In search of an ardent neutrality. Dutch intellectuals, the Great War and the call for a cultural regeneration

This article focuses on the works of two leading figures of the Dutch public and intellectual debate on the First World War: novelist and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden (1860–1932) and art critic Just Havelaar (1880–1930). Both Van Eeden and Havelaar reconciled a call for an ardent neutrality with an aversion to the violence of war and an understanding of the war as a kind of ‘redemptive suffering’ that would eventually bring about cultural regeneration in Europe. Their visions of a forceful neutrality that would allow the Dutch – while remaining neutral in the actual conflict – to benefit from and contribute to the alleged regenerative potential the war had so violently revealed were formulated in response to a negative vision of neutrality as a spineless, pusillanimous, and selfish stance and informed by Lebensphilosophie (‘Philosophy of life’), a heterogeneous neoromantic school of thought that during the war served as an important intellectual source for cultural propaganda in the belligerent states. In this way, this article sheds light on a remarkable parallel between, on the one hand, the self-definitions of the Netherlands as a neutral nation put forward in Dutch public debate by cultural critics and, on the other hand, the war propaganda notion of the conflict as a ‘cultural crusade’ that held out the prospect of a rejuvenation of Europe’s decayed and ‘lifeless’ civilization – an idea invoked by various German, French, and British intellectuals to legitimize their countries’ war efforts.