Hope in a Moonlit Graveyard

In Geneva last week there met, for the first time since World War II, a cultural conference of the remnants of Europe's brilliant intellectuals. Their purpose: to try to relight those lamps of civilization which Viscount Grey, watching darkness close over Europe in 1914, said would not be lighted again in our time. Near by loomed the abandoned palace of one of man's highest hopes: the League of Nations. Around them lay a shattered Europe whose mood might be conveyed in the title of one of Delegate Georges Bernanos' books: Vast Cemeteries in the Moonlight.

This peace conference of the mind had not been called by any government. It was largely organized by Marcel Raymond, a Geneva university professor, and Swiss Musician Ernst-Alexandre Ansermet. Present were delegates from France (Catholic Writer Georges Bernanos, Socialist Writer Jean Guehenno), Italy (Socialist Novelist Ignazio Silone), Hungary (Marxist Critic George Lukacs), Germany (Existentialist Karl Jaspers), Switzerland (Philosopher Denis de Rougemont), Britain (Poet Stephen Spender) and others.

Caricatures of the Past. Most formal sessions were held in the Athenee (birthplace of the Red Cross). Corridor conferences were held in a Geneva restaurant whose walls were hung with malicious caricatures of statesmen of the Europe which had just died. Cigaret smoke spiraled spectrally across figures of Laval, Briand, Chamberlain, Mussolini, as the intellectuals discussed the mistakes of the past and tried to lay a groundwork for a new pan-European peace of the mind.

Said Poet Stephen Spender: "The gap across Europe does not separate victors and vanquished, but the devastated poor countries and those which are still intact and rich. Let's prevent one side living in self-pity and resentment, and the other in self-righteousness and fear of contamination."

Said Georges Bernanos: "Europe has not another fundamental reality today than the black market. ... It is becoming a civilization of hands, hands to beg, hands to take, to steal, instead of being a civilization of souls. Machines are such hands, the atom bomb is such a hand, formed to smash the world. Why have we a bomb to destroy a city in one minute and no machine to construct a city in the same time? . . . The world cannot be saved by machines or by popular masses. It can only be saved by free men."

Only George Lukacs (who was Commissar for Culture in Bela Kun's Hungarian Soviet Republic, and has since lived in Moscow) again & again urged the subordination of the individual, especially the intellectual, to the community.

Retorted Existentialist Karl Jaspers: "When acting, we have to be guided by a moral conviction and not by the illusion that we are on the inside of the secret of history."

Victors & Vanquished. For the first time since the war, representatives of the victors and vanquished met on common ground to face common problems. Some decisions: the delegates recognized the collective war guilt of the German people (acknowledged by Jaspers); recognized the collective guilt of all Europeans; recognized their common responsibility for salvaging or resurrecting the chief moral values of western civilization. The delegates agreed to organize a permanent congress of European intellectuals.

There was one notable absence from the conference--Soviet Historian Eugene Tarle, who did not reply to the invitation. Russian Novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was also approached. Cried he: "What do you want? We in Russia have no dilettantes, but men of action. Your meeting does not interest me. . . . Your only aim is to prepare another war."

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