Herman Heijermans

• Born: December 3, 1864
• Birthplace: Rotterdam, the Netherlands
• Died: November 22, 1924
• Place of death: Zandvoort, the Netherlands

Other Literary Forms

Herman Heijermans began his literary career by writing prose sketches under a variety of pseudonyms and became a journalist by writing theater criticism for De telegraaf, a newspaper that had been founded in Amsterdam. He won his first literary success with ’n Jodenstreek? (a Jew’s trick?), a novella about intermarriage, which appeared in 1892 in De gids (the guide), one of the most respected periodicals in the Netherlands.

During his literary career, Heijermans employed several pen names, the most famous of which was Samuel Falkland, which had originally belonged to his father. He affixed “Jr.” to it and made it his own. With this pseudonym, he signed a series of vignettes and sketches of Amsterdam life that appeared weekly for twenty-one years, first in De telegraaf and later in Algemeen handelsblad (general journal of commerce). His “Falklandjes,” as they came to be called, attracted a large audience that looked forward to each new sketch and, sometimes, a one-act play. When they were later published in book form, they filled eighteen volumes. As a writer of Dutch prose, Heijermans is also known for his autobiographical novel Kamertjeszonde (1898; sin in a furnished room); Droomkoninkje (1924; the little dream king), a novel filled with the dreams and fantasies of childhood; and other sketches, novellas, and novels.

Achievements

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Dutch drama emerged from the literary revolution known as de Beweging van Tachtig (the movement of the eighties) unchanged. The man who was to revive the Dutch drama and to become the greatest playwright of modern Holland was Herman Heijermans. He was aware not only of the vitalizing effect of the new literary movement in the Netherlands but also of the influence of such new dramatists as Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Ibsen’s Samfundets støtter (pr., pb. 1877; The Pillars of Society, 1880), Et dukkehjem (pr., pb. 1879; A Doll’s House, 1880; also known as A Doll House), and Vildanden (pb. 1884; The Wild Duck, 1891) had already appeared on the Dutch stage when, in 1892, André Antoine toured the country with his Théâtre Libre and returned again in 1893 and 1894 with such plays as Ibsen’s Gengangere (pb. 1881; Ghosts, 1885), Tolstoy’s Vlast tmy (pb. 1887; The Power of Darkness, 1888), and Hauptmann’s Die Weber (pb. 1892; The Weavers, 1899). In September, 1894, Lugné-Poë brought his company, L’Œuvre, to Amsterdam, with performances of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1892; English translation, 1894) and Ibsen’s Rosmersholm (pb. 1886; English translation, 1889) and En folkefiende (pb. 1882; An Enemy of the People, 1890). Heijermans was sensitive to the new ideas and points of view in the modern European theater, and he soon began to put them on the stage in his own country. Like many great dramatists, however, he does not fit neatly into the narrow definition of this or that movement in the drama, and he was never a member of any school or coterie.

For the next thirty years, apart from occasional interruptions, Heijermans devoted himself to his career in the Dutch theater, as dramatist, critic, director, and producer. Although he borrowed for his own purposes what seemed best to him from the new European drama, he put on the Dutch stage much that was his own and much that was native to Dutch soil. He had a keen insight into Dutch society, as well as into Jewish life in Amsterdam. He was a sharp critic of the middle classes and never hesitated to attack hypocrisy. A foe of intolerance, he castigated it whether it came from Christians or Jews. His zeal for social reform, as well as the popularity of The Good Hope, one of his greatest plays, contributed to the passage of the Ships Act of 1909, which provided for better protection of the lives of sailors and fishermen.

Heijermans brought to the Dutch theater a mastery of dramatic technique and the ability to create characters on the stage. Even as he criticized and satirized, he could not help revealing his love for some of his characters, both working-class people and self-made middle-class businessmen. He had a gift, too, for portraying the comic, even eccentric, side of human nature and an understanding of the lonely, but cantankerous, so that he had a sure hand for comedy.

