after the building of the Berlin Wall, authors and filmmakers were invited to, and there were also many interested in coming to, Berlin. Shepard Stone, a friend of Berlin and a man full of ideas, who had studied in Berlin before 1933, threw a bridge to the Ford

Foundation.” (9).54 By spring 1962, Walter Hasenclever had put Stone in touch with

53 Werner, Bruno E. “Vier Männer an der Wand.” December 6, 1961. Circulated in large regional newspapers. Walter Höllerer Papers – Literature Archive Sulzbach Rosenberg. For other similar reviews see: Urbach, Ilse. “Literature im technischen Zeitalter.” December 30, 1960, LASR. See also Florian, Paul. “‘Olympische Spiele’ der Literatur.” Article circulated in regional German Newspapers, LASR. Original text: “Aber wenn man bei der Berliner ferngesendeten Dichterlesung das erste Befremden über die nackten Apparaturen und die Scheinwerfer überwunden hat, wenn man sieht, daß diese abstrakte technische Welt leise und ohne zu stören agiert, und wenn man sich schließlich umdreht, und zweitausend junge atemlose Zuhörer in dem amphitheatralischen Raum erblickt, fragt man sich, ob eine solche Dichterlesung nicht besser der zweiten Hälfte unseres Jahrhunderts und den vorgetragenen Werken entspricht. Denn die im allgemeinen nur bei Fußballwettkämpfen, Eishockey und politischen Veranstaltungen auftauchenden Apparaturen scheinen ein Signal dafür, daß die hier offerierte Literatur keine Lebensdekoration für Weihestunden sein will, sondern Teil unseres Daseins, unseres wohlvertrauten Alltags, auf den jene Dichtung unmittelbar einwirken will. ...Gewiß, es gibt in Deutschland ähnliche Veranstaltungen wie diese Dichterreihe...Aber das Programm von Professor Höllerer mit den zwölf Dichterabenden gibt ein Schaufenster auf die junge Literatur der Welt frei, es hat einen eigenen, profilierten, unabhängigen Charakter, und es ist in seiner Art durchgehend künstlerisch revolutionär.” 54 Original text: “In der Zeit unmittelbar nach dem Berliner Mauerbau waren dann Mittel da, Autoren und Filmemacher einzuladen, und es waren auch viele daran interessiert, nach Berlin zu kommen. Shepard Stone, ideenreicher Berlinfreund mit Studienjahren in Berlin vor 1933, schlug die Brücke zur Ford-Foundation.” 74 Höllerer to discuss their proposal for a literary center in Berlin. Höllerer charmed

Stone with a tour of unique bars in West Berlin. Hasenclever reported to Höllerer after his brother-in-law’s visit that Stone thought their suggestion could be successful with Ford’s board, particularly because it was a type of institution that did not yet exist in Germany.55 In November 1962, Hasenclever wrote to Höllerer in regard to

Stone: “I am particularly satisfied that you gave my brother-in-law such a good impression. He has sometimes been so disgracefully annoyed by the gentlemen at the

Free University, that he was taken with your way of purposeful planning and energetic action.”56 Höllerer had endeared himself to the men with money. By the end of December 1962, he had sent his proposals to both Nabokov and Stone, which outlined the primary programs and nature of the cultural investment. He envisioned creating a foundation or trust that would support residences, educational programs, and his technical institute, among other activities.57 Many of the activities he wished for were supported in the final grant allocation, but a foundation was not established separately and the activities were actually split into two main programs: the Literary

Colloquium and the Artist-in-Residence program.

In addition to working with the Americans, Höllerer also tried to get German partners on board, liaising with the Berlin Senate and seeking funding from other sources, such as the Volkswagen Foundation, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, and the

55 Walter Hasenclever to Walter Höllerer. May 17, 1962, LASR. 56 Walter Hasenclever to Walter Höllerer. November 24, 1962, LASR. Original text: “Ich bin besonders befriedigt darüber, daß mein Schwager an Ihnen so großen Gefallen gefunden hat. Er hat sich bei den Herren der Freien Unviersität manchmal so schändlich geärgert, daß er von Ihrer Art der zielbewußten Planung und des energischen Handelns sehr angetan ist.” 57 Walter Höllerer to Shepard Stone. December 20, 1962, LASR. 75 Deutsche Klassenlotterie.58 On November 27, 1962, Höllerer summarized the official aims of the LCB in a statement to officials of the City of Berlin:

[The literary center should make it so] that Berlin is visited by international authors, that these authors write about Berlin, that Berlin will be a center for young writers, from Western countries as well as, if possible, from Poland and Yugoslavia, that here in Berlin a connection will be made between writers and the mass media, and that in this way the ideas of the writers will not remain in a small circle, but instead influence a broad circle of the population.59

Höllerer had the right message at the right time. His rationalization for the center, to make Berlin an international cultural hotspot, lined up with both the German and

American governments’ Cold War aims. By the end of the year, Ford’s investment was secured and Höllerer was able to begin building his long-wished for literary center.

Ford was satisfied with the selection of Höllerer as a key project leader.

Professor Dr. Moritz von Bomhard, Ford’s initial representative in Berlin, wrote to

Joseph Slater on August 1, 1963, “Professor Höllerer, being a resident of Berlin, has taken over the responsibilities which concern the ‘Literary Colloquium’ and it is not likely that he will ask for personal help.”60 Von Bomhard’s inclinations proved correct. In a general report from February 3, 1964, Haas wrote to the Ford Foundation updating it on various institutions. Writing about the Literary Colloquium he said:

This organization has made remarkable progress under the direction of the extremely active and imaginative Walther Höllerer (sic). Its work in the rooms

58 G. Gambke to Walter Höllerer. April 2, 1963. See also letter from Westdeutscher Rundfunk from March 6, 1963 and letter from the Deutsche Klassenlotterie January 13, 1965, LASR. 59 Walter Höllerer. “Stiftung zur Förderung der neuren Literatur in Berlin.” November 27, 1962, LASR. Original text: “Es soll dadurch erreicht werden, daß Berlin von internationalen Autoren besucht wird, daß diese Autoren über Berlin schreiben, daß Berlin für die Nachwuchskräfte, sowohl der westlichen Länder wie auch, wenn möglich, etwa aus Polen und Jugoslawien, ein Zentrum wird, daß hier in Berlin die Verbindungen zwischen den Schriftstellern und den Massenmedien hergestellt werden, daß auf diese Weise die Ideen der Schriftsteller nicht nur im kleinen Zirkel bleiben, sondern sich auf breite Bevölkerungskreise auswirken.” 60 Von Bomhard, Moritz to Joseph Slater. August 1, 1963. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF, RAC. 76 of the Carmerstrasse includes currently 16 young prose writers from England, Austria, Israel, Switzerland, Westgermany (sic). These young talents take courses under the direction of such wellknown (sic) writers such as Grass, Johnson, Richter etc. Regular lectures are held and critical discussion and symposions (sic) take place. For this summer a Dramaturgie-Regie is planned and for the coming winter-season the Avantgarde will have its say. Furthermore, brief television films, cultural films generally are planned; small international theaters will perform under the Colloquium’s auspices and the Academy of Arts plans a showing of Avantgarde theatrical attractions through the Colloquium. Since this week the future home of the Colloquium, Am Sandwerder 5, will be occupied along with the city-rooms in Carmerstrasse.”61

Even The Times in London noted, “One of the biggest boosts to English creative writing is now being administered in a German city and financed by American capital.”62 Höllerer seized this opportunity and was greeted with congratulations for his success. As he himself reported on the achievements of the LCB after one year: “It was the intent of the Ford Foundation that through the establishment of the Literary

Colloquium, Berlin would be a cultural center. The Literary Colloquium has truly endeavored to reach this mission.”63

During this time, Höllerer slowly gained closer ties with the American government as well. In early 1963, John Steinbeck made a tour of Europe “on behalf of Kennedy” and, stopping in Berlin, requested specifically via the U.S. Mission in

Berlin to meet Heinrich Böll, which Höllerer arranged, along with introductions to

Günther Grass, Uwe Johnson, and Bachmann. He also arranged for a reading at the

LCB along with Steinbeck’s other reading at the Amerikahaus.64 Böll later remarked

61 Haas, Karl, General Report. February 3, 1964. pp. 1. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF, RAC. 62 Marowitz, Charles in The Times. September 11, 1964. Quoted in “Literarisches Colloquium Berlin: Das bisherige Programm und seine Beurteilung in der Presse.” pp. 4, LASR. 63 “Literarisches Colloquium Berlin: Das bisherige Programm und seine Beurteilung in der Presse.” pp. 8, LASR. Original text:” Es war die Absicht der Ford Foundation, durch die Gründung des Literarischen Colloquium das Kulturzentrum Berlin zu bereichern. Das Literarische Colloquium hat sich redlich bemüht, dieser Aufgabe gerecht zu werden.“ 64 Walter Höllerer to Heinrich Böll. December 6, 1963. 03WH/AA/7, 13, LASR. 77 to Höllerer, “We survived Steinbeck; he was more exhausting than amusing.”65

Höllerer also worked in cooperation with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) on the 1964 Berliner Festwoche. Held from September 22-27, it was sponsored by the

Society of African Culture, Akzente, Der Monat, and the CCF.66 By 1965, Höllerer had clearly worked his way into the good graces of the American government as he was invited to attend a small circle event held by the US Ambassador.67 Höllerer’s organizational skills along with his ability to cooperate with a variety of institutional and governmental groups helped him secure financial and practical resources. His deep integration into the German literary scene was the final element that ensured his success.

Höllerer, Gruppe 47, and the German State-Private Network

Gruppe 47 dominated post-WWII German literature. While Hans Werner

Richter, the founder and organizer of the group, has been given much attention, little notice or study has been devoted to Höllerer, who played a major role by bringing the group to the public and connecting German literature to the wider world. Höllerer came from the quiet Bavarian village of Sulzbach-Rosenberg, a perhaps surprising origin for a man who became a key arbiter of post-WWII German literary life and a central figure in Berlin’s cultural landscape. After the war, Höllerer studied and earned his doctorate. From 1953, he worked as an assistant professor at the University of Frankfurt. Shortly before he took up his position there, he had met Hans Bender, a writer based in Heidelberg who was publishing the journal Konturen—Blätter für

65 Heinrich Böll to Walter Höllerer. December 18, 1963, 03WH/AA/7,13, LASR. Original text: “Den Steinbeck haben wir überstanden; es war eher anstrengend als amüsant.” 66 Letter from Edouard Maunick to Walter Höllerer. July 2, 1964. 03WH/AG/11,22, LASR. 67 William Ryerson to Walter Höllerer. September 10, 1965. 03WH/AB/11,6 and 47, LASR. 78 junge Dichtung. Gradually over their first year of friendship, Bender decided to cease publishing Konturen and he and Höllerer began Akzente, one of the most prominent journals for postwar German writing, which published work from almost every literary figure of consequence writing in German including Thomas Mann, Theodore

Adorno, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Uwe Johnson, and Günter Grass, among many others.68

In 1954, just as Akzente got off the ground, Höllerer, a poet and writer in his own right, was invited to join Gruppe 47. He established relationships with the writers there and gained influence among them as a key critic and the main editor of

Akzente. In his 2003 obituary for Höllerer, Marcel Reich-Ranicki contemplated how to classify Höllerer: was he a poet, writer, teacher, critic? Reich-Ranicki traced the many ways Höllerer supported German literature throughout his career, including publishing, promoting, organizing, and writing. He correctly points out that Höllerer played a key role in popularizing contemporary literature, particularly in Berlin, but also more widely (Reich-Ranicki 2003). Kristen Reiben asserts that Gruppe 47’s rise was not pre-determined or inevitable. Rather, “the group’s success was not brought about by literary merit. Other factors,” she states, “had a far greater impact, including political orientation, and an organizational structure that facilitated market connections” (448). She points out that in the first several years of Gruppe 47’s existence the main impetus to take part in the group related to professional affirmation and taking on the challenges of German literature in the post-Nazi era, as publishing opportunities were severely limited in post-war Germany. She asserts though that Gruppe 47 had a selective feature: as the group gained prominence, the

68 For more on the formation of Akzente see Gnose and Hehl, eds, 2009. 79 press, critics, and publishers attended or even became part of the group, creating both strong and weak ties between the group and the outlets that equated with financial and cultural success. As Stuart Parkes and John J. White point out:

…Richter astutely combined the image of a relaxed series of poetic workshops with the maintenance of strong contact with the media (radio stations, reviewers – many of whom were Group members writing pro domo – and academe). Die Zeit soon came to be regarded as the Groups Hausorgan, although Richter also had good connections with the Süddeutsche Zeitung and a number of leading publishing houses (viii).

Höllerer was one of the earliest and perhaps most influential publishing insiders of the group in his role as editor of Akezente. A 1965 article in the

Hambürger Abendblatt characterized Höllerer:

...he is widely known as the energetic promoter of young literature. He discovers and promotes beginners, gives advice, coaches, mothers their first tentative attempts. ...Would there be no new literature without Höllerer? After all, he did discover Günter Grass. He waves this aside: ‘That would have happened without me.’ And furthermore: ‘I would much prefer to only write, but it is easier to promote young talent.’69

Höllerer’s assertion that it is easier to foster talent than to write points towards a truth of mid-century German language writing: it was rife with talent managers. From Hans

Werner Richter to Hans Weigel and Walter Höllerer, a number of German literary men with a sense of business and the ability to build cultural connections made themselves into gatekeepers of the German culture industry. While they had modest literary credentials of their own, they became well known and capitalized on connecting more talented, and often younger, writers to venues that assured their financial and literary success. Joseph G. McVeigh has shown how the “paper wall,”

69 Jonas. “In Hamburg getroffen: Walter Höllerer.” Hambürger Abendblatt. February 15, 1965. Walter Höllerer Archive, LASR. Original text: “...er ist weithin bekannt als energiegeladener Promoter der jungen Literatur. Er entdeckt und fördert die Anfänger, berät, betreut, bemuttert ihre ersten tastenden Versuche. ...Kein literarischer Nachwuchs ohne Höllerer? Schließlich hat er Günter Grass entdeckt. Er winkt ab: ‚Das wäre auch ohne mich gekommen.’ Und außerdem: ‚Ich würde viel lieber nur schreiben, aber es ist einfacher, junge Talente zu fördern.’” 80 the limit on trade and cultural exchange between Austria and Germany, contributed to an Austrian brain drain, as Austrian authors sought to pursue their careers in Germany where remuneration out-stripped their Austrian equivalences by as much as 1:120.

McVeigh also charts how Weigel, who first found success in Germany, turned away from Gruppe 47 from “his hurt and bitterness at having ‘lost’ two such promising writers as [Ingeborg] Bachmann and [Ilse] Aichinger to the German publishing industry” and focused instead on keeping young talent in Austria (1996; 488).

Bachmann’s turn away from Weigel’s Gruppe 50, itself founded by direct inspiration of the CCF, surely had financial motivations, since it was simply more lucrative to work in Germany, but had political implications as well: Gruppe 50 was founded directly in relation to the CCF, obviously mixing artistic and political efforts, while

Gruppe 47, in its early years, professed a focus much more constricted to the artistic realm.70

Gruppe 47 was always intended by Hans Werner Richter to be, on some level, a political group and became increasingly politically engaged throughout its existence

(McVeigh 1996, 492; Gilcher-Holtey). This political involvement was not without criticism and contributed to its eventual dissolution by generating not only external pressure, but also internal fissures. As Parkes and White suggest, the media circus of the Sigtuna meeting in Sweden and the trans-Atlantic trip to Princeton University along with the alleged elitism, made it “clear by the late 1960s…that the Group had changed beyond all recognition from what it had been in the ‘heroic’ early period”

(iv). Scholars have also shown that while Richter may have started the group as a way

70 For more on Bachmann’s relationship to Hans Weigel and her early political involvement in Austria see Joseph McVeigh’s “‘…mehr als eine Störung in meiner Erinnergung’: Ingeborg Bachmann und die Politik des Kalten Kriegs 1947–1953” and McVeigh 2014. 81 to foster independent public intellectuals to engage in democracy in an effort to correct the way he believed intellectuals of the Weimar Republic had failed, the group gradually became part of the very establishment it was intended to critique, much as

Gramsci’s theory outlined (Cofalla).

Höllerer’s connections to the state-private network including Kissinger at

Princeton and the Ford funders, who helped support the infamous 1966 trip, along with his powerful role as primary editor of the two leading German literary cultural magazines, provoked criticism from leading writers (Gilcher-Holtey). As Ford’s programs got off the ground in the early 1960s, criticism was already building against the “Berlin literary mafia” with Robert Neumann pointing the finger directly at

Höllerer: “Höllerer is just as political as blotting paper or cotton wool from a medical cabinet. He is everywhere, ubiquitous, a garnish for every literary soup, an errand boy at the literary stock exchange, an agile man, as sensitive to tracing grants as a diviner”

(quoted in Kämper-van den Boogaart, 118).71 In short, he claimed Höllerer was not on a political side, but was a slippery businessman looking to get ahead. Worse though, getting paid through the government and the Ford Foundation, Neumann suggested, was a step to conformism, just like fascism.

Höllerer’s increased cultural capital and his role as the main connection between political and literary life created difficulties with Richter because he embodied the political-cultural position Richter had once wished to have (Kämper- van den Boogaart 111). Richter had a more complicated relationship with the

American powers, having been held as a prisoner-of-war and dismissed by the US

71 Original text: “Höllerer ist etwa so politisch wie Löschpapier oder Watte aus einem Ärzteschrank. Er ist ein ‚Adabei’, ein Überalldabei, Schnittlauch auf allen literarischen Suppen, ein Galoppin der literarischen Börse, ein flinker Mann, feinnervig beim Aufspüren von Subventionen wie ein Rutengänger. ” 82 occupation government from his role as the editor of Der Ruf. For him, working with the Americans had a different history and more complicated connotations (Gherasim).

Kämper-van den Boogaart traces convincingly how as Höllerer’s influence grew, it also morphed the intended direction of Gruppe 47 and its authors; Höllerer’s creative writing program at the LCB, moved away from Richter’s idea of an external artistic group towards an institutionalized space for learning and executing creative endeavors. Höllerer also gained influence within the group through his access to institutions and funding. For example, Richter relied on Höllerer to facilitate and enable Gruppe 47 to meet in Berlin in the early 1960s. Taking advantage of the presence of the German writers, Höllerer further arranged a meeting for all of the artists in Berlin.72 It was soon known among German authors that Höllerer had connections to the funding. In March 1964, Barbara Koenig wrote to Höllerer inquiring if it was still possible to secure some funding from the Ford Foundation because she needed to fill an income gap while she finished her next book.73

Höllerer, by institutionalizing a creative writing program in which he had a main role hiring the instructors, ensured the establishment of a certain school of literature. As Jürgen Becker, a member of Gruppe 47, testified, contact with the group was a formative and supportive factor for a young author (Parkes and White ii).

Höllerer may have strayed from Richter’s vision, but in so doing, he cemented a lasting legacy. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey has argued that the Gruppe 47 worked in the political field the same way that they worked in the artistic field, in effect insuring that intellectuals secured a place within postwar German society (2000). Günther

Stocker and Michael Rohrwasser show in a variety of ways that the Cold War,

72 Höllerer to all Berlin guests. October 23, 1963, LASR. 73 Barbara Koenig to Walter Höllerer March 7, 1964. 63WH/AA/6, 11, LASR. 83 through its political and monetary influences, shaped German-language literature.

This spans the range from promoting certain types of literature, to the literal creation of West and East German literature after the building of the wall, to taking seriously works that in other political constellations would never have received wider societal attention outside of specific intellectual circles. They also demonstrate that even writers who did not want to partake in the conflict were assigned political importance that they may not have desired.

Bachmann Comes to Berlin

Bachmann and Höllerer were in touch from the early 1950s. Höllerer published some of her first works in Akzente and assisted her in working with her first publications. Their correspondence shows how their relationship developed over the decade.74 By the time events in Berlin precipitated the artistic program, Bachman and

Höllerer clearly had a close friendship. She openly shared her health conditions with him and they worked together to be sure she could come to Berlin when she was ready.75 When she first went to the clinic in Switzerland after her separation from

Max Frisch, she wrote to Höllerer, “Dear Walter, now please do not be angry, something stupid has happened, tomorrow I must go to a clinic for four weeks to get myself fixed…Please forgive me, let me know once in a while, if after this I still have a chance, and then I will write a little note immediately.”76 Höllerer wrote back right

74 See correspondence regarding early publications, request for input on poems, and visits in Ingeborg Bachmann: LIT, Sign.: 423/B1040/1 and LASR, particularly 01AK/5575, 02WH/16213, 03WH/AA/7,17 and the corresponding folders. 75 See the several letters from Ingeborg Bachmann to Walter Höllerer in LASR, 03WH/AA/4,9; 6,6a; 6,6b; 7,33; 8, 45. 76 Ingeborg Bachmann to Walter Höllerer. December 9, 1962, 03WH/AA/5,27, LASR. Original text: “Lieber Walter, nun sei bitte nicht böse, es ist etwas Dummes passiert, ich muss nämlich morgen für vier Wochen in eine Klinik und mich reparieren gehen...Bitte verzeih es mir, lass mich gelegentlich wissen, ob ich nachher noch eine Chance habe, und ich schreibe dann auch gleich einen Zettel.” 84 away telling her not to worry and reassuring her that she could come to Berlin when she was ready. Bachmann kept Höllerer updated on her progress and in the spring they settled on her arrival. Once she was more confident about traveling and coming to Berlin, she wrote to Höllerer:

Yes, and Berlin. I was planning to write to you again or to call you, and now, two days ago, suddenly something has happened that stifled my half-baked, embryonic plans. I should receive, from a different party, a full year stay in Berlin, it is actually quite certain, even though I am still staring unbelievably at such a marvel. I hope you understand that I now will accept this offer because a full year in Berlin would be much better for me than a short stay. It will give me more stability and is a proper block of time for work, while the other offer would be more for a change and curiosity and a visit, and it would be best for me to work now. It should not make a difference to you under which patronage I come to Berlin, and I will write to Dr. Schwedt and thank her and explain—it should also not make a difference to them, there are surely enough candidates for the invitations.77

The letter intimates that Bachmann had two opportunities to come to Berlin and chose the Ford residence for practical purposes; she desired to go to Berlin for her own time and space in order to stabilize and write. Höllerer was likely connected to both opportunities.

Bachmann’s time in Berlin was pivotal to both her work and her network. She was writing prose before she came to the city, but during her stay she separated from

Germany and the network that had given her both fame and financial security, making a clear artistic turn. Although Bachmann signed some petitions and supported her

77 Ingeborg Bachmann to Walter Höllerer. March 16, 1963, 03WH/AA/6,6b, LASR. Original text: “Ja, und Berlin. Ich wollte schon bald darangehen, Dir wieder zu schreiben, oder Dich anzurufen, und nun hat sich vor zwei Tagen plötzlich etwas ereignet, was meine halbgaren, embryonalen Pläne erstickt hat. Ich soll, von ganz andrer Seite, einen einjährigen Berlinaufenthalt bekommen, d.h. es ist sogar ganz sicher, obwohl ich noch ungläubig auf das Wunder starre. Ich hoffe, Du verstehst, dass ich jetzt dieses Angebot annehmen werde, denn das einjährige Berlin wäre sehr viel besser für mich als ein kürzerer Aufenthalt, das macht mich stabiler und ist ein richtiger Zeitblock für Arbeit, während das andre mehr auf Abwechslung und Neugier und Besuch hinausgelaufen wäre, und mir täte jetzt Arbeit am besten. Dir selber wird es ja wohl nichts ausmachen, unter welchem Patronat ich nach Berlin komme, und der Frau Dr. Schwedt werde ich schreiben und danken und erklären – es wird ihnen wohl auch nichts ausmachen, da ja genug Anwärter für Einladungen sich finden werden.” 85 colleagues in their political battles into the mid-1960s, 1962 was the last Gruppe 47 meeting she attended and her famous speech on reception of the Georg Büchner Preis in 1964, “Ein Ort für Zufälle,” marked her departure from an active role in the cultural Cold War. Living in the epicenter of the conflict appears to have pushed

Bachmann away from accepting any role in what she increasingly identified as a game of violence and domination, a society of endless war. Bachmann’s road to involvement in the cultural Cold War state-private network culminated in her experience in Berlin. Her prose writings from Berlin and after deliver a damning critique not only of the artistic patronage that the dueling superpowers were offering, but the entire premise of the Cold War conflict, which suggested that everything could be ruthlessly traded or divided, including artists.

The Weight of the Congress: Bachmann’s State-Private Network

Bachmann’s direct political support of Willy Brandt and the SPD along with that of fellow Gruppe 47 members such as Günter Grass and Hans Werner Henze in the early 1960s is well known. She signed several protest letters issued by the group.

Reflecting on her involvement in the 1970s, Bachmann said:

The contact with writers was very good for me at one time…these times are now gone. I do not find it important for a writer to live amongst other writers, I only found it important at a time in which one could do something, namely get people out of jails, to demand that they can travel out of dictatorships, to help them as much as one can (Ein Tag wird Kommen 40).78

Bachmann saw herself as using her position and opportunities to do what she could to help. From her correspondence, it is clear that this was not always an easy decision

78 Original text: “Die Kontakte mit Schriftstellern waren für mich einmal sehr gut…diese Zeiten sind vorbei. Ich finde es nicht wichtig für einen Schriftsteller unter Schriftstellern zu leben, ich habe es nur wichtig gefunden zu einer Zeit, in der man etwas tun hat können, und zwar, die Leute aus Gefängnissen heraus zu holen, zu verlangen, daß sie ausreisen dürfen aus Diktaturen, ihnen zu helfen, wie man nur kann.” 86 and she knew full well that it came with risks. Organizing their involvement in support of Brandt in the 1965 election Bachmann wrote to Hans Werner Henze:

Yesterday I was at Günter Grass’, who is traveling around in order to help the SPD win the elections, and he would very much like for you to come to Bayreuth and speak with him there, because Willy (even though he does not always hold his own in front of an audience) turns out to be the only possible serious figure in this country. We spoke about it for a long time. I am thus a diplomat with restrictions, but I agree, despite everything that can be said from the outside, that this party must finally win the election so that one can actually keep going in this country. Otherwise it will go to the dogs. (Letter to Hans Werner Henze, Berlin, 26 July 1965, letter 161, pp. 259–260).79

She wrote again a month later:

…I have still interfered and in the best faith, but sometimes I get the shivers when I think about it all and here, more than in Berlin, the bourgeois and nationalistic tone that comes from this party today and that has for some time stands out to me…I have readily said, this land with its guilt and its unwillingness to learn should go to hell, but I write in this language and you are the most precious person to me…I watch how one ‘adjusts’ oneself to the Soviet Union in order to suddenly make the Chinese criminals, which they are not, to play out a conflict between restoration (in Russia) and revolution (in China) against each other in the most malicious way or worthy of all these idiots that do not understand what it means that millions starve and yet are in the right. It is so easy to say, we ‘accept’ this or that course, but the world, the degraded world, has only one course, starvation only one, ignorance only one, and we stew in our little economic wonders and cultural wonders, but history is a steamroller that is strong and we are strong, not when we ‘give in’ to what is given, but rather when we think further (Ingeborg Bachmann to Hans Werner Henze, 30 August 1965, letter 165, pp. 266–268).80

79 Original text: “Gestern war ich bei Günter Grass, der herumreist, um der SPD zum Gewinnen der Wahlen zu verhelfen, und er möchte so gerne, dass Du nach Bayreuth kommst und dort mit ihm redest, weil Willy (wenn er auch nicht immer vor Publikum besteht) sich herausstellt als die einzig mögliche seriöse Figur in diesem Land. Wir haben lang darüber gesprochen. Ich bin also der Diplomat mit Restriktionen, sehe aber ein, dass, trotz allem, was von aussen zu sagen ist, diese Partei endlich die Wahlen gewinnen muss, damit man überhaupt weitermachen kann in diesem Land. Denn sonst wird es wohl vor die Hunde gehen.” 80 Original text: “…ich habe doch interveniert und in dem besten Glauben, aber manchmal bekomm ich das Frösteln, wenn ich alles so überdenke und mir hier, besser als in Berlin, die bürgerlichen und nationalistischen Töne auffallen, die aus dieser Partei heute und seit einiger Zeit kommen…Ich habe leicht sagen, dieses Land mit seiner Schuld und seiner Unbelehrbarkeit soll zur Hölle gehen, aber ich schreibe in dieser Sprache und Du bist mir der kostbarste Mensch…Ich sehe zu, wie man sich ´arrangiert´ mit der Sowviet Union, um plötzlich die Chinesen zu Verbrechern zu machen, die sie nicht sind, einen Konflikt zwischen Restauration (in Russland) und Revolution (in China) gegeneinander auszuspielen auf die infamste Weise oder würdig all dieser Dummköpfe, die nicht verstehen, was es heisst, dass Millionen hungern und im Recht sind. Es ist so leicht zu sagen, wir ‘akzeptieren’ diesen oder jenen Kurs, aber die Welt, die erniedrigte, hat nur einen Kurs, der Hunger nur einen, die 87

Bachmann had a clear understanding of how the least worst option was sadly the best option, but found the entire situation dangerous and absurd; the leaders were blind to or unmoved by the wider human suffering and the real troubles of the world.

Recent scholarship on Bachmann’s political activity—Dirk Göttsche,

Franziska Meyer, et al in their collection Schreiben gegen Krieg und Gewalt and Hans

Höller, Helga Pöcheim et al’s Schreiben gegen den Krieg—has focused on her direct political involvement and her critique of the violence of politics and war as experienced in daily life. Joseph McVeigh’s research has also explored Bachmann’s involvement in Cold War politics during her early years in Vienna, particularly her work for the American-backed radio station Rot-Weiss-Rot. Sara Lennox outlines concisely Bachmann’s full involvement in various postwar and Cold War American cultural efforts, analyzing Bachmann’s social and political critique of the role and position of women in Cold War society, particularly its “instrumentalization of women to meet the needs” of the period (307). What has not been fully grappled with is a factor that McVeigh hints at, but does not fully address: Bachmann’s entanglement in and management of her lengthy and lucrative involvement in the

Wests’ anti-communist culture war. Bachmann’s deeper involvement in the cultural

Cold War’s state-private network solidified her now famous assertion that fascism starts between individuals. It is evident to see from Bachmann’s writings that the milieu of the cultural Cold War, particularly as experienced through the German-

American nexus, was a new historical experience that reflected and refracted the recent fascist past, continuing the abuse and manipulation of people in a different

Unwissenheit nur einen, und wir schmoren in unseren kleinen Wirtschaftswundern und Kunstwundern, aber die Geschichte ist eine Dampfwalze, die stark ist, und wir sind stark, nicht, wenn wir ‘eingehen’ auf das Gegebene, sondern wenn wir weiterdenken.” 88 way. The male-controlled political discourse that dominated the 1950s and 1960s attempted to harness its subjects to its effort and in the process distorted them through financial influence. As Bachmann alludes to in Malina: “It was the beginning of a universal prostitution” (172).

Bachmann’s absorption in the Cold War climate gave her full view of the reality of the conflict at hand. While she certainly felt the importance of political engagement, she appears to have become increasingly skeptical of its effectiveness.

As she began to disentangle herself from the cultural Cold War’s long reach, she explored the toxicity of the conflict in her work. Two of Bachmann’s writings from the 1960s demonstrate how she wrestled with the reality of the state-private network that failed to see humanity in the populations they traded across ideological lines: in

“Ein Ort für Zufälle” Bachmann forcefully illustrates the madness of the conflict by manifesting it as an illness. As she argues, it is only those whom society deems ill who can truly see the sickness of the era. In Malina, the narrator embodies one of the individuals this society would deem sickly. She refuses to play the power politics game and consistently seeks to obfuscate its efforts and redirect them to the personal, lived experiences of suffering. Questioning the premise, however, results in her being scolded and rebuffed. Eventually she literally disappears into a wall; the conflict swallows her up and the disciplined, exacting, state-archivist Malina takes over.

Bachmann’s involvement in the emerging state-private cultural network of the postwar period began with her involvement in the American funded newspaper Neues

Österreich and the American funded radio station Rot-Weiss-Rot. In his analysis of her early years in Vienna, McVeigh traces how Bachmann avoided acknowledging or discussing her work for the radio station. He speculates she did this to cultivate her

89 public persona as a writer of only serious literature suggesting that, “There may have indeed been other factors that contributed to her silence about this period of her life for it was hallmarked by her incessant uncertainty about whether she would be able to pursue a ‘life in literature’ and support herself financially at the same time” (300). He also draws some attention to the American role in running Rot-Weiss-Rot, which likely would have discouraged Bachmann from publicizing her involvement with the station writing: “Her later skittishness about the political implications of her work for the Americans was certainly strengthened by her acceptance into Gruppe 47, whose politics were decidedly to the left of those of her Austrian colleagues in Weigel’s group of young writers” (2014, 334). What McVeigh’s analysis overlooks is that

Bachmann continued to receive American funding during a number of years throughout her career involvement in Gruppe 47, as did several other members of the group. Still, understanding the role Rot-Weiss-Rot played for Bachmann is essential to understanding her literary-political connections and the trajectory her career took.

Bachmann’s Austrian identity must also be taken into account. As Cettina

Rapisarda has suggested, to Gruppe 47 and the German media, Bachmann was a spokesperson for modern German (language) literature, despite Bachmann herself claiming the difference and distance between Austrians and Germans and increasingly emphasizing her own status and identification as an Austrian throughout her career.

Schneider-Handschin also points out that it was her Austrian otherness that made her fascinating for the German audience. It was the economic and cultural border the

Allied governments, particularly the US Americans, forced between the Austrians and

Germans at the end of the war, which created a distance and also pushed Bachmann and other writers to pursue their careers in West Germany. As Bachmann herself said,

90 “It is not the first generation…but rather for many generations all of our writers have, in the twentieth century at least, published in Germany because there was no other possibility” (quoted in Rapisarda 193).81

It was through her friendship with Ilse Aichinger at Rot-Weiss-Rot that

Bachmann was first invited to a Gruppe 47 meeting where she gained early recognition and also learned about the lucrative German radio market. Finding she could earn much more by writing manuscripts in the Federal Republic, she departed

Austria and settled in Rome. When Bachmann first moved to Rome to pursue her career, she initially had misgivings and was worried about giving up the steady income that her work at Rot-Weiss-Rot afforded her, but she took the chance anyway

(McVeigh Radio Family 300). In some form, Bachmann may have also thought she was moving away from the political implications of Rot-Weiss-Rot and Weigel’s influence connected to the CCF. She wrote in 1950, “The congress weighs on me like a sickness” and she believed that the meeting of the congress was nothing but the spiritual preparation for World War III (quoted in McVeigh “mehr als eine Störung...”

326).82 Yet in her future, she would get closer to the CCF.

Even though Bachmann had concerns about Rot-Weiss-Rot and Weigel’s political associations, she was not disengaged from politics. Within her work at the

Austrian radio station, she had been focusing on the personal implications and effects of political actions from her earliest writings. McVeigh provides convincing evidence of some of Bachmann’s themes presented in her radio scripts, from a Serbian man feeling completely unwelcome and persecuted in Vienna to co-education and the

81 Original text: “Es ist nicht die erste Generation…, sondern seit vielen Generationen haben alle unsere Schriftsteller, im 20. Jahrhundert jedenfalls, in Deutschland verlegt, weil es keine andere Möglichkeit gegeben hat.” 82 Original text: “Der Kongress liegt auf mir wie eine Krankheit.” 91 moral endangerment of youth, and “a humorous criticism of politics as a manifestation of power” (2014, 323-325). Bachmann, McVeigh states, raised “a political issue to a more general issue of human interest…in her political scripts. In contrast to the episodes by [Jörg] Mauthe and [Peter] Weiser, where political issues are often the central theme, Bachmann’s contributions to the programme usually retain a focus on the very details of the family’s life…” (324). Bachmann’s focus on the personal lived experience of historical and political decisions would eventually push her to withdraw from the state-private network.

Despite her earlier concerns about the CCF, by the time Bachmann arrived in

Berlin, she was sufficiently entangled in the long arm of the organization. She had attended Kissinger’s summer seminar at Harvard and was publishing in Encounter.

She then accepted Ford’s invitation and its generous financial support. While

Bachmann was receiving funding from Ford and publishing in Encounter, she began to cut her ties with Germany and the state-private network in official capacities.83 It is as if she went to the city to take her leave of the country. 1962 was the last year she attended a Gruppe 47 gathering. In December 1963, Bachmann canceled her membership to the German PEN club, emphasizing in her letter to the club that she did not intend her withdrawal to be a provocation, but stated:

It is not true that I have regarded this membership as some sort of decoration or whatever…I would like, as they say, to quietly withdraw my membership, to simply take the consequences that in all of these years I have not been of any use to PEN and I think so little of formal memberships as you do… I got

83 In 1963 Bachmann also published a story in Encounter. On December 14, 1963 Bachmann wrote to Melvin Lasky at Encounter to thank him for the copy of the magazine he sent her and for publishing her story in it. She says, “Ich hoffe, sie ist für London nicht ganz unverständlich oder sie macht etwas Verstehen.“ Ingeborg Bachmann: LIT, Sign.: 423/B279. 92 into the German PEN-Club as an Austrian, in which I presumably never belonged, which should surely make the entire thing even less problematic.84

Despite sharing a language with the Germans, in the early 1960s, she began drawing a clear public line, delineating herself as distinctively Austrian.

