Column | ‘The Occupied City’ lasts four hours and you don’t notice it

Dozens of times I heard it said “first get my bicycle back” and as a child I already understood what that joke meant: ‘the Krauts’ had taken our bicycles during the war. So as soon as a German person wanted, claimed or did something, you threw in that joke. Heard it so often, sneered at it so often myself, but the logical follow-up question never occurred to me: all those bicycles, where did they put them? Since the movie The occupied city I do not know.

There I see the site of the Westergasfabriek – for me a jubilant cultural focal point full of memories. To performances and films. On a steaming one concert by jazz musician Curtis Salgado. Evenings on sultry café terraces. I will probably come there often, but not without getting sick of the thought that terrorizing Nazis stored the confiscated bicycles here.

The movie I’m seeing is called Occupied City because I accidentally bought a ticket for the English version. Doesn’t matter, I guess. And indeed, it doesn’t matter that ‘the Lido’ is called the Laido. But now the name of resistance member Gerrit van der Veen is pronounced correctly but with difficulty, just like the street name Euterpestraat, address of the SD, place of pain and abuse of power factor 10,000. The English throat pulls back the veil of familiar words and sounds. This makes it even more raw what it feels like when your street, your neighborhood, your environment are a punching bag of terror.

Filmmaker/visual artist Steve McQueen filmed Amsterdam places with a war past, from a bare house door to the magic of a flock of flamingos in the nighttime zoo. His images are evoked by the words with which author Bianca Stigter mapped out the locations that were affected by the German occupation. The combination Stigter-McQueen means illusionism: then becomes now and now becomes then. The past creeps up on the present. The present creeps into the past. Can not. And yet it happens.

Lasts four hours The occupied city. I don’t notice that time passing. And even if I did notice, I wouldn’t want to miss a scene. I see a monument, a sidewalk, someone walking by. I hear reports that the Nazis executed three men there and left their bodies for days. Out of revenge, as punishment. How can such sophisticated violence exist? Are you used to it? Sophocles describes in his tragedy Antigone that King Creon forbids the burial of his cousin Polynices. In newsreels from Gaza I see corpses lying in the dust, a child walking past.

Wait, it’s winter. In the film, children sled down the ‘dog ear’, the slope on Museumplein. I remember how the design for that dog-ear was condemned. Ugly! Dangerous! But no one foresaw that snow fun.

The occupied city ends. The words fall away. The film reaches from this present to the future, populated by today’s young people. Unknown territory, the country full of expectations.

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