Which books should you read around May 4 and 5? A selection from the new stack

What makes diary entries from the war years so fascinating? Not necessarily the drama of front movements or nighttime bombing. It is the deceptive and threatened normality that so appeals to the imagination. The May Days of 1940, a ‘collective diary’ of people who were there, compiled by Luuc Kooijmans, relies on this.

The woman who objects to the noise in the street after the outbreak of hostilities. The soldier who confesses before taking a taxi to the battlefield. The not very domestic painter who, in despair, on May 10th, is going to dust the rooms and wash the dishes from the previous day. People who habitually cycle to work. Pupils who ‘go away cheering’ precisely because they have school-free due to the war circumstances. Writer Antoon Coolen, who moves into the fields outside his hometown of Waalre ‘to be alone with my thoughts’, is freed from ‘the compromising neutrality’ with which the Netherlands believed it could maintain itself in an evil world. Karel van het Reve, who spent most of the first day of the war in his garden, ‘where everything was fresh and the grass was high’.

But at a certain point, normality irrevocably gave way to the realization that everything would be different from now on – although opinions about the longevity and nature of that new order varied quite a bit. One expected that life would become ‘more boring and monotonous’, the other that a new world order would emerge with ‘much more prosperity due to the disappearance of borders and less need for armaments’. Many had no illusions about the tolerability of the German occupation. The aforementioned painter fell prey to ‘a gnawing sense of amazement’ at the disaster that was unfolding. Several hundred Jews tried to leave the country or took their own lives.

Militancy and apathy

Writer Menno ter Braak constructed a barricade with his neighbors in The Hague ‘from a mishmash of worthless household goods, planks, stones and even tied packages of Fatherlands’, Fred Batten wrote in his diary on 12 May 1940 (The Fatherland was the newspaper in which Ter Braak had published a lot). This occupation gave him more satisfaction than ‘writing articles’, Ter Braak assured. ‘I only now feel, really, Dutch.’ After the capitulation of the Dutch troops on 15 May, he took his own life. ‘Greet all friends’, he wrote in his farewell letter to his wife, Antje Faber. “I’ve had so many friends, that’s why my life was all right, but mostly because of you.”

The militancy that Ter Braak and many others had shown in the May days was lacking among some leaders at the front (‘The captain was of no use to you’) and among the virtually entire government. Disconcerting – even with today’s knowledge – is ‘the apathetic impression’ that Prime Minister Dirk Jan de Geer in particular made on his civil servants. In one case, the war cabinet aroused associations with ‘a flock of sparrows that had been raining heavily’, in the other with ‘a bunch of pigeons lined up in the gutter on a rainy afternoon’. “Thank God they’re gone,” Max Hirschfeld, secretary-general of the Department of Commerce, Industry and Shipping, wrote in his diary after the seat of government was moved to London. “What should we have done with them?”

The flight of Queen Wilhelmina in May 1940 was one of the most discussed topics in the diaries of ordinary Dutch people. ‘Is she trying to keep herself safe while our boys are fighting to the death?’, a retired school principal in Zwolle wondered. ‘The mood about the Royal House and the Government is, to put it euphemistically, very reserved’, noted the later minister Jaap Burger (SDAP/PvdA) in his diary on 21 May. Understanding of the queen’s actions was very rarely expressed.

Alert spectator

While most Dutchmen rejoiced after the capitulation about the end of the fighting and the (apparent) complacency of the German occupier, the war was and remained the predominant theme in the diaries of the Swiss physician Fritz Rimathé, ‘scientific representative’ of the pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche in the Netherlands. In the house where he lived and worked, Amstel 278 in Amsterdam, he reported on the social, economic and mental changes that were taking place in the occupied country.

In doing so, he proceeded academically: the diary forced him into the attitude of an alert spectator, ‘as someone who has fallen into a glacier has to stay awake in order not to freeze to death’. He wanted to know what moved the Nazis. To that end, he even studied their lampoons. He thought about the future of Europe after a German victory or a German defeat. Both scenarios made him feel gloomy: a continent dominated by Russia was not a pleasant sight either.

