donderdag 30 juli 2009

IN MEMORIAM Michaël Zeeman: an avid reader, a vehement critic

by Dragan Klaic

As a cultural and literary critic, Michaël Zeeman, who died of brain tumor on July 27, aged 50, was more well known than well liked in the Dutch cultural circles, but such is the fate of critics: creation of enemies is their professional hazard. He was a very tall Dutchman, of intimidating posture and well projected voice. In his writing, he was also often intimidating and ruthless. 

As many Dutch public figures of strong convinction, Zeeman was also a son of a Calvinist pastor who moved his family often from one village parish to another, making Michaël detached from boyhood friends and more attached to books. He lost his faith early and when he dared to question it, his father made him leave home. As a 17 years old, he started working in Leeuwarden in a bookstore, his natural habitat, where he begon to amass a personal library of over  20,000 books, later subject of a long courtsuit of the bookshop owner who accused him of theft. He started writing poems and book reviews, worked for the Rotterdam Cultural Foundation under the legendary Paul Noorman, then became the editor of the cultural pages of  the leading Dutch daily de Volkskrant in 1991, later editor of its Friday book section "Cicero". He was an erudite and voracious reader who wrote often about Central and Eastern European letters and helped establish its prominent authors, classics such as Bruno Schultz and Sándor Márai, and contemporaries as Győrgy Konrad  and Aleksandar Tišma, in the Dutch book market. For several years he had his television program on books at the Dutch VPRO network. Since 2002 he lived as a free-lance correspondent and cultural commentator in Rome, contributing each week to de Volkskrant a book review, a column and often additional articles. He was also publishing in the German and French press.

By coincidence, my whole immersion in the Dutch culture and language in the last 18 years is much linked from the very beginning to Michaël Zeeman because he was the member of a small search committee, led again by Paul Noorman, that had the audacity to get me from Belgrade in 1991 to take over the Dutch Theater Institute in Amsterdam. I learned a great deal from Michaël in my cultural integration, both from our talks and his articles, which I read regularly and with relish, but with dictionary at hand. Over the years I got often irritated by de Volkskrant, even considered cancelling my subsciption but did not want to miss Michaël's writing. When we would meet, I'd pull out the last juicy phrase from his recent articles for further exegesis. He introduced me to Multatuli, the maverick critic of Dutch colonialism, by giving me a Pinguin edition of Max Havelaar in English and surprised me with the travelogue of Edmondo de Amicis through the Netherlands at the end of 19th century, not knowing that De Amicis' Il Cuore was one of the key books of my childhood.

Our first shared trip was just days after I moved to Amsterdam in December 1991, to Romania, an expedition of the informal cultural network Gulliver, set up by Steve Austen. I described this bizarre journey in more detail in my exilic memoir, how we moved in a freezing winter with the composer Peter Schat, playwright Heiner Mueller, historian Karl Schloegel and others, among the glaciers of the Romanian cutural landscape, left over by Ceausescu, chaperoned by Securitate veterans, now in service of the new regime. Other Gulliver adventures we shared in Istanbul and Paris and later also in Berlin, Belgrade, Vilnius and Skopje, sometimes under the auspices of Soul for Europe cultural initiative, thanks to Steve Austen's stubborn cultural mapping and connecting strategies.

Even after Michaël moved to Rome, he was several times a month in the Netherlands as a much demanded moderator of public debates. I got used to bumping into him at Schiphol and other airports. Despite his frequent travels across Europe, he kept inserting himself in the Dutch debates and fought vehemently the anti-European sentiments and provincial self-pity about the supposedly endangered Dutch identity that have been plaguing the public life in the country in the last 7-8 years. As a polyglot, Michaël held the Dutch language in high esteem and handled it with much respect. As a cosmopolitan, he took it for his duty to point out with pride the peculiarities and specific values of the Dutch culture and letters to his fellow Europeans. As a public intellectual, he was a vehement critic of cultural nationalism, Dutch or any other. As a convinced European, he followed the twists and hiccups of the European integration process and its cultural aspects with much critical scrutiny and sarcasm. Inevitably, Dutch cultural life will become much more dry without Michaël Zeeman.

Michaël Zeeman, literary critic, poet and columnist, born 12 September 1958, died 27 July 2009 in Rotterdam.

Dragan Klaic is a theater scholar and cultural analyst in Amsterdam and a Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Budapest (www.draganklaic.eu). 

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