[9][5] He was a talented orator, and his pacifist and socialist views were seen as a danger to society at that time, which is why the BVD, the Dutch secret service, started a file om him.

[10][11] Schurer joined the Christian-Democratic Union (CDU), a Christian-socialist splinter party, and in 1935–1936 he served as a member of the provincial assembly of North Holland for a year.

[5] In World War II he was involved with the Dutch resistance in Amsterdam, where his house was used as a temporary hiding place for people wanted by the Nazis, before they could be smuggled out of the city.

[15] In 1950 and 1951, in several court cases in Friesland the judge denied the defendants the right to speak Frisian,[16] Schurer wrote a sharply worded editorial rebuke in the Heerenveensche Koerier newspaper.

[19] He was then charged with slandering the judge, and had to appear in court on Friday, 16 November 1951, in the provincial capital of Leeuwarden,[20] together with another journalist, Tsjebbe de Jong, of the Bolswarder Nieuwsblad who used the term "nazi methods" in his column about the case.

[2] In fact, although Schurer is known as both a writer and a poet, his body of prose, consisting only of the short story collection Beam en Bast (1963) and his posthumously published autobiography De Besleine Spegel (1969), is diminutive when compared to his poetry oeuvre.