Menno ter Braak

Biography

Dutch modernist author (Eibergen 26 January 1902 ? The Hague 15 May 1940).

Related Topics:
Dutch - Modernist - Eibergen - 1902 - 1940

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Menno ter Braak grew up in the town of Tiel where he proved to be an exemplary student of great intelligence. He went on to the University of Amsterdam where he majored in Dutch and History. As a student he was a regular contributor to the fairly prestigious student magazine Propria Cures and involved himself in the study of film (then a very young discipline).

Related Topics:
Tiel - University of Amsterdam - Propria Cures

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Menno ter Braak was also the founder of the Filmliga (Movie League), an organisation for the study of animated film. He completed a Ph.D. dissertation on the medieval emperor Otto III and consecutively worked as a teacher in a number of secondary schools.

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In 1932 ter Braak, together with Edgar du Perron and Maurice Roelants, started the literary magazine Forum which proved to be one of the most important literary periodicals in the Dutch-speaking world in the nineteen-thirties.

Related Topics:
Edgar du Perron - Maurice Roelants

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Forum is widely considered a bulwark of cultural elitism, advocating a high cultural level of discourse, a rational form of literary criticism, consequent individualism and a stern disapproval of all intellectual ornamentation. ?Vent boven vorm? (loosely translated: ?personality over form?) was the catchword of the Forum movement.

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In 1933 ter Braak joined the Dutch liberal daily Het Vaderland (the Fatherland) as a literary affairs editor and was one of the first Dutchmen to understand the looming threat of Nazism. It is in these years that he started het Comité van Waakzaamheid (the Committee for Vigilance).

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As a public intellectual, he is most famous for his essays, most of which deal with European culture, politics, or a mixture of the two. He is distinctly influenced by Nietzsche and his style is deliberately paradoxical.

Related Topics:
Intellectual - Nietzsche

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In his last, and most well known essays he ruthlessly chastises those who would subject themselves to "higher" and "spiritual" values, unmasking the hierarchies behind those values who are working to further their own agenda. Against this subjection to extraneous authorities and false values, ter Braak posits the individualist ideal of the honnête homme, the "Man of Integrity" who will not conform himself to other people's expectations and systems.

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A born polemicist, he managed to find himself an amazingly diverse group of opponents. By the end of his life he had entered into polemics, some of which quite hostile, with the self-proclaimed representatives of what he considered to be "nebulous collectivisms" such as Catholicism, liberal Humanism, Marxism and Fascism.

Related Topics:
Catholicism - Liberal - Humanism - Marxism - Fascism

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Towards the end of his life he became increasingly involved in the growing anti-Fascist movement in the Netherlands. When the Second World War broke out in 1939 he fell into a deep depression.

Related Topics:
Anti-Fascist - Netherlands - Second World War

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On 15 May 1940, days after the Germans had invaded the Netherlands and after a failed attempt to flee to England, Menno ter Braak shot himself through the head with his brother?s handgun. He died instantly.

Related Topics:
15 May - 1940

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His influence remained fairly large and lasted well into the 1950s; during the fifties his influence began to wane but a number of literary periodicals, especially Libertinage and Tirade remained faithful to a number of ter Braak?s ideas.

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