‘We all had the impression, I think, of having passed out of the modern world back into a vanished civilization.’ These were the words of the American historian James Shotwell following a visit to the devastated towns of Reims and Soissons in northern France in the spring of 1919.Footnote ¹ Shotwell was a prominent internationalist who taught at Columbia University, was heavily involved in the work of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and was a member of President Woodrow Wilson’s Inquiry, a team of experts brought together to plan the post-war peace.Footnote ² It was in the latter capacity that he was in Paris in 1919 as part of the American delegation to the peace conference. During his time in Paris, Shotwell visited the nearby battlefields and régions dévastées, confronting the material damage of total war face on, and writing of his experiences in graphic detail in his diary. The battlefields of Verdun and the Belgian town of Ypres, he recounted, symbolized ‘the utmost that has ever been suffered and endured by men from the beginning of the world’.Footnote ³ And yet Shotwell argued that while wartime destruction needed to be understood in a manner which was tangible and graphic, it also took more subtle forms where ‘there was no marching army in evidence’. This was the cultural war. ‘There are devastated regions in the realms of philosophy and religion’, he argued, ‘as well as on the desolate fields of Northern France’.Footnote ⁴ At the heart of this book lies Shotwell’s assertion that the war had caused physical harm but also damage to more abstract entities like the production of different branches of knowledge. In the wake of the most destructive conflict in human memory, which was an intellectual as well as a military confrontation, how might intellectual life, its institutions, and its practitioners be rebuilt from the ruins of war?

The First World War ushered new ways of waging war into the twentieth century. The logic of total war meant that whole societies were mobilized in prosecuting industrial and mechanized warfare where the distinction between civilian and combatant was increasingly blurred.Footnote ⁵ This was evident not only in the wider societal mobilization for war, but also in the conflict’s targets and victims, with this war seeing the first aerial bombardment of civilian populations, mass internment of enemy alien civilians, and the vast displacement of populations.Footnote ⁶ The conflict was inaugurated by infamous instances of cultural destruction in 1914, such as the burning of Louvain library in August and the shelling of Reims Cathedral the following month, both by the German army. These acts quickly became notorious around the world as examples of the wanton excess of modern warfare.

Beyond the well-known examples of Louvain and Reims cultural life sustained severe damage across Europe in a series of interconnected ways that took years, and sometimes decades, to resolve.Footnote ⁷ Universities, libraries, churches, schools, and other sites of cultural importance were destroyed by long-range artillery fire, aerial bombing raids, or deliberate acts of vandalism by armies as they advanced or retreated. In eastern Serbia, the Bulgarian army sought to eradicate Serbian cultural influence through the destruction of books, manuscripts, and archives, while, in northern Italy, Austrian and German forces conducted bombing raids that caused significant damage to churches, museums, libraries, and archives.Footnote ⁸ These examples are far from exhaustive.Footnote ⁹ The deliberate destruction of sites of cultural importance in wartime contravened the 1907 Hague Convention, which stipulated that ‘buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes’ should not be targeted unless they were being used for military reasons.Footnote ¹⁰

Beyond built infrastructure, cultural life suffered severe and direct damage through the loss of human life: many young scholars, writers, and artists died in combat at the front lines. The mass deployment of troops at the beginning of the war meant that those with specialist skills were often mobilized in regular fighting units. As the war progressed, these men began to be ‘combed out’ to work on war-related projects more closely aligned with their skills. Nevertheless, the move came too late for promising intellectuals, such as the British physicist Henry Moseley and the French sociologist Robert Hertz, both of whom had already been killed in action. The deaths of individuals constituted a loss to wider intellectual life that was understood as such by contemporaries.Footnote ¹¹

International cultural life suffered in more subtle ways during the war; the disruption caused by the conflict to international communications mechanisms meant that, in many cases, the exchange of people, books, and ideas – essential to much pre-war intellectual activity – was severely impeded. Cultural destruction, such as that which took place at Louvain in 1914, was central to wartime cultural mobilization and the creation of an image of the barbaric enemy.Footnote ¹² The conflict was fought as a cultural war with intellectuals trading bitter manifestos across borders in defence of their national cause, with the Allies claiming to defend Western ‘civilization’ and Germany invoking its Kultur.Footnote ¹³ The most infamous intellectual manifesto was the German ‘Appeal to the Civilized World’, published in October 1914. Signed by ninety-three eminent German intellectuals, it defended Germany’s conduct in the war while denying that atrocities had been committed by the German army in Belgium.Footnote ¹⁴ It elicited a strong international reaction with many intellectuals and institutions in allied and neutral countries severing ties with their erstwhile colleagues as a consequence.Footnote ¹⁵ The bitterness of wartime divisions meant that international connections, too, would need to be rebuilt in a process that took years.

Against the backdrop of unprecedented violence being waged on cultural life, the war saw the beginning of humanitarian efforts to assist intellectual communities and institutions. Aid of this type was often presented as a demonstration of solidarity between allied nations and a means through which nations mobilized culturally during the conflict. Following the German invasion of 1914, hundreds of Belgian refugee scholars were accommodated at institutions across Europe and North America. A ‘Belgian University’ was formed at Cambridge to allow exiles to continue their studies and to conduct research, where one observer claimed that it was evidence that ‘the sacred hopes of our country have come through all her trials undiminished’.Footnote ¹⁶ Serbian scholars were afforded a similar welcome in allied countries from the onset of the Central Powers’ offensive in late 1915.Footnote ¹⁷ The housing of refugee intellectuals privileged them as symbols and custodians of national life in exile. These relief efforts emphasized the importance of ensuring not only the good health of intellectual refugees, but the continuity of their scholarly work and, in turn, national cultural life. This paradigm would be replicated on a larger scale in the post-war years.

Wartime relief to intellectuals had value in demonstrating solidarity with fellow allied states in wartime but it also spoke to the belief that cultural pursuits might form a protective bulwark against the barbarism of modern warfare. In many belligerent states, war libraries were established to send books to troops at the front, keeping their minds healthy and active against the ravages of total war.Footnote ¹⁸ Book relief emerged in other ways that spoke to intellectual, educational, and class differentiation, notably where soldiers and civilians were being held in internment or prisoner-of-war camps.Footnote ¹⁹ While the Hague Convention of 1907 made no specific provision for the treatment of interned intellectuals, many relief organizations sent specialist reading and laboratory equipment to camps, with informal ‘universities’ set up to structure learning.Footnote ²⁰ Alfred T. Davies, who oversaw a British book relief scheme, stated that his work was ‘absolutely essential to save the prisoners from mental starvation’.Footnote ²¹ A French prisoner of war newspaper described the camp library as ‘a wonderful intellectual dining room where we can satisfy our literary and scientific appetites’.Footnote ²² The use of this humanitarian metaphor equated literal hunger with an absence of specialist reading material; in this way, it also claimed that the needs of middle-class intellectuals differed from those of other sufferers as they needed intellectual as well as corporeal sustenance. As will be shown throughout this book, this metaphor became widespread in the early 1920s across a range of organizations and initiatives.

Figure 0.1 British war library workers prepare book parcels to send to wounded British soldiers, 1916

(Topical Press Agency/Stringer/Getty)

While the war posed an existential threat to European intellectual life, the conditions underpinning this threat did not abate with the signing of the armistice in November 1918. Violence of different types continued with great intensity across much of the continent into the early 1920s.Footnote ²³ Hunger and disease were rife in Central and Eastern Europe by 1919, while the mass displacement caused by the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War led to a major refugee crisis. Spiralling inflation gripped countries like Germany and Austria, meaning that practitioners of intellectual pursuits were unable to purchase books, periodicals, or laboratory equipment. Cumulatively, these events put millions of lives in Europe at risk, among them thousands of intellectuals and their institutions, many of whom had already suffered severe disruption owing to the First World War.

