Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  By chance I have in my hands a diary that was written during the war. The Royal Institute for War Documentation contains about two hundred such diaries, but I would be astonished if there was another so pure, so intelligent, and so human as this one, which caused me to forget everything I was going to do today and to read it in one sitting. When I had finished, it was night and I was surprised that the light was on, that there was bread and tea to be had, that I heard no planes roaring and no soldiers’ boots resounding in the street, so intensely did the reading capture me and return me to the surreal world that is already almost a year behind us.

  The diary was published the next year in the Netherlands, and in 1952 in the United States and England. It is one of the most widely read books of all time, having sold thirty-one million copies in sixty-seven languages. It is universally and rightfully admired. But the Dutch have had a hard time with it. Many sympathize with the Holocaust survivor who called the book “a public relations exercise” by the Dutch to gloss over the fact that the vaunted tolerance of the Netherlands, and of Amsterdam in particular, was, during the war, only sporadically to be found. For every Walraven van Hall there had been many Jaap Schrijvers and Adriana Valkenburgs. While people elsewhere see Anne Frank’s writing as an example of the buoyancy of the human spirit, for the Dutch it has been a thorny reminder and a cause for soul searching.

  If there had been a moral collapse during the war, a failure to live up to their liberal heritage, some Dutch people in its immediate aftermath also believed that the rebuilding task ahead of them was an opportunity to improve their society. In effect, the Dutch asked themselves: “Who are we, what do we want to become, and how can we use this crisis to arrange our society to advance our goals?” At issue was the tension that existed between the two liberalisms that over the centuries had become part of the Dutch identity. Why did they have to be in conflict? Maybe in Germany or France it was inevitable, because of the structure of those societies, that workers and capitalists should be at odds. But Dutch history had different roots. Where in neighboring countries society in the dim past had broken down into nobility and peasants, the Dutch landscape had produced a different dynamic. The need to battle against the sea had ingrained a group ethic so elemental the Dutch have a term for it that they use on an everyday basis: the poldermodel, so called for the patches of land collectively reclaimed from the sea and hemmed in by dikes. The striking thing about this communalism is that from the start it was tethered to individualism. When medieval Dutchmen banded together to reclaim land from the sea, that new land was not owned by a king or church; it became theirs. They chose not to own it collectively, however, but to divide it up into individual parcels. So while feudalism held sway elsewhere in Europe, people in these low-lying provinces were protocapitalists: landowners who set about buying, selling, renting, and making profits. Yet at the same time they recognized that their individual economic interests lay in keeping the group bond strong, in working together. Could they not, then, use the historic commitment to both individual and social freedom—to economic and social liberalism—to rebuild in the aftermath of world war?

  A kind of nationwide debate on the topic ensued in the war’s wake. It had several results, one of which was the founding, in 1950, of something called the Social Economic Council, or SER, to use the acronym for its name in Dutch. The SER has been a feature of the Dutch landscape ever since. There is no equivalent to it in the American, British, or most other systems. It is a panel comprising three groups: labor leaders, industry leaders, and experts appointed by the government. On a given topic, the panelists will consult with their constituencies, then convene as a group and hash out the issue until they reach unanimous agreement on how it should be handled. Then they lay their finding before the government. Alexander Rinnooy Kan was the head of the SER from 2006 to 2012. He told me that the government almost always adopts the SER’s position because “it’s not just the position of the members of the council, but of all of their constituencies, whether employers or trade union members. That equals 80 percent of the economy.”

  In other words, after World War II the Dutch crafted a system that brings the forces behind their two vaunted liberalisms—social and economic—together. Or, put even more simply, they created a social welfare state that is fueled by capitalism. Instead of corporations and unions clashing and lobbying government from opposite perspectives, they work out a problem themselves and then lay their solution before the government. “The miracle, by Anglo Saxon standards, is that it’s possible to arrive at this kind of unanimity,” Rinnooy Kan said. “In Anglo Saxon countries the relation between employers and employees is adversarial. But in the Netherlands we’ve learned that there is a joint interest for employers and trade unions to get together.”

