Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 31, Issue 1, 2026

This article examines the cultural memory and literary afterlife of the Dutch writer Jacob Israël de Haan (1881-1924), asking how his work continues to circulate despite his marginal position in Dutch literary historiography. Taking Pierre Bayard’s reflections on the spectrum between reading and not-reading as a point of departure, the author investigates how De Haan and his work circulate in contemporary cultural memory. The article demonstrates that De Haan’s continued visibility depends on processes of cultural memorialization and reuse in public space, via street names, plaques, and memorials with his poetry. Elaborating on the work by Kila van der Starre on street poetry, the article shows how these material forms of remembrance function as sites where literary, political, and identity-based meanings intersect in various ways. De Haan’s poetry, particularly its brevity, lyricism, and recurring themes of longing, memory and displacement, proves especially suitable for such cultural reuse. His identities as a Jewish and homosexual writer further enhance the ‘usability’ of his work – in Rita Felski’s sense – in debates about cultural memory, emancipation and national identity. The article contends that the monumentalization of literature has become a crucial condition for sustaining the cultural relevance of literary authors in a context where the cultural capital of literature has become increasingly fragile.

This article offers an affective and sociological reading of Pijpelijntjes (1904), the debut novel of Jacob Israël de Haan – often described as one of the first openly homosexual novels in Dutch literature. While earlier scholarship has mainly focused on the novel’s relation to contemporary medical discourses on homosexuality and on the question of sexual identity, this study shifts attention to the affective structures that shape the characters’ experiences of desire. It argues that the novel constructs homosexual longing not as a liberating force but as a source of melancholy, conflict, and emotional disturbance. Drawing on theoretical insights into hegemonic, subordinate, and complicit forms of masculinity, the article analyzes the hierarchical relations between the three central male characters: Joop, Sam, and Koos. Their interactions reveal how homosexuality is positioned as a form of subordinate masculinity within a heteronormative gender order that is simultaneously structured by class differences. Joop gradually accepts his subordinated position, which brings both deep melancholy and a fragile sense of serenity. By contrast, Sam is modelled after the hegemonic model of bourgeois heterosexual masculinity as he conforms to the heteronormative marriage plot, in this case characterized by aggression, emotional repression, and ultimately the extinction of affect. The article further situates this affective economy within broader queer theoretical debates on temporality and normativity. It shows how Pijpelijntjes contributes to what has been identified as the cultural production of the melancholic homosexual subject, while at the same time questioning the chrononormative, future-oriented ideals that often structure narratives of sexual emancipation. In this light, De Haan’s novel offers a critical perspective on the emotional costs of both social conformity and queer marginalization.

The life and work of Dutch author Jacob Israël de Haan (1881-1924) have frequently been labelled ‘scandalous’ – a qualification that reflects both public reaction to his actions and a central motif within his writings. As a gay writer in the early twentieth century, De Haan authored provocative novels exploring homosexual relationships and transgressive intimacy. As a journalist, he repeatedly exposed instances of social injustice and abuse of power. Later, as a vocal critic of the Zionist movement and a defender of ultra-Orthodox Jewish interests in Palestine, he became a polarizing figure in international Jewish politics, which ultimately resulted in his assassination in 1924. Yet beyond these biographical controversies, this article argues that the notion of the ‘scandalous’ functions as a structuring principle in De Haan’s literary and journalistic output. Drawing on theoretical approaches to scandal from literary studies, media theory, and sociology, I argue that scandal should be understood not merely as an effect of De Haan’s work, but as a linguistic figure. Scandal, in his writing, operates not solely at the level of content – through depictions or exposing of taboo, injustice, and social deviance – but, more importantly, at the level of language as a mode of communication that seeks to provoke, challenge, and disrupt dominant conventions and power relations. By tracing how scandal operates as a figure of language across De Haan’s diverse oeuvre, I show that it provides a conceptual thread that binds together his seemingly disparate activities as novelist, polemicist and public intellectual. This interpretive lens offers a deeper understanding of his unorthodox oeuvre, his deeply-felt commitment to the inalienable right to individual freedom, and De Haan’s enduring relevance to questions of identity, dissent and the politics of transgression.