About Felix Meritis
Hall of fame
Willem Writs
Willem Writs (1732-1786) was a maker of watches and other instruments, a draughtsman, etcher and inventor. He and a number of like-minded individuals established the Sapientia et Libertate (‘Wisdom and Freedom') society in 1771, from which the Felix Meritis (‘Happy through Merit') society emerged six years later. The objectives of the society were to enhance intelligence and virtue, practice art and science, and encourage trade. Writs was the first administrator of the society and an effective member of the Physics, Commerce, Literature and Drawing departments. He died in 1786, too early to witness the opening of the building beside the Keizersgracht.
Jacob Otten Husly
Jacob Otten Husly (1738-1796) was the architect of the Felix Meritis building beside the Keizersgracht. He obtained the commission after winning a not uncontroversial competition. Husly's equally controversial building has gone down in history as the icon of Dutch Neo-Classicism. Felix Meritis is an ingenious and unparalleled building tailored to meet the requirements of the society.
Jan Hendrik van Swinden
Jan Hendrik van Swinden (1746-1823) was one of the most prominent and internationally acclaimed scientist of his day. He delivered more than 100 lectures in Felix Meritis and was an honorary member of the society. He played an important role in the setting up of the Observatory and the purchase of the collection of scientific instruments. With the arrival of teachers such as Van Swinden, Felix Meritis changed from a glorified literary club to become a popular university.
Joseph Schmitt
Joseph Schmitt (1734-1791) was the first conductor and choirmaster of Felix Meritis. He conducted the orchestra at the opening of the building beside the Keizersgracht. The new premises and the rapid rise to fame of its Concert Hall were a strong impulse to cultural life in Amsterdam, and the concerts were very popular. The former German monk became the hub of musical life in the capital and played an important role in the musical development of the Netherlands. By the end of the century he was one of the most frequently performed composers from the Netherlands in Felix Meritis. A grand memorial concert was held in the Concert Hall nine months after his death in 1791.
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte
Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1778-1846) became king of Holland in 1806 at the behest of his brother, the emperor Napoleon I. He implemented administrative reforms, played an important role in the development of Dutch legislation, and was a great lover of culture and science. After taking office, Louis Napoleon donated 41 crates with casts of ancient statues, busts and bas-reliefs to Felix Meritis. He was an honorary member of the society, but his desire to become patron was not respected. The society was not particularly fond of the French and is sometimes described as a ‘club of patriots'. Although Holland was formally independent, in practice it was a French vassal state and Felix Meritis kept a distance from the regime.
Clara Schumann
Clara Schumann (1819-1896) was one of the most important pianists and composers of the Romantic era. Clara started to perform at the age of 13 and entered upon a glorious long career. She married Robert Schumann when she was 21 years old. They had eight children and toured Europe, where Clara played an important role in bring Robert's work to the attention of the public. They performed together twice in Felix Meritis in 1853. After Robert's death in 1854, Clara went on to give several solo concerts in Felix Meritis.
Johannes Bernardus van Bree
Johannes Bernardus van Bree (1801-1857) was a composer, violinist and conductor. He had a reputation as the most talented musician in the Netherlands. He was conductor of Felix Meritis from 1830 to 1856. Van Bree was responsible for professionalisation within the orchestra and the Concert Hall. He drew up strict regulations for the musicians and the audience; he modernised the repertoire; and he brought foreign musicians to the Netherlands. Van Bree was an important and pioneering figure in Amsterdam musical life. He introduced Beethoven's quartets with his string quartet and in 1848 he conducted the first full performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Felix Meritis. The concerts in Felix Meritis became exceptionally popular under Van Bree. In 1846 health problems forced him to give up his functions.