  By means such as this the country rebuilt itself after the war. Amsterdam was a part of the effort, of course. But then too, Amsterdam is not the Netherlands. I have been guilty in this book of sometimes seeming to equate the two. Every Dutch person who is from outside the city will be ready to counter that notion. Indeed, people from elsewhere often question whether the city is even part of the Netherlands. The Republic of Amsterdam, they derisively call it.

  How is it different? If liberalism is part of the historical development of the Netherlands, that is even more the case in Amsterdam. In tolerating behavior, celebrating diversity, empowering individuals, the city almost always goes far beyond what the country as a whole would do. It has perennially argued with the national government in The Hague; it sometimes regards developments in other cities and provinces only vaguely, as if they were parts of another country. Most of all, for better or for worse, it has gone probably further than anyplace on earth in seeking to expand individual freedoms. One reason for this—for Amsterdam being the city it is today—has to do with the war. In maybe no other city was the connection between World War II and the countercultural and civil rights revolutions of the 1960s as clear as it was in Amsterdam. In one sense the connection is obvious: the city was actually under Nazi occupation. Beyond that, the fact that a larger percentage of Jews here were killed than almost anywhere else created a deep wound on the psyche, one that cried out for healing. And because of the city’s liberal heritage, both before and during the war activists of various stripes had fled Germany and other places under Nazi thrall and set up shop here, so that those still surviving after the war helped to give the city a renewed commitment to that heritage. The horror of what had happened was as real here as anyplace else, but the conditions for acting, and bringing change, were in place as they were nowhere else.

  The new era in Amsterdam’s liberalism came about via several trajectories. I’ll follow one of them by backing up to one of the individuals I focused on in the previous chapter: Dr. Bernard Premsela, who built on the work of Aletta Jacobs and became one of the first sexologists and a pioneer in the realm of sexual and reproductive rights and freedoms. He and his wife raised their three children in a secular, progressive atmosphere. They exposed them to culture and encouraged them not to be hemmed in by society but to follow their interests. When the family moved to a new house in Amsterdam, the couple had its interior done in Bauhaus style, the new, clean, modernist school of design then prevalent in Germany. Their thirteen-year-old son, Benno, was captivated by it and decided on the spot that he would become a designer.

  But his ambitions were delayed. As Jews, the Premselas were forced into hiding during the Nazi occupation of the city. As it happened, Benno did not stay with his parents but took shelter in a house in Oud Zuid with an actress who had befriended the family years before. It was a fortunate choice, for the other hiding place was breached, and by the war’s end his parents and sister were dead, all of them swallowed up by Auschwitz. Benno and his brother survived.

  After the war, Benno Premsela began working in design and landed a job at the Bijenkorf, Amsterdam’s premier department store. He was given charge of the store’s display windows. Window display was a utilitarian
affair at the time: show the product and the price. Premsela turned these windows into something else, a means of self-expression and a way for the city to interact with itself as it wrestled with the forces of change swirling within it. His mannequins were modern people, assuming aggressive poses; there were no price tags in sight. It was as if passersby were meant not to buy but to see, to have an experience. Premsela was friends with people throughout the city’s art world, and he commissioned paintings and huge blowups of photographs as dramatic backdrops. Crowds began to gather on Friday evenings at the store’s location on Dam Square, waiting for the new windows to be unveiled. Avant-garde art was meeting urban consumerism, and people were beguiled.

  Premsela left the department store and founded his own interior design company, which in time made everything from furniture to clothing and gained worldwide renown. Probably his most famous design is the Lotek lamp, an ultramodern, pre-Ikea assemble-it-yourself lamp with white cubes for shades and steel rods as supports. As the decades went by Premsela became the Amsterdam node of an international circle of artists and designers that included people like Edward Albee, Philip Glass, and Robert Mapplethorpe; he became, as he liked to say with self-deprecation, “world famous in Holland.”

