Queer Places:
Herengracht 401, 1017 BP Amsterdam, Netherlands
Spaarnwoude Cemetery
Spaarnwoude, Haarlemmerliede en Spaarnwoude Municipality, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
Claus Victor Bock (May 7, 1926 - January 5, 2008) was a professor of German studies. In the early 1950s, Bock studied with Ronald Peacock at the University of Manchester, attracted by the latter's research on Hölderlin, and obtained a PhD at Basle under Walter Muschg. After working briefly as an assistant lecturer at his alma mater, he became a lecturer at Queen Mary College, London (1958), then reader (1964), and finally professor of German, Westfield College, London (1969). Two of Bock's noted PhD students were Jeremy Adler and John Fletcher.
Francesca Rheannon, daughter of Guido Teunissen, describes how
Claus Bock and Manuel Goldschmidt with
Friedrich W. Buri, as
Germans, belonged to the inner circle around the charismatic leader
Wolfgang Frommel.
In the second circle the young Dutchman
Vincent Weyand was the
primus inter pares - Frommels favourite. But he did not live at the
Herengracht. He lived in Bergen and later in a room on the Singel. He was a
son of the painter Jaap Weyand and his Jewish wife, and therefore half-Jew
according to the Nazis. Gisèle was the 'mother' of the circle, also as an
artist. She was indispensible because of the help and resources she provided.
She was also the one who provided the hiding places. Fellow artists who did
not join the Kulturkammer, like Mari Andriessen and Adriaan Roland Holst -
Roland Holst later on did join under pressure - supported her with food
coupons; as did Adriaans' brother Eep.
Claus Bock's parents fled from Hamburg via Brussels to the Netherlands because of racist persecution on 21 September 1938, his father's birthday. Since the parents went to India for professional reasons, a boarding school had to be found for the son.
"My father was a chemical merchant. During his apprenticeship in Antwerp, he was familiar with the French language. He had maintained relations with Belgian business friends, on whose behalf he was to travel to India – initially for one year. The mother would of course accompany him, but it was advised not to take the twelve-year-old son immediately into the tropical climate and into a still uncertain existence."
A Belgian convent school recommended to parents did not appeal to her mother, who instead opted for a school where her former classmate Josi Warburg already worked as a housemother.
During the summer holidays of 1939, Claus was in London, visiting a school friend. Here he experienced the outbreak of the Second World War and was evacuated to the countryside together with English children. Due to the overlap of telegrams, he did not stay in England, as his parents had wished, but followed the school's request to return to Eerde. He describes the following period, the period between the outbreak of war and the German invasion of the Netherlands, as the time of "my slow awakening. At the school, I perceived Cyril Hildesheimer and Buri as two teachers who impressed me – each in their own way."
Through the two, around whom a circle of other students had formed, he came
into contact with thewritings of
Stefan George and Wolfgang Frommel, whom he met first by letter and then personally – during Frommel's visit to the Quaker School Eerde. This resulted in lifelong relationships and a "love called friendship", as Marita Keilson-Lauritz put it.
After the occupationof the Netherlands by the German Wehrmachtand the decision of the Quakers to give in to the pressure of the occupiers and to banish the Jewish children from Schloss Eerde to an outbuilding, Frommel and Wolfgang Cordan tried to persuade the school administration to let the Jewish children go into hiding. When the school administration opposed this plan and even threatened to file a complaint with the Gestapo, Frommel and Cordan decided to act on their own and help the students close to them to escape. Claus Victor Bock, Clemens Michael Brühl, Liselotte Brinitzer and Thomas Maretzki went into hiding. Claus Victor Bock, like his former teacher Friedrich W. Buri, lived from 1942 in hiding at Herengracht 401 in Amsterdam, for which the name Castrum Peregrini became established. Herengracht 401 also remained a point of reference for the other refugees from the Eerde Quaker School – even if they were hiding elsewhere in the Netherlands. They all survived the German occupation – despite the ever-present threat of the raids of the German occupying forces and their Dutch auxiliary organs. After the Second World War, Claus Bock lived with his parents in India for a year. He then resumed his studies at the University of Amsterdam, which he then continued in Manchester. In 1955 he received his doctorate in German literature in Basel under Walter Muschg. He then returned to Manchester and London, where he worked as an editor. For eight years he was Director of the Department of German Studies at the University of London until he became Dean of the Faculty of the Arts in 1980. With his retirement in 1984 he went back to Amsterdam to the house "Castrum Peregrini". A foundation was established for the publication of the journal Castrum Peregrini, founded by Frommel in 1951. Until 2001 he was chairman of this foundation. He worked on the journal until 2005.
Claus Victor Bock was buried on 12 January 2008 in a small cemetery in Spaarnwoude, the Netherlands, where Wolfgang Frommelis also buried. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung of 18 January 2008 wrote about this funeral:
"The rituals he had learned as a teenager also guided him on the final journey. His friends read 20 poems, 3 by Frommel, the rest by Stefan George.
In 1984 Claus Victor Bock was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, First Class, and since 1996 he has been an assigned Fellow of the Queen Mary and Westfield College of the University of London.
His Life motto was "As long as we write poetry and write, nothing happens to
us."
My published books:
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