Literature Museum to investigate Lucebert’s Nazi letters | Book & Culture

In 2022, the Literature Museum acquired a stack of letters that the then up-and-coming young poet Lucebert wrote to his childhood friend Tiny Koppijn. The letters, most of them signed with the Hitler salute “Sieg Heil”, include pleas for a Greater Germanic Empire.

Bergen, where Lucebert worked and lived for decades, has his art in the municipal art collection. The municipality said in a statement that there has been unrest in recent years “about how to deal with Lucebert’s art and his legacy as far as it is present in the municipality”.

According to the municipality, Lucebert was “a versatile person, also as a person, but in a period on the eve of his poetry he made expressions that make you wonder: what was going on at the time and what do we actually think of it?”

The Literature Museum’s research should provide clarification and will shed light on the letters from different angles. Results are expected in the first quarter of 2025.

Lucebert, whose real name was Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk, became one of the best-known poets in the country after the war and was the leader of the Vijftigers, the literary movement to which Gerrit Kouwenaar, Remco Campert and Hugo Claus also belonged.

Lucebert’s art and poetry was known as revolutionary and socially committed. He received, among others, the PC Hooft Prize and the Prize of Dutch Literature.

In a biography by Wim Hazeu about Lucebert, it appears that he sympathized with the Nazis and had anti-Semitic ideas during the Second World War. According to the biography, Lucebert voluntarily went to Germany to work in the arms industry. The poet himself has always claimed that he was forced by the Germans.