On Thursday 4 March the famous Dutch writer Harry Mulisch reopened the newly renovated Museum of Literature in The Hague.

Experience the writing process

See how books originate, from the first scribble to the last proofs. Read, hear, see and enjoy poems, fragments of prose, plays and the film versions of books. Get a feeling of the hubbub surrounding literary arguments and find out about the elevation – or is it ordinariness? – of writers’ lives.

Discover the Pantheon

“The Pantheon. 100 writers – 1000 years of literature” offers an overview of literature in Dutch from the Middle Ages until today.

You’ll find the classics cosily side by side, including Hooft, Vondel, Bilderdijk, Multatuli, Couperus, Gorter, Leopold, Nijhoff and Hermans.

There’s Thomas a Kempis, the author of the Imitatio Christi, too; the internationally acclaimed lawyer Hugo Grotius (aka Hugo de Groot); the Portuguese-Jewish philosopher Spinoza; the humanist Erasmus, who never wrote a word in Dutch; the great... letter-writer Vincent van Gogh; the great historian – but what a stylist! – Huizinga and the face of the Holocaust, Anne Frank.

For the first time, Flemish writers have been included in this canon. The twelfth-century poet Hendrik van Veldeke (although he’s really a Limburger without any clear national identity), the mystics Hadewych and Ruusbroec, and the encyclopaedist Jacob van Maerlant. Not by chance they’re all from the Middle Ages. In those days the Low Countries’ centre of gravity was actually in the South.

But nineteenth-century authors from Flanders have made the selection as well, including Hendrik Conscience (the Belgian Walter Scott, well-known for his “Lion of Flanders”) and Guido Gezelle (the brilliant poet-priest). Then from the twentieth century there’s, among others, avant-gardist Paul van Ostaijen, cynical melancholic Willem Elsschot (Cheese), tender anarchist Louis Paul Boon (Chapel Road) and jack-of-all-trades Hugo Claus (The Sorrow of Belgium).

You can join the Pantheon for that matter – when you’re dead. So Harry Mulisch will have to wait a while.

See an overview of the 100 writers selected by the Museum of Literature here.

Where?

Pr. Willem-Alexanderhof 5
The Hague
Tel: 070-3339666
Fax: 070-3477941

Close to The Hague Central railway station.

The Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Prijs 2010, an important Dutch award in the field of culture, has gone to the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century.

Frans Brüggen (Conductor) and Sieuwert Verster (Director) co-founded the orchestra in Amsterdam in 1981. It consists of about 60 members from many different countries, who all play on period instruments or on contemporary copies thereof. All orchestra members and the conductor receive equal shares of concert earnings. The orchestra does not audition its members, but receives them through word-of-mouth invitations.

Until now, the orchestra went on tour about a hundred times, performing for more than a million spectators, during more than a thousand concerts all over the world. The wide-ranging repertoire this orchestra has recorded for Philips Classics includes works by Purcell, Bach, Rameau, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert & Mendelssohn. Many of their recordings have received international awards.

More about Frans Brüggen

Frans Brüggen was born in Amsterdam in 1934. After finishing his studies he launched a major career as a virtuoso performer of music for the recorder. As a flute soloist, he was equally at home in performances of the Baroque masters and contemporary avant-garde composers. He also gave informative lectures and illustrative performances of recorder music in Europe.

At the age of 21, he was appointed professor at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and later held positions as Erasmus Professor at Harvard University and Regent's Professor at the University of Berkeley, making him one of the youngest musical scholars of the time though still remaining, as Luciano Berio wrote, "a musician who is not an archeologist but a great artist”.

You can see and hear the orchestra on YouTube, performing Midsummer Night's Dream from Mendelssohn on August 28 2009 in Utrecht, together with the Nederlands Kamerkoor and Dutch video artist Daniëlle Kwaaitaal. 

Ruhe (Rest) is a recital of melancholic Schubert lieder that is rudely interrupted by people who want to talk about their voluntary enlistment in the SS in 1940. A search for harmony was in those days, as it is for the singers now, the basic principle and, as in a choir with any ambition, anyone who sang false was out. They ask for understanding.