Johannes Kinker
The poet, writer, philosopher and lawyer Johannes Kinker (1764-1845) was the most important member of the Literature department of Felix Meritis at the end of the 18th century. He was admitted as a member of the department in 1791, became its president-director in 1799, and commissioner from 1800 to 1803. Kinker delivered countless lectures on a variety of topics in Felix Meritis and was regularly invited as a speaker or poet at special events. His reputation was high both inside and outside the society and almost single-handed he elevated the Literature department to a higher level. His position began to weaken after he had vainly called for the right of women and Jews to become members of Felix Meritis. After Kinker's departure, the Bataafsche Maatschappij van Taal- en Dichtkunde [Batavian Society of Literature and Poetry] became the centre of cultural Amsterdam.
Jacob van Lennep
Jacob van Lennep (1802-1868) was a writer, publisher, philologist and politician. He was appointed State Lawyer in 1829 and became an honorary member of Felix Meritis in 1832. From 1853 to 1856 he was a member of the Dutch parliament. He published works by Multatuli and Vondel; his career as a writer began with translations of the works of Byron and Walter Scott. One of his major works is a posthumously published diary of a journey on foot through the Protestant Northern Netherlands. In 1851 he was one of the founders of the Amsterdam Dune Water Company, of which he became chairman. With his support two British engineers developed a plan for the River IJ, which attracted consider attention at the time.
Mina Kruseman
The writer, actress and singer Mina Kruseman (1839-1922) was one of the most famous Dutch feminists. In 1872 she and Betsy Perk toured the Netherlands and Flanders to draw attention to feminism. A year later Kruseman rose to fame with her book Een huwelijk in Indië [A marriage in the East Indies], the first Dutch feminist novel. It was on her initiative that Multatuli's Vorstenschool [School for Kings] was performed in 1875. She played Queen Louise in that production. In 1869, when she was not yet known, Kruseman had met the conductor at that time, Johannes Verhulst, to arrange a performance for herself in Felix Meritis, but in vain. As far as we know the 1875 performance was her only appearance in Felix Meritis.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher with an extremely pessimistic view of the world. With its motto Felix Meritis gave expression to the Enlightenment belief in knowledge and its acquisition, but Schopenhauer was most struck by the view from the roof when he visited the society in 1803. He did not believe in happiness through taking cognizance of the world. Schopenhauer wrote his entire message for humanity in his most important work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [The World as Will and Representation] (1819). In 1820 he accepted a position at the University of Berlin. In 1831 a cholera epidemic broke out in Berlin. Both Hegel and Schopenhauer left the city. Schopenhauer moved to Frankfurt, where he spent the rest of his life.
Holdert & Co
In 1889 Stoomdrukkerij Holdert & Co became the owner of the Felix Meritis premises. In the course of the sixty years that this family business spent beside the Keizersgracht, it expanded to become one of the biggest commercial printers in Amsterdam. Holdert & Co was established in 1881 by the brothers Hendrikus Marinus Johannes Holdert (1835-1918) and Antonius Hendrikus Holdert (1843-1931). In the same year they introduced De Echo van het Nieuws - Volksblad voor Nederland. Hendrikus' eldest son, Henri Holdert (Hendrik Joannes Casper, 1858-1925), became director and editor-in-chief of De Echo and sleeping partner of the company. Hak Holdert (Hendrikus Marinus Cornelis, 1870-1944), the son of Antonius Holdert, became manager of the printshop.
A fire broke out in Felix Meritis on 19 February 1932 and the second floor, attic and roof were entirely destroyed. Holdert & Co took advantage of the restoration to add a third floor. Holdert & Co left Felix Meritis on 1 September 1948.
CPN
The Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) was established in 1909 as the Social Democratic Party after a split within the Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP). The CPN was a small party up to the Second World War. After the war, thousands of new members joined the CPN, it was the largest party in the first Amsterdam council elections, and in 1946 the CPN acquired prestigious new premises: Felix Meritis. It came to be known as a bastion and symbol of Dutch Communism. That picture has been etched in popular memory ever since the mass storming of the building on Sunday 4 November 1956, one of the most dramatic events in the history of Felix Meritis. The 1960s saw the start of growing prosperity, workers demanded higher wages, and respect for authority decreased. It became increasingly difficult for the CPN to hold on to Felix Meritis, and in 1980 it sold the building. The CPN merged with the Green Left party in 1991.
