120 J.-A. PEMBERTON
referred, largely concerned the fact that present at the event were three
Italians: Giuliano, Ugo Ojetti and Alessandro Pavolini.^122
Pavolini at that time was president of the Confederazione Fascista
dei professionisti e dei artisti and in that capacity was a member, along
with his compatriot Ojetti, of the ICIC’s Letters and Arts Committee.^123
Following a period of service as a volunteer in Ethiopia, in connec-
tion with which he ‘boasted about his military prowess,’ Pavolini had
resumed what Richard M. Bosworth describes as his ‘comfortably
worldly life as a cultural agent of the regime’^124 Pavolini vigorously chal-
lenged the statement on literary freedom that concluded the resolutions
presented to the participants, warning that it was ‘susceptible to divide
us.’ The reason Pavolini gave for objecting to the statement was that
it appeared to define the stance of the writer as one of independence in
relation to the great social, political and ideological movements that were
agitating the modern world. Pavolini maintained that while some writers
demanded the liberty to be above the fray, others demanded the liberty
to plunge head-long into it. This, he enthused, was exactly what he and
other young writers had done during the revolution of the Blackshirts.
One cannot say, Pavolini advised his fellow discussants, whether the
future destiny of letters will depend on those who were ‘above the
mélée’ or those who ‘want to be with all their soul in the heart of the
mélée.’^125
Georges Duhamel, a member of the Freedom Library, or what was
otherwise known as the German Library of Burned Books which
had been established on May 10, 1934, out of a ‘desire to empha-
size the barbarism perpetrated by the Nazi book burnings,’ and of the
Académie française, feigned astonishment at Pavolini’s intervention.^126
(^122) Ibid., 6, 187–88.
(^123) Ibid., 7. Note that Ugo Ojetti had participated in the conversations on Goethe in
1932 in Frankfurt that were organised by the Permanent Committee of Letters and Arts of
the ICIC and later published by the IIIC. See n. 116 above.
(^124) R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship (London: Allen Lane,
2005), 506–8. In October 1939, Alessandro Pavolini would become the minister of popu-
lar culture. He later would be a pivotal figure in the notorious Republic Sociale Italiana or
Saló Republic.
(^125) Société des Nations, Institut International de la Coopération Intellectuelle, Entretiens:
Le destin prochain des lettres, 187–89.
(^126) Jean-Michel Palmier, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and
America (London: Verso, 2006), 293.