Belgium's Agony

by Emile Verhaeren, Michael Sadleir

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Nook

First published January 1, 1915

About the author

Emile Adolphe Gustave Verhaeren (sometimes spelled Émile) was a Belgian poet who wrote in the French language, and one of the chief founders of the school of Symbolism.

He was one of the most prolific poets of his era. His first collection of poems Les Flamandes was published in 1883. Inspired by the paintings of Jacob Jordaens, David Teniers and Jan Steen, Verhaeren described in a direct and often provocative, naturalistic way his country and the Flemish people. It was an immediate success in avant-garde milieus, but caused a great deal of controversy in Catholic circles. His next book Les Moines (1886) was not the success he had hoped for. This, and his health problems, led to a deep crisis. In this period he published Les Soirs (1888), Les Débâcles (1888) and Les Flambeaux Noirs (1891).

Reviews

[Michael Martinez · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the dumbest books I have ever read in my entire life. Sometime in the distant future, someone will ask me about Belgium, and this book will tempt me to hate on Belgium and Belgians. Emile Verhaeren appears to have almost written more about Germans, than Belgians, throughout this whole book. There is an American cliche that a bully is someone who puts others down in order to lift themselves up; this is literally what Emile Verhaeren does throughout this whole book. Bro really hates Germans; not even an exaggeration, he literally says this: “And by this deed she has created against herself in the hearts of Belgians a hatred so passionate and so universal, that it will go down from generation to generation to a depth that no man can foretell. So far as any human sentiment can be, this hatred will be eternal. It will become a part of the education of our primary schools, it will be a tradition in our families, an instinct in our homes. It will be for us a hallowed reserve of rage and vigour. We shall feel, all of us, as did a peasant with whom I had a brief but wonderful conversation, not long ago, in a coast-village between Coxyde and Dunkirk, He said: ‘My wish is that when I am dying I may use the last reserve of my strength, which I shall have stored up inside me, to utter one more curse, one more word of hatred against the Germans.’ I remarked that such feelings were far from Christian.” He then acknowledges that to “hate is unchristian” and wrong, but that he just does not care since he thinks it is necessary. Verhaeren writes very imaginative descriptions of German soldiers in World War One, and substantiates virtually none of the claims about German cruelty; even the numbers given appear to come out of thin air (not a single citation for anything throughout this entire book). Some of the chapters are just random pieces of poetry in French, without an English translation for some reason. Emile Verhaeren reduces the German into being a composite of two non-German things, a strange hylomorphism: a Jewish soul, and a Roman body. Emile Verhaeren does not only hate Germans, but hates the Roman Catholic Church, but not necessarily Jews interestingly. He says that just like the Roman Catholic Church had been responsible for brutal repression in the Middle Ages, that the Germans were adopting that ecclesiastical model and seeking to impose their civic brutalism on Europe. Emile Verhaeren even seems to hate the Spanish for some reason. He says some completely slanderous nonsense about Queen Isabella the Catholic, accusing her majesty of having transformed Spanish Christianity into being just like African Islam; he says this by analogy to what he claims constitutes the Asiatic or Semitic root of German ideology. The motivations for hating both the Germans and the Spanish, seem pretty obvious from the Belgian nationalist perspective of Emile Verhaeren: the Spanish were once the masters of the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium), and the Germans had just fought a war against Belgium in the time that Emile Verhaeren writes this book. Interestingly, the connection between the Spanish and the Germans even appears in other authors like Oswald Spengler, but with a much more positive note; for Spengler, the Spanish and the Prussians are analogous in their nationalistic solidarity which made the two the only two groups to revolt against foreign Napoleonic rule (even the Comte de Gobineau makes note of how the Spanish are the most nationalist of all Europeans). Emile Verhaeren describes the Germans to be an ontologically “uncivilizable” people, a people perpetually barbaric like in the days of their attacks on Roman territory. He claims that the German does not have empathy, that they are universally psychopathic somehow. He claims the Germans are not original in anything, and that they only take something and improve it (this was somehow meant to be a bad thing); he arguably contradicts himself though when he says that the Germans destroy everything they think not to be German. Emile Verhaeren, being primarily a poet, does use fluffy language to deceive Belgium and the Belgians. He describes the little villages of Flanders to be near-Arcadian, and the big cities like Ypres to be very magnificent. He does acknowledge that the Flemish and the Walloons were enemies up until this war which brought the two Belgian sides together, which does vindicate a theory that I personally accept about war being a unifying thing that diminishes separatist fervor. The chapter on King Albert is actually pretty good, and does a good job of showing how monarchy unifies a people more than democracy (even though he does not say this directly, and may not be intending to say that considering the many liberal views he espouses throughout this book; the praise of King Albert may just merely come out of some pro-Belgian attitude, not necessarily a pro-monarchy attitude). He does say something else extremely interesting in this book though, in that despite the hatred that he has of Germans and Germany, he actually vindicates the argument of later Germans that the Jewish-Germans have too much economic and cultural power in Germany. Emile Verhaeren outright says the following: “The Jews have thrust themselves, more numerously than anywhere else, into German lands. Nearly all the names they have adopted are German names. They flaunt them about the world. When their ghettos were suppressed, they toiled for the prosperity of the free cities—Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfort. Everywhere they amassed wealth. Their power became so great that it could dispense with proud display.“ He even says the following: “The great German shops, the steamship companies, the electrical firms are still ruled by powerful Jews. In other activities, they are less prominent. They prefer to leave ostensible direction to native Germans, while, from behind the scenes, they exercise the true control.” He doubles down again with the following: “With the exception of the newspapers of the Catholic Centre, every great daily of Vienna, Frankfort and Berlin is controlled by Jews.” Obviously a non-German who does not like the Germans whatsoever, a non-German writing contemporaneously with this time prior to World War Two that many later and controversial German figures allege to have been a time of Jewish domination in Germany, supports the German argument, since this bias of Emile Verhaeren is in fact anti-German, ergo giving more credibility to the claims by pro-German Germans that agree with this claim by Emile Verhaeren.