He is much more closely connected to Ibsen and Hauptmann than to Émile Zola, and to classify Heijermans as a naturalist would be a superficial criticism of him, as well as a misinterpretation of his work. The Dutch dramatist had too much of an interest in fantasy and in the imagination of the child, and some of his plays reveal neo-Romantic characteristics and even display a fairy-tale atmosphere. Although Heijermans did, indeed, speak out against middle-class marriage based on money and class, against exploitation of the toilers of the sea, the workers in the mines, and the tillers of the soil, against the dehumanizing effect of imprisonment, and against the immorality of businessmen, his humor, his interest in individual character, his optimistic love of life, and his pantheism make him less a naturalist than a realist. He observed the life and people of his native land, with all their strengths and weaknesses, and put them on the stage with all the skill and living warmth that Dutch painters had made famous two centuries before. Heijermans is, for many critics, the greatest dramatist modern Holland has produced. He is the only playwright since Joost van den Vondel who has won admiring recognition outside his own country.

Biography

Herman Heijermans was born in Rotterdam in 1864, the eldest son in a family of eleven children. His father, Herman Heijermans, Sr., was a well-known and highly respected journalist, whose talents and professional career had a considerable influence on the life of his famous son. His mother, née Mathilde Spiers, was well educated and, unlike her husband, came from a wealthy family. Heijermans’s formal schooling ended with his graduation from the Hogere Burgerschool, a secondary school equivalent to the European lycée or gymnasium and thus more advanced than the American high school. He was a good student, but although his father would have liked to send him to the university, it was all he could do to provide a solid basic education for each of his many children.

Heijermans had early shown an interest in writing, and before he was twenty, he had finished his first play, “Don Gables,” a tragedy in blank verse. His father knew from his own experience, however, how difficult it was to earn a living as a journalist, and because he knew someone at an important Dutch bank, a position was soon found for his son. Not long afterward, young Heijermans went into the wholesale rag business, to which his fiancée’s family contributed some money. He was not a very good businessman, an unfortunate side of his nature that turned up at several points later in his career. It was only by assuming some of the financial burden himself that his father was able to save him from the disgrace of bankruptcy. Nevertheless, Heijermans lost his standing in the community, people he had thought were his friends deserted him, his family was deeply disappointed by the sudden collapse of such a bright career, and his engagement came to an end.

In the meantime, he had not really given up his interest in writing, and his success as a journalist and a writer of sketches and stories enabled him to leave Rotterdam for Amsterdam. Heijermans was already at work on his first play, Dora Kremer, which was produced in Rotterdam. It was not as good as Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, from which he had borrowed a theme, but the young Dutch playwright blamed its failure on the audiences, who, he believed, lacked interest in the work of native dramatists. He had already written his effective one-act play Ahasverus, but he decided to have it produced under the Russian-sounding pseudonym Ivan Jelakowitch. This drama of the persecution of the Jews in Russia during the pogroms was a tremendous success and marked the beginning of Heijermans’s fame as a dramatist.

He had lived with Marie Peers for some years, then he scandalized his family and neighbors by marrying her. He transformed the experiences of his early business career and of his life with Marie Peers into two full-length plays, Ghetto, in which he revealed his alienation from the Jews, and Het zevende gebod (the seventh commandment), in which he castigated the narrow-mindedness of tradition-bound Catholics. His greatest and most famous play is The Good Hope, in which he brought the figure of Kniertje to the Dutch stage as a tragic symbol of the cost of taking the fish out of the sea. It was a tribute to the mariners of a great seafaring nation, and during the decades following the play’s premiere in 1900, it was performed, in several languages, in European countries, Russia, the United States, Israel, and Japan.

