Menno Wigman
Winter 2005/2006
Writer and poet Menno Wigman set out to complete a collection of poems while in Het Vijfde Seizoen and put together a small anthology of poetry by residents of the clinic. He also hoped to find traces of Gerrit Achterberg, one of the clinic’s most famous patients. In the personal log, ‘Het gesticht. Drie maanden Den Dolder’ (‘The asylum. Three months in Den Dolder’), that he wrote during his stay, Wigman looks into the thin line between madness and genius, and describes daily life in the clinic with irony and compassion. ‘Het gesticht’, Wigman’s prose debut, was published by Prometheus in 2007.
