Then Gorter became smitten by socialism. Spinoza was out the window; Marx was his man. Gorter had never really worked himself—he tried teaching but found students to be an annoyance—but he became convinced that Marx’s revolutionary theory about society and economic justice had a mystical, absolute truth. He became a popular public speaker on the plight of the working class and the coming revolution. He joined the Social Democratic Party, forerunner of the Dutch Communist Party, and became the editor of its journal. He grew into a revered figure, though he also seems to have been a bit of a joke to the metalworkers and pipe fitters and printers who attended party gatherings. Gorter seemed oblivious to the contrast between his take-no-prisoners revolutionary rhetoric on the one hand and his personal appearance on the other—he favored a straw hat and pince-nez—and his bourgeois private life, which involved playing tennis and cricket. As it turned out, Gorter’s personal interest in Marxist revolution was equally contradictory. He wanted to turn Marx’s truths into a new form of mystical poetry. He published a collection of verse that took the reader through the aesthetic stages of mankind’s economic awakening, climaxing with rapturous communism. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia propelled him to even greater heights, resulting in poetry that, to say the least, has not aged well. His last collection is entitled The Workers’ Council.
On the other side of the social liberalism debate stood a man named Henri Polak. Polak had grown up in a family of eleven children squeezed into an apartment on Amsterdam’s Butter Market, one of those workers’ families that had been battered by unchecked economic liberalism. Despite being a brilliant student, he was forced to leave school at age thirteen to work in a diamond polishing factory in order to help keep the family together. At eighteen, he went to London and at Hyde Park rallies became entranced with the ideas of Marx. When he returned to Amsterdam, he joined the doctrinaire Socialist Party, but he grew tired of its ideological fervor, which he felt was too far removed from the real world, and began to work toward a practical form of social liberalism.
The evolution of Polak’s ideas had a great deal to do with the fact that he was a Jew. Like Jews elsewhere, those in Amsterdam kept a low profile; they were predominantly workers, and so they were attracted to the socialist program of fairness and decency. But they were deeply repelled by the idea of revolution. They knew from centuries of experience which group would become the scapegoat if things turned out badly. Polak read widely and while in England was influenced by the Fabian Society, which promoted a moderate path between socialism and capitalism. He cofounded the Dutch diamond workers’ union (whose members were overwhelmingly Jewish) and became its chairman. From that perch he was able to put his ideas into practice. He wanted not only decent housing for workers but something more: beauty, a genuinely good life. Under him, the union provided health insurance and offered classes for personal improvement; workers had access to a library; they got instruction in personal hygiene and even suggestions on how to furnish their homes. Polak commissioned a new headquarters, designed by Hendrik Berlage, the most sought-after architect of the day. Berlage conceived of it as a modernist version of a medieval Italian palazzo, a palace for the people, and so it was called The Citadel. Today the building is a small museum; touring it offers a sense of the exquisite, handcrafted care that went into this effervescent idea of turning the top-down capitalist system on its side and giving workers a sense of the good life. The building incorporates stained glass, sculpted brickwork, art nouveau murals, and an inscription in which the workers thank their board for introducing the eight-hour workday, which took effect in the Netherlands in 1919.
The diamond workers’ union became the model for the city’s other trade unions, and Polak went on to head both the national federation of trade unions and the international federation of diamond workers, exerting a huge moderating influence on the prevailing social liberalism.
For a time, hard-core Marxist leaders and those advocating social reform without revolution battled it out in Amsterdam, while much of the working class sat on the sidelines. The argument over which direction social liberalism should take was carried out in union halls and newspapers, but the center of it was a café along the Amstel River called the Ysbreeker (Icebreaker), which still exists and which was the watering hole of leaders of both groups.
When the shouting was over, Herman Gorter and the hard-core socialists did not hold sway in Amsterdam; they faded. Instead, something else was born. The features of the city of today were coming into focus—and they had an already familiar look. The Amsterdam that emerged out of the early twentieth century would be a capitalist place, a place of business and money, but it would at the same time wholeheartedly commit itself to the “social” path: to providing a blanket, a safety net. How, outsiders may wonder, could it do both? The short answer is: by having the capitalists themselves join in the commitment to social welfare. You can trace this commitment back to the seventeenth century, when the regents who ran the city—the merchants who were principals in the VOC—created (often, it must be said, after intense battles) some of Europe’s first orphanages, homes for the elderly, and an urban structure in which rich and poor were not segregated but lived in the same neighborhoods.
But you can go further back than that in looking for the roots of this dual identity: to the very founding of the city, and the battle against water. Early in this book I highlighted the curious notion that the struggle to reclaim land and then to protect it from the sea involved two seemingly contradictory factors: it was both a communal project and one that fostered intense individualism. Imagine a group of people in the Middle Ages standing on a shore, looking out across the water, and deciding that they would reengineer what they were looking at, make land where now there was water, and do it entirely with sweat and backbreaking labor. The degree of cooperation required would surely be a powerful binding force for a community, as would the long-term project of maintaining a system of dams and dikes to keep the water at bay. And once they had reclaimed the land, it was not, as was the case elsewhere in Europe, the property of a church or king: it was theirs. Individuals were free to buy, sell, or rent it. That protocapitalist power excited an individualistic sensibility. Yet it was only possible because of the underlying social bond. This combination, which seems in many other places to be a contradiction, became an essential part of the city’s identity.
