Murder in Amsterdam

by Ian Buruma

  9.

  November 2004 was Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, when all Muslims fast between sunrise and sundown. It is a time of gathering with family and friends, of prayer, and, especially toward the end of Ramadan, of charitable thoughts and good deeds.

  On the evening of November 1, Mohammed received his friends at his Amsterdam apartment, which he shared with another friend named Ahmed. Jason, the half-American, was there, and Ismael, and Fahmi, and Rashid. The friends from The Hague had brought some soup. They talked about the old days, when Mohammed used to get high and tell fantastic stories. They laughed. Time passed quickly. It was past midnight when Mohammed decided to go for a walk around the Sloterplas, a pond near his apartment. He was accompanied by Rashid and Ahmed. Mohammed didn’t say much, but pointed to the night sky and remarked how beautiful and peaceful it looked. They listened to Koranic prayers through their headphones attached to digital music players. Nothing much more was said.

  Back at the apartment, Ahmed and Mohammed went straight to bed. It was late and they had to rise early. At 5:30 A.M. they prayed and had a light breakfast. Ahmed went back to sleep. When he woke up a few hours later, Mohammed had already left the apartment. On his bicycle, like so many other Dutch people, he was making his way to another part of Amsterdam, where he would meet another man on his bicycle. There were no surprises. He had cycled this route many times in the weeks before. He knew exactly what he was going to do.

  SEVEN

  In Memoriam

  I have been in a total rage ever since I read in last week’s paper that the Amsterdam borough of East/Watergraafsmeer refuses to build a permanent memorial to Theo van Gogh in Linnaeus Street. The borough council [Social Democrats and Greens] fears that such a memorial would lead to provocations and unrest among the Muslims living in the surrounding areas…. So much cowardice makes me sick.

  LETTER TO HET PAROOL, JULY 13, 2005

  “There certainly is a place here for a monument in memory of Theo van Gogh,” says Germaine Princen, temporary chairperson of the East/Watergraafsmeer council…. Princen believes that unrest in the neighborhood should not be a reason to abandon the idea of a monument. A mural commemorating the murder has already been defaced twice.

  NRC HANDELSBLAD, JULY 12, 2005

  And so the bickering went on. Should a memorial be built on Linnaeus Street, on the spot of the murder, or in the neighboring park, or perhaps in the center of Amsterdam, or maybe not at all? And what kind of monument should it be? Het Parool, a newspaper founded by the Dutch resistance under Nazi occupation, invited its readers to come up with ideas for the most appropriate memorial: a two-meters-high cigarette, suggested one reader, from which puffs of smoke would emerge at regular intervals; a sculpture of a great happy pig, said another, on whose pink flanks people could write their opinions. Many liked the idea of a sculpture in the form of a giant cactus—a cactus, in the words of one reader, employing the quaintly old-fashioned jargon of postwar novels about war heroes, “that was just as big and strong as Theo, as a beacon of prickly power, as an inspiration to stand tall, proud and undaunted.”

  The cactus had become something of a trademark for Van Gogh. He would always end his television talk shows by kissing one, after inviting his guests to do the same. One of his guests, Roman Polanski, refused. Van Gogh, who idolized Polanski, said he loved kissing cacti. Polanski replied that everyone has to be good at something.

  Erecting monuments to their own bravery and suffering during World War II had become so prevalent a Dutch practice in the late 1940s and early ’50s that people spoke of a “monument rain.” The largest and most famous one, a kind of fluted stone phallus with reliefs all around of suffering Dutch humanity in chains, is the National Monument on Dam Square, opposite the royal palace in Amsterdam. The Queen lays a wreath there every year to remember World War II—not the Holocaust, which was hardly an issue in the 1950s, but the suffering of the Dutch people under German occupation. It is where the nation feels most sorry for itself. (It is also where the world’s young gathered in the 1960s and ’70s to strum guitars, make out in their sleeping bags, and smoke dope.)

