The Trump era has prompted Germany to review the historic effects of America’s soft power, and debate Berlin’s future relationship with Washington

In Europe’s city of spies, it was a feat of cold war counter-propaganda: a modernist congress centre with an audaciously curved roof, gifted by America to West Berlin in direct response to the buildup of Soviet’s Stalinallee boulevard on the other side of town.

Its initiator, Eleanor Dulles, a sister of the head of the CIA at the time, announced Berlin’s House of the Cultures of the World in 1956 as “a bright beacon shining light into the east”.

Yet a year into the Trump era, the building that lies a stone’s throw from Angela Merkel’s chancellory is one of several places in Germany that is prompting questions over America’s cultural influence.

A new exhibition, Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War, which is on show at the historic building in Berlin’s Tiergarten park until 8 January 2018, charts how CIA front organisations such as West Berlin’s Congress for Cultural Freedom enlisted the art world in a propaganda war between two ideologies, which came to be known as “the battle for Picasso’s mind”.

By promoting modern art movements such as abstract expressionism – and artists including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as showcases of America’s creativity and freedom of expression, foreign intelligence services ended up shaping the modern world’s aesthetic sensibilities.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Literary-political magazine Encounter (1953–1991) Photograph: HKW

Mixing archive pieces and works by contemporary artists, the Berlin show criticises the gallery’s own role in the cold war period, in a similar way to the analysis applied by German institutions in relation to the the Nazi period.

“My belief is that public institutions like mine need to take responsibility for what they do,” said Bernd Scherer, director of the House of the Cultures of the World. “It has to be clear what position you are speaking from.”

While the Soviet Union professed its belief in the use of art as a class-war weapon from the start, America’s support for liberal left but anti-communist organisations had been covert: when the CIA’s methods were revealed by US media in 1967, it caused a scandal and led to resignations, such as the British poet Stephen Spender stepping down as editor of the literary journal Encounter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Japan’s Jiyû journal Photograph: HKW

But 50 years later, in a year in which the CIA has proved a pernicious opponent to a US president with autocratic ambitious, the picture is more ambivalent.

Scherer said he found fault with the CIA’s cultural programme for the way in which it “functionalised and thus corrupted the term ‘freedom’”, pointing out the paradoxes of an intelligence agency funnelling money to anti-apartheid organisations abroad while helping to sabotage the Black Panther movement at home.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lebanese journal Hiwar (1961–1967) Photograph: HKW

“But you cannot overestimate the CIA’s intelligence and efficiency: making culture part of their strategy required a genuine artistic sensibility. When you examine the individual measures employed, you quickly end up in a grey zone,” Scherer said.

The centre piece of the Parapolitics exhibition is a display of the more than 20 artfully crafted literary magazines that were financed across the globe via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, such as Der Monat in Germany, Jiyu in Japan and Hiwar in Lebanon.

While many of these publications worked as platforms for cold warriors such as the US diplomat George Kennan and helped to squash intellectual debate of the Vietnam war, others became radical trailblazers almost by accident: Nigeria’s Black Orpheus was one of the first journals to publish traditional Yoruba poetry and art, and is now considered a key shaper of postcolonial modernism.

“It’s hard not to admire the CIA’s employees for their infallibly good taste,” wrote the art critic of Berliner Zeitung after viewing the display.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigerian literary journal Black Orpheus (1957–1975) Photograph: HKW

Reactions to the show mirror a wider German debate over the future of transatlantic relations. In a recent article in weekly Die Zeit, a group of academics and thinktank directors called for a responsible long-term foreign policy that would “build a bridge into the era beyond Trump’s presidency”.

While conceding that Europe and America could be headed for trade wars and that the EU would have to act alone in reforming global asylum rules, the authors warned that “it would be a historic mistake to play off ‘more Europe’ against the transatlantic alliance”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest German journal Der Monat (1948–1987) Photograph: HKW

In a response published a week later, however, two of Die Zeit’s leading writers replied that “those who think we can just wait for the US to return to its old role after Trump are deceiving themselves”. The transatlantic crisis, argued Jörg Lau and Bernd Ulrich, “didn’t begin with Trump, and will not end with Trump”.

Their article ended in a manifesto for a Germany unshackled from US influence, which would “support France without condescending to it”, “manage Brexit without punitive fantasies”, as well as “reduce the appeal of Europe to Africa’s aspiring population and simultaneously allow for controlled immigration”. They argued that China should be brought in from the cold on trade and climate policy but confronted on human rights and intellectual property theft.

“One could almost be grateful to Donald Trump”, Lau and Ulrich wrote. “By undermining the transatlantic partnership, he has heightened Germans’ recognition of how much this relationship has benefited them.”