The combination was personified in one man. As socialists advanced, they gained a powerful leader. Floor Wibaut had been raised in a Roman Catholic household and considered becoming a priest, but at age seventeen he came into contact with Multatuli’s progressive antireligion writings and abruptly dropped his faith and went into the timber trade. He became highly successful—selling as far as Russia and the United States—and rich. At the same time, he was deeply affected by the ideas of class and fairness that were in the air. He joined the socialists and won a seat on the city council.
From that perch, he oversaw the biggest expansion in the city’s history. As it had during its early golden age, Amsterdam annexed a vast semicircle of land on its outskirts, tripling its size, and sketched out new neighborhoods for its growing population. Wibaut determined to imprint Henri Polak’s social vision into the city’s geography: “The point of departure for raising the culture of the working class,” Wibaut said, “must lie in the improvement of housing conditions.” Hendrik Berlage—who had designed The Citadel for the diamond workers—crafted the layout for the new areas, and dozens of young architects filled in the blanks on the map. The new area would complement the seventeenth-century canal zone without trying to duplicate it. That earlier expansion, which brought the Amsterdam canal house into its own, was a kind of response to the monumental architecture of cities like Paris and London, suggesting, in effect, that the greatness that this city would herald was not in institutions but in its people, its families, their ordinary lives. The city’s new zone would be a recommitment to that notion, but in a style that spoke to the modern age. The town house
s that went up—block after block of them—followed a few common design principles: they were made of brick, not too high, and fairly uniform in width. But beyond that the architects let themselves play. They sculpted in brick, created curves and turrets, wove animals and small children into the masonry, incorporated glazed tiles and stained glass, riffed on the gables of the seventeenth-century canal houses located just a few minutes’ walk away. Their immediate aesthetic influence came from Germany, but the style was distinct enough that they became known as the Amsterdam School.
The town houses were to be sold, but the apartment buildings were intended as social housing. Even more loving attention went into these. The most famous is called The Ship: a block-long apartment complex near the waterfront, built of brick, seemingly ready to sail away. (Today it is a museum devoted to Amsterdam School architecture.) In all, thirty thousand dwellings were created in the six-year period between 1915 and 1921. Wibaut was aided by a personality that was by turns domineering and cajoling—the press took to calling him The Mighty—and by good fortune: he had the tailwinds of history with him. The fortunate convergence seemed to carry right down to his name. His political campaign slogan was “Wie bouwt? Wibaut!” The question and answer are pronounced the same in Dutch; the question means, “Who builds?”
But Wibaut had something more going for him. He was not the stereotypical socialist city planner, oblivious to and indignant about larger economic realities, but an experienced, savvy businessman who made this massive real estate project work by overseeing a novel approach. Private developers did the building, and made profits, but, together with an economic liberal in the city government named Willem Treub, Wibaut fashioned something called erfpacht, or “ground rent,” which gave owners long-term rent of the land their building stood on rather than ownership of it; this arrangement avoided the kind of speculation and corruption that had defined the seventeenth-century expansion. Social housing complexes, meanwhile, were run by housing corporations, which allowed for both private investment and government oversight. The system has been altered many times since the early twentieth century, but its basic feature—mixing capitalist incentive and a commitment to the public good—is still the goal.
The sensibility that brought social and economic liberals together in Amsterdam in the early twentieth century is captured in a single structure, which foreshadowed Wibaut’s era. In 1903, a new “church” of economic liberalism was christened, which had also been designed by Hendrik Berlage: a modern stock exchange, just up the road from where the original seventeenth-century one had stood. Berlage created a fortress of a building that mixed traditional, even ancient, stylistic references with new elements, festooning it with terra cotta and gold tile murals. Its relief panels and poems convey a bewildering hybrid of signals about capitalism, socialism, society, and where it should be going. One relief shows paradise in the form of a matriarchal society; another shows people from all walks of life with the motto beneath declaring rather confidently that
the earth will soon be one; its people as groups
all forming one great union the wide world round.
The building was all about capitalism, but its facade, its message, was social—and its design was an attempt to bring the two forces together.
A strange thing about journals and personal correspondence of Amsterdammers in the period from 1914 to 1918 is that they just hum along; ordinary life carries on. It’s strange because there was a world war going on. The Dutch government managed to maintain a position of neutrality based on the belief that the war was a struggle for world dominance by major powers, which their little country had no part in. (As one Dutch writer later put it, “Our self-esteem told us that we were too good to fatten other people’s ambitions with our blood.”) So while the Dutch army was on continual maneuvers during the Great War, the city of Amsterdam trundled along, pausing its expansion plan but not halting it.
