Jacques Presser

It began as calmly, petit-bourgeois, as one would like. It ended in a restless and precisely uncivilised way, that devastated life of the historian Jacques Presser whose name, together with the historian Lou de Jong, will continue to be mentioned and quoted in this twentieth century. Nanda van der Zee has blended the significance of not only the historian Presser, but also the literary man he wanted to be and thus the man Presser, as overtaken and affected by his own time, would become, in a multifaceted biography.