During the sixties the Dutch artists Armando and Hans Sleutelaar carried out a number of conversations with people who belonged to the SS in the Second World War. They typed out the tapes, left out the questions and the result is some monologues by people trying to explain what and how they thought and felt back then and why their lives took that turn. No bitter regrets, just people who cannot by any means rid themselves of their past.

The Collegium Vocale singers and the two actors are already in their chairs when the public comes in and takes the empty seats. The audience sits among the singers and actors. The performance begins.

 Simply moving and admired from Paris to Edinburgh, Budapest, Leipzig, Singapore, Norway and Australia. On 3 and 4 November 2010 in the Guggenheim Museum in New York. 

Other performances
22 May 2010 in Mechelen (Belgium)
24 May 2010 in The Hague (the Netherlands)
26 May 2010 in Dortmund (Germany)
3 June 2010 in Quimper (France)

Acting: JOSSE DE PAUW, TOM JANSEN, DIRK ROOFTHOOFT, CARLY WIJS (2 actors per performance) / COLLEGIUM VOCALE GENT 

A Muziektheater Transparant production in coproduction with KunstenFESTIVALdesArts and Zeeland Nazomerfestival, in cooperation with Festival Spielart (Munich)

However, due to Hannema’s dubious reputation in the field of attribution (Hannema was responsible for the purchase of The Supper at Emmaus, attributed to Vermeer, but painted by the forger Van Meegeren), people dit not pay attention to his intuitive remarks. The painting ended up against a wall in Museum de Fundatie in the small Dutch town of Zwolle and wasn't looked after for decades.

But now, exactly 35 years after his purchase, Hannema has finally been proven right. Recent research by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has demonstrated that the painting can be attributed to Van Gogh. The canvas, the paint used, the size and use of colour give convincing evidence. On top of that, Van Gogh painted that mill, a famous landmark of Montmartre, several times. He stayed in Paris in 1886-1887 , his brother Theo having a flat in the neighbourhood.

Exhibition: The Discovery - Vincent van Gogh’s The ‘Le Blute-fin’ Mill in the collection of Museum de Fundatie, 25 February to 4 July 2010, www.museumdefundatie.nl. More information in English can be downloaded through this link.

Confusion
In De reis van de lege flessen (Journey of the Empty Bottles, 1997), he described his original confusion regarding the Dutch way of life, comparing Iran as a culture where everything happens behind the curtains to the Netherlands, a society without curtains, where everything is done in a half-naked way. Abdolah started writing simple stories about being a foreigner in the Netherlands and has, in the meantime, become one of the most celebrated novelists in Dutch literature. Since 1996, Abdolah also writes columns in the prominent Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant under the name of Mirza (Persian for 'chronicler').

Struggle
Abdolah’s struggle with the Dutch language is metaphorically reflected in his autobiographical novel Spijkerschrift (translated into 13 languages, including in English by Susan Massotty as My Father's Notebook in 2006). It tells the story of the political dissident Ishmael, who, in his new home in the Netherlands, attempts to translate his father’s notebook into Dutch. In this process of translating and deciphering, he narrates his father's story, his own story, and the story of twentieth-century Iran. This task is complicated by the fact that his mute and illiterate father wrote the notebook in a self-invented cuneiform script. While Ishmael’s writing in Dutch represents the construction of a new homeland, the process of translation brings back memories and mysteries of his native Persia. His search for a new identity in the Netherlands entails a complicated deciphering of the past, which results in his rewriting the history of his father’s land in the literature of his new language. Like his father, who was a carpet-mender, Ishmael interweaves both traditional and new elements into a colorful tapestry of words. In 2006, Abdolah discussed the impact of Islamic fundamentalism on the daily life of a tradition-conscious family in Het huis van de moskee (The House of the Mosque). This book was voted second best Dutch novel ever; the English translation has been published this January. In his latest work, Abdolah undertook the difficult task of translating the Q'uran into Dutch, yet he deliberately altered some parts in the original version to make the book more accessible for a Western audience.

