Mount Holyoke to Re-create Historic WWII Symposia
That Provided Haven for European Intellectuals Fleeing Hitler

Where Chagall, Masson, Arendt, Lévi-Strauss Met
Stevens, Moore, Motherwell, Sessions...and the OSS

South Hadley, MA---This fall the Mount Holyoke College community will revisit an extraordinary but little-known facet of its history--a time when the campus served as a haven to French Jewish intellectuals and other prominent European thinkers fleeing Hitler.

Artists Marc Chagall and André Masson, philosopher Hannah Arendt, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and dozens of other eminent exiles sat in the shade of Mount Holyoke's huge maples during the World War II summers of 1942 through 1944 to discuss the future of art and humanism in a world gone mad. In this act of intellectual resistance to Nazism, they were joined by a number of equally illustrious Americans, including poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, artist Robert Motherwell, and composer Roger Sessions.

To celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Pontigny-en-Amérique, as these summer sessions were called, the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership at Mount Holyoke will revivify this fascinating piece of the College's history by hosting a special three-day symposium, Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II:  The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942-1944.  The symposium will run Thursday through Saturday, November 6-8.

Event organizers--led by Weissman Center codirectors Christopher Benfey, professor of English, and Karen Remmler, professor of German studies--have invited scholars and visitors participating in the symposium to focus on three major trends that emerged during the original Pontigny sessions: the transition from surrealism to abstraction in the arts; the emergence of structuralism in the social sciences; and the search for a theory of creativity in philosophy, mathematics, and natural sciences--all amid the strains of war.  "The idea," says Benfey, "is to get some of the best minds of today to revisit some of the concerns of the original Pontigny and to gauge their contemporary relevance."

The original Pontigny colloquia were the brainchild of a resourceful Mount Holyoke French professor, Helen Patch. Aware that World War II had ended the famous annual gatherings of intellectuals at the Abbey of Pontigny in the Burgundy region of France (attended by such luminaries as André Gide, Lytton Strachey, and Edith Wharton), she proposed to her former Sorbonne professor, eminent medievalist Gustave Cohen, that Mount Holyoke might offer something similar to him and other refugees. Cohen had participated in some of the original Pontigny sessions, as had prominent French philosopher Jean Wahl, who had recently fled imprisonment and torture in Nazi-occupied Paris to become a professor at Mount Holyoke. First Cohen and then Wahl became the guiding forces behind Pontigny-en-Amérique, the annual Mount Holyoke event that caused such a stir it was covered by the New York Times and Time magazine, and was praised in the London Times Literary Supplement. It was even noticed by the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA), which sent an agent in 1942 to sit in on all four weeks' sessions and report back.

Cohen and Wahl organized the Mount Holyoke conferences around general themes such as "Art and Man" and "Permanence of Values, Renewal of Methods." Students and local faculty were welcome, and many of the original talks survive in written form. Some speeches are memorable, even groundbreaking, including Hannah Arendt's new interpretation of Kafka as critic of totalitarianism and Wallace Stevens's idea of poetry as a form of resistance in "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet."  Robert Motherwell's talk "The Place of the Spiritual in a World of Property" suggested that artists abandon surrealism as spiritually inadequate and embrace abstraction.

Among the speakers slated for the 2003 fall symposium are the Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell, art historians Romy Golan and Jed Perl, and Arendt biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Opera singer and Mount Holyoke alumna Nancy Gustafson '78, will perform a selection of French and American music. There will be a special session for alumnae on the plight of Jewish refugees at Mount Holyoke during World War II, with special attention to MHC professors Rachel Bespaloff and Jean Wahl. An exhibition at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, "The Artists of Pontigny-in-America," will focus on artists who participated in the Pontigny sessions.  Students will also be able to choose from a cluster of Pontigny-related courses across disciplines.  In addition, a series of "Monday Night Soirees"---including film screenings, art exhibitions, readings, musical performances, and lectures---is providing students and others with many opportunities to approach and appreciate the intellectual, historical, and cultural currents that flowed around and through the Pontigny encounters.

Among Pontigny-related courses will be a first-year seminar, Pontigny at Mount Holyoke, in which students will study the dynamics of the intense discussions that took place here about the future of civilization, and cultural legacy, under threat of Nazi domination, if not eradication.  Students will individually research various participants at the historic colloquia.

"What was being sought at Mount Holyoke College was a new way of articulating culture and politics, creative work and criticism," observes Laurent Jeanpierre, an intellectual historian from the University of Paris. Jeanpierre, who is writing a book on Pontigny-en-Amérique, will speak at the symposium. Though this unique and remarkable undertaking was Helen Patch's inspiration, Jeanpierre suggests that, from its inception, Mount Holyoke's tradition of internationalism made the College the perfect setting: "The intellectual culture of Mount Holyoke College, though of a type very much in the minority in the American academic world of that time, was nonetheless quite close to what the spirit of Pontigny represented in French and European intellectual circles during the period between the world wars."

The Mount Holyoke College Archives has posted information related to material in its collection from the Pontigny-en-Amérique sessions, including historical sketches, articles, notes, and books at: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/library/arch/news/
colhigh/pontigny.shtml