The Alianza

for Friday, 12:30p.m. - Sept. 3, 1937

One of the liveliest artistic and intellectual centers in the world at the moment is, without doubt, the house of the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas in Madrid. In English, the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals. It is a large house, in fact a palace, belonging to a former gentleman of title who fled from Madrid to devote his riches and his lordly aid to the cause of those who are trying to overturn the Spanish government and force the people back into feudalism again. The Marquis, for that was his title, took with him all the gold he could carry, but he left his palace, his Sorollas and El Greco, his hand-carved furniture, and his enormous library behind him. Now his mansion has been taken over by the State, and the State has given it into the care of the artists and writers of Madrid as the headquarters and meeting place of all those men and women in Madrid who are devoting their pens, paint brushes, and talents to the Spanish Republic and its welfare.

The Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas itself, as an organization, is an outgrowth of the First International Writers Congress held in Paris in 1935. But in Spain, it has been enlarged to include not only writers, but painters, sculptors, composers, and all others who, through the arts, are contributing to a better and more beautiful world. It now has centers, or affiliated organizations, in Valencia, Barcelona, and Alicante, as well. When the Fascist rebellion broke out, the Alianza, immediately alligned with the government, and began to devote all its resources to the preservation of the Republic---for who could know better than artists and writers what happens to creation under a Fascist re-

2. game? Many of the members of the Alianza had experienced the censorship and suppression of freedom thought under the monarchy, and the dictatorship of the late Primo de Rivero. And all of them know what happens to books and theatres and science in Italy and Germany. They do not want that to happen here again. That is why, last November when Franco and his Italians and Moors were at the gates of Madrid, many writers and artists and musicians died on the barricades defending their city against the burners of books and the assassins of culture. At present, many members of the Alianza are at the front, some as soldiers, some as teachers in the campaign against illiteracy, others as editors of brigade news papers or as makers of propaganda posters, some reading their poems to the troops, others playing their music in the trenches.

Here in Madrid, the house is a hive of intense and varied intellectual activities. Its president is Jose Bergamin, the Catholic writer. Its Executive Secretary is the poet, Rafael Alberti. (Alberti and his wife, Maria Teresa Leon, are well-known in New York and in Latin America, having lectured there a few years ago.) In and out of this Madrid house, formerly a palace of the idle rich, now pour the best of the Spanish writers and artists and thinkers, as well as the visiting foreigners resident in Spain or here gathering material for articles and books: famous foreigners like our own Ernest Hemmingway, like Andre Malraux, like Ludwig Renn, Igon Erwin Kish, Jef Last, and Michael Kolsov. Sometimes these writers, Spanish or foreign, leave the house to continue their work as fighters or thinkers or artists at the front, and they do not come back again. Pablo de la Torientte-Bréu, the Cuban writer, went away a few months ago, never to return. He was killed on the front at Majada Honda. One of Spain's great sculptors, Francisco Perez Mateo, died in the defense of Madrid. The poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, was executed in rebel territory at Granada. And more recently in the battle of Brunete, the excellent woman photographer, Gerda

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Taro, died making her pictures of the brave soldiers of the Spanish People's Army for the papers and magazines that she represented in Paris. You see, the artists and writers who came in and out of the Alianza in Madrid are not of the ivory tower school. In fact, there couldn't be an ivory tower in Madrid. The Fascist cannons in the hills would blast it to pieces.

In time of war, what can writers and artists do that is useful, entertaining, and beautiful in a living, vital way? Here are some of the things the Alianza helps to do. At the beginning of the Civil War, many members of the Alianza went into the trenches and the villages near the front explaining to the fighters the basic meaning of this Civil War and why a group of industrialists and military men had chosen to rise against the majority of the voters of Spain. They made posters, they gave speeches, they read poems, they worked with and under the direction of the Ministry of Public Instruction. From Paris, the French writers sent them a school on wheels, a truck equipped with a motion picture machine and a printing press, brought to Spain by a committee headed by Louis Aragon, famous poet and novelist. Last August, a year ago, the Alianza founded its paper, the MONO AZUL, (Overalls), and begin to publish stories, poems, and chronicles of the war. When the People's Army was formed, members of the Alianza helped to establish, and several of them still edit, the Brigade newspapers that are such an important part of the cultural work being carried on among the men in the front. The Alianza has its own publishing activities, too, and has edited and printed a number of books, including a concise historical record of the first year of the war called THE GENERAL CHRONICAL OF THE CIVIL WAR, and a valuable anthology, POETS IN LOYALIST SPAIN. There are now in preparation two volumes of short stories about the war, one to include the work of Spanish writers, the other the work of foreign writers in Spain such as Gustave Reigler, XXXI Andre Malraux, and Kish.

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In Valencia, a new and beautiful magazine, HORA DE ESPANA, has many
Alianza members on its editorial board.

In the field of the theatre, the Alianza has been most active, too.
Its members established the first serious dramatic theatre of the war,
presenting plays by Ramon Sender and Rafael Dieste. And now in Madrid,
Maria Teresa Leon, the first woman in Spain to direct a playhouse, has
in rehearsal Schnitzler's GREEN COOKATOO and a hitherto unproduced play
by Garcia Llorca, as her first bill. At the front, one of the most
popular entertainments with the soldiers has been the satirical puppet
show, KXXTXKKMBB LA TARUMBA, directed by Miguel Prieto with the assis-
tance of several other members of the Alianza, and picturing by means
gesturing dolls the fantastic boastings and struttings of those grandiose
generals on the rebel side, from Franco on down.

But, from every standpoint, one of the most important achievements
of the Alianza in recent months has been the bringing to Spain in July
of the Second International Writers Congress which held sessions in
Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona, all cities within the range of either
Franco's shell fire or the bombs of Fascist aviation. This Congress,
certainly of great historic importance, brought together more than a
hundred men and women of letters from all over the world, of all races
and colors, meeting in the very front line trenches for the defense of
world culture and the preservation of the integrity of the arts against
Fascist aggression. These men and woman, many of them of international
fame, are of those who do not wish to write books to be burned in public
squares by international gangsters, or blown to bits on library shelves
by bombs dropped from the air, or censored until all their meaning is
drained away. And so they came together in Spain, famous and busy writers,
to show their solidarity with, and their faith in, the Spanish workers
and intellectuals who are now battling against those forces that would

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kill all culture and send the human race back to the dark ages.

The Alliance of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals is Madrid's center for
such men and women. It is a center for every writer and artist who opposes
the return to barbarism. It is a center for today's work and tomorrow's
dream. It is a place where creative miracles continually happen. It
is a place where now, today, art becomes life and life is art, and there
is no longer any need of a bridge between the artists and the people—
for the thing created becomes immediately a part of those for whom, and
from whom, it was created. The poem, the picture, the song is only water
drawn from the well of the people and given back to them in a cup of
may
drink—and in drinking, understand themselves.

That is art in Loyalist Spain. And that is the function of Madrid's
Alianza, the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas.

Langston Hughes

Madrid, September, 1937.