Writers' Block: The Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935

by Jacob Boas

In 1935, 230 writers from 38 countries converged on Paris to consider ways of countering the fascist threat to culture. Held against a background of a rapidly changing political climate, the five-day congress attended by some of Europe's foremost writers — André Gide, André Malraux, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Ilya Ehrenburg, Aldous Huxley, among others — ultimately collapsed in a bitter standoff between Soviet and Western conceptions of freedom of expression, literature, and political engagement. Of all such congresses held in the 1930s, none better exemplified the interplay between history, politics, and literature. Writers' Block looks beneath the surface to expose the complex wiring that motivated participants. Clashing ideologies and personalities drive the narrative forward. Jacob Boas is the author of a number of books on the Holocaust and teaches history at Linfield College (McMinville, Oregon, USA).

162 pages, Hardcover

Published December 19, 2016

About the author

Jacob Boas has a Ph.D. in modern European history and is a historian, writer, and translator. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife.

Reviews

[Dylan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hundred of artists, writers, thinkers, and revolutionaries gather together under the banner against fascism—it sounds almost utopian, even suggesting a Golden Age of the European public intellectual. Too bad it was an all-out disaster of conflicting egos, platforms, and ethos. And could even spell the end of collaboration between the Western European Intellectual and the Soviet. Romantic individualism vs. idealized collectivism, clean bourgeois hands vs. dirty revolutionary hands? Perhaps it was bound to fail. Though the threat of the Nazis, Franco, and Mussolini were real enough to attempt a union of opposites, and depending on how you read it, not all was a loss.

Told in a humorous play-by-play portraiture, Boas has a knack for writing history that is as stylistically engaging as prose.