Embracing the Border: Bachmann in Berlin

Bachmann arrived to Berlin in April 1963, officially beginning her yearlong

Ford stipend on May 1, 1963. While she did receive her stipend regularly and promptly from the Ford Foundation, Bachmann had two administrative snafus in

Berlin, one with her phone and one with reimbursement for her medical bills, which raise critical questions about Ford’s administration and Bachmann’s shifting status. 85

The initial concern was that she did not have a phone in her apartment. Having arrived in May, by early December, she still did not have a phone.86 Frustrated,

Bachmann wrote to Karl Haas on December 21, 1963 after attending a reception at his house earlier that week. She thanked him and then raised the issue of the telephone. She had provided a letter from the Martin-Luther-Krankenhaus in her application that said she needed a phone for health reasons. She also of course needed it for professional reasons, which should have been enough. Her letter expressed her frustration and desire to have the phone sorted. She concluded her plea stating: “And for you, for the Ford Foundation, I would also add the additional reason that you did not bring me to Berlin, so that I could live in full isolation. Dear Dr. Haas, please help

84 Ingeborg Bachmann: LIT, Sign.: 423/B108. Original text: “Es stimmt nur nicht, dass ich diese Mitgliedschaft als Dekoration oder was auch immer betrachtet habe…Ich möchte, wie man sagt, in aller Stille austreten, einfach die Konsequenzen daraus ziehen, dass ich in all den Jahren dem PEN von keinem Nutzen war und von formalen Mitgliedschaften so wenig halte wie Sie…als Österreicherin in den deutschen PEN-Club geraten bin, in den ich vermutlich nicht einmal gehören dürfte, macht es die ganze Sache sicher noch unproblematischer.” 85 Ingeborg Bachmann: Ingeborg Bachmann to the DAAD. December 14, 1963, LIT, Sign.: 423/B105. 86 Ingeborg Bachmann: Ingeborg Bachmann to Herr Busse. December 6, 1963, LIT, Sign.: 423/B7. 93 me.”87 By mid-January 1964, Bachmann still did not have a phone and escalated her complaint to the Berlin Senate, writing:

May I also say something about the telephone so that you are better informed? In the house, in which I live, three renters that have moved in after me already have a telephone. Therefore, it cannot be true that it is impossible in principle to get a prompt hook-up in the Grunewald district. There surely is a possibility to get a hook-up right away. I have already been waiting for this for four months—and if I am perhaps not allowed to have an opinion—it still seems that in the three other cases I spoke about the urgency is rather less than in my case.

I also wrote a letter to Dr. Haas of the Ford Foundation at Christmas requesting his help with this matter, since I also now begin to require a telephone for professional reasons and because of my ‘unreachableness’ am more often in unfortunate situations. I also feel, despite all of the lovely invitations and courteousness, so isolated here and immobile that I cannot imagine that my hosts, the Senate and the Ford Foundation, can feel satisfied with my presence in Berlin.88

By October 1964, Bachmann amazingly still did not have a phone. The Berlin Senate claimed there was ongoing work in the area on the entire network requesting her to be patient until the following year. It is unclear if the phone was ever installed while she was in Berlin. While the phone may have been an irritating issue, the fact that neither

Ford nor the city’s administrators took it seriously points to their failure to take her

87 Ingeborg Bachmann: Ingeborg Bachmann to Karl Haas and Herr Kirchner. 21 December 1963, LIT, Sign.: 423/B255/1-2. Original text: “Und für Sie, für die Ford-Stiftung, wäre doch noch zusätzlich der Grund anzugeben, dass Sie mich nicht nach Berlin eingeladen haben, damit ich in völliger Isolation lebe. Lieber Herr Dr.Haas, bitte helfen Sie mir.” 88 Ingeborg Bachmann: Ingeborg Bachmann to Senator Kirchner, LIT, Sign.: 423/B40. See also Ingeborg Bachmann: LIT, Sign.: 423/B1633. Original text: “Darf ich des Telefons wegen – auch damit Sie genauer informiert sind – noch etwas sagen? In dem Haus, in dem ich wohne, haben drei Mieter, die nach mir eingezogen sind, bereits ein Telefon. Es kann also nicht wahr sein, dass es prinzipiell unmöglich ist, kurzfristig einen Anschluss im Bezirk Grunewald zu erhalten. Es besteht also durchaus eine Möglichkeit, sofort einen Anschluss zu bekommen. Überdies warte ich jetzt schon den vierten Monat und - wenn ich mir vielleicht auch kein Urteil erlauben darf – so scheint mir doch in den drei anderen Fällen, von denen ich sprach, die Dringlichkeit eher geringer als sie es in meinem Falle ist.

An Herrn Dr. Haas von der Ford-Foundation habe ich Weihnachten ebenfalls einen Brief geschrieben mit der Bitte, mir in dieser Sache zu helfen, da ich nun auch aus beruflichen Gründen das Telefon immer mehr zu entbehren anfange und durch ‚Unerreichbarkeit’ immer öfter in unleidige Situationen komme. Auch fühle ich mich trotz all der schönen Einladungen und all der Liebenswürdigkeit hier so isoliert und unbeweglich, dass ich mir nicht vorstellen kann, mit meiner Anwesenheit in Berlin meine Gastgeber, den Senat und die Ford-Foundation, zufriedenzustellen.” 94 concerns in earnest. If it is indeed accurate that other people in her same building had phones, there would appear to be no technical reason she could not have one installed.

There must have been another reason for this lack of attention from the caretakers of the program.

Another inequity Bachman faced can shed further light on the situation. Both

Bachmann and Gombrowicz spent time in sanatoriums while in Berlin. She went to

Martin-Luther hospital on July 14, 1963 for several weeks.89 The Artist-in-Residence program provided insurance for the participants. This insurance, paid for by Ford, duly covered Gombrowicz’s hospital bills. However, when Bachmann accrued bills for her hospital stay, she was not able to get her expenses covered. She wrote several times to Peter Nestler at the DAAD, who by 1964 was in charge of the administration of the program, but was not able to receive compensation.90 Nestler reported to

Bachmann that the insurance would not pay for her bills because they see it as a pre- existing condition.91 This seems to have been an unequal assessment. By all recorded accounts, Gombrowicz had well-known poor health before arriving in Berlin. Though his condition deteriorated during his time in Germany, it was related to previous illnesses and a generally weak physical condition. While it is impossible to know each writer’s precise medical condition, based on the documents available, the lack of financial support for Bachmann’s medical bills appears inequitable. In addition, several of Ford’s letters trace concern for Gombrowicz’s health and express offers to visit or help in any other way possible. There is no record of any concern for or

89 Ingeborg Bachmann: Ingeborg Bachmann to Peter Nestler. September 24, 1964, LIT, Sign.: 423/B 328. 90 Ingeborg Bachmann: Ingeborg Bachmann to Peter Nestler. January 1, 1964 and September 24, 1964, LIT, Sign.: 423/B 328. 91 Ingeborg Bachmann: Peter Nestler to Ingeborg Bachmann. October 1964, LIT, Sign.: 423/B760/3. 95 discussion of Bachmann’s condition. The key differences of course were that

Gombrowicz was a man and his medical issues clearly physical, while Bachmann was a woman and her medical issues related to mental health. The administrative lack of concern could be the result of sexism, views on mental health, or, perhaps politically motivated; many eyes from just across the border were closely watching

Gombrowicz’s participation, while Bachmann was likely viewed more-or-less at home in the German community. Whether it was one of these reasons, a combination of them, or mere administrative incompetence is unclear, but Bachmann did not have a smooth experience in Berlin.

Despite their unequal treatment by their hosts, Bachmann’s friendship with

Gombrowicz in Berlin was fortuitous for both writers. Not only did they each come to what would be a forsaken and deeply problematic city and not only did they both get ill and spend months in sanatoriums from which they never fully recovered, but they also both embraced borders, a suspension in between identities, that created understanding and support. As Leslie Morris has pointed out, Bachmann “positioned herself inside a geographical gap. She certainly disassociated herself from Germany, and felt much ambivalence about Austria, but was able to distance herself from

Austria by virtue of having grown up in Carinthia, which borders Yugoslavia and

Italy” (19). Bachmann wrote of herself:

I spent my youth in Carinthia, in the south, on the border, in a valley that had two names—a German and a Slovenian. And the house, in which generations of my forefathers had lived—Austrian and Slovenians—, has still today a strange sounding name. So that near the border is still also the border: the border of language—and I was on both sides of the house, with the history of good and evil spirits of two or three countries; because over the mountains, an hour away, was already Italy (quoted in Lindemann 8).92

92 Original text: “Ich habe meine Jugend in Kärnten verbracht, im Süden, an der Grenze, in einem Tal, das zwei Namen hat – einen deutschen und einen slowenischen. Und das Haus, in dem seit 96

Having grown up in the Austrian province of Carinthia, near the border with Slovenia and Italy, Bachmann drew a lineage of inbetweenness that gained larger prominence in her work throughout her career as her geographical focus also turned eastward and she embraced and highlighted more publicly her family’s Slavic origins. While in

Berlin, she visited what was then Czechoslovakia, writing “Böhmen liegt am Meer,” which she claimed as her own favorite poem from her oeuvre. A few years later, she took a trip to Poland, which, Hans Höller writes, was one of her happiest trips. She saw a new beginning in Poland after the catastrophes of National Socialism and was inspired by the women of Poland who she felt were both rational and emotional at the same time, as she suggested literature should also be. Bachmann said of her trip:

I was recently in Poland for the first time and I noticed again where I belong. Because I am a Slav, and Slavs are different. Italians are more rational, they think cerebrally. Slavs are more emotional, and I have noticed this again in Poland, and I belong there. I belong to these people who in fact cannot think less rationally and are not less cerebral, on the contrary (Ein Tag wird kommen, Gespräch in Rom 65–66).93

In the 1960s and 1970s, Bachmann’s gaze clearly moved from West to East. As she withdrew from the cultural Cold War and the German publicity market, she sketched a more complex picture of her origins. Where in concrete reality she experienced borders of hard divisions, she drew attention to the suspended and complex living reality of permeable borders that actually exist.

Generationen meine Vorfahren wohnten – Österreicher und Windische – , trägt noch heute einen fremdklingenden Namen. So ist nahe der Grenze noch einmal die Grenze: die Grenze der Sprache – und ich war hüben und drüben zu Hause, mit den Geschichten von guten und bösen Geistern zweier und dreier Länder; denn über den Bergen, eine Wegstunde weit, liegt schon Italien.“ 93 Original text: “Ich war vor kurzem in Polen, zum erstenmal, und ich habe wieder bemerkt, wo ich hingehöre. Denn ich bin ja eine Slawin, und Slawen sind anders. Italiener sind viel rationaler, denken zerebraler. Slawen sind emotiver, und ich habe das in Polen wieder gemerkt, und ich gehöre dort hin. Ich gehöre zu diesen Leuten, die zwar nicht weniger rational denken können und nicht weniger zerebral sind, im Gegenteil.” 97 While Bachmann attempted to redraw or realign her ethnic and national origins, she also was coming to terms with her border crossing in relation to political engagement and financial success. Bachmann crossed the Austrian-German border to pursue her career, which took her on a whirlwind ride of success into the heart of the cultural Cold War apparatus, eventually placing her directly in front of the most severe and extreme representation of the Cold War conflict: the Berlin Wall. Brought to this point, with full knowledge of the conflict’s simultaneous importance and wicked destructiveness, she withdrew from the public conflict to deliver a fuller and far more damning assessment of the situation. Her journey to and experience in Berlin highlight the scope of opportunities the cultural Cold War could offer, along with the complications that being a woman in this environment entailed. Her prose writings, particularly Malina and “Ein Ort für Zufälle,” also offer the broadest, earliest, and most stringent critique of the expanding and increasingly powerful state-private network within which she partook.

Getting Out

Hans Werner Richter and Alfred Andersch, editors of the WWII and postwar newspaper Der Ruf and founding members of Gruppe 47, fully embraced the idea of

“Stunde Null,” concentrating their efforts on making a clear break from the Nazi period, a sentiment that Bachmann increasingly could not tolerate. As she moved from poetry to prose, she also distanced herself from Gruppe 47 and Germany. On

December 7, 1963, Bachmann wrote to Joachim Kaiser in Munich:

But with Berlin, that is a misunderstanding, I have not moved, but I have come here, (so have moved yet again). I do not have much time for the Wall and the West, although I am more sensitive to this situation than one might suppose.

98 If Berlin is hugging the foreigners, I do not know, I am also not in Berlin at all, but in Grunewald, and in this Grunewald I try to become healthy and to forget the nightmares of the endless hospitals. That is certainly nothing for the feuilleton.94

While Bachmann perhaps did not have the will to deal publicly with the Wall, her time in Berlin proved highly fruitful for her new stage of writing. She did approach the divided city directly just the next year in her acceptance speech for the Georg-

Büchner prize. It was the first time Bachmann had publicly criticized Germany in a direct way through her work. “Ein Ort für Zufälle” is a significant text in Bachmann’s career because it laid out the themes and concerns that would occupy her for the rest of her life, particularly in the Todesarten project. Elke Schlinsog’s Berliner Zufälle:

Ingeborg Bachmanns “Todesarten” – Project provides an incisive look not only into

Bachmann’s prize acceptance speech, but also into the pivotal role Berlin played for

Bachmann personally and professionally. She argues, that “[after] the author tested the Fanny figure in many versions of the 'ways of death' for over a year in her Berlin

'text workshop', ‘Ein Ort für Zufälle’ in 1964 publicly showed the direction of her writing, which led directly to the Todesarten-project. The Berlin prose thus marked a clear turning point in her work.” (9).95 Schlinsog carefully analyzes the many iterations and drafts of various works within which Bachmann developed the main texts of her Todesarten project, which is, as Lennox states, “Bachmann’s first public

94 Ingeborg Bachmann: Ingeborg Bachmann to Joachim Kaiser, December 7, 1963, LIT, Sign.: 423/B243. Original text: “Nur mit Berlin, das ist ein Missverständnis, umgezogen bin ich nicht, aber hierher gezogen (also doch wieder einmal umgezogen). Für die Mauer und für das Abendland habe ich wenig Zeit, obwohl ich für diese Situation empfindlicher bin, als man vielleicht meint.

Ob Berlin die Fremden ans Herz drückt, weiss ich nicht, ich bin auch gar nicht in Berlin, sondern in Grunewald, und in diesem Grunewald versuche ich, gesund zu werden und die Cauchemars aus endlosen Krankenhäusern zu vergessen. Für das Feuilleton ist das freilich nichts.” 95 Original text: “Nachdem die Autorin über ein Jahr in ihrer Berliner ´Textwerkstatt` in mehrfachen Fassungen die “Todesarten” der Fanny-Figur erprobt, zeigt Ein Ort für Zufälle im Oktober 1964 nun auch der Öffentlichkeit die Richtung ihres Schreibens, die direkt zum Todesarten-Projekt führt. Die Berlin-Prosa markiert nun auch nach außen einen deutlichen Wendepunkt in ihrem Werk.” . 99 fictional effort explicitly to thematize the relationship of politics to subjectivity”

(313). My attention to both “Ein Ort für Zufälle” and Malina considers the ways in which the texts resurrect and dissect the politico-economic milieu of the cultural Cold

War, highlighting the destructive ways it manifested in individual lives while also putting the conflict in historical perspective. Bachmann realized very early, historically speaking, that the Cold War, while it could have caused world destruction, was only one battle in a broader and longer conflict of humanity, as historians such as Odd Arne Westad are now arguing.

In her opening remarks to “Ein Ort für Zufälle,” Bachmann states, “Madness can also come from without, towards the individual, it has therefore already gone much earlier from within the individual outwards, and meets on the return journey, in situations that have become familiar to us in the inheritances of this time” (278).96

Highlighting the cyclical personal damage historical events unleash on generations,

Bachmann proceeds to draw a picture of Berlin in a feverish disease. The city is not a glorified symbol of the historical moment, but is plagued by myriad illnesses. “Ein

Ort für Zufälle” describes Berlin as a giant hospital with sick crowds roaming and airplanes flying through it, while doctors and nurses attend the patients. As the speech proceeds, the city heats up like a desert. Various actions, including the political, push the temperature ever higher. The only escape is to dig a tunnel or steal the camel from the zoo to try to escape. Doctors and nurses repeatedly attend to the patients, but it is unclear if they are helping them, damaging them, or providing palliative care. As

Schlinsog has noted, in this hospital, it is the sick who see most clearly: “‘Ein Ort für

96 Original text: “Der Wahnsinn kann auch von außen kommen, auf die einzelnen zu, ist also schon viel früher von dem Innen der einzelnen nach außen gegangen, tritt den Rückweg an, in Situationen, die uns geläufig geworden sind, in den Erbschaften dieser Zeit.” 100 Zufälle’ is told from the perspective of the sick, who from the hospital observe the events of the external world as ‘coincidences’. For Bachmann it is precisely the sick, who are sensitized to the perception of reality.” (114).97 Bachmann asserts: “Division: that is something else, an industrious word, it cuts off a lot, not least, thinking”

(279).98 The incisive business of division is insidious, taking away not only physical needs and connection, but also rational thought, creating and encouraging madness.

Those who appear or assert they are in charge are truly mad while those deemed ill are able to grasp reality.

In the midst of the roaming invalids, “[a] few famous people were stealthily admitted at night by the flashing blue lights [of ambulances or police cars], most though are relatives, who can provide no support; they have addresses, but no next of kin” (282).99 Most of the residents are natives of the place, but they have no family to call on because they have all been separated by either death or the Wall. Although they still have a place to exist, they are no longer connected or grounded in their human relationships. The handful of famous people in Berlin have been smuggled in clandestinely at night. Just as the guest artists and the rotation of visitors in real life, they are unwelcome strangers in the city, their presence suspicious. Are they there to help, inspect, observe? It remains unclear. In the art academy, however, everything is visible, laid bare. It is a place of torture:

In the academy all of the doors and windows are made of glass, there are no curtains, so that everything lies in the light, it gets light just after midnight,

97 Original text: “So wird in „Ein Ort für Zufälle“ aus dem Blickwinkel der Kranken erzählt, die aus dem Krankenhaus die Vorkommnisse der Ausßenwelt als ‘Zufälle’ wahrnehmen. Für Bachman sind es gerade die Kranken, die für die Wahrnehmung des Wirklichen sensibilisiert sind.” 98 Original text: “Teilung: das ist ein anderes, ein fleißiges Wort, es nimmt vieles ab, das Denken nicht zuletzt.” 99 Original text: “Einige bekannte Personen sind hier auch heimlich eingeliefert worden, nachts bei Blaulicht, die meisten sind aber Anverwandte, die alle keinen Halt angeben können, Adressen haben sie, aber keine nächsten Angehörigen.” 101 only the portraits are covered with cloths. The exhibition is opened, heads everywhere, and all are present in front of their pictures. The exhibitors are still searching for the picture that will be dissected. Before this there is a terribly long wait, everyone thinks that he will be beheaded, but then it is another. Nevertheless everyone must cry. The fire that suddenly breaks out, comes from the basement, is salvation…(285).100

In the house of art, the glass structure and penetrating light ensure there is no place to hide. It has become an execution ground. Everyone waits to be beheaded, to have their work destroyed, relieved only when someone else comes under the ax. The only thing that rescues the artists is a raging fire from below. Destruction alleviates destruction. The depth of despair in the city offers one suffering to replace the other.

For everyone at the academy, it is better that the entire building was destroyed than to have to look at what the artists in their glass house of truth had to say. For the artists it is better as well that they avoid the intense inspection.

Later, the scope widens to take in a full view of the city with its division cutting through it. The crossing points stand out and are the sites of curious procedures, guards inspecting cars, scratching off the paint, and flipping coins before deciding to issue stamps that allow entrance to the other side. Friedrichstraße “ is still another crossing, an exit and an entrance for red cross cars and big, black cars with their windows covered with curtains (289).101 This special crossing point is designated for the powerful: the doctors, the politicians, the people with influence and money, who drive around in their big, black cars, the windows blacked out so no one can see who is coming and going. The big black car that Gombrowicz was put in on

100 Original text: “In der Akademie sind alle Türen und Fenster aus Glas, es gibt keine Vorhänge, damit alles im Licht liegt, es wird gleich nach Mitternacht hell, nur die Porträts sind mit Tüchern verhängt. Die Ausstellung ist eröffnet, lauter Köpfe, es sind auch alle anwesend vor ihren Bildern. Die Aussteller suchen noch nach dem Bild, das zerschnitten werden soll. Vorher ist ein langes furchtbares Warten, jeder meint, er wird geköpft, aber dann ist es ein anderer. Trotzdem muß alles weinen. Das Feuer, das plötzlich ausbricht, aus dem Keller kommt, ist die Rettung…” 101 Original text: “…ist noch ein anderer Übergang, eine Aus- und Einfahrt für Rotkreuzwagen und schwarze, große Autos, deren Fenster mit Vorhängen geschlossen sind.” 102 arriving to Berlin, appears here for Bachmann also. Whether it is a foundation man or government official, he travels secretly through the city, avoiding the suffering, closed away from the disease to play his role. The game soon begins with countries traded over the Wall, the two sides of the Cold War swapping populations like baseball cards:

The week begins with Nepal and Ghana. On Tuesday the Congolese will, amidst complaints and furious commentary, be torn here and there from one side of Friedrichstraße to the other, on Wednesday Pakistan has a tour bus, on Thursday, the delegation from the South Pole is only on one side and will be kept quiet about on the other. The mix of visitors from the next evening drive away with wigs from the Schiller Theater and receive costumes at the Schiffbauerdamm Theater, then there is a hold-up, the Central Americans rip out the Brandenburger Gate and take it with them as a souvenir, then come the Malays and abscond with the Berlin Victory Column [Siegesäule]. Suddenly the gypsies have occupied Berlin and slap up their tents, the Berliners flee to the outskirts, and the gypsies wash all of the laundry, it flaps all the way to Lichterfelde (289–290).102

Not only do the superpowers trade their influence, but the smaller countries take advantage of the situation, clambering to get the best deal they can, to gain resources and advantages. Visitors come to gawk, grabbing what they are able, claiming their ground. Berlin is no longer a sacred place, but, riddled with disease, it is treated as a passing relative. The heirlooms are handed out before its weakened eyes, the Central

Americans snatch the Brandenburg Gate and the Victory Column, the Roma set up their camp as if Berlin is now free territory to be occupied, a public land for squatters and passer-byes.

102 Original text: “Die Woche fängt an mit Nepal und Ghana. Am Dienstag werden unter Beschwerden und wütenden Kommentaren die Kongolesen hin- und hergerissen von einer Seite der Friedrichstraße zur anderen, am Mittwoch hat Pakistan einen Rundreiseautobus, am Donnerstag sind die Abordnungen vom Südpol nur auf einer Seite und werden auf der anderen verschwiegen. Die gemischten Besucher vom nächsten Abend fahren mit den Perücken vom Schiller-Theater weg und bekommen am Schiffbauerdammtheater die Kostüme dazu geschenkt, dann gibt es eine Stockung, die Mittelamerikaner reißen das Brandenburger Tor aus und nehmen es zum Andenken mit, dann kommen die Malaien und verschwinden mit der Siegessäule. Plötzlich haben die Zigeuner Berlin besetzt und schlagen die Zelte auf, die Berliner flüchten in die Außenbezirke, dann waschen die Zigeuner allen die Wäsche, die flattert bis Lichterfelde.” 103 Bachmann’s picture of Berlin is bleak, but not unsympathetic. It is diagnostic.

Where the doctors and officials in the poem hand out palliatives and close their eyes to the suffering, she suggests, by her act of writing and presenting the poem, that there could be a way out. At the end of the scene, a letter arrives from the insurance company delivering the harsh news that:

The insurance company, which is responsible for Berlin, clarifies, that it is not responsible; it is a pre-existing condition. The pain is being suppressed and, because none of the doctors is here—because they are only there for the great events in the mornings, only during the ward rounds—, everyone tells the nurses it is not right, it is not true, then it must all be incurable…The nurses talk past the main point, it is ‘diplomacy’, yes, that is how it is called, it is slowly leaking through. Everyone says, under the suppressed pain, there is now ‘diplomacy’. There is nothing anyone can do. The exhaustion is too great (291–292).103

The insurance will not cover a pre-existing condition. Just as Bachmann found in her experience in Berlin, when it came to illness, the ruling powers that liked to flash their influence and cash at the high point of conflict, disappeared when the acute crisis was over. In Berlin’s moment of need, the doctors are not there, the nurses can only mumble that slowly it will all be resolved through a diplomatic solution. The situation has exasperated and exhausted everyone. In the end, the beleaguered city is on its own, which leads to Bachmann’s main point: illness also comes from within.

No one will save the German city from outside. Instead, all of the influence, the money, the big, black cars filled with important people will only magnify the pain.

The Germans must heal themselves.

103 Original text: “Die Versicherung, die für Berlin zuständig ist, erklärt, daß sie nicht zuständig ist, es ist ein vorvertragliches Leiden. Der Schmerz wird niedergehalten, und weil keiner der Ärzte da ist - weil sie nur da sind bei den großen Anlässen am Vormittag, nur bei den Visiten - , sagen alle den Schwestern, es sei ungerecht, es stimme nicht, es sei dann ja alles unheilbar...Die Schwestern reden an der Hauptsache vorbei, es ist 'Diplomatie', ja, so heißt es, es sickert langsam durch. Alle sagen, unter den niedergehaltenen Schmerzen, es sei jetzt die 'Diplomatie'. Man wird nichts tun können. Die Erschöpfung ist zu groß.” 104 Bachmann said she hated the Germans “not because they are bad, because why should they be [worse] than others, but because they teach us to fear again, and I hate them because they do not realize they are doing it” (quoted in Schneider-

Handschin 237).104 Berlin was not a glorious symbol, but rather a symbol of the world’s sickness. A symbol that showed the confused logic and direct damage the past engendered in the present. By moving on and glorifying the East-West conflict, the Cold War covered up the destruction of the past that the Germans did not address and the rest of the world was ignoring. Each nation, big and small, found a way to profit from the new construction, squirreling away wealth and closing its eyes indifferently to suffering. The big, black cars of the state-private network covered their windows, their passengers averted their eyes. In an emergency, they would send in the doctors, the specialists, open the doors to the arts, but most of the time, they turned away, happy to profit by selling beer, cigars, “everyone wants to rush into

KaDeWe” (282).105 Only the glass house of the arts had been able to offer some hope, but now it was also destroyed, gutted from underneath by the fires of history.

When Hans Werner Henze first read “Ein Ort für Zufälle,” he wrote to

Bachmann:

…I have just read it and now you have brought me to tears. I hardly know what I should say. It is very beautiful and it is also endlessly bad and lonely and collapsed and I understand now how terrible everything is for you, you who do not have the weapons of cynicism and promiscuity, and I would like so much to say and do something good for you. And yet, it seems clear to me that you, you who wrote this, have now made a significant step away from the past and forward. In any case, you are now again on the way, you have

104 Original text: Bachmann hasste “...die [Deutschen], nicht weil sie schlecht sind, denn was sollten sie [schlechter] sein als andere, aber weil sie uns wieder das Fürchten lehren, und ich hasse sie, weil sie nicht begreifen, daß sie es tun.” 105 Original text: “…alle wollen auf einmal hinein in das Kadewe.” 105 knighted yourself with yourself and can have pride and courage, the airs of a victor. And I am proud that you have achieved it (253–255).106

Henze saw in the piece Bachmann’s first step towards herself. In “Ein Ort für

Zufälle,” Bachmann declared publicly that she was not able or willing to play into and with the knot of power and opportunity bound up in the Cold War conflict that Berlin symbolized. She looked at it seriously and addressed it but remained aloof, asserting that she could be of no help.

When Bachmann left Berlin, she effectively withdrew from the cultural Cold

War network, issuing perhaps her starkest critique with her absence. Where “Ein Ort für Zufälle” acutely identified the sickness prevalent in the Cold War conflict and the historical crimes that shaped it, Malina, published in 1971, offers a sustained critique of the Cold War’s state-private network as one of the manifestations of interpersonal damage that leads to what Bachmann saw as a society’s constant state of war. Early in the novel, the narrator declares, “But Washington and Moscow and Berlin are merely impertinent places trying to make themselves important” (Bachmann, Malina 12). For the narrator, Vienna and more precisely Ungargassenland, is the center of the world.

It is her local and personal history that is most important. She attempts to assert again and again that it is daily, lived experience that imparts meaning.

A well-known writer, the narrator is constantly intruded upon by demands for her time and attention in the service of different causes: correspondence requires answers, daily tasks must be completed, and invitations declined. Her interview with

106 Letter 158, October 31, 1964. Original text: “...ich habe es eben gelesen und nun hast Du mich also zum Weinen gebracht. Ich weiss kaum, was ich sagen soll. Es ist sehr schön und ist aber auch so unendlich schlimm und einsam und hingefallen und ich verstehe nun, wie schrecklich alles für Dich ist, die Du nicht die Waffen des Zynismus hast und der promiscuity, und ich möchte Dir so gern etwas Gutes sagen und tun. Eines wiederum scheint mir aber klar, dass Du, die Du dies geschrieben hast, nun einen erheblichen Schritt getan hast, weg vom passato und voran, Du bist jedenfalls nun wieder unterwegs, Du hast Dich selber mit Dir selber zum Ritter geschlagen, und kannst Stolz haben und Mut, Sieger-Allüren. Und ich bin stolz, dass Du es geschafft hast.” 106 Mr. Mühlbauer, a journalist, is a direct critique of the state-private network and its long arm, exhibiting how it has corrupted the press and in turn controls communication, ensuring it is acceptable and amenable to strategic aims. In much the same way as Mr. Mühlbauer, Shepard Stone from the Ford Foundation had worked at

The New York Times and was well connected to the German press from his role in the occupation forces. He used these connections to help oil the press wheels for Ford’s

Berlin programs. In the novel, Mr. Mühlbauer, literally Mr. Mill Builder, switched from his original newspaper to the political opposition without any scruples and

“always attains his goal because of his tenacity” (54). Smoking Belvederes and drinking whiskey, he sweet talks his way to success, collecting his grist without indiscretion. Despite his supposed suaveness, the narrator befuddles him by refusing to play his game. Mühlbauer asks standard interview questions about the narrator’s development, what she is reading, her thoughts on the youth of today, etc. She answers his questions fully, but in an obtuse and yet more honest way. When he asks about her development, she questions the concept of development and talks about the odd concept of a school with children swarming all together. When he asks about the youth, she asserts that if she thinks about the youth, she should also think about the elderly and those in middle age as well. He gets increasingly frustrated, repeatedly erasing his tape to begin the interview again in order to gather more palatable answers for his newspaper article. Eventually he leaves in a huff, frustrated and baffled by the experience.

The interview questions draw out a critique of the political-cultural world.

Mühlbauer wants the narrator to speak directly to the main aims of the public facing intellectual, but she resists. When he asks about her role as a mediator, she responds:

107 Have you ever mediated? It’s a thankless role, please, no more missions! And I don’t know about missionizing in general…We’ve seen what that led to wherever it was tried…Whose mission is it anyway, why do we need a task here at all! It’s unthinkable, it’s depressing. But maybe you meant to say administration? Or maintaining archives?...Of course I’m opposed to every administration, surely you won’t doubt that; I’m against this worldwide bureaucracy which has taken over everything from man and his likeness to the potato bug with its carbon copies. But here in Vienna something else is going on, the cultic administration of an Empire of the Dead, I don’t know why you or I should be proud, why would we want to attract the world’s attention with all these festivals: Festspiele, Festival Weeks, Musical Weeks, Memorial Year, Days of Culture. The world could do nothing better than to ignore them all so as not to get scared…” (60–61).

The narrator dismisses the artistic role of mediator to the public and suggests the entire premise is misplaced and dangerous. She clearly connects the artistic role of mediator between festival organizers and governments and the public and asserts they are useful only to scare people, to get them worked up, to take sides. As a small country, Austria would be better off minding its own business instead of turning itself into an open air museum for tourists and political causes.

It is of course Malina, the narrator’s doppelganger, who seamlessly sees to everything. Working at the Austrian Army museum he is a class A administrator, one of the workers organizing Austria’s past to put it on display. He ensures the bills are paid, the household organized, and progresses steadily in his job. He is the archetype of the new European man in the capitalist wonder, rationally climbing the ladder and succeeding. His main role though is to preserve and celebrate the culture of war, preparing weapons, uniforms, and medals for films to circulate an approved version of history. He torments the narrator “with his impeccable self-control, his imperturbable trust” (53). As Bachmann suggested in “Ein Ort für Zufälle,” it is the ones who appear sick who can see most clearly. Malina succeeds in a material sense, but the narrator feels and shows what the costs for this prosperity are. When the

108 narrator forgets something, making what she considers a mistake in the conversation,

Malina does not react, “he continues to deceive himself as if there weren’t anyone or anything else, as if it were just he and I” (53).

The acceptable language provided by society and the tools of modern communication will not successfully carry the narrator’s message. Echoing

Bachmann’s experience in Berlin, the narrator’s relationship with Ivan, her Hungarian love interest, revolves around the telephone. Where in Berlin the phone was lacking, in the novel it appears incessantly. It is not a form of successful communication, but rather a way for the narrator to announce her presence, a simultaneous debilitating and enabling justification of only anticipating. The narrator calls Ivan and lets the phone ring, “as an announcement to everything in his possession” (13). She holds her breath, calls, smokes, and waits for the potential that Ivan will answer, that he will be the answer, that he will fix the past and lead to a whole and more hopeful future. As the novel progresses, the phone moves from connecting Ivan and the narrator to progressively relaying messages of stalling and regret. In the final pages, Malina delivers the message to a caller that, “[there] is no woman here. I’m telling you, there was never anyone here by that name” (224). The narrator has been cut off from the phone, removed from the line. In a passage left out of the novel’s final version,

Malina declares that there is no flower power nor flower children in Vienna. In

Vienna, “youth destroy flowers and demolish telephone booths” crushing any revolutionary new ways of seeing and cutting off communication (Lennox 320).

Telegrams and postman also consume the narrator. She is constantly writing and re-writing letters then throwing them away only to start again. She cannot find the words to answer the requests, the meetings, or the official invitations. Fraülein

109 Jellinek takes over this communication and helps the narrator navigate the boundaries, making socially acceptable excuses and issuing apologies liberally. The narrator’s true message is never carried in the letters or through the telephone wires. Instead, she offers her message to the four visible male figures in the novel and it is constantly interrupted and silenced. Through her attempts to communicate, the narrator again and again seeks Versicherung, assurance and insurance, but her claims are denied, just as Bachmann’s were in Berlin. The narrator insists to Herr Mühlbauer, and by extension his readers, that expression has to do “with insuring life in a single sentence, and, in turn, with the sentences seeking insurance in life” (57). Herr

Mühlbauer asks if she is on drugs and erases the tape to start again. The narrator wishes for Ivan to say one sentence that would insure her in the world, but he does not grant it and she concludes: “No policy in the world can cover me” (46). She turns later to the father figure and seeks his assistance in paying the hospital bills saying, “I try to explain to him how sick he has made me…I am holding the bills from all the treatments, since I think we should share the costs” (124). Her father does not understand the connection and ignores her entreaties. The search for insurance, for assurance, for compensation, for support ends in rejection. Just as Bachman was unable to have her hospital bills reimbursed in Berlin, just as the insurance fails for

Berlin in “Ein Ort für Zufälle,” so the insurance fails in Malina. The damage inflicted by the fascist past, by the patriarchal history, by the capitalistic present will not be acknowledged as valid. It therefore cannot be addressed and successful communication is not granted. Instead, after sharing everything with Malina, he disconnects her from the phone and breaks her glasses, crushing her ability to see and throwing her vision in the trash. As Sara Lennox has argued, Bachmann’s female

110 characters have “access to no language whatsoever that would allow them to speak either about their own condition or about circumstances outside the purview of women” (16). The narrator in Malina is never able to find her one sentence and all of her attempts to reach it are frustrated; she will not be heard or understood.

The narrator dismisses the diplomatic, bureaucratic world outside and although she successfully frustrates Mühlbauer’s interview and his attempt to commoditize her for his career, she is the one who ultimately disappears into the wall.

Malina, Mühlbauer, and the narrator’s friend François at the French embassy all work to preserve, share, and exchange culture. Yet they clearly view it as their jobs and in their personal interest without any conviction or understanding of a wider aim. As the narrator states, François “sees to it that our cultures are exchanged, reconciled or mutually fructified, [though] he himself doesn’t know exactly how” (47). The administrators and mediators of the expansive world bureaucracy do not appear to understand why it functions and are not interested in thoughtful exchange: Mühlbauer is not interested in a conversation, only usable quotes; François and the narrator chat throughout the artistic event; Vienna presents its history as easily consumable for global tourists. Yet, the conscientious, laboring bureaucrats are rewarded. Those who side step this hard work, exchange cultural platitudes and packaged cultural products, those who are willing to serve as cultural ambassadors of one flavor or another, are lauded and decorated. Where the narrator attempts to engage with the complicated history of the Hapsburg empire and the legacy of fascism, devastatingly examining and working to understand her personal trauma, she goes without recognition and remains unheard and uninsured in the world.

