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Jan Marius Romein (30 October 1893 – 16 July 1962) was a Dutch historian, journalist and literary scholar. A Marxist and a student of Huizinga, Romein is remembered for his popularizing books of Dutch national history, jointly authored with his wife Annie Romein-Verschoor. His work has been translated into English, German, Indonesian and Japanses. ==Biography== Born in Rotterdam, Romein married the writer and historian Annie Romein-Verschoor (1895–1978) on August 14, 1920. Romein began writing while studying humanities at the University of Leiden (1914–1920). Of his professors the historian Johan Huizinga inspired him the most. During his studies and impressed by the First World War and the Russian Revolution he became interested in Marxism. He translated Franz Mehring's biography on Karl Marx into Dutch (1921; with an introductory essay). After the couple moved to Amsterdam in 1921, he became an editor of the daily ''De Tribune'' of the young Communistische Partij Holland (CPH, Communist Party of Holland). In addition, he worked as a freelance writer and translator. Already in 1916-1918 he published a Dutch translation of Romain Rolland's ''Jean Christophe'' (10 vols., with an introductory essay). In 1924 he received his doctoral degree, with the highest distinction, at the University of Leiden with the dissertation ''Dostoyevsky in the Eyes of Western Critics''. In 1927 he left the communist party, but he remained interested in Marxism and in the political development of the Soviet Union and of Asia. After publishing a book on the history of the Eastern Roman Empire (''Byzantium'', 1928) he translated and edited the ''Harmsworth's Universal History of the World'' into Dutch, in co-operation with other historians (1929–1932, 9 vols.), with three added chapters written by himself. His first book publication in the field of Dutch history was a pioneering study on the history of Dutch historical writing during the Middle Ages (1932). His most famous books include a history of ''The Low Countries'' (1934) and a four-volume work with 36 short biographies of important Dutch (1938–1940), both in cooperation with his wife and fellow historian Annie Romein-Verschoor. In 1939, Romein was appointed professor of history at the University of Amsterdam. He survived World War II after being held hostage as a prisoner for three months by the German police in the notorious Amersfoort police detention camp, and returned to writing and teaching. In 2011 Jan Romein and his wife were posthumously awarded the title "Righteous among the Nations" by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, for offering a hiding place to a persecuted Jewish fellow-citizen during the German occupation.〔See: http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/pdf/righteous_june_2011.pdf; http://db.yadvashem.org/righteous/family.html?language=en&itemId=8712453〕 In 1937, he published an essay on technology called ''"The dialectics of progress"'' (in Dutch: ''"De dialectiek van de vooruitgang"'') in which he describes a phenomenon called the ''"Law of the handicap of a head start"'' (''"Wet van de remmende voorsprong"''), as part of the series ''"The unfinished past"'' (in Dutch: ''"Het onvoltooid verleden"''). This article was also published in German as "Dialektik des Fortschritts" in: ''Mass und Wert. Zweimonatsschrift für freie deutsche Kultur'' (eds. Thomas Mann and Konrad Falke), vol. 2 (Zurich, Switzerland, 1939). In 1946, Annie Romein received a copy of Anne Frank's diary which she tried to have published. When she was unsuccessful, she gave the diary to her husband, who wrote the first article about the diary and its writer, for the newspaper ''Het Parool''. Interest raised by his article led to the diary being published the following year. Also in 1946, he introduced the theory of history as a subject in the academic curriculum.〔See: André C. Otto, ''Het ruisen van de tijd. Over de Theoretische Geschiedenis van Jan Romein'' (Rustle of Time: on the Theoretical History of Jan Romein ). Ph.D. dissertation. Book edition published by the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam 1998 (English summary on pp. 279–283).〕 Soon after the beginning of the Cold War his marxist conceptions, though undogmatic, had placed him in relative isolation, and in 1949 he was denied entry to the United States for an intended speaking engagement at an international scholarly conference in Princeton. Instead, he was welcomed as a guest professor in the young republic of Indonesia during the 1951–1952 academic year. He devoted the latter part of his life to writing a history of Europe during the 25-year period from 1889 to 1914: ''The Watershed of Two Eras. Europe in 1900'', which was published posthumously in 1967 (English edition 1978).〔(See the book review by Allen R. Douglas, 'Marx and Huizinga: Jan Romein As Historian', in: ''The Virginia Quarterly Review'' (VQR, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA., Winter 1980), pp. 152–161. )〕 It is an attempt at writing "integral history" of the transitional decades from the 19th to the 20th century, during which Europe's supremacy in the world started waning. The book devotes chapters to all aspects of European history during this period: political, economic, social, cultural, scientific, literature, art, emancipation movements etc. Due to a chronic illness, which became manifest in 1959, he limited his professorship at the University of Amsterdam to solely Theoretical History. He died in Amsterdam in 1962. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jan Romein」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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