12/14/2023 0 Comments Watch shadow of doubt 1935The only English edition of Shadows in print. From then until his death in February 1945, he lived in the Dutch countryside as a guest of one of his Leiden colleagues, working on a few last writings that were published posthumously. Of course, the Nazis followed a very different standard for treating prisoners in Western Europe than on the Eastern Front - Huizinga was released less than three months later due to poor health, and in the meantime was even allowed to indirectly protest by giving a history lecture to the other prisoners on the failed Spanish siege of Leiden in 1574. In 1942, the occupiers forced him to resign all of his academic appointments, and he was arrested and sent to an internment camp in August of that year. In 1940, after the German invasion of the Netherlands, he turned down an opportunity to emigrate to the United States, while this was still possible. In 1933 he caused an international incident by banning the German delegation from a conference at Leiden, upon having learned that the leading delegate had written an anti-Semitic pamphlet. Huizinga consistently opposed fascism from the beginning, he saw it as anti-intellectual and culturally destructive. Around that same time, his work began to take on a more polemical aspect, as a reaction to the rise of fascism. From the 1910s onward, and especially after The Autumn of the Middle Ages, he went from one success to another, finally becoming rector of Leiden University (where Descartes had once studied) in 1933. He became a chair professor, at the University of Groningen, at the age of 32 his inaugural lecture was titled, “The aesthetic component of historical perception,” which in retrospect sounds like a statement of intent for his entire body of work. Huizinga was famous in European academic circles long before Homo Ludens.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |