1947: Anton van Wilderode. Een 'repressie'-trauma

This chapter is a contribution to a reader about politically committed poetry in modern Dutch literature. It analyses a poem published in 1947 by the Flemish priest-poet Anton van Wilderode (1918-1998) in light of the latter's conservative catholic nationalism, and especially of his staunch defence of Flemish nationalists who collaborated with the nazi occupier during World War II. In doing so, Van Wilderode was highly representative of the way Flemish nationalist discourse attempted, with a good deal of success in Flanders, to exculpate these collaborators. The poem is shown to be carefully coded in order to convey its 'subversive' message, and most notably its depiction of the collaborators as innocent victims of a vengeful populace and the Belgian state.