In April 1945, Hendrik Werkman languished in a cell inside the Nazi garrison in Groningen, The Netherlands. He could hear the gunfire erupting, first at a great distance, and gradually closer and closer. He likely presumed the Allied forces were getting close to liberating the city and freeing him and the city from the relative hell of Nazi occupation and imprisonment. Perhaps there was hope after all.
Werkman was Dutch, and therefore, considered among the purest stock of Aryans by Hitler and his like-minded minions who took such racist ideas seriously. Nevertheless, Dutch citizens of any sort who ran afoul of the Gestapo were arrested and imprisoned.
In Werkman’s case, his arrest had nothing to do with him being in the Dutch army, a spy, or part of the resistance. Werkman, like many Dutch citizens, was sympathetic to the plight of the Dutch Jewish community, 75% of whom perished during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Additionally, Werkman, like many artists, was an independent thinker whose sense of aesthetics did not always conform to those of his Dutch peers. While he was a member of an artist’s group, De Ploeg (the Plough), many of the members considered him to be likable, but a little quirky. The Gestapo did not look kindly on those who were sympathetic to Jews. Nor were they fond of people who were a little different. In addition to the yellow star that identified Jewish prisoners in concentration camps, Nazis assigned a variety of colored stars and triangles to prisoners who were non-conformist, were gay or Romanian, considered a vagrant, or had some other “difference” that they thought to be undesirable. Nevertheless, Werkman was not arrested for either holding sympathy for Jews or being a bit odd.
In 1945, during the waning days of Nazism in the Netherlands, Werkman was arrested for the crime of “seditious typography”
Werkman was a printer, artist, and designer who ran a small, barely profitable print shop in Groningen. The Nazis kept a close eye on his shop, as they did other shops that were capable of producing and distributing any kind of publications. Like all dictatorial regimes, controlling media and the messages they create is of utmost importance. From media manipulation to book banning, controlling the free expression of creative people is a hallmark of all extremist regimes. The Nazi regime even tried to control the use of certain fonts. For example, the use of Blackletter fonts was praised, encouraged, and sometimes even mandated. The Blackletter font Fractur was used on the cover of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Ironically, Fractur was later banned by the Nazis for being “too Jewish.” Such ironic, outrageous, and paranoid control over design, publishing, and media was not only creatively restricting, it could have consequences related to the health and well-being of the creator as well.
Like most creative people, Werkman didn’t take well to having what he designed and printed being censored or controlled. And in one of many acts of defiance, he and his staff published over 40 works under the clandestine publishing house name of De Blauwe Schuit (The Blue Barge). Some of the works, featuring designs and illustrations by Werkman, included a series of Hassidic stories from Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism.
In 1945, during the waning days of Nazism in the Netherlands, Werkman was arrested for the crime of “seditious typography” (Drucker & McVarish). There was, no doubt, a sense of desperation on the part of his captors. The Allied forces were rapidly making their way toward Groningen, and the Nazis knew the end of their reign of terror was coming soon. In an unspeakable act of cruelty, Werkman and nine other prisoners were taken to nearby Bakkeveen and murdered by firing squad.
Today, most of us are appalled by the extreme measures a dictatorial regime may take to control the free expression of others. Yet censorship, book banning, and attempts to control messaging by various political and religious extremists pop up in our modern, supposedly enlightened, times all too often. Suppression of free expression is the death knell of creativity.
Hopefully, we are a long moral leap from the actual execution of a writer, designer, or artist for freely practicing the unrestricted creation and publication of information, as extreme suppression, censorship, and book banning signals the possible death of creativity. While not as sudden and violent as killing a human being, the death of creativity inevitably leads to the slow, painful death of culture.
Boyer, Kent L. “A Post-Holocaust Hasidic legacy.” Portraits, 1 June 2021, pp. 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781438483993-003.
Drucker, Johanna, and Emily McVarish. Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide. Pearson, 2013.
Dusty Crocker, PhD is Professor of Professional Practice at Texas Christian University.