Paul van Ostaijen

A radical young activist in wartime Antwerp, Van Ostaijen fled to Berlin in 1918 following the collapse of the German occupation. Immersing himself in the Berlin Dadaist and Expressionist avant-garde, he experienced the revolutionary street uprisings of the Weimar Republic.

In Berlin, he composed Bezette Stad (1921), a revolutionary masterpiece designed in explosive typographic layout by Oscar Jespers that mirrored the trauma of military occupation and commercial jazz culture. Returning to Belgium, he wrote pure lyrical poetry (Nagelaten gedichten) before dying of consumption in a Walloon sanatorium.