Murder in Amsterdam

by Ian Buruma

Fifty thousand people filled the largest soccer stadium in Amsterdam, where Hazes’s coffin was displayed on the kickoff point—the altar, as it were, in the giant open-air cathedral of popular sentiment—and thousands more stood outside watching the events on huge screens. Job Cohen, the Amsterdam mayor, told the masses that when Hazes wrote his songs “he dipped his pen in his heart.” The occasion was like a religious jamboree, with much singing, mournful silences, and testimonials from friends and relatives, including the singer’s ten-year-old son, who cried, “Papa, I love you!” National radio stations played “She Believes in Me” one more time. His ashes were blasted over the North Sea from a cannon. The same woman who said that men like Pim Fortuyn are born only once in a thousand years mentioned one other example of similar rarity and eminence: André Hazes.

  7.

  What, then, was Fortuyn’s message to the people who adored him? What deliverance did he promise? I think it was a nostalgic dream born of his own sense of isolation.6 Like many people, in France as well as in the Netherlands, who voted against the proposed constitution for the European Union in 2005, Fortuyn thought of Europe as a place without a soul, an abstraction that appealed only to top politicians, elite cultural figures, international businessmen, Our Kind of People on a European scale. In his vision, a national community should be like a family, which shares the same language, culture, and history. Foreigners who arrived with their own customs and traditions disturbed the family-state. “How dare you!” he fulminated against such aliens in one of his columns: “This is our country, and if you can’t conform, you should get the hell out, back to your own country and culture.”7 What mattered in the ideal family-state wasn’t class, it was “what we want to be: one people, one country, one society.”

  Despite his protests to the contrary, this kind of thing did put Fortuyn in the same camp as right-wing populists in other parts of Europe. Yet he came to his vision from a different angle, not the murky Nazi revanchism of Jörg Haider, or the bitterness of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s memories of fighting Arabs in Algeria, but from his own sense of detachment. If he couldn’t belong to any existing community, he would invent one. To establish his idealized vision of a Dutch family-state, the people would need a leader to guide them. “A leader of substance,” he wrote, “is both a father and mother…. The capable leader is the biblical good shepherd … who will lead us to the father’s house. Let us prepare for his coming….”

  In 2001, before his first electoral triumph, he gave a very peculiar interview. “Even if I don’t become prime minister,” he said, “I still will be. Because that is how many people see me. Politics cry out for a turnaround. So you have to show the people. Precisely. Politics on the spot. I will visit hospitals and schools, and I’ll show the nurses and teachers exactly how to do things…. That is the type of leader we need. Someone who can show people what to do. Then you will automatically become the incarnation of the people.”8

  It sounds slightly deranged, those strange shifts of personal pronouns from “we” to “you” to “I.” It is the fantasy of a dictatorial dreamer, the “politics on the spot,” the idea of natural selection to be leader. It is the language used in the leadership cults of Kim Il Sung or Chairman Mao. What makes this most peculiar is that Fortuyn’s model in this reverie was neither Mao, nor Kim, but Joop den Uyl, a former prime minister, whose brand of puritanical social democracy was not some romantic ideal, but a typical product of Dutch moralism, profoundly influenced by the Calvinist attitudes he grew up with. Den Uyl’s aim to level Dutch society by taxing the wealthy was bold for its time, the early 1970s, but he was far from being a dictator, and his policies would have been loathed by Fortuyn’s rich backers. But to seek for consistency here is to miss the point. Like so much else in a society that appears on the surface to have rejected the Church, Catholic or Protestant, Fortuyn’s views were still steeped in biblical terms. He was the leader who, in a secular age, would guide his Dutch flock back to the father’s house. What made him a potential menace was that both he and his followers imagined him to be the father—the father they had lost.

  The loathing of Islam, then, may have gone deeper than a hatred of those Moroccan vandals who threatened gay men in Rotterdam. To see it as the conflict of rival monotheistic religions is too simple. Fortuyn’s venom is drawn more from the fact that he, and millions of others, not just in the Netherlands, but all over Europe, had painfully wrested themselves free from the strictures of their own religions. And here were these newcomers injecting society with religion once again. The fact that many Europeans, including Fortuyn, were less liberated from religious yearnings than they might have imagined, made the confrontation with Islam all the more painful. This was especially true of those who considered themselves to be people of the Left. Some swapped the faiths of their parents for Marxist illusions, until they too ended in disillusion. The religious zeal of immigrants was a mirror image of what they themselves once had been.

