There Is No Such Thing as Dutch Literature

Dutch Literature Seen From Abroad

By Hermann Wallmann

When it comes to thematic art exhibitions, consistency of content is more important than the quality of the pictures and objects displayed. The same applies to a national literature when it is taken as the theme of a festival, a series of readings, or the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Why should I be interested in Dutch literature just because it happens to come from Belgium or the Netherlands? A writer wants to find his own answers, which has nothing to do with arrogance but everything with discipline and technique. He doesn’t represent a country, let alone a government, but rather his own particular qualities.

For the moment, therefore, I shall stick to the proposition that there is no such thing as Dutch literature. In other words, for me Dutch literature originated when literature from the Netherlands and Belgium came about. I never embraced this literature, it literally fell into my lap. More precisely, I happened to eavesdrop on the conversation that, as Umberto Eco put it, books are constantly engaged in, even when our backs are turned. Thus I would never have stumbled upon Menuet (Minuet) by the great Flemish author Louis Paul Boon, who died shortly after being marketed as a potential Nobel prize candidate, if the blurb on the back of the German edition hadn’t reminded me of Nabokov’s Lolita.

Conversely, this year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Westphalian poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Had it not been for Margriet de Moor I would never have realised that the term ‘women’s literature’ is an attempt to narrow the scope of literature written by women: a Dutch woman has created her own precursor in German literature! Similarly, it was only after reading the novel Een vlucht regenwulpen (A Flight of Curlews, 1978) by Maarten ‘t Hart that I discovered the power and relevance of one of Germany’s greatest autobiographies, namely Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton Reiser, first published in 1785.

But the experience I had with the immortal Multatuli is perhaps paramount. On the occasion of the 1993 Frankfurt Book Fair, when the Schwerpunkt or Focal Theme was Dutch and Flemish literature - proving that such events do have their benefits - a small German publisher brought out a revised edition of Max Havelaar. The book was first published in Germany by an anarchist who taught himself Dutch while a political prisoner in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison so he could translate Multatuli. The novel describes a Javanese village that ‘had just been overcome by the Dutch army and was thus in flames.’ This particular thus, which at the time caused a fierce war of pens, is deleted in the revised edition. In other words, the importance of such details often becomes apparent only when a work is translated. A less dramatic example can be found in the German translation of the poems of Gerrit Kouwenaar. Here the Dutch word terwijl is translated as obsolete German derweil - which reminded me as a German reader that my own language is still in transition.

But let’s get back to the subject. An unbiased reader might wonder what literature in Dutch has that German literature doesn’t. The question is formulated incorrectly if we’re talking about content, since books don’t have nationalities. By the same token, concepts such as ‘metropole’ or ‘periphery’ should not be used as value judgments. At a time when Schiller’s distinction between naive and sentimental poetry has lost its validity, if only because contemporary authors have access to world literature, we may be left with only one criterion: How do the authors digest the work of their colleagues? In this regard, German writers have been negligent in a way comparable to German film and television industry: every thing is dubbed, even movies and programmes in English, a lang uage that is taught in German grammar schools.

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