Would there already be a chosen one among the 1,400 interested in Akkerstraat 32, the house in the Amsterdam neighborhood of Betondorp where Johan Cruijff grew up? A ground floor apartment of 62 m2 with a garden, for less than 800 euros rent – a dream for many Amsterdammers. They like to take those curious peepers for granted.
‘Tuindorp Watergraafmeer’, the official name, was built in 1924. Alderman Wibaut wanted to create ‘a residential area for the worker’. For the conscious worker, who obviously voted ‘red’. It became a cozy fake village: streets (with Soviet-like names such as Egstraat and Ploegstraat) around a real Brink. Such an environment would bring out the very best in people.
Social control, according to historians who wrote about it, was strict. They did not drink, did not touch the neighbor, did not hang out the window screaming. You should not listen to folk singers but to opera and furnish your house with light wood furniture. Instructive hobbies were folk dancing, Esperanto, or going out into nature with a botanist drum. Children could safely kick a ball outside, they had to do their best at school. In fact, these ideals were very similar to those of the hated ‘bourgeois’ elite.
It worked, that elevation. A while. A spectacular social increase was visible in Betondorp. Eight boys were born before 1940 who would later become professors. The brothers Gerard and Karel van het Reve lived there between 1924 and 1938, at three addresses. Their father was not a worker or greengrocer like Johan’s, but a journalist. He wrote about the workers’ paradise and the overthrow of capitalism, stories that frightened little Gerard.
Gerard and Johan did not play together on the street in Betondorp. When the Cruijff family came to live there in 1947, the Reves had already left. Reve would say about Betondorp: ‘This entire neighborhood (…) has always had an atmosphere for me of unfathomably deep, inescapable melancholy. “Abandon all hope, ye who grow up here.” But then again, Reve’s dislike was a projection of his childhood fear. All the houses of his childhood were “so many caves and dens, inhabited by incalculable demons.”
I like the neighbourhood, the gray houses with turquoise doors, the black-and-white tiling, the Brink with the happy lime trees, the art-deco school building and the statues of Hildo Krop (whose noses were cut off ‘for lack of genitals’, according to Reve). an unreal beauty. I once peeked at Ploegstraat 133. Reve let Elmer live here, the main character from Werther Nieland. In this garden Elmer buried animals, here he beheaded sticklebacks, ‘dangerous wrens’. The Club of the Tombs was founded in this shed. Elmer, who looks for friends but scares everyone away, who dreams in vain of a Christmas tree with lights (‘civil’ according to his parents), is the most heartbreaking character I know.
The outbreak of the war in 1940 was the death blow for the Betondorp ideals. Many Jewish residents were deported. When Cruijff came to live there, it became an ordinary, green Amsterdam neighbourhood. There was no longer a predominantly red vote. The neighborhood makes me melancholy because of the persistent belief in the feasibility of happiness, always a disillusionment. ‘Playing outside should be a subject at school’, it says on the window of the Cruijff house. The only moralism in the neighborhood now comes from him.