111

Goodbye Berlin

When Bachmann kicked off Höllerer’s celebrated literary series in 1961, her presence electrified the crowd. A reporter wrote:

Every seat of the large auditorium in the Kongreßhalle, the most representative and modern conference center of West Berlin, was taken. 1200 guests, mostly young people between twenty and thirty years old….A few hundred leaned motionless against the walls. They all listened attentively to the quiet, halting voice of a young woman with light, red hair. The youthful “First Lady of German-Speaking Poets”, Ingeborg Bachmann…Approximately 2000 people had rushed here in stormy rain showers of a cold autumn’s day…107

When Bachmann left Berlin in 1965, she was on quite different terms with the

German public. On February 26, 1965, the Rheinischer Merkur ran an article entitled,

“Ingeborg Bachmann didn’t come…Ford Foundation and Poets from East and West hold a Competition”.108 The article is critical of American involvement in Berlin and skeptical about any positive outcomes from the sponsored artistic presence in the city.

It singles out Bachmann as a symbol of the harm of the program and criticizes her

“Ein Ort für Zufälle” stating: “At the awarding of the Büchner Prize, Bachmann read a poem about Berlin, which would surely not please the Berliners and in effect seemed a bit dark and unconvincing. Yet, she wants to stay and promised to create new lyrical observations about Berlin.”109

107 Florian, Paul. “‘Olympische Spiele’ der Literatur.” Article circulated in regional German Newspapers, LASR. Original text: “Das große Auditorium der „Kongreßhalle“, das repräsentativste und modernste Veranstaltungsgebäude Westberlins, war bis zum letzten Platz besetzt, 1200 Besucher, meist jüngere Leute zwischen zwanzig und dreißig Jahren...Einige hundert lehnten bewegungslos an den Wänden. Sie alle lauschten der leisen, stockenden Stimme einer jungen Frau mit hellen, roten Haaren. Die jugendliche „First Lady der deutschsprachigen Dichter“, Ingeborg Bachmann...Ungefähr 2000 Menschen waren deshalb herbeigeilt, im stürmischen Regen eines kalten Herbsttages... ” 108 Original text: “Ingeborg Bachmann kam nicht…Ford-Foundation und Dichterlesungen von Ost- und Westautoren machen sich Konkurrenz.” 109 Aichinger, Gerhard. “Ingeborg Bachmann kam nicht….” Rheinischer Merkur. February 26, 1965, LASR. Original text: “Die Bachmann las bei der Verleihung des Büchner-Preises ein Gedicht über Berlin, das zwar den Berlinern nicht gefallen wollte und in der Tat ein wenig dunkel und nicht 112 Bachmann publicly shifted her stance on Germany, threatening her image as the “First Lady of German Poetry,” but she gained a voice more true to her next stage of artistic investigation. As she moved away from the German-American state-private network, her relationship with Austria changed. Reflecting on this shift, she said:

Austria has exited history—for me, at first, this was a handicap, I felt disadvantaged, as if I was dispossessed, coming from a province, which had nothing to do or to decide. Today, however, I see myself at an advantage: from this small, decaying country one can see phenomena much clearer, which someone in the big, blinded countries cannot see (quoted in Rapisarda 195). 110

At the beginning of her literary career, she moved away from Austria and towards the financial and literary success Germany could offer through Gruppe 47 and its connections to the expanding postwar trans-Atlantic cultural patronage system.

Eventually, she clearly saw and felt that she was expected to play a game that was more damaging than productive. As she shifted towards prose and more direct explorations of the past and critiques of society, she moved away from the state- private network, including Gruppe 47. They also began to find her less acceptable.

Her critiques of Germany, the division of Berlin, and the American role politically and economically roiled feathers. The German press negatively reviewed her first short story collection and certain groups were critical of her Büchner Prize speech.

Bachmann’s colleagues at Rot-Weiss-Rot have asserted the Americans did not interfere in their work and did not censor them, as they urged efforts and steps toward democracy (McVeigh 2014, 301). Neither the Ford Foundation nor its associates

überzeugend wirkte. Aber sie will bleiben und stellte neue lyrische Beobachtungen über Berlin in Aussicht.” 110 Original text: “Österreich ist aus der Geschichte ausgetreten – für mich war das anfangs ein Handicap, ich fühlte mich benachteiligt, wie ein Enterbter, aus einer Provinz kommend, die nichts mehr zu tun und zu entscheiden hat. Heute sehe ich mich jedoch im Vorteil: Man kann von diesem kleinen, verwesten Land aus Phänomene viel genauer sehen, die man in den großen, verblendeten Ländern nicht sieht.” 113 censored Bachmann either, but it is odd that she, as one of the most highly decorated authors to take part in the Ford-Berlin context, does not appear in the book given to

Ford by the City of Berlin. The lack of support for her phone and her insurance claims raises questions of equity in her treatment; echoing the insurance company in “Ein

Ort für Zufälle” that declares the claim “is not covered, it is a pre-existing condition”

(291).111 As the narrator’s trajectory in Malina exhibits, those who question the situation in fundamental ways, those who push to uncover the violence and damage that underlies the true pain, may not be censored by the system, but they certainly are not rewarded.

Bachmann created distance between herself and the organizations of the expansive cultural network, but she maintained her friendships. On July 5, 1966,

Bachmann wrote to thank Walter and Renate Höllerer for their telegram and tell them she was settled back in Rome. At the end of her letter, she wrote:

It is very hot, already midnight, still hot, I have so many wild cats that they cannot all be housed in any poem, otherwise things are fine; I am still arranging the apartment, with the tenacity of a newlywed, but I must follow only my wishes and the mass in the apartment is my one opposition, each wall is too short, each room is too small, and my crushed imagination has still not done anything about it. So that leaves me with only writing novels and the hope that the “long-distance books” will one day help me reach longer walls and higher rooms; a longer poem would also help me to already take a small step towards the goal.112

111 Original text: “…daß sie nicht zuständig ist, es ist ein vorvertragliches Leiden.” 112 Ingeborg Bachmann to Walter Höllerer and Renate Mangoldt. July 5, 1966, 03WH/AA/8,45, LASR. Original text: “Es ist sehr heiss, schon Mitternacht, noch immer heiss, ich habe soviel wilde Katzen, dass sie in keinem Gedicht mehr unterzubrigen wären, und sonst geht es; -ich richte noch immer Wohnung ein, mit der Zähigkeit eines Jungverheirateten, muss aber nur meine Wünsche berücksichtigen, und die Masse in der Wohnung sind mein einziger Widerstand, jede Wand ist zu kurz, jedes Zimmer zu klein, und die Brecher meiner Fantasie haben noch nichts dagegen ausgerichtet. So bleibt mir nur das Romanschreiben und die Hoffnung, dass die Langstreckenbücher mir eines Tags zu längeren Wänden und höheren Zimmern verhelfen; auch ein längeres Gedicht wäre schon ein kleiner Schritt auf das Ziel hin.” 114 Bachmann departed Berlin and the network in search of longer walls and higher rooms, wider spaces to cool the heat of history.

115 Chapter 3 Well-Formed: Witold Gombrowicz

“In Berlin I was not a guest but something far more horrifying, desperate, powerful, I was myself…Today, in a day of easy voyages, a writer becomes more of a cultural traveling salesman. No. No one is going to import me as if I were a bag of lozenges.” – Gombrowicz, Diary 688

In March 1963, Moritz von Bomhard, a representative of the Ford Foundation in Berlin, wrote to the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz in Argentina, “Let me say once more that we are happy, indeed, that you will spend a year in Berlin as possibly our ‘first’ Artists in Residence. Personally I am looking forward to the pleasure of meeting you.”113 Along with Ingeborg Bachmann, Gombrowicz was one of the first of

Ford’s artists-in-residents. He was to find the city a difficult place. Language barriers, health problems, the proximity to Poland, and cultural readjustment back to Europe after a twenty-four year absence all took their toll. Yet he began hopefully, attempting to recreate the literary café cultural scene he had enjoyed in Warsaw and Buenos

Aires by starting a bi-weekly artist café at Café Zuntz on Kurfürstendamm. He wrote to Walter Höllerer in August 1963, “I would be delighted if this small initiative could lead to a real artistic cafe in Berlin. What glory! I think that in this case I will deserve to have a Gombrowiczstrasse.”114 Gombrowicz gave a sincere effort to create a community for himself, the program, and Berlin, but his tongue-in-cheek assessment was that an artistic life or community was lacking. In principle, he agreed with Ford’s assertion that Berlin needed cultural invigoration. His experience shows exactly why

Ford’s efforts were problematic: they were haphazardly thrown together and failed to integrate the guests and the city’s community. Gombrowicz, one of only two

113 von Bomhard to Gombrowicz March 25, 1963, GEN MSS 515 Box 3 f.103, WGA. 114 Witold Gombrowicz to Walter Höllerer August 23, 1963. 03WH/AA/6,33, LASR. Original text: “Je serait enchante si cette petite iniciative puisse aboutir a un vrai cafe artistique a Berlin. Quelle gloire! Je trouve que, dans ce cas-la je meriterai avoir une Gombrowiczstrasse.” 116 participants and the only writer from the other side of the Cold War divide during

Ford’s years of oversight, also highlights the distance physically, intellectually, and spiritually between East and West and the devastating challenges this caused participants to face.

Gombrowicz left Europe in 1939 by chance. An up-and-coming writer with a successful novel, Ferdydurke, he was selected by the Polish government to take part in the maiden voyage of a new ocean liner route to Buenos Aires. While he was in the

Argentinian capital, Germany invaded Poland. The ship quickly returned to Europe, but Gombrowicz stayed in Argentina, embarking on a quarter-century exile. As

Gombrowicz described, during this time there were “three periods, eight years each, the first period–poverty, a Bohemian life, no concerns, inactivity; the second period— seven and a half years at the bank, the life of a clerk; the third period—a modest but independent existence, growing literary prestige” (Gombrowicz, Diary 591). By the time Ford invited him to Berlin, Gombrowicz had published steadily in the Polish

émigré press and was known on the European continent, but not physically part of it.

This put him in a unique position of having a pass to inclusion in but being physically new to European intellectual life, allowing a mode of observation with built in distance.

This duality of simultaneously belonging and not belonging suited Gombrowicz to a degree. He had habituated himself to living within suspended space between borders, identities, and life’s demands. Born into the minor Polish landed gentry, the son of a man who was also an industrialist, Gombrowicz came from Lithuanian heritage, but grew up in Congress Poland. As Ewa M. Thompson writes of his childhood:

117 Gombrowicz’s family was by no means as stable and socially secure as might at first appear. Within the Polish context it was a family which did not fit comfortably in any of the three major social groups…It would be more accurate to say that he inherited a sense of uncertainty of his origins and magnified this uncertainty in his own mind to such an extent that it became a distinguishing feature of his art and personality (13–14; see also Ziarek 8).

Gombrowicz articulated his suspension within his origins in his final autobiographical accounting, A Kind of Testament. Poland, he wrote, “a country between the East and

West, where Europe starts to draw to an end, a border country where the East and the

West soften into each other. A country of weakened forms…” (Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament 56). From a young age, Gombrowicz, by his own definition, found himself in between classes, countries, and identities: not quite European, not quite

Slavic. Finding the Polish form stifling, centered always on sacrifice for the nascent and, he felt, imminently doomed country, he decided instead he was European and strove to move into his own form, partially through a re-definition of his origins.

Commenting on the relationship between his Polish nationality and European claims, he stated:

One can understand how a Frenchman might dedicate himself to adoring France, an Englishman to adoring England. These countries have provided their natives with precious advantages. But to be a man is more significant than to be a Frenchman, and Europe is more significant than England or France. So, for men situated in minor countries, like Poland, the Argentine…and bound to them sentimentally, subjugated by them, formed by them, it was really a matter of life and death to break away, to keep one’s distance…The writer, the artist, or anyone who attaches importance to his spiritual development, must feel no more than a resident in Poland, the Argentine, and it is his duty to regard Poland or the Argentine as an obstacle, almost an enemy. That is the only way to feel really free. And only those people for whom their country is an obstacle rather than an advantage will have a chance of becoming truly free spiritually, and, in the case of Europe, truly European. (Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament 60–61).

When Gombrowicz settled in Argentina in the early 1940s, he kept up his vacillation between identities, sometimes playing the landed gentry, sometimes the

118 avant-garde rebel. This fluctuation of presentations extended beyond his class. He wanted money and recognition and yet he ridiculed the writers who prostituted themselves to Cold War patrons. He mocked the blatant patriotism of his fellow

Poles, while writing to and for them and reaching into his Polish identity for inspiration and explanation. He partook in homosexual relationships, admitting them openly in publication while simultaneously denying them. He identified himself as

Polish and European, but when he returned from his self-imposed exile, he found

Europe unrecognizably changed and thought of himself as also Argentinian.

Gombrowicz embraced his liminal existence declaring that, “[being] in-between is not a bad way to elevate yourself—for in applying the principle of divide et impera you can bring about the mutual devouring of the two worlds and then escape and soar

‘above’ them” (Gombrowicz, Diary 525). It is a dialectical vision that rests not on synthesis or resolution, but destruction and escape, a shedding of societal bonds to a purer freedom.

Gombrowicz’s embrace of dualities and divisions should have enabled him to thrive in confrontation with the Wall, but instead the intensity and number of internal and external conflicts appears to have overwhelmed him. On his first arrival to Berlin, after the rush of his Argentinian departure and media tour of Paris, he felt himself on holiday in the quiet calm of the city where he knew almost no one. Then, while walking in the Tiergarten, he suddenly

caught a certain scent, a mixture of herbs, water, stone, wood bark….yes, Poland, this was Polish…why, it wasn’t too far away now, a stone’s throw away, the same nature….Death. The cycle was coming to a close. I had returned to those scents, therefore, death. Death. I had come across my death in various circumstances but there was always some sort of missing each other that gave a perspective on life, meanwhile in the Tiergarten I came to know death head-on—and from that moment it has not left me. I should not have left America. Why didn’t I understand that Europe meant my death? …from then 119 on death sat on my shoulder, like a bird, throughout my entire stay in Berlin (Gombrowicz, Diary 626).

Gombrowicz had suffered for years from poor health, but he could not have known that the bout of sickness he endured in Berlin would weaken him further, that he would die just a few years later. The death he found in the Tiergarten was the life he had left behind, the life he never fulfilled or touched again. The death of the war and of the country and culture he had known in pre-WWII Poland. Gombrowicz never returned to his land of birth. Czesław Miłosz characterized Gombrowicz’s style as

“bringing to light precisely what one may be ashamed of. If you are hunchback, don’t pretend you are not. If you are an egotist, don’t pretend you are not” (Miłosz).

Gombrowicz was a strong critic of Polish nationalism and he dealt with his homeland in a direct way, aiming to snap his compatriots out of what he viewed as their historical downward spin. Miłosz asserted, “Being a Pole was for Gombrowicz something like being a hunchback and accordingly he has to handle it openly.

Because Poles have a mania for bragging over the presumed glories of their country, he felt he should do the opposite. He makes a fierce assault on the Polish mentality as reflected in literature…” (Miłosz). Through his regular diary entries in the Polish

émigré journal Kultura, Gombrowicz attacked his countrymen and women again and again, chastising them for being slaves to Poland and urging them to free themselves of their Polishness. Argentina was an opportunity to release himself from the country’s baggage, from what he viewed as its limitations. It was an opportunity to reinvent himself, and he took advantage, opting to define himself as European. Yet he, like many exiled writers, still wrote of and about Poland or about the Polish community. He felt his Polishness intimately and in the Tiergarten, breathing in the

120 same air, there was much with which to reckon: the reality of his Polish identity, the

Nazi invasion of Poland, and the new communist Poland a stone’s throw away.

The Form of the Thing

In his article, “Witold Gombrowicz or: the Shadow Duel of a Polish Nobleman” published in Akzente, François Bondy provided an introduction to Gombrowicz as a writer through an exploration of the duel motif in his works. Bondy suggested that the duel is used in Gombrowicz’s work to constantly challenge himself and others to overcome. Gombrowicz, Bondy asserted, uses the duel “because a confrontation is more human than any form of objectification. He sees himself as the 'challenger' who comes to the fore, who knocks other writers out of the field or who constantly measures himself against them and fights them.”115 The duel is externally confrontational and internally productive, re-shaping outer relationships and personal self-understanding. Gombrowicz uses it repeatedly throughout his novels to articulate his understanding of self-actualization through his concept of form. Form is a concept central to Gombrowicz’s work and it is necessary to understand it to make sense of his critiques and gain insight into how his experience in Berlin refracted through him and his self-understanding.

Form, for Gombrowicz, is how we understand ourselves and how we attempt to have a sincere voice in a noisy and chaotic world. He never developed a full theory of form, suggesting his role as a writer was to present problems, intensify them, but not

115 François Bondy, “Witold Gombrowicz oder: Die Schattenduelle eines polnischen Landedelmannes”, originally published in Akzente 4/1965, pp. 366-384. 03WH/31/1.1, LASR. Original text: “…weil eine Konfrontierung menschlicher ist als jede Form der Objektivierung. Er selbst sieht sich als der ‘challenger’, der in den Vordergrund tritt, der andere Schriftsteller aus dem Feld schlägt oder sich doch unablässig an ihnen mißt und gegen sie ficht.” 121 provide potential explanations or solutions. For Gombrowicz, the main aim was to wrestle with form. The struggle against form, he suggested, is to be lived: “I have only found one answer: I don’t know who I really am, but I suffer when I am deformed. So at least I know what I am not. My ‘self’ is nothing but my will to be myself” (Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament 83). It is something we must break free of and always find ourselves falling into again. Gombrowicz challenged people to

“[t]ry to set yourself against Form, try to shake yourself free of it” (Gombrowicz, A

Kind of Testament 65). Several scholars describe Gombrowicz’s philosophy as a conflict between form and chaos, but Maria Baraniecki puts forward a more accurate dichotomy of form vs. non-form.116 While Gombrowicz uses several dualities to illuminate his ideas of the forces that we find ourselves torn between, moving out of form does not lead to chaos. Escaping form, even for a second, allows freedom, peace, and independence. This is most clearly illustrated in his first novel Ferdydurke when the main character, Joey, escapes from the home of the Youngbloods, where his was boarding, and briefly walks a trail alone, declaring:

…it was all gone, I was neither young nor old, neither modern nor immature, I was neither this nor that, I was nothing…Oh blithe indifference! No memories! When everything dies within you, and no one has yet had time to beget you again. Oh, it is worth living for death, to know that all has died within us, that it is no more, that all is empty and barren, all quiet and pure—and as I departed it seemed to me that I was going not alone but with myself…But only for one hundredth of a second. Because as I was crossing the kitchen, feeling my way in the semi-darkness, someone called softly from the servants’ quarters: ‘Joey, Joey...’ (190–191).

Joey is hailed in Althusserian style, interpellated back into a social self.117 During his few moments break from form, he was not lost in overwhelming chaos; he was,

116 For more on the concept of form in Gombrowicz’s work, particularly its relationship with chaos, see Baranczak 1989; Pratt 2015; Just 2018. 117 Althusser, 2001. 122 rather, in a peaceful state of non-being, unarticulated. But to live he must be recognized and so ensues the battle of forms to dominate and shape him.

Form for Gombrowicz is related to social norms, behaviors, and our relationships with and among people, which are essential and inescapable, yet problematic. As Daniel Pratt asserts, in Gombrowicz’s work form

has been understood largely as an external process, but the difference between the external and internal blends when considering Form…Form in-Forms the individuals (sic) understanding of not only others but also himself. Form creates the conditions for the self to exist as we know it. The self is no different from other aspects of the manifold of experience and understanding the self requires the same Forms (14–15).

Gombrowicz explores how our presentations of ourselves and interactions with others shape and re-shape us from one moment to the next. To an extent, this could be similar to a public and a private self, but forms in Gombrowicz are more complex.

They are not just about presenting a certain face or acting out a persona to a public audience, though that is certainly part of it. Rather, forms and the expectations they hold shape us in totality, publicly and privately, so that we must work to get free of them.

While form can be destructive, it is also necessary. Created by what he called the “Formal Imperative,” which is a need to create order or to generally make sense of things in a rational way. Whether it is the logic of symmetry, analogy, synthesis, or analysis, it encompasses all efforts to create an internal form or understanding.

Importantly, for Gombrowicz, each action requires a complement. His own example of this is that if he says A, he must say B. There is a “need to develop, to complete, because of a certain logic inherent in Form” (Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament 73).

Sometimes these forces drive us into action, but they often create more chaos and unexpected outcomes than anticipated by the seeking of order. A person, through 123 form, is “penetrated to the marrow…[and] emerges more powerful than himself, a stranger to himself…He becomes a function of the tensions which arise…”

(Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament 81). Form is social, psychological, and, most importantly, productive.

Gombrowicz’s resistance to and desire for form are played out in exemplary model in his career and animate his experience in Berlin. His focus on dualities and the constant effort to synthetically shed and acquire new forms are an insightful way to think about his time in Berlin and the many confrontations he faced. Gombrowicz was stuck between forms of identity: pushing for public recognition while detesting the means to achieve it, confronting Poland while suffering from its absence, recognizing and exploiting his positions between East and West, exiled and belonging, participative and independent. Within these spaces, he created room to maneuver. His participation in Berlin highlights his mastery of this balancing act, while also underlining the literal physical toll it could exact. Bringing an outsider’s perspective to the new trans-Atlantic, technocratic world he found, Gombrowicz offers the most direct critique of the state-private network, while simultaneously charming his way into its good graces.

Gombrowicz’s Rise

All roads lead to Paris. On his way to Germany in 1963, Gombrowicz made a detour through France to meet his patrons and supporters there. Bondy, in coordination with Konstanty Aleksander Jeleński, a Polish CCF employee, organized several receptions to honor him. As William Whiteford writes, “But what probably satisfied Witold the most were the receptions at Countes Ruby d’Arschott. Later, on

September 19, 1963, he would write to his family that, according to the Countess, 124 Paris entered the era of Gombrowicz…In Paris, Gombrowicz was interviewed by eight important French media publication such as Le Figaro and Le Monde.” (175–

176). On May 1, 1963, Witold wrote to his family that, “he was on the way to win a battle for Paris” (Whiteford 178). It was a glorious start for his return to the continent.

Gombrowicz learned French from his governesses as a child. Fluent, he was well read in French literature and philosophy. He spent time in France as a young man and Paris weighed heavily on him in exile, holding the key institutions that could recognize his voice, provide money for sustenance, and create the conditions for his return. Kultura, the foremost Polish émigré journal and main organ of the Polish

Literary Institute, moved from Rome to Paris and printed its first issue there in 1947.

Jerzy Giedroyc was Kultura’s editor. His first book publications in France were of

Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk and The Marriage. The same year, Giedroyc first published Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind. While Giedroyc, may have kept the journal independent from Cold War sponsorship, the journal was tangentially connected to perhaps the most famous Paris-based Cold War intellectual circle, the

CCF. Giedroyc was friends with Jeleński, who had fought for the Polish army during

WWII and worked for the UN in Rome during the war’s aftermath. In 1952, he settled in Paris and took up a position on the secretariat of the CCF, serving on the editorial team of its French publication Preuves from 1953–1969. Jeleński was the first to translate Gombrowicz’s work into French and well situated to promote Polish literature to a wider European audience.

Via Preuves, Gombrowicz gained an influential supporter in Bondy, who was selected to be editor of Preuves by Nicolas Nabokov. The magazine was intended to be the mouthpiece of the CCF for continental European concerns, focused on French-

125 German relations and European unification. Bondy guided Preuves within a clear set of principles: “The defence of European cultural values against Stalinism, the disassociation of Russian culture from ‘Sovietism’, a consideration of the phenomenon of totalitarianism and a maintenance of a transatlantic dialogue on key political and cultural issues” (Scott-Smith 126). Preuves was launched in France in

1951 with the immediate aim to counter Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’s

Les Temps modernes and its communist sympathies (Stonor Saunders 102).

Frances Stonor Saunders has shown that Bondy was a CCF insider, aware of the CIA funding and sent to some events to monitor them. He was firmly of the opinion that the well-educated elite should guide cultural and societal development. In a 1971 New York Times article, Bondy bemoaned the terrible state of German cinema, while celebrating the quality of films on TV. The difference between the two industries, Bondy surmised, was “because of a comparatively small élite endowed with almost dictatorial powers in running TV, which imposes its high standards”

(Bondy, “Munich: The Decline of Cinematic Art”). It is not a surprising assessment from one of the most influential cultural impresarios of the 1950s and 1960s and speaks directly to his approach in leading the CCF. Bondy championed Peter

Lilienthal as one of Germany’s promising directors. Lilienthal happened to have directed two films based on Gombrowicz’s books and was commissioned to make a film about Gombrowicz’s life. Bondy was a powerful supporter to have in your corner and Gombrowicz benefitted.

Gombrowicz first met Bondy in 1961, when Bondy visited Buenos Aires.

Gombrowicz thought there would be a great racket about Bondy’s visit and so planned to drop by the hotel to meet him a day or two into his stay, however, on his

126 first day in Argentina Bondy stopped by Gombrowicz’s apartment. Gombrowicz, finding that Bondy had no real commitments, hastily arranged a meeting. In all of his published writing, Gombrowicz never discusses the CCF or the CIA, but his description of Bondy suggests he was aware or had suspicions of his varied commitments:

[Bondy] is a poet so much that sometimes we, poets, harbor the suspicion that his indolence, his expression of a lost child, greedy eyes, the strange capacity for just appearing (instead of walking in normally), are to lure us and use us coldly to his own purposes. But I cheer myself that politicians are inclined to do the reverse, to nurture the fear that Bondy’s cold organizational talents are to dupe them and to catch them in nets of poetry. Bondy probably (I know him very little) is one of those people whose strength lies in his absence; he is always removed from what he is doing, keeping at least one foot somewhere else, his wisdom is the wisdom of a calf that suckles two mothers (Gombrowicz, Diary 496–497).

Gombrowicz was skeptical of Bondy and his attentions, but calculated and assumed that nothing too negative could come of it. He was also looking to use the plethora of cultural funding to his advantage; Bondy was instrumental in bringing Gombrowicz to Berlin (Giroud 55).

Although Gombrowicz was in Argentina throughout the 1940s and 1950s, he was well aware of the money floating about the Western cultural sphere and pragmatically open to receiving what he could to sustain himself. When he decided to stay in Buenos Aires in 1939, Gombrowicz had no plan and lived for years in poverty, sometimes sleeping on floors and going days without eating. He got by on support from wealthy friends and a small stipend from the Polish Legation. In 1947, finding his literary prospects in Argentina coming to naught, he took a job in a bank to sustain himself. At first he wrote while on the job, allowing him to finish Trans-Atlantyk, but gradually this was not possible resulting in the frustration of his writing. In 1952,

Giedroyc encouraged Gombrowicz to start his diary, which is something he could 127 write while holding his job. At the same time, Gombrowicz translated his play The

Marriage into French and sent it to Albert Camus, André Gide, and Martin Buber.

Buber and Camus wrote back and made efforts to support its publication in France

(https://witoldgombrowicz.com/en/wgbio/argentina-1939-1964/writer-and-worker).

He also tried to get work from the new Polish-language wing of Radio Free Europe.

While he did not have immediate relief from the bureaucratic drag of his administrative position, his steady publications, the translation of his work into

French, and Bondy and Jeleński’s article on Ferdydurke in Preuves expanded

European awareness of his writing and provided him with more opportunities.

This period was surely difficult for Gombrowicz, but the creation of his Diary, arguably his best work, emerged from this challenging circumstance. Gombrowicz’s diary is not a daily record of what occurred. Rather it was initially published as a series of articles in Kultura from 1952 until his death, which took the form of a diary with dated entries, though not all dates correspond directly with his experience. It is not a factual relaying of events and should not necessarily be considered as true. As

Daniel Just summarizes: “Instead of trying to convince others and himself of who he really is, the diarist brings to the fore the effects of deformation on himself… The

Diary is not an instrument of self-decipherment. It is a tool for exploiting the unavoidable process of one’s deformation for one’s future development” (616).118

This was true for Gombrowicz both spiritually and bodily.

By 1956, with growing recognition and supporters in Paris, Gombrowicz received small commissions from Radio Free Europe and the Argentinian publisher

Jacobo Muchnik, and began teaching some philosophy courses (Giroud 48–50). As a

118 For more on Gombrowicz’s self representation in his diary and other writings see Hochman 2015; Jarzębski 2015; Just 2018; Lutsky 2015; Pratt 2015. 128 result, he was able to quit his job and focus on writing. This marked a turn, as he began to be paid by the state-private network. In his reflective autobiography, he wrote, “Am I moral man? Yes…but…I am far too cowardly, too much of a physical coward. I can’t say that I regard the fact of having put up with twenty years of misery and loneliness in the Argentine, in order not to betray my artistic principles or make any concessions, as moral victory. It happened of its own accord” (Gombrowicz, A

Kind of Testament 85). He refused to stand as a hero against communism, but rather suggests that he stayed in Argentina just because he did; he was not Miłosz. His declaration also implies that his rising fame and ability to get funding from the other side of the Cold War was a different offer. Even though it had political implications and in turn caused him some trouble, it did not require him to betray his artistic principles or make concessions in his creative work.

Professionalization of the Mind

“I challenge anyone to go to Witold Gombrowicz and escape unharmed. This devil of a man makes you doubt everything, starting with him, and with yourself”

(Guerin).119 Gombrowicz can be abrasive and demanding as his interviewer in Paris in 1963, Anne Guerin, discovered. As a result of a simple grammatical misunderstanding, Gombrowicz answered the question, “Who are you?” stating that he embodied the name Gombrowicz and there, in front of the interviewer, he was the fictitious actor of himself. Despite such evasive answers, he understood the world he was in and what he needed to do to provide for the body he inhabited. While in

Argentina, Gombrowicz worked for several years in a bank, his creative work

119 Original text: “Je défie quiconque d'aller voir Witold Gombrowicz et d'en sortir indemne. Ce diable d'homme vous fait douter de tout, à commencer par lui, et par vous-même.” 129 languishing for lack of time. Bemoaning this tedious labor he wrote: “[e]verything suffers because for seven hours every day I commit murder on my own time”

(Gombrowicz, Diary 181). His need for money was partially why, despite his strong criticism of artists who participated in the cultural Cold War road show, he wanted to be part of it, to be recognized and rewarded. His protection of his integrity and his clear-sighted analysis of the functional role artists were acquiescing to play in the mid-twentieth century pushed continuously against his desire to converse and his wish for the accolades and financial rewards he believed he deserved. This insistent conflict impelled him to write in 1962, upon seeing Michel Butor, Ignazio Silone,

Stephen Spender, Jon Dos Passos and others appear at events in Buenos Aires:

“Torture! Torture! My pride, howling like a dog! Consternation and vomit that what I have sneered at a thousand times is getting to me and permeating me…”

(Gombrowicz, Diary 574).

Gombrowicz arrived to Berlin on May 16, 1963. Reflecting on his arrival a year later he wrote: “Professor von Bonhard (sic), a representative of the Ford

Foundation, put me and my suitcases into his beautiful black car and drove me through the city. Me—just another piece of baggage” (Gombrowicz, Diary 625).

Gombrowicz glided through the city in the sleek car to be delivered to his temporary home where he would write, entertain, and take part in the new cultural-political project to ensure the city did not go provincial, or worse, turn communist.

Gombrowicz’s understanding of himself as baggage shows his clear awareness that the Ford Foundation and authorities in Berlin expected him to fulfill a role and perform his part in the Cold War drama unfolding in the city. He had no misconceptions about the situation. Criticizing a 1962 conference put on by the

130 Argentine PEN club that featured Dos Passos, Spender, Butor, Silone, and others,

Gombrowicz wrote:

These discourses about calling the writer to do battle with what is untrue, about his unmasking role—when they know darn well that they are babbling in exchange for the trip they got. And they know that everyone knows that they know! Once a courtesan said to me: ‘Everybody sells something. I sell my body.’ And at least she does not give papers on Authenticity at the Foundation of Developmental Perspectives of Culture (Gombrowicz, Diary 569).

Gombrowicz had actually been invited to Berlin by Höllerer in 1961, but refused because he was mortified by the prospect “because, well, reading something Polish to

Germans is hardly a spiritual coming together” (Gombrowicz, Diary 569). Like

Henry Miller, Gombrowicz professed that he did not see how he could help the people of Berlin through their crises. He had a larger critique as well. He felt that writers were moralizing about the” Cold War and society because they were rewarded for it. “The moralizing tendency of post-war literature—of the Marxists, the

Existentialists, the Catholics, Sartre, Camus, Mauriac, and so on—never convinced” him, but they did earn these writers fame, a large income, accolades: “Didn’t Camus’ moral anguish get him the Nobel Prize when he was barely over forty?” Gombrowicz asked (A Kind of Testament 86).

Gombrowicz’s strongest criticism of the way writers were implicated in the cultural Cold War emerged in his diary during 1961 and 1962, just months before he accepted the offer in Berlin. What had changed so that by 1963, when his invitation came, he rushed to accept and prepare himself for a return to Europe? What made him ready to become the luggage, the lozenge, and play the game? Gombrowicz’s public

Diary skips over this. He criticizes the network and its participants and then suddenly he writes again from Berlin detailing the facts of how he got there. Perhaps it was the

131 “Formal Imperative”: if there is A, there must be B, he left, so he had to return. More pragmatically, Gombrowicz had been thinking of returning to Europe for some time and this was an opportunity to relocate. During “The Thaw” under Nikita

Khrushchev’s leadership of the Soviet Union, Gombrowicz’s work, excluding his

Diary, was republished in Poland and flew off the shelves. This new recognition in his homeland quickly ended when the political winds shifted again, but between this success and his support from Bondy and Jeleński, Gombrowicz began to gain a profile in the Francophone world. Ferdydurke appeared in French in 1958,

Pornografia in 1962, and The Marriage was performed in France in 1963 as well, following its debut and subsequent banning in Poland in 1960. Despite the short shrift

British reviewers made of Ferdydurke, wondering, “Why shouldn’t publication have ceased just because there were no more takers?” and “It must have been after reading it that a distinguished Englishman announced that the novel was dead,”

Gombrowicz’s fame grew on the Continent and he had a network behind him

(Grigson 304; Scott 271). Ford’s generous funding offer also likely played a significant role. It provided full expenses plus a salary, which was more money than

Gombrowicz had enjoyed in decades. It was the perfect financial and practical opportunity for him to return.

Understanding the game well, Gombrowicz found an opening into the cultural

Cold War that worked to his advantage. That did not mean he took the opportunity for granted. As Ingeborg Bachmann would later write about him, “In him was the greatest good, a tenderness, that he masked as arrogance. He was the most modest of

132 people that anyone can think of” (Bachmann, “Witold Gombrowicz” 328).120

Gombrowicz could deliver unforgiving critiques with stark honesty, at times embodying an aristocratic arrogance that left everyone cold, but he was, at heart, sincere, tender, and yearning for recognition. These dueling states emerge forcefully in his diary, creating a full picture of what being human under duress means. His approach to Ford’s funding and his time in Berlin held both of these sides equally.

Gombrowicz dissected the efforts of the cultural Cold War’s extensive network, yet happily took the money. In Berlin, he participated as best he could, even learning

German, yet provided a frank depiction of the Germans in his Berlin Notes that roiled some of his hosts.

Gombrowicz’s Berlin Notes, his diary from his time in Berlin, was published in German in 1965. It holds both his attempt to come to terms with the Polish-German past and his assessment that the Germans exemplify the problem with the contemporary moment, stressing that they are only a symbol of the wider trans-

Atlantic malaise. The only way for people to shed the effects of WWII, he suggested, had been the formalization and organization of all aspects of life, making intellectual and artistic life in return anaemic; the intellectual scope was blinkered and everyone was focused narrowly on their own project or aims so that wider engagement, debate, or invigorating disagreement was no longer possible. Gombrowicz formulated his assessment from exposure to a small section of European intellectual life, primarily

Francophone and Polish thought concentrated in the milieu of the cultural Cold War.

He read German philosophy from the pre-WWII period, but was not well informed about the German intellectual or literary scene in the postwar period, yet alone what

120 Original text: “[In ihm] war einer große Güte, eine Zartheit, die sich maskiert hat als Hochmut. Er war der bescheidenste Mensch, den man sich denken kann.” 133 was happening in North America. He also did not fully engage in the Argentinian literary scene and did not have access to a wide variety of texts because he primarily depended on what was sent to him by friends abroad. Despite these obvious limitations and perhaps as a result of his multi-decade absence, Gombrowicz presents a clear-eyed critique of the trans-Atlantic intellectual elite and their impotence and disinterest in instigating societal change.