  But his real importance would not come from design. During his years in hiding, Premsela realized that he was homosexual. Being gay in the 1940s meant existing in a netherworld. It meant shame and secrecy. For most gay people, there were no safe places, public or private, to be together. (In Amsterdam, more than one street was known at night as Rue de Vaseline.) Hiding the truth had always been a part of what homosexuality was. But after the war, in Amsterdam, that would change. Benno Premsela later said that he had spent the war years hiding because of his identity, and once the city was liberated he vowed that he would never hide again. He had as an example his father, who had devoted his career to breaking down sexual prejudices and taboos.

  Other Dutch gays felt similarly; in 1946, they formed the world’s first organization to advance gay rights, whose original name, the Shakespeare Club, indicates the caution with which its members proceeded. It later became the Cultuur en Ontspanningscentrum, or Culture and Leisure Center, and is now known as the COC. Premsela was one of its first members and eventually its chairman. As was the case elsewhere, gays and lesbians in the Netherlands were divided on how to advance their cause, or even what it should be. Should the organization look inward and act as a place of refuge and support for its members? Or should it go public? Premsela wanted to go public. Homosexuality, he argued, was not the moral or physical deformity that society had cast it as; thus the COC had a responsibility to correct that view. Gays, in other words, were entitled to civil rights, and the COC, under him, would become an advocacy organization.

  Many of the organizations’ members were appalled at the notion of going public. They were respected members of society who knew perfectly well that society’s recognition of homosexuality as normal would come, if ever, only after long struggle; in the meantime they had careers and families to think of.

  Premsela effectively ended the debate by appearing on a television news program in 1964. Until then, membership in the COC was an incognito affair; if members were quoted, they didn’t use their real names. Premsela’s appearance on Achter het nieuws (“Behind the News”) on December 30, 1964, marked the first time that a homosexual appeared openly on Dutch television giving his real name. In a professorial performance—at forty-four, he was mostly bald and rather severe of demeanor, and he wore a three-piece wool suit with a tie—he explained to an interviewer that the goal of the organization was to promote public awareness of the reality and normalcy of homosexuality, much as his father, three decades earlier, had appeared on the radio to make heterosexual sex a topic of public discourse.

  The appearance turned out to be a landmark not only for recognition of homosexuality but for Dutch television and for the postwar advance of civil rights. Amid the upheaval of the 1960s and through the next two decades Premsela probably helped his cause by maintaining a sober, almost fatherly, above-the-fray manner. When he spoke publicly, the tone was businesslike but the message could be oracular. He seemed to echo what was already a long line of Dutch civil rights figures, going back to Multatuli and the nineteenth-century uproar over the exploitation of Javanese peasants under the East India Company. Multatuli, after all, had influenced Aletta Jacobs, who in turn had influenced Bernard Premsela. And Benno Premsela was aware of his father’s values as well as of what the fight against Nazi ideology had meant. “The problem of homosexuality,” he once said, in an apt encapsulation of the whole civil rights movement, “is the problem not of the homosexual but of society. Just like the problem of anti-Semitism is in the end the problem not of the Jews but of non-Jews. And it’s the same with the problem of women’s emancipation, where it’s actually men who are the problem.”

  Another promoter of civil rights in the postwar period was the woman into whose home I ventured at regular intervals while writing this book. Like many other Jews who had been in concentration camps, after Auschwitz Frieda Brommet simultaneously renounced belief in God (“if God exists and he allowed that to happen, then it’s better that he doesn’t exist”) and connected with her Jewishness for the first time. She married another Auschwitz survivor, Herman Menco, and followed him in joining the Progressive congregation. Over several years, while her body remained fragile from her camp experience, she found, especially after hearing fellow Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel discuss his experiences, that she had a voice. She became an international activist, speaking about the Holocaust and women’s rights issues from Miami to Nairobi, and broke new ground of her own by becoming the first woman to head the Dutch Union of Progressive Jews. At the same time she turned herself into a radio journalist and made radio documentaries on the Holocaust, Jewish survivors, and the evolution of life in Amsterdam through the 1970s and 1980s.

