In this chapter, Susanne Klengel looks back at processes of cultural reconstruction after the devastations of the Second World War. Recognising the historical complexity of this moment in time, Klengel pays tribute to UNESCO’s founding discourse of a "new holistic humanism", despite its contemporary ineffectiveness and despite Latour's later theoretical critique of anthropocentrism. On the basis of archival material, the essay traces negotiation processes within a new kind of community, a transnational group of intellectuals, including numerous participants from the "South", who felt responsible not only for "rediscovering" concepts such as humanity, or humanism, but also for examining and working through them from the perspective of a much wider world beyond Europe. After reviewing the agenda of UNESCO's second Director-General, the poet and politician Jaime Torres Bodet (1902−1974), and his emphasis on a "Latin American humanism", Klengel focuses on the reconciliatory power attached to an inclusive concept of the literatures of the world, concretised in UNESCO's large-scale translation project. This project set in motion a paradigm shift from "classics" (with their symbolic and Eurocentric weight) to "great books" or "masterpieces" and finally (after 1952) to "OEuvres Représentatives". Abandoning "classical" connotations of uniqueness, universality and indispensability, this impressive and diverse corpus of world literature, which comprises over a thousand works under the title of UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, is symptomatic of a deep intercultural conflict between the "old world" and "young nations". By highlighting the dilemma of reconciling universality and particularity, it can also be understood as a forerunner of the "new world literatures" and their bridge-building between "centre" and "periphery", North and South.