AM de Jong

AM de Jong (1936)

AM de Jong (Adrianus Michiel de Jong, also Adriaan Michael de Jong) (born March 29, 1888 in Nieuw-Vossemeer, now Steenbergen municipality ; † October 18, 1943 in Blaricum ) was a Dutch writer and journalist. The working-class son and avowed socialist was best known for his autobiographical novels about Merijntje Gijzen - and for his tragic end. He was murdered by Dutch SS men at the age of 55 .

life and work

De Jong grew up in poor conditions, from 1896 in Rotterdam . The child was sent peddling. Of his twelve siblings, 10 died within two years of their birth. Nevertheless, the bright boy read many books that he borrowed. The family later moved to Delft , where De Jong found a job as a primary school teacher in 1907. From 1912 he was able to accommodate articles in magazines. His first novel Ondergang (Downfall) was published in 1916. A year earlier he had married his colleague Jacoba Cornelia (Co) Koekebacker. They moved to Amsterdam . This marriage produced a son and a daughter. Co died in 1936. In the same year De Jong married the singer Marie-Louise Josephine (Wies) Defresne.

In 1916, De Jong was drafted into the then rather reactionary Dutch army, despite his political commitment to socialism . The First World War did not hit Holland directly, but the armed forces had been mobilized just in case. De Jong, who exercised an "intellectual profession", was allowed to attend an officer training course. However, he promptly wrote a series of critical sketches about the Dutch military that appeared (under a pseudonym) between 1914 and 1918 in the socialist daily Het Volk . When the military authorities learned of this, De Jong was dismissed from the army. This series later resulted in the humorous novel Frank van Wezel's roemruchte jaren ( Frank van Wezel's Glorious Years), published in 1929 , which, of course, is not one of De Jong's most successful works.

Bulletje and Boonestaak

In 1919 De Jong started working as an editor at Het Volk . From 1922 he supplied the Amsterdamer Blatt, in collaboration with his artist friend George van Raemdonck, with comic strips rich in text that revolved around the crooks Bulletje and Boonestaak . Although openly turned against capitalism and militarism, these "stripes" (until 1937) enjoyed great popularity among young and old. They also appeared in book editions after De Jong's death. Also with Raemdonck he published comics between 1925 and 1927 under the series title Appelsnoet en Goudbaard in a magazine.

De Jong's main work, the autobiographical eight-part novel cycle Merijntje Gijzens Childhood and Youth , was published between 1925 and 1938. Unrolled , strongly based on the author's childhood memories, it depicts the hard rural and proletarian life in Brabant around 1900. As the first volume Het verraad (The Treason) had great success straight away, De Jong set up as a freelance writer. The first German editions of these volumes came out around 1930. In 1936 the work was filmed by Kurt Gerron (in Dutch) , with De Jong writing the script and also starring in the film. A two-part German complete edition of the eight books of the novel cycle appeared in 1979 and 1982 under the two titles A white dream was this morning. A childhood novel and The great summer is coming to an end. Novel of a youth .

The socialist as a squire

De Jong was very productive and sat at his desk from morning until night. He also wrote children's books, radio plays, translations and also worked as a cabaret artist. The official, bourgeois literary criticism did not think much of him, as Margreet Schrevel notes. He wrote straightforward and straightforward, with a mixture of realism and romanticism. So he contrasted the annoying factory with nature, sexual desire, love and friendship. In body, however, the worker's son liked to give the "bon vivant" after his first successes. His special passion was Persian carpets, horses, dogs and travel. According to Piet Bakker , the Brabanters sometimes mistook the socialist for a feudal squire. De Jong was hospitable, which also benefited the Greek-Romanian writer Panait Istrati , who became known in the Netherlands through De Jong. In 1929, De Jong condemned the official refusal to grant Leon Trotsky an entry visa for the Netherlands.

assassination

In 1939 De Jong presented a violent accusation against fascism and the half-heartedness of Western democracies with the novel Tanz auf dem Vulkan . A year earlier, at age 50, he had bought a house near Amsterdam. Unfortunately, a neighbor turned out to be a Nazi, with whom he soon had an argument. In 1942 De Jong was arrested by the German occupiers for his convictions, but released after a few weeks due to his poor health. But the following year he was shot dead in his own house as part of a “retaliatory train” by members of the notorious Dutch SS special command Silbertanne .

A museum dedicated to him has been set up in De Jong's birthplace, Nieuw-Vossemeer (North Brabant).

Works (German)

• Adriaan de Jong: The great summer is coming to an end. Novel of a youth . (Umf .: The great summer , the good death , the bad rumor , farewell to a boy ). Transferred by Jutta and Theodor Knust. Berlin, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1982
• Adriaan de Jong: This morning was a white dream. Childhood novel . Transferred from Ms. and M. Grünberg. 2nd edition Berlin, Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1981 (1st edition: Heart in the surf. Novel of a childhood . Stuttgart, 1957)
• AM de Jong: The death of the patriarch. Novella . Vienna, Erasmus Verlag, 1946

literature

• CJ Kelk: Designing rondoms. Critical overzicht van de Nederlandsche romanliteratuur , Utrecht 1938
• D. Coster in Critisch Bulletin , 1945, pages 47-59
• MJG de Jong: Flierefluiters apostel , in: Ders .: Meningen en meningsverschillen , Leiden 1970, pp. 9–28
• Matthijs Boumans et al. a .: AM de Jongs Merijntje Gijzens jeugd en het sociaal-Demokratie ontwikkelingswerk. Een materiaalverzameling , Nijmegen 1977
• MJG de Jong: AM de Jong 1888-1943 , in: A. Korteweg (ed.): 'T Is vol van schatten hier , Volume 1, Amsterdam 1986, pages 279-280
• Mels de Jong: AM de Jong, schrijver , Amsterdam, Querido, 2001

Margreet Schrevel cites other sources.

Individual evidence

1. ^ German edition Berlin 1921
2. ↑ ^{a b} Kindler's New Literature Lexicon , Munich 1988 edition
3. ^ Extract in Dutch online , accessed on November 11, 2011
4. ^ Lambiek , accessed November 11, 2011
5. ↑ Adriaan de Jong: This morning was a white dream. Childhood novel . Berlin 1979
6. ^ Adriaan de Jong: The great summer is coming to an end. Novel of a youth . Berlin 1982
7. ↑ ^{a b} Margreet Schrevel 2002 , accessed on November 11, 2011
8. ↑ See also Silbertanne , accessed on November 11, 2011
9. ↑ AM de Jong Museum , accessed November 11, 2011
10. ↑ Mels is a nephew of the sitter

Web links

• Literature by and about AM de Jong in the catalog of the German National Library