Peace Movement, consisting of books, articles, pamphlets, brochures, posters and manifestos, literary and artistic expressions testifying of the struggle for peace, from the period 1899-1940.
In our series of interviews for our Newsletter we met with Hanneke Eggels, who expresses her concern for peace through another artistic manner, poetry. She is a Dutch poet, whose work strongly focuses on social issues related to politics, human rights and peace. She writes mainly in Dutch. Translations of her work into English, Russian, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Persian have attained worldwide attention.
Ever since graduating from Leiden University in Neerlandistiek (Dutch Studies), Eggels used poetry as a means to express her emotions. The sight of the famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich playing during the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, inspired her to write MIR (peace). This was followed by a personal invitation of him to publish in her bilingual (Dutch-Russian) volume of poetry ‘MIR’ (The Wall), dedicated to maestro Rostropovitsj (with his permission).
Her poem Charter, is based on the manifesto Charta 77 of Vaclav Havel and linked with the Chinese dissident-poet Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner of 2010 who wrote Charter 08. She actually witnessed Vaclav Havel's first public speech in Prague in 1990.
She recognizes the strong link between poetry and politics, since many peace activists have used poetry as an effective means to communicate their ideas to a worldwide audience. Many poets have found their inspiration in times of war and conflict, exposing injustices and crimes and putting their own lives at risk. The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to numerous poets whose work stems from their engagement and involvement with human rights, political prisoners and authoritarian regimes. Despite their
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