  Theo van Gogh’s fascination with “the divine baldy” was more idiosyncratic. He certainly had no longing for a family-state, nor a hankering for a strong leader to herd the Dutch into a collective state of bliss. But he shared Fortuyn’s allergy to the regenten, their smugness, their complacency, their patronizing air of “we know best.” Both he and Fortuyn, though not quite the same age, were products of the 1960s, when the rebellion against the pillars of church and state shook everything up. To shake things up was Van Gogh’s aim in life. It kept him going. Whatever else he said or did, Fortuyn shook things up in the polders of his native country. And like Van Gogh, he paid with his life.

  *

  Spruyt did not take the money. He did, however, enter politics in a more active capacity by joining forces with Geert Wilders, a right-wing politician with an anti-immigration agenda.

  THREE

  The Healthy Smoker

  “He was a bit of a moral crusader, wasn’t he?” said she.

  “I don’t know why you should say that,” he replied.

  “Oh, you’re all such Calvinists!” she rejoined.

  “Well, I’m not sure …” he protested.

  “Oh, yes, Theo was a Calvinist …”

  We were sitting in the garden by the lake in Wassenaar. The pink roses were still in bloom, the rippling water was covered in white lilies. A little above where we were sitting on the gently sloping lawn, drinking tea from porcelain cups, was the large white villa, well stocked with family furniture and good books, where Theo van Gogh and his two younger sisters grew up. There was nothing marginal about this, or petit bourgeois. This was the social chic to which the likes of Pim Fortuyn could only aspire.

  Theo’s mother, Anneke, still a beautiful woman, with sharp blue eyes and light blond hair, wore an elegant red twinset, and had a box of cigarettes readily at hand. Johan, his father, a trim figure in slacks and an open shirt, used to work as an analyst for the secret service—a job not discussed at home. He spoke in the cultivated, discreet manner of a professional spook, leaving the faint impression that he always knew more than he was letting on. He was happy to let his wife do most of the talking.

  She told me how Theo was already a rebel at primary school, where he wrote a pamphlet entitled The Dirty Paper. It ran to two issues. The main subject was shit and piss. His co-author was an aristocrat named Johan Quarles van Ufford. I recognized the name. Although Theo was born in 1957, five years after me, and I did not meet him until many years later, I knew the air he breathed where he grew up. The Hague has many social layers, some with very rough edges, but the town of our childhoods was a buttoned-down place of bureaucrats, bankers, and lawyers, where joining a tennis or cricket club meant being quizzed about one’s grandparents’ lineage, where little boys were bullied for wearing the “wrong” kind of neckties, where kids returned to school after their Christmas breaks in Switzerland with bronzed faces and broken legs, where girls wore Hermès scarves and pearl necklaces, where eighteen-year-old boys drove onto the playground in their Mini Coopers, splashing the
teachers on their bicycles, and where names like Quarles van Ufford still cut a great deal of ice.

  Wassenaar was a plush extension of The Hague, a verdant suburb of rolling lawns, gravel drives, and large villas, with bucolic touches like thatched roofs and stone lanterns. Ambassadors of the larger countries had their residences in Wassenaar, alongside bankers and captains of industry, hidden from the prying gaze of hoi polloi. Its hushed, leafy streets, well-tended gardens, and sturdy gates spoke of wood-paneled discretion, of quiet evasions, of things left unsaid.

  The Van Goghs, however, were not like everyone else. A rebellious streak runs though the family. Johan, the grandson of Theo, the famous artist’s brother, comes from a family of strict Calvinists who mixed with socialists. His mother was a Wibaut, one of the founding families of the first Social Democratic party. Several Wibauts were in the Resistance during the war. Johan’s brother, Theo, was a member of the student fraternity in Amsterdam when the war broke out. He refused to sign the loyalty oath required by the Nazis, and joined the Resistance, where, among other things, he helped to forge papers and hide Jews. In 1945, he was arrested, along with the rest of his resistance group. Shortly before the end of the war he was executed in the dunes near the North Sea.