As soon as the war was over, the development continued. A stadium went up amid the apartment complexes—and became the centerpiece of the 1928 Olympics. As far as the city’s leaders in the 1920s were concerned, the expansion offered an opportunity not only to tear down slums and provide new living spaces but to change the social dynamic. Henri Polak was a devotee of the Enlightenment, and he wanted to encourage workers to loosen the chains of their traditions, particularly religious traditions, and to become versed in science and art. He had in mind particularly his fellow Jews. Amsterdam’s relative tolerance of Jews, so novel in the seventeenth century, had by this time resulted in a community of eighty thousand, 13 percent of the total population. But of course the tolerance had always been limited, and ever since the time of Spinoza Jews had kept themselves largely in the old Jewish neighborhood. Polak encouraged them to move out, to mix with the wider community.
And they did: thousands left the cramped quarters of the old ghetto and moved into the new neighborhoods on the southern perimeter. Apartments and houses there were modern, with larger rooms, clean white walls in place of fusty wallpaper, and broad and inviting avenues to stroll along outside the windows. People moved into new jobs as well, and intermarrying between Jews and non-Jews became more common. Certainly discrimination existed, but there was a fresh wind blowing, a feeling that the twentieth century was going to be different from everything that had come before.
The stories of three families may give a sense of this hopeful, newly expansive, but brief moment of the city’s history. Of course, many of the Jews who moved into the new district were diamond workers. A cluster of streets preserves the memory of the time in their names: Topaz Street, Diamond Street, Emerald Square. One couple in particular moved to Sapphire Street. Another moved a few blocks up the river. The boy from the one family, whose name was Joël Brommet, fell in love with Rebecca Ritmeester, the girl from the other. They married, and the young man, who had an artistic sensibility, began to work with fabric and window design for shops. In 1925 they had a daughter whom they named Frieda, and the little family moved to the Zuider Amstellaan, or Southern Amstel Avenue, one of the wide boulevards that Berlage had laid out. Frieda spent her girlhood in the embrace of her extended family, living a few blocks from both sets of grandparents. She had an easy life, she tells me. Her parents doted on her.
Meanwhile, another son of a Jewish diamond cutter, whose name was Bernard Premsela, fell in love with a girl named Rosalie, married her, and moved with her to an address just across the river, in what is now called Spinozastraat. In the same year that they married, 1913, Bernard Premsela got his medical degree. He came under the influence of Aletta Jacobs, and in this expansive, liberal era he became consumed by thoughts of sex: that is, he realized that gender differences, sexual urges, and the act of sex constituted a large portion of what it meant to be human, and yet society had caged and perverted this vast and undeniable force. He decided to specialize in something that almost didn’t exist. He chose to become a sexologist.
Following Aletta Jacobs, he focused first on birth control. As a socialist, he saw it initially as a way to help lift people out of poverty, but as his ideas expanded he concentrated more on women. He believed that equality between the sexes should be a goal of society and that birth control was a tool to achieve this, for it helped protect women against, as he said, the “excessive procreative demands” of men. After Jacobs’s death in 1929, Premsela helped to found the Aletta Jacobs House, a family planning clinic, and became its director. The next year he held a public event at the American Hotel—one of the big new structures that architecturally defined the city’s new golden age—at which people discreetly submitted questions about sex to him in writing. For by now he was interested not just in birth control but in sex as a means of personal growth and liberation. He began a radio show about sex. He wrote a series of books with titles that sound more like they were written in the 1970s than the 1930s: Sexual Education for Our Children. It was all quite shocking to the prevailing conservative culture, but Bernard Premsela maintained a serious, digni
fied persona, and he pulled it off. It also helped that he enlisted the aid of Floor Wibaut, whose advocacy of sexual reform and women’s rights dated from his reading Multatuli in his early years.
At home, meanwhile, Bernard and Rosalie had three children, and when the time was right Rosalie taught them frankly about sex using her husband’s books. Benno, the youngest of the three, later remembered being aware in the schoolyard that he knew colossally more than his classmates knew about the human body and what people did in their bedrooms. Overall, he said, the atmosphere in their household was secular and progressive, which matched that of many Amsterdam Jews. “We may have been Jews,” he said, “but we were not religious at all. Socialism and humanism were of much greater importance.”
Jews were also emigrating to the city from other parts of Europe. Amsterdam was now, as it had been in different eras in the past, a famously liberal place: tolerant, relatively speaking, and a city whose planners had adopted quality of life for ordinary people as part of their program. Otto Frank was a German Jew, born in Frankfurt and raised in wealth: his father was the president of a bank that bore his name. At Heidelberg University, Otto became friends with a German American named Nathan Straus, whose family owned Macy’s department store in New York. Straus got him a job at Macy’s, and Otto crossed the ocean and threw himself into the adventure and whirl of midtown Manhattan. His father’s death, however, forced a change to his plans. He returned to Germany and took over the task of rescuing the bank. Then World War I broke out; he served in the German army. After the war, he married Edith Holländer. The two struggled through the painful postwar period, when Germans suffered economic depression, hyperinflation, humiliation, and poverty. It was a lousy time to be in the banking business. Otto tried to keep the bank afloat by moving it to Amsterdam. It didn’t work; he returned to Frankfurt and eventually the Michael Frank Bank went bust.
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