  One of the readers of Het Parool took the view that the National Monument should make way for a cactus monument that would be just as large and imposing. In the eyes of such people, Van Gogh had finally become what he had aspired to be: the symbol of Dutch resistance, the national hero who stood tall, a freedom fighter who did his uncle and grandfather proud. The cactus idea won. A decision was made by the borough council of East/Watergraafsmeer to erect the stone cactus in the park where Mohammed Bouyeri was arrested, not far from the place where he killed Van Gogh.

  The bickering did not stop with the monument, however. Just as contentious was the first anniversary of the murder, to be commemorated in Linnaeus Street. Job Cohen, the mayor, would speak, and so would the prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende. This was enough reason for the Friends of Theo to stay away. “We have not been invited,” Theodor Holman sniffed in his weekly column for Het Parool, and surely Cohen “must have” regarded Theo as an anti-Semite—“which he wasn’t.”

  And so, intoned Theo’s best Friend: “Fuck off, Job Cohen! We know you always hated Theo….

  “Shut down those filthy mosques, goddamn it, where they really preach anti-Semitism and want to kill you and my kind. Throw those fucking fundamentalists out of the country! Or, better still, sew the butchers up in bags and drop them into the sea!

  “That’s the way to remember Theo!”1

  The language, as usual with Holman, was extreme, and the sentiments deeply unpleasant. Yet it is worth quoting because the tone was not unique. I hesitate to attach national characteristics to this particular air of aggrieved self-righteousness, but Holman’s outburst, in a perfectly respectable Amsterdam daily, expressed something that is not uncommon in Holland today: offensiveness projected as a sign of sincerity, the venting of rage as a mark of moral honesty. Theo van Gogh himself, of course, had done much to set this tone.

  As it happened, the memorial ceremony in Linnaeus Street was a calm and dignified occasion. There were flowers, a teddy bear, messages of grief, and a large pale green cactus, sticking up from the bicycle path like a hairy cucumber. The one bit of discord was a placard held up by a woman that read: “Balkenende, you’re here one year too late.” But after the prime minister went over to have a quiet word with her, she raised her thumb and praised him for being such a fine fellow. She had only been upset, she said, because he had visited vandalized Moroccan schools after Theo’s murder. Why, she asked him, did he have to pay so much attention to “those Moroccans”? After all, she said with tears in her eyes, he was the “Dutch prime minister.”

  The crowd was relatively small, a few hundred people at most. Followers of Pim Fortuyn wore T-shirts with portraits of Van Gogh and their own hero fraternally side by side, as freedom fighters. Balkenende spoke about the importance of the rule of law. The murder, he said, was an attack on “everything we hold dear in the Netherlands.” Cohen, too, appealed to reason: “We must be free to believe what we want, free to say what we think, and free to go where we wish, without fear.”

  The crowd began to disperse. It was just another office day. Of the dignitaries, only the Amsterdam council member, Ahmed Aboutaleb, lingered. He explained to reporters, in his faint Moroccan accent, that he was there in support of the constitution, which had been brutally assaulted by the murder of Van Gogh. Candles were lit by one or two of the Fortuyn followers. A gust of wind caught the flames and the prickly cactus was swiftly reduced to a pile of ashes.

  There was one more commemoration that day, in the Arena Hotel in Amsterdam. This time, Theo’s family and Friends did turn up, even though Job Cohen spoke once again, about freedom and tolerance and the need to face life without fear. Theo’s father, Johan, thanked people for their support, and a discussion followed, which was largely an opportunity to express goodwill and liberal sentiments. Oh, for “a brilliant debater like Theo van G
ogh,” lamented one observer. How deplorable that “most people there were well educated and susceptible to reason.” Only Holman did not disappoint. “Do you really think Theo would have been happy with this?” he roared. “He would have loathed it! Can I say that I read the Koran and thought it was a fucking rotten book? Only at the risk of my life.”

  The fighting over Theo van Gogh’s remembrance was unseemly, but not untypical of a country with a long tradition of religious strife. Memory, especially in ceremonies for the dead, is not about debate, but about shared emotion, often cast in a religious or quasi-religious form. The Netherlands, like the rest of western Europe, may have become a largely secular society in recent decades, but the habits of faith die hard. Preaching still comes naturally to the Dutch, as does the venting of moralizing emotion—that sense of being “in a total rage.” Emotion, one year after Theo’s murder, had largely lifted the victim out of the history of actual events and elevated him to an almost mythical status as a martyr for the pure and absolute truth.

