Ode to Lau Mazirel | Quirky cross-thinker

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At Prinsengracht 466, Lau Mazirel, then 30, started her law firm in 1937. The building has since become home to a hairdresser and Lau has fallen into oblivion. The outspoken Lau Mazirel (1907-1974) was one of the most versatile and unique cross-thinkers of the 20th century. A pioneering lawyer, resistance fighter and publicist. A pioneer who, while her ideas slowly became commonplace, remained in the shadows of history. A champion of the right to be yourself undisturbed, she was ahead of her time. Too far: as early as a century ago, she advocated the abolition of gender naming in passports, defended gay men as a lawyer and refused to marry before the law because doing so would deprive her of her legal capacity. She always stood up for oppressed people. Regularly, Lau was the messenger of ‘the uncomfortable truth. She recognised the threat of Nazism well before the outbreak of World War II thanks to her contacts with German refugees and her travels in the 1930s, but her warnings were not heard. As an outspoken woman in a world dominated by men and double standards, she encountered opposition and scorn. But history proved her right more than once in hindsight.

From her early pacifist youth, Mazirel was suspicious of ‘social comedy’, as she would later characterise both pigeonholing and the hypocrisy of power. Lau always had an independent spirit: at 15, she took long hikes through the Black Forest on her own, with her tent and provisions as her only companions. As a maverick, Mazirel recognised the struggles of others who fell outside the social norm. She found her battleground in the legal profession from the 1930s onwards. After Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Mazirel became involved in the reception and naturalisation of fleeing German Jews. She also became one of the few lawyers to defend men persecuted under penal code art. 248bis. The law allowed sex between people of the same sex only from the age of 21, and led to the criminal prosecution of men in particular since the 1911 Morals Act. 

She had a keen eye for group discrimination and the danger of government registration. Through her many contacts from Germany, she heard that Roma and Sinti were ‘disappearing’ into ‘delousing camps’ from which they could not get out. From 1936, the Nazis' racial ideology had led, among other things, to large-scale data collection and blood sampling of Roma and Sinti living in Germany. For Lau, this was reason to be very critical of data registration, including in the Netherlands. There, a new population register had just been started, in which not only personal information but also the ‘church denomination’ had to be listed. Lau's warnings against this were not heard in the conservative-bourgeois Netherlands of the 1930s; regularly also because the headstrong Mazirel - deliberately living unmarried with the father of her children - was seen as an ‘eccentric woman’. 

During the German occupation of the Netherlands, Lau's resistance work was a logical continuation of her earlier fight against injustice. Headstrong and solo, she was involved in organising hiding places and smuggling children out of the Hollandse Schouwburg. Her office on Prinssengracht was a jump address, her house on Frederiksplein a temporary fitting room for the attackers of the Amsterdam population register in 1943. As a maternity nurse, she reported a child to the civil registry under the pseudonym Noortje Wijnants every year to get a false passport. Her two young children spent the war at various hiding addresses, their Jewish partner went into hiding elsewhere and after the war married the woman who sheltered him. Much was broken for Lau in the war and her disillusionment with the ‘social comedy’ grew in the years that followed. But her commitment never waned. She participated as secretary in Amsterdam's Police Purification Committee, organised Amsterdam protests against the decolonisation war in Indonesia, became house lawyer of the newly founded COC, was active as president of the Amsterdam branch of the Dutch Association for Women's Interests, Women's Labour and Equal Citizenship (NVVVG) and continued her practice. 

But the social order readjusted to the pre-war compartmentalised Netherlands where there was no room for misfits. Resistance to this proved lonely and thankless. Lau became increasingly oppressed and, due to her mental and physical injuries sustained during her resistance work, had to give up her law practice in 1956. She remained belligerent about ‘unwelcome information’, which she sought to get on the agenda with letters to the editor, opinion pieces and many denunciations. When she left Amsterdam with her new partner and moved to France in the late 1950s, she continued her social criticism from her bed box in the Morvan. 

Despite her limited mobility, Mazirel managed to ardently spearhead opposition to the 1968 Housing Act. To her dismay, the law built on policy documents from World War II that eagerly used racial ideology about Roma and Sinti. Mazirel eventually had to grit her teeth as her charges were increasingly framed as those of a ‘mentally unstable woman’. Despite this, she continued to inspire kindred spirits on the grounds of her French farm until the very end with her vast knowledge, bedside lectures, and extended conversations about the struggle against injustice. A small group of activists and journalists made attempts to continue Mazirel's thinking. Her last action was against the 1971 Census - an abomination that threw her back in time; by setting up a Committee of Vigilance, Mazirel managed to make it clear, even at her last strength, that you do not have to be many to bring about change.