Intellectuals and War (original) (raw)

2009, Journal of War and Culture Studies

The essence of the interface between intellectuals and war is choice. Of course, this is true for members of all populations caught up in war but more so for the intellectual who enjoys a high cultural profile and who intervenes in the public space. In considering the issue of intellectuals and war, the first part of this introduction will initially focus almost exclusively on the two world wars in order to consider the case of: intellectuals whose conscription in the armed forces modified their status as intellectuals; intellectuals who contributed to the war effort by living out or adapting their role as intellectuals to a new set of circumstances; and intellectuals who opposed war. Attention is then paid to the fragmentation of intellectual communities occasioned by war, a theme extended by a consideration of intellectuals and competing claims of legitimacy in a country under foreign occupation (in this case France 1940-1945). Finally, the role of the intellectual in a covert war will be examined. It is clearly way beyond the compass of a short contribution such as this to address any of these questions in detail and, because of restricted space, only a limited number of examples of intellectuals can be given. But it is hoped that the article will provoke thoughts and raise issues that may be developed elsewhere by others. Mobilization of the intellectuals in the armed forces in two world wars Unless they were exempt on grounds of age or ill-health, French and British intellectuals were mobilized in both world wars. But although it was expected that intellectuals should contribute to the war effort by joining the armed forces, their commitment to the national cause was nonetheless questioned in some quarters on both sides of the Channel. In France, in the 1930s, many conservatives took the view that far too many intellectuals were over-sympathetic to the USSR and 'Bolshevism', while in Britain during the same period, a traditional distrust of intellectuals had been reinforced by a belief, again in conservative circles, that the left/liberal intellectuals were undermining the patriotic spirit. This view, already common currency well before the outbreak of war, had been compounded by the Oxford Union vote in 1933 not to fight for King and country. At the annual meeting of the Royal Society of St George which took place shortly afterwards, Churchill declared, 'The worst difficulties from which we suffer…come from the unwarrantable mood of self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals' (Mawson 1942, quoted in Weight 2002: 44). These reservations not withstanding, when war was declared in 1939, intellectuals on both sides of the Channel were among the millions conscripted: the historian Christopher Hill, who had learned Russian during a year spent in the USSR, was transferred from the intelligence Corps to the Foreign Office; Raymond Williams was a commissioned officer in a tank unit which was in Normandy after D-Day before advancing through Belgium and Holland to Germany. E. P. Thompson served as a commissioned officer in North Africa and Italy, while his fellow historian Eric Hobsbawm remained a sergeant in the Education corps. 1 Across the Channel, André Malraux joined a tank unit, Louis Aragon was in a motorized division, André Breton worked in a medical section (Spotts 2008:9), while both Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre were allocated to meteorological units, the former based near the Belgian border, the latter, like author and future collaborationist Robert Brasillach, stationed in Alsace (Aron 1983: 162ff.; Cohen-Solal 1985: 193ff.; Pellissier 1989: 247ff.). Mobilization of intellectuals in support of the national war effort is rarely contentious. A notable exception, however, is the case of German Nobel Prize Winner Günther Grass who, in August 2006, revealed in an interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that he had been a member of the Waffen SS towards the end of the war (Grass 2006).