“I will never forget how she stood there,” says the German editor Anne Tente about her friend Mireille Berman. “When I passed her on the Frankfurter Buchesse, Mireille was always deep in conversation, the head was a bit slanted, attentive and investigating. People felt like her. In an industry and herself, she pierced her passion by all.”
Tente and Berman got to know each other in 2004 on the Buchmesse and became friends, inside and outside the work. For example, it went more often with Berman: as editor non-fiction at De Bezige Uitgeverij (2001-2005) and as a policy officer at the Nederlands Letterenfonds, she built a large international network of authors, translators, editors and other sympathizers of the written word. After Berman died on March 3 this year from the effects of breast cancer, the fund received hundreds of reactions.
“I was in the application committee when Mireille reported to the fund in May 2005,” says former director Tiziano Perez. “She was so thoughtful and modest that we initially opted for another candidate. That was Peter Buwalda, who withdrew within two weeks because he preferred to write; Mireille came into the picture. And luckily she was smart, very read, curious, and she had an impeilable moral compass. When I was a feature and did not run into their position. A confidant – not just for me, for many of us. “
Berman was born in 1964 as the fourth child and only girl in a teachers’ family, who moved from Hattem via Zuidlaren to Groningen. Her father taught as a music teacher, her mother was a French teacher; Both were read and politically committed and passed it on to the children.
Eager reader
“My father had lost almost all his family from mother’s side in the war,” says Thijs Berman, the second-oldest son. “We mainly got an unspoken, always present sadness of that Jewish background. My father was not religious. He chose communism that promised a radical revolution of social order. We were subscribed to [communistisch dagblad] The truth. Literature was in the highest respect at our home, we read a lot. If, as a teenager, you did not have to Tolstoy, Zola, Turgenev and Proust, you pretty much did not count. ”
Mireille was also an eager reader – but she followed her own taste. “We had our own world,” says childhood friend Maaike Post. “We both had a rabbit, we wrote together, we turned pictures. We read a lot of girls books full of intense feelings and small lives: Cissy van Marxveldt, Schooly From Top Naeff. The crazy, old -fashioned language in those books touched a chord in us, we could quote endlessly. ”
Post and Berman remained friends all their lives. Berman had “a crazy talent for friendship”, in the words of Judith Uyterlinde, who met her in 1982 at the Amsterdam teacher training D’Witte Lelie and was immediately impressed. “At Mireille you didn’t have to prove anything. She didn’t judge, she wanted to understand.”
Berman moved to Amsterdam after her final exam of HAVO on Thorbecke College in Groningen – unlike her brothers, she could not go to the gymnasium, her parents decided. Through the teacher training she ended up at the University of Amsterdam, where she studied history and joined the editors of Skript Historical Magazine: a first step in her career as an editor that she, says brother Thijs, “completely built up from the bottom.” “The manners at the publishers where she got her first jobs were pretty rough, and Mireille was sensitive. But she was also determined. It was her lifelong mission to give a voice to the unnoticed, the vulnerable, and to bring the right people into contact with each other.”
Gender issues
In 1993, Berman met co -historian Ido de Haan, with whom she had two children: Eva (1996) and Mischa (1999). Their parents “had a very good marriage for a long time,” say daughter and son, even though it came to an end after 28 years. They grew up in a warm house, with often guests at the table with whom the world was discussed. “Sometimes people came in a little shy because they came from abroad,” says Eva. “Mama then embraced them immediately, and put everyone at ease.”
In her career, Berman slowly but surely flourished – it sometimes took her effort to value herself, she preferred to put others in the light. In 2013 she was given the position of non-fiction specialist at the fund and started a period of many journeys: in China, Suriname, Egypt, Russia, Turkey and on European book fairs, she was committed to the promotion of Dutch literary non-fiction. She liked everything at work, she said herself, also the hassle and the practical chores.
Bermans’s last great achievement for the fund was the organization of the Dutch host landscape at the Book Fair in Leipzig in March 2024, where they could have themes that were dear to her, such as the colonial past and gender issues. She already knew that the breast cancer for which she had been treated five years earlier had returned, but wanted to remain an independent, working person for as long as possible. Until just before her death, she was part -time in Athenaeum bookstore in Amsterdam. Whoever met her there could see how she beamed; It was as if she had never done anything else.
“Mireille was a wise person,” says friendly author Bram de Swaan. “She lived with books, but not in Books. She did not put you around with her knowledge, but preferred to say, and then put something that put everything in a completely different light, often through a joke. Very special. ”