In 1907, Heijermans moved to Berlin, hoping to gain the copyright protection that was available under the Berne Convention, but not in the Netherlands. He remained there almost five years. During this period, many of his plays were produced in Berlin, and he wrote for the Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin daily newspaper), which also published his Falklandjes and serialized his novel De roode flibustier (1911; the red buccaneer). When the Nederlandsche Tooneelvereeniging (the Dutch Stage Society) collapsed at the end of 1912, Heijermans decided to leave Germany and return to the Netherlands, which had, meanwhile, joined the Berne Convention. The theatrical company had produced most of his plays, and together they had brought new glory to the Dutch theater. Unfortunately, he now became involved in the business side of the theater, and this made enormous demands on his energies, thus preventing him from pursuing his interests as a dramatist.

The marital relationship of Heijermans and his wife became strained during these years, and in 1918 he divorced her and married Annie Jurgens, a young actress with the theatrical company. His theatrical enterprises involved him in ever greater financial responsibilities, however, and instead of declaring the Dutch Stage Society bankrupt, as any prudent businessman might have done, he refused to take the step he had dreaded in his early years in business. When the financial disaster did come, he assumed all the outstanding obligations. In an effort to pay off these debts, he returned to journalism. He was soon turning out material with all his old speed and energy. In addition to De telegraaf, he contributed to several other newspapers, writing feuilletons, articles, detective stories, and novels.

He moved with his wife and family to Zandvoort and took a small room in Amsterdam, where he would go to work alone every day. In 1923, he began working at his literary career again, glad to be away from the nagging demands of business and once more hopeful and enthusiastic. Then pain and suffering intervened; he became seriously ill. In April, 1924, he underwent an operation for cancer of the mouth. After a period of temporary improvement, the wasting disease consumed him. He died shortly before his sixtieth birthday.

Analysis

During his career as Holland’s leading modern dramatist, Herman Heijermans produced more than twenty full-length plays and at least that many one-act plays, most of them of outstanding quality. His first play, Dora Kremer, showed his talent, but it was a weak drama, and the characters were not convincing. Ahasverus, the one-act play that followed, revealed the master hand of the born dramatist. He created a moving picture of the pious old Jew who refuses to give up his faith, in spite of the horrors of the Russian pogroms.

Ghetto

With Ghetto, a full-length “middle-class tragedy,” Heijermans achieved the development promised by this first success. The play also reflects his early business experiences in Rotterdam, as well as his observations of Jewish life in Amsterdam. He was alienated from Judaism and attracted by socialism. There is thus much of the rebellious Heijermans in the play’s young hero, Rafaël, but although he wanted to criticize the Jews unmercifully for the spiritual ghetto in which they had trapped themselves, he could not resist warm admiration for life and character wherever he found them.

The redeeming qualities of Rafaël’s father, Sachel, and his father’s sister, Esther, as well as what he himself called “the Jewish spirit,” are fused in Rebbe Haëzer, who emerges as the only wholly admirable character in the play. The easygoing rabbi, continually sipping coffee, presents such a warm and glowing view of Jewish family life that the stubborn adherence of Sachel and Esther to the old ways seems more understandable, their characters more human. Rafaël appears as a romantic but vague hero when he comes up against the life-size figure of this genial, wise old man.

Het zevende gebod

In Het zevende gebod, Heijermans gave his ideas on middle-class and religious conservatism and on marriage based on property a setting more typical of Dutch national life than the one he had employed for Ghetto. This time the family is Catholic, but it is again the authoritarian father, with his blunt manners, who is the dominant figure in the play. A member of the agricultural middle class, Dobbe, Sr., abides by its most hypocritical conventions and is a symbol of the bourgeoisie that Heijermans despised. His relationship with his children has never been a loving and intimate one. Yet the younger generation, while romantic and idealistic, like the one in Ghetto, is not very convincing.

