It takes some getting used to: are you just enjoying a passion murder in the Stone Age, or you are watching the shaving of a muff whore, and then suddenly Daan Schuurmans walks into the image, in contemporary teacher clothing, to view the scene with pitying eyes and a to teach history.
The story of the Netherlands† Now that the ten-part series has been completed, we can call the historical series with staged scenes a great success. Not only because it is an unexpected hit, with an average of 1.7 million viewers, but also because it covers the entire national history in an innovative, attractive way, from the first hunters who foraged here (15,000 BC), to the Dutch soldiers who lived in Indonesia (1945-1949).
“The history handbooks that have been around for a century, hang Dutch history on the great virtues of tolerance, freedom and democracy,” Flemish writer David Van Reybrouck said on Monday. Eus’ Book Club (NPO2). According to him, this ‘positive framing’ ensures that the Dutch have an exaggeratedly favorable self-image, and have little eye for ‘the black pages’.
The makers of The story of the Netherlands are determined not to fall into that trap. “It is a story of mountains of gold and black pages,” says Schuurmans right at the beginning, “that show who we are and how we have become that way.”
“We” are rather brutal, evil and mean, it turns out. In every episode there are examples of poverty, exploitation, massacres. In the seventh episode (1600-1750) colonialism is added. The genocides of the VOC are mentioned, and slavery. An African woman is dragged from a ship’s hold, leaving her son behind. The program devotes ten minutes to slavery. Then we have to move on quickly.
Collaborating in the war
The tenth and final episode (1930-1950) gives the final blow to the last remnant of patriotism. Schuurmans paints in stark colors how in the Second World War almost everyone cooperated with the German occupiers, thereby ensuring that the murder of 102,000 Jews went smoothly.
The episode opens with a Jewish family lighting the candlestick on Hanukkah when the Germans come to drag them out of their home. They flee to the back neighbors, but the neighbor pushes them out the garden gate. Later you see that heartless neighbor in the Hunger Winter demolish wood from the abandoned house of the Jews. We have seen her husband as a civil servant dutifully sorting personal cards of Jews from the card catalog. So these are the Dutch.
“Only a few take action”, Schuurmans mumbles. Now it’s getting too much for me. An individual? Were there also people who took Jews into their homes? About 45,000 Dutch people (half a percent) protested, a quarter of whom paid with their lives. It’s not much, but don’t say it never happened.
The series does not want to end in a minor key, so there is a kind of finale with a sequence of images from all episodes, while Schuurmans hesitantly tries to distill a national character from all this: “Don’t whine, but put our shoulders under it, because otherwise we will get wet feet.” .” He immediately puts it into perspective, and instead comes up with the moral of the story: “Every choice changes the course of history, every decision to do something, or to do nothing, has consequences. Not only in the past, but also in the present.”
Well. Of course you could also tell it without morals. And without the pretense that we can draw a national character or lesson from this. Simply: this happened. That’s how it goes.
This column will be written by various authors until April 25.