This accompanies Tara Talwar Windsor’s Contemporary European History article ‘Extended Arm of Reich Foreign Policy’? Literary Internationalism, Cultural Diplomacy and the First German PEN Club in the Weimar Republic

In 2021 the international writers’ association PEN is celebrating the centenary of its foundation. In its 100th year PEN international is an umbrella organisation for over 150 PEN centres based in more than 100 countries and is one of the world’s oldest and best-known defenders of freedom of expression and human rights. As the founding centre, English PEN has launched a programme of events and initiatives to mark the centenary under the title ‘Common Currency’.

The notion of ‘common currency’ has been at the heart of PEN’s ideals and mission since its early years and is taken directly from the first article of the organisation’s charter: ‘Literature knows no frontiers and must remain a common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals’. This particular wording was adopted after discussions at PEN international congresses in the early 2000s, subtly but powerfully altering a long-standing emphasis on nations and the nation state enshrined in the original clause, which had been drafted by PEN’s first president, John Galsworthy, and formally ratified in 1927: ‘Literature, national though it be in origin, knows no frontiers, and should remain common currency between nations in spite of political or international upheavals.’ (My emphasis.)

PEN’s 1927 charter encapsulated both the tensions between and the interrelatedness of nationalism and internationalism which permeated the political and cultural spheres in the interwar period. Originally established in 1921 by British writer Catherine Amy Dawson Scott in response to the breakdown of international intellectual relations during the First World War, PEN was initially envisaged as an international dinner club that would draw writers from different countries together to overcome and avoid future recurrence of those national rivalries and political divisions.

One key challenge for PEN in the early years was to integrate literary representatives from former enemy nations. My article discusses the history of the early German PEN Club, which was formally established in 1924 after a difficult start amidst ongoing post-war tensions. The article charts how the (remarkably diverse) German PEN group negotiated its role as a semi-formal agent of cultural diplomacy, blending PEN’s overarching ethos of (ostensibly) non-political literary internationalism with the specific national concerns of the fledgling Weimar Republic.

From today’s perspective – and, indeed, in the eyes of many PEN members at the time – the notion of aligning PEN with the interests of a nation state, however young and fragile, seems counterintuitive for an organisation which prides itself on championing the ‘common currency’ of literature to challenge state authority. Nevertheless, by cultivating a mutually expedient – though by no means uncontroversial – relationship with the German Foreign Ministry and by using PEN to test different visions of international order, the German writers active in PEN debated and exercised their own intellectual and professional agency as part of the wider search for new ways to conduct international affairs in the aftermath of the First World War.

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