Neerlands Hoop
In the second season of the Shaffy Theater (1969-1970) it acquired a new attraction: the duo Freek de Jonge and Bram Vermeulen under the name Neerlands Hoop. Their performances unleashed a revolution in postwar cabaret. They broke with the old-fashioned cabaret tradition and presented a dazzling programme of jokes, songs and sketches. They showed political commitment, but spared nobody. Neerlands Hoop remained in the Shaffy Theater practically down to its disbandment in 1979. Bram Vermeulen became very successful particularly in Flanders as a song writer and musician. He died in 2004. Freek de Jonge became one of the best-known cabaret artists in the Netherlands.
Ramses Shaffy
Ramses Shaffy (1933) was admitted to the Amsterdam theatre academy in 1952. In 1964 he set up Shaffy Chantant. After a period of performances, Shaffy tried to find a permanent venue in Amsterdam. At the end of 1967 his eye fell on Felix Meritis in connection with one of the Provadyas - alternative evenings with pop music, dance, theatre, film, poetry and light shows. The Shaffy Theater opened on 21 January 1969 with Shaffy Verkeerd, in which Ramses Shaffy appeared with the Louis van Dijk trio and the Thijs van Leer trio. Shaffy had a number of big hits with Liesbeth List, including Pastorale.
Steve Austen
Steve Austen (1944) began his career as an arts entrepreneur with the establishment of the Shaffy Theater in 1968. He had already been touring the country as road manager with Ramses Shaffy and his ensemble when he was asked to organise a hall in Felix Meritis. The Shaffy Theater developed to become the Amsterdam platform for innovative theatre. Austen left the Shaffy Theater in 1978 and was responsible for the reorganisation of the Lantaarn-Venster complex of the Rotterdam Arts Foundation. In 1981 he became director of the Netherlands Theatre Institute and in 1987 he was joint manager of Amsterdam Cultural Capital of Europe. In 1988 Austen became director of Felix Meritis. Since 2001 he has been a Permanent Fellow of Felix Meritis and involved in such big international projects as A Soul for Europe.
Theo Loevendie
Theo Loevendie (1930) is a Dutch saxophonist and composer. The STAMP concerts (Promotion of Alternative Music Practice) were launched in Felix Meritis. An initiative of Loevendie, they were intended to introduce contemporary music to a wide audience. In the first season he presented the Afvalorkest [waste orchestra], which played such musical instruments as the garden hose and the beer bottle. Loevendie wrote a couple of bars for each concert, until the composition was finally complete at the end of the season. The STAMP concerts were a great success, but after a number of seasons Loevendie gave them up. He has played in a variety of ensembles. During the last few years he has regularly played with his Ensemble Ziggurat.
Hauser Orkater
Hauser Orkater (1972-1980) first played in the Shaffy Theater in 1974, and the company performed regularly in the Concert Hall in the 1970s. Hauser Orkater consisted of the brothers Rob and Dick Hauser (later director of the Shaffy Theater from 1984 to 1988), Eddie B. Wahr, Thijs van der Poll, Chris Bolzcek, Gerard Atema, and the brothers Alex, Marc and Vincent van Warmerdam. Jim van der Woude joined them later. Hauser Orkater became famous for absurd music theatre in which pop music was combined with bizarre, mainly visual inventions. Hauser Orkater was disbanded in 1980. Since then presentations by different combinations of performers have been put on under the name De Horde (Jim van der Woude, 1981-1984), De Mexicaanse Hond (Alex van Warmerdam, 1980-), and Orkater (Marc van Warmerdam).
