The mystic and the Nazis

February 26, 2008 in General, News

meins_01.jpgThe University of Missouri Press has just included in its catalogue a book on Etty Hillesum by Meins Coetsier (pictured here), who spent some years in Ireland as a scholastic. Etty Hillesum was a Dutch Jew who died in Auschwitz in 1944, aged 29. For the last two years of her life she kept a diary in which her descriptions of life under German occupation became more and more infused with mystical reflections on God and her own spiritual development. Meins, who, like Hillesum, is Dutch, began his work as a postgraduate thesis in the Milltown Institute, and it comprises an attempt to correlate the mysticism of Hillesum with the philosophy of Eric Voegelin. The title is Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis. For more details, see the publishing house website.