Autograph letter signed by H.G. Wells about the Nazis and German P.E.N Club 1933

H.G. Wells, exiled Jewish writers and the Nazi P.E.N. Congress confrontation of 1933
 
WELLS, H.G. - Autograph letter signed about Nazi Germany, Jewish writers and freedom of speech, a precursor to the 1933 P.E.N. Congress at Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and an infamous confrontation. 21, April 1933.
 
Autograph letter signed, from H. G. Wells to the journalist and former Westminster Gazette editor Joseph Burton Hobman, dated 21 April 1933. Two single sheets, each approximately 210 x 270 mm, written in ink over the recto of each, on Wells's "Lou Pidou, Saint Mathieu, Grasse A.-M." stationery, and signed by him. Old horizontal and vertical folds, creasing, and a tear with some loss to the lower margin of the second sheet, not affecting the principal text. Good.
 
A letter written at a significant moment in the history of International P.E.N., five weeks before the organisation's eleventh international congress at Ragusa, now Dubrovnik. Wells sets out privately the principles he intended P.E.N. to follow in confronting the rapid Nazification of the German organisation and the exclusion of Jewish writers.
 
Wells gives his clear stance: a national P.E.N. centre should be a free association of writers without distinction: "As members of the Berlin branch there are neither Jews nor Gentiles. The club is (or should be) a club of German writers, a comprehensive free club... If any external body interferes with its membership or activities, it ceases to be a P.E.N. club." Most significantly, Wells explicitly connects this principle with the forthcoming congress: "That is the principle on which the mother club (the London club) is going, & which I hope to have affirmed unanimously at Ragusa." Of a Jewish writer who regarded himself as a German writer he adds that "all the Hitlerism in the world" should not be able to exclude him from a properly constituted German P.E.N. club. Wells states that he wants the dispute confined to the issue of "world-wide freedom of expression".
 
The letter is particularly important in light of what occurred at Ragusa the following month. Hitler had become Chancellor on 30 January 1933, and during the spring the German P.E.N. centre was being brought into conformity with the new regime while writers objectionable to it were excluded. The Nazi book burnings followed on 10 May. By the time the congress opened later that month, the position of German P.E.N. and the persecution of writers in Germany had become the central issue.
The exiled German Jewish playwright and socialist Ernst Toller attended the congress as an independent representative. When the official German delegation attempted to make its continued participation dependent upon preventing Toller from speaking, Wells, presiding over the congress, refused. Toller was permitted to speak and challenged German P.E.N. over the expulsion and persecution of writers, the burning of books and the suppression of intellectual freedom. The official German delegation objected specifically to Wells allowing Toller to address the congress and walked out.
 
Contemporary accounts show Wells publicly following at Ragusa exactly the principle he had privately expressed to Hobman on 21 April: that a P.E.N. centre could not claim political neutrality while allowing political authority to determine which writers might belong or speak. 
The letter is equally revealing for the limitations and contradictions within Wells's own position. His opposition to Nazi racial exclusion is emphatic, but his universalism is accompanied by an uncomfortable assimilationist view of Jewish identity. He suggests that a writer who considers himself "first & foremost a Jewish writer" should belong to a specifically Jewish P.E.N., and argues that Jews would best serve themselves by keeping "the racial issue in a subordinate place", warning that Gentiles might be estranged by what he calls "racial egotism". The result is a document considerably more complex than a straightforward denunciation of Nazism. Wells rejects Nazi interference with literary life and insists upon the right of Jewish writers to be treated as German writers, while at the same time revealing his own prejudicial assumptions concerning Jewish identity. 
 
At Ragusa, the confrontation between Wells, Toller and the Nazi-aligned German representatives demonstrated both the strength of Wells's defence of freedom of expression and the impossibility of separating that principle from the racial persecution being imposed by the German state.
A substantial Wells letter, written on the eve of the Ragusa confrontation.