As we write this, it’s May 1st, International Worker’s Day. As graphic designers, we do feel connected with this date: after all, aren’t we the manual labourers of the culture industry? It’s a good day to revisit the text of The Internationale, especially the Dutch translation. This version, written by poet Henriëtte Roland Holst, reads like a modernist design manifesto as it contains the famous lines “Sterft, gij oude vormen en gedachten” (“Die, thou old forms and thoughts”). It’s a sentence that’s on our mind often.
In our opinion, it’s a phrase that should not be taken literally, but spiritually. The Internationale was originally intended to be sung to the tune of La Marseillaise; in the same spirit, we think that old forms are here to be loaded with new meaning, until they burst. We need to make these old forms our own, so that they can become new. The ghost of the past, as an agent of change. 

H.R. Holst by M. de Klerk, 1921.