  Anneke also came from a line of socialists, but with a vicarious aristocratic pedigree. Because her grandfather worked as majordomo for one of the grander Amsterdam families, her mother was able to attend the French school with the aristocratic daughters and take piano lessons. This could have turned her into a snob, but in fact she remained firmly on the Left, as did Anneke’s father, who joined the Resistance with a number of other socialists. Arrested for helping Jews and working for an underground newspaper, he spent time in a concentration camp, was freed in 1944, and immediately resumed his illegal activities. “He was relentless,” Anneke explained. “He would never give up, just like Theo.”

  In a country where only a small number of people were active resisters, as opposed to minding their own business, this made Theo’s family unusual. They were also keen members of the Society of Humanists, now a defunct institution, founded in 1947 as a kind of pillar for people who sought a spiritual life without believing in God. Instead of the Bible, they read Voltaire, the secular saint of dissident literature. Theo’s grandfather made sure that Dutch soldiers had the benefit of humanist “counselors.” Dutch radio on Sunday mornings used to be almost entirely devoted to sermons, given by a variety of priests and ministers. At 9:45, a humanist would hold forth about the life of the spirit without God or Jesus.

  Calvinism, socialism, humanism—all left their marks. Perhaps this explains why Theo’s father was not only a spook, but a man of quixotic missions, such as his resistance to the planned residency of the Dutch crown prince and his family in a particularly leafy part of Wassenaar. Why should a prince be allowed to hog so much land? So off he went, from door to door, eighty-year-old Johan, campaigning for a hopeless cause. He never gave up. It was, after all, a matter of principle.

  2.

  As a child, Theo couldn’t have cared less about the war, or the heroics of his ancestors. When his father read him a children’s story about a class that refused to go swimming after the Jewish pupils had been barred from the pool, he refused to listen. Theo was nine at the time, so this would have been in 1966, the big year of rebellion in Amsterdam, when the city was turned upside down by Provos in white jeans throwing smoke bombs at the royal coach bearing Princess (now Queen) Beatrix and her bridegroom, Prince Claus von Amsberg, a German diplomat who had joined the Hitler Youth as a schoolboy. There was nothing unusual about this; most Germans of his age had. Certainly nothing about Prince Claus suggested that he harbored any residual Nazi sympathies. Quite the contrary. But celebrating the royal wedding in Amsterdam, city of rebels and republicans, was seen as a provocation.

  Provocation was what the youth rebellion was all about,* provocation of the authorities, to expose the authoritarian instincts of the regenten class, staging “happenings” and demonstrations, waiting, even hoping, for the police to reveal the heavy hand of authority. (Exposing “repressive tolerance,” as Herbert Marcuse, a guru of the student Left, put it.) Similar mutinies broke out all over the world, in Paris, Prague, London, Berkeley, Berlin, Tokyo. What they had in common was youth; youth against the middle-aged. But, as with the response to political Islam, there were national differences, reflecting national histories. In Prague, the revolt was against Communist dictatorship. In Amsterdam, it was against “consumer culture,” against slavery to TV and the family car, against the boredom of affluence. But this being Holland, it was also against the pillars of religious and political authority that had held society together for so long.

  The revolt actually began with a television program, broadcast in 1964. I was reminded of it when a woman in her forties remarked to me one night in Amsterdam that it was, in her words, “impossible to imagine people in our culture getting violently upset over religion.” (We had just been to see two Muslim actors, discovered by Theo van Gogh, perform in a theater near the mosque where Mohammed Bouyeri used to worship.) She had forgotten, or perhaps never knew about, Zo is het toevallig ook nog’is een keer, a satirical television program modeled after the BBC’s That Was the Week That Was.

