‘Until now, I have never felt inclined to write an autobiography.’ So begins ‘My Way to History,’ Huizinga's short autobiography that he wrote towards the end of his life. Huizinga was no Erasmus. The latter had enjoyed talking about himself, had dramatized his life and revelled in his role in the limelight of his age. Huizinga preferred to disappear between the pages that he wrote, and was inclined to lead a more secretive life. ‘It is better that the reader sees the brainwork, not the head itself,’ he is said to have once remarked.

‘My Way to History’ is largely about that ‘brainwork’. Huizinga was also a true writer, someone who could not resist enlivening a detached report with details and images of great precision and emotion. Moreover, he was writing about something very personal, about the development of an interest. ‘Interest [belangstelling] is a very remarkable and valuable word.’ An almost untranslatable word; a concept that covered freedom and necessity, wandering and coming home.

Huizinga was born in Groningen in 1872, but he tells us little of his origins and the family in which he grew up. He tells us nothing of his grandfather, a Baptist minister, the dominant figure in his early life who inspired in him the ethic of self-analysis. He writes almost nothing of his father, a professor of physiology, who gave him his fascination for scientific research. Nor does he write of his mother's early death (before Huizinga was even two) or the suicide of his halfbrother (in 1903). The other significant deaths in Huizinga's life – those of his first wife and eldest son – also remain in the shadows.

Huizinga's sole purpose was to describe how he had become an historian. He thus tells us the story of his ‘first encounter with history.’ It was the autumn of 1879; he had completed his first year of primary school and was not yet seven. The students’ union of Groningen University was celebrating its anniversary. In those days, this would take the form of a masquerade in which the students imitated a triumphal procession from the past or the visit of a new ruler to one of his cities.