Between the Wars
The Story of Esperanto
Course 1 · Chapter 5 · Between the Wars: Hope and Politics (1918-1939)
The years after the First World War were the movement's most hopeful. The founder was dead, but the League of Nations was meeting in Geneva, new states had appeared, and many people wanted a way of understanding each other. Esperanto asked to be part of the answer, and failed to win official support, but it grew as a community, produced its first great poets, and held its biggest congresses. This chapter follows the hopes and the disappointments, including the congress held in Edinburgh in 1926. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".
The League of Nations
The proposal
In 1920 and 1921 the League of Nations, the new international body based in Geneva, looked at Esperanto. A report by the Secretariat was favourable, and at the 1921 Assembly delegates from about a dozen countries proposed that Esperanto be taught in schools (check). The Japanese official Nitobe Inazō, who was a senior member of the League's staff and had attended an Esperanto congress, supported the idea (check).
The opposition
The French delegation opposed it, and is generally said to have blocked the proposal because French was then the leading language of diplomacy (check). Later resolutions were weaker, encouraging international languages teaching in general without naming Esperanto as the choice (check).
The result
The League never adopted Esperanto. Supporters concluded that governments would not accept a neutral language that took status from their own, and turned back to building the community (check). It is an early example of a recurring pattern: strong support from individuals, and caution from states.
Two Esperantos?
| Body (check each) | Outlook |
|---|---|
| Universal Esperanto Association (UEA) | Neutral: the language belongs to everyone, and the association takes no side on politics. Its members ranged from teachers to civil servants and religious believers. |
| SAT (Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, "Worldwide Anational Association"), 1921 | Founded by the French teacher Eugène Adam, who wrote as Lanti. It was a movement of workers and the left, which argued that neutrality was an illusion and that Esperanto should serve the labour movement and be "anational". |
| Religious and other groups | Catholic, Protestant, Bahá'í, pacifist and other organisations used Esperanto for their own meetings and publications (check). |
| The Soviet Union | In the 1920s the state allowed an Esperanto association and the language was encouraged for international propaganda; attitudes changed in the 1930s (Chapter 6, check). |
The disagreement was an old one in new clothes. The Declaration of Boulogne (Chapter 3) said Esperantism had no political programme, but nothing stopped Esperanto speakers from having views. SAT was the answer of those who saw the language as a tool for working people rather than diplomats. The two organisations coexisted, argued and sometimes shared members (check).
A Literature of Its Own
- Original writing. Until the 1920s most Esperanto literature was translation. After the war, poets began to write directly in the language and to treat it as a literary medium, with its own metres and style (check).
- The Budapest school. Around the Hungarian doctor and poet Kálmán Kalocsay, and the journal Literatura Mondo published in Budapest, a group of writers developed a polished style, among them the actor and poet Julio Baghy (check). Kalocsay's collections of the 1920s and 1930s are often named as turning points (check). If you studied Hungarian Grammar 1, you will find that Hungarian writers shaped the early literature of an international language, a striking fact for a language with no country.
- Reference works. Kalocsay worked with the French scholar Gaston Waringhien on an anthology and a guide to Esperanto verse in the early 1930s (check), a sign that the language had traditions of its own.
- Biography and history. Edmond Privat, a Swiss writer, published a life of Zamenhof in 1920 that shaped the picture of the founder for decades (check).
- Periodicals, radio and schools. The interwar period saw many journals, the first radio broadcasts in Esperanto (check) and courses in some schools and evening classes, though never as a national policy (check).
Edinburgh, 1926
The congress
The 18th Universal Congress of Esperanto was held in Edinburgh in 1926 (check). It was organised with the British Esperanto Association and local supporters, and brought several thousand participants from many countries (check).
What it shows
A world meeting in the Scottish capital in the 1920s is a reminder that the language movement was not only Central European. British organisers presented it as a practical help for travel, trade and peace, and the Scottish press covered it (check).
What to check
Details of attendance, the venues and the programme should come from the congress report, newspapers and the British Esperanto Association's records, not from later summaries.
Exercises
Give three reasons why the League of Nations might have refused to adopt Esperanto, and for each say what evidence would show that it was a real reason.
Compare the neutral UEA and the worker-oriented SAT: what they believed about the language and about politics, and what each risked.
Explain why original writing in Esperanto mattered more to the language's reputation than translation, and what the Budapest school shows.
Quick Reference
- League of Nations: proposal of 1921, blocked, French opposition reported (check)
- SAT: founded 1921 by Eugène Adam (Lanti), a worker and anational movement (check)
- Literature: Kalocsay, Baghy and the Budapest school; Literatura Mondo (check)
- Edinburgh: the 18th Universal Congress, 1926 (check)
- Method: separate what happened from why; the reasons are often debated