  Frieda’s husband worked for a time at the Bijenkorf department store, and it was there, through him, that she met Benno Premsela. She and her husband eventually divorced, but she and Benno remained fast friends, bonding over their parallel drives to advance civil liberties but also over their shared sense of humor, which tended toward the gallows. In the early 1980s, Benno proposed that the two of them, along with his partner, Friso Broeksma, drive to Berlin to see an exhibit on “Jewish identities.” Frieda was uncomfortable. “I’ve never been to Germany,” she said. Whereupon Benno shot back, “How did you get to Auschwitz and back?” So they went. Soon after crossing the Dutch border into Germany, they stopped at a café. Frieda ordered mineral water, and the waitress asked if she wanted “gas or no gas.” Frieda turned to her friends and deadpanned: “I never wanted anything to do with their gas.”

  The friendship of the two civil rights figures whose trajectories were forged in Amsterdam’s Nazi-occupation era continued through the Day-Glo sixties and the art-scene seventies, until Benno’s death in 1997, and culminated when both received knighthoods for their work to expand individual freedoms. At Benno’s ceremony in 1995, his partner, Friso Broeksma, noticing that he and Benno were seated next to Queen Beatrix and her mother, Juliana, gave about as pithy a summary as you could get of how far Amsterdam, and the Western world, had come since the darkness of the Nazi era, when he whispered wryly into Benno’s ear: “Four queens in a row.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  THE MAGIC CENTER

  Look at a photograph of Gijs van Hall from 1957, the year he became mayor of Amsterdam, and you might well consider it a generic image of any politician in the Western world in the 1950s: white, male, middle-aged, besuited and bespectacled, hair slicked back, in every sense an establishment figure. Although mayors are appointed rather than elected in the Dutch system, his selection probably pleased the vast majority of residents, for beneath the image lay substance. Van Hall was a genuine war hero, who together with his brother Wally van Hall had been the heart of the Dutch resistance. And—useful in a t
ime of rebuilding—he was a banker with contacts in the financial world in the United States. Moreover, politically he was a social democrat, so he embodied the dual-liberalism ideal. When he became mayor, Van Hall set about an adventurous building campaign in the city. His goal was to give businesses room to grow while maintaining the city’s commitments to its citizens via the welfare state programs that had come into force. The 1950s were about casting off the wartime era and pushing toward the future. The city needed to expand. It had to finance new housing and roadways. It lashed itself to the forces that were coming into their own: cars, television, advertising, consumerism. There was an ecomomic boom: industry took off; wages nearly doubled in the course of the decade.

  Van Hall’s program worked for a while. And then it crashed. And the crash—the story of a good man’s fall, which is also the story of how Amsterdam became what it is known for today—mirrored the difficult trajectory that the whole Western world followed from the postwar era to the latter part of the twentieth century: from black and white to color, from double-breasted suits to bell-bottoms.

  If the distinguished, decorated establishment figure of Mayor Van Hall represented one side of what would become a colossal culture clash, then in the other corner was a seventeen-year-old boy from The Hague named Roel van Duijn. In 1960, on learning that the government was going to allow American nuclear weapons to be stored on Dutch soil, Van Duijn and a couple of his friends sat down in the middle of a busy intersection and blocked traffic. “I thought, we just finished the Second World War—we don’t need a third world war, with even worse bombs,” Van Duijn, now seventy, told me as he reminisced in his neat little garden apartment in Amsterdam’s Slotervaart section. He and his friends were arrested. When he got out of prison, he headed to Amsterdam, protested there, and got arrested again. Why Amsterdam? “Amsterdam was still very much wounded by the war,” he said. “So it was the center of critical thinking about racism and fascism.”