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Words and letters, in multiple typefaces and scales, are strewn across the pages of Paul van Ostaijen’s long-form poem Bezette Stad (Occupied City) in as if by chance. The Flemish language, in which most of the poem is written, holds its own against intrusions of German, French, and even Latin throughout. Breaks in this verbal cacophony are offered in the form of a series of jagged woodblocks by Oskar Jespers (1887–1970), which incorporate vestiges of letterforms to varying degrees. Written in Berlin, but published and printed in Belgium, every spread of this visually explosive volume was, in fact, carefully planned by Van Ostaijen as documented by his surviving manuscript in the Collectie Vlaamse Gemeenschap. The poem was written at both a temporal and geographical distance from the events it describes, namely the occupation of the poet’s home-city of Antwerp by the Germans during the First World War. When Germany invaded Belgium in September 1914, the eighteen-year-old Van Ostaijen (1896–1928) briefly fled with his family to The Netherlands, but returned the following month and remained in Antwerp throughout the occupation. At war’s end, he was sentenced to imprisonment for his pro-Flemish activism and fled to Berlin, where he lived between 1918 and 1921 and kept the company of Dadaists such as Walter Mehring and George Grosz.
Selected spreads from Bezette Stad are reproduced below with their corresponding manuscript pages and translations from Flemish to English by David Colmer (the other languages remain untranslated) in Paul van Ostaijen, Occupied City (Grewelthorpe, UK: Smokestack Books, 2016). For more on our Belgian collection, see Abstract Antwerp: Belgian Avant-Garde, 1917–1925.
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