‘There was so much noise, and sometimes the hotel also boomed, you think: could the next one land here, in room 203?’ War reporter Hans Jaap Melissen told in talk show On 1 (NPO1) what he experienced in the besieged Ukrainian capital Kiev. “In my work you have to regulate your fear well, because fear is not always synchronized with danger,” he said. “You have to be able to push a lot.” Melissen travels from war to war – before Ukraine he was in Syria and Afghanistan. Crazy work, but important work.
The war came immediately after the pandemic, and meanwhile the climate crisis is swell. It is therefore not surprising that people think that the apocalypse is imminent. But that idea is timeless. Illnesses, natural disasters and genocides have decimated humanity for thousands of years, after which it continues to bounce back.
War is never far away. Take now Straight through the Low Countries (NPO2), a pleasant walking program in which the Belgian program maker Arnout Hauben walks from the Belgian coastal town of Ostend to Pieterburen in Groningen. In the second episode he walks along the border of Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, the flat land is as if it has been world peace for centuries. But promptly the air raid siren goes off, and Hauben receives an urgent beeping message on his phone. A farmer from Zeeland reassures the Belgian: this is the exercise on the first Monday of the month. Hauben sputters: “I think that’s a bit of a surprise, don’t you. Are you taking a leisurely stroll here…”
Arnout and his comrades have only just crossed the border and immediately get the shock of their lives. ⚠ Watch a new ‘Dwars door de Lage Landen’ tonight, at 20.25 pm on NPO 2. pic.twitter.com/n1GqkE5Z9r
— vpro (@vpro) March 29, 2022
You don’t have to tell Hauben, who previously made travel programs about the Second World War, that the grassy meadows are not always so peaceful. During the Dutch Revolt, this border was the front line of the Spanish and Northern Dutch armies. During the First World War there was also the ‘Death wire’: a German electric fence with two thousand volts on it, which was intended to prevent the Belgians from fleeing to the neutral Netherlands. Hauben encounters a man who has a portrait of his grandfather Albert tattooed on his forearm. Bompa—soft eyes, gleaming lower lip—was damaged by the war, he never talked about it, and was always painting in his garden shed. Hauben, for example, always encounters people on his way who tell a tragic life story very briefly.
Fire, lots of fire
In The Curse of the Ancients on the History Channel, Alice Roberts lists an endless series of catastrophes. In the first episode of the historical program, the pink-haired professor goes through the Bronze Age (3300-1200 BC.) Rapidly you see one civilization after another disappear in waves of fire or water. Amazing that people still had time to build new civilizations in between. There are no images of it, so we get a lot of maps and abstract images of fire, a lot of fire. The superlatives and the dramatic, Marvel movie-like music do the rest.
Roberts begins with Doggerland, the primeval forest between the Netherlands and England that was hit by a tsunami eight thousand years ago, and subsequently transformed into the North Sea by the melting ice caps. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are always the culprits in this story, but the program also depicts human massacres, such as the genocide in Micina in Poland (571 BC) and the battle of the Tollense in Germany (1250 BC).
What those wars were about, and who all those dead people were, we’ll never know. What remains are some bronze arrowheads, burnt wood, and skulls with signs of serious injury. What will be left of us? And will anyone ever bother to dig that up?
This column will be written by various authors until April 25.