Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was formed under the official patronage of Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, Karl Jaspers and Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher. These old men conferred respectability and authority upon the new venture, but the political drive and intellectual energy behind it came from a glittering middle generation of liberal or ex-Communist intellectuals—Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, A. J. Ayer, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Ignazio Silone, Nicola Chiaromonte and Sidney Hook. They, in turn, were assisted by a group of younger men, mostly American, who took responsibility for the day to day planning and administration of the CCF’s activities. The CCF would eventually open up offices in thirty-five countries worldwide, but the focus of its attention was on Europe, and within Europe on France, Italy and Germany. The goal was to rally, energize and mobilize intellectuals and scholars for the struggle with Communism, primarily through the publication and dissemination of cultural periodicals: Encounter in Britain, Preuves in France, Tempo Presente in Italy and Der Monat in Germany. None of these journals ever reached a large audience—Encounter, the most successful, boasted a circulation of 16,000 copies by 1958; in the same year Preuves had just 3,000 subscribers. But their contents were of an almost unvaryingly high quality, their contributors were among the best writers of the post-war decades, and they filled a crucial niche—in F...