Zwalf Collection

The Zwalf Collection brings together 535 pamphlets on socialism and related movements, published across 7 countries between 1875 and 1950. Curated by Dutch activist and researcher Meyer (Max) Zwalf, this rare and multilingual collection captures decades of political debate, labour history and international collaboration.

Key items in the collection

Highlights from this collection demonstrate its historical significance and variety.

Zwalf Collection

The Zwalf Collection consists of 535 pamphlets on socialism and related subjects published between 1875 and 1950 in:

the Netherlands
Germany
Austria
Czechoslovakia
the Soviet Union
France
Britain.

The writers include:

Max Adler
Eduard Bernstein
HN Brailsford
Alfred Braunthal
Nikolai Bukharin
GDH Cole
Maurice Dobb
Friedrich Engels
Dmitri Furmanov
Rudolf Hilferding
Anatoli Kamensky
Karl Kautsky
Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin
Nadezhda Krupskaya
Ferdinand Lassalle
Vladimir Ilich Lenin
Wilhelm Liebknecht
Jack London
Karl Marx
William Morris
Friedrich Muckle
Walther Rathenau
Upton Sinclair
Werner Sombart
Georges Sorel
Leon Trotsky
J van der Wijk
Sam de Wolff
Hekter Zoccoli
Max Zwalf.

Some of the works are translations, for instance, works of Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky and William Morris in Dutch, and Jack London and Upton Sinclair in Russian.

The collection also includes 2 journals:

De Socialistische Gids (Amsterdam, 1916–24)
Neue Zeit (Stuttgart, 1897–1908).

About Meyer Zwalf

Meyer (Max) Zwalf (1901–1954) was born in Amsterdam and was involved in politics from an early age.

Affiliations and career

Zwalf served as an official in the Amsterdam Social Democratic Youth Organisation. He later worked with Marxist scholar Rudolf Kuyper at a private institute for higher education.

From 1923 to 1930, Zwalf was librarian and archivist of the Association of Social Democratic City and County Councillors.

Zwalf wrote a Dutch supplement to Max Beer's History of British Socialism (1929) and was the author of a number of political pamphlets and articles, 7 of which are held in this collection.

International Transport Workers Federation

In 1931 he was recruited by Edo Fimmen, the Secretary of the International Transport Workers Federation (the Federation), to be the research and publications officer of the Federation. He held the position for 23 years, until his death in 1954.

By 1938 the International Transport Workers Federation had a library of 3,800 volumes and was receiving 400 journals and newspapers in 20 languages. Zwalf was regarded as the intellectual in the organisation and its congress accepted his analyses in such works as:

Reparations and War Debts from the Labour Point of View (1932) [not held in the National Library]
European Transport: The Way to Unity (1946) [not held in the National Library]

London office

Zwalf worked with other members of the Federation's administrative team, mostly Dutch or Belgian people, and left Amsterdam with them in 1939 to set up a London office. When he died, he was one of only 6 people from Amsterdam still working for the Federation.