Gombrowicz experienced German intellectual life through his Berlin café salons and Höllerer’s Literary Colloquium. His interaction was limited because of his language skills; nevertheless, he hoped his efforts would help revive intellectual café culture in Berlin. On September 3, 1963, Karl Haas, Ford’s representative in Berlin, wrote to Stone at the Ford Foundation in New York, “I have also spent some time with Gombrowicz who has a very definite language barrier, hence must be made to feel at home particularly. I spoke French with him which helps his morale. We have instigated a little ‘Stammtisch’ at ‘Zuntz’ where he meets with literary figures of

Berlin and I try to attend whenever I have time.”121 The effort Gombrowicz made was appreciated by Ford, but he soon found that there was little interest among local writers. Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Peter Weiss, and other Ford participants came at first, but after a few months attendance dwindled. Gombrowicz reflected:

I assume that if this initiative had been more theirs, internal, less international, it would have been sustained somewhat longer…It seemed to me that they generally did not want to give of themselves, they did not need an exchange of thought or any other kind of exchange, each knew his thing and what he knew he expressed in what he produced: books, articles, paintings or other activities. There was a general skepticism regarding any direct contact not within the framework of a specific assignment. Their eyes met but always about something, never in the way that eyes look deeply into other eyes” (Gombrowicz, Diary 649).

121 Haas, Karl to Shepard Stone. September 3, 1963. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 134

Gombrowicz felt just as many other participants did: they were not exactly welcome.

This imposed exchange was not beneficial, particularly because the foreign artists got the majority of the attention and money, while the German artists were expected to be grateful and play host. Yet Gombrowicz’s critique digs at a larger change in European intellectual life that he had worried about for years and experienced acutely in Berlin.

In his perception, intellectual and literary life was becoming a profession with tasks, aims, targets, and perhaps most damagingly, clear limits. Discussion was lifeless.

Gombrowicz wrote in 1962:

There was a time in European life when one could have invited Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Ibsen to breakfast—people so unlike one another each one of them could have come from a different planet—yet what breakfast would not have exploded from such a gathering? Today one can easily arrange a general banquet for the entire European elite and it would take place without a jarring note, without a spark” (Gombrowicz, Diary 577).

Gombrowicz thought this extensive flattening, this acquiescence, resulted in the deadening of literature, the loss of its power to resist, to “create antibodies.” Writers, he argued were no longer honest with their spirit, but were reduced to a function.

“Since everything in society is functional, the social order of the spirit likes a certain production of superiority and greatness and thus a new category of functionary arises: the spiritual functionary” (Gombrowicz, Diary 577). Impresarios like Nabokov and

Bondy were guilty. They enabled and encouraged this. Writers and artists who played along, who lost themselves to the function or form of writer or artist in the new professional scheme, enabled and encouraged this by accepting prizes, entertaining politicians, attending conferences, visiting embassies.

Gombrowicz found himself in the middle of this storm by accepting his stipends from the CCF and Free Europe Radio along with the invitation to Berlin. In

135 Berlin, he found that the Germans exemplified the failure of this new cultural organization. His critique of them distanced him from the process, establishing him, the true author, as aware of and external from them, the authorial spokespeople; it was a duality and conflict of forms that proved insurmountable. Gombrowicz saw himself as independent and truly, widely intellectually engaged while the German-American and trans-Atlantic intellectual movements of the 1950s and 1960s stultify and blunt intellectual and artistic pursuits making them into merely a form of business and social organization. He recognized the personification of this phenomenon in

Höllerer. Gombrowicz wanted to know Höllerer better, but their language barrier made direct conversation impossible. They got to know each other through letters and reading each other’s works in translation. After reading one of Höllerer’s books,

Gombrowicz wrote to him, “So I read your ‘Epiphany’ with great interest and also with great profit, because it introduces in one of the main "structures" of the modern literature ... I very much regret that I can not discuss these things with you….”122

Gombrowicz respected Höllerer and called him a friend. Thus, in true

Gombrowiczian fashion, when he published his diary about his time in Berlin, he hoped his Berlin friends would “want to pardon this indecency… of the type that he who knows he is not supposed to eat fish with a knife is allowed to eat fish with a knife” (Gombrowicz, Diary, 642). Having apologized for his forthcoming rudeness and critical remarks, he carried on with what he wanted to say about the Germans, using Höllerer as an exemplar of his point.

122 Witold Gombrowicz to Walter Höllerer. December 4, 1963. 03WH/AA/7,12, LASR. Original text: “J'ai lu donc votre "Epiphanie" avec grand interet et aussi avec grand profit, car elle introduit dans une des principales "structures" de la lietterature moderne... Je regrette beaucoup que je ne peux pas discuter ces choses avec vous,..” 136 A key incident that encapsulates Gombrowicz’s critiques and fears is when he partook in a reading as part of his residency. One afternoon, Höllerer whisked

Gombrowicz off to the reading where he was, unbeknownst to him, expected to read his work in German translation. Confused by the entire situation, the German hosts explained that Gombrowicz was a guest in Berlin and so the reading was “merely a courtesy on [their] part, and also something prescribed by international cultural cooperation, not to mention the enrichment and enlivening of [their] curriculum”

(Gombrowicz, Diary, 643). This was exactly the situation Gombrowicz feared; he refused to read in German. Klaus Völker read for him. As the conversation about the works read ensued, Gombrowicz, in his telling of the event, could not endure his silence and spoke out as best he could in broken German, the entire audience focused on him. In turn, he picked a fight with the other Polish artist there, Henryk Berlevi, finding relief only when Höllerer closed the session. Everyone politely clapped and left. There is not another account of this reading, so it is impossible to know the veracity of Gombrowicz’s interpretation, but his dramatization of his internal horror and desperation opens up his distress at being read, of reading himself, in front of an audience in a foreign language, of reading himself in German for Germans. Unwilling to participate in this absurd prostitution, Gombrowicz asked someone to read for him, but hearing himself read, interpreted, and discussed in a dialogue he could only partially grasp, he urged himself to action. As one of his translators, Lillian Vallee, wrote: “To assert his existence as something more than just an appendage to his work, to assert his being in that room, he [began] to babble his imperfect German, to argue passionately in gibberish, to gesticulate violently—anything to make his existence known” (Gombrowicz, Diary 740). Gombrowicz’s desperation and helplessness in his

137 retelling of the reading illustrates the impossibility of his situation in Berlin and the anguish more generally of the recipient of political patronage; his work was now in the hands of others who formed it to their purpose. The imposition of this Cold War form on him took over.

Gombrowicz’s tale of his bewilderment and impotence in the reading concretely depicts his wider critique of the state-private network that transformed the trans-Atlantic intellectual world. After and despite Gombrowicz’s awkward interjections, the entire procedure of a reading was politely followed: artists read or spoke, a few questions were asked, applause was given, the event ended. Witnessing the ritual unfold, Gombrowicz found in it an exemplar of the German organization of culture, which mirrored the wider cultural network in which it was embedded. For him, Berlin felt solid, felt real, but something was suspicious. It was a talent the

Germans had “for actualization based on nothingness” (Gombrowicz, Diary, 643). In

Gombrowicz’s telling the reading is only a perfunctory matter, something that must be performed and ticked off the list of obligations. He saw in the Germans an

“unrelenting passion for actualization.” When this occurred in the building of a house, it was one thing, but applied to culture, it was dangerous. Gombrowicz knew that:

Berlin organizing its spiritual and intellectual life is full of sessions, congresses, meetings, exhibits, lectures, seminars, etc., etc., everything— functional, everything done as if no one could doubt this work…that incredible loyalty of a German working for culture, a loyalty all the more strange because it goes hand in hand with the most penetrating skepticism (Gombrowicz, Diary, 643).

From Gombrowicz’s perspective, everything the Germans did was quantifiable, formulaic, presentable as evidence. Throughout his Berlin Notes, Gombrowicz never directly discusses the Holocaust or WWII, but he eludes to it in the hooks he imagines on wall and the German hands he encounters, always friendly, but dubious. 138 Gombrowicz suggests that there is a constant German need to actualize their efforts, to show that they themselves are correct, but that erecting structures is only avoiding discussion of the fact that the structural frames are built to hide the cold, damp basements and the remnant hooks on the wall. “Oh sure, everything on the surface is,

I repeat, extraordinarily solid…but there are basements and in these basements reality gets into their hands like a laboratory rabbit, like rubber which one forms and almost, one could say, changes into something produced like any other product”

(Gombrowicz, Diary 647–648). In Berlin, in Americanized Germany, everything was polished and exhibited, yet somehow sordid. Gombrowicz saw this in his reading and in the aims of the Literary Colloquium in general dismissively declaring that: “They impart rather strange knowledge there: how to write, how to become a writer…and I said primo that if they want to be writers they should tear out of here through the doors and windows” (Gombrowicz, Diary 649).

In the Germans, Gombrowicz confronted both his past and modernity. He observed, “[The Germans] work well together, that is, they give of themselves only partly, within the context of their functions. Their loneliness is devoured by their transformation of the world and by satisfying their needs” (Gombrowicz, Diary 632).

The true Germans were hidden in the basements, carefully bricked over by this makeshift Berlin and a professional exterior. Two motifs from Berlin Notes highlight the duality of the Berliners he observed, hooks and hands. Gombrowicz was taken to a prison and saw iron hooks hanging from the ceiling that had been used to hang or strangle people who fought against Hitler. Repeatedly throughout his recollection of experiences in Berlin, when Germans are performing a formal role, being professional, Gombrowicz is in distress and he sees a hook on the wall. When Volker

139 read Ferdydurke in public, Gombrowicz tried to listen, “but there somewhere at the top was a hook pounded into, pounded, pounded, pounded into the wall”

(Gombrowicz, Diary 634). He is anxious, uncertain, concerned, but the Germans take over and everything goes smoothly. He is not hung. The awkward incident, his failure to perform, the hook, is brushed over and everyone simply moves on. This strict adherence to form rattled Gombrowicz. The perfectly behaved dogs, politeness of the people, ease of the traffic, all paper over what he saw in the German hands, so many of the capable hands that had perhaps put his compatriots on hooks, in gas chambers, under a bullet. He felt “that Berlin, like Lady Macbeth, was endlessly washing its hands” (Gombrowicz, Diary 634). Criminal hands, youthful hands, trembling hands,

German hands, hands from over there, “fraternity from over there was death…a forest, a forest of arms stretched before them in conquering gesture, lovingly, heil, creating hands! Idiocy! Away! Imaginings!” (Gombrowicz, Diary 635). Gombrowicz scolds himself, reminding himself that he should write only about himself, but the past seeps through. He veers away from politics, but yesterday, he remarks, made today and he saw it everywhere. “Their astounding strength in overcoming their past sometimes makes it hard to believe” (Gombrowicz, Diary 634).

Höllerer’s exemplification of this German need to organize, work, and create, both baffled Gombrowicz and stirred admiration because “the pointlessness of this undertaking was certainly obvious to [Höllerer]” (Gombrowicz, Diary 643). Yet

Gombrowicz clearly saw that it built form and structure to avoid and obscure what could not be said, to overcome the past or at least lock it away. For Gombrowicz,

Höllerer was sometimes a student—laughing, engaging, peering deeply into humanity—sometimes he was the professor, an excellent one, a superb organizer:

140 “German competence beamed from [Höllerer’s] eyes, movements, words…[Gombrowicz] knew that [he] had found [himself] in competent, efficient and refined hands” (Gombrowicz, Diary 643). During the reading, Gombrowicz wanted terribly for Höllerer to laugh, to break the formality, to bring humanity to the proceedings, but he did not. The division of the roles was clear and, Gombrowicz observed, Höllerer could not embody them at the same time. This created an unreality. It was not just the past that was cut off from intellectual encounter, but the entire intellectual sphere, all of cultural life, was regulated by events and forms that could not be broken, which therefore also did not allow humanity, sincerity, creativity, or exploration to enter. It of course also avoided the potential for conflict or violence.

Culture, as Gombrowicz witnessed it, was boxed into clear products of work, circulated through presentations and publications then neatly laid on a shelf or in a meeting’s minutes. His sense of the unreal in Germany underlines the nebulous haze of the milieu and the fog of Cold War West Germany, the new Europe that had emerged in his absence with the quick and widespread movement of people and goods. It was wonderful and overwhelming. Confronting this organization of culture, the exchange perfunctorily performed, Gombrowicz poked at the absurdity and obfuscation of the entire fiasco. Who was really taking part? What did they actually think? What was the point? He posed his questions to both the cultural Cold Warriors and the Germans: what was real? In Berlin, Gombrowicz found Poland, the war, the

Holocaust, the atrocities that he escaped, and a new Europe. He was attuned to the changes in Poland and Germany, but his critique of the distraction and abstraction of postwar culture and life into routine events and shiny products applied to Europe as a

141 whole. Reflecting on what he found, he wrote, “Why, all of Europe, since I landed in

Cannes, seemed to me to be blind with work…I had not met anyone who was not a function, a cog in a wheel…Goethe? Instead of Goethe—mastodons of factories, no less creative” (Gombrowicz, Diary 638). He acknowledged that he wanted “to write as far away as I can from politics…Which perhaps is dumb, as the swift economic rebirth of the Federal Republic affected the fate of all of Western Europe and has become etc., etc., etc. All this is obvious” (Gombrowicz, Diary, 639). He found all aspects of life deeply affected by this new economic whirlwind of Americanization in

Europe. Several people complain about the Americanization of Europe in his writings, but he offers no comment. Based on his open critique of his German hosts, his friends, and his approach in general throughout his diary, this should not be read as a polite deference to his patrons. Gombrowicz was not interested in the United

States and its geopolitical role in the postwar period. He wrote little about it with only brief mentions of people going to the States or people complaining about the country.

Instead, he laid Europe at Europe’s feet, putting responsibility for it in its own citizens’ hands. He grappled with it, mourned it, and wanted to be part of it.

Although Gombrowicz criticized the cultural Cold Warriors, the colloquia, readings, and exchanges, he needed money in order to have time. He wanted to take part. His critiques as well are not dismissals or judgments. As he wrote to Nicolas

Nabokov after providing him his impressions, “This is the way I see you and maybe, my friend, it is nonsense. But as I myself like to be told how I am perceived, I thought it might be of interest to you” (Giroud, 346). Gombrowicz offered up his thoughts with the intent to broaden and deepen perspectives, to get past forms and more to a true center. His criticism, when given personally was sincere, intended to be

142 constructive, although it was not always interpreted this way. When Berlin Notes was published in Germany, it was met with mixed reviews incensed by his opinions of the

Germans. Gombrowicz was concerned this might have negative ramifications on his future funding or appear ungrateful. He quickly wrote to Peter Nestler, the new

Ford/DAAD representative of the residency program to try to clarify:

You have probably read the articles in Der Spiegel and Die Zeit. Since you are now the representative of the Ford Foundation in Berlin, I want to say that I am absolutely surprised by this hostile reaction. If I had been able to imagine that this text was unpleasant for the Germans, I would not have published it, since it was not at all my intention to reduce the hospitality that I knew in Berlin, as much on behalf of the Ford Foundation than Berliners.

On the contrary. In writing these chapters of my journal in a spirit devoid of any nationalism and, it seems to me, very European, I wanted to contribute to the efforts of all those who work for the consolidation of a united and delivered Europe of the past. But I think it is not by discreetly forgetting the past that all of us - Germans, Americans, Poles - will come to that, but by going beyond it.

I hope that Berliner Notizen will find some readers who will assimilate it in a more serious way. For the moment, please tell Mr. Stone and the other Ford Foundation officials that I am sorry for this misunderstanding, which is truly amazing. Two weeks ago, my editor Neske assured me that the press would be 'very good'.123

123 Gombrowicz to Nestler, December 5, 1965, GEN MSS 515 Box 3 f.78, WGA. Original text: “Vous avez sans doute lu les articles dans Der Spiegel et Die Zeit. Puisque vous etes maintenant le representant de la Fondation Ford a Berlin, je tiens a vous dire que je suis absolument surpris par cette reaction hostile. Si j'avais pu m'imaginer que ce texte fut desagreable pour les Allemands, je ne l'aurais pas publie, puisque ce n'etait pas du tout mon intention de retribuer ainsi l'hospitalite que j'ai connue a Berlin, autant de la part de la Ford Foundation que des Berlinois.

Tout au contraire. En ecrivant ces chapitres de mon journal dans un esprit depourvu de tout nationalisme et, il me semble, bien europeen, je voulais contribuer a l'effort de tous ceux qui travaillent pour la consolidation d'une Europe unie et delivree du passe. Mais je crois que ce n'est pas en oubliant discretement le passe que nous tous - Allemands, Americains, Polonais - nous arriverons a cela, mais en le depassant.

J'espere que Berliner Notizen trouveront quand mem des lecteurs qui l'assimileront d'une facon plus serieuse. Pour le moment, je vous prie de bien vouloir dire a M. Stone et aux autres fonctionnaires de la Ford Fondation que je suis desole par ce malentendu, vraiment suprenant. Il y a encore deux semaines, Monsieur Neske, mon editeur, m'assurait que la presse serait 'tres bonne'.”123

143 Before Gombrowicz had even written to Nestler, Nestler had actually written to him to congratulate him, having heard from Gombrowicz’s editor that the resonance was very good.124 Having received Gombrowicz’s concerns, Nestler wrote again on

December 22, 1965, to respectfully disagree with Gombrowicz on the reception of his book, arguing that though Die Zeit’s review was accentuated, it only worked to arouse more interest in the book. He also noted that the Frankfurter Allgemeine had printed a positive review and further that he had gone to purchase a copy to send to the Ford

Foundation in New York and the bookstores were out of stock. He had to wait for the second shipment for a copy. 125

Intentionally or not, Gombrowicz obfuscated. He laid insightful lessons next to stinging critiques next to flustered apologies and sincere compliments; one published in a novel, the next in his diary, others arriving by letter. He wove a web of varying messages that blunted his strike, yet eased his way. Another perspective might be to say he attacked the structures and forms he found himself and his compatriots caught in and performing, but reached out to the individuals, of whom he caught glimpses of in rare moments.

Dividends Paid

Both the German-Polish history of WWII and the Cold War conflict centered in Berlin visited Gombrowicz while he was in the city. Berlin, an island within the

Soviet Union’s orbit, was an auspicious location for East-West confrontation engendering its own cultural politics. When Höllerer wanted to host a Polish theater

124 Nestler to Gombrowicz, December 2, 1965, GEN MSS 515 Box 3 f.78, WGA. English translation: “I'm sure your editor has told you that the resonance of your book - as far as I can judge - was extremely positive.” 125Nestler to Gombrowicz, December 22, 1965, GEN MSS 515 Box 3 f.79, WGA. 144 company as part of a festival in Berlin in 1964, his contact Andrzej Wirth wrote, “The difficulty, it seems to me, is of a geo-political nature centered on the awkward location of [Berlin]. Perhaps the visit could be possible in another German city.”126

Berlin’s geographic and political location made all activity there subject to intensive scrutiny.

Gombrowicz wrote that in 1930s Poland, “Day by day my position on the

European continent became increasingly precarious and equivocal” (Gombrowicz, A

Kind of Testament 53–54). Argentina had given him the distance he needed personally, but at a cost. He was accused of desertion for staying in Argentina in 1939 and not returning to Europe. Gombrowicz was in touch with the Polish delegation in

Buenos Aires, but he did not return to Poland or report to the Polish army in England.

Plagued with ill health, it is not clear if he was rejected or decided not to enlist, but in reflection he said morally he was “distraught, in despair…but glad to find [himself] miraculously sheltered by the ocean” (Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament 92). This did not bode well with those who fought and suffered. It also played into the hands of his detractors when he was in Berlin.

Gombrowicz soon found himself on the receiving end of his compatriots’ rancor. In the autumn of 1963, the Polish press attacked Gombrowicz. Rattled by these attacks, he wanted to be sure his patrons clearly understood his position and to inquire if they could perhaps help. On November 15, 1963, Gombrowicz wrote directly to Nabokov and Shepard Stone, Director of International Affairs at Ford, who was then visiting Berlin, to clarify his position:

126 Andrzej Wirth to Walter Höllerer. June 8, 1964, LASR. Original text: “Die Schwierigkeit ist, scheint mir, ‘geopolitischer Natur’, und liegt in der unbequemen Lage der Stadt [Berlin]. Wahrscheinlich in einer anderen deutschen Stadt könnte der Besuch durchaus möglich sein.” 145 It is, without doubt, an organised campaign. Up to now fifteen such articles have appeared, sometimes taking up whole pages. A falsified inteview (sic) with me has also been published, in which I am quoted as saying both stupid and provocative things…The campaign is based on two motives. 1) My presence here in Berlin is considered provocative; and it is interpreted as collaboration by me with ‘the revanchist spirit’ of West Germany against Poland. 2) They are taking advantage of this situation to try and destroy my influence among the intellectuals and young people, in putting me over not as anti-communist but as anti-polish. …Because my writings have an european (sic) and universal meaning, against all narrow nationalism, it is not difficult for them to present me as a ‘traitor’ and ‘renegade’ before a public only aware of my purely artistic work (my ‘Diary’ has not been published in Poland).127

Gombrowicz did try to defend himself by writing letters to the Polish press, but neither his letters nor the letters of other émigrés who wrote in his defense were published until a much later date. While Gombrowicz may have at times presented himself as ambivalent about Poland, his reaction to the attacks suggest that, even though he would not return to his nation of birth, he cared deeply about his reputation and his ability to assist any like-minded Poles. Later, in early 1964, when

Gombrowicz was terribly ill and should have moved to a better climate, he did not want to leave Berlin because he was afraid it would look as if he was fleeing from the attacks of the Polish press.128 Gombrowicz may not have taken up arms in WWII, but it was important for him to stand his ground against the Polish Communist Party, even in the face of rapidly declining health.

In his 1975 recollections, Höllerer wrote about Gombrowicz in Berlin:

Witold Gombrowicz: he took a room in West-Berlin situated near the top of the building with a window facing east; high so that he could always be in the East, in the East, where he did not want to enter. A room that took, like he said

127 Gombrowicz to Stone, November 15, 1963, GEN MSS 515 Box 3 f.103, WGA. 128 Gombrowicz to Haas, August 10, 1964, GEN MSS 515 Box 3 f. 103, WGA. Original text: “Toutes ces complications c'est une force mayeure [sic], la maladie (je porrai vous envoyer un certificat de mon medecin)...et cette maladie se doit avant tout au fait, que je ne voulais pas quitter Berlin pendant l'hiver pour ne pas avoir l'air de fuir devant les attaques de la presse communiste polonaise.” English: All these complications is a major force, the disease (I will send you a certificate from my doctor) ... and this disease must first and foremost, that I did not want to leave Berlin during the winter not to to appear to be fleeing attacks by the Polish communist press. 146 himself, in the morning, and especially on beautiful, light autumn days, ‘Baltic Sea days’, that sometimes occur in Berlin, the compulsive neurotic form. He lived as if bound by air, without bodily tangency; he hung in the Eastern-Air, continued in the Eastern-Air, was in the East. There were military parades; while beneath him in the West, from the Hilton-Hotel to Halen Lake, a singular western buffet; that did not phase his balance at all, on the contrary, his head, his eyes, that were materially here at least as much as the brain must be, were overstrained; - it gave him so much pain; his sense of touch grew out from him like shoots from potatoes in winter, they hung out of him and pulled him out of balance, - too little recognizable tangibility- , - everything concrete was too far away from him, by an invasive surplus of apparent palpability-; he hung overboard, in this position he made appropriate literature, and then went overboard. The case of Gombrowicz is an example of literature and society in special circumstances…129

Höllerer intimates that it was all perhaps too much for Gombrowicz. Facing the East in the pay of the West, he was spread thin. Bound only by air, he worked himself ragged and could not hold himself together. Facing the past, Gombrowicz found it difficult to present himself in any type of form. He became terribly ill in Berlin, spending months in a hospital to recover just enough to return to France. Suffering from asthma, he had a lengthy history of physical frailty often retiring to the mountains or coast to convalesce. The cold, wet German winter did not support his health. Haas wrote to Stone and Slater on March 11, 1964 “Gombrowicz has been in a hospital for about 2 weeks with a flue (sic) which has affected his heart. The doctor assures me that there is no cause for worry at this time, but he cannot have visitors. If

129 Walter Höllerer. “Augenblicke mit Besuchern”. Akzente 4/1975, pp. 346-349, LASR. Original text: “Witold Gombrowicz: er nahm sich ein hochgelegenes Zimmer in West-Berlin, mit den Fenstern nach Osten; hochgelegen, um immer auch im Osten zu sein, im Osten, den er nicht betreten wollte. Das nahm, wie er selber sagte, am Morgen, und besonders an schönen hellen Herbstagen, an ´Ostseetagen`, die es ja in Berlin zuweilen gibt, an solchen Tagen nahm das zwangsneurotische Formen an. Er lebte in einer Verbindung-durch-Luft, ohne körperliche Berührung; er hing in der Ost-Luft, währen unter der Ost-Luft, im Osten. Militär-Paraden waren; während unter ihm selber, im Westen, vom Hilton-Hotel bis nach Halensee, ein einziger westlicher Puff war; das schaffte ihm keinerlei Ausgleich, im Gegenteil, sein Kopf, sein Auge, das hier ja in höherem Maße als sonst auch Gehirn sein mußte, wurden überanstrengt; - es tat ihm da alles weh; seine Tastsinne wuchsen aus ihm heraus wie lange Triebe aus Kartoffeln im Winter, sie hingen heraus aus ihm und zogen ihn so aus der Balance, - zu wenig anerkannte Greifbarkeit- , - alles Greifbare war für ihn so weit weg, bei einem aufdringlichen Überangebot von scheinbar Greifbarem -; er hing über Bord, er machte in diesem Zustand zutreffende Literatur, und ging dann auch über Bord. Der Fall Gombrowicz als Beitrag zum Thema Literatur und Gesellschaft in Speziallagen.” 147 you want to write, here is the address: Sanatorium Hygiea, Fuggerstrasse 23, 1 Berlin

33.”130 Gombrowicz should have moved to a better climate, but he did not want to leave Berlin at that point because it might look like he was fleeing from the attacks of the Polish press.131 He remained until the spring when he returned to France.

Gombrowicz admitted in his diary that he was unsure how much of his perception of Berlin was due to his own illness and how much to Berlin’s. He felt

Europe was sucking him dry: “Having landed on a city-island, a city-chimera, I sensed my own death in the Polish scents of the Tiergarten. Weakened by this death from the inside, I had to deal with the hidden death of the city, which meted death and got it” (Gombrowicz, Diary 643). Gombrowicz’s death, the death of his youth, his pre-exile self, his former life, all confronted him in Germany. “The German smile which was right next door to a Polish smile” pushed his death, his previous self, his

Polish self before his Argentinian self and he did not want to confront it. He did not return to Poland; the smell of the Tiergarten was enough. After regaining his strength,

Gombrowicz returned to Paris, eventually settling in Vence on the Mediterranean.

Gombrowicz’s return to Europe, his solidification and extension of his network, helped support him in his final years and further cemented his reputation in

Europe and beyond. In the 1960s, Gombrowicz clawed his way to a monetary award first with publications and small stipends, then with Ford’s grant. Gombrowicz was briefly considered for the Prix International de Littérature in 1964, when Francois

130 Haas, Karl to Shepard Stone and Joseph Slater. March 11, 1964, pp. 3. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63-351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 131 Gombrowicz to Haas, August 10, 1964, GEN MSS 515 Box 3 f. 103, WGA. “Toutes ces complications c'est une force mayeure [sic], la maladie (je porrai vous envoyer un certificat de mon medecin)...et cette maladie se doit avant tout au fait, que je ne voulais pas quitter Berlin pendant l'hiver pour ne pas avoir l'air de fuir devant les attaques de la presse communiste polonaise.” English: All these complications is a major force, the disease (I will send you a certificate from my doctor) ... and this disease must first and foremost, that I did not want to leave Berlin during the winter not to to appear to be fleeing attacks by the Polish communist press. 148 Bondy was on the jury, but lost out to Nathalie Sarraute (Gold). The following year the award was a close battle between Gombrowicz for Pornografia and Saul Bellow for Herzog. Bellow narrowly won by a vote of four to three; notably, Bellow’s book concerns itself more directly with foundation-sponsored intellectuals. When

Gombrowicz was being considered for the International Publisher’s Award with a prize of ten thousand dollars, he wrote, “Dollars! And somebody kept calling, dollars, dollars….my dignity was a rag, my sovereignty idiocy, dollars, dollars, dollars…”

(Gombrowicz, Diary 676–677). Gombrowicz needed the money. On August 10,

1964, he wrote to Hass from France to ask for assistance. He confided in his letter that he was “more dead than alive, I’m dragging myself….”132 Despite this, he had been contemplating a return to Argentina and had even inquired about securing passage on a ship. The Ford Foundation would pay for his return, yet, the documentation suggests he was making travel arrangements through the CCF office in Paris. By September

1964, Gombrowicz decided to postpone his return due at least partially to his bad health; he never returned to Argentina. He was also troubled about his financial situation. He confided in Haas that Radio Free Europe was considering suspending or ending his monthly stipend as a result of his Ford grant. He confidentially asked Haas if he could assist by writing to Free Europe to explain that the money from Berlin was not to be saved and he still required regular support. He also requested Haas to perhaps ask Shepard Stone if he would be willing to match his funding and also provide a small monthly stipend to assist him. Haas acquiesced and wrote to New

York.

132 Gombrowicz to Haas, August 10, 1964, GEN MSS 515 Box 3 f.103, WGA. Original text:“plus mort que vif, je me traine…” 149 There is no evidence to suggest that Stone assisted in matching the funds, but

Gombrowicz now had wide contacts to assist him both in finding resources and promoting his work. In 1966, Piers Paul Read was back in England and keen to read the work of Gombrowicz, the man who had influenced him while in Berlin. It was hard to find the book in English. Read was determined to change this by convincing reviewers to write about Gombrowicz’s book. Doubtful of the old guard, Read warned Gombrowicz, “But do not count on the old; you have to wait for the young.”133 Read did help Gombrowicz reach English readers by introducing him to

Alastair Hamilton, a friend connected to the newspapers. Hamilton ended up translating Gombrowicz’s Pornographia.

In 1967, Gombrowicz finally won a significant prize for his novel Cosmos, being awarded the newly branded International Prize for Literature, formerly the

Formentor Prize; the new version of the award was decided upon by critics instead of publishers. The purpose of the award had also changed. Previously it was awarded to garner international attention for the work of an outstanding young author, but in

1967, the prize was intended for “an author whose work had failed to gain the attention it deserved” and came with a handsome $20,000 along with the translation of the work into thirteen languages (Polish Writer Wins Top Literary Prize 41). In coordination with Gombrowicz’s win, Grove Press republished Ferdydurke in English translation and released Pornografia in its first English translation. It launched in

London to mediocre reviews, with some declaring it “extremely funny…in a style so visual one has the sensation that one is not only reading the book but seeing the film,”

133 Letter to Witold Gombrowicz February 21, 1966. BC MS 20c Read/F3. Correspondence Family + Misc. 1959-1963 (2999-437), PPR. Original text: “Mai[s] ne comptez pas sur les vieux; il faut attender les jeunes.” 150 while others found it “bookish without being prurient” (Freeman 685; Rhode 635).

Time gave Cosmos a rave review, while the review in The New York Times Book

Review found the ideas essential, but execution lacking.

In 1968, Gombrowicz was considered for the Nobel Prize, but lost out to

Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the prize. Bondy wrote in 1971 that in West Germany Gombrowicz was considered “one of the major writers of our time, a stature he [had] yet failed to reach with readers of his work in English translations” (Bondy, Munich: The Decline of Cinematic Art). Miłosz called

Gombrowicz “a liberating influence” (Miłosz, “Intellectual Orgies”). Serge

Gavronsky wrote that Gombrowicz was “that rarest of literary creatures, a writer’s writer. In a world shadowed by literary agents and besotted with commercial acceptance, Gombrowicz, some 20 years after his death, stands as a noble reminder of the value of literature and what it can achieve” (Gavronsky). He influenced Milan

Kundera, Czesław Miłosz, Ingmar Bergman, who produced Gombrowicz’s “Yvonne,

Princess of Burgundy” in 1980, and Susan Sontag. At the turn of the twenty-first century, with the release of Danuta Borchardt’s new translations of his work directly from the Polish, Gombrowicz has gained prestige as one of the great modernists, a bridge between the modern and postmodern (Hoffman). It is therefore clear that the state-private network could play a powerful role in boosting authors who may have otherwise limped quietly into the night.

Cash and Cosmos

In Berlin, Gombrowicz came face-to-face with all of the issues he pontificated on seemingly easily in exile—battling the vindictive power of the Polish government, reconciling the German atrocities of World War II, forging relationships in person 151 with his European interlocutors—having to confront them in complex ways. Berlin was not a place of comfort for Gombrowicz. Perhaps it was his growing success, his having achieved recognition after decades in penury and bureaucratic labor that first made him uneasy. Bachmann observed: “I believe to have guessed correctly that this money did not affect his integrity or way of life; it was comfortable for him, but, as so often, comforts…are bound with enormous changes” (Bachmann, “Witold

Gombrowicz” 326).134 Having money did not trouble Gombrowicz, but it surely must have been an adjustment to not have to worry about it, to be an insider, to have even been summoned to the front lines of the cultural battle he had long criticized. While

Gombrowicz’s integrity and writing remained free from direct manipulation, he did not find this balance easy. The tightrope walk between participating and remaining independent was taxing.

Gombrowicz departed and returned to Europe through state-backed sponsorship. His involvement in the Ford programs establishes the important role state-private network funding played for artists exiled from the Soviet Union and its orbit. Finding himself in the pay of the Americans, Gombrowicz fiercely defended his independence against implications that Ford controlled his writing or that he was their lackey. He had never been willing to be the puppet in exchange for money. Ewa

Thompson traces how Gombrowicz snubbed his nose at his patrons and high society:

“In short, in Argentina as well as in Poland, Gombrowicz was the opposite of a social charmer. He displayed his rough edges even in the presence of people whose good will he desperately needed” (21). He was unwilling to perform. Vincent Giroud also

134 Original text: “.…ich glaube also erraten zu haben, daß dieses Geld seine Integrität und seine Art zu leben nicht berührt hat, es war ihm angenehm, aber wie so oft, sind Annehmlichkeiten…mit ungeheuerlichen Veränderungen verbunden.” 152 writes about how Gombrowicz kept his distance from the Argentinian literary community and states that Gombrowicz’s essay “Against Poets” was “a plea for freedom from unquestioned literary conventions and for independence of judgment…” (The World 31). Still, Gombrowicz’s engagement with his patrons and the literary world during this period becomes more direct and, through his diary, he is compelled to dwell on it and come to terms with it. The forms of cultural patronage he participated in and the strange functionality and efficiency of the world he discovered in Europe pressed on him. He also presents a forthright rejection of the direction of European cultural life amid the professionalizing impetus of the mid- twentieth century. As he said in an interview in 1965:

Absurdity is present in everything we touch, in our way of creating (which became cerebral and repugnant), in our talking about art (there is too much talk), in all the mechanisms of our little artistic world, that gigantic machinery made up of 100,000 doctors, docents, interpreters, glossators, sucking pale blood from the anemic bodies of thousands of ordinary artists (Gombrowicz, Diary 690).

He was deeply troubled by the mid-twentieth century European culture with its loss of the humanistic tradition and the aggressive advance of the technologists. Yet,

Gombrowicz was not an idealist and had a clear understanding of the damage having to work a day job had on his intellectual and spiritual life. Feeling drained by the daily demands of life as a bank clerk he bemoaned, “[one] cannot be nothingness all week and then suddenly expect to exist on Sunday” (Gombrowicz, Diary 44).

Gombrowicz’s uncompromising accounting of himself and his environment combined with his generous willingness to share his humanity also illustrate the essential lifeline the state-private network’s money created while underlining its insidious destructiveness; he took what financial gain he could garner from the Cold War network while criticizing its ethos and aims at every turn. 153 Gombrowicz’s summation and frustration with the financial positions of artists in the mid-twentieth century is best encapsulated in his final novel Cosmos.

Witold, the main character, takes a holiday in the mountains to get away from his family and professional troubles. During his trip, he lets form wash over him and follows its ebbs and flows. He never articulates what his troubles at home in Warsaw are, avoiding them entirely. Instead, he gets caught up in his roommate Fuks’ obsession with the supposed signs of mystery and meaning hanging around the property: a hung sparrow, an arrow on the ceiling, a hanging stick. Witold and Fuks sneak around the property trying to locate the objects and imbibe some meaning from them. This becomes Witold’s only focus. Eventually he decides to take an active role and asserts his own presence by absurdly killing a cat and hanging it from a string. He thinks he is gaining power over at least his own narrative, but in the end, as Alex

Spektor has noted, he quite literally hands over authorship to the patriarch of the house, Leon Wojtys, who, at the close of the novel, masturbates in the darkness on a mountain precipice while the other characters are there “for the sole reason of his doing his business in [their] presence…with his own…self-gratifying…gratify yourself...” (Gombrowicz, Cosmos 187–188). Mr. Wojtys exclaims, “Berg,” and

Witold confirms this by saying, “Berg,” giving up his own sense of authority to confirm the self-satisfying grunts and groans of another.

In Cosmos, Gombrowicz underlines the struggle he worked to articulate throughout his career, the struggle of the individual to be his or her own independent author, to assert himself or herself, while also taking part in society. As Jean-Paul

Sartre alleged, hell may be other people, and Gombrowicz does not dispute this, but he admits and asserts repeatedly that other people are necessary; there is no option to

154 go it alone. The tension Gombrowicz manifests in all of his main characters between independence and social engagement saw itself realized most concretely in

Gombrowicz’s own negotiation of remaining independent and becoming politically and financially involved in the cultural Cold War. Whether it was the Polish press interpreting him as anti-Polish or the Germans discussing him in German in front of his eyes, he found his control of his narrative overrun. Like his narrator in Cosmos who strangled the cat, Gombrowicz jumped up during the textual reading in Berlin and asserted himself in halting German. When trouble arrived via the denigration of the Polish press, he wrote hastily to his patrons at Ford to set this story straight. When he had received criticism in Kultura he could respond in due course. In Berlin, he found his voice was muffled, lost in translation, and he sprung to action pleading to be heard.

155 Chapter 4 The Ideal Candidate: Piers Paul Read

In 2013, Piers Paul Read reviewed the new edition of W. G. Sebald’s On the

Natural History of Destruction, reflecting that the book took him

back to Berlin in the early 1960s when German writers from the Gruppe 47 were in the ascendant, and no self-respecting avant-garde author wrote novels with stories or plots. They did not even write essays but rather ‘texts’; and I see that Notting Hill Editions, whose elegant slim editions resemble those published by Suhrkamp or the Carl Hansa Verlag at the time, also use the word ‘texts’ for literary writing (Horrors too Close to Home).

Read makes no assessment of Sebald’s work within the review, but reports to The

Spectator’s readership about who Sebald was and that he is highly acclaimed by some people. He then concludes the article abruptly by asserting that most of the writers

Sebald refers to in his work will be unfamiliar to English readers. Read is clearly not enthusiastic about his contemporary’s books and fails to draw any productive comparisons between Sebald’s contemplation of the influence of WWII bombings on

German literature and its own relation to the British position. Instead of damning the work or endorsing it, Read suggests that English readers should not bother because they will not understand the literary context. Read’s review of Sebald is representative of much of his writing: he criticizes English society to some degree, in this case for their lack of knowledge of other traditions; shares and revels in his historical knowledge of Continental Europe, which he can explain to his British readers; and passes judgment on anything that veers away from a traditional approach. By the time Read wrote this review, he had had a lengthy career and all of his novels focused on Europe display these characteristics along with a staunch

Catholicism. Their topics intriguingly follow the trajectory of the Cold War in Europe

156 criticizing the bipolar divide while exhibiting that art is a key chess piece in the game of power.

Piers Paul Read was born in 1941 to Sir Herbert Read (Sir Read) and Margaret

Ludwig and grew up primarily in North Yorkshire, England. Both of his parents shaped his intellectual focus. Read’s mother was a Catholic and he attended a

Catholic school, becoming a life-long adherent to Catholicism. She also had a mix of

European heritage with a strong connection to Germany, which likely shaped Read’s focus on Continental Europe. His father, the famous left-wing art critic Sir Read, put his son in contact with a range of intellectuals from a young age. All of these influences provided Read with a supportive environment to pursue a career in writing and publishing. Before attending university, he spent time in both Paris and Germany after which he proceeded to complete his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the

University of Cambridge. Following short stints at publishing houses in Munich and

London, Read was off to Ford’s Berlin residency program where he launched his literary career.

Growing up Read was part of the upper-class English milieu. His youth was spent at posh parties with aristocrats and vacationing on the Continent or at his acquaintances’ islands.135 His youthful vanity and self-assuredness shine through in his letters and, although he admits this, he does not apologize or step back from it. In several letters he analyzes his friends’ lives and tells them how they should live or what mistakes they are making, encouraging one friend not to get married or pursue a settled career and expressing condescension and disdain for his ex-girlfriend’s choice

135 “Letter to Tony. Tuesday 4th April 1962.” 147. BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), PPR. 157 of a husband.136 As a young man, Read appears to have had no doubts about his opinions or position and found himself to be righteous, more disciplined, and more principled than his peers. His self-assuredness and class position combined with his

Catholicism appear to have forged Read’s outlook. As Read himself has acknowledged, “When I was young, I was pretty nasty and cynical…I was tremendous as a social climber and my idea was charming a duchess’s daughter. The upstart—that’s me” (Teodorczuk). Beyond this pursuit, his letters from his young adulthood also evidence that he felt he had a greater responsibility and purpose than merely charming a duchess’ daughter. Getting ready to leave Cambridge in 1962,

Read confided to a friend that he felt he had a vocation and duty ahead of him. He felt that because of his position in society and the advantages he held, he had a larger responsibility to serve than other people had.137 Though Read consistently criticized

American philanthropy and wealth, his perception of his own purpose and role is closely aligned with the common philanthropic position that “with great wealth comes great responsibility.”

Read’s selection to partake in the Berlin program evidences the state-private network in full swing. Both he and his father were, in many ways, the kind of elite men Ford and their colleagues would want to be associated with and give their money. It was in fact through his father that Read ended up in Berlin with full grants to support his literary endeavors. During his time in the divided city, Read completed his first novel and gleaned the inspiration for his second. His involvement in the

Berlin program provides a fitting case study because he exhibits exactly how the

136 “Letter to Tony. 8 March 1963.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), PPR. 137 “Letter to Peter. Friday 17 June 1961.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133– 298), PPR. 158 state-private network can reinforce and perpetuate itself. Moreover, the topics of

Read’s books from 1960s to the 1990s display what on the surface may be an ideal outcome for the involvement of a young artist in the program: the novels return again and again to Berlin, the issues of postwar Germany, European relations, the failure of communism, and the role of art within war and power politics. His anti-Semitism is deeply troubling and his anti-Americanism is problematic from a funder’s point of view. Read’s early fiction in particular exhibits a strong antipathy against the very apparatus that enabled his early career. His case therefore provides insight into the legacy of the programs and underlines the fact that funding writers, particularly young ones without a record, comes with high risks.

Finding a Place in Berlin

Sir Herbert Read repeatedly embraced conflicting positions: he was a professed anarchist who accepted a knighthood and also a critic of cultural patronage who was deeply involved in the dispersing of state-private network funds. Sir Read was part of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and took part in a wide range of lectures, panels, and conferences. Yet, in the fourth edition of his book Art and

Society published in 1967, he stated: “I do not believe that artists can be disciplined without disastrous effects on their creative energy; I do not believe that the arts can be

‘organized’ by state departments and I look skeptically on all of our efforts to promote art by state patronage (though this skepticism has not prevented me from trying to guide such patronage into the least harmful channels)” (Read v). Sir Read legitimized his position further through his fear of both the socialist realist limitations of Soviet art and his trepidations about the entertainment industry. As with many participants in the cultural Cold War, Sir Read was happy to take advantage of the 159 resources while delivering his own critiques. Taking a swipe at the men providing him with money and opportunities he wrote:

That is to say, art becomes not merely a commodity, but more precisely a luxury product. The means to commission or purchase luxuries belong only to those individuals whose acquisitive instincts have triumphed in competition with their fellowmen…There have, let it be freely admitted, always been exceptions, but as a general rule such individuals are, in all matters of sensibility and taste, both vulgar and stupid. They are, by definition, men of action, that is to say, men in whom the contemplative faculties necessary to imaginative creation have been inhibited” (74).

Having little respect for the men of action and their judgment, Sir Read found it best to assist and advise them on how to spend the money they would spend anyway. His son benefitted and followed in his footsteps of acceptance and critique.

Piers Paul Read would not have ended up in Berlin if it had not been for his father’s position and connections. On February 25, 1963, John G. Carter, an editor at

Routledge and Kegan Paul in London, wrote to Read, at the request of his father, offering him a job at the start of 1964.138 Read replied with keen interest from Munich where he had grudgingly accepted a publishing job in 1962 after graduating from

Cambridge. He was dissatisfied with the terms of his position in Germany, which did not enable him to be independent, pushing him from “socialite to poet-in-garret” and forcing him to become a “confidence trickster.”139 Despite his annoyance with his pay, he was depressed that after his sojourn in Bavaria, he would need to return the following spring to take over his father’s role at Routledge.140

138 Letter from John G. Carter editor. 25 Febraury 1963. BC MS 20c Read/F3. Correspondence Family & Misc. 1959–63 (299–437), PPR. 139 “Letter to Tony. Tuesday 17th July 1962.” 146. BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), PPR. 140 “Letter to Peter. Friday 8 June 1962. BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), PPR. 160 Luckily for Read he did not have to return to England for long because he soon got the offer to go to Berlin. On March 12, 1963, Ruby d’Arschot, the secretary of the CCF in Paris, wrote a letter to her friend Herbert Read instructing him to send his curriculum vitae to Berlin presumably for an upcoming engagement. In the same letter, she asked Read to recommend an English writer to take part in the new Artists- in-Residence program, one of Nicolas Nabokov’s vast projects in Berlin. The writer would have to be sociable and not a communist, as that could create trouble for the

Ford Foundation.141 Sir Read promptly instructed his son to send his credentials to

Nabokov at the CCF office in Paris and express interest in taking part in the new institute in Berlin. Sir Read spells out how his son should write the letter and clearly states that he was in contact with Nabokov and they both though Piers was the kind of person the institute was looking for. Sir Read directed him to how to write his letter suggesting he should say he wanted to write about German culture in a creative way, emphasizing he was writing fiction and not an academic work.142 Read dutifully wrote to Nabokov with great interest in being considered for the project.143 His mother waited anxiously for the decision, but was also skeptical that Berlin as a suitable destination and wondered if Rome would be a better place to live and write.144 Read was not wanting for opportunity and despite his mother’s concerns about the drabness of Berlin, he was keen to go. In November 1963, his brother Ben wrote that finally some communication had come to their father and by early 1964

141 Letter from Ruby d’Arschot to Sir Herbert Read. March 12, 1963. BC MS 20c Read/F3. Correspondence Family & Misc. 1959–63 (299–437), PPR. 142 Letter from Herbert Read. Undated. BC MS 20c Read/F3. Correspondence Family & Misc. 1959– 63 (299–437), PPR. 143 Letter to Nicolas Nabokov. January 18, 1963. BC MS 20c Read/F3. Correspondence Family & Misc. 1959–63 (299–437), PPR. 144 Letter from Margaret Ludwig. Undated. BC MS 20c Read/F3. Correspondence Family & Misc. 1959–63 (299–437), PPR. 161 Read was in the divided city.145 He was soon not under Nabokov’s direction, but

Höllerer’s as one of the young, student writers studying at the LCB.

In addition to this father’s connections, Read did have some credentials that made him a good candidate for the residency. By the time he was in touch with

Nabokov, he had spent time in both Germany and France and, his letters suggest, he had a decent command of both languages. His time in Germany provided him with an insight into postwar German culture and his time in France in 1958, as the Fourth

Republic collapsed, had played a formative role in sparking his political engagement.

When the young Read returned to England from France at the end of 1958, he was just beginning his march left and attempted to bring Parisian politics to Yorkshire, joining the Liberal Party.146 In 1961, after finishing his Bachelor’s degree, he spent the summer between his familial home in Yorkshire and London. His letters from this time indicate a growing fascination with socialism and communism. On June 28,

1961, reflecting on a party he attended with members of parliament and aristocrats he wrote to a friend that he felt torn between the anger of socialism and the compassion of Christianity.147 He continued complaining about the English geist, but admitted that he was a part of it and could not separate himself from it. He also outlined his reading list for the summer, which included Marx, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Sartre,

Camus, Brecht, Musil, Montherlant, and Henry James, declaring to his friend that he

145 Letter from Ben Read. November 20, 1963. BC MS 20c Read/F3. Correspondence Family & Misc. 1959–63 (299–437), PPR. 146 “Letter to Tom. Monday December 1958” and “Letter to Tom. Tuesday 8 April 1958.” 249. BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), PPR. 147 “Letter to Tony. Wednesday 28 June 1961.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), PPR. 162 would like be a full communist by the time they met again.148 By 1963, Read had joined the Labour party, putting him left of center when he departed for Germany.149

While he was leaning left on arrival in Berlin, his experience there had an inoculating effect.

Into Berlin and a Style

As he got comfortable in Berlin, Read ran into some trouble with his Ford

Foundation funding. In late spring of 1964, he moved from his original residence in the city to the Literary Colloquium, which meant a higher grant and a new place to live within the Colloquium itself at Am Sandwerder 5. Read intended to continue receiving two grants from Ford, one from the Artists-in-Residence program and one through the Literary Colloquium. Gradually Karl Haas, Ford’s representative in

Berlin, caught onto this and one of the grants was rescinded. Read protested to no avail. Angrily, he wrote to his friend Alastair Hamilton complaining about the Ford

Foundation and his funding, unleashing a torrent of anti-Semitic abuse at Karl

Haas.150 Read is perhaps the only artist who complained about having too little money while in Berlin. All other criticism of the funding levels were to the contrary, finding them far too high in comparison to Berlin’s living standards at the time. Read’s anti-

Semitism in the letter is also not an isolated incident. It appears in both of his novels inspired by his time in Berlin, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx and The Junkers, and also in his later novel Polonaise, published in 1976. In many ways, Read was the

148 “Letter to Tony. Wednesday 28 June 1961.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), pp. 3, PPR. 149 Letter to Miss J. Maynard. Tuesday 22 July 1963. BC MS 20c Read/F3. Correspondence Family & Misc. 1959–63 (299–437), PPR. 150 “Letter to Alastair. 8 August 1964.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 163 perfect candidate to be a young attendee to Ford’s program: he spoke some German, had experience in the country within publishing, and, as the son of Herbert Read, was well connected. But his racism and treatment of both his hosts and sponsors throughout his attendance and in his fiction offer proof that artistic presence in a city does not always breed positive outcomes.

Read must have got by suitably on one grant because he stayed in Berlin. The building that he had moved to at Am Sandwerder 5 was grand and newly furnished.

Read thought it the center—a huge, expensive building with a private chef—was a waste of Ford’s money.151 In contrast to the Artists-in-Residence program, the

Colloquium’s housing and grant were not without obligation. Participants were expected to write, share their work, and receive and give criticism. The writers were split into groups based on their origin and language. Read’s group was made up of

British and American writers led by the English playwright James Saunders. Read was first engaged and happy to participate, encouraged by the money.152 He found the time helpful for his development as a writer; writing to his friend that the workshops were fascinating and that he was learning a lot from the experience.153 He also discovered that the Colloquium was time consuming and he did not like writing for the theater as the workshops required, which took away attention from his book.154

The tension of living in Berlin also influenced the atmosphere and brought its own stress. In the summer of 1964, Read wrote to his friend that there was a thunderstorm

151 “Letter to Alastair. 9 May 1964.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 152 “Letter to Alastair. 5 May 1964.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 153 “Letter to Mary. 1 June 1964.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 154 “Letter to Alastair. 1 June 1964.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 164 in the night and at the first rumbles he thought the Russians were attacking. He astutely noticed that the unconscious tension of being in the divided city created its own persistent stress. 155 By mid-1964, his romantic ideal of the city had worn thin.

He was no longer thrilled to go over to the East and, after some of his first compatriots moved on, found the company dull and the work at the Colloquium demanding.

Despite Read’s judgments of the program and dissatisfaction with some of his activities, the artists and writers he met influenced his work and outlook. At the

Literary Colloquium Read shared his residence with Tom Stoppard and Derek

Marlowe. Though Höllerer attempted to create structure with workshops and joint projects, there were no requirements of production based on the grants themselves. As

Stoppard later wrote, the participants “were told [they] could spend [their] time doing anything [they] liked, preferably writing something.” Marlowe later recounted the experience:

There were eight of us there, from England and Germany…and it was supposed that we’d be stimulated to write. Two of the Germans were Guenter Grass, who became famous for ‘The Tin Drum.’ and Uwe Johnson (sic). None of us, I think, really did much writing; the people who arranged the affair forgot that writers are naturally lazy, and that the only person who can make a writer write is the writer himself” (Cross).

Marlowe’s criticism of Ford is not surprising—many people questioned how simply dropping writers into the city was going to help—but his dismissal of productivity is overdone. While in Berlin, Marlowe had the idea for his first novel A Dandy in Aspic,

Stoppard wrote the first draft of what would later be Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Read finished his first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx (Cross,

155 “Letter to Mary. 1 June 1964.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 165 Reiter). The three writers also formed a friendship and continued to live together when they returned to London in 1965.

While Stoppard was in Berlin enjoying his first major benefit, Read, he claimed, “seemed to be an old hand on the writers’ perks scene” (Stoppard vi). Read had the confidence and ability to connect, impress, and move around in his new-found literary environment, securing his place in the Colloquium and connecting with other writers. His knowledge of both French and German no doubt helped. It was via his

French skills that he was able to make friends with the Polish writer Witold

Gombrowicz. Read built a relationship with Gombrowicz and, back in London in

1966, tried to help find recognition for him and his work there. He solicited his friend

Alastair Hamilton to write a review of Pornagraphia and wrote to publishers he knew, including his father, to advocate for Gombrowicz and his work.156 Hamilton eventually became the first English translator for Pornographia. Read’s connection to

Gombrowicz was more than just his shared experience; he admired his writing and declared that Gombrowicz had influenced his own work.157 There is no doubt

Gombrowicz played some role in inspiring his later novel Polonaise, if only in its focus on the fate of the Polish aristocracy in the early twentieth century.

Even though Read connected with his fellow writer’s and was stimulated by his environment, he held a strong skepticism about the experimental, avant-garde nature of the work around him. While in Berlin, Read wrote the sketch of a theater scene in which a Russian, Englishman, German, and American meet at a colloquium for a lesson in how to communicate and write. The Russian, Karlovitch, arrives late

156 “Letter to Mrs. Marion Boyars. 22 April 1966.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 157 “Letter to Mrs. Marion Boyars. 22 April 1966.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 166 and speaks with the director intimating that he is from Odessa fifty years ago and wishes he were still in that past time. The director suggests that it is better now because he is in the West and free to do anything he likes. The characters do not have names, only nationalities, and introduce themselves as stereotypical specimens of their nations: the Englishman believes his country to be more civilized than others and looks down on his peers while he worries only about matching his suit and tie; the

American speaks informally and is concerned only with big steaks and virginity; the

German is parochial, didactic, and focused on money; in the perspective of the other participants, the Russian appears to be an ignorant relic of the past. All of the participants share a small sample of what they wrote, all of which are in line with the presented stereotypes. When it is finally the Russian’s turn to read his piece, he can only make some groaning sounds. The others are perplexed. The German argues it is avant-garde, the American thinks it is nothing, the Englishman suggests he simply cannot write, and the director wonders if perhaps the Russian should never have been invited. The director congratulates himself anyway on the success of the lessons and legitimizes the spending of the money it took to create the event concluding that at the minimum literature had been shared with the souls of others. They all leave except

Karlovitch and then Lenin enters and declares that the old Russian simply wishes he was brave enough to be a Bolshevik.158

It is a short and simple sketch, yet it is full of mocking rancor and a preoccupation with the activity Read took part in throughout his stay in Berlin. The characters reductively represent the company Read would have found there. The picture the scenario draws is far from flattering; it reeks of cliché. The American

158 “Sketch.” BC MS 20c Read/E Juvenilia, pp. 5, PPR. 167 character is dull and ignorant. When he finally sits down to write, he writes a schoolchild’s letter to his mother. The German is rule-bound, only able to think he can write once he has attended a class, and is single-minded in his focus on the avant- garde, interpreting everything to be experimental, seemingly willing to accept any utterance as artistic if it is said to be so. The Englishman is reserved and condescending, criticizes what is presented, but offers little on his own. In his delineation of the Englishman, Read admittedly pokes fun at himself, pillorying his countrymen for being removed and self-righteous. Overall, the sketch condemns the project Read participated in. The participants do not meaningfully engage with the other side, the Russian, but instead condescendingly coddle and then dismiss him as uneducated, incapable, and stuck in the past. Even Lenin dismisses his countryman as too weak and too fearful for the new Soviet era. The victim is and our sympathies go out to the old Russian from fifty years ago who is the only one in the sketch who can speak eloquently and is positively grounded in his own tradition before he is overtaken by the Western participants. The other characters fail to understand this factor and the aim of the meeting is frustrated: no one communicates, rather they all talk past each other going on about their own preoccupations and perspectives.

Regardless of this outcome, the director congratulates himself, choosing to see only what he wishes: a wonderful experience with fine food and delicacies, suggesting that the luxury of the experience itself was a bulwark against the poverty of other societies.159 Read’s sketch depicts the project in Berlin as a farce, wasting resources for no purpose except self-congratulation. No meaningful engagement takes place and, if anything, the perspectives and thought patterns of the characters are only

159 “Sketch.” BC MS 20c Read/E Juvenilia, pp. 4, PPR. 168 reinforced, mocking the proposition of the programs and the literary moods of the time.

Read may have admired Gombrowicz’s work, but the sketch suggests his true feeling about experimental work and his novels show that Gombrowicz’s effect was not formative or lasting; for example, where Gombrowicz used sex as a way to explore the human condition, Read used it to moralize. Read’s work carries on the

Catholic literary revival tradition, but where Graham Greene wrote a handful of novels focused on Catholicism, Read’s novels are almost all focused on religion. He was, and in his work remains, decidedly against any experimental form. His first novel plays with satire, but his subsequent work, correspondence, and fragments increasingly dismiss the experimental, absurd, and satirical in favor of direct critique, clear plotlines, and a consistent focus on redemption. As Read stated in a 2009 interview,

Writing is a vocation and, as in any other calling, a writer should develop his talents for the greater glory of God. Novels should neither be homilies nor apologetics…it is important for a Catholic writer to demonstrate that he is fully human/ that he does not flee from evil but confronts it and disarms it in his imagination with the help of that holy wisdom that comes from faith in Christ (Ignatius).

Read’s involvement in the Berlin programs was pivotal to his artistic life, solidifying his outlook on art’s purpose and its relationship to politics. His exposure to Gruppe

47 and Gombrowicz pushed him in the opposite direction, confirming his Catholic beliefs.

Read’s focus on religion in the 1960s stemmed from his belief in Western society’s need for purpose. This in turn shaped his view of the role of art, religion, and tradition in society and our lives. In a letter of February 29, 1959, Read wrote to his Catholic friend expounding that the purpose of art was to introduce people to 169 beauty in their own local, accessible art.160For Read, at least a young Read, art was the best method of communication and everything else quite inadequate.161 He had no patience with contemporary movements or with popular culture. Rather, it was the disappearance of what he considered the natural order (the changing position of women, the loss of nature and agrarian life) that caused dissatisfaction and insecurity of modern society, evident in Sartre’s nausea, Osborne’s anger, or Kerouac’s beatness.162 He did find the movements interesting and read about them—the poets, their lives—but on the whole vigorously disagreed with them.163 In Read’s estimation, art has a distinct social and often instructive purpose and is a waste if used for anything else. His judgments and dismissals were absolute. Writing to a friend from Munich in 1963, Read wrote criticizing the satire boom in the UK, finding it vacuous.164 The Satire Boom emerged from Oxbridge in the early 1960s, sparking the

TV show That Was The Week That Was, the stage show Beyond the Fringe, and the publication Private Eye (Carpenter). Read has an earnestness in his outlook that demands satire and critique be bent towards meaningful change, not simply stress relief. Feeling empathy or love towards the subject of satire and undoubtedly having the satire be comical and enjoyable, undermines its ability to subvert convention. This seriousness of purpose comes through clearly in Read’s work with unforgiving criticism of English society appearing as an element in many of his novels. His

160 “Letter to Peter. Saturday 29 February 1959.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), pp. 3, PPR. 161 “Letter to Peter. Friday 17 June 1961.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133– 298), PPR. 162 “Letter to Peter. Tuesday 5 May 1959.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133– 298), PPR. 163 “Letter to Mary. Monday 25 May 1959.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133– 298), PPR. 164 “Letter to Tony. 8 March 1963.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), PPR. 170 assertion that art should be purposeful, combined with his belief that he should lead and use his privileges to help those beneath him, has inspired rather didactic novels.

While his style and approach may not have been in vogue in the literary circles of the day, his focus on the European Cold War evidences a strain of his production that was a great investment for the Ford Foundation and the state-private network’s Cold War aims. His work does not toe a party line, so to speak, but its consistent focus on the Cold War conflict, art, and politics keep the moment alive.

The works also encourage a contemplation of the British, primarily English, relationship with Germany, East Europe, and the U.S. It is this continual contemplation and renewal of the topics close to the patrons’ hearts, which Ford and their associates can call a success. The more important outcome of Ford’s investment was arguably not the artists and their engagement with each other and the city, though this too had important influences, but the creation and circulation of texts and art works that caught people’s imaginations and centered them on the conflict in Berlin across both space and time. Read’s own political leanings took their first published expression while in Berlin and though critical of capitalist society, he eventually wrote off communism as purely an escape mechanism from the growing meaninglessness of life in modernized society.

Communism, Catholicism, and the Need for Purpose

Read started his political journey on the left. In 1958, at the age of seventeen, he spent time in Paris studying French during the collapse of the Fourth Republic. In an attempt to protest against the police violence and censorship in the press, he went to a Communist Party meeting and was very impressed writing about the thousands of people in attendance and the strong spirit of unity against fascism. He declared that he 171 was a fellow traveler because he sympathized with the cause, but also could not join it because of the fallacies he saw in the theory as a result of his Catholic beliefs.165

Read’s new bent towards the left caused a conflict with his Catholic faith, which he insistently strove to reconcile and explain both in his letters and his fiction.

Read’s first novel, A Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, is centered in the absurd, constantly mocking people’s search for meaning as pointless, but his work quickly gives way to a defiance of the meaningless, siding more with Albert Camus than Jean-Paul Sartre.166 Read’s commitment to leading people, along with his competing adherences to communism and Catholicism, are the center of his first novel, which was written in Berlin. While Read may have been dismissive of experimental or avant-garde art forms, the atmosphere and individuals he found in

Berlin during the early 1960s influenced his debut work published in 1966. Set in the mid-twentieth century, the novel is narrated by a dead, young Englishman who is in heaven conversing with a duchess and Eleanor “Tussy” Marx, the daughter of Karl

Marx. The unnamed narrator tells the story of Hereward, a Marxist revolutionary

Englishman, tracing his promising start and slow neutralization by the English aristocracy. The book has a vague plot based on Hereward’s progression through life, a Bildungsroman of sort, but jumps back and forth between the discussion in heaven,

Hereward’s story, Herebardo’s story (a South American revolutionary who mirrors

Hereward), and other digressions related to more minor characters. The attempt at an experimental or avant-garde style is heavy handed and clunky, leaving the prose feeling forced. It is evident that for Read the traditional format was a better fit.

165 “Letter to Tom. Friday, 21 March 1958”. BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133– 298), PPR. 166 “Letter to Tony. 8 March 1963.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), PPR. 172 However, the themes taken up in Tussy Marx show a clear-eyed engagement with the funding of Read’s Berlin stay and the politics of the moment.

Read’s critiques of Western society and of the communist revolutionaries are well developed in the novel. The main discussion the narrator has with Tussy Marx is about the nature and possibility of a socialist revolution happening in England. Marx, who, both in real life and in the novel, committed suicide after finding out her partner had married another woman, is presented as a naïve for believing in the revolution and the future of socialism in Great Britain and the world. Presenting Marx as a naïve, unthinking devotee of communism enables the narrator to make his point and suggest that, while a revolutionary spirit may be endearing, it is rather childlike and ignorant of how the world actually works. In various ways, the narrator shows how the capitalists and Western aristocracy are able to subvert and eliminate any true potential revolutionary challenges. To this end, a range of figures representing various class strata are presented who either eliminate themselves or end up in unfortunate circumstances: the office worker cannot get past day dreams and falls from his chair to break his neck; the philosopher overthinks his situation and is killed by piles of books; an English lover tries to get a tan to impress a young American woman and is lynched in the southern United States; the dandy is lost in the pleasure of his wealth; the criminal becomes very successful, has agreements with the police and is satisfied with his crime ring; and the true revolutionary, Hereward, is married into the aristocracy and thus neutralized. The conclusion is that love, whether for a person or a pursuit, combined with money are enough to stop any revolutionary force. Revolution then is only for those who are poor or destitute and communism is doomed to be ineffective in creating equality or purpose because feeding human desires for comfort,

173 status, love, and wealth can easily nullify any true threat to the established social order.

The novel ends with mimicry of proletarian literature. Everyone marches and waits for a hero to come. He comes in the form of Hereward, who is now scholarly and indistinct. They all march together in unison, but we do not know if they carry guns or crosses and so it is unclear what actually brought them together. The narrator and Marx then pass on to heaven to meet god. Marx declares that being a revolutionary is what destroyed her and now, awakened by the narrator’s explication and looking down on Hereward, states, “[but] if Hereward believes in God, he will surely have God to help him. Then nothing can stop him or the revolution. The world is ready, and I am saved” (Tussy Marx, 159). Religion wins out and is suggested as the answer that can provide clarity and meaning. The people still on earth march on in one uniform or another. Those already in heaven do not know which it is, but are no longer concerned.

Read included the theme of communism in his next few novels but it often played a minor role. It is in his 1976 novel Polonaise the conflict between communism and religion in relation to one’s search for meaning comes to the fore, but, in this reiteration of the theme, Read’s critique of communism is asserted more forcefully. Polonaise tells the story of the aristocratic Kornowski family in 1920s and

1930s Poland. The narrative follows the coming of age of Stefan and Krystyna, the son and daughter of Count Kornowski. The Count gambles away and mismanages their fortune, leaving the family in poverty as the two children reach adulthood. They are forced to forfeit their estate and move into their aunt’s dingy apartment in

Warsaw. Stefan continues at the university studying literature while Krystyna goes to

174 work at a jewelry store owned by Jews where she had originally pawned her deceased mother’s jewels. Disillusioned by the poverty they experience and see on a daily basis and alarmed by the rise of Hitler in neighboring Germany, both Stefan and Krystyna become communists, joining a local cell. Stefan writes short stories for the communist paper and eventually marries a Jewish member of the party; both Stefan and his wife are motivated by the practical desire to live independently, away from their families.

Krystyna falls in love with and marries, Bruno, a leading member of their cell and a trusted communist.

Gradually Moscow carries out purges of the Polish Communist Party and their friends start to disappear. Bruno and Stefan go to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

Bruno makes it to Spain, but Stefan remains in Paris living out his dream of being an expatriate writer, returning to Poland only when he finds out his wife is pregnant.

Stefan is dismayed when his child looks more like his Jewish in-laws than himself and grows distant from his family as his literary career takes off, ingratiating him with the aristocracy and intellectuals of Warsaw. Bruno returns from Spain a shattered and disillusioned man to find that Krystyna has been having an affair in his absence.

World War II sets in and the family is scattered. Stefan, on a trip to the U.S., learns of

Stalin’s pact with Hitler, disembarks in New York, and does not return to Poland. His wife, children, and in-laws are eventually murdered by the Nazis, about which he never expresses remorse. Bruno joins the Polish forces and is killed honorably in battle. Krystyna escapes to Paris with her son, Teofil. The story then resumes in

1950s Paris, where Stefan, Krystyna, and Teofil now live. Teofil falls in love with a wealthy English aristocrat, Annabel Colte, daughter of an earl. Her family is dismayed by her wish to marry a Pole and tries to put another love interest in her path,

175 Jack Marryat. On a swimming trip, Stefan pushes Jack over a cliff and Teofil marries

Annabel, restoring the family’s wealth and aristocratic status, with Teofil embodying a perfect combination: the Catholic English gentleman. The novel closes with

Stefan’s realization that god is real. Upon this epiphany, he dies.

The books’ argument about the causes of communism’s attraction and the characters’ growing disillusionment with political solutions is Read’s most forthright denunciation of communism. Initially, the young characters exhibit an exuberant and unquestioning solidarity with the Party and, in turn, the Soviet Union. They follow the party line as their colleagues disappear. Bruno and Krystyna fall in love in the heady anticipation of revolution and Stefan writes propaganda with vigor. They all find sincere purpose and guidance for their lives through communism. Stefan seethes with anxiety that his stories will be rejected by the party and by association so will he. This terrifies him, for “…if he was not a Marxist, he was nothing, and if he was nothing…Nothingness frightened him…If Stefan had no objective values by which to judge and guide his own behavior, then he could only go whichever way he was blown” (Polonaise 126).

All of the characters slowly lose their anchor in communism and, grasping for purpose, find only exile, deception, sadism, and death. Stefan, the main character, is the archetype of the lost man that can be found. He becomes disillusioned by his own lack of courage. Faced with the choice to fight for the Republican cause in Spain, he realizes his weakness and decides to pursue an intellectual life. He makes his way to fame and some fortune through absurdist theater and leads a life of debauchery and depravity, somehow, the novel suggests, redeeming himself through murder.

Krystyna, losing faith in the cause with her husband’s absence, succumbs to adultery

176 and eventually moves to Paris abandoning her language and culture by adopting a

French identity in a new marriage. Bruno remains true to communism, but suffers a form of post-traumatic stress disorder from the mass murders he is forced to carry out.

He devotes himself to the Polish cause, but is quickly slaughtered by the Germans.

Still, he is the only one who is celebrated as a hero for fighting for his own country and culture. The Jewish characters are increasingly resented by Stefan and Krystyna and are murdered by the Nazis. The novel offers no condemnation of this and the characters never face this horror or express remorse.

Without the discipline of some kind of belief, the characters drift off to their end, if not of their life, of their integrity. It is Stefan’s explanation of communism that gets the last say. He argues that communist beliefs would not exist without

Christianity and the belief in equality for men is grounded not in Marxist writings, but in a Christian culture. Stefan argues to a disillusioned Bruno:

Do you know why you and all other Communists want to civilize man, and change nature? Because you still believe in God, in original sin, and in the perfectibility of the soul. Your mind is moulded by twenty centuries of Christian belief, and though you say you are atheists, your whole philosophy is shaped by Christian beliefs and has no justification without them. The Soviet Union is not a new development in the evolution of human history; it is Holy Russia under another name – the same old nation of monks and mujiks in the thin disguise of those philosophical speculations which Karl Marx, the Rabbi’s son, sold to the world as scientific truth (Polonaise 126).

The text provides no reply from Bruno and makes no further arguments other than to show that the next generation has little understanding of communism except as a bogeyman. With a blurring of anti-communism and anti-Semitism, Stefan has the final word and later ends up redeemed; in the novel’s logic, all is forgiven if the final realization is correct.

177 Reflecting in 2006 on the relationship of the Catholic Church to Communism in the 1950s and 1960s, Read stated that it “is a very difficult thing to realise now— back in the sixties it was by no means universally accepted that Communism was a bad thing. There was an enormous enthusiasm for it. I was very left wing at the time, and when I went to East Germany, I thought this was the ‘future’” (Rowland). Read had flirted with communism in the late 1950s and while he was in Berlin, but by the mid-1970s he had fully rejected the possibility of a political redemption and strongly advocated for religion as the answer. While there are no real sympathetic characters in

Polonaise, the novel itself puts Stefan and Teofil as the heroes. Stefan, although he had a life of debauchery, is saved because he finds his way to the correct conclusion.

Teofil and his new life hold promise, but primarily because they are becoming simultaneously less Polish and more religious. Both Tussy Marx and Polonaise offer bizarre plots that verge on the absurd, but are intended to be taken seriously. The characters indulge in perverse behavior and are offered paths to redemption. The male narrator is always correct and the female characters are never fully developed. These two novels exhibit Read’s strong anti-communism, but they offer little support of or defense for the West’s alternatives in particular. Instead, religion is the answer.

A trans-Atlantic pact?

While Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx and Polonaise are Read’s novels with the most sustained focus on communism, several of his other books explore the

Cold War conflict and the fate of post-WWII Europe. Read’s critique of Western society went right to the nexus of art and politics during the mid-twentieth century, focusing on the cultural Cold War and the philanthropic funding of art. Much like his

178 father, who famously accepted royal honors though an anarchist, Read was happy to accept money from foundations while firing off critiques at their projects. Whether out of defense or antipathy, Read’s novels consistently critique philanthropic cultural patronage during the Cold War, pegging the American patrons as disingenuous and greedy, the participating artists as self-interested, yet still acknowledging the important role of art in the long cultural and military conflict. Read asserted in 1958 that the tragedy of the moment was that the English, with their great traditions, had not provided a positive alternative to communism that would also challenge the

American’s religion of money and guns, a religion and purpose that is not from the heart.167

Read’s involvement with the cultural Cold War in an official way began with his Ford Foundation award in Berlin. After receiving two grants from Ford, he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund of New York City to spend a year in the U.S. Through his connections and experience, he seems to have had some understanding of the support behind the CCF and its related cultural projects throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In his correspondence with an editor from the New Left Review about printing excerpts from his novel The Junkers, the editor was also curious about something Read had mentioned. At the end of a letter he asked him if he knew anything about possible connections with the CIA that he may have heard from Mrs. Stone.168 Mrs. Stone is undoubtedly the wife of Shepard Stone. It is unclear what Read replied, but neither Read’s excerpt nor the CIA’s ties to cultural

167 “Letter to Peter. Monday 10th March 1958”. BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133-298), PPR. 168 “Letter from Alexander, New Left Review.13 August 1966.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 179 efforts were published in New Left Review. The story was broken by Ramparts magazine a year later.

