Biography in the Public Sphere: The Year in the Netherlands

The culture of the biography in the Netherlands is based on a strong national tradition. At the same time—and there might well be a relation with the size of the country—public opinion on the genre is strongly internationally oriented. An example can be found in the Dutch translating policy. When a biography of Hitler or Goebbels, written by Peter Longerich, appears in the United Kingdom, it takes roughly two years until this book appears on the American market. Often such books are to be found in Dutch bookstores, translated and nicely bound, more than a year before they appear in the United States.

A turbulent history precedes this state of affairs in the Netherlands. In 1990, the Nederlandse Maatschappij der Letterkunde established the Werkgroep Biografie. Since 1991, this workgroup has published the Biografie Bulletin, currently known as Tijdschrift voor Biografie. Earlier, in 1982, the publishing house De Arbeiderspers started producing the prestigious biography series Open Domein, and the privately funded Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds initiated a subsidy policy for biographies in the 1980s. They started by inviting ten biographers to write a biography of Dutch legators of culture. Each biographer received 100,000 guilders (45,000 Euro), a substantial amount of money in those days. In 2007, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds implemented a second project, asking ten writers to pen a biography of a key figure in Dutch history. The (not uncritical) biographies that were produced on three Dutch kings who ruled the Netherlands during the nineteenth century were very successful. All three appeared when the Kingdom celebrated its two hundredth anniversary; the salary of these three biographers during four years was funded by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. The Letterenfonds, financed by the government, has a special bursary for biographers—every two years a sum of 40,000 Euro is given to nine biographers to promote the genre.

In 1990, the city of Dordrecht installed the Dordtse Biografieprijs; this encouraging initiative lasted until the year 2000. Apparently, new institutions were needed to put the biography on the map again in the new millennium. At that time, I published my biography of Jan Campert—the Dutch journalist, critic, poet, and WWII resistance hero. By the end of 2004, I set up the Biography Institute at Groningen University. We started with a programmatic text, stating that biographies had gained significant popularity in recent years. By 2007, we were able to add that the board of the university had installed a chair entitled History and Theory of the Biography. In 2012, the chair was transformed from an extraordinary professorship to a full professorship, and therewith the Department of History and Theory of Biography came into existence.

Foremost, we study and practice biography as an overarching field of study that includes life writing. In the Netherlands, “life writing” is often, unfortunately, an ideologically biased practice that does not have much consideration for historical approaches and is pursued without the narrative skill necessary for biographical writing. This is why the biographies of the Biography Institute are aimed to work in two ways: they require academic justification, and they are published by commercial publishers so as to reach a wide readership.

The Biography Institute considers biography as an independent genre in its own right—involving history, literature, journalism, and other disciplines that serve as auxiliary disciplines. Research for a biography, however, is always historical in nature. Apart from dealing with interesting persons, biography is, in my view, foremost about methods and the theoretical framework that is constructed.

Firstly, we publish on the subject of biography on a theoretical level. This has resulted, among other publications, in the edited volume Theoretical Discussions of Biography (2014); a series of edited volumes on biography related to different fields of knowledge (2006–2012); the edited volume Microhistory and the Picaresque Novel (2014); the PhD dissertation From Prince to Pauper: Biography and the Individual Perspective in Historiography (2015) by Binne de Haan. Secondly, we aim to employ this theory in practice: since 2004, twenty-one biographical projects have been initiated, including Nigel Hamilton’s text on US President F. D. Roosevelt; biographies on the...