All of this meant that when James Shotwell wrote of the damage wrought by the war on intellectual life in 1919, the worst was still to come. What followed was not just an act of reconstruction, but an improvised humanitarian intervention to save Europe’s intellectual life. Governments, philanthropists, and humanitarian organizations oversaw a vast range of initiatives designed to save intellectuals and rebuild cultural institutions in the face of widespread fears over the fate of European civilization and the perceived threat of disorder across the continent. This book tells the story of how intellectual lives were saved from starvation and disease, libraries were rebuilt and restocked, and refugees were placed in new homes because they were deemed to be intellectuals. It argues that intellectuals and intellectual life were seen as an important emblem of the old, pre-war European order; thus, their salvation and restoration were symbolic means of safeguarding peace and stability following the terrible bloodshed of the Great War and the humanitarian crisis that followed.

Intellectual Relief: Definitions and Contexts

Feeding the Mind shows how the reconstruction of intellectual life formed a distinct and important part of the broader effort to rebuild Europe and save lives in the aftermath of the First World War. I term all of this intellectual relief. This form of relief was highly elitist, in that it was directed towards educated, middle-class communities, and was also seen as an emergency measure in response to a crisis of European intellectual life. Intellectual relief was both literal and metaphorical; it proceeded from the conviction that not only did the physical lives of intellectuals need to be saved, but that intellectual life itself – an abstract, intangible entity – needed salvation in the face of a mortal threat. Intellectual relief stressed that it was insufficient to merely restore intellectuals to physical health through feeding and medicines; their minds, too, required sustenance and restoration. Humanitarian organizations of differing sizes led schemes that provided food and medical aid to intellectuals at risk of death, but also supplied books, laboratory equipment, and other materials so that they could continue their creative work as both producers and imparters of knowledge. Beyond this, intellectual relief entailed the reconstruction of institutions like libraries and universities that had been destroyed by the violence of total war. Cumulatively, it sought to reconstruct Europe’s intellectual life as it had been in 1914.

This type of humanitarian activity constituted an important element in the quest for stability in post-war Europe; it was, in many cases, directed towards new states in Central and Eastern Europe where democracies replaced deposed multi-ethnic empires. Here, the study of humanitarian aid offers a unique perspective on how philanthropists and policy makers sought to build stable states through the work of intellectuals; not so much in terms of what they researched or wrote, but what they represented as figures who were deeply embedded in the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge and who embodied middle-class interests. It is an example of what Charles Maier called ‘recasting bourgeois Europe’, a reaffirmation of middle-class interests against the perceived threats to order posed by Bolshevism, the growing strength of the working classes, or calls for self-determination from empire.Footnote ²⁴

Intellectual relief utilized both the practices and the language of post-war humanitarianism. In Austria, Poland, and Russia, ‘intellectual kitchens’ were set up to provide food and nourishment exclusively for those labelled intellectuals. In a similar manner, intellectuals were identified for special assistance among the 150,000 Russian refugees stranded in Constantinople in 1920 and 1921, with the League of Nations resolving in August 1921 that it was ‘especially desirable’ that they receive ‘special protection and employment’.Footnote ²⁵ Across Europe, from Vienna to Berlin, Budapest to Warsaw, Paris to Odesa, and Belgrade to Moscow, there is much evidence of a similar emphasis on ensuring the wellbeing of those involved in intellectual and cultural pursuits which marked them as a distinct category of sufferers. Feeding the Mind explores the contours of intellectual reconstruction and humanitarianism as a discrete project because that is how it was viewed by a wide range of contemporary actors, including politicians, diplomats, philanthropists, aid workers, and intellectuals. Across organizations such as the American Relief Administration (ARA), the Imperial War Relief Fund (IWRF), the Friends’ Emergency and War Victims’ Relief Committee (FEWVRC), and the Rockefeller philanthropies, the category of the intellectual (and the related field of ‘intellectual life’) emerged again and again as necessitating bespoke, distinct, and discrete aid in post-war Europe. Seen as emblematic of wounded European civilization, intellectual relief was almost existential.

