Cees Nooteboom was born there on 31 July 1933. On 16 May 1940, the Wehrmacht marched into Amsterdam; Cees Nooteboom describes it as follows: „Die Straße ist breit, die Menschen am Rand sind still, und dazwischen, in der prächtigen Mitte, zieht und rattert die endlose graue Armee“. After the death of his father and the evacuation of the family, the boy, baptized Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria, grew up in Catholic convent schools in Eindhoven and Venray.
He earned his first money working in advertising offices and banks. He roamed Amsterdam as a „Dandy ohne Geld“, wearing a velvet jacket, a colorful scarf, and carrying a walking stick. His debut, the travel novel Philip en de anderen, which appeared in 1955, made him famous overnight and became a long seller in the German translation Das Paradies ist nebenan. In addition to song lyrics, poems, and poetry translations, Nooteboom primarily wrote travel reports, often including photographs taken by his wife Simone Sassen. As a travel writer, Cees Nooteboom became a citizen of the world. The author lives in Amsterdam, in Berlin, and on Menorca, and has traveled across five continents, including almost all European countries. „Ich ziele wie ein Pfeil / auf die Ferne, / aber in der Ferne / bin ich / weg“, he writes in his poem „Weg“.
Cees Nooteboom has captivated his readers as a storyteller. On one occasion, the Accademia della Crusca in Florence invited him to write about a letter of the alphabet. Nooteboom chose the letter „L“ because it stands for both Lesen and Laufen. This declaration, in turn, is connected with freedom, the libertà, and with the unity of thought and movement. Cees Nooteboom is a philosophizing citizen of the world for whom traveling and seeing coincide with describing the world.
Nooteboom’s literary artistry unfolds primarily in his novels. Rituale, published in 1984 by a GDR publisher, in 1985 in the Federal Republic, and adapted into a film in 1989; the Berlin epic Allerseelen (1999), written in Los Angeles; the love novel Paradies verloren (2004), set in Australia and Austria; and above all Die folgende Geschichte (1996) address cosmopolitan themes, cultural rituals, and the quest for ultimate truths. In the latter novel, a classical philologist falls asleep in Amsterdam, awakens in Lisbon, and ultimately encounters figures from his past on a ship—a Totennachen.
In addition to his novels and poems, Nooteboom has also established himself as a vigilant political contemporary. His Berlin travelogue Berlin 1989 | 2009 serves both as a personal chronicle and a historical commentary on the once-divided, now-reunified city, structured around experiences spanning more than fifty years. In January 1963, he was handed an ideological city guide in East Berlin, which still demanded respect for the „Schutzmauer“. In November 1989, he witnessed the fall of that wall. While people streamed into the West and Trabants drove along the Kurfürstendamm, he walked into the eastern part of the city and observed the immediate consequences of the people’s self-liberation. Twenty years later, as a „Mann, in Worte eingewickelt“, he read newspapers in a café „Zum Nußbaum“ that were „randvoll mit Krise“.
Cees Nooteboom, as Norbert Lammert stated in his laudation for the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Literature Prize in 2010 in Weimar, is a „große, kräftige Stimme im polyphonen Chor der europäischen Literatur“. As a guarantor of a values-conscious Europe, the author can, in a manner of speaking, move mountains. In the Dutch mountains of the eponymous novella, the province of Limburg, the southernmost tip of the Netherlands, is cartographically elongated so that the country stretches over the Balkans to the Greek border and can be read as an intercultural model corridor of Europe.
At the age of 92, Cees Nooteboom passed away on 11 February 2026 on his favorite island, Menorca. „Er weiß es, vor dem Ende kommt / alles noch einmal vorbei, erst dann darf er / gehen und wer weiß auch lachen als Waise im Dunkeln, / die hängt an den Füßen von Versen,“ it reads in the volume Abschied (2021).