Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944

Part V: Conversations in Exile

V Conversations in Exile What has Helen to hope for? Nothing short of the death of the Immortals would restore her freedom, since it is the gods, not her fellow men, who have dared to put her in bondage. Her fate does not depend on the outcome of the war; Paris or Menelaus may get her, but for her nothing can really change. She is the prisoner of the passions her beauty excited, and her passivity is, so to speak, their underside....Homer is as implacable toward Helen as Tolstoy is towardAnna.Bothwomenhaverunawayfromhomethinkingthattheycouldabolishthepast and capture the future in some unchanging essence of love.They awake in exile and feel nothingbutadulldisgustfortheshriveledecstasythathasoutlivedtheirhope .Thepromiseoffreedomhasbeensloughedoffinservitude ;lovedoesnotobeytherulesoflovebutyieldstosome more ancient and ruder law. Beauty and death have become neighbors and from their alliance springs a necessity akin to that of force. Rachel Bespaloff, On the Iliad (1947) Inadissolvingsocietywhichblindlyfollowsthenaturalcourseofruin,catastrophecanbeforeseen . Only salvation, not ruin, comes unexpectedly, for salvation, not ruin, depends upon the libertyandthewillofmen.Kafka’sso-calledprophecieswerebutasoberanalysisofunderlying structures which today have come into the open. Hannah Arendt,“Franz Kafka: A Reevaluation” (1944) 205 As many of the contributors to this volume have argued, the face-to-face encounters at Pontigny-en-Amérique engendered fruitful, if subtle, shifts in the poetic, philosophical, and artistic exchanges between American and European culture. The formal and informal conversations that took place then may not have led to immediate or discernible outcomes. Nevertheless, more than sixty years later, their afterlife continues to occupy us. The contributions in this section embody the very essence of conversation as a form of action and of response to injustice and to imagining a world not prone to war and violence. First, in“A Tale of Two Iliads,”Christopher Benfey considers the imaginary dialogue between the French Jewish philosophers Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff. His close reading of their respective essays on the Iliad,“L’Iliade, ou, le poème de la force,”and De L’Iliade, investigates the converging and diverging understanding of force within the context of Nazi-occupied France and the impact of the war on these two contemporaries and their mutual friend Jean Wahl. The second essay documents an actual dialogue that took place at the Pontigny symposium in 2003. In the form of a conversation, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt’s biographer, and Jerome Kohn, the director of the Hannah Arendt Center in New York, consider Arendt’s understanding of violence. Their long-standing conversation about ideas, politics, and action dates back to their first encounter in 1968 in Arendt’s seminar “Political Experiences in the Twentieth Century.” In the true spirit of the Pontigny conversations of 1942–44, Young-Bruehl and Kohn take on the task of rereading Arendt’s understanding of the philosophical and political uses and abuses of force, violence , and power. Building on Arendt’s Pontigny talk in 1944 and subsequent essay “Franz Kafka: A Revaluation” (Partisan Review, 1944), and taking the two essays on the Iliad by Rachel Bespaloff and Simone Weil as points of reference, they place Arendt’s judgment of violence during the Vietnam War within the context of the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Iraq war, and curtailment of rights in the wake of the Patriot Act. In order to preserve the immediacy and fluidity of the conversation , the two interlocutors’responses to each other are identified as“installments” and their direct address preserved. The timeliness and continued relevance of this conversation stand as a reminder of the urgent necessity for conversing face-to-face with others in dark times. And finally, Holger Teschke, a German writer and former dramaturge and director at the Berliner Ensemble Theater in Berlin, describes in his notes to a short excerpt from Brecht’s little-known play Conversations in Exile (1940) the actual conversations between Brecht and Benjamin that took place in Denmark in 1934 and 1938. Their legacy embodies the multifaceted experience of refugees under German fascism. Brecht began the play while in exile in Finland, on his way to California via the Soviet Union. The play, a dialogue between two German refugees at a railroad station pub, a space of limbo for those on the run across borders in times of war and totalitarian regimes, was performed as a staged reading at the symposium at Mount Holyoke College as a tribute to participants in Pontigny-en-Amérique. 206 PartV:ConversationsinExile ...