Henriette Roland Holst

Independent activity Left communism Netherlands Netherlands 1869–1952 ○ Natural causes

Dutch poet who wrote the Dutch words of the Internationale, and a left socialist delegate at Zimmerwald

Dutch poet and Marxist writer. Prompted by Gorter to read Capital, she joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1897, sat on its executive and attended congresses of the Second International. She left the party in 1911, founded the Revolutionary Socialist Union in 1915, joined the Social Democratic Party (SDP) the following year and took part in the Zimmerwald conference. In the Communist Party she sided with the left of Gorter and Pannekoek before breaking with the party in 1927; in later life she turned to Christian socialism. She wrote the Dutch words of the Internationale.

Also known as: Henriette Roland Holst-van der Schalk · Henriëtte Roland Holst

Activities and affiliations

Career Timeline

From orthodox dissenter to the communist left

Roland Holst found her way to poetry around 1890 through Albert Verwey of the Tachtigers. After marrying the artist Richard Roland Holst in 1896, she read Marx's Capital at Herman Gorter's urging. Joining the Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1897, she spent night after night in smoky halls calling the workers to struggle, sat on the party executive and was delegated to the Second International in 1900; at its congresses she came to know Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky. Works such as Capital and Labour in the Netherlands (1902), a study of the great railway strike of 1903 and General Strike and Social Democracy (with a preface by Kautsky in German) established her as a Marxist theorist.

She stayed in the party when the Tribunists were expelled in 1909, but left the SDAP as an orthodox Marxist in 1911. Unlike most orthodox Marxists she did not move straight to the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and against Luxemburg's advice remained without a party for some years. In 1915 she founded the Revolutionary Socialist Union with some SDAP and SDP members and went to the Zimmerwald conference as a Dutch delegate. The union merged into the SDP a year later, and she joined it. Having become a communist after the Russian Revolution, she led a march with David Wijnkoop to the Orange-Nassau barracks in Amsterdam on 13 November 1918; it was dispersed with casualties, the "revolution that did not happen".

In the Communist Party she sided with the left-communist faction of Gorter and Anton Pannekoek. She attended the Third Congress of the Comintern in 1921 and wrote From Soviet Russia, but frustrated by the party's internal quarrels she broke with it in 1927. She then joined the opposition's League of Communist Struggle and Propaganda Clubs, kept close ties with Indonesian nationalists such as Mohammad Hatta and attended the founding congress of the League against Imperialism. Her later poetry and writing took on an increasingly religious character, and she became a Christian socialist.