Mireille Berman (1964-2025) lived with books, but not in them

“I will never forget how she stood there,” says German editor Anne Tente about her friend Mireille Berman. “When I passed her at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Mireille was always deep in conversation, her head tilted, attentive and inquisitive. People felt seen by her. In an industry that sometimes takes itself too seriously, Mireille saw through all the bragging and hype and retained her passion for books.”

Tente and Berman met at the Buchmesse in 2004 and became friends, both at work and outside of work. This was often the case with Berman: as a non-fiction editor at publisher De Bezige Bij (2001-2005) and as a policy officer at the Dutch Foundation for Literature, she built up a large international network of authors, translators, editors and other supporters of the written word. After Berman died of breast cancer on 3 March this year, the Fund received hundreds of responses.

“I was on the selection committee when Mireille applied to the Fund in May 2005,” says former director Tiziano Perez. “She was so thoughtful and modest that we initially chose another candidate. That was Peter Buwalda, who withdrew after two weeks because he preferred to write; Mireille came into the picture anyway. And thank goodness for that. She was smart, very well-read, curious, and she had an infallible moral compass. She cared about people, not about their position. When I became director of the Fund, she just kept coming into my office. She was a sounding board and a confidant – not just for me, but for many of us.”

Berman was born in 1964 as the fourth child and only girl in a family of teachers, who moved from Hattem to Groningen via Zuidlaren. Her father was a music teacher, her mother was a French teacher; both were well-read and politically engaged and passed this on to their children.

“My father had lost almost all of his family on his mother’s side in the war,” says Thijs Berman, the second-oldest son. “From that Jewish background, we mainly got an unspoken, ever-present sadness. My father was not religious. He chose communism, which promised a radical revolution of the social order. We subscribed to [communist daily] De Waarheid . Literature was held in the highest regard in our home, we read an awful lot. If you hadn’t figured out Tolstoy, Zola, Turgenev and Proust as a teenager, you pretty much didn’t count.”

Mireille was also an avid reader – but she followed her own taste in this. “We had our own little world,” says childhood friend Maaike Post. “We both had a rabbit, we wrote together, we played records. We read a lot of girls’ books full of intense feelings and small lives: Cissy by Marxveldt, Schoolidyllen by Top Naeff. The crazy, old-fashioned language in those books struck a chord in us, we could quote from them endlessly.”

Post and Berman remained friends their entire lives. Berman had "an insane talent for friendship" anyway, in the words of Judith Uyterlinde, who met her in 1982 at the Amsterdam teacher training college D'Witte Lelie and was immediately deeply impressed. "With Mireille, you didn't have to prove anything. She didn't judge, she wanted to understand."

Berman moved to Amsterdam after graduating from the Thorbecke College in Groningen – unlike her brothers, she could not go to grammar school, her parents decided. Through teacher training, she still ended up at the University of Amsterdam, where she studied history and joined the editorial staff of Skript Historisch Tijdschrift : a first step in her career as an editor that, according to her brother Thijs, she “built up from the bottom”. “The etiquette at the publishing houses where she got her first jobs was quite rough, and Mireille was sensitive. But she was also determined. It was her lifelong mission to give a voice to the unnoticed, the vulnerable, and to bring the right people into contact with each other for that purpose.”

In 1993, Berman met fellow historian Ido de Haan, with whom she had two children: Eva (1996) and Mischa (1999). Their parents “had a very good marriage for a long time,” daughter and son now say, even though it ended after 28 years. They grew up in a warm home, with often guests at the table with whom they discussed the world. “Sometimes people came in a bit shy, because they came from abroad, for example,” Eva says. “Mama would immediately embrace them and put everyone at ease.”

In her career, Berman blossomed slowly but surely – she sometimes had trouble valuing herself, preferring to put others in the spotlight. In 2013, she was given the position of non-fiction specialist at the Fund and a period of extensive travel began: in China, Suriname, Egypt, Russia, Turkey and at European book fairs, among other places, she committed herself to promoting Dutch literary non-fiction. She liked everything about the work, she said herself, including the hassle and the practical chores.

Berman's last major achievement for the Fund was organizing the Dutch guest of honor at the Leipzig Book Fair in March 2024, where she was able to address themes that were close to her heart, such as the colonial past and gender issues. She already knew then that the breast cancer for which she had been treated five years earlier had returned, but she wanted to remain an independent, working person for as long as possible. Until shortly before her death, she worked part-time at the Athenaeum bookstore in Amsterdam. Anyone who met her there could see how radiant she was; it was as if she had never done anything else.

"Mireille was a wise person," says author friend Bram de Swaan. "She lived with books, but not in books. She didn't hit you over the head with her knowledge, but preferred to listen, and then say something that put everything in a completely different light, often by means of a joke. Very special."