As trains carrying writers from around Europe rolled into Weimar on Thursday, October 24 1941, the [Axis’s] articulation of an alternative model of European literature began with, or rather through, these writers themselves.³³ In political terms, the group the Germans assembled in Weimar reflected the map of [the Axis in] Europe. Predictably, it included some invitees distinguished solely by their […] fascist political commitments.

In literary–political terms, however, it represented regions and trends that the French model of European literature had generally excluded from the upper echelons of international literary exchange. Substantial contingents represented the literatures of Europe’s northern and southeastern periphery, from Norway and Finland to Croatia, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. Of course, individual writers from some of these countries had achieved success in Paris.

But the writers the [Axis] called ‘European’ were generally ‘national writers’ ― both in the sense that their readership was largely confined to their nation and in the sense that they placed their talents at the service of the political-cultural project of the nation, rejecting the autonomous status of the ‘international writer’.³⁴

In their national contexts, several were important figures. Veikko Antero Koskenniemi was Finland’s ‘unofficial national poet,’ author in 1940 of new lyrics for the hymn in Sibelius’s Finlandia; historical novelist Fani Popova-Mutafova was a leading intellectual of interwar Bulgaria; Slovakian novelist Jozef Cíger Hronsky led the influential nationalist cultural association Matica Slovenská.³⁵

The focus on national writers accounts for the heavy representation of authors of naturalistic novels set in the rural village or farm — not so much out of ideological linkages to [Fascist] ‘blood and soil’ ideology, but because this was the central literary genre for many of Europe’s predominantly agricultural societies.

Writers in this vein included prominent figures like internationally successful Belgian children’s author (and Flemish nationalist) Felix Timmermans, and Europe’s greatest novelist of ‘the soil’, Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun, who communicated his support for the Writers’ Union by telegram.³⁶

Moreover, a significant group among these ‘national’ writers could also be classified as ‘regional’. Works by writers like the Transylvanian-Hungarian Josef Nyirö, Dutch writer and Frisian nationalist Pieter Sybesma, or Norwegian Lars Hansen, whose ishavslitteratur ― travel literature set amid the icy landscapes of the North Pole ― sold well in Germany, all expressed unique forms of life seen to have emerged from the intensely local relationship between people and their regions or landscapes.³⁷

But the predilection for rural themes did not mean the writers were themselves all provincials. The group included many sophisticated, multi-lingual, urban intellectuals, often responsible for translations into their national languages of major works from more established literary languages, above all French and German ― but not for this reason any less nationalist.³⁸

Right-wing Finnish nationalist Koskenniemi, for example, had translated Goethe and Balzac into Finnish. Croatian Antun Bonifačić’, cultural director of the Ustasha régime’s foreign office, had studied at the Sorbonne and published a study on Paul Valéry.³⁹

As these writers mixed and mingled with one another, while being told repeatedly that they were ‘the intellectual select [geistige Auslese] of all European nations,’ they were offered a definition of European writer that built on a [fascistised], antisemitic updating of the traditional German-Herderian model of literature: European literature was composed of national literatures, and only those writers who most authentically expressed their nations’ spirits deserved the title ‘European’.⁴⁰

This was a European literature with no place for cosmopolitan exiles, modernists who appealed to Parisian trends while ignoring the local public, or, needless to say, Jews; nor for those European nationalities now slated for repression, like the Poles, Czechs or Russians, among many others. But with regard to those nationalities it included, this model called on the broad currency of the German model of literature, which after all had stimulated the emergence of some of these national literatures to begin with.⁴¹

Moreover, by including and celebrating regional and rural writers, this vision of European literature capitalized on the international 1930s trend for literary regionalism. Partaking of what Roberto Dainotto calls the ‘metaphysics of place,’ writers and critics across Europe saw in realist texts about specific rural regions a comforting vision of uncorrupted traditions ― cast against the cultural rootlessness and superficiality of urban modernity ― as a basis for literary (and political) renewal and regeneration.⁴²

In Germany this kind of thinking had received its most sophisticated exposition by Martin Heidegger, and had been fully systematized in multi-volume works of völkisch and racist literary theory.⁴³ Thus the writers gathered at Weimar cannot simply be dismissed as ‘applauding pieces of scenery, comparable to the participants in any number of State and Party events’.⁴⁴

On the contrary, this assemblage reflected a careful strategy on the [Axis’s] part: presenting this particular group of authors to the world, to one another, and to themselves as European deliberately labeled national and indeed regional writers as the most European. It turned Larbaud’s definition of the European writer, whereby the ‘European’ was the supra-national, precisely on its head.

(Emphasis added.)

The inclusionary pretensions coupled with the exclusionary practices should sound familiar to some of you: creators (usually white cishet men) who either promote or conform to the status quo are honoured by prestigious institutions while revolutionary socialists are ignored.