Maatschappij Discordia
Maatschappij Discordia was set up in 1981 by Jan Joris Lamers, Titus Muizelaar, Matthias de Koning and Marc Warning. Discordia usually played in the Felix Meritis Hall of Columns and had an office and space for rehearsals on the top floor of the building. The company put on a large number of plays. Under the name of De Republiek (established at the end of 1992), Maatschappij Discordia organised public meetings on the first Monday of each month in collaboration with the Felix Meritis Foundation, Nieuw West and Toneelgroep Amsterdam. The artistic director Jan Joris Lamers was admitted to the board of directors of Felix Meritis in 1997 and was one of those responsible for the performing arts. In 1997 a conflict broke out between Felix Meritis and Maatschappij Discordia about the rent, which eventually led to the departure of Maatschappij Discordia in 1998.
Truus Bronkhorst
From the end of the 1970s the Shaffy Theater was the venue for modern dance. The in-house dancer was Truus Bronkhorst (1951). She already performed in Felix Meritis as a member of the Stichting Dans Productie, but it was her dramatic solo performances that established her reputation. She used stage props in them that became regular features of her visual idiom. Male dancers came to play an increasingly prominent role in her group performances: in Zwarte Bloesem [Black Blossom] (1993) Bronkhorst danced with three black men, and Truus Bronkhorst, Marien Jongewaard and Friends (1997), in which she did not herself dance, was a performance for male dancers alone.
Günter Grass
The German writer Günter Grass (1927) has written many works, including plays, poems and short stories. The novel that made him world-famous, The Tin Drum, in which he described historical events in a surrealist and grotesque style, was published in 1959. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999. In the 1960s Grass campaigned for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and in the 1980s for the peace movement. In 1985 he launched the idea of a pan-European cultural foundation. It was thanks to an initiative by Grass that a meeting of artists and intellectuals from both East and West was held in 1987 during Amsterdam Cultural Capital of Europe and the working group Gulliver was set up. Grass' plans became the framework for the organisation of Felix Meritis.
Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller (1929-1995), German playwright, author, poet and director, was involved in the meeting initiated by Günter Grass in Amsterdam in 1987 and the founding of Gulliver. During the Felix Meritis event Deutschland in Europa in Duitsland [Germany in Europe in Germany] Müller's play Der Auftrag [The Assignment] attracted particular attention and a film on the genesis of the production was broadcast on the Amsterdam Arts Channel.
Joseph Stiglitz
The US economist and writer Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (1943) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001. Stiglitz is particularly well known for his critical views on globalisation and international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund. In 2002 he published one of his most famous books, Globalization and its discontents, a diatribe against and an analysis of the practices of the International Monetary Fund in particular, but also of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In connection with this and other publications, Stiglitz has appeared on several occasions in Felix Meritis.
György Konrád
György Konrád is regarded as one of the major writers of the twentieth century. He is well known as a champion of individual liberty and his work was banned in his native Hungary until 1988. Konrád was also involved in the 1987 meeting at which Gulliver was set up. On the initiative of Felix Meritis, the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam School of the Arts (within the framework of the Amsterdam Fellowship Award 1998), Konrád wrote the essay Amsterdam, a fond and personal portrait of the city. Konrád's The War in Yugoslavia was presented in 1999 at the Essay International festival organised in Felix Meritis. Konrád is a regular guest speaker in Felix Meritis.
Nilüfer Göle
Nilüfer Göle (1953) is a writer and Professor of Sociology at the École des Hautes Études in Paris. She works on such themes as the position of women in Islam, the confrontation with modernity, and the relation between the public and the private domain in the Islamic world. She has been a regular guest in Felix Meritis since 1993. Nilüfer Göle took part in meetings of the Informal Working Body Gulliver, study meetings on the future of the Middle East and the relation between Western Europe and Islam. She was one of the participants in the Amsterdam Arts Channel series Europeans on the future of Europe. She has also been a guest tutor at The Amsterdam-Maastricht Summer University.
