Fedde Schurer

Life and career

From 1904 on, Schurer grew up in the Frisian fishing village of Lemmer, and from a young age worked as a carpenter. Through self-education in the evenings he studied to become a schoolteacher, and in 1919, he was appointed in that position to the local Christian elementary school in Lemmer. His wife Willemke "Willy" de Vries, who was also a schoolteacher, and his colleague at this school, he had actually met when he was still a carpenter's apprentice, as she was the girl who delivered the newspaper at the carpenter's workshop everyday. Schurer and Willy were married on 1 July 1924.

In 1930, his openly pacifist stance caused Schurer to lose his job, after which he moved to Amsterdam, where he was appointed to a state-run school. He was a talented orator, and his pacifist and socialist views were seen as a danger to society at that time, which is why the BVD, the Dutch secret service, started a file om him. Schurer joined the Christian-Democratic Union (CDU), a Christian-socialist splinter party, and in 1935–1936 he served as a member of the provincial assembly of North Holland for a year. In World War II he was involved with the Dutch resistance in Amsterdam, where his house was used as a temporary hiding place for people wanted by the Nazis, before they could be smuggled out of the city.

After the war, Schurer returned to Friesland, where he lived in Heerenveen, and worked as a journalist. Like most people from Friesland, he was a native West Frisian speaker, and from a young age he had been an ardent supporter of his mother tongue. When in several court cases in Friesland in 1950 and 1951 the judge denied the defendants the right to speak Frisian, Schurer wrote a sharply worded editorial rebuke in the Friese Koerier newspaper. He was then charged with slandering the judge, and had to appear in court on Friday, 16 November 1951, in the provincial capital of Leeuwarden, together with another journalist, Tsjebbe de Jong, who stood accused of the same offence.

On the Zaailand square, in front of the Leeuwarden Palace of Justice, a large crowd gathered that day. There were some supporters of Schurer (among them renowned Frisian authors like Douwe Tamminga, Anne Wadman and Eeltsje Boates Folkertsma), some Frisian nationalists, members of the Frisian-language press (who weren't allowed in the court-room) and a group of students carrying plackards, but it happened to be market day that day, and a lot of the people there were simply market goers who came over to see what all the fuss was about. Through inept crowd control by the police the situation got completely out of hand and turned into a riot known as Kneppelfreed ("Baton Friday", after the batons used by the police). Something like this was unheard of in sleepy Dutch post-war society, and the event triggered angry protest meetings throughout Friesland. The story even made headlines in the foreign press, and questions were raised in the Tweede Kamer, the Dutch lower house of parliament. Under pressure to resolve the situation, the national government in The Hague sent a committee consisting of three ministers to Friesland to confer with the Frisian leaders, which eventually led to changes in the national laws (in 1955 and 1956), making it possible for Frisians to speak their own language in the court of law and giving the Frisian language in the Province of Friesland the official status of tweede rijkstaal ("second national language"). Kneppelfreed is considered one of the most important milestones in the emancipation of the West Frisian language.

As for Schurer, he lost his case, and after the appeal he had to pay a fine. He served from 1956 to 1963 as a member of the Dutch national parliament for the Dutch Labour Party. He also continued to win acclaim as a poet. In fact, although Schurer is known as both a writer and a poet, his body of prose, consisting only of the short story collection Beam en Bast (1963) and his posthumously published autobiography De Besleine Spegel (1969), is diminutive when compared to his poetry oeuvre. Schurer also wrote two plays, Simson (1945, about the Biblical figure of Samson), and Bonifatius (1954, about Saint Boniface). Active also as a translator, he was responsible for the Frisian text of the Book of Esther in the New Frisian Bible Translation, while in 1931 he published a collection of poetry written by Heinrich Heine, which hy had translated into Frisian. Fedde Schurer died in Heerenveen, in 1968, and was survived by his wife and their adopted son Andries. In 2010, the first comprehensive biography on Schurer was published, titled Fedde Schurer (1898–1968): Biografie van een Friese Koerier, written in Dutch by Johanneke Liemburg, the mayor of Littenseradiel.