Henriette Roland Holst

Henriette Roland Holst

Henriette Goverdine Anna Roland Holst-van der Schalk (24 December 1869, Noordwijk – 21 November 1952, Amsterdam) was a Dutch poet and socialist.[1]

The poet Adriaan Roland Holst (1888–1976), nicknamed "the Dutch Prince of Poets", was the nephew of her husband.

Early life

Roland Holst was brought up in the affluent, liberal Christian family of the notary Theodore Willem van der Schalk and Anna Ida van der Schalk-van der Hoeven. Roland Holst attended four years of boarding school in Velp and studied French in Liege.

Roland Holst soon came to develop a talent as a poet. She married the artist Richard Roland Holst (Rik) in 1896 and befriended the poet Herman Gorter, who prompted her to read Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Around this time she became politically active and began her career as a writer on political, historical and philosophical fields.

Poetry

Around 1890, Henriette met Albert Verwey, who with William Kloos was among the leaders of the Tachtigers and the founders of De Nieuwe Gids. In 1892 she met the painter Jan Toorop. She wrote about Toorop and Verwey in her first sonnets. In these poems she showcased her intense needs as an artist, more precisely: as a poet(ess).

Socialism

At the age of 27 Roland Holst joined the SDAP. She was then working night after night in smoky halls calling for workers' struggle to improve their miserable fate. She became part of the party leadership and, in 1900, was delegated to the Second International. At the conferences of the International, she came into contact with prominent Marxists such as Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky.

Bust of Henriette Roland Holst at the Lindenplein, Noordwijk.

In 1911, Roland Holst had joined as an orthodox Marxist in the SDAP. Unlike most other orthodox Marxists, she did not immediately move over to the Social-Democratic Party (SDP, later known as the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN)). Against the advice of Rosa Luxemburg in some years she remained non-partisan. She founded in 1915, along with a number of SDAP and SDP members, the Revolutionair Socialistische Vereeniging. While in the CPN, she sided with Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek and the left communist fraction of the party.

"Rode Jet" (meaning "Red Jet", a nickname of Roland Holst) also played a role during the revolutionary turmoil of November 1918. On November 13 she went with David Wijnkoop at the head of a procession on the Orange-Nassau barracks in Amsterdam, to celebrate the brotherhood with the hussars. Intervention by the security forces resulted in two dead, the only victims of the "revolution that did not happen".

In 1927 she broke with the CPN. She later joined the Communist Workers' Party of the Netherlands, a council communist party.

1928-1952: religious-socialist

Henriette had deep slumps. She suffered from depression, bouts of anorexia, anemia and heart disease but when she was well she struggled with an unrelenting zeal to improve the position of workers, youth and women.

Her first poems were passionately for socialism. She wrote among other things, the Dutch text for the anthem The Internationale. Later, her work took a more religious character. Among her writings were plays, biographies (of Rousseau, Gandhi and Tolstoy), journalism and radio plays.

During World War II she was active in the resistance, as editor of the Resistance magazine De Vonk, then De Vlam. Though of a well to do background, she was certainly not a "salon socialist".

At the end of her life she wrote the autobiography Het vuur brandde voort. She died at the age of 82. A bust was placed in her memory in her birthplace of Noordwijk in 1969.

Works

Poetry collections:

Reprinted in simpler form of being. WL and J. Brusse, Rotterdam in 1913 and 1922 and out. BZZTôH, The Hague 1983.

Political work:

the Dutch railroad strikes of 1903, and the role of unions and of the SDAP therein.
this work appeared in German in 1905, with a preface by Karl Kautsky.
a lyrical work on the 1905 Russian Revolution.
First published in German, translated by Sam de Wolff.
polemic against revisionist socialism of Troelstra with regard to voting rights.
written in defense of the Bolsheviks.
the third congress of the Comintern.
description of her trip to the Third International
biography of Tachtiger Herman Gorter.
biography of Rosa Luxemburg.

Further reading

Notes

  1. ↑ Her name is spelled in some places as Henriëtte, but her birth certificate spelled her name without the umlaut and the diaeresis are not used in most literature about her. Her nickname was Jet, and to many she was known as "Aunt Bev".

External links

Poems by Henriette Roland Holst Online

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