“THE EIGHTEEN DEAD” was not Jan Campert's first antifascist poem. In 1933 Campert had used poetry to express his concern about Nazism in “Ballade der verbrande boeken” (Ballad of the Burned Books). The poem was a reaction against the Nazi book burnings in May 1933. It ended with a reference to the power of literature: the books that were being burned by the henchmen of the Third Reich could not be destroyed because “Thomas Mann, Fallada, Wassermann, and Zweig had already achieved the eternal Reich (217–18).”

Only a few months earlier, in February, another fire in Berlin, in the German parliament, had made the young Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe world-famous. When van der Lubbe was arrested as the sole culprit in February 1933, he suddenly put the Netherlands in the spotlight of the international debate on National Socialism. In Braunbuch über den Reichstagbrand (Brown Book on the Reichstag Fire, 1933), the communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg claimed that van der Lubbe was mentally disturbed and that he had merely been an instrument in the hands of the Nazis. This humiliating interpretation was supported by the Dutch Communist Party but triggered a fierce reaction in defense of van der Lubbe by the proletarian writer Maurits Dekker and others in Roodboek (Red Book, 1933).