Even if Read did not expose a scandal, he did deliver a stinging rebuke to the entire Western cultural Cold War, while nevertheless admitting its effectiveness. In

Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, George Watkinson, a one-time revolutionary

English socialist falls into bankruptcy. Aimless, he is eventually enticed by an

American foundation to form a liberal, anti-communist committee. As a member of the foundation, Watkinson meets with

many men wearing spectacles from Michigan and New York [who explain the] need for an offensive against the individual who might secretly be forming revolutionary attitudes in his mind…The revolutionary had to be convinced that social efficiency was less desirable than his own indulgence; other people’s well-being less important than his own freedom. He was to forget politics and, for that matter, any practical religion. If he persisted in his revolutionary activities, he was to be destroyed (Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx 45–46).

The benign, kind-hearted beneficiaries of capitalism are firmly against equality, empathy, and religion. Watkinson is given a large salary and an unlimited budget to create the anti-communist committee with few guidelines and no responsibilities to the funders except to succeed and eventually write a report. Watkinson succeeds by killing off every type of revolutionary except for the true hero, Hereward, who marries into the aristocracy and, in this way, is neutralized. There is little doubt that this aspect of the novel was influenced by Read’s experiences with the Ford

Foundation and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The similarities are too close to be anything other. The origins of the foundation men being from Michigan and New

York point to Ford and the elaborate anti-communist congresses with a plethora of funding and no accountability are just as Read found the open-ended grant of Ford and the high dealings of Nabokov’s CCF. It is a stretch to suggest that the CCF 180 participated in direct or indirect murders, as the novel suggests, but the ruthlessness and clear sense of purpose in neutralizing socialist or revolutionary activity across, in the case of this narrative, Europe, points to a potential real aim of both the foundations, the congress, and the CIA.

The foundation men, leading capitalists, and the aristocracy are unsympathetic characters throughout the novel, although they are presented as more powerful, suave, and clever than the revolutionaries. The leading connection between the British elite to the American foundation men is Meerstein, a rich Jewish banker. Originally

Watkinson thought he was using Meerstein and his wealth to aid the revolution, but it quickly becomes clear that the advantage is the other way as Watkinson is used for

Meerstein’s and his friends’ advantage. Yet Meerstein is not as powerful as it might initially seem. When Watkinson becomes too ruthless for the British taste and

Meerstein fails to get rid of Hereward, the English aristocrats step in to solve things in the old way, by having the revolutionaries marry into the family. As Lord Cossey says, “What’s wrong with the old way of doing things? Half our bankers, ministers, ambassadors, were tamed in that way. It has never let us down. It is what keeps

Britain great today. It’s foolproof” (Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx 80). Meerstein is forced to swallow his words and, with thoughts of Auschwitz in his mind, remembering he is a Jew surrounded by Gentiles, acquiesces and invites Hereward to dinner to set him up with Lord Cossey’s daughter. Lord Cossey is proven correct and successfully engineers Hereward’s demise.

The revolutionaries and artists themselves are shown to be easily corrupted.

They all believe that they are playing the game of the capitalists in order to eventually take advantage of them and use the wealth for their own revolutionary purposes, but

181 they are each foiled and serve as stooges and agents of their own undoing. The many minor revolutionaries all meet their end, easily arranged by Watkinson. The two main characters undergo a slow unraveling that neutralizes them nonetheless. Watkinson is quelled by monetary need and monetary gain. Invited in by the foundation and provided unlimited funds, he creates a committee, develops the congresses, and goes about his business, rallying intellectuals and rebels to an anti-communist cause that serves his employer’s end.

Hereward’s revolutionary aims are corrupted by love. After marrying Lord

Cossey’s daughter, he enters the aristocracy. Eventually becoming bored, he pursues a string of affairs that lead him to younger and younger women. His salvation comes when he stops himself before having an affair with a child. In this warped sense,

Hereward is a hero because he stops himself from sleeping with a minor and

Watkinson does not, marrying a teenager. Hereward does not exactly become a revolutionary again, but he does hunt down Watkinson in Iceland and shoots him in the back, seeking limited retribution, but creating no real change. Read’s novel finds socialist revolutionaries hopelessly foolish. The capitalist aristocracy wins with a mix of trans-Atlantic tactics; its members are presented as ruthless, calculating, and morally bankrupt. Ultimately everyone appears lost and without purpose. This purposelessness is, in Read’s estimation, the condemning factor. Revolution is not an answer, but a symptom of modern aimlessness.

Read did not turn away from the subject of his patrons quickly. The American patron turns up again in his second novel, The Junkers. Published in 1968, the novel won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1969. It tells the story of a young unnamed

British diplomat in early 1960s Berlin. He falls in love with a German girl and gets

182 entwined in her family the von Rummelsbergs, who he is also investigating because of their Nazi past and potential ties to contemporary right-wing movements. While the Germans are not shown all that favorably in the text, perhaps worse are the

Americans, always represented as slow, overzealous, taller, stronger, and irritatingly successful. The narrator’s distaste for Americans is particularly expressed in his reaction to the Jewish-American Gerry Stone. Gerry Stone, originally Gerhard Stein, is a German-born American Jew holding the powerful position of American Political

Adviser in 1960s Berlin. Stone has a direct line to the President of the United States and, in the narrator’s estimation, all other American figures in Germany were just decorations. Originally born in Berlin where he had been friends with Helmuth von

Rummelsberg, Stone escaped to the U.S., settled in New York, and married a German woman, slowly rising through the American foreign policy establishment to become an official in the State Department. He returned to Germany after the war and gave

Helmuth a job and a lifeline.

The character Gerry Stone appears to be an amalgam of Ford executives that

Read had known. Gerry Stone shares many biographical similarities with Shepard

Stone, Ford’s Director of International Affairs. Born in America, Shepard Stone had lived in Berlin before the war, where he completed his PhD and married a German.

He then worked his way up in the American military structure becoming a powerful figure in the postwar German government. Shepard Stone was not permanently stationed in Berlin on behalf of Ford while Read was there, but he did make visits and it is likely Read knew Stone from both his time in Berlin and through his father, Sir

183 Read.169 The description of Gerry Stone is also similar to the racist diatribe Read issued about Karl Haas, Ford’s other representative in Berlin, in his displeasure about his grant. The narrator of The Junkers describes the fictional Stone as “small, broad- shouldered and had a large head. He had black hair and a large nose. He was one of those people who made me feel guilty, arrogant and embarrassed because I was taller than he was and my body had grown more in conformity with the Hellenic ideal”

(The Junkers 81). In his letter, Read assaulted Haas with anti-Semitic slurs and suggested that he might consider himself lucky that he had not been sent to a camp for

Aryan’s on Long Island.170 Outside of his outright and disgusting anti-Semitism, why would Read base the character, particularly such an unlikeable one, on someone he knew, who was well-respected, and who had actually been instrumental in helping him gain opportunities? Read’s depiction is in line with his critique of foundations in

Tussy Marx and his antipathy to the trans-Atlantic relationship, at least as expressed in his early novels. His life experience seems to tell another story, but he voiced a clear critique of the Untied States’ role on the European continent and had an antagonistic relationship with the world of art patronage within which he found himself enmeshed. In both novels, he pokes fun at the lack of accountability and the fallibility of the effort, while mocking its key figures. At the same time, he outlines the futility of trying to avoid US American money and influence, begrudgingly admitting their success and the lack of alternatives to be found in the West.

169 Herbert Read was connected to the Congress for Cultural Freedom and published in Encounter. He also was involved in a joint project with Shepard Stone to support the Ulm School of Design in the mid-1950s. For more on how their presence in the project overlapped, please see René Spitz, The View Behind the Foreground: The Political History of the Ulm School of Design, 1953–1968. Edition Axel Menges, 2002. 170 “Letter to Alastair. 8 August 1964.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 184 The Junkers focuses more broadly on the relationship between Britain and a potentially united Europe in contrast to the U.S., searching for a solution to the United

Kingdom’s listlessness after the war. Read’s novel on postwar Europe had been marinating long before his time in Berlin. In 1958, he wrote his friend Hugo expressing his uncertainty about the next two years and wondered if he would go to

Switzerland or Germany.171 Read’s first foray in Germany was in 1959 when he spent time at the Goethe Institute in Bad Reichenhall, West Germany, intensively studying

German before entering Cambridge.172 During his stay, he gained insight into German culture and the historical moment. His initial reaction to the Germans and those of other nationalities he met was judgmental and condescending. His correspondence to his friends from the institute details the unbearable naiveté of Americans, loose

Swedish women, and unchristian Arabs. His opinions of his hosts in Bavaria were no higher. He found that they were stupid, unthinking, and only interested in blindly doing their duty.173

Read’s consistent lack of self-awareness is stunning and throughout his correspondence in the 1950s and 1960s he fails to grasp the advantages he has in a meaningful way. It is easier to judge, critique, and dismiss. He clearly viewed himself as the superior and failed to see the disadvantages others might face. Despite this, his experience in Germany fed his curiosity about the German position, the role of

Nazism, and the future of postwar Europe so much so that he returned to the country two more times upon his graduation. One thing that frustrated Read was that he found

171 “Letter to Hugo. Monday 22 September 1958”. 167. BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957– 1962 (133–298), PPR. 172 “Letter to Hugo. Sunday 10 May 1959.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133– 298), PPR. 173 “Letter to Hugo. Sunday 10 May 1959.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133– 298), PPR. 185 many people unwilling to speak frankly about the German past. While he was preparing for the move to Munich, he met his mother’s friend Freya Von Moltke, whom he believed took a refreshingly frank view of Germany by engaging its

National Socialist past while valuing its present.174

Read’s further experiences in the country only confirmed his feelings about the German relationship to Nazism. In a letter to his friend from his first job in

Munich in 1963, Read complained about the pretentiousness and provincialism of

Munich and found that the attitudes and outlooks were still the same as the Nazi period.175 Read’s experiences in Berlin a year later only confirmed his assessment.176

Despite his dismissiveness of the Germans, these experiences deepened his understanding of the challenges of postwar Germany more generally. In 1962, while working his first job at a publisher in Munich, he attended a party thrown by the daughter-in-law of the director of Siemens and reflected that sadly the young

Germans simply had no idea how to throw a party or socialize; they had no examples to follow and how to build everything again from scratch. 177 Read may have been disappointed in post-WWII Germany, but his letters evidence some growth in understanding by his generation and some of the challenges they faced in reconstructing their culture. He took up this contemplation further in The Junkers.

While writing The Junkers, he wrote to a friend that he was happy he could write to her about Germany because so few people cared to try to understand or learn

174 “Letter to Peter. Thursday 22 February 1962.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), PPR. 175 “Letter to Tony. 8 March 1963.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), PPR. 176 . “Letter to Miss Maynard. 11 November 1964.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 177 “Letter to Rosanna. Sunday 14 October 1962.” BC MS 20c Read/F2. Correspondence 1957–1962 (133–298), PPR. 186 from the German past.178 Read even wanted to return to Germany on a separate grant after his Ford experience to continue to learn about the country.179 Quite outside of communism and cultural patronage, the central focus of The Junkers is on how

Germany was taken over by Nazism, capable of the Holocaust, and moreover, how

Britain and the rest of Europe can continue having a relationship with the country.180

Outside of its stark anti-Semitism, it is, in many senses, the exact prototype of what

American financers could have hoped for in sponsoring a writer.

The novel tells the story of a young British diplomat in early 1960s Berlin, who is the narrator, but is never named. He starts a relationship with a German girl named Suzi Strepper, whom he believes is the mistress of one of the von

Rummelsberg brothers he is investigating. The narrator does not use Suzi, but rather is interested in Suzi in and of herself; her connections to the von Rummelsbergs make his dull work more interesting as he tries to discover her true identity. As the narrator falls in love with Suzi, he uncovers the history of the von Rummelsberg family. The three brothers, Klaus, Helmuth, and Edward are counts from Pomerania, which, after the war, became part of Poland, displacing them and making their homeland nonexistent. The novel moves back and forth between telling the history of the von

Rummelsberg family through the early twentieth century and WWII and the narrator’s present in 1960s Berlin and Western Europe. The three von Rummelsberg brothers all served in the German forces, Edward as a soldier, Helmuth in the Foreign

Office as a diplomat in Japan, and Klaus as secretary to a powerful Nazi, Günter

178 “Letter to Alice. 17 September 1966.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 179 “Letter to J.R. Bambrough. 4 May 1966.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 180 “Letter from Martin. 2 September 1966.” BC MS 20c Read/F4. Correspondence 1963–64 Munich, Berlin; 1964–66 (438–617), PPR. 187 Strepper. Strepper, the von Rummelsbergs, and Katerina von Treblitz, Helmuth’s first love and later Strepper’s wife, all grew up together in Pomerania and share strong bonds as a result. Suzi lives with Helmuth in Berlin and the narrator befriends him, growing to respect and trust him. The narrator eventually learns that Suzi is likely the daughter of the uncaptured notorious Nazi war criminal Strepper and quickly falls out of love. As a diplomat, the narrator must still investigate the von Rummelsbergs and eventually interviews Klaus in West Germany, where he meets Katarina, now Klaus’ wife, and learns that Suzi had been pregnant, aborted his child, and is now living in

East Berlin with Edward, who has become a top official in the German Democratic

Republic. The two reunite and after the narrator has political discussions with ambassadors from France and the U.S., he marries Suzi in a quiet wedding in Bavaria, which Strepper, the ex-Nazi, attends, unable to talk as a result of throat cancer and on the verge of death. As Suzi and the narrator drive off to their honeymoon, the narrator asks if the old man in the corner was Strepper. Suzi confirms it was saying, “‘I’d never seen him before…I didn’t think he looked very nice, did you?’ She screwed up her nose and smiled at me. ‘I don’t know,’ I said and I smiled too but kept my eyes on the road’” (The Junkers 314).

In contrast to his frank comments in his letters, Read’s story presents a complex look at the German position both during and after World War II. The text does not demand sympathy, but it does foster it, asking its reader, particularly its

British reader, to think more broadly about the German perspective and to be a bit more critical or at least honest about his or her own faults and responsibilities in the war. The narrator presents the von Rummelsbergs as a typical aristocratic family, having a long lineage in the upper reaches of the Prussian landed gentry. As such, the

188 novel suggests, they were simply partaking in their patriotic, class, imperial duty for their homeland, as any British officer was doing as part of the Colonial Service. As a young soldier, Edward von Rummelsberg contemplates during the invasion of

Poland:

that the governments of Britain and France should have declared war over Poland when they had allowed Hitler to march into Czechoslovakia. Poland was not a democratic state…And it seemed natural and proper (to Edward) that the Germans should rule Poland, as it seemed natural and proper…that the English should rule Ireland or…India….What, if not this philosophy, lay behind the French and British empires? (The Junkers 115–116).

This comparison of imperialisms is raised throughout the novel in a variety of ways, a main one being the recurrence of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s famous line that giving Silesia to the Poles after World War I instead of the Germans would be like giving a clock to a monkey. This trope is combined with a presentation of the von Rummelsberg brothers as primarily noble in their cause. Strepper, who is uneducated and from the lower class, is the true Nazi, while the brothers are presented as appalled by Nazi crimes and the true nature of the movement. This combination encourages readers, particularly British readers, to see the Germans as not so different from themselves. The novel fails to criticize this collaboration or the position of supposedly superior and inferior people or colonialism, never completing the analogy to suggest that if there are evil Nazis, there are also evil imperialists.

The theme of reconciliation between Germany and the United Kingdom is pushed further in the final third of the novel when European unity rises as a solution to troubles on the Continent. The narrator first raises the ideal of a united Europe when he is speaking to Suzi about a potential future together in England. Suzi is unsure about moving to England because she is a German. The narrator tries to brush this away by saying, “German, English—what does it matter? Europe will be united 189 soon enough” (The Junkers 154). Suzi agrees about Europe uniting, but is not convinced about the move or a change in English perspectives. The narrator never explains his feelings about this inevitable union of European countries, but Klaus von

Rummelsberg, the ex-Schutzstaffel (SS) man and now a leader of the refugee

Pomeranians and far right has a much clearer vision of the importance of Europe. For

Klaus, Pomerania is gone and West Germany is simply an economic structure, not a true, historic land or entity that can inspire bravery or loyalty. Instead, to be a patriot in 1960s Germany, one must be committed to Europe. Germany and Pomerania will not return. For a peaceful and successful future, Germany must grow into a united

Europe.

Armand, that narrator’s French counterpart, clarifies the importance of a united Europe by explaining it is the only way to bring peace to the continent and ensure Germany does not re-emerge to wreak havoc. He is prepared to create this unity by uniting the two Germanys in a form of communism so that the continent is peaceful from the Atlantic to the Urals. All the English narrator needs to do, Armand suggests, is to convince the British government that Stone and the Americans are wrong about Klaus, that he is not a threat to German democracy, is not encouraging the rise of the far right, and then help remove the Americans from the picture. The narrator grasps this view as advantageous since Suzi, whom he wishes to marry, is now a communist; if Germany would be communist or at least if America’s heavy hand would be weakened, this would be less of a problem for his diplomatic position.

The narrator acquiesces concluding that Germany may indeed be the Trojan Horse of

Europe and not the British. He comforts himself in the knowledge that his decision is best for the UK for he “could see, though [the British public] might not, that their

190 interest was to be eased into the next phase [of history] as quickly as possible,” echoing a Soviet view of intellectual leadership of the masses (306). The narrator agrees to Armand’s wishes, not because he is tied to the political aims, but rather to marry Suzi. In effect, his personal matters trump any political concerns or patriotic duties. He brushes his betrayal of the facts under the rug, convinces his government of his newly adopted position, spurns the Americans, and marries Suzi, concluding his wedding with the thought that he and the von Rummelsbergs are one happy family of

Europeans.

In the final scene, as Suzi and the narrator drive away, Suzi wants to turn away and move on and the narrator remains ambivalent. He smiles a knowing smile and looks ahead, feeling confident that this Nazi past is now in control and, though ugly, he is one step ahead of it by forging a united Europe. Read’s tale gets to the heart of the complications on the continent in the 1960s, particularly for the British, and lends a more complex view to the Germans than most wanted to provide at the time though it roundly concludes from all angles—French, British, and American— that the Germans ultimately cannot be trusted. Where the Americans and the French disagree is on the American presence. As Armand and the narrator concur, the

Americans and their way of life are “almost…German,” which is quite different from the British and French (The Junkers 301). For the French, the goal is a united Europe without the Americans. For the narrator, the goal is personal fulfillment and no harm done to the UK; he does not believe that Britain has much to lose, so it must unite with Europe to embrace the future.

The book makes a cynical argument for the British to join the European community, but ultimately fails because this is as far as Read takes the analysis. The

191 novel never fully acknowledges the horrors of the Holocaust nor addresses the important enabling relationship the aristocrats, such as the von Rummelsbergs, had with the Nazi party. The narrator is clearly troubled by his Nazi father-in-law, but never issues criticism against fascism, communism, or the far right. In his perspective, the higher-class Germans are comprehensible, but the lower classes are the enactors of fascism. The novel explains a portion of Nazi sympathizers in a way that the

British public would perhaps understand, right or wrong, but fails to tackle the larger question regarding the fascism of the aristocrats, which was famously present in the

UK as well. The book never criticizes the British imperial project and, if anything, implies they are indeed superior because of their position in WWII. As the narrator concludes, “If the Rummelsbergs could sort out their country, [he and Armand] should answer for [theirs]” (The Junkers 306). The novel ultimately argues that the elite state-private networks must take control of their countries and guide them behind the scenes to what is best for them; while the British aristocrat may have his failings, it will be better for him to take steer for the populace than to let the incompetent, materialistic Americans or hopeless, untrustworthy Germans be in charge.

The final answer proposed by the novel is to push for European unity in any fashion, whether promoting communism or right-wing proto-fascism in order to, most importantly, oust the Americans and preserve proper West European culture and peace. The narrator’s decision to support the French position is of course shortsighted and self-serving, but it is also the solution proposed by all of the continental

Europeans he meets. In this sense, the novel is historically inaccurate. In the 1960s, the Americans were strongly pushing for European unity and Britain itself was in the midst of repeated rejection from the French in their bids to join the project. In some

192 ways, the Ford funders would have been pleased with the result: it pushed for

European unity and attempted to bring some form of closer understanding between the British and the Germans. Having received an award for his effort, it can be argued that Read succeeded. The seething anti-Americanism and the openness to communism in particular are problematic, but Read could be counted as a success: he pushed for the more important goal of European cooperation and wrote a text justifying and promoting the leadership of the elite.

The Muscle of Art

A third strand of Read’s work that deserves attention is his focus on the importance of art within the exercise of geopolitical power. About a decade after publishing Polonaise, Read measured his interpretation of communism’s failures with his novel A Season in the West, for which he was awarded the James Tait Black

Memorial prize in 1988. The book tells the story of a Czech dissident named Josef

Birek, who escapes to the West and initially receives the support of the Comenius

Foundation. He is welcomed as a hero, provided an apartment, and a small stipend, but after a few weeks he is urged to find a way to support himself. He is ill equipped for the task. He has an affair with the wife of one of the foundation’s board members,

Laura Morton, who then pays his way for a while. Birek is unable to connect with the intellectuals in London who are presented as entirely fatuous, void of morality, and drunkards. Eventually Laura loses interest in Josef and he is left on his own. As he contemplates suicide, someone from the Czech embassy intervenes before he jumps in front of a train. The embassy employee suggests he can help him return to

Czechoslovakia and admits, “[it’s] not paradise…but if you ask me, it’s better than

193 under a train.” Josef goes with him and soon makes a public statement declaring,

“[o]ur society may have its faults…but its shortcomings cannot be compared to the decadence and injustice which I have encountered here” (A Season in the West 235).

The British press and establishment claim the statement was forced, but doubt lingers in the reader’s mind. The book delivers a look into a bleak, depraved society of

London in the 1980s and suggests that there is no moral high ground on either side; perhaps the social support offered by the East even puts it ahead of the shallow and purposeless West.

A Season in the West makes a strong critique of the role foundations played in cultural patronage during the Cold War. Set in the 1980s, the focus of the philanthropic spending had changed. There are no longer congresses and well- supported Western authors; instead foundations work to support escaped dissidents, to elevate them and show them off as proof of the West’s superiority. Birek escapes to the West full of the promise that he will be sheltered, supported, and thrive like Milan

Kundera, but things do not fall in place for him and he finds, much like Aleksandr

Solzhenitsyn, that the West is not a promised land. He is welcomed as royalty, the press hound him, but then he is expected to thrive on his own.

The novel traces his slow awakening to the harshness of capitalist society, for which he is not prepared. The foundation workers who encouraged him to flee in the first place are insincere and he soon finds that their interest in his work disappears now that he is not suffering from behind the Iron Curtain. The Comenius Foundation, which initially support Birek, is financed by London bankers and aristocrats, who are really only interested in the veneer it provides them as supposed generous and politically engaged citizens. Laura, one of the banker’s wives and the translator of

194 Birek’s work, lives out her fantasy by having an affair with him. Both the foundation and Laura slowly drop Birek as they realize his earnestness and sincerity do not fit into their world. Birek himself is shattered to find that the goodwill promoted is short- lived and he has been used.

In Read’s telling, the foundations are self-serving and exist only to provide the wealthy with a means to feel morally sound when in fact they are the opposite. The novel also suggests that there is no place for sincere political engagement or struggle, offering a stinging critique of the West’s vaunted proclamations of the value of free speech. Birek’s struggle for his self-expression is championed only when it serves a political purpose. Once in London, he is expected to become cynical, self-serving, and rich to prove his mettle. In A Season in the West, Read offers a balanced and harsh critique of the moral, financial, and political abuse certain Western philanthropies and wealthy socialites offered to Soviet dissidents, calling them out for their tendency to fetishize human suffering. He points also to the real material values of elite

Westerners, evidencing how his view changed over the decades: where in his early novels Read concluded that the elite should lead, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, he withdrew from these potentials, finding the entire system corrupt.

His final Cold War novel illustrates even more baldly how art and artists are used as a means to political and economic gain. In this novel, Read also provides intriguing insights into how legacies of the Cold War carried on in the 1990s and in turn still shape our world today. Read returns to Berlin in his book A Patriot in Berlin, published in 1995. The book takes place from 1991-1993 in Berlin and Moscow where a number of German political and cultural leaders, an American art historian, and a Russian art historian, who is an ex-KGB agent, are organizing a major art

195 exhibition of experimental Russian painting. Like many of Read’s books, the narrator follows a few characters, Francesca McDermott, the American art historian; detective

Kessler, from the Berlin police force; and Nikolai Gerasimov, an intelligence agent in the new Russian security service. Gerasimov and Kessler are both looking for Andre

Orlov, a high-ranking ex-KGB agent. McDermott is unknowingly falling in love with

Orlov under his pseudonym Dr. Andrei Serotkin, as they organize the exhibit together. It slowly emerges that Orlov, who was fired from the KGB when the Soviet

Union collapsed, has a mission to steal the Russian art, get a ransom payment from the German government, and then destroy the collection. The money is intended to sustain the organization of true Soviet believers so they can regain influence in

Russia, while the destruction of the artwork will eliminate an errant Russian art and save Russian culture from Western capitalistic forces. Orlov ends up securing his ransom, but, as a result of his love for Francesca, returns the art safely. When Orlov returns for Francesca, who still loves him and plans to return to Russia with him, he is shot and killed by Gerasimov.

The character of Orlov is strikingly like Vladimir Putin or one of his ilk and is a clearly prescient look at the diverse forces in the fallen Soviet Union. On the whole, the plot is clunky and it is clear early on where the deception lies. The setting in

Berlin, however, allows Read to explore the range of changes and reckonings the fall of the Wall forced on the individuals who lived with and around it. The West Berlin police repeatedly long for the simplicity of life when the Wall was there; the East

Germans struggle both to adjust to Western capitalism and to come to terms with the extent and influence of the Stasi; the Russians struggle to adapt and even understand what this new, open Russia is; and the American, healthy and successful, shows little

196 understanding of or compassion for the political and historical forces pushing on the other characters’ lives. The heart of the novel centers on how art is used for political purposes in the midst of these diverse and struggling actors.

All of the characters believe that art is always a political tool and they each try to use or shape the meaning of art for their own ends. The circulation of Russian art throughout the book highlights art’s commodification and the West’s tendency to fetishize Russian art, treating it as a trophy or a novelty. The book opens with the murder of two successful Russian icon smugglers. The two low-class smugglers secured Russian icon paintings from Russians permitted to travel, primarily KGB agents, and then sold them on to the Western market with astronomical markups; smuggling Russian historical artifacts quickly became a profitable business. Orlov, the rogue KGB agent, sees them “traded as commodities, just to decorate the houses of the bourgeoisie in Frankfurt and New York” (A Patriot in Berlin 61). He is, he believes, a true Soviet and passionate believer in the cause and devotes himself to saving his version of Russia. One of his first acts is to kill the two art smugglers and take back the icons. His mission is not simply to regain Russian historical culture, but to preserve and protect his vision of that culture. Orlov has little patience with experimental art, the focus of the exhibition. In a discussion of Vassiliy Kandinsky, he suggests his writings are nonsense and mocks his poems. Regardless of what he thinks of particular artists, he strongly believes that if art is Russian, it should be in

Russia. The worst outcome would be for it to end up in the hands of the Americans.

In order to have somewhere to take the stolen paintings, Orlov ingratiates himself with the colonel of a nearby Russian base. Manipulating the military’s patriotism, he convinces them that top-secret, first-rate, Soviet military equipment made in the GDR

197 is going to be dismantled, sent back to Russia, and sold to the Americans. Outraged at

Boris Yeltsin’s plan, the soldiers offer to store and then destroy it in their empty hangars for this “would surely be better than letting it fall into the hands of the

Americans” (A Patriot in Berlin 104). Art, the novel suggests, is just as powerful a weapon as tanks and missiles.

The focus on curating and positioning art to one’s purpose is perhaps best relayed through Francesa McDermott’s obsession with creating the exhibition’s catalogue. McDermott’s focus on the catalogue is intense because it is the document that will hold her name and serve as an asset to her for her future job prospects. Here is an American scholar, not a capitalist, whose main purpose is nevertheless purely what she can gain socially and professionally from the art. She is what many of the

Soviets and East Germans are struggling to become throughout the novel, a Western professional. As Gerisamov defines it, a professional is someone who has an indifference to ideology or as his boss General Savchenko declares, “[l]oyalty to one’s country, of course, and to the government of the day, but not to one’s own convictions. Not to a cause” (A Patriot in Berlin 14). For Savchenko, this is incredibly difficult as the orders he receives conflict with his Soviet ideology; for

Orlov, it is impossible; for McDermott, it is natural. At the end of the book,

McDermott’s East German colleague, Günter Westarp, compliments her for teaching him “how professionalism and hard work could be combined with courtesy and charm” (A Patriot in Berlin 244-245). What Westarp admires in McDermott’s professionalism is of course her ability to focus on her own aims and get ahead financially while climbing up the ladder. Professionalism, Read suggests, is being absent of moral or patriotic values, but full of an ideology that adheres to the self,

198 focused on personal improvement in a capitalist world. Though Orlov dies, he is the hero that the book champions, while McDermott is suspect and is saved by her love for Orlov and her willingness to move to Russia and follow his lead.

The Germans involved in the exhibit, from both East and West, primarily want a huge successful show, jointly arranged to bring attention and peace through cooperation to Berlin. Some of those on the Eastern side are admittedly trying to show their worth and get ahead in a brave new world by putting the past behind them.

The leader of the political party in power in Berlin invites McDermott in order to get

American funding and museums to support the exhibition. Stefan Diedrich, the political organizer of the exhibit and McDermott’s friend’s husband, turns out to be an ex-Stasi spy who was responsible for the destruction of thousands of Stasi files including his own. He constantly tries to arrange things to his advantage while struggling, like the rest of the East German characters, to fit into Western society, always coming up short. Despite the constant German presence, as during the Cold

War, East Germany primarily features as the backdrop of ongoing conflict between

Russia and the U.S. through the embattled cultural artifacts. In the end, Orlov receives a high ransom, getting the funding he wanted for his movement, but he dies, sacrificing himself for the greater cause. The paintings are safely returned to the show’s curators under the rather unbelievable guise of love and the show goes on to great acclaim for both the Germans and McDermott. Orlov and McDermot do not ride off into the sunset as a Russian-American couple, instead the tale is satisfactory to the

Western perspective: the rogue Soviet remnant is shot dead, the paintings are returned, the show a success. The money does go into the pockets of the underground

Soviet movement in Russia, but this is of little concern in the immediate moment.

199 Though art is fiercely contested and several characters are even murdered for the paintings, the art itself is barely discussed. It is more important as a symbol, as a canvas for historical interpretation of the past than for any artistic merit. The

American interpretation wins out. McDermott ponders, “[if] the Russians could be shown that they are not outsiders knocking at the door of contemporary culture, then it would be far easier for them to become assimilated into the new world order” (A

Patriot in Berlin 49). In a rebuke to this idea, the novel states that they are not willing and will not adopt McDermott’s professional stance.

An Ideal Outcome

Read has written non-fiction, such as Alive and The Train Robbers, and more fiction than was discussed here, primarily novels that are centered on Catholicism such as Scarpia and The Death of a Pope. Even these books, which seem unrelated to

Cold War politics, carry fragments of the early foci, incorporating German characters or focusing on the role of art in political conflict. Although Read was highly critical of his American financers, his work and themes largely aligned with their aims. When he arrived in Berlin in 1964, Read was knowledgeable and interested in German and

European politics and history. Young and impressionable, well-educated and multilingual with good connections that promised a bright and influential future, he was a prime candidate for the Artist-in-Residence program. In many letters to friends as a young adult, he expressed his urge to lead people, to have a responsibility and duty to guide those who were under him. This sentiment aligns with the goals of the philanthropists’ whose money he accepted. Read criticized philanthropists generally, but it seems this was more a difference in perspective than outright condemnation.

200 While the philanthropists fought for a more democratic and capitalist society, Read thought people should be guided towards structure, purpose in faith, and through this a greater level of equality. In Read’s estimation, communism was a false god, capitalism a dirty god, and Catholicism a future of true potential.

Regardless of these differences, Read arguably became a rather ideal outcome of the funding program. He engaged in Berlin, joined the Literary Colloquium, and built a cross-continental network, connecting with Gruppe 47 writers and becoming an advocate for translating Witold Gombrowicz’s work into English. After his fellowship in Berlin, he spent time in the United States. Perhaps more important, the work he produced brought attention to Berlin, the East-West divide, European unity, and repeatedly the role of art in political conflict. The criticism of Americans would be forgivable in the eyes of the funders, since it served a greater purpose—including demonstrating that the West encourages criticism of its institutions. Read’s involvement in the Berlin programs clearly correlated with his work. Did his experience contribute to his position? Maybe. Obviously his involvement in the experimental project shaped his work, his network, and gave him time to focus on

Germany and Continental Europe, allowing his interests in politics and art—and their interconnections—to bloom. It is this precise selection, promotion, and development that philanthropic patronage fosters, promoting the germination and circulation of more favorable ideas over others.

Read writes for a particular audience, yet, in relation to the Berlin program, his career shows how connections bred opportunities and that those opportunities spurred mixed results inspiring anti-communist literature focused on Europe, but also literature that was unabashedly anti-Semitic and scathingly savaged the Americans,

201 biting the hand that fed him. Read’s experience also shows that the CCF facilitated developments far beyond its direct meetings and publications. The principles and values it supported were circulated further through key connections, serving to reinforce them and elevate participants that the network chose. In the short term, this system may have reinforced and valued modernism, as Greg Barnhisel and Duncan

White have argued, but in the long term it actually reinforced the ways and means to success via a network, acceptance, gatekeepers, and funding.

202 Chapter 5 Cashing In: W.H. Auden

“…After all, it’s rather a privilege amid the affluent traffic to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into background-noise for study or hung as a status-trophy by rising executives, cannot be ‘done’ like Venice or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon being read or ignored…”

– W.H. Auden from “The Cave of Making: In Memoriam Louis MacNeice”

“God bless the U.S.A., so large, /So friendly, and so rich.” With this line, W.

H. Auden concludes his poem “On the Circuit.” The poem captures the monotony of a lecture tour: city after city, hotel after hotel, giving the same talk again and again, with random meal times and, to his despair, venues without alcohol. While the people he meets are all kind enough, the speaker describes himself as “an instrument” of the

Columbia-Giesen Management Company. He feels powerless, “predestined,” driven by the company’s “unfathomable will.” He is amused when something happens to disturb the perfectly scheduled “Giesen plan.” The poet is pushed, placed, controlled by the company and while he might grumble, his “spirit is willing” to comply for the handsome salary it provides; as he declares, it would be “damnable to ask/ If I am overpaid.” Auden’s sentiments in “On the Circuit” point at the heart of his approach to squaring the challenge of making art and earning money; for the most part, he was happy to talk about his work for the right price.

By the 1950s, Auden was no stranger to patronage and did not suffer from lack of opportunity. He found himself well enough connected to benefit from the constellation of political and financial opportunities of the post-WWII period. His tenure in the Berlin programs was brief and largely unsatisfactory, but this latter part 203 of his career insightfully exhibits the trajectory of many so-called Cold Warriors. He was not a committed foot soldier in the battle and likely would not identify himself as such. He was surely not a Melvin Lasky or an Arthur Koestler. Instead, he floated around the edges of the cultural Cold War publishing, speaking and benefitting from his early rebellious reputation, his experience on war fronts, and the many contacts he now had in high places. Auden was well aware of the role he played and became increasingly reflective of it publicly as he tried to make sense of his financial gain and the political implications it had. He took a pragmatic approach, accepting opportunities that generally supported the West, but avoiding direct political engagement in the work he published. He further tried to separate his literary criticism from his poetry, happily selling the former while protecting the latter. Auden’s situation shows how a radical past with correct political changes by the time of the

Cold War put him in a position to benefit substantially, enabling him to eventually buy a house he never thought he would own. He also exhibits the pressures and compromises these gains entailed and provides a stirring example of how some writers worked to legitimize them.

