Literature and De Stijl

Abstract

The northern Netherlands escaped direct involvement in World War I, but although they were spared the ravages of battle and the trauma of occupation, the first decades of the twentieth century were for them as for the rest of Western Europe, an era of upheaval and turmoil. In the field of literature this ferment manifested itself in the emergence of new styles and new attitudes that superseded the realistic traditions as well as the aestheticism of the Movement of ‘Eighty. Foremost among the innovators was Herman van den Bergh, not least because of his influence on Marsman. Their poetry is widely regarded as the major modernistic impulse in Dutch writing at the time; their significance is generally acknowledged and their achievements have repeatedly been subjected to scholarly study and analysis. Parallels have been drawn between them and the formally often much more radical German expressionists, and there are indeed points of similarity, of which in the present context the tendency toward cosmic visions is particularly relevant. Such lines as “Hemels staan op mijn hand gebogen” (“Heavens stand arched on my hand”) from Herman van den Bergh’s poem “Tegen Avond” (“Toward Evening”), or “en ruimte brak aan zijn metalen tred” (“and space broke under his metallic tread”) from Marsman’s “Heerscher” (“Ruler”) are closely related to the evocations of infinity typical of German expressionism. Kurt Heynicke wrote in his “Gesang”: “In mir ist blauer Himmel; / ich trage die Erde, / … Sonne kniet vor mir.”