For years, Arend Jan Heerma van Voss got up early on Queen’s Day to go to the flea market. In the streets of his neighborhood in Amsterdam South he searched for the most beautiful toys for his two sons. “When I woke up, there was an army of Star Wars figures in front of us on the kitchen table,” recalls Daan, the eldest son. His father was already in bed by then.
The memory typifies the journalist who died on Sunday, his children and friends tell us. A hardworking man who nevertheless took the time to immerse himself in the world of his children. He had two daughters from a previous marriage. Expressing love for his children verbally and physically was more difficult. He was a man of indirect communication. “After we left home, we still had dinner with my parents every Sunday evening,” says Daan. “He wouldn’t say, ‘How nice that you are here.’ But when we left, ‘What a pity you’re going again.’”
Arend Jan Heerma van Voss was born in May 1942 as the youngest descendant of a well-known Brabant family. His great-grandfather is a successful sugar baron. During the war years, little Heerma van Voss was inseparable from his sister Dokie, four years older. Until she is killed in September 1945 by a border guard on a motorcycle, in front of the parental home in Roosendaal. His parents initially withhold the horrific reality from him. Dokie is with a friend, then she is supposedly in the hospital, after which the bitter truth eventually comes out.
Heerma van Voss is left with a lifelong urge to find the truth. The family leaves Roosendaal not long after the drama and settles down in a residential area in Bentveld, near Haarlem. The great loss is no longer spoken of. The abrupt uprooting in Brabant and the death of his sister mark his life. “I have been the youngest child, only child and oldest child, since my sister was born,” he said in a 2006 radio interview. “The period as an only child was the worst.”
Philosophy until dawn
“AJ,” as some call him, wants to belong. At the age of 17, he registers as an economics student with the student corps in Amsterdam. “It was hell for me,” he will say later. Physically and mentally unable to cope with the roaring students, he leaves disillusioned. Only in his fourth year, he is now studying law, did he find what he was looking for in Student House Westermarkt. With his housemates Wim Noordhoek, John Jansen van Galen and friends like Bert Vuijsje, Heerma regularly smokes, drinks and philosophizes about politics and everything else until dawn. In the background you can hear the roc ‘n’ roll music of Jerry Lee Lewis or the blues of Elmore James.
Many of his friends are members of the Baart fraternity set up with their own hands. After the failure, Heerma van Voss fits in with the corps for that group commitment. He is, to his great satisfaction, the only ‘outside member’. A fitting title for the observer that he is. “Arend Jan was sharp and had an almost detective-like interest in details, such as a person’s choice of words,” says friend and neighbor Leonoor Broeder. “And he was a brilliant actor,” recalls Chris Kijne, who worked with him at VPRO radio. “Thanks to this combination, he was able to perfectly imitate broadcasters with whom he had spent hours as VPRO boss at the conference tables in Hilversum.”
Also read the review of the book from 2012 Doc. A family message.
For the outside world, Heerma van Voss, married to sociologist Christien Brinkgreve since 1985, was above all a journalist. At the Hague Post in the 1970s, when as editor-in-chief he coined the credo ‘Left yet legible’, as a nod to the left-wing but illegible Free Netherlands† He subsequently led the Mental Health Monthly Magazine before joining the . in 1990 VPRO where he, in addition to being chairman, was also editor-in-chief of the radio branch for ten years. His strength: bringing the right people and ideas together. On the other hand, making difficult decisions as a result of persistent budget cuts was less for him. Chris Kijne: “Arend Jan liked to give problems the space to solve themselves.”
The common thread in all his work was his fascination for the behavior and psyche of people. “He felt a kinship with people who also did not quite find themselves in reality,” says friend Adriaan van Dis. In Heerma van Voss’ office at the VPRO there were two photos of a mentally retarded man and a woman. He told visitors who lingered on the portraits as they entered: “Those are my parents.” Due to his hypothermic humor, many visitors left the room without realizing that they had been tricked.
The prolific Heerma van Voss tended to record and document everything. It led to an unprecedented stream of rankings, reviews, articles and books, the most striking of which is the one about his late sister Dokie from 2012. “A retro-report,” he called it himself, in which he shows his emotions and explores the caverns of the psyche. “An occupation that he also underwent professionally for years in the form of psychoanalysis,” says Van Dis. “Without anything changing. He found it especially interesting conversations.”
Sketches Koot and Bie
According to friends, the erudite lawyer enjoyed the countless, often modest, roles he played in films, on TV and, at its peak, in skits by Koot and Bie. “Arend Jan always played an authority,” says Kees van Kooten. The director of a housing corporation, an inspector of the Stichting Kijk- en Luistergeld or an expert who indicated a conflict. “Professor Mangelmans,” says Van Kooten with a laugh. “He made up those names himself and there was not a letter of his text on paper. Arend Jan had the gift of choosing exactly the right words.”
For example, one summer day Van Kooten sat with him on a terrace in Amsterdam South where a luxurious, open sports car stopped right in front of them, driven by an archetypal rich man. Van Kooten: „Arend Jan looked at it, raised his eyebrow and only said: ‘Homeless’. That was it for him.”
Heerma van Voss (79) died after an illness. Van Dis visited him shortly before his death. “I gave him one more kiss on the forehead. Something he hated.” It was a tradition. “I did it every year on his birthday,” says Van Dis. “This time it was to thank him for almost fifty years of friendship.”