But the bulk of the notes, which together take up 608 pages, related to everyday events. These were increasingly dominated by the hunt for Jews, of whom Fritz housed two: the Berlin comedian Géza Weisz (the father of filmmaker Frans Weisz) and Lazare van Amerongen, the stepfather of Fritz’ (second) wife Georgette. . Both initially enjoyed some freedom of movement – ​​Weisz because he came from Hungary, an ally of Nazi Germany, and Lazare because he was exempt from deportation to the east “until further notice.”

But fate was also increasingly on their heels. And Fritz Rimathé exchanged the role of a spectator, who for a long time tried to practice ‘objectivity’, for that of a participant in the drama forced on him by the Nazis. The diaries in which this development is recorded form – with the notes of Géza Weisz – the guideline for the book that Tom Rooduijn has written about the community of destiny of Amstel 278. It gives an impression of the oppression of people who in the end were completely at the mercy of a ruthless occupier, and of a city that was visibly devoured and impoverished (both physically and morally).

A watertight system

Philosopher and filmmaker Jurriën Rood wrote a ‘philosophical biography’ of the man who, without any ideological motive, enabled the Nazis to track down, isolate and deport Jews in the Netherlands: Jacques (Sjaak) Lentz, head of the National Inspectorate of the Population Registers in The Hague.

During the German occupation, this official, who was more headstrong than subservient, was able to put into practice the administrative ideal that he had already strived for in the pre-war Netherlands: the design of the ‘paper man who represents the carnal man on the secretariat of the municipality’. ‘. In other words: a watertight system – of which the identification card that is difficult to forge was the final piece – that made it virtually impossible for citizens to escape the prying eyes of the government. The book is a fine, if at times a little too long, study of the insanity that persistence can entail when the carnal man disappears from a system.

Even after the war, Lentz never subjected himself to an examination of his conscience. And the Justice Department did not force him to do so either: he was sentenced to three years in prison, minus pre-trial detention. In the explanatory memorandum to this verdict – which was not considered too mild at the time – reference was made in particular to the fact that Lentz had facilitated forced labour, not to the fact that he had facilitated the identification of Jews or made resistance activities more difficult. Until his death in 1963, Sjaak Lentz was able to feel wronged in freedom.

Monument to an unadulterated hero

Heroes have had a bit of a hard time in war historiography in recent years. They were mainly presented as exceptions to the rule of arranging, looking away, grumbling and keeping wet – with the result that the exceptions are rarely considered worthy of a biography. This fashionable puritanism has not prevented historian Peter Sierksma from erecting a small monument to an unadulterated hero: his grandfather Pieter Kapenga, chief police officer in Kampen until November 1942, when he was ordered by his superior to round up Jewish fellow citizens. laid down with the simple words, “Sir, I refuse.” His reluctance stemmed from his solid faith. “Germany, your rulers have violated the Jews,” he wrote, looking back at the moment of truth. “Never has a nation persecuted the Jews with impunity.”

Kapenga spent more than two years in captivity: first in camp Vught, later in Dachau. From there, immediately after the liberation, he instructed his ‘beloved wife and children’ to see to it ‘that the tires always remain well inflated’, because ‘I half and half hope that I can get away on the bike this summer’ . After his return to Kampen, he rarely spoke about camp life.

When grandson Peter later expressed an interest in this episode, Kapenga merely said, “Read Hoornik”—a succinct reference to writer and journalist Ed’s wartime memories. Hoornik, a fellow sufferer of Kapenga. And Sierksma had to deal with that. He has supplemented the scant testimonies of his grandfather with reports from the Kamper society of the past and the orthodox Reformed milieu of Pieter Kapenga. They may have been the necessities of a desperate biographer, but they do not diminish the respectability of a man for whom refusal of an unchristian service order was so self-evident that he had only four words to waste.