On Sunday afternoon March 24, 2024, the 2nd Huizinga Lecture took place in the Oostkerk in Middelburg. After the gratifying success of the 1st Huizinga Lecture on March 26, 2023, this 2nd lecture with 250 visitors was no less successful.
The focus was on Johan Huizinga’s 1935 publication ‘In the shadows of tomorrow. A diagnosis of the spiritual suffering of our time’. It turns out to be a publication that is still extremely relevant today, which is an exceptional quality. Its opening sentences have become iconic:
“We live in a possessed world. And we know it. It would come as no surprise to anyone if madness suddenly broke out in a frenzy that would leave our poor European humanity in stupor and bewilderment, with the engines still running and the flags still flying, but the spirit gone.”
Carla du Pree, who provided a 2019 retelling of this publication, delivered the first lecture. Here, she focused on ‘Johan Huizinga as a public intellectual between two world wars’, a topic on which she also received her PhD on June 15, 2017.
Much to the delight of the organisation, writer, translator and interviewer Bas Heijne was prepared to deliver the second lecture of this afternoon. He placed ‘In the shadows of tomorrow’ against the backdrop of our own time.
In keeping with the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, already in its 53rd year on December 8, the lectures of both speakers have been offered to visitors of the 2nd Huizinga Lecture in an attractive, edited publication. Carla du Pree and Bas Heijne gladly made their texts available for this purpose. That publication means a lasting, valuable memento of this lecture.
The Hurgronje Family Fund made a financial contribution to the publication of the lectures.
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