A traveler on tour
Abdolah begins his American tour on March 7 at Columbia University, New York, and will continue his journey to Ithaca (Cornell University, March 12-17), Ann Arbor (University of Michigan, March 12-17), Bloomington (University of Indiana, March 17-22) and Minneapolis (University of Minnesota, March 27-April 2). He will end his tour at the University of California, Berkeley, where he will spend the entire month of April. Following in the footsteps of Cees Nooteboom, Harry Mulisch and Leon de Winter, Abdolah will receive the distinguished position of a Regents’ Professor. His Regents’ lecture at Berkeley will take place in the prestigious Morrison Room on April 15th.

Kader Abdolah’s American tour is organized with the support of the Dutch Language Union and the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature.

In 2001, Abdolah wrote about his struggle with Dutch in The Low Countries.

Spirit of freedom
While clandestine book publishers also operated in other countries under Nazi rule, the Netherlands is unique due to its exceptionally high number of clandestinely printed book titles. Perhaps even more impressive than the number of titles is the amazing popularity of resistance poetry. People who before the war had shown little or no interest in poetry read the verses that were published in illegal newspapers with a zeal almost equal to that with which they read news about German military defeats. Traditionally, this combative Dutch “spirit of resistance” has been seen as a reaction to the ambitions of the German propaganda; whereas the Germans hoped to find support for the Nazification of the Netherlands and the tightening of links between the “Germanic” Dutch and their German “brothers,” clandestine literature insisted on the incompatibility of Dutchmen and Germans for “spiritual reasons.” The German spirit was depicted as intrinsically subservient, in contrast to the Dutch “spirit of freedom.”

Kader Abdolah
The Berkeley exhibit will focus on the technical difficulties in producing clandestine literature in a country under Nazi occupation. It will present to the public some of its most precious examples of beautifully illustrated books that were produced with minimal resources. The exhibit will illustrate the risks of writing, printing, selling and buying this literature and reflect on its specific content as well as its - sometimes dubious - commitment to the resistance. The exhibit will also pay attention to clandestine literature in other cultures that suffer(ed) under foreign oppression or dictatorship. The official inauguration of the exhibit will take place on April 15th with a lecture by Dutch writer Kader Abdolah, who in his youth was involved in the clandestine press in his native Iran.

Where and when
The exhibit will be on display at the U.C. Berkeley Main Library until June 30th and is organized in collaboration with Berkeley’s Dutch Studies Program.

Tuymans is currently one of the most highly valued Flemish painters, an appreciation which has grown beyond the borders of his native Belgium over the last couple of years. This retrospective was already on show at the Wexner Center Galleries in Columbus, OH at the end of last year, and on that occasion Peter Schjeldahl described the artist as "the most challenging painter in the recent history of art" in The New Yorker.

As noted in an article in our yearbook The Low Countries, Adrian Searle once wrote that Tuymans "examines the malaise of European culture". Or as the SFMOMA press release reads: "Tuymans's paintings initially suggest relatively innocuous depictions of everyday life - but other meanings almost always lurk beneath their surfaces." Ominous and not to be taken at face value.

The exhibition at SFMOMA runs until May 2, 2010.

[Illustration: Luc Tuymans, The Secretary of State, 2005; oil on canvas; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, promised gift of David and Monica Zwirner, 2006; © Luc Tuymans; photo: courtesy David Zwirner, New York]

The Dutch Council of Ministers has decided to establish the Dutch language in the Constitution. More and more languages are being spoken in the Netherlands. English, in particular, is gaining ground. It is imperative to ensure that the Dutch language does not come under pressure. The Council of Ministers wants to change the Constitution to guarantee that people in the Netherlands will always be able to use the Dutch language in the Netherlands.

The cabinet wants to enshrine in the Constitution that Dutch is the official language of the Netherlands and that the government will promote the use of the language. There will also be a clause on Frisian (Fries), the language spoken in Friesland (North-West of the country).

Controversial
The bill, which can most likely count on a majority in the Second Chamber, is controversial in some circles. Constitutional experts, in particular, talk of "symbolic legislation" and consider its practical significance minimal. They point to the fact that there is no such constitutional clause in scores of countries, like the United States and Germany. On the contrary though, France, Italy and, of course, Belgium do have one.

[Illustration: Text of the Constitution on a wall in The Hague by Jan Kooi]