Bibliotheca Neerlandica extra muros – serie

In two world wars waged within the life time of one generation Death reaped a prolific harvest. His most formidable scythe in former days was not war but pestilence. But since medical science has forged all kinds of weapons wherewith to strike that dreaded tool out of his knuckles he resorted in our lifetime to a new technique of morticulture which has yielded him un­ dreamt-of results. Using race hatred as fertilizer he has grown on the soil of the globe a crop of dead whose size baffles the imagination. The executioners whom he employed in Hitler's Germany kept careful record of the loathsome work they did for him in torture camps and gas chambers. They reckoned that six million Jews were delivered to Death by their efforts. In Holland alone only fifteen thousand of her one hundred and fifty­ thousand Jews survived the massacre. Death was the chief war profiteer. Though his inflated power was reduced by the overthrow of his Nazi henchmen, his innings are still large as he stalks across the world with his satellites Poverty, Hunger, and Disease.

Herman Heijermans (1864-1924) was convinced that he lived in an "overgangs­ 1 tijdperk," a transitional period. As a young man in the eighteen nineties, he rejected those values and life styles which he felt belonged to the past period dominated by the bourgeoisie, and sought out situations and a profession which would attune him to the future when, he hoped, the proletariat would 2 be in power. He left the conservative business milieu of Rotterdam in 1892 and went to Amsterdam- then teeming with radical ideas. At first, Heijermans was attracted to a group of poets, de tachtigers, who were claiming to have enlivened the stale tradition of Dutch poetry by discovering language and beauty in a totally new way; but soon he felt them to be elitist. Then, in 1895, he became a member of the newly founded Dutch Social Democratic Workers Party. He alienated himself from the literary circles by claiming that art should be socialistic and by rejecting the class separation between artists and workers. He felt himself to be one with the proletariat and, through them, with "The New Life" and "The New Humanity. " Stimulated by the ongoing theater revival, which he interpreted as an attempt to challenge the bourgeois smugness and moral self-righteousness, he had started to write plays before becoming interested in the Socialist Party.