  It is always easier, particularly in what was once a deeply religious country, to erect memorials and deliver sermons than to look the angel of history directly in the face. The way people remembered Theo van Gogh was marked by a surfeit not of reason but of sentimentality. It is a common feature of the secular age, these outbursts of displaced religiosity, often expressed at the funerals of media celebrities: Princess Diana, Pope John Paul II, Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh. The tearful farewells to people we never knew have replaced the established forms of organized faith, which used to absorb, in the shape of confessions or common prayer, more personal anxieties and discontents. Collective sentimentality is the easiest way to deal with matters we would rather not face head-on. This is evident in many painful memories, including those of the darkest past, that still haunt the Dutch, perhaps even more than other Europeans. If Clio is the muse of history, the ghostly presence of Anne Frank has hovered over the collective memory of Nazi occupation.

  2.

  The Amsterdam apartment where Anne Frank began her diary before going into hiding from the Nazis has been restored to the style of the 1930s to create a refuge for persecuted writers…. Using photographs from the family archive and a letter from Anne Frank describing the apartment, a team of experts worked for months to remove modern fixtures and decorate and furnish the residence in the same style it was left in by the family. A carpenter reconstructed the writing table at which the 13-year-old probably started her diary in June 1942, weeks before disappearing into the secret annex of a canal-side warehouse to hide during German occupation of the Netherlands….

  The first resident of the apartment at Merwedeplein in southern Amsterdam is Algerian novelist and poet el-Mahdi Acherchour, 32, who is working on a new novel.

  REUTERS, OCTOBER 28, 2005

  I was struck by this news item, not because I begrudged a persecuted writer his refuge in Amsterdam. Offering an Algerian, or any other writer, a place to work in freedom and peace is a good and noble undertaking. But the exact recreation of Anne Frank’s old family apartment, so that a writer can dwell in her ghostly presence, is morbid and indeed sentimental—as though the past could be relived by recreating its settings, as though there is anything to be learned, apart from one or two things about interior decoration, by restoring the period fixtures of Anne Frank’s living room. Sometimes it is better to let the past be.

  Yet I, too, found it hard to forget the past during the summer months I spent in Amsterdam. Friends had lent me their house in the oldest part of the city. It stands on a narrow street that once ran through a medieval nunnery. The area, now part of the most famous red-light district in Europe, is nothing if not cosmopolitan. On one corner of the street is a Thai massage parlor, on the other a brothel with three Brazilian transvestites, one of whom advertised his particular assets in a photograph of a large brown penis drooping above a gartered leg.

  The virtually naked “window prostitutes,” from all the poor countries in the world, pose in their dimly lit rooms along the canal, in old houses decorated with gracefully carved seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gables and neon signs offering live sex shows. It is easier in that part of town to buy a large electric dildo than a newspaper. Drunken Englishmen in T-shirts and razor haircuts slouch past the windows in groups, sniggering and pointing at the girls from Guatemala or Ukraine. Turkish men with sad mustaches negotiate prices with their hands, while black men from Suriname do drug deals under the trees by the bridge. Bewildered groups of Chinese tourists are ushered into the sex shows by Dutch hawkers, who offer “fucky fucky, sucky sucky” while making obscene gestures with their tongues. Sex shops are stacked with magazines and DVDs catering to fantasies of every conceivable taste. Inflatable dolls with wide-open mouths, rhino whips, leather masks, penis rings, and large photos of blowjobs and anal penetrations are openly on display.

  A stench of beer, marijuana, rotting garbage, and piss hangs like vapor over the historic canals. A friend of mine once admonished a couple of Moroccan youths for urinating against the wooden door of a fine seventeenth-century townhouse. Why not use the canal, he suggested. For an instant, they were taken by surprise, but then told him in perfect Amsterdam accents to “mind your own business, you fucking Jew!”