Daniel Libeskind
Daniel Libeskind (1946) is an architect from the USA. All over the world he has implemented prominent commercial projects, housing estates and museums, including the Jewish Historical Museum in Berlin (Germany), the Denver Art Museum (USA), and the Wohl Centre of the Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv (Israel). Libeskind was one of the tutors from abroad during the first years of The Amsterdam-Maastricht Summer University. In 2003 his Freedom Tower was chosen for the site of the World Trade Center in New York.
Mauricio Kagel
Mauricio Kagel (1931) is a German-Argentine conductor, librettist, director, and one of the most prominent contemporary composers. Kagel composes instrumental music, theatre and film music, and compositions for radio. From 1969 to 1975 he was musical director of the Kölner Kurse für Neue Musik and of the Institut für Neue Musik. In 1974 he was appointed Professor of ‘Neues Musiktheater' in Cologne. Kagel also developed new instruments and playing techniques. His music is often performed at festivals of contemporary music.
Isaac Stern
Isaac Stern (1920-2001) was a US violinist of Russian descent. He was considered one of the best violinists of his day and was famous for his technique and interpretations. He recorded compositions by Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Vivaldi and others, as well as more modern work by Samuel Barber, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein. Among the venues where he performed in the Netherlands are the Concertgebouw and Felix Meritis.
Karen Armstrong
Karen Armstrong (1944) is a controversial British author. Her work is characterised by a non-dogmatic view of the phenomenon of religion and targets Christianity, Jewry and Islam. Her Through the Narrow Gate (1982) describes the limited world of nuns. One of her best-known books, A History of God, which was published in 1993, deals with the development of the idea of God as interpreted by the major thinkers of the three main religions. Her book The Great Transformation was presented in 2005 in a packed Felix Meritis.
Theo van Gogh
Theo van Gogh (1957-2004) was a Dutch director of films for cinema and television, columnist and commentator. Van Gogh was awarded a Golden Calf for his films Blind Date (1996) and In het belang van de staat [In the interest of the state] (1997). He also directed programmes for television and wrote provocative columns for various newspapers and magazines. In 2004 he and the member of parliament Ayaan Hirshi Ali made the 11-minute controversial film Submission about Muslim abuse of women and the interpretation of the Koran. Van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam on 2 November 2004. In his lifetime Van Gogh was already a champion and explorer of the limits of the freedom of speech, and his violent and premature death only reinforced that role.
Job Cohen
Marius Job Cohen (1947) is a Dutch politician for the Labour Party (PvdA). He was associated with the University of Maastricht from 1981, where he became Rector Magnificus in 1991. In 1997 the Felix Meritis Summer University, funded by the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam School of the Arts, merged with the University of Maastricht. The cooperation was beneficial for all parties: Maastricht hoped to attract more students, and the Summer University received a financial injection and more opportunities. Cohen has also been a member of the Supervisory Board of Felix Meritis. He left Maastricht in 1998 and was appointed later that year as State Secretary of Justice in the second Kok cabinet. Job Cohen assumed the function of Mayor of Amsterdam on 15 January 2001.
Peter Sloterdijk
The cultural philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (1947) has published many essays since 1980, including Critique of Cynical Reason (1984). He was appointed Rector of the Staatlichen Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe in 2001. One of the themes he tackles is globalisation and what he regards as the absence of a historical perspective in the discussion of the phenomenon. The introduction to his latest book, Zorn und Zeit [Anger and Time] contains a note on Felix Meritis (note 18, page 34): "Klassisch ausgedrückt in der Bürgerdevise des 18. Jahrhunderts: Felix Meritis: kraft eigener Verdienste glückselig. Dieser Spruch ziert mit gutem Grund die Fassade eines des schönsten klassizistischen Gebäude von Amsterdam, eines Tempels der Aufklärung an der Kaisergracht, errichtet im Jahr 1787, nach 1945 zeitweilig Hauptquartier der Niederländischen Kommunistischen Partei, heute Sitz eines der lebendigsten Kulturzentren der Niederlande."