Alongside threats to human life presented by post-war famine, disease, and displacement, the peril of cultural death loomed large over post-war Europe. Discourses of civilizational decline, famously articulated by Paul Valéry and Oswald Spengler, were widespread among European intellectual elites following the end of the First World War and, in this reading, ideas and culture themselves faced extinction. A 1921 appeal by the British Quakers stated its fear that ‘Austria, the beggared nation, will starve in her rags; a noble and splendid civilization will have passed away’.Footnote ²⁶ Following the example of aid to prisoners of war in the recently-ended conflict, humanitarian appeals frequently spoke of the ‘intellectual hunger’ or ‘intellectual starvation’ of individuals in central and Eastern Europe who could not access recent literature and continue their cerebral work for the cause of civilization. The breakdown of cultural life was further evidence of post-war disorder which in turn provided an impetus for aid programmes to disperse literature and laboratory equipment to those in need. In the words of the ARA’s head, Herbert Hoover, it was a matter of ‘keeping their minds alive well as their bodies’.Footnote ²⁷ This phrasing showed how those engaged in intellectual relief drew on fears of civilizational decline but utilized the language of humanitarianism in order to locate their work firmly within that sphere.Footnote ²⁸

Feeding the Mind has two overlapping and mutually reinforcing themes, being the fate of intellectuals and intellectual life in post-war Europe and the humanitarian effort undertaken to reconstruct Europe in the same period. Neither of these themes is examined in isolation; indeed, I argue that each elucidates the other in a reciprocal manner. Humanitarianism shaped the organization of post-war intellectual life and the squalid conditions and cultural destruction of the war informed the humanitarian response that followed. In this manner, the two themes – seemingly distant and traditionally occupying distant places in the historiography – are deeply interconnected.

Intellectual relief was a widespread but limited element of post-First World War humanitarianism which sheds important light on the emergence of humanitarian practices in this key transitional period.Footnote ²⁹ ‘Intellectuals’ were identified as especially deserving of aid owing to their societal and cultural eminence, which, in the eyes of philanthropists, politicians and many aid workers, differentiated their needs from those of other sufferers in the wider humanitarian landscape. Davide Rodogno has shown that ‘civilization’ was a key political and moral norm underpinning early twentieth-century humanitarianism; the concern to bolster civilization in areas seen as ‘less civilized’, such as Eastern Europe and the Near East, was fundamental to much humanitarian activity.Footnote ³⁰ The idea of civilization was premised upon racial and gendered visions of global order. The same preoccupation with civilization informed intellectual relief and cast scholars, writers, artists, and students, as well as the institutions that supported them, as the elite embodiments of European civilization or, as one appeal put it, ‘civilizing influences’.Footnote ³¹ As politicians, diplomats, philanthropists, and aid workers frequently invoked threats to European civilization in making the case for the importance of their work, the suffering of intellectuals, overwhelmingly men, came to take on an acute and symbolic importance. In this way, the humanitarian salvaging of intellectual life was portrayed as an imperative for the buttressing of civilization.

Many humanitarian initiatives in the aftermath of the First World War operated on the idea that ‘need, not identity’ was a key motivation for those who received attention.Footnote ³² This type of humanitarian rhetoric was best exemplified by schemes that sought to assist children who were suffering in the aftermath of war, with the image of the destitute child seeking to mobilize universal empathy, even when assistance served national or imperial ends.Footnote ³³ Intellectual relief was explicitly premised upon the opposite of universal suffering as it identified a specific elite and educated group as especially deserving of assistance. Because it implicitly denied that all suffering was equal, it spoke to a different universalism, emphasizing that the production, dissemination, and cultivation of knowledge were universal phenomena of universal concern.

Post-First World War relief is a crucial indicator of how Europe sought to attain peaceful equilibrium against the persistence of wartime hostilities in the early 1920s. The humanitarian issues that followed were more complex than those of wartime because the worst suffering was experienced not among fellow allies, but in the territories of former enemies such as Germany and Austria. In wartime, cultural reconstruction constituted a form of ongoing mobilization against a demonized enemy. In the aftermath of war, reconstruction simultaneously presented opportunities for the hardening of wartime belligerence as well as for international reconciliation, meaning that the transition from hostile wartime mentalities to conciliatory post-war mindsets was neither immediate nor straightforward.Footnote ³⁴ Seen in this context, relief was both a measure and a facilitator of post-war cultural demobilization, although it was not always articulated as such. Instead, sweeping invocations of the collapse of civilization itself were made to justify assistance to intellectuals in post-war Austria, while their counterparts in Germany were overlooked by a range of agencies owing to lingering wartime bitterness.

