Remco Campert brought the dark war years and the frivolous sixties together

His poems, stories and novels say more about the past than photographs and moving images.

Borrowed a few weeks ago Volkskrantcolumnist Frank Heinen, the incestuous farming family Kneupma and constable Bonkjes of their creator, the poet/writer Remco Campert, who died on Monday. A further introduction of these figures was unnecessary: ​​twenty years after they regularly featured in Campert’s exchange column on the front page of the newspaper, they are still part of the collective memory. What applies to them according to poet Lucebert applies to Campert: they never die.

Campert’s poetry and prose were timeless in the most literal sense. Although he was affiliated with the literary movement De Vijftigers, he did not derive his identity from it. “Campert basically doesn’t need the others,” he was told. He took himself, and what he did, less seriously than many of his art brothers and sisters. “Nothing is gnawing inside,” he said himself. No resentment, no pretension, no urge to convert. He was mainly guided by ‘writing fun’, which after more than sixty years is still active in his debut novel Life is very happy† The polemic did not suit him. He only reacted against the ‘contrived poetry’ of the past, because as a young poet he simply had to be against something.

But Remco Campert was also timeless in another respect: he was a child of the war (whose father was murdered by the Nazis in 1943), but he also expressed the way of life of the frivolous sixties. In his oeuvre he brought both extremes together, because ‘when I talk about death, it is also about life’. He treated life and death with the same open-mindedness, bringing lightness to dark themes. That lightness was relative, in the opinion of poet Ramsey Nasr. “He knew how to hide the fact that something is actually very difficult.” That was already part of it when he said to his mother about the war that had just broken out on 10 May 1940: ‘I don’t like it.’

Part of Remco Campert’s oeuvre will inevitably be forgotten. But the poems, the stories and the novels that solidify the spirit of the 1960s have eternal value. Because they say more than photos and moving images from that era.