Johan Huizinga

Biography

Johan Huizinga’s first doctoral topic was rejected. On his return from Leipzig he wrote a thirty-eight-page outline for a study of how languages express light and sound. His supervisor, Barend Sijmons, judged the subject a matter for a psychologist, not a linguist. Huizinga quickly took up something else, but he kept coming back to the idea even at the end of his life.

He was born on 7 December 1872 in Groningen. His father, Dirk Huizinga, was a professor of physiology; his mother, Jacoba Tonkens, died when the boy was two. His father’s second wife, Harmanna Margaretha de Cock, became for him a mother in every sense. His grandfather had been a Mennonite pastor, and in 1891 Johan was baptised in the Mennonite congregation of Groningen. He took to reading early, collected coins, and attended drawing lessons at the gymnasium. His literature teacher, Jan te Winkel, drew him to languages, and for a time he meant to study Arabic at Leiden, but his father could not afford it.

In 1891–1895 he studied Dutch literature at the University of Groningen, a course that included Indo-European linguistics and Sanskrit. In the winter of 1895–1896 he attended courses in Leipzig, but the formal analysis of the Neogrammarians disappointed him: what interested him was the meaning of words. After Sijmons’s refusal, the Sanskritist Jacob Speyer suggested another topic. Huizinga defended his dissertation on the jester, the vidushaka, in Indian drama on 28 May 1897.

Then came eight years in Haarlem, where he taught history at a municipal school. The post was found for him by Petrus Blok, a professor of art history, who had been the first to see a historian in him. From 1903 he was also a privatdozent in Amsterdam. He did not abandon Oriental studies, but it was at the school that he began to study European history systematically.

He became Professor of General and Dutch History at the University of Groningen on 1 August 1905. There he wrote a history of Haarlem and a history of the university for 1814–1914. After 1907 he began to gather material for the future “Autumn of the Middle Ages”, and in 1908 he travelled to Ghent to see the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne. In 1902 he had married Mary Schorer; they had three sons and two daughters. She died on 21 July 1914, a year after the birth of their last child.

He moved to Leiden, to the chair of general history, in 1915. “The Autumn of the Middle Ages”, published in 1919, was conceived as a study of Jan van Eyck and grew into a picture of the late Middle Ages in France and the Netherlands. In 1920 it won him the Thieme Prize, and in 1924 it appeared in English and German. In 1916 he entered the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, where in 1929–1942 he chaired the literature section, and from 1916 to 1932 he edited the journal De Gids. Next came “Erasmus” (1924) and the books on America: “Man and the Masses in America” (1918) and “Life and Thought in America” (1927), after a four-month journey in 1926. In 1930 he was the honorary sponsor when Princess Juliana received an honorary doctorate from Leiden, and in 1937 a witness at her wedding.

In the spring of 1933, as rector, he learned of the antisemitic writings of Johann von Leers, who headed the German delegation at a university conference, and asked him to stop enjoying the university’s hospitality. The delegation left. In the essay “In the Shadow of Tomorrow” (1935) Huizinga wrote about the crisis of Western civilisation; the book quickly appeared in several languages. In 1938 came “Homo Ludens”, in which play appears as a primary element of culture. In the same year he became vice-president of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, to which he had been elected in 1933. He was nominated many times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He published his book on Dutch culture of the seventeenth century in 1941, already under the occupation; in it he objected to the very name “Golden Age”.

Classes at Leiden University were interrupted in November 1940. On 1 June 1942, in protest, Huizinga resigned from the university and the Academy. On 7 August he was arrested and held until 30 October in the hostage camp at Sint-Michielsgestel. Why he was released is unclear: the intervention of Sweden and a sharp decline in his health have both been named. He was forbidden to return to the large cities of the west of the country, and he settled with his wife and daughter in the village of De Steeg, in the house of his colleague Rudolph Cleveringa. There he finished “Geschonden wereld”, published after his death, and left his autobiography unfinished.

He died on 1 February 1945, three months before the liberation of the country. At first he was buried in De Steeg, and on 27 February he was reburied in Oegstgeest, in the churchyard of the Reformed Church, in the grave of his son Dirk.