Auden and the State-Private Network

Auden did not initially jump at the opportunity to go to Berlin. His invitation to the divided city was also not the first invitation he had received from the Ford

Foundation. In 1958, the Foundation ran a “Program for the Creative Writer” that provided grants to eleven writers to support their writing for two years. Auden was invited to nominate writers, but he never replied to the letters.181 When the Ford

Foundation, guided by Nicolas Nabokov, wanted to invite Auden to participate in

181 Ford Foundation, Project File C-638, 1958 Writers Program, FF-RAC. 204 Berlin, it used a different approach. In an undated and unsigned memorandum entitled

“Art Projects Considered by the Ford Foundation,” likely from 1962, Nicolas

Nabokov wrote that Auden would come to Berlin for the “Berlin Meetings” to give a lecture. During this visit Nabokov advised that the Ford Foundation representative should invite Auden to come to Berlin for a residency.182 The timing and persuasion of his old friend worked. In late 1963, one of the project leaders in Berlin, perhaps

Peter Nestler, reported that Auden accepted his invitation and would come to Berlin in October 1964 for six months.183 Upon accepting the invitation, Auden wrote to

Cecil Day-Lewis, “I go there for six months—more if I wish. The Ford Foundation pays me a handsome salary, the City of [B]erlin provides me with a free apartment, and I have absolutely no official duties. What more could one ask for?” (qtd. in

Arnold 238). It was a perfect set up: excellent benefits with no obligations to lecture or teach. Auden did give some readings and tried to get involved in Berlin’s literary scene, but in principle it was a free holiday.184 As an added bonus he also had a

182 While the memorandum is unsigned, all evidence suggests it was written by Nabokov likely for the Berlin Senate or perhaps Willy Brandt. The memo itself has Nabokov’s name at the top written in ink and then scribbled over. The fact that the letter is translated suggests it was not written for the Ford Foundation, but rather translated to be shared with them. The memo is lengthy at ten pages and provides an overview of what the foundation is willing to fund along with an explanation of why it is beneficial. It then goes on to a rather overworked argument in favor of the continuation of the Berlin Festivals, reincarnating them with a new purpose. Before the Wall, they had been use primarily to reach East Germans. Now that it was not possible, the memo suggests they could be used to draw an international audience to Berlin, but stakes out that in order to do so they would need to be unique. The writer suggests that they could, for example, be focused on African culture or Japanese culture. It recommends that there should be one key festival organizer and lists several names, none of which are Nabokov. Nabokov became the sole festival organizer and created two festivals, one focused on African culture, the other on Japanese culture. For more see Giroud (2015) and Wellens. For the memo itself see Ford Foundation – International Affairs, FA748, Series V: Exchanges, Box 7, Folder 1963- 1965 – Berlin Artists in Residence – General, TRANSLATION, Memorandum: Art Projects Considered by the Ford Foundation, FF-RAC. 183 Ford Foundation-International Affairs, FA748, Series V: Exchanges, Box 7, Folder: Exchanges 1963–1965 Berlin Artists in Residence-General, FF-RAC. 184 For example, Ford Foundation records say that Auden gave a reading on April 2, 1965 at the Kunstamt Charlottenburg. He also attended a dinner on April 19, 1965 at Peter Nestler’s house and likely another one at Peter Heyworth’s residence on April 20. It is recorded that he left for Austria on April 24, 1965. See Ford Foundation – International Affairs, FA748, Series V: Exchanges, Box 7, 205 secondary reason to make some public appearances in Germany: selections from The

Dyers Hand were published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1964. His residency therefore could serve as publicity for his new book.185

Contemporary critics of Auden expressed dismay and disappointment that in the post-WWII period he was disengaged from the political fray and worked to distance himself from his politically active leftist past. In their estimation, this shift, combined with his move to the United States and his increasing dependence on alcohol and Benzedrine, damaged his poetry.186 More recent critics, by contrast, have pointed out that Auden’s post-WWII work is some of his most profound and personal.

Edward Mendelson has asserted, “[whatever] might be said about him by disappointed reviewers, Auden knew he was working at the height of his powers from

1961-1966—a period as fertile and inventive as his earlier bumper seasons…” (452).

Davenport-Hines argues that “his dying fall proved glorious, with many rich, luxuriant poems brimming with courage, consolidation, gratitude and hope; steady, patient wisdom and sharp political comment interspersed with sparkles of campiness and rumbles of grumpiness.” There is no doubt that there is a significant change between Auden’s political engagement before World War II and after. Before the war he was a political activist, publicly promoting the Republican cause in the Spanish

Civil War, documenting the Sino-Japanese war, and writing to bring attention to the

Folder 1963–1965 – Berlin Artists in Residence – General, FF-RAC, especially the June 9, 1965 letter from Peter Nestler to S. Stone and J. Slater. 185 Auden, Wystan H. and Arnold, Fritz and Insel-Verlag and Insel-Verlag Anton Kippenberg, DE- 2498-HS00948480, GLA. 186 Christopher Caldwell asserts that “The poetry fell off in the 1960s, as alcohol and benzedrine (sic) took their toll, and as Auden grew content with a less formal, less demanding idiom (as do so many English-language poets who move to the United States)” (Caldwell 55). Humphrey Carpenter holds a similar view and Richard Davenport-Hines cites Philip Larkin’s critique that “Auden had done ‘irreparable’ damage to his poetry by emigrating in 1939” among a number of other negative reviews for Auden’s Homage to Clio. 206 the battle against fascism. After WWII, this type of direct assertion into conflicts evaporated from his work. This does not mean that he abandoned political causes.

Rather, his terms of engagement shifted. Setting aside the debate on the quality of

Auden’s later work, his publication record, speaking gigs, and residencies establish that he was quite politically active from the 1940s until the late 1960s. He may not have been writing overt essays or giving rally speeches, but he was consistently supporting publications and organizations that fought for the West’s side in the Cold

War.

Auden published thirty-three times in Encounter between 1953 and 1966, submitting an almost even mix of poems, essays and reviews. The majority of his published content in the magazine focuses on literary topics, but a handful of articles delve into political matters. The most directly political contribution was to a special

“symposium” on the question of whether Britain should “go into Europe,” joining what was in 1963 the European Communities; an attempt that was later defeated by

Charles de Gaulle of France. The 2016 Brexit referendum and its long-winded aftermath make Auden’s full response and indeed the entire two-part symposium well worth reading. Auden overall is decidedly for the UK joining the Communities. He astutely notes though that, “[o]ne will never understand the current debate about

England joining the Common Market if one thinks of it as merely a clash between various economic interests. Beneath the arguments Pro and Con lie passionate prejudices and the eternal feud between the High-Brow and the Low-Brow” (“Going into Europe” 54). He tellingly undercuts the United Kingdom’s interests by equating them with England’s interests. In both his main points and his blindness, he shows that the debate of the 1960s and 1970s is the same debate happening in the 21st

207 century. He also bemoans the fact that no matter what happens, Britain will not join

Europe because Europe no longer exists, instead globalization has unified low-brow and high-brow cultures across the West.

Auden’s article on the UK joining the European Community comments the most directly on political developments, but several other essays delve into political issues indirectly. In his eulogy to Dag Hammarskjold, he wonders at Hammarskjold’s intellectual and poetic knowledge, admiring his ability to hold the fate of individuals and nations and give them appropriate attention and concern at the same time. In a

1962 review of the Labor politician John Strachey’s book The Strangled Cry, and

Other Unparliamentary Papers, Auden states:

One political danger in the States—I cannot speak for Britain—is the opposite of Russia’s; our professional politicians, our Senators and Congressmen, have too little power. It is very difficult for the average citizen in the States not to become politically apathetic because one has the feeling that the people or groups of people with the real power to decide policy cannot be influenced by one’s vote. One does not even know their names (Strachey’s Cry 88).

Auden does not elaborate further on whom he has in mind, but they are clearly not elected officials. He may be referencing civil servants, military leaders, think tanks, philanthropies, or all of them together. It is therefore fascinating that about a year later he accepted Ford’s invitation to Berlin, embracing the money and hospitality of the U.S. state-private network with open arms.

Auden was both critical of and implicated in the cultural battles raging around him. In addition to his many publications in Encounter, he also participated in the first major festival put on by the CCF in Paris in 1952 where he took part in a debate with

Czeslaw Milosz, Roger Caillois, and Glenway Wescott on the topic “Revolt and

Communion” (Giroud 264). A few years later, he spoke in Bombay on behalf of the

Congress alongside Stephen Spender and Denis de Rougemont and in 1958 Auden 208 participated in a week-long seminar in Italy at Nabokov’s invitation on the subject of

“Tradition and Change in Music” (Giroud 289, 324). In 1960, he took part in a CCF- organized event to honor the fiftieth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death and then in 1963 he came to Berlin for a set of “Berlin Meetings” organized by Nabokov (Giroud 325,

Ford letters). He also attended the Berlin festival in 1964 while in residence on his

Ford Foundation grant (Giroud 354).

Auden secured these publications and opportunities partly from his status as a writer and poet, but there is no doubt that his friendships with Nabokov and Spender particularly, among others, played an important role in securing the opportunities and the paychecks. Auden had a long friendship with Stephen Spender, editor of

Encounter, and with those who emerged as the British nexus of the West’s cultural

Cold War. Spender was actually the first person to publish Auden’s Poems in 1928

(Caldwell 54–56). Auden was also a good friend of Nabokov, cultural ringmaster of the CCF, reaching back to their early days in the U.S. and strengthened by their time serving together in the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. These friendships bequeathed him publishing opportunities in Encounter, speaking engagements through the CCF, and eventually the opportunity for the residency in Berlin. Whether

Spender and Nabokov provided Auden with an opportunity or he did a favor for them is not clear, but it is also not necessary to know which way the favors flowed. They were mutually beneficial and all sides had a general sympathy for the cause of the

West. It was a win-win situation. Auden’s abandonment of overt political engagement and his ambivalence to the CCF’s political efforts, while simultaneously lending his face and voice to their publications and events, demonstrates most forcefully how even without political commitment, writers and artists got swept up in this new order

209 of artistic production. Auden’s experience illustrates that the changing landscape of patronage was not just the well-known story of how the avant-garde of the 1930s became ringmasters of the cultural Cold War. Rather, there was a wider change that provided new opportunities and ethical challenges for all artists finding ways to make a living.

Auden’s connections to the post-WWII state-private network had deep roots in the Spanish Civil War and WWII itself. His experiences in these conflicts gave birth to both his turn away from politics and his ability to benefit handsomely from them.

To understand this shift, his time spent in these war zones must be taken into account.

Visiting Auden in New York City in the late 1940s, Stephen Spender reported, “…his pattern of ideas was completely altered. He had shed all preoccupation with politics…[Auden] explained to [Spender] that his politics in the 1930’s had been based on the conviction that the anti-Fascists could really stop the war. When he realized that this view was mistaken, he had dropped the ideas which went with it”

(Spender 298). Spender goes on to suggest that Auden’s adoption of American citizenship underlined his new political outlook because, he speculated, as an outsider

Auden could never play the same political role in the U.S. as he had in England.

Spender could not have been more off the mark. Auden’s American citizenship and his time serving in the American military made him more attractive as a recipient of cultural Cold War funding. He was an ex-communist supporter who had proven he was now on the right side, spoke German, was British, and had friends and sympathies across Europe. His inherent straddling of the Atlantic made him a perfect candidate to help build trans-Atlantic unity.

210 By all accounts, the key turning point that instigated Auden’s conclusion about political action was not moving to the U.S. but his experience in the Spanish

Civil War. Auden’s poem “Spain” is one of his most famous and is also one of the few times he addressed or publicly reflected on his time in Spain during the Civil

War. He went to Spain in January 1937 with the intention to work as a stretcher- bearer or ambulance driver until summer. Instead, he returned to London in early

March (Caldwell 56, Carpenter 206–222; Mendelson xvii; Osborne 133). He never spoke about his experience there, even with his closest friends. Neither Spender nor

Christopher Isherwood ever heard about what he encountered and why he returned so quickly (Spender 247, Caldwell 56, Carpenter 215–216). It is particularly curious that he never spoke about it with Spender because Spender himself spent many months in

Spain during the civil war as a journalist. Humphrey Carpenter has pieced together a picture of Auden’s time there as much as is possible with the scant documents he left and accounts given by other writers. Auden seems to have struggled to find a role for himself in Spain, moving from Barcelona to Valencia and attempting to make it to

Madrid. He perhaps did a bit of broadcasting, but mostly moved around rather aimlessly and increasingly disillusioned.

The few writings by Auden that do exist from his time in Spain suggest his disgust and dismay with the Republicans’ behavior. He declared that witnessing civil war was a shock and found it evident that nothing good could come of it. He further was deeply affected by the Republicans’ destruction of almost every church in

Barcelona. He wrote that he was “profoundly shocked and disturbed” by the state of the churches in the city. “The feeling was far too intense to be the result of a mere liberal dislike of intolerance, the notion that it is wrong to stop people from doing

211 what they like, even if it is something silly like going to church. I could not escape acknowledging that…the existence of churches and what went on in them had all the time been very important to me. If that was the case, what then?” (quoted in

Carpenter 209–210, Query 601). Auden’s experience in Spain seems to have disillusioned his belief in revolution or drastic change; the destruction of Catholic churches, a foundation of European culture, was more than he could bear. Reflecting on his silence about the Civil War, he said that he had little to add to the far better writings of George Orwell and others and did not dare criticize the Republican Army, because regardless of how he felt, he “certainly didn’t want Franco to win. It is always a moral problem when to speak” (Carpenter 215).

It was after his experience in Spain then that Auden turned away from communism and its revolutionary manifestations during the early twentieth century.

He asserted, “I still believe socialism to be right, but believe the theory and practice of revolution to be wrong in the sense that I do not believe it will conquer fascism and establish socialism” (Quoted in Caldwell 56). Spender seems to have agreed with

Auden’s estimation that the efforts of intellectuals in the Spanish Civil War were for naught. Reflecting on the English writers involved, he concludes that those who died and became viewed as martyrs were “perhaps the greatest contribution made by creative writers in this decade to the spiritual life in Europe” (Spender 203). He clearly did not have a high opinion of the intellectual achievements of the 1930s.

This disenchantment, both with the Spanish Republican effort and the failed influence of intellectuals in the Civil War, did not deter either Spender nor Auden from getting involved in the continued fight against fascism in World War II or the

Cold War. Auden’s desire to see fascism defeated was surely one of the reasons he

212 joined the Morale Division of the US Strategic Bombing Survey in 1945. He was soon posted to Germany where he served alongside James Stern and Nicolas

Nabokov. Lending his skills to the US military, Auden felt quite patriotic. On the way to Germany he had a layover in England where he is reported to have lectured John

Lehmann and Stephen Spender about the superiority of American culture and houses and criticized English food and the future prospects of the British Isles. Carpenter speculates that perhaps Auden’s aggressive stance was meant to hold off any criticism of his absentee status while London suffered the Blitz (Carpenter 333–334). It is reasonable to assume that Auden had some internal reckoning to address. He was surely chastened by learning about the actual experience of living through an air raid.

Auden’s role in the Morale Division was to interview German civilians to help determine what effect the Allied bombing had had on them. The results of these surveys were then used to compose a report entitled “The Effects of Strategic

Bombing on German Morale.” The standardized surveys asked questions such as

“How is it going with you now under the occupation? Did the first air raid surprise you, or had you expected it? When did you first experience a big raid? Did you blame the Allies for the air raid? What, in your opinion, is the chief reason Germany lost the war?” (United States Strategic Bombing Survey 109–112, original italics). Each of the two scripted surveys, one for individuals who were bombed and one for individuals who were not bombed, had forty to forty-five questions and the replies make for somber reading.

Auden was deeply affected by the abject suffering he saw in Germany.

Reporting that he often cried, he quickly became cynical about his work summarizing the job: “We asked them if they minded being bombed. We went to a city which lay

213 in ruins and asked if it had been hit. We got no answers that we didn’t expect”

(Carpenter 335). The report itself speaks volumes in its utter absence of humanity and apathy to suffering and trauma. It is accurate to say that many conclusions are obvious, such as the fact that people who were directly bombed and lost their house or loved ones were more highly affected than those who did not. In summing up the purpose of the survey, Nabokov quotes Auden as saying, “How can one learn anything about morals when one’s actions are beyond any kind of morality? Morale with an e at the end is psycho-sociological nonsense. What they want to say, but don’t say, is how many people we killed and how many buildings we destroyed by that wicked bombing” (Giroud 184, original italics). Auden also commented to Nabokov about the horrific meticulousness of the concentration camps, which used “the same pedantic organizational skills a piano tuner does when he tunes a virtuoso’s concert grand” and reported to Elizabeth Mayer that he “…was prepared for [the concentration camp survivors’] appearance, but not for their voices: they whisper like gnomes” (qtd. in Giroud 184; qtd. in Carpenter 336). In a separate letter, he wrote to

Mayer, “I keep wishing you were here with us to help and then I think perhaps not, for as I write this sentence I find myself crying” (qtd. in Carpenter 334-335). Auden’s horror was total. Both sides of the war were condemnable, but not equally.

Just as with Spain, Auden did not speak of his time in Germany afterwards.

The one time where a reference to the dropping of bombs appears in his work is in his

1956 article “Hic et Ille,” a collection of thoughts focused on juxtaposed or dual meanings. In it, Auden wrote about the two ways you might view the earth from an airplane 10,000 feet above the ground. On the one hand, that “there should run a frontier, and that the human beings living on one side should hate or refuse to trade

214 with or be forbidden to visit those on the other side, is instantaneously revealed…as ridiculous” (Hic et Ille 36). On the other hand, the speaker also realizes that this view, which makes a family and flock of sheep or a rock outcrop and a cathedral appear the same, does not recognize historical values. At this distance, he declares, “I am unable to feel any difference between dropping a bomb upon one or the other” (Hic et Ille

36). By placing the viewer remotely above the earth, he describes both how the horrors of WWII were possible and also draws attention to the absurdity and absolutely understandable historical reasons for the Cold War. His war experiences directly inform his positions in the post-1945 world.

Considering these experiences, it is easy to comprehend why Auden would turn away from direct involvement in politics. Yet it is an overstatement to argue that he left the political fray entirely. The same ordeals that pushed him out of political debate connected him more closely to the growing state-private network and the opportunities of the cultural Cold War. As the details of his publications within

Encounter and his appointments with the CCF indicate, in the post-WWII period

Auden was not disengaged; rather, his experience shows the rewards of a steady and careful public and political participation over a lengthy career. At the late stage of his career in the 1950s and 1960s, institutional honors were bestowed on him and commissions were easy to secure. This changed his terms of engagement. Auden had paid his dues and, finding himself with new opportunities, joined the political fight by cashing in and selling his presence to bolster the cause without needing to fight or rally any troops.

215 Money and its Aftermath

Reflecting on his and Auden’s student days at the University of Oxford, Spender described Auden’s approach to school: “Auden regarded the University as a convenient hotel where he stayed and was able to read books and entertain his friends” (Spender 40). In 1956, Auden returned to his alma mater when he was elected as Professor of Poetry, a prestigious five-year appointment with light lecture duties. Auden’s pragmatic approach to the purpose of studying at university comes through in his lectures. In “The Poet & the City,” an essay about the poet within modern society, he proscribes specific subjects of study, but primarily emphasizes that a young poet should both work in the garden and learn a way to make money using his hands so that he or she does not have to earn money by writing or teaching.

Despite his success, Auden resented, to some degree, the fact that he had to write and lecture to make a living. His return to Oxford provided him with a prime opportunity to reflect on this state of affairs and share his ideas of how to succeed as a poet in the twentieth century. Auden’s lectures were published at the end of his tenure at Oxford in the 1962 collection The Dyer’s Hand. He promoted this book while in Berlin. The collection holds a range of essays focused on key poets and literary works, including a section entitled “Americana,” but the first third focuses on the role of the poet in society and his or her challenges to create authentic work and make a living. In these lectures, Auden works through and explains how to thrive with non-commercial art while keeping one’s integrity as a poet. His answer was that you cannot and should not.

Auden wrote his Oxford lectures with several accolades under his belt and an increasing accruement of lucrative speaking engagements and publications through 216 the CCF, Encounter, and The New Yorker. His critical essays exhibit a clear awareness and contemplation of the financial struggles of being a writer and evidence his careful consideration of the strictures with which these financial constraints saddle an artist. He does this with a panache of ambivalence about the situation, suggesting a reality of simply being stuck. The key non-literary themes in The Dyer’s Hand, published between Auden’s time in Oxford and Berlin, establish his thoughtful compromise between the creation of poetry and the public engagement of criticism, between social commitment, financial demand, and maintaining integrity and authenticity within his creative endeavors. His introduction to the book gets to the heart of these dilemmas. Auden took the integrity, the authenticity, of his work seriously. His explicitness in this commitment puts his contemplation of the economic use of his lyrical talent into an earnest light. In his foreword to the The Dyer’s Hand

Auden writes:

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it. All the poems I have written were written for love; naturally, when I have written one, I try to market it, but the prospect of a market played no role in its writing. On the other hand, I have never written a line of criticism except in response to a demand by others for a lecture, an introduction, a review, etc.; though I hope that some love went into their writing, I wrote them because I needed the money” (The Dyer’s Hands xi).

Auden’s frankness about selling his wares is refreshing. After all, we all must eat. His distinction between the motivation for writing poetry and criticism works to redeem him from a callous dismissal of his creative power. Auden claims that when writing poetry he did not think of the market in his creation. His art is not created to be sold, but, if there happens to be some profit, it is a happy accident.

The collection itself, of course, is only comprised of criticism, no poetry. It is therefore curious to open a book declaring it was done not out of personal care for the 217 form, but from personal need for money. Why reveal this? It is likely true, is not surprising, and it does not add to or take away from the quality of the writing. It is a claim though to a lack of commitment and an effort to distance himself from the book. Many of the topics he chose himself. Even if they were commissioned, no one dictated to him what he should lecture on at Oxford. Auden’s assertions put a curious escape clause to the book’s contents and suggest dissatisfaction with the work or a lack of willingness to declare it fully his own. Auden’s second and final thought in his succinct one-page foreword is to clarify that he does not like commissioned criticism because the form is dictated regardless of the content. “A poem must be a closed system, but there is something, in my opinion,” he declares, “lifeless, even false, about systematic criticism” (The Dyer’s Hands xii). Auden rails against the tight strictures, the inorganic and unnatural dictation of form, of conformity. It is a form demanded by someone else, just as the form of university education, that is the problem.

The question of getting paid for producing criticism is a more complicated one than Auden presents in his foreword and he is well aware of this. Approximately a third of the essays in The Dyer’s Hand focus on or tangentially reference finances and politics, the role of the artist in society and patronage. Auden’s direct conclusions are the claims he makes in his opening comments of the book, but they are drawn from careful analysis. His collection starts out with a prologue composed of two essays,

“Reading” and “Writing”. “Reading” is a collection of thoughts on the subject more than a coherent essay, with a significant portion given to contemplating the purpose of the critic. As Auden declares, a critic can perform “one or more of the following services”: introduce readers to a new author, show the value of an author or work,

218 show relations between works, provide a reading to give further understanding, and shed light on the artistic process or the relationship between art and life or another subject (The Dyer’s Hand 8–9). Auden calls a critic’s work a service. It is consumable and produced to be sold. Following through on his earlier claim, criticism is produced for money. It is a product on the market.

Of course, it also serves an important intellectual purpose because the services he declares it provides create the literary conversation and, in most cases, take specialized knowledge to compose—and thus add value, if only in terms of prestige.

Nevertheless, it is only criticism that is consumed this way. Poetry or fiction is a different consideration. Reading poetry or fiction is a creative process in itself.

Reading, for Auden, is translating and there is no right way to translate, though there are better or more accurate ways than others. The pleasure of reading is only our own and is purely private. Auden delineates the difference between reading privately and writing criticism in a curious way: “So long as a man writes poetry or fiction, his dream of Eden is his own business, but the moment he starts writing literary criticism, honesty demands that he describe it to his readers, so that they may be in the position to judge his judgments” (The Dyer’s Hand 6). He goes on to describe his own Eden in order to argue that it is only someone with the same or a similar vision of Eden, the same or similar shared values, whom he would be able to trust for criticism and reviews. For Auden, the distinction between private and public is essential. If one will write criticism publicly than he or she must share more of his or her self in order that a reader can judge it accurately in relation to his or her own subjectivity. If it is a creative work, the reader can add his or her own interpretation lessening the

219 importance of the author’s original intention or belief. Creativity enables creative license, criticism requires strict openness and clear evidence of bias.

Auden’s emphasis on the important distinction between the public and private are social, but also financial. Public writing, that is writing originally intended to be consumed by or shared with the public, requires a certain amount of disclosure by the author in order for the value of the work to be determined. Said another way, it is the consumer or the patron, whomever is paying for the work, who assigns value to the writing. The logic of this argument, which is a clear financial analysis of the service provided and the goods circulated, means the value is determined by the purchaser’s likelihood either of agreeing or of finding an opinion of a certain subjective or political value. This cannot be interpreted as having always been the case for Auden’s patrons, but it exhibits his thoughtful awareness of the economic relations entailed in his criticism. As Auden himself makes clear at the beginning of the book, it was rare that he was hired to read his own poetry. More often, he was contracted to write criticism, signaling that his main poetic labor was not valuable enough; he had to also explain himself and pontificate on his views.

In this vein, Auden’s essays suggest that he was not interested in writing for the public and being a public figure or public intellectual in and of itself. He did so purely for the money. In his estimation, popularity is not important for writers.

Rather, a writer “needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgment he respects” (The Dyer’s Hand 14). A writer is writing for his limited circle of friends, acquaintances or perceived equals.

The general population is irrelevant and indeed troubling. In his aphoristic essay

220 “Writing,” Auden returns to the fact that writers and poets face a troubling dilemma in that their medium is the common property of everyone who speaks the language.

Mathematicians, for example, have a limited audience of people who understand and so a purer and more astute base of critics and partners for dialogue. Since everyone who speaks English believes they have some understanding of the language, they feel they have a right to form an opinion and create a commentary. Auden believed that many people do not understand the language and should rather keep their mouths shut. Poetry, as opposed to criticism, was a private affair that was unfortunately, in many cases, made public.

Auden determined his view of the private nature of poetry within a wider consideration of the role of the poet in society and the romanticized vision that many people have of it without being qualified to actually partake. He takes his contemplation of this conundrum further in his essay “The Poet & The City,” the city being a metaphor for society. In the piece, Auden hypothesizes that a great majority of young people have ambitions to be writers not because they are actually talented writers or because they have a particularly high regard for art, rather they are enthralled or envious of the way the artist works; “he, and in our age, almost nobody else, is his own master” or so it appears (The Dyer’s Hand 73). Auden quickly points out that the reality of an artist’s position in society is rather at odds with the great desire of so many to be in charge of one’s time, labor, and the direction of one’s energies. An artist may have creative freedom in principle but he or she has no particular social status, role, or value in society. The artist is admired for his or her supposed independence, but is not found to be useful. There is no social utility to the work artists perform and there is no longer respect for gratuitous activity resulting in

221 little money or status. Many people do not realize this state of affairs though. Auden concludes that art as propaganda or socially engaged art arises from the mistaken belief that art can still have a social utility: “[W]hen poets fall into [this heresy], the cause, I fear, is less their social conscience than their vanity; they are nostalgic for a past when poets had a public status” (The Dyer’s Hand 76).

Auden does not develop his critique of propaganda further, but it is telling that he delivers this reproach to politically engaged poetry at a time when he is consistently providing his voice for politically engaged projects. Auden’s explanation and defense of the need to write criticism for financial purposes conflict sharply with his condemnation of socially engaged art. He attempts to draw a blurry line between directly writing about political events or positions, as in his rejection of his 1930s poems “Spain” and “September 1, 1939,” and publishing non-politically focused poems in politically charged publications such as Encounter. His position on the creation of art is soundly developed, but does not logically follow through in relation to where or how the art is later circulated, remunerated, or used. It is also evident that his publication within politically charged contexts weighed on him as he wrote these essays and contemplated his position so publicly as he continued to be enmeshed in the cultural Cold War funding stream, soon heading to Berlin.

It is plausible that Auden would defend his publication record and fellowship record with the simple explanation that a person must earn money. He did advise that anyone considering being a poet should train for a crafts trade in order to be sure his or her income is not dependent on work with literary faculties, a demand that would in turn tax the artist and damage his or her art. Auden himself did not do this and at various points worked as a teacher, critic, and translator. That said, poets, in Auden’s

222 estimation, had an important role to play within the economy and society in general.

He claimed that “the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act [because] it reminds the Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous numbers” (The Dyer’s Hand

88). Similarly, his lead quotation opening The Dyer’s Hand comes from Nietzsche:

“We have Art in order that we may not perish from the Truth” (The Dyer’s Hand, x, capitalization in the original). Under the presupposition that artists, particularly poets, focus on the experience of the individual as opposed to the masses, Auden argued that it was therefore the artist’s main role to remind society that human beings were individuals possessing experiences akin to those of their politicians and leaders. After going out of his way to defend the private nature of poetry and declaring its lack of social utility, Auden claims that poetry does indeed have an important role in maintaining and demanding recognition of each person’s humanity. He argued that society, while it did not practically need to, also found the role of the artist important.

Auden alluded to the fact that while an artist might see his role in a pure way, society makes requests of him or her:

The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: ‘For God’s sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages,’ what just reason could he give for refusing? But nobody says this. The self-appointed unqualified nurse says: ‘You are to sing the patient a song which will make him believe that I, and I alone, can cure him. If you can’t or won’t, I shall confiscate your passport and send you to the mines.’ And the poor patient in his delirium cries: ‘Please sing me a song which will give me sweet dreams instead of nightmares. If you succeed, I will give you a penthouse in New York or a ranch in Arizona. (The Dyer’s Hands 27).

The state of society is so horrendous, according to Auden, that the work of a poet is technically superfluous to the physical demands of survival. Of course, logic does not often apply to human behavior and this provides the poet with an opening. The 223 societal demands of the poet, however, are far from what Auden declares the purpose of poetry to be: to tell the truth, “to disenchant and disintoxicate” (The Dyer’s Hand

27). If anything, both elements of society, the have and have-nots, want the same thing from the poet, hypnosis or a palliative. The punishment and rewards available are tellingly financial. Those with power, the nurse, demand a song to remain in power over the societal body and threaten punishment if it is not delivered, stripping identity, freedom of movement, and a condemnation to a life of poisonous drudgery underground, away from the light, a living grave. Those who are suffering, request a soothing song to calm their nerves and give them hope. In return, they offer riches and comfort. The poet is pulled and pushed to deliver what is desired. Neither of the options offers him or her a route to provide what is authentic to his or her purpose, but they do offer a route to status in a world where they should be obsolete. A compromise must be made to stick with the craft. The duality of this theorization and life in practice highlights the difficult position artists found themselves in when trying to preserve their art, but also make their way in a world where politics consumed culture.

Auden in Berlin

Auden twisted himself into contortions trying to defend the importance of his role in society while preserving his work and paying the bills. The successes and failures of his negotiated position are exhibited most fully through his relationship with the Ford Foundation and his time in Berlin. By the time Auden arrived in Berlin, he had wrapped up his obligations at Oxford and was splitting his time between New

York City and his house in Kirchstetten, Austria. With his geographically stretched 224 commitments and regular presence in Europe, it was not surprising that he accepted the opportunity to be in Berlin in the autumn of 1964. In many ways it was a gift: the money was good, it was not far from his home, and it gave him an opportunity to revisit a city from his youth. Coming right at the end of his well-paid tenure in

Oxford, the residency also filled an income gap. From Ford’s perspective, Auden was a prime candidate for funding. He was well known, respected, a European by birth, an

American citizen by choice, spoke German, had a history in the country, and a commitment to the region. On paper, it seemed the opportunity was mutually beneficial.

Auden had nostalgic hopes about his return to Berlin. He had been connected to German culture since his early years. Whenever discussing the various European cultures, he made no secret that he had a preference for German culture. In a 1963 essay in Encounter, he wrote:

I am one of those—there are not many of us [in Britain]—who fell in love with the German language…Perhaps, also, I had an unconscious bias in favour of Germany because, when I was a little boy in prep-school during the First World War, if I took an extra slice of bread and margarine, some master was sure to say—“I see, Auden, you want the Huns to win” – thus establishing in my mind an association between Germany and forbidden pleasures…. (Going into Europe 53).

The final ellipsis in the quote above is Auden’s own inclusion. He then breaks the page with three clear lines before continuing on to another paragraph. The page break indicates his break with England and his exploration of the forbidden pleasures 1920s

Berlin held for him from its enemy culture to its sexual openness. From the 1920s on,

Germanic culture held a large space in Auden’s life orienting him within Europe and becoming an expression of his otherness in the face of tradition-bound England. From his marriage of convenience to Erica Mann to his focus on translations and

225 collaboration, Germanic culture provided fruitful inspiration and material for self- reflection. In a 1962 article to promote his new translation with Elizabeth Mayer of

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italienische Reise, his description of Goethe’s need to go to Italy can stand in for his need to go to Berlin and later to America. He writes,

“How necessary it was for Goethe to remove himself from the literary atmosphere of

Weimar can be guessed from his letters about his new version of Iphigenie and

Egmont, for it is clear that Weimar preferred the old versions and did not care for his new classical manner” (On Goethe 65). In the same way that Auden needed to remove himself from England in 1928 to explore his own identity to the way British critics did not appreciate Auden’s new work from the United States, he likely needed the new environment to experiment.

Returning to Berlin, Auden resumed his practice of keeping a diary exploring his sexual forays, but it did not last long. Mendelson asserts Auden found “he no longer needed to keep a private record of his inner life, because he had begun to say in public everything he wanted to say (Mendelson 471). Auden did attempt to engage constructively in the artistic programs as well. Walter Höllerer recalled that Auden was involved in Berlin in some of the exact ways the funders would hope, namely providing guidance to young writers. He wrote:

Every Wednesday at 6 p.m. W.H. Auden sits down between the students, listens to what is being disputed. Every Wednesday between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. Auden says a single sentence in the post-graduate seminar, which he articulates clearly, always in German. Once he declared, in a ‘discussion of principles’: “Thus everything is shit, —in this view, —naturally”. —He is sitting at the table, across from me, there are slippers on his feet, because he doesn't like being pinched by shoes. I see the slippers on his long legs when I look down past the edge of the table. Looking ahead: it sparkles and sparks from his face, from a landscape opposite with elephant wrinkles.187

187 Walter Höllerer “Augenblicke mit Besuchern,” Akzente 4/1975, pp. 346-349, LASR. Original text: “Jeden Mittwoch um 18 Uhr kommt W.H. Auden, setzt sich zwischen die Studenten, hört zu, was 226

Still, Auden found the experience on the ground was rather disappointing. He received a slew of invitations for lectures and dinner parties, which he was not interested in, but felt obligated to attend as a guest in the city. Further, he found it difficult to settle into and take part in the literary life Berlin offered. He went to

Höllerer’s Literary Colloquium to try to integrate, but found he was relatively unknown to the largely German audience and failed to strike up friendships with the leading German figures, such as Günter Grass. As Humphrey Carpenter correctly claims, a contributing factor may have been the local writers’ resentment of the lucrative salaries the guests were getting paid, while Germans were largely barred from benefitting from the program (Carpenter 411). Upon taking over the administration of the program on behalf of the DAAD in 1965, Peter Nestler elaborated on this, diplomatically arguing in the Spandauer Volksblatt that guests such as Eric Bentley and Auden would have been more satisfied with their stay if they had had carefully arranged and suitable responsibilities in order to support integration and the actual building of a community and exchange with the German writers

(Hösterey, Spandauer Volksblatt).

Ford had a rather different view of Auden’s participation. In a letter from

January 16, 1965, Slater wrote to Stone that Eric Bentley was overcoming his problems and settling in, “but he is not as successful as W.H. Auden.”188 Sibylle Otto,

verhandelt wird. Jeden Mittwoch zwischen 18 und 20 Uhr sagt Auden, im Oberseminar, einen einzigen Satz, den er, jeweils auf deutsch, deutlich artikuliert. Einmal erklärt er, in einer ‘Grundsatz- Diskussion’: ‘Alles ist somit Scheiße, — so besehen, —natürlich”. – Er sitzt am Tisch, mir gegenüber; an seinen Füßen sind Pantoffeln, weil er ungern von Schuhen gekniffern wird. Ich sehe die Pantoffeln an seinen langen Beinen, wenn ich am Tischrand vorbei nach unten schaue. Nach vorn gesehen: es funkelt und funkt aus seinem Gesicht, aus einer gegenüberliegenden Landschaft mit Elephanten- Runzeln.” 188 Slater to Stone 16 January 1965. International Affairs – Exchanges – 1963–1965. Berlin Artists in Residence – General, FF-RAC. 227 Haas’ assistant and a key administrator of the program, wrote in an undated letter,

“The dinner at the Forsthaus was a success. People like Bentley, Auden, Vlad evaluate the program in an evident way being familiar with Germany and the specific

‘characteristics’ of Berlin. The meeting therefore was very cordial, vivid and interesting for both parts.”189 Auden was attending parties and giving lectures, just as

Ford hoped, but did not require; his integrity in relation to his income appears to have obliged him more than his patrons, from which they benefitted. Ford was willing to count this as a success.

Nestler’s local perception of success, integration and exchange, clashed with

Ford’s more superficial definition of presence and attention. Auden implicitly agreed with Nestler. Though he was wining and dining, he did not feel as satisfied with his time in Berlin as Ford did. Considering the available evidence, it is difficult to conclude if his experience was the result of a lack of opportunity or his own behavior.

