From Anti-Fascim to Anti-Totalitarianism: Congress of Intellectuals from 1948 to 1950

Helmut Peitsch gives a talk about symposia of intellectuals held from 1948 to 1950 in Wrocław, New York, Paris and Berlin and relates them to the two meetings of the International PEN in London in 1941 and 1944. From Deutsches Haus NYU:

By looking at the reception of the congresses of 1948–49 in the press of the Western and Soviet Zones of Germany the following question will be asked: How did writers and audiences come to accept that, even though enforced, exclusion did not contradict freedom of expression? Or, as the CIA’s historian Michael Warner, in 1995, wrote on the Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘that debate in the West is truly free, with room for all shades of anti-totalitarian opinion.’