  Perhaps Western civilization, with the Amsterdam red-light district as its fetid symbol, does have something to answer for. Maybe these streets are typical of a society without modesty, morally unhinged. Such a naked display of man’s animal instincts could be seen as a form of barbarism. For people whose faith is predicated on modesty and whose code of honor prohibits any display of female sexuality, every single window along that Amsterdam canal is an intolerable provocation. You might say that nobody asked those people to live in Amsterdam. But they were encouraged to come and work there, and their children were born there. They are there, whether one likes it or not, and the Dutch prime minister is their prime minister too.

  The red-light district on one side of my street became wearisome in its relentness exploitation of human lust. Though intrigued by its more colorful denizens, I grew tired of it and spent more time on the other side of the street, which leads to a large square, the Nieuwmarkt, one of the oldest in Amsterdam, where the open-air cafés face a scene that sometimes filled me with a far greater melancholy than the crassest sex emporium. On the far side of the Nieuwmarkt is an old section of the city whose narrow, densely populated streets were once lined with higgledy-piggledy row houses, some dating back to the early seventeenth century. Almost all those houses are gone now, replaced by buildings of the 1980s, whose slick white modernity makes them stand out in the historic heart of Amsterdam. It used to be known as the jodenhoek, Jews’ corner.

  During the war a barbed wire fence separated one side of the square from the jodenhoek. Amsterdam never actually had a ghetto, unlike Warsaw, even though the Germans had made plans for one at the beginning of the war. After much consideration, the idea was abandoned because it would have caused too much inconvenience to gentiles, who would have had to move out of the area. But the Nazi authorities did force more and more Jews, many of them from the provinces, to move into three overcrowded Amsterdam neighborhoods, one of which was the jodenhoek.

  This part of the city, with its seventeenth-century Portuguese and German synagogues and its lively street markets, had long been populated by Jews, most of them poor. Rembrandt lived there too, however, and picked the models for his biblical paintings from the streets around his studio. Before the German occupation more than eighty thousand Jews resided in Amsterdam. By the end of the war about five thousand had survived.

  After the last cattle train to “the east” had left in 1943, the jodenhoek was like a ghost town. The houses, emptied of their inhabitants, had been looted for wood to stoke the fires of Amsterdammers during the icy “hunger winter” of 1944–45. And so for three decades after the war they remained, gutted and increasingly falling apart, often with the Jewish family names of abandoned shops still faintly showing on
crumbling walls. Many of the houses were later demolished, leaving large gaps filled with rubbish. People preferred not to think about the reasons for this urban ruination. The remains of a human catastrophe were simply left to rot. The few houses that were still there in the 1970s were taken over by young squatters, until, finally, around 1974, the last remnants of the jodenhoek were swept away to build an underground railway station and a new opera house.

  But first the squatters had to be removed from their improvised homes. What followed was a kind of grotesque reenactment of the historic drama. Not that the Dutch police, using batons and waterhoses to flush out the squatters, had anything in common with the Nazis, or that the squatters were destined to be murdered. It was just that the spectacle of uniformed men dragging people from their homes, while we watched the action behind fortified barriers, conjured up images I had only seen in blurry photographs taken on that very spot three decades before.

  Before remembering the Holocaust, in memorials and textbooks, became an almost universal Western ritual in the late 1960s, only two monuments in the jodenhoek stood as reminders of what happened there. One, a relief in white stone, was erected in 1950. It is called the monument of “Jewish Gratitude”—gratitude to the Dutch people who stood by the Jewish victims. The other, built two years later, is a sculpture of a burly workingman, with his head held high, and his meaty arms and large proletarian fists spread in a gesture of angry defiance. The Dockworker is a monument to the two-day “February Strike” of 1941, when Amsterdam stopped working in protest against the deportation of 425 Jewish men to a concentration camp. The men had been brutally rounded up in plain sight of many gentiles shopping at the popular Sunday market. Word spread quickly: city cleaners refused to collect garbage, mail was not delivered, trams stopped running, and the port of Amsterdam was silent for forty-eight hours.