This book was researched and written a century after the events in question, at a time when there is widespread cynicism and scepticism in political discourse about intellectual pursuits, the authority of experts, and the veracity of facts.Footnote ³⁵ From the vantage point of 2023, the prevalence of projects to assist and support intellectuals and their institutions as part of the wider reconstruction of Europe suggests that an implicit faith was placed in these figures as agents of stabilization and reconstruction. Against the backdrop of modern-day anti-intellectualism, this appears almost utopian. In the aftermath of the First World War, assistance to intellectuals was consistent with a wider liberal internationalist belief in a rational and progressive international order where educated public opinion regulated international relations and sought to provide a safeguard against aggression.Footnote ³⁶ In a world where educated public opinion was the ultimate sanction, intellectuals had an important role to play in building a stable order.Footnote ³⁷

The idea of intellectual relief opens up important definitional questions. Who was an intellectual and what function they were expected to perform? The intellectual has been variously invoked, assailed, defended, mourned, and celebrated in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe. There is a vast scholarship concerning intellectuals which generally analyses them in specific national contexts, meaning that they are frequently taken to have particular qualities specific to national settings.Footnote ³⁸ Feeding the Mind argues that in the aftermath of the First World War, intellectuals began being defined in an international (rather than national) context, with shared responsibilities and challenges, all of which were a product of the conflict and post-war social and economic conditions. This collective definition was highly gendered, in that it usually referred to men, as well as Eurocentric. In this period, tens of thousands of ‘intellectuals’ were referred to and assisted as a collective, whether that was in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, or Russia. The widespread invocation of intellectuals in this period suggests a growing but uneven transnational consensus regarding their importance, further evidence of which can be seen in the multiplicity of national and international associations set up in this period to protect intellectual interests. These organizations, such as the Confédération internationale des travailleurs intellectuels (CITI, established 1923), spoke of protections to be afforded to safeguard the social and cultural standing of international intellectuals. The frequent collective mention of intellectuals is evidence that, in the context of the post-war humanitarian moment and the reconstruction of the continent after the cataclysm of war, intellectuals mattered.

This book relies upon the archives of a number of humanitarian organizations and initiatives, some large and permanent, others small and fleeting. The archives of Western humanitarian organizations are notable for the story that they seek to convey, generally of good intentions and successful outcomes where the absences can be as revealing as that which is present.Footnote ³⁹ Western humanitarian actors frequently initiated action based upon their perception of what was ‘best’ for populations based on racist, colonial, religious, political, and other motivations. As Davide Rodogno notes, the voices of local populations are often absent in these archives.Footnote ⁴⁰ An interrogation of the plight of intellectuals in this period highlights a different issue: these people were educated, often multilingual, and sometimes had access to influential intellectual and philanthropic networks. Crucially, they were equipped with the vocabulary to speak the language of civilizational decline and intellectual relief; they could, in many cases, ‘write up’ to humanitarian organizations and philanthropists in a manner that other sufferers could not.Footnote ⁴¹ In a humanitarian context, intellectual voices were heard loud and clear.

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Feeding the Mind explores the phenomenon of intellectual relief and cultural reconstruction from the end of the First World War through to 1933 when, following the Great Depression and the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany, European intellectual life was confronted by a new set of challenges. Chapter 1 begins in Paris in 1919 as the peacemakers sought to remake the post-war world. It analyses the emergence of discourses of civilizational decline and different schemes to rebuild the world which saw intellectuals at their heart. As news of the privations being experienced in Central Europe began to reach philanthropists, politicians, and intellectuals in Western Europe and North America, the reconstruction of intellectual life was presented as a means of averting civilizational collapse. This chapter shows how, by mid-1920, the problems of post-war reconstruction and the needs of intellectual communities had been identified by foundations such as the Commonwealth Fund and humanitarian organizations like the British Quakers as important objects of humanitarian action.

