Willem Frederik Hermans was a Dutch author of poetry, novels, short stories, plays, as well as book-length studies, essays, and literary criticism. His most famous works are The House of Refuge, The Darkroom of Damocles, and Beyond Sleep.
Dutch language literature comprises all writings of literary merit written through the ages in the Dutch language, a language which currently has around 23 million native speakers. Dutch-language literature is the product of the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles and of formerly Dutch-speaking regions, such as French Flanders, South Africa, and Indonesia. The Dutch East Indies, as Indonesia was called under Dutch colonization, spawned a separate subsection in Dutch-language literature. Conversely, Dutch-language literature sometimes was and is produced by people originally from abroad who came to live in Dutch-speaking regions, such as Anne Frank and Kader Abdolah. In its earliest stages, Dutch-language literature is defined as those pieces of literary merit written in one of the Dutch dialects of the Low Countries. Before the 17th century, there was no unified standard language; the dialects that are considered Dutch evolved from Old Frankish. A separate Afrikaans literature started to emerge during the 19th century, and it shares the same literary roots as contemporary Dutch, as Afrikaans evolved from 17th-century Dutch. The term Dutch literature may either indicate in a narrow sense literature from the Netherlands, or alternatively Dutch-language literature.
Willem van Mieris was an 18th-century painter from the Northern Netherlands.
Willem Arondéus was a Dutch artist and author who joined the Dutch anti-Nazi resistance movement during World War II. He participated in the bombing of the Amsterdam public records office to hinder the Nazi German effort to identify Dutch Jews and others wanted by the Gestapo. Arondéus was caught and executed soon after his arrest. Yad Vashem recognized Arondéus as Righteous Among the Nations.
Willem Johannes Theodorus Kloos was a nineteenth-century Dutch poet and literary critic. He was one of the prominent figures of the Movement of Eighty and became editor in chief of De Nieuwe Gids after the editorial fracture in 1893. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.
Renate Ida Rubinstein was a German-Dutch writer, journalist and columnist.
The Henneicke Column was a group of Dutch Nazi collaborators working in the investigative division of the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration, with headquarters in Amsterdam, during the Nazi Germany occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. Between March and October 1943 the group, led by former auto mechanic Wim Henneicke and Willem Briedé, was responsible for tracking down Jews in hiding and arresting them. The group arrested and delivered to the Nazi authorities 8,000-9,000 Jews. Most of them were deported to Westerbork concentration camp and later shipped to and murdered in Sobibor and other German extermination camps.
Theodor Holman is a Dutch journalist, presenter, and writer of Indo descent.
Uitgeverij Lannoo Groep is a Belgian publishing group, based in Tielt, with assets in Belgium and the Netherlands. Its Belgian subsidiary is Uitgeverij Lannoo. Its Dutch subsidiary is LannooMeulenhoff. Over the years Lannoo evolved from Catholic and Flemish to an open, commercial publishing house.
The Willem de Kooning Academy is a Dutch academy of media, art, design, leisure and education based in Rotterdam. It was named after one of its most famous alumni, Dutch fine artist Willem de Kooning.
Jan van de Cappelle was a Dutch Golden Age painter of seascapes and winter landscapes, also notable as an industrialist and art collector. He is "now considered the outstanding marine painter of 17th century Holland".
Willem Schellinks (1623–1678) was a Dutch painter, draughtsman and etcher of landscapes and marine scenes and also a poet. Willem Schellinks was one of the most widely traveled Dutch artists of his time. He traveled along the Loire and the Seine in 1646, and between 1661 and 1665 he visited England, France, Italy, Malta, Germany and Switzerland, keeping a record of his travels in multiple landscapes and scenic views as well as a journal. Alternative spellings, Schellinger and Schellinx.
The Bataviaasch Nieuwsblad was one of the leading and largest daily newspapers in the Dutch East Indies. It was based in Batavia on Java, but read throughout the archipelago. It was founded by the famous Dutch newspaperman and author P. A. Daum in 1885 and existed to 1957.
Beyond Sleep is a novel by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans, published in February 1966. The protagonist, Dutch geologist Alfred Issendorf, has a geology dissertation in preparation, and embarks on an expedition to Finnmark, northern Norway, to verify his dissertation director's theory that craters in the local landscape were formed by meteor impacts rather than by Ice Age glaciers. Initially he is accompanied by a group of three Norwegian students of geology, but soon after two travel their own course Alfred loses his guide Arne, who falls to his death, and is then on his own in a land where the sun never sets.
The Darkroom of Damocles is a war novel by the Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans, published in 1958. An immediate success since it was first published, the novel has been printed in numerous editions and is considered one of the greatest World War II novels. The book has been translated into English twice, in 1962 by Roy Edwards, and again in 2007 by Ina Rilke. It was adapted into the 1963 film Like Two Drops of Water, directed by Fons Rademakers. Le Carré's spy novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was in part inspired by The Darkroom of Damocles by Hermans, who suspected plagiarism.
A ribbon of poems was the literary debut of Dutch writer Louis Couperus. The collection of poetry A ribbon of poems received a good review by critic J.H. van Hall in the Dutch literary magazine "The Gids"; Van Hall compared Couperus' poetry with those written by Heinrich Heine, Everhardus Johannes Potgieter and Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft; Jan ten Brink, Couperus' teacher and later professor at the University of Leiden drew comparisons with Constantijn Huygens. Not every critic however was that positive; Couperus' debut was also termed "contrived and effeminate".
Williswinde is a collection of verses written by Dutch writer Louis Couperus. The first edition was published by L.J. Veen in 1895. In 1904 Veen acquired full rights of Williswinde and 16 other works that were written by Couperus. For the first edition in 1894 Couperus received 200 guilders and the poems by that time had already been published in a number of Dutch newspapers and magazines. However Couperus had some difficulty to get the poem Williswinde published, as he wrote in a letter to a colleague, Smit Kleine. The book cover was designed by painter Ludwig Willem Reymert Wenckebach.
Rudolf Herman "Rudi" Fuchs is a Dutch art historian and curator.
Mensje van Keulen, pseudonym of Mensje Francina van der Steen, is a Dutch writer.
Censorship in the Dutch East Indies was significantly stricter than in the Netherlands, as the freedom of the press guaranteed in the Constitution of the Netherlands did not apply in the country's overseas colonies. Before the twentieth century, official censorship focused mainly on Dutch-language materials, aiming at protecting the trade and business interests of the colony and the reputation of colonial officials. In the early twentieth century, with the rise of Indonesian nationalism, censorship also encompassed materials printed in local languages such as Malay and Javanese, and enacted a repressive system of arrests, surveillance and deportations to combat anti-colonial sentiment.