Menno ter Braak

Menno ter Braak's 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.

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. Four days after Nazi Germany had invaded the Netherlands, on 14 May 1940, the Luftwaffe carpet-bombed his former hometown Rotterdam. Earlier that day, ter Braak and his wife had made a half-hearted attempt to find out if they could flee to England by boat from the port of Scheveningen, only to learn that under the circumstances such a trip was prohibitively expensive. When the Dutch army's supreme command announced capitulation in the late afternoon, Menno and Ant ter Braak went to the house of Menno's brother Wim and Ant's half-sister Mineke, also in The Hague. There, Menno ter Braak committed suicide by using a sedative, combined with an injection of poison (most likely administered by his brother, who was a neurologist). Coincidentally, his friend du Perron died at about the same time from a heart attack caused by angina pectoris.

In 1933 ter Braak married Ant Faber, daughter of the social-democratic member of parliament and reverend Jan Lambertus Faber. They moved to The Hague, where 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). 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.

In 1932 ter Braak, together with Eddy du Perron and Maurice Roelants [nl], started the literary magazine Forum which proved to be one of the most important literary periodicals in the Dutch-speaking world (it expressly involved Flemish intellectuals as well) in the nineteen-thirties. 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, and Multatuli was one of its most important paragons.

Menno ter Braak (26 January 1902 – 14 May 1940) was a Dutch modernist writer, critic, essayist, and journalist.