Auden had connections in the city, including Nabokov, Peter Heyworth, a British journalist and writer, and Igor Stravinsky, but consistently put himself in difficult positions by drinking heavily, which often led to behavior that was anything but endearing. Nabokov wrote that once when Auden stayed with him, he caught him raiding the liquor cabinet in the middle of the night stark naked (Giroud 350).

Heyworth reported that Auden was pulled over and charged for drunken driving. He accompanied him to court where he said Auden was cleaned up and looked like a schoolboy. Auden stated frankly that he drank every night, but was let off after city

189 Otto, Sibylle to Shepard Stone and Joseph Slater undated letter, pp. 2. Ford Foundation International Affairs, Program Action No. 63–351. Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program, FF-RAC. 228 officials pulled some strings to sweep the incident under the rug and avoid the bad

190 press of a scandal (Carpenter 411–12).

Despite these episodes, while in Berlin Auden worked on two commissions: an anthem for Christ Church College at the University of Oxford and a translation of the songs from Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage for the National Theater in London

(Carpenter 412). The anthem was a small project left from his time at Oxford, but it is striking that Auden was working on Brecht’s famous anti-war play as he sat in a war- torn city, being paid by one of its antagonists, while student protests began to grow against the raging battles in Vietnam. He was not alone in this project either. Eric

Bentley, who was also in residence at Berlin at the same time, translated the text for the same production. Auden’s involvement with a politically charged play while taking part in a politically charged project points to the fact that during Auden’s later career he was consistently supporting political projects.

Auden’s translations appeared in his 1969 poetry collection, City Without Walls and Other Poems. The collection is dedicated to Heyworth and is Auden’s statement on the Cold War. The underlying themes that creep through it are about division and crossing borders, both physically, but more importantly, in interpretation and understanding of our moral position and place in history. Craig Hamilton has evidenced Auden’s lifelong metaphor of the city representing society or humanity

(2001). City Without Walls and Other Poems builds on this in a mixed tone of nonchalance and despair. Moving from the post-WWII moment to his present in

1965, the collection addresses the experience of the city during these two decades.

The opening and title poem “City Without Walls” bemoans the Megalopolis and is

190 For more on Auden’s episode of drunken driving and his behavior in Berlin see Arnold, especially pp. 246–249. 229 based on New York City “with numbered caves in enormous jails,/hotels designed to deteriorate/their glum already corrupted guests,/factories in which the functional/Hobbesian Man is mass-produced” (11–15). The modern city is the city that has brought what used to be “beyond the Pale,” beyond the safe, spiked walls of the city, inside. There is no more protection and no safe or meaningful place to reside.

Nonetheless, the speaker suggests that perhaps it is better now than it will be in the future “Gadgeted Age.” The poem concludes with a yell from another person to “Go to sleep now for God’s sake!/You both will feel better by breakfast time!” (114–115).

The poem laments the loss of the medieval city with walls, clear boundaries, to keep the danger and mundane existence out, implicitly suggesting that the Berlin Wall is not effective and cannot contain or assist people in the modern gadgeted age. It is bound to fail. Now, the monotony of life is only drudgery according to the speaker and there are no signs of hope for escape. The speaker ridicules the “subcultures” that

“hold palaver…their tongues tattooed by the tribal jargon/of the vice or business that brothers them” and the seedy cafes “where in bad air belly-talkers,/weedy-looking, work-shy,/may spout unreason, some ruthless creed/ to a dozen dupes till dawn break.” (26–30). The rebellious movements, the communists, the socialists, the conference goers, and staples of the underground are pointless, lazy, delusional. There is little hope for relief or return to a more meaningful time. There is little hope for correction. One must simply make the best of it.

Invasion and division emerge most obviously in the poems “Partition” and

“Elegy.” The former traces the administrative nonchalance of Sir Cyril Radcliffe as he decided the fate of the Indian subcontinent. The latter was written for Auden’s maid who was a Sudeten German “made homeless paupers when Czechs/got their

230 turn to be brutal” (24–25). Similarly, “August 1968” marks the brutality of the Soviet

Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. As Grosvenor points out, Auden “broke his post-Spain moratorium on explicitly political poetry” by writing the poem about

Czechoslovakia just a year after contributing to a volume entitled, Authors Take Sides on Vietnam (272). In a most literal interpretation that a poem is titled after a political event, this is true, but Auden was engaged politically throughout his career, if not directly. Across his collection each population takes a turn at bullying and terrorizing another. These are all obvious invasions and transgressions, unjust and determined redistributions of people and nations. Two poems in particular point out the difficulty of separating good from evil, spreading blame across all actors. “Two Songs” is composed of “Song of the Ogre” and “Song of the Devil.” Each poem outlines a form of coercion. The ogre threatens and brutally stamps out its victims and challengers, just as the Soviet Union, referred to as the Ogre in “August 1968,” stamped out

Czechoslovaks seeking liberation. The ogre taunts and teases its victims before obliterating them. Alternatively, the devil, using social psychology instead of theology, urges the victim to let go of shame and responsibility, indulge and enjoy life, “Since men are like goods, what are shouldn’ts and shoulds/ When you are the

Leading Brand?” (33–34). American culture based on consumption can swallow and obliterate you just as dangerously as the ogre can stamp you out. The poem easily concludes that both sides are cruel, empty, and will devour the citizens under their control, underlining the futility of the Berlin Wall and the hopelessness of modern society in “City Without Walls.”

“Joseph Weinheber” pushes further the idea of division and the (in)ability to judge and make sense of the correct side or the correct interpretation. The poem is

231 perhaps one of Auden’s most direct poetic encounters with World War II. Weinheber was an Austrian poet who joined and wrote for the Nazi Party. He was from

Kirchstetten, where Auden owned a house and lived from 1958 until his death. In the poem, the speaker imagines that if history had been different, he would now be friends with his contemporary Weinheber and they would discuss poetry over a beer.

Yes, yes, it has to be said: Men of great damage And malengine took you up. Did they for long, though, Take you in, who to Goebbels’ Offer of culture Countered – in Ruah lossen? But Rag, Tag, Bobtail Prefer a stink and the young Condemn you unread. (21–30)

The poem acknowledges Weinheber’s Nazi past and to an extent excuses it, pointing to his defense of Austrian culture against Goebbels and the fact that the alternative was to die, as had other writers killed by the Nazis. It also suggests the limits that politics places on poetry: because he was a Nazi, nobody will read his work now. The first stanzas unfold the tension between admiration for Weinheber’s work and acknowledgement and defense of his Nazism. The role of the younger generation extends it as they condemn Weinheber and say he should not be read. As the reader’s discomfort increases with this validation of Nazism, a judgment perhaps rising in their minds against Auden as the writer of the poem, the speaker points the finger at the reader. While the next generation righteously condemns every collaborator, it, in the current moment, consistently papers over old divisions and benefits from such blanket forgiveness.

Already the realms that lost were properly warm 232 and overeating, their crimes the pedestrian private sort, those nuisances, corpses and rubble, long carted away: for their raped the shock was fading, their kidnapped physicists felt no longer homesick.

today we smile at weddings where bride and bridegroom were both born since the Shadow lifted, or rather moved elsewhere: never as yet has Earth been without her bad patch, some unplace with jobs for torturers (61–78)

In the first stanzas, the reader is ready to rebuke the speaker for his easy sympathy with and openness to Weinheber, and the feeling does not recede, but it is soon complicated by this quick summing up of the postwar clean up where everyone is settled into new alliances and warm homes, with plenty of food, and successful new lives. The violence and division continues, but in another location. While some may have more righteousness than others, the poem points to the fact that all have been active and complicit in moving beyond the postwar moment. The reader must ask then, is it right to condemn the speaker’s musings over Weinheber, for did the Allies’ forgiveness or forgetfulness not make them also implicit? To recall that similar terrors were being unleashed in other parts of the world by Europe’s liberators in Vietnam, makes readers question their judgment of the present: do we have the right to point a finger? The dilemma presented to the speaker and the reader is one we all face: if the historical circumstances had been different, how would our lives be different? Would we be neighbors, acquaintances, friends with those who are or were our enemies? Are we now in another fraught moment when similar evils are beginning to rage? The 233 speaker decides to respect Weinheber’s work. The question of judgment is blurred and complicated, leaving the reader uncomfortable and wishing to be defiantly righteous, though feeling uncertain and guilty as well.

It is curious that the poem does not specify a respect for Weinheber’s early work before he wrote Nazi propaganda; yet it is perhaps most powerful that

Weinheber as a figure is considered in his entirety. Weinheber’s guilt is Auden’s guilt. In no way was Auden a Nazi sympathizer; instead, what Auden’s Weinheber poem gets at is his first-hand knowledge of the terror of total war. While Nazism and the Holocaust were incomprehensibly evil and wrong, Auden’s poem points to the complex truth that there are no winners and right and wrong, good and bad are complicated determinations on an individual basis. Auden’s City Without Walls collection highlights the evils in communism, capitalism, and fascism. Auden’s own political journey underlines the failures of all of them. His initial mission was to join communism to beat the most obvious devil fascism. His experience in the Spanish

Civil War pushed him away from communism, which was only confirmed later by understanding the Soviet Union and its ogre-like persona. Auden is left with the

West’s capitalism. Having seen its evils, he begrudgingly sides with it, as there seems to be no other plausible option.

Auden may not have been publishing direct propaganda as Weinheber did, but he served in the military, toured, and published, selling his artistic abilities to his capitalist sponsors, the US government, the German government, and the Ford

Foundation. He was complicit in their efforts to spread US capitalism and the trans-

Atlantic alliance, and a party, in some way, to their crimes in carpet bombing already defeated German cities, easily forgiving Nazism, and spreading war and terror to

234 newly independent nations across the world. Considering Auden’s financial and political position puts his explanation of the public role of criticism and the private status of poetry into a different light: Auden tried to protect his poetry from politicization by making it a private and personal affair while paying his bills with his commissioned and detached criticism.

The rest of the collection suggests the myriad ways the walls that once protected the city, the society, the group, have been moved internally and imposed between individuals and subgroups to sow division and destruction. The collection draws a bleak picture, but also offers individual hope. Joseph Weinheber and the speaker are divided by categorizations of good and evil, friend and enemy, which the speaker now sees as an arbitrary accident of history. “Since” divides the speaker from his youthful lover only by time. The many celebratory poems of marriages, anniversaries, birthdays, and deaths celebrate “that life should have got to us/ up through the City’s/ destruction layers…” (“Epithalamium”, 45–47). As in “The

Horations”, “…what the Capital/ holds out as a lure, a chance; to get into Society,/ does not tempt” the speakers of these poems. The city and all of its constructions are ruinous traps of spiritual or physical danger. Though Auden dismissed his infamous line in “September 1, 1939,” “we must love one another or die,” he still struggles twenty-five years later with the verity of the statement, pondering throughout the collection the weight individual relationships have against the historic violence surrounding them.

Within the context of Auden’s focus on finances and his awareness of who is signing his paycheck, his condemnation of capitalism in “City Without Walls” and of the ravenous, unprincipled consumerism it demands in “Song of the Devil” speak

235 loudly. In her review of the collection, Helen Vendler declared that “[t]here are five or six very handsome poems in this volume, along with some rather trifling commissioned things, some forgettable translations from “Mother Courage,” and some touching occasional poems. Nothing Auden does of his own and on his own is ever uninteresting” (Vendler). Her implication is that the commissioned translations and texts are somehow suspect, out of place. Taken within Auden’s wider critique of the construction of “the city” and his judgment of capitalism, they should be seen in a different light. The translated and commissioned texts pad out the volume, but they are not necessary. Even without them, the book would have reached over ninety pages, a respectable length. The inclusion of the songs from Mother Courage stand out as particularly odd at first glance. Outside of being pure filler though, the songs contribute an acknowledgement of the economics of war and a failure of militaristic narratives. They hearken back to the 1930s and the abject failure to stop fascism.

They call out to the futility of the Cold War efforts. In the context of Auden’s financial affairs and his receipt of payment from Ford and Encounter in particular, he was also a foot soldier in the battle. He may not have been literal cannon fodder, but

“war cannot live on bullets only,/ Nor powder either: it needs men” (“Mother

Courage’s Song, Scene VIII, 5–6). Auden was positioned as a Mother Courage of sorts, benefitting from the battle, providing his wares for sale and consumption, aiding the continuance of the conflict. What Vendler identified as forgettable is actually Auden’s primary concern. He may have been a passive beneficiary, but he benefited from the Cold War nonetheless and he knows it.

The five other commissioned texts are obviously out of place. One is about a runner, one the apostles, another two based on Aesop’s fables, and finally a prologue

236 for an event at Christ Church College at Oxford. It is a disparate collection. Each text is only one aspect of a larger project and the commissioner and, where appropriate, the co-creators are listed for each of them. They are confusing inclusions that do not fit into the context or flow of the full collection. Perhaps they were included as padding, as Vendler suggested. Even if this is the sole reason, it is an odd choice to include these incomplete pieces lacking context and limited in their meaning because of their fragmentary nature. They could theoretically point you to these other projects and pieces, but it also seems unlikely because they are so fragmentary. Their presence indicates Auden’s financial situation. He exhibits, in the middle of his collection, that he makes money by writing about random topics chosen by others. Their inclusion shatters any façade of the romanticized poet and instead details the necessary requirements for survival. While Auden’s poems throughout the collection explore and condemn the many divisions scratched into the land and twisted into society, he also breaks a wall and shows how his bills are paid, his stomach filled.

In “The Poet & the City,” Auden writes that young people want to be writers

“because they are under the illusion that in that profession they will be able to create”

(The Dyer’s Hand 72–73). In City Without Walls he breaks the illusion that poets live on creation alone. The quality of the commissions also complicates his claim to distinguish between writing poetry and writing criticism. Auden argued in the early

1960s that these were separated by an internal will and an external need. His commissioned texts here are not poems as such. They are libretti, theatrical voice- overs, and speeches. They likely fulfilled their purposes well, but they stand out in the collection and reveal uncomfortably the way Auden made money. They interrupt the book in the same way their writing must have interrupted his creativity. It is easy to

237 dismiss them as a misjudgment by Auden or his publisher, since they seem to add little. But it is far more likely that they are deliberately included to break the romance and stress the reality of living as a poet or writer.

Hitting Back

As City Without Walls shows, Auden was not opposed to calling out the system in which he participated. In Berlin, he found a way to attempt a similar rebuke to the Ford Foundation. In 1965, the City of Berlin created a book to give to Ford as a gift of thanks for their investments. Entitled Berlin Confrontation, it includes an introduction and thank you from Willy Brandt and an overview of the three main artistic programs funded by the Foundation with acknowledgement of the range of

Ford investments throughout the city. The primary contents are contributions from a number of artists who participated in the Ford-run years of the program from 1963–

1965. The great majority of these are reflections on artists’ time in Berlin or related to what they created while there. The poem Auden included is “The Cave of Making: In

Memoriam Louis MacNeice.” Originally published in About the House in 1965 as part of the sequence “Thanksgiving for a House,” the poem is a memoriam to Louis

MacNeice, Auden’s longtime friend and collaborator. At its heart, however, it is a contemplation of the private, sacred art of creating and a mixed lament and acceptance of the role the poet has in twentieth-century society. It accomplishes this through recounting how MacNeice and Auden came to understand their positions as poets.

The poem opens with a description of Auden’s office or writing studio. Now that MacNeice has departed the physical world, now that he cannot demand anything of Auden’s time or attention, he is invited in as company to his private chamber: 238

Seeing you know our mystery from the inside and therefore how much, in our lonely dense, we need the companionship of our good dead, to give us comfort on dowly days when the self is a nonentity dumped on a mound of nothing, to break the spell of our self-enchantment when lip-smacking imps of mawk and hooey write with us what they will, you won’t think me imposing if I ask you to stay at my elbow Until cocktail-time… (111–121)

As with all of Auden’s poems, it is essentially personal. Bringing MacNeice into his antechamber, Auden describes his writing space full of piles of paper, dictionaries, his typewriter, a heaving mess of creative energy; it is just as it had been described by friends and visitors to Auden’s houses (Carpenter). Though Auden, and most certainly his visitors, described his room and house in a constant state of disarray,

Auden’s description belies an underlying more important sense of order:

…Devoid of flowers and family photographs, all is subordinate here to a function, designed to discourage day-dreams – hence windows averted from plausible videnda but admitting a light one could mend a watch by – and to sharpen hearing: reached by an outside staircase, domestic noises and odors, the vast background of natural life are shut off. Here silence is turned into objects. (8–17)

While papers and books may be stacked and strewn about, the entire space is designed to focus his mind on the creative process and possibility. The personal, the domestic are closed out. The entrance of light is managed so that it comes through precisely to enlighten the space perfectly for thinking while blocking any distraction

239 or potential realistic impressions onto his mind; the plausible is averted while the piercing light is admitted. It is in this carefully staged and protected physical space that Auden writes—and in so doing, makes language material.

The word domestic hangs in the air: “reached by an/ outside staircase, domestic” (Berlin Confrontation 98). Auden’s space is reached not through the shared house, but by an external staircase, making the entrance to his studio a divide between the wild and the domestic, imbuing it as a safe and secure place, but one that is not overwrought with the internal. As the next line runs on, the domestic becomes part of something greater “…domestic/noises and odors, the vast background of natural/life are shut off” (Berlin Confrontation 98). Auden’s external cave blocks out the noises of other people, his partner walking, the maid cleaning, food cooking, making his space secure, protected by the rising stairs and sealed door. The domestic is at once a kind of ideal, necessary to feed creation, but also a threat. His studio is a refuge that blocks out the external, public concerns and noise and lets us contemplate it at a distance, yet it is also a space that must be closely managed. In its structure it mirrors

West Berlin, blocked off, creating an environment to feed creativity, but Auden’s cave shuts out the noise, while the enclosure of West Berlin amplified and intensified it.

For Auden, shutting off the noise does not mean excluding the world. Taking away the physical and living human distractions, Auden is still encircled or supported by the private and historical. He invites MacNeice into his room not as a departed soul, but as a part of his private space. He laments, “I wish, Louis, I could have shown it you / while you were still in public” (Berlin Confrontation 98). MacNeice has not departed from the physical to the spiritual world, but moved from the public to the

240 private. He has gone from an actor in the intellectual, public landscape to a private influence to be remembered, recalled, entertained within and through only internal dialogues. It is a dialogue that Auden would value. MacNeice, a “lover of women and

Donegal,” straight and Irish, would bring a different perspective to queer and British

(now American) Auden’s consideration of the sacred space of creation (Berlin

Confrontation 98). Beyond these two outlined differences, Auden traces a historical landscape that maps their experiences, positions, and struggles into a shared personal development.

(for instance, four miles to our east, at a wood palisade, Carolingian Bavaria stopped, beyond it unknowable nomads). Friends we became by personal choice, but fate had already made us neighbors. (23–28)

The poem collapses the medieval empire of Charlemagne, the prehistoric Wayland

(Weland) and Horace, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and German attempts at empire through WWI and WWII into a shared history. By doing so, it ties together

Auden’s present in Austria with Germany and the United Kingdom and Ireland to a clear map of his private mythology fostered through his growth and long friendship with MacNeice. The fate of geography made each of these locations neighbors and the interactions inevitable. Auden highlights that it is only by choice friendships are forged. The poem lays bare the decision to see our neighbors as either “unknowable nomads). Friends we became” (Berlin Confrontation 98). The two possibilities are laid out stretching in opposite directions with the wall of a single parenthesis in between. Auden references his physical house in Austria where he is providing the imaginary tour to MacNeice. Just beyond, to the east, centuries ago were the 241 unknowable nomads, enemies, or dangers of the Carolingian dynasty. In Auden’s present, the 1960s, the unknowable nomads of the Soviet Union are not much further east, he suggests. Auden and MacNeice reached across the divide of England and

Ireland to be friends, suggesting such a closure is possible. The mapping of the historical interpretations of unknowable others to the present existence of the same is juxtaposed with the insistent possibility of another choice. Just as the perceived disarray of Auden’s studio initially obfuscates the carefully managed discipline of the space to engender artistic creation, there is the possibility that in the historic neighboring of two states, a choice can be made.

The possibility is raised, but quickly dashed:

More than ever Life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, lovable, But we shan’t, not since Stalin and Hitler, Trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively, All is possible. (45–49)

Having sketched the historical landscape and admitted its potentiality, Auden tamps it down with the fact that our worst nightmares are also surely possible, suggesting that hope should be mediated. Confronted with the unlikelihood of reconciliation, the poem turns to Auden and MacNeice’s position within the historic landscape. Where previously in his essays Auden bemoaned the lost public role of the poet in the twentieth century, here he waxes on about its advantages. He puts the domesticity of poems, the private, closed, indivisible nature of them on a pedestal. Instead of lamenting the decline of the public role, he revels in a poet’s ability to escape the market:

Who would, for preference be a bard in an oral culture, 242 obliged at drunken feasts to improvise an eulogy of some beefy illiterate burner, giver of rings, or depend for bread on the moods of a Baroque Prince expected, like his dwarf, to amuse? After all, it’s rather a privilege amid the affluent traffic to serve this unpopular art which cannot be turned into background-noise for study or hung as a status-trophy by rising executives, cannot be “done” like Venice or abridged like Tolstoy, but stubbornly still insists upon being read or ignored: our handful of clients at least can rune. (70–84)

Auden cuts out the glory of the public bard and states the harsh truth about the obligations those earlier lauded poets faced: the pressure to perform, necessity to please, and the demand to provide glory above honesty. While poets might not be held in high esteem or valued in the general public, they have gained an intellectual privacy. Just as Auden is safely guarded in his writing studio, so is poetry guarded from the demands of the government and the market. A poem is self-contained and finite. It cannot be divided, hung in the businesses or corridors of the powerful, or played in cafes; if it were, it would be viewed as odd. Poetry is not held in high regard by twentieth-century society or capitalism and, in its low esteem, it has escaped a battering. The readers who do engage are true fans, a committed audience, leaving the conversation rich and appreciative. The artist in his domestic study sits parallel his poem in the cave of capitalism: protected, secure, and there only for those who seek it out.

Unlike Plato’s cave, in Auden’s aerie, poets do not project shadows; they cannot. In an intriguing move, it is one of the few arguments for a positive perspective on poetry’s discounted and debased value in a capitalist order of art. As

243 Auden said in his 1940 tribute to William Butler Yeats: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/ In the valley of its making where executives/ Would never want to tamper” (“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”). By its unimportance, it escapes market influence and demands. Poetry is not easily commoditized outside of a few works or cut-out phrases put onto inspirational posters. It is not the poetry that makes a poet money and is not what made Auden much money either.

Auden made money by his criticism, teaching, lecturing. His poems on their own were not as valuable, but they were also therefore protected. Auden did not write something special as a gift for Berlin, the city that had played such an influential role in his life. He also did not choose something related to the political conflict or to his funders, such as “On the Circuit,” “Elegy for J.F.K,” or his poems responding to the aggressions of the Soviet Union. He did not write something to show solidarity with the German people or play the role of the bard or public poet. In short, he did not choose a politically engaged poem. Instead, knowing that Ford was the intended recipient of the collection, he slyly rejected its demands, underlining the fact that they cannot interfere in his work or compel him to act. Yet he accepted their money and his work appears in a book with their name on the front; as Auden knew, it’s complicated and one is always complicit.

While Auden accrued accolades and opportunities in the lucrative cultural

Cold War trade, he persistently worked to find a rationalization for his position as one of its foot soldiers. His defense is epitomized in his contribution to Berlin

Confrontation. Auden attempted to cleanly divide his authentic, personal creative work—his poetry—from his commissioned criticism, translations, and lectures. He fully acknowledged the diminished status of the poet in the twentieth century and

244 tried to celebrate it or simply accept it. This division and minimization coupled with economic necessity attempts to excuse his complicity. More than suggesting a perfect solution, Auden’s case shows that artists and writers who were not diametrically opposed to the West’s invocation of the Cold War, those who thought, like Auden, that capitalism was better than communism and fascism, could easily get swept up and take part in its battles because it was a way to make money. They did not necessarily make this decision lightly and, at least in Auden’s case, could tie themselves in knots to find peace with their position in this new corporate order of the world.

245 Conclusion: Swindling the Devil

The chaos at the end of WWII led to the re-mapping of geographical boundaries across the world. It also engendered the re-shaping of civil landscapes, accelerating the rise of institutions in all areas of life: governance, civil and corporate.

This was perhaps most evident and extreme in the United States where governmental departments and agencies proliferated and corporate enterprises ballooned with postwar glut, growing not only in size but also influence. Philanthropies were and are one of the key tangents between governmental bodies and corporate wealth. These funders were the epitome of C. Wright Mills’ “power elite.” Mills illustrates how throughout the mid-twentieth century the robber barons of the previous decades were being transformed into industrial statesmen through endowments and foundations

(94–95). The Fords and Rockefellers are prime examples of how the establishment of foundations, the commissioning of official histories, and the service of their resources and men during WWII remade corporations into good-hearted patriots. Combining hard capital, often earned through ruthless business practices, and a professed benign do-gooding mission, philanthropies wield power and pursue social policies both in coordination and in conflict with their legally and socially empowered government counterparts. Philanthropies are therefore fruitful sites for investigating how the state- private network operates and for thinking through its influences and effects, particularly on knowledge production and creative energy—the very ideas and research that shape our lives.

The Ford Foundation’s Berlin programs were a site of government and philanthropic cooperation. The shared experiences and interests of their personnel evidence how the state-private network reinforced itself, productively connecting 246 government agencies, military leadership, chairmen of boards, and even the press. It was also a gathering point for international artists, each of whom had diverse motivations and relationships to the funders, Germany, and the Cold War. While funding research allows the patron general control over which ideas are pursued, funding artists includes far more risk; the product is elusive, in many cases uncontrollable, yet with a higher potential for public engagement. The decision to patronize artists therefore is a risky one. The work of Penny von Eschen illustrates the headaches US government agencies had by supporting artists. The short-lived nature of philanthropy’s support for artistic creation as opposed to exhibiting and financing tours of known works shows how quickly the burgeoning philanthropists realized this.

Governments and philanthropies support artists generally when the reward is having them on the payroll, when the exhibit is the artist her or himself. Why artists decide to participate is a different question. In The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz details the many ways people in the Soviet republics justified their participation in the new communist government and thus their acquiescence to and even celebration of

Stalinism. In the case of Catholics, Milosz argues that they rationalized participation in the government and bureaucracy of the Soviet republics by believing it was part of god’s larger plan. In return for their participation Catholics were tolerated by the government bureaucracy, the Center, but treated as “shamans or witch-doctors from savage tribes whom one humors until one can dress them in trousers and send them to school. They appear in various state spectacles and are even sent abroad as shining testimonials to the Center’s tolerance toward uncivilized races” (73). The religious adherents went along with government efforts believing that it was part of god’s bigger plan, that they were using the system for their own ends. Milosz undercuts

247 their logic concluding: “… they swindle the devil who thinks he is swindling them.

But the devil knows what they think and is satisfied” (73).

In much the same way that Catholics in Milosz’s example told themselves that they were the ones using the government, artists and intellectuals who accepted and promoted US government and philanthropic funding told themselves that they were just taking advantage of the situation for their own ends. This is echoed loudly in both

Herbert and Piers Paul Read’s claims of helping to steer the resources already ear- marked for cultural activities to more amenable ends and in Auden’s approach to getting what financial benefits he could with minimal political engagement. The artists and intellectuals claimed that they were swindling “the devil” by taking advantage of the generous resources to pursue their work. To an extent they were right. They received money and benefits often to pursue their own projects or ideas.

Overall though, the funders’ aims were not to promote particular ideas, but rather to create a spectacle on center stage and co-opt the leading thinkers into the ever- expanding circle of the state-private network. This state-private patronage not only served the immediate Cold War aims of exhibiting the vibrancy of Western culture, but also normalized artists’ collaboration with philanthropies, corporations, and government agencies, engendering a new form of literary patronage that ultimately appears as its own sub-genre of literature: foundation literature.

In 1967, there was an outcry against CIA funding of artists and intellectuals.

No one yelled about Ford funding writers or Rockefeller supporting art, though successive critiques have slowly emerged and are now gaining prominence.191

Through government overreach private patronage was largely accepted as benign.

191 For example, the Institutional Critique movement and growing protests against British Petrol, Warren Kanders, and Sackler family patronage. 248 While the government pursued a trickle-down theory of thought, hoping that amplifying preferred voices would lead the public in the desired direction, the more important goal they achieved was normalizing a corporate and philanthropic presence in society. Artists and intellectuals helped soften and humanize the images of organizations that were simultaneously trying to shape society to their ideal vision without the annoying issue of democratic oversight.

The writers considered in my dissertation and all of the artists who took part in various Cold War projects did not naively sign up. The case studies presented here evidence that throughout the 1950s and certainly by the early 1960s writers across the world understood that patronage emanating from the United States had political aims.

Every artist appearing at an event or publishing in an American-supported publication knew that they were choosing a political side. When the CCF was exposed as primarily a CIA operation in 1967, careers were tarnished and plausible deniability was invoked across the board, in some cases more successfully than others. While many intellectuals, particularly those deeply involved in the organization, dismissed accusations with pleas of ignorance or a shrug of the shoulders, the four writers considered here show a deepening concern regarding the intent and influence of this new flow of governmental and corporate patronage. Bachmann’s assertion in 1950 that the newly formed CCF weighed on her “like a sickness” proved to be prophetic for all intellectuals (quoted in McVeigh 2014 362).192 While the exposure of covert funding may have been a blow to the cultural Cold War narrative regarding the freedom of intellectuals in a capitalist society, those consequences were short lived and arguably, as a result of the timing and the Cold War’s shift to a focus on the

192 Original text: Der Kongress liegt auf mir wie eine Krankheit. 249 Global South, the collateral damage in relation to the West’s Cold War was limited.

The intellectuals who tried to shrug their shoulders paid the heavy price. As

Christopher Lasch writes, “[in] associating themselves with the war-making and propaganda machinery of the state in the hope of influencing it, intellectuals deprive themselves of the real influence they could have…Time after time in this century it has been shown that the dream of influencing the war machine is a delusion. Instead the war machine corrupts the intellectuals” (108–109).

These case studies illustrate that the writers involved had no illusions about the state-private network at play. The writers explicitly included references to and discussions of their funding in the texts they created during and after their fellowships. For financial and personal reasons they decided the tradeoff was worth the risk. The experiences of Bachmann, Gombrowicz, Read, and Auden establish that writers, while taking part, were increasingly aware of the consequences and attempted to either raise the alarm, criticize the effort, or at least wave their arms desperately for humanity to take notice of this development. All of these authors witnessed a change to a more corporate and functional approach to culture. They worried about the monitoring of discussion by funding decisions and the careful framing and stage management of the presentation of themselves and their work. Their critiques exposed the perfunctory and performative nature of much cultural exchange. There is no doubt they each benefitted financially, gaining publications and new audiences from the connections and networks the state-private funding and private-public cooperation the

Cold War conflict encouraged. In their divergent ways, they were all also simultaneously alarmed at the cool operation of the foundation man in his suit and big black car, armed with briefcases of cash.

250 Despite the CCF members’ insistence that the CIA never actually influenced their work, the texts produced by artists-in-residence show an intense engagement with the changing world of patronage and the Cold War conflict. The funders created the environment and the environment in turn shaped the concerns of the writers, engendering the subgenre of foundation literature. Foundation literature, particularly of the mid-twentieth century, directly incorporates the presence of foundations and their financial largess along with the wider context of the state-private network and cultural exchange to which it devoted its resources. Throughout the works discussed here, the foundation man repeatedly appears, never playing a dominating role but asserting a lasting presence. When Gombrowicz arrived to Berlin, he was placed in a long black car and delivered to his residence. As Höllerer noted, there was a buffet of

Western culture just below him, which Bachman brought to critical cacophony in her essay “Ein Ort für Zufälle,” where the big black car ferries diplomats and foundation men across the border and officials weigh heavy judgment on art works as artists lives hang in the balance. The figure of the foundation man himself appears in Auden’s poems as the corporate American man with deep pockets. In Read’s novels he is depicted as cold, exacting, and drawn using overt anti-Semitism, injecting a disturbing element of racism.

Foundation literature also usually issues a warning about the dangers of this public-private patronage and the limits it sought to impose on creative production. As

George Kennan’s concept of containment took over the US Cold War approach, cultural patronage also attempted to dictate the range of movement available to intellectuals in the country’s sphere. In all of the texts discussed here, cultural exchange plays an integral role to their themes evidencing the paid writers’

251 preoccupation and clear awareness of their own context. Plot lines include foundation men figures and instances of cultural exchange programs, such as visits to embassies, the employment of writers, and the circulation of art works. More critically, the texts are all centered on the relationship of the individual writer or artist with the political and financial context of the mid-twentieth century and the writer’s limited ability to avoid being co-opted into the expanding state-private network and its influence.

Gombrowicz’s Cosmos explores the potential influence of an individual’s assertion of meaning, arguing it is negligible. Bachmann outlines the personal damage involvement in the system requires. Read illustrates the power of political forces and their desire to use culture instrumentally. Auden issues the warning that there is no escape. All of these writers found themselves immersed in the state-private network; initially making the compromise to take part, they ultimately emerged with concern and often desperate pleas for serious attention to the loss of artistic agency within the merging of financial and political power in such direct forms.

Finally, foundation literature exhibits a longing for what Virginia Woolf articulated as “a room of one’s own.” Auden published his collection About the

House, just as he could finally depart from the world of state-sponsorship, taking a jab at Ford and its American dollars on his way out. As Bachmann retreated from the corporate structures, she longed for wider walls and higher ceilings to break out of the patriarchal, financial strictures that had attempted to set themselves firmly around artistic creation. Stuck between East and West the demands literally drained

Gombrowicz physically while he longed for a stable home. Finding themselves fenced in by the political environment, held there through financial necessity, these writers longed to delineate and hold their own space of being.

252 Ford’s cultural programs were one instance of state-private network funding that normalized government and corporate cultural patronage. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s there were several other instances of similar activity including the Ford

Foundation’s Creative Writers Program, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in

Washington D.C., and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Writers in these programs took up similar concerns in their work such as Saul Bellow’s eponymous character Herzog who is paid thousands by the Narragansett Corporation to continue his study and undertake cultural tours and James Baldwin’s novel Another Country, which explores artistic integrity and physical and social mobility while issuing wider challenges to the foundation man’s desired picture of mid-century America. Ford funding supported both of these writers.

The foundation man oversaw the proliferation of artistic programs and selected the participants. When selecting recipients for their Creative Writers program, Ford Foundation officials were “struck by the fact that many of [the writers] seemed to have had Guggenheim fellowships and also awards from the National

Institute of Arts and letters.”193 The overlap of personnel and priorities suggest that this was not actually surprising. As Parmar has asserted, direct coordination between foundations and agencies was not necessary because shared values and perspectives dictated similar thought patterns and results, perpetuating a view that promoted capital and individual expression as long as it remained within the walls and borders established by the builders and did not challenge the foundations. In this context, it is clear to see that the Berlin programs were not designed to topple the wall, but rather to entrench it. It is also only one example of a much wider phenomenon. In the face of

193 Ford Foundation Writers Program. Letter from EFD to WML. December 3, 1958. Project File C- 638 – 1958 Writers Program. Reel No. 086, FF-RAC. 253 this new reality, the writers involved emerged from their experiences with grave concerns and labored to render them in texts of warning.

The legacy of the state-private network established in the early Cold War is still with us today. Academia is rife with opportunities for philanthropic and government funding and these types of grants have become enshrined as one way to help ensure success in an ever more competitive market. Just as writers found that involvement with Gruppe 47 and later the LCB helped open doors to future success,

Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Carnegie research grants and Facebook and Amazon internships, along with government agency fellowships, open doors to publications and jobs. In all arenas, they encourage academics, students, and artists to market themselves and their project to secure these lucrative and celebrated milestones and hopefully lay the groundwork for future success.

This is not news to anybody in academia or the arts. Scholars in Education and the Social Sciences have made headway in studying how philanthropic and corporate support of the arts has influenced the direction of research and policy. Researchers of art history have made some progress in this as well. With this work, I have brought attention to the ways state-private coordination and sponsorship of writers has influenced literature as well. More urgently, reviewing the literary works of mid- twentieth century writers with their patrons in full sight can help us think about our position in this hyper-corporatized and increasingly precarious society. In a world of proliferating foundations built on tech industry wealth along with the status-marking acceptance of the old foundation stalwarts, it would behoove us to better understand how sponsorship influences work and to yield the warnings of writers who came before.

254 Archives Consulted

Ford Foundation Archive, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York,

USA.

Ingeborg Bachmann Archive, Literature Archive of the Austrian National Library,

Vienna (LIT), Austria.

German Federal Archives, Koblenz, Germany.

German Literature Archive, Marbach am Neckar, Germany.

Papers of Piers Paul Read. Special Collections, Leeds University Library, Leeds,

United Kingdom.

Walter Höllerer Archive, Literature Archive Sulzbach-Rosenberg, Sulzbach-

Rosenberg, Germany.

Witold Gombrowicz Archive. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.

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