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This article examines the European Writers’ Union, founded by Nazi Germany with representatives of 15 nations in October 1941, in the context of the history of the idea of European literature. It argues that this institution was a serious effort to re-order the international literary field into a European form, designed to help legitimate Nazi Germany’s New Order Europe and to establish the cultural hegemony which German elites believed they alone deserved. Aware that what Pierre Bourdieu calls the ‘literary field’ had its own rules, the Nazis sought at Weimar to legitimate their bid to reorder European literary life by highlighting Germany’s literary capital and by playing on the tensions within the interwar understanding of the concept of European literature. In this way, the European Writers’ Union marked a historically significant intervention into the contested and high-stakes issue of what ‘European literature’ was. Drawing on work by scholars of comparative literature and cultural sociology, this article sets the Writers’ Union in the transnational history of the literary field in twentieth-century Europe in order to interpret the rhetorical, ideological and practical strategies of what could be called the ‘soft power’ of Nazi Empire.

Bilateral treaties are an age-old tool of diplomacy, but before the First World War they were only rarely applied to the world of intellectual and cultural relations. This article explores the process by which diplomatic agreements on intellectual and cultural exchange came instead to be a common feature of interwar European international relations by contrasting two types of agreements identified by period observers: ‘intellectual’ accords, typified by the agreements France signed in the 1920s, and ‘cultural’ treaties, advanced by fascist Italy in the 1930s. Comparing France and Italy's use of such agreements in Central-Eastern Europe reveals that Italy's fascist regime responded to the crises and opportunities of the interwar period by developing a distinctive model of ‘cultural treaty’ that applied state power to international cultural exchange, and mobilised the idea of ‘culture’ itself, in a new and influential manner.

Photographs of the German and Soviet pavilions facing off at the Paris International Exposition in 1937 offer an iconic image of the interwar period, and with good reason. This image captures the interwar period's great conflict of ideologies, the international interconnectedness of the age and the aestheticisation of political and ideological conflict in the age of mass media and mass spectacle. [Figure 1] Last but not least, it captures the importance in the 1930s of what we now call cultural diplomacy. Both pavilions – Germany's, in Albert Speer's neo-classical tower bloc crowned with a giant swastika, and the Soviet Union's, housed in Boris Iofan's forward-thrusting structure topped by Vera Mukhina's monumental sculptural group – represented the outcome of a large-scale collaboration between political leaders and architects, artists, intellectuals and graphic and industrial designers seeking to present their country to foreign visitors in a manner designed to advance the country's interests in the international arena. Each pavilion, that is, made an outreach that was diplomatic – in the sense that it sought to mediate between distinct polities – using means that were cultural – in the sense that they deployed refined aesthetic practices (like the arts and architecture) and in the sense that they highlighted the distinctive features, or ‘culture’, of a particular group (like the German nation or the Soviet state).