Henk van Randwijk

HM van Randwijk, March 4, 1965

Hendrik "Henk" Mattheus van Randwijk (born November 9, 1909 in Gorinchem , † May 13, 1966 in Purmerend ) was a Dutch journalist and author . From 1945 to 1950 he was the first editor-in-chief of Vrij Nederland after the previous time in the underground.

Life

As a school principal and journalist in the underground during the German occupation in World War II

Van Randwijk was born the fourth of six children to a gardening couple who also ran a small business. He first became a teacher at a church school in Werkensdam. In 1935 he married Ada Henstra. In addition to his work as a teacher, van Randwijk also began to make a name for himself as a poet and novelist. His second work "Burgers in nood", a socially critical novel directed against the Colijn cabinet , met with some approval, and he was able to achieve this success with the successor "Een zoon begraaft zijn vader “do not repeat.

Shaped by his Reformed origins and belonging to the small, left-progressive party “Christlijk-Democati Unie”, van Randwijk was very committed to his job. After moving to Amsterdam in 1937, this soon earned him the appointment of school director at his new place of work.

After the beginning of the German occupation in World War II , van Randwijk began illegal activities in October 1940. He distributed a brochure to a church group and took in a Jew in hiding with his wife. In early 1941 his school had become a center of resistance. A teacher at his school, Anne Henk Kooistra, wanted to continue running the underground newspaper Vrij Nederland after numerous arrests and brought van Randwijk as the new editor-in-chief, who started work in August 1941.

In his articles in which he rejected the totalitarian occupation as godless, he also thought about the new society coming after liberation. According to his vision, this should be both anti-liberal and anti-capitalist , and he saw Vrij Nederland as the center of a spiritual renewal in the Netherlands. Despite the shared Christian motives, some colleagues saw van Randwijk's position towards communism as too positive, which despite its totalitarian character he did not want to deny the ideals of social justice. These employees then left Vrij Nederland and became co-founders of the Trouw newspaper .

In March 1942 the first of two brief arrests of van Randwijk took place, after which he and his wife (who was also arrested once) went into hiding for good. Initially without a permanent address, in 1943 they had a permanent address and also had fake IDs. The steadily increasing threat ensured that the rules were tightened on the part of van Randwijk, which made him perceived as increasingly authoritarian, which continued even after the war.

As editor-in-chief of Vrij Nederland and freelance journalist after the Second World War

On May 9, 1945, at the Liberation Festival in Amsterdam, he spoke on behalf of the resistance to the assembled audience. Van Randwijk had become a folk hero who was given an advisory role in the first cabinet formation since World War II. In that year, Vrij Nederland initially had a high initial circulation of 109,000 copies, but this subsequently collapsed completely and in August 1948 was only 18,000. Vrij Nederland was felt to be rather boring in terms of content, and with the revived De Groene Amsterdammer and the new Elsevier, new competition quickly emerged. The opposition to the war in the Dutch East Indies was not well received by all readers, and the third path between capitalism and communism, desired by van Randwijk, was not shared by some editors. A merger with the like-minded De Groene Amsterdammer failed in 1949, among other things, because the editorial team of the magazine refused to accept van Randwijk as editor-in-chief.

In 1948, Vrij Nederland got a second editor-in-chief , Johan Winkler , who came from Het Parool , who from then on took care of the daily editorial business. Het Parool had previously started to support Vrij Nederland , eventually Vrij Nederland was taken over by "Arbeiderspers". In 1950 van Randwijk resigned as editor-in-chief, but initially remained an employee. In September 1952, however, he ended the collaboration entirely when one of his Third Way articles was not printed. He then wrote for De Groene Amsterdammer and Maatstaf . From 1959 onwards, on the initiative of his resistance comrade Jaap Camer, van Randswijk worked again for his old newspaper, which had regained importance under the new editor-in-chief Mathieu Smedts . Camer also finally persuaded van Randswijk to join the PvdA . Since the end of the 50s he was seen more and more on television, including in the discussion program “Welbeschouwd”. Van Randwijk's reviews of the resistance period, published in Algemeen Handelsblad , were summarized in the book “In de schaduw van gisteren” after his death and provided with a foreword by Jan Bruins Slot, Trouw's long-time editor-in-chief , who had already dealt with van Randwijk had agreed to cooperate when his death intervened. The book was a great success and had ten editions.

Henk van Randwijk died at the age of 56 from complications from a gallbladder operation. After his death his words were placed in a memorial wall in Amsterdam

Een people dat voor tirannen zwicht
zal sea dan lijf en goed lost
dan dooft het light.

A people who submit to tyrants
will lose more than their body and property
then the light will go out.

chiseled in.

Works

• Op verbeurd gebied , Uitgeverij Holland, Amsterdam 1934
• Burgers in nood , Callenbach, Nijkerk 1936
• Een zoon begraaft zijn vader , Callenbach, Nijkerk 1938
• Celdroom , (poem) 1943
• In de schaduw van gisteren (posthumous), Bert Bakker / Het Parool / Vrij Nederland, Amsterdam 1967

literature

• Piet Hagen: Journalists in Nederland. Een Persgeschiedenis in portraits. Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam / Antwerp 2002. ISBN 90-295-2222-4 (Dutch)
• Jan van de Plasse: Kroniek van de Nederlandse dagblad- en opiniepers / seed gesteld by Jan van de Plasse. Red. Wim Verbei , Otto Cramwinckel Uitgever, Amsterdam 2005, ISBN 90-75727-77-1 . (Dutch; earlier edition: Jan van de Plasse, Kroniek van de Nederlandse dagbladpers , Cramwinckel, Amsterdam 1999, ISBN 90-75727-25-9 )

Web links

• Biographical Woordenboek van Nederland (Dutch)
• Biography on Stichting Dodenakkers.nl with photos of the burial site and a memorial (Dutch)
• Henk van Randwijk at the digital library van den Nederlandse letterkunde (dbnl) (Dutch)
• Detailed catalog of works with all published poems (Dutch)