The Good Hope

With The Good Hope, Heijermans began a group of plays that were to portray the position of the worker in society. There is socialism in this play, too, but the setting of this “play of the sea” is not the home of a middle-class Dutch family, but of a fisherman’s widow, Kniertje, in a village on the North Sea. She is a symbol of the people who earn their living from the sea. Yet it is not Heijermans’s socialism that makes The Good Hope a great play, but the skill with which he has combined his message with the realistic portrayal of the people of a Dutch fishing village. It is the characters who make the doctrine credible, not the doctrine that makes the characters credible.

One cannot speak of a hero or heroine in The Good Hope, for all the fishermen and their people are heroes and heroines, but Kniertje is the central character about whom the play revolves, and it is she who, before the final curtain falls, stands on the stage as the symbol of her people. When the play begins, Kniertje has already lost her husband and two of her sons at sea. “I have my belly full of that waiting on the pier,” she says. Kniertje is submissive yet courageous. It is not only resignation but also the courage to face the dangers of a hard life that are at the bottom of her attempts to persuade her son to go to sea, and she tells him that every trade has some element of danger. Her trust in God sustains her. There is no bitterness in her humble fortitude, and when she is reminded that her sons are out in the storm for the shipowner and his daughter, Kniertje adds, “And for us . . .” Yet it is this patient bravery and this firm faith in the goodness of God and humanity that, in the end, make of her such a tragic figure. When the sea has claimed her two remaining sons, she is left to depend on the crust of charity condescendingly granted by those very members of society who have exploited her. She stands for all the loyal women who wait at home in loneliness while their men risk their lives at sea and who must suffer in poverty if their men do not return.

Het pantser and Ora et labora

In 1901, Heijermans wrote the antimilitarist play Het pantser (the suit of armor), which belongs to the same group of plays as The Good Hope and Ora et labora (pray and work), “a play of the land” that portrays the peasants of Friesland locked in a harsh and unequal struggle to force a living from their soil. Their deeply ingrained traits of pride and stubbornness, or the alternative, submissiveness, are their only weapons against degradation. In Het pantser, Heijermans’s message is so clear as to be heavy-handed, and he himself admitted that is was a “propaganda play.” In Ora et labora, on the other hand, the didactic element is, if anything, too weak. In this drama, which also belongs to this group, the characters have not been developed effectively, and although the construction is excellent, the conflict involves not so much the characters as the environment.

Bloeimaand and Glück auf!

Also connected with this group is Bloeimaand (May time), “a play of the city,” which portrays the aged poor with great skill but which lacks a certain unity. Mention must also be made of Glück auf! (good luck!), “a play of the mines,” which was based on a visit to a mine made by Heijermans while he was in Germany. Although individual scenes show his dramatic skill at its best, there is a certain weakness in the characters and structure.

Links

One of Heijermans’s most interesting and effective plays is Links, which bore the ironic subtitle, “A Happy Play of the Family Fireside.” The hero, Pancras Duif, a self-made middle-class businessman, dominates the play, with none of the faults of his class. He is no longer young, and when his children discover that he is thinking of remarrying, they scheme to protect their shares of his estate. It has been one of the dramatist’s most popular plays.

Bibliography

Flaxman, Seymour Lawrence. Herman Heijermans and His Dramas. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954. The classic biography of Heijermans in English. Focuses on his dramatic works. Bibliography.

Yoder, Hilda van Neck. Dramatizations of Social Change: Herman Heijermans’s Plays as Compared with Selected Dramas by Ibsen, Hauptmann, and Chekhov. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978. A comparison of Heijermans’s dramas with those of Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Anton Chekhov, with emphasis on presentation of social problems. Bibliography.

Young, Toby. “Gritty but Grotty.” Review of The Good Hope by Herman Heijermans. The Spectator, November 17, 2001, p. 64. This review examines a revival of the political play The Good Hope, revised by Lee Hall and performed at the Cottesloe Theatre in London, finding it heavy on the political statement and light on dramatic development. The reviewer notes, however, that many in the audience enjoyed the play.