Why the name Lucebert should never be erased according to this Bergen historian

The JOBA asks municipalities to rename the Lucebert School in Bergen, to remove the memorial statue on the Plein in Bergen and to remove a passage from a poem at the Alkmaar city office.

Lucebert, the pseudonym of the Amsterdam Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk, was a poet and painter. He lived for years with his family in Bergen and was seen as the leader of the movement of the Vijftigers, a progressive group of post-war poets and artists.

He was not only one of the most influential Dutch poets of the twentieth century – known for the phrase: “Everything of value is defenseless”, but also a great Nazi sympathizer in his youth.

shocking letters

After a biography from 2018 by Wim Hazeu, with shocking quotes from the correspondence with childhood friend Tiny Koppijn, it only became clear how great his fascination for Nazi ideology really was.

Greatnesses of the past are now up for debate. Through what glasses should we look at Lucebert’s life’s work, now that we know of the fascist ideas of his youth?

Journalist Frits Barend argued this morning on NH Radio that municipalities should distance themselves from his name.

“He was very popular in the Netherlands, but then it came out that he had volunteered for the German Arbeitseinsatz in 1943. He was 19 at the time, perhaps a youthful sin, but then the persecution of the Jews was widely known. signs up voluntarily and meanwhile signs letters to his childhood friend with: Sieg Heil, is convinced Nazi.”

Free will

He wrote the letters to his childhood friend Tiny Koppijn in Germany. They revealed that the poet, when Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk had not been summoned against his will, for the Arbeitseinsatzbut that he had volunteered.

“It was only after that biography that what he had written came out. People knew about it in a small circle, but it was a shock to the general public. He never spoke about it, because I think it was actually a shame himself. If he had been open about it, no one would have named a school or street after him.”

‘Political matter’

Barend calls it ‘sad’ that a Jewish organization has to worry about this again after four years of silence. “I think this is a matter for the municipalities and politics. According to Lucebert, Jews were the evil in the world. It is a juvenile sin or not, you are not going to name a street or school after such a person. I would not want to put my child at a Lucebert school.”

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But calling the poet and artist a convinced Nazi is going too far, according to the Bergen historian Frits David Zeiler. “In his younger years he was searching for a while, but it is not clear from his letters that he was anti-Semite. It is clear that he adhered to an ideology in which he was blind to the consequences. He has been weighed down by those mistakes for a lifetime and only dared to talk about it privately. We must not take his name down thirty years after his death for a youthful sin.”

‘Complete nonsense’

He therefore thinks it is ‘complete nonsense’ to change the name of the Lucebert School. “Burning or burning books and art is a method evil regimes use to write people out of history. We shouldn’t erase our history because someone with the knowledge of now was a little or very ‘wrong’. History is not black and white, so we shouldn’t look at it with those glasses.”

In all criticism of the poet, nuance is often lacking, according to the historian. The Arbeitseinsatz was in fact a legal obligation, with young men from occupied territories doing the work of German men who were themselves in the army. Those who refused could expect punishment. “Not only Lucebert, but a lot of people went to Germany in 1943 to work. Most of them did not do so voluntarily. He may not have been lifted from his bed, but he has responded to a mandatory call in a hopeless situation. Did you go against it? Then you were grabbed in the neck.”

Influence of Tiny

There are suspicions that German censorship contributed to his choice of words in the letters. The postal traffic was thoroughly checked by the Germans. To better understand the correspondence between Lucebert and his childhood friend, Graa Boomsma did last year research into Tiny Koppijn and her influence on his ideas.

According to Boomsma, there is a much-needed nuance to the story. Namely that the ideas seemed to come more from Koppijn. According to the researcher, Lucebert looks more like a hopeless romantic of 19, who saw in her a kind of muse. ‘Lucebert has talked and provoked Tiny much more than I thought after Hazeu’s unambiguous biography,’ she states in her conclusion.

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The fact remains that in his letters Lucebert used terms such as ‘power Jews’, a ‘negro culture’ and ‘our Führer’. “He seems to have bet on the wrong horse, but we also have to look at the big picture of his life. In his work he has also shown something completely different. For example, he also wrote a love letter to our tortured bride Indonesia, a fierce charge against the Dutch East Indies.”

Other times

Zeiler also learned in primary school that man is divided into races. “All kinds of anthropological studies were done over time. That some races made it further than others was common thinking at the time. You have to see it again in that context. All those social factors also play a role. Today we connect Muslims with terrorism. : that kind of reasoning is always in society.”

For the historian Lucebert therefore remains the emperor of the Fifties. “They are disgusting letters, but he later renounced them in a grand manner. The distinguished poet Gerrit Achterberg murdered his landlady and assaulted her 16-year-old daughter. We don’t burn his books, do we?”