irreconcilable loyalties (2): the Dutch national character

A Dutch friend lent me a collection of historical essays written by a grandfather, his son and his grandson (Jan Blokker, et al). The thesis of this collection is that the "national character traits, defined by historians from the 19th century on, are not supported by the events they describe in Nederland in twaalf moorden (The Netherlands in Twelve Murders). Amsterdam 2008.

Although each of the writers has some academic training in history, they write like journalists, or rather op-ed editorialists; they also have arranged the essays, each dealing with one or more murders in a non-chronological and, as I see it, random manner. The character traits they are particularly examining are those given by Johan Huizinga (d. 1945), the wellknown author of The Waning of the Middle Ages as well as several important essays, one of which seeks to define the origins of a "sense of belonging together" (an icipient nationalism) which he sees emerging during the Burgundian era (15th and 16th centuries) to be strengthened for the provinces that became the modern Netherlands in the so-called Eighty Years War of independence against Spain (1568-1648). Huizinga enumerated the salient Dutch character traits in the 1934 (when the country was a relatively closed society in a pre-electronic age) as a variation of those defined by his predecessors. The Blokkers single out the "relatively small inclination to national pride" and if one felt pride it was a private emotion. The Blokkers recall that at the beginning of the 21st century, as a result of the enlarged European Union, the replacement of the guilder with the Euro and the influx of Muslim immigrants, the Dutch are experiencing a sense of loss of identity. This led to a search of what was actually lost which came to a head after the murder of Theo van Gogh by a radical Islamist (a Moroccan with Dutch nationality) in 2004. Then the authors return to Huizinga who thought of the Dutch as "unheroic, bourgeois and modest, but with a high regard for the rights and opinions of others and individually they tended to resist social and political extremism and rejected illusions and rhetoric." (p.11).

As I read Huizinga's discussion, these characteristics apply primarily to the Dutch of the 19th and 20th centuries and as one of Huizinga's successors H.A. Enno van Gelder, made abundantly clear if one were to project them back into Dutch history beginning in the 16th century, they would appear as exceptions or tentative beginnings. In fact 19th century historians cite the bourgeois desire of a comfortable, self satisfied existence as a negative in contrast to the heroic and enterprising nature of our 17th century ancestors that created the "Age of Gold" and in my high school (conservative and Calvinist) the decline of Dutch heroic enterprise was the result of the wealthy regent class avoiding risks, beginning in the early 18th century after the grandiose foreign policies of William III of Orange (who had become King of England). A corollary of my education was that the Dutch were the linear heirs of God's chosen people. None of this appears important to the Blokkers whose "murders" demonstrate the absence of tolerance and the existence of extremism in the Dutch past.

The essays are well researched, easy to read and even the ones that went over familiar ground kept me interested; quite a few dealt with unfamiliar events so that I finished the collection in two days.

I have two major problems: 1) The authors' goal to disprove Huizinga slants their presentation; 2) they include "murders" that occurred before there was a Dutch nation.

1) Here I would question their use of the word murder to describe all the violent deaths they discuss. The standard Dutch dictionary defines murder a "killing with malice aforethought, to which Webster ads "unlawfully." A case in point is the death of Count William II which occurred in battle. It may be true that, having gone through the ice, harnessed and all, he was fairly defenseless and his enemies could have taken him prisoner and held him for ransom, but the undisciplined and non-aristocratic band of Frisians that did away with him, apparently not having recognized him (not even identified him by his armor) did not fight according to the rules of chivalry that in the 13th century might have been applied. A more historically appropriate term would be "he was slain."

Still more absurd is the authors' inclusion of the "Virgin of Yde," one of the so-called (pre-historic) "bog people," people whose bodies were well preserved by the airless and acid soils in which they were deposited. The Blokkers admit that she was killed long before there was a civilized Netherlands language and that we can hardly be certain of the "why" of her death. But they describe her people as " nearly non-human" and "as merciless as Jack the Ripper, brute as the Afghan executioner who strangles an unfaithful woman." Such comparisons may excite the empathy of the reader but, as I see it, are a-historical. They also write that scholars generally agree that these "bog people" were ritual offers. Thus, once more, the girl's death hardly qualifies as a murder in the modern sense.