  The presenters of Zo is het included various well-known journalists, a young gay novelist, and a TV presenter named Mies Bouwman. The novelist, Gerard van het Reve, was to become famous, not just through his books, but as a more and more clownish purveyor of outrageously right-wing opinions, who converted to a kind of camp Catholicism—half Pim Fortuyn, half Oscar Wilde. A brave literary pioneer of confessional gay fiction on the one hand, and a sardonic, half-serious reactionary on the other, he preceded Van Gogh as a verbal provocateur whose extreme views and very public personal feuds were never taken entirely seriously.

  But the real celebrity in the Zo is het team was Mies Bouwman. She had become a national star in 1962 by hosting a forty-eight-hour nonstop TV and radio charity show to open a village for physically handicapped people. Open the Village caused an explosion of nationwide hysteria. Every celebrity, major or minor, anyone with any name value at all, as well as a constant stream of Boy Scouts, amateur conjurers, local policemen, and guitar-playing nuns, passed through the studio for a few minutes in the spotlight with “our Mies.” The sudden collective passion for “The Village” reached such a pitch that people were literally stuffing money through the gates of the television studio. I followed it on the radio. Like many people, we did not yet own a TV; my father worried that it would be bad for our minds. In a way, the radio, leaving more to the imagination, made the event even more exciting.

  But Zo is het was pure television. Nothing dramatic happened when it started in the summer of 1963, poking mild fun at pillars of the establishment. There was the usual trickle of hate mail denouncing the “dirty Reds!” and “filthy Jews!”—nothing more. Every new program will stir up a few cranks. The third program in the series, on January 4, 1964, promised to be a little more provocative, but no one expected it to spark quite the reaction it did. It was a skit, performed by “our Mies” and the others, called Beeldreligie, “Screen Religion.” The idea was to mock the devotion in more and more middle-class households to television. As the churches were emptying, people were basking in the luminous glow of their new house altars. Passages from the Bible, including the Ten Commandments, were read by a law student from Amsterdam, substituting the word “screen” for “God.”

  It was hardly outrageous, indeed it was tame compared to what a much more subversive figure like Lenny Bruce was doing around the same time in America. But the fallout was extraordinary. Newspapers cried shame on their front pages. The prime minister was furious. Questions were asked in parliament, demanding to know why the authorities hadn’t prevented this outrage from being broadcast. The culture and education minister had plans to make sure that a similar program would never be aired again.

  And then the letters came, thousands of t
hem, many semiliterate: Dirty Reds! Filthy Jews! of course, but also: “It may take time, but one day we’ll ram you with our car. It’s dark where you live. You’ve had your time.” Or this: “One of these days we’ll get you NSBers [Nazi collaborators]* and Jews. We’ll get you, you filthy gang…. You should have become a pimp [sic] …” Or this, showing a peculiar degree of historical confusion: “After liberation from Germany we shaved the hair off the hated NSBers, now we’ll come and shave that hated bunch who made that shameful program, we’ll bring the necessary pots of tar, as well as bottles of petrol and hydrochloric acid….”

  NSBers were the Dutch Nazis. The rigid insistence after the war to brand people in hindsight as “good” or “bad,” patriots or traitors, anti-Nazis or NSBers, was a sign perhaps of high moral principle. More likely it was a reflection of the guilty conscience of a people who had been, on the whole, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. More disturbing is the fact that in 1964, “Jews” was used as an insult along with “NSBers.” That some of the anonymous writers appear not to have known the difference is perhaps most disturbing of all. “Our Mies,” denounced as a “Jewish whore,” was in fact a Catholic. For some people, “Jewish,” like “NSBer,” had clearly become a term for anything rotten. Mies’s children needed police escorts to go to school. Herman Wigbold, the producer, needed day and night protection.

  But the pillars were tottering. With the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the home-grown Provos and the Pill, they began to fall. Amsterdam was the center of the revolt. The Provos, in white denim, were both rebellious and utopian. Homo ludens would rule in New Babylon. White bicycles were distributed around the city for anyone to hop onto. Plans were made to feed LSD into the Amsterdam waterworks, or laughing gas into the church where the royal wedding would take place. A monument to Lieutenant General J. B. van Heutsz, a former governor general of the Dutch East Indies, became a popular place for demonstrations. In 1965, it was defaced with white paint. In 1967, it was smashed by a homemade bomb.