The complete collected work of Dutch historian Johan Huizinga has been published in German, in translation by Annette Wunschel. The seventh and final volume of the extensive Huizinga Schriften series was recently published by Brill | Fink. The translation project, initiated by Maarten Valken, was one of the longest-running supported translation projects of the Dutch Foundation for Literature: the first volume was published in 2011.
Annette Wunschel, who received the Else Otten Prize in 2016 for her Huizinga translation Kultur- und zeitkritische Schriften, not only re-translated Huizinga’s main works The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Erasmus and Homo Ludens, but also re-translated Huizinga’s letters, his America books and his biography of the artist Jan Veth. For the first time, a complete overview of the work of the Netherlands’ most famous cultural historian is available to the German-speaking public.
The Dutch Foundation for Literature supported this project with Translation Grants. Annette Wunschel also stayed several times in the Amsterdam Translators’ House to work on this project.
Johan Huizinga
Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) was a Dutch historian and cultural philosopher. He was born in Groningen and studied history and art history at the University of Groningen. He later taught history at the universities of Amsterdam, Groningen and Leiden. Huizinga is one of the most influential Dutch historians – he was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature and his work has been translated into more than thirty languages.