The Press: Independence Abroad

Magazines sponsored by the U.S. Government have usually met with limited success abroad. The reason is that Europeans and Asians view any government publication with suspicion. A notable exception is Germany’s Der Monat (the Month), a monthly with a Harper’s format that was launched six years ago by the State Department as a “weapon against Communism and Naziism.” Although its circulation is small (30,000), Der Monat has become the most respected and influential magazine in Germany, helped spark a renaissance in German intellectual life, which was stamped out by the Nazis. Read largely by intellectuals, government officials, students and university professors, the Communists have made reading the magazine a criminal offense and denounced it as a “real intellectual poison brew.”

Nevertheless, more than 3,500 copies a month are smuggled into East Germany. One German couple, sent to a Red prison after the Communists discovered copies of the magazine in their East zone apartment, made straight for Der Monat’s office to replenish their confiscated copies after they escaped.

Ford Grant. Der Monat owes its prestige to the State Department’s wise decision to give virtually a free hand to its New York-born editor, Melvin J. Lasky, 34. By filling the magazine with the work of the world’s leading writers, he has convinced German readers that Der Monat is much more than a mere mouthpiece of U.S. policy. Last week Editor Lasky took the final step to establish the magazine’s independence. He severed its official U.S. ties completely, and got a $175,000 Ford Foundation grant to continue publishing, hopes to make the magazine more self-sufficient. But he has not changed his objective “to offer the German reading public an important link with the outside world of ideas and controversy.”

Der Monat establishes the link by printing articles by such writers as T. S. Eliot. Bertrand Russell, Joseph Schumpeter, Benedetto Croce, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Aldous Huxley and Reinhold Niebuhr. Articles, all translated into German, cover every subject, from the relationship between Christianity and Western civilization to the real place of Wall Street in the U.S. economy. ‘George Orwell’s biting anti-Communist satires, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, were translated into German only in the pages of Der Monat.

Editor Lasky makes no attempt to follow the smaller turns of U.S. foreign policy. The magazine fits within broad U.S. objectives, but argues both sides of such questions as EDC, socialism v. capitalism, etc. Says Lasky: “Can you imagine telling our readers in 1946 that rearmament was bad, then trying to tell them in 1950 it was good after all?”

Right Bank. Editor Lasky, who has become one of the leading intellectual figures in Germany, went to the City College of New York (’39) and got a master’s degree from the University of Michigan (’40). He worked as an editor of the weekly anti-Communist New Leader, was an Army battle historian (captain) who moved into Berlin with the U.S. Army. At war’s end, unlike most G.I.s who stayed in Europe, he decided the “proper place for the new generation is on the right bank of the Rhine, not the left bank of the Seine.” While working as a freelance correspondent, he caught the eye of U.S. Military Governor Lucius D. Clay at a Berlin Communist writers’ congress. While delegates were attacking “U.S. cultural barbarism,” Lasky broke up the meeting with a fiery speech in fluent German denouncing Russian totalitarianism (TIME, Oct. 20, 1947).

With General Clay’s aid, Lasky and a staff of four Germans started publishing Der Monat at a cost to the U.S. of about $65,000 a year. Lasky, who still wears the beard he grew six years ago because Communist propaganda made it a “symbol of their hate” of him, never misses an opportunity to attack Communism, Naziism or German militarism. He makes no attempt at impartiality in politics. Says he: “Freedom is Der Monat’s goal, and our readers know that freedom is com pletely incompatible with either Communism or Naziism.”