Menno ter Braak

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

Early career
Ter Braak was born in Eibergen and grew up in the town of Tiel where he was an exemplary student. He went on to the University of Amsterdam where he majored in Dutch and History. He was a regular contributor to the student magazine Propria Cures and involved himself in the study of film (then a very young discipline).

Together with Joris Ivens, Menno ter Braak was also a 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, lastly in Rotterdam.

Forum movement
In 1932 ter Braak, together with Eddy du Perron and, 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.

Political involvement
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.

Later writing
In his last, and best-known essays he 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.

A born polemicist, he managed to find himself a diverse group of opponents and by the end of his life had entered into polemics, some of which were hostile with the self-proclaimed representatives of what he considered to be "nebulous collectivisms" such as Catholicism, liberal humanism, Marxism and fascism.



Death
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.

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.