Emmanuel Berl was from an upper middle class Jewish family related to Bergson and Proust and the novelist and screenwriter Monique Lange.
Discharged in 1917 with a respiratory disease after having received the Croix de Guerre (or, war cross), he joined the surrealists, especially working with Louis Aragon, Gaston Bergery and his former schoolmate from the Lycée Carnot, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle.
In 1928, with Édouard Berth, Marcel Déat, Bertrand de Jouvenel and Pierre Mendès-France, he took part in the editing of the Cahiers bleus which had just launched George Valois.
The same year, he met André Malraux to whom he dedicated his Mort de la pensée bourgeoise, a satire in which Emmanuel Berl called for a more committed culture and literature.
In it, he defended a political line favourable to the Popular Front but his intransigent pacifism and his equal refusal of both fascist and communist totalitarianism led him to adopt heterodox positions and to show his curiosity and sympathies in neo-socialism.