Chapters 2 and 3 explore two distinct dimensions of post-war intellectual relief. Chapter 2 begins in Vienna, the epicentre for intellectual starvation in the early 1920s and widely described as one of Europe’s ‘centres of civilization’, where different food aid schemes identified starving and impoverished intellectuals as a key demographic for assistance. Here, intellectuals were often fed and clothed away from the wider populations in which they lived. Despite the widespread invocation of ‘intellectuals’ as a category to be assisted, the practical distribution of aid demonstrated challenges in clearly defining who this encompassed. Chapter 3 analyses the emergence of book relief, the metaphorical counterpart of ‘intellectual feeding’, which operated on the understanding that the minds – as well as the bodies – of intellectuals needed nourishment. The provision of specialist literature and laboratory equipment to intellectuals across Central and Eastern Europe was articulated as an emergency humanitarian measure that overlapped with the provision of food and medicine to scholars. Book relief necessitated a more nuanced process than its corporeal counterpart; the ultimate resolution to Europe’s book famine could not be found in emergency aid but rather in the restoration of international flows of publications that had ended abruptly with the outbreak of war, which meant that many libraries in Central and Eastern Europe had received no new overseas literature since 1914. For this reason, the normalization of international cultural relations occasioned by 1925’s Locarno treaties was a key point in the resolution of this issue.

While the issues of intellectual feeding and provision of literature were two sides of the same coin, Chapter 4 explores the theme of intellectual displacement of both people and institutions. Starting in Constantinople in 1920, it assesses how and why thousands of intellectuals were combed out of the wider body of Russian refugees from the civil war and relocated to sites across Europe and the wider world, much as Belgian refugees had been during the First World War. The chapter also looks at how other forms of intellectual capital were displaced following post-war treaties and the redrawing of international borders, such as Hungarian universities and libraries which found themselves ‘exiled’ to new states. The displacement of knowledge demonstrated how individuals, institutions, and even modes of thinking were portrayed as synonymous with certain national identities and thus ‘deserving’ of emergency assistance for that reason.

Chapter 5 explores the reconstruction of intellectual sites in the aftermath of the war and various attempts to replace the knowledge that had been lost in warfare. It focuses on the rebuilding of the university libraries of Louvain and Belgrade and pays particular attention to not only the physical rebuilding of buildings, but the reconstruction of knowledge itself through the replacement of library and manuscript collections. Cultural reconstruction was not just about repairing sites that had suffered war damage; it also sought to support the production and dissemination of new knowledge and to symbolically push back against the ‘collapse’ of civilization. Reconstruction of sites destroyed in the war, and the replenishment of their collections, was an international phenomenon in which different countries, generally erstwhile allies, could make their own symbolic contribution to the buttressing of civilization; thus, this chapter also explores the reconstruction of the library of Tokyo Imperial University, destroyed in the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, as a continuation of schemes to rebuild Louvain.

Whereas the preceding chapters focus on sites of humanitarian action, Chapter 6 centres on Geneva as a crucible for bureaucracy and attempts to categorize and organize international intellectual life. It addresses a question that underpins all of the preceding chapters: given widespread claims of their suffering in early 1920s Europe, who were the intellectuals? Beyond the famous analyses of figures like Julien Benda, Antonio Gramsci, and Karl Mannheim, this was a widely discussed transnational issue in the period. Europe’s humanitarian crisis shone a light on the suffering of intellectuals as a distinct category, while, in the same period, a wide range of national and international organizations came into being in order to codify and safeguard their international standing. The post-war humanitarian crisis generated international interest in the position of intellectuals because, grappling with rampant inflation, precarious employment, and other material concerns, they had much in common across post-war Europe. The Epilogue discusses the legacies of post-1918 intellectual relief and how the memory of its failures – and the practical experience gained by those involved in the schemes of the early 1920s – informed how European intellectual life was rebuilt again from the ruins of the Second World War.