The Blokkers are on more solid ground in their selection of the execution of a group Catholics from the town of Gorcum by Protestant privateers in 1572. It could be argued, as has been done by 19th century historians, that these privateers were led by a non-Dutch nobleman, etc. As pirates they generally acted unlawfully in any case. Certainly they were guilty of an extremism (religious if not political) that Huizinga excluded from the Dutch character. Obviously they acted
with malice and their execution of these Catholics can be seen as a parallel to the still more horrid battle in 1997 between the fans of two soccer teams that is the subject of another essay. Or can it? The 1572 pirates lived in an era in which the cruelties in war or the execution of heretics, witches (and criminals) were hard to justify in peoples brought up with the words of Christ (I sometimes got the impression that the Blokkers are more critical of Christians than of Huizinga). My teachers did not approve of the mores of those days in the history of what became our country. A similar lesson was drawn from Voltaire's Candide in which, it was pointed out, one of the few positive characters is a certain Dutchman, Martin the peace loving Mennonite. The soccer hooligans may not have been brought up by the same words any more, but they were certainly brought up in a law abiding modern democracy and their behavior is a conscious choice of deviance, but even they were appalled that a death resulted from their action. A better parallel with 1572 is the lynching by a mob of the brothers Jan and Cornelis de Witt, leading statesmen in the Dutch Republic, about a hunderd years later. (The composition and style of the 17th century painting of the martyrdom of the Catholics is obviously based on the Deposition of Christ by Rembrandt). I doubt that lynchmob can be called extremist but they certainly exhibited uncontrolled histeria in which one action led the next one. My high school history teacher used this lynching as an example of the dangers of ignorance fed by rabble rousers (or demagogues). Class consciousness was a by(?)product of our education and I always, automatically, assumed that Huizinga's essay referred to Dutch citizens with a thorough formal eduction in the humanities or to those who aspired to that and acquired it as autodidacts rather than to the Dutch people as a whole.

2) A propos the ritual death of the "Virgin of Yde, the authors ask whether we should be ashamed of this un-Netherlandish behavior which they answer in the negative citing as a justification a biblical text from Ezekiel 18 that sons do not have to pay for the sins of the father. I am tempted to use this citation as an instance of their cavalier use of sources, after all the Bible frequently says the opposite as when the sins of the father are visited upon the children of the seventh generation, etc. In any case, the choice of her sacrifice, which is one of many that also occurred in what are now Denmark, Germany, etc. has nothing to do with these later nations, even if the Blokkers suggest that such behavior must somehow have left traces in successive people and thus in us. It seems an odd argument, as if people are passive victims of a (not even their own) past.

Other questions also arise, such as "How Dutch were those Frisians who had successfully resisted the Counts of Holland in the attempts to annex their mostly island (the campaigns were in winter) region.?" Or even "How Dutch was William himself?" He was a descendant of the nobility of the western Low Countries, but two generations after him the Counts of Holland were no longer from Holland and soon they were Bavarian, then Burgundian and then Austrian. So un-Dutch were his successors that in 1477 one of them had to grant the "Dutch" the Great Privilege, which among other rights stipulated that the counties of Holland and Zealand had to be administered by native officials according to the regional laws.

If they not purposely picked a fight with Huizinga's 1934 essay, the Blokkers were led astray by their confusion of tolerance (incl. freedom of thought and speech) of "the other" with national identity, for as the historical works of Huizinga make abundantly clear, the Dutch nation emerged in opposition to the otherness of foreigners with different languages, legal systems and religion. And to cite Voltaire, one must always be intolerant of intolerance.