Rotterdammers are known as phlegmatic people. Always able to put bad luck, misfortune or outright disaster into perspective with a down-to-earth or resigned wisdom. ‘You can’t do anything about it,’ or ‘That’s just how it goes.’ On the Maas, pride in ‘the city’ goes hand in hand with a modest awareness of human shortcomings. Although there are limits, also in Rotterdam. It is not without reason that social commotion breaks out there first.
Years ago, when I visited the neighborhood where I grew up – Hordijkerveld in Groot-IJsselmonde, new construction in the low sixties, porch flats and green areas – an older acquaintance who had continued to live there updated me. Not that much had happened, everything just went on as usual.
Well, the neighbors across the street had been taken from their beds by an arrest team a few weeks ago. She had been startled awake by the bright blue light in the street and had been looking through the kitchen window. Police with helmets and shields, shouting. A neighbor’s son stood on the street, handcuffed to a lamppost. Nice people, she thought, those neighbors, but she didn’t know them very well. Another cookie with your coffee?
More recently I visited the street where my parents’ residential career had continued in South. From the low terraced houses of Hordijkerveld, built without central heating or a shower, we went to a sunny house in Kreekhuizen, a few kilometers away. Once again, an acquaintance served as a one-person news agency. And everything went well here too, you know. Yeah right, there had been that shooting. But that was on the other side of the street, I didn’t notice anything. Only with the new neighbors there was hassle, barking dogs and so on. Also a bit difficult to talk to. In the sense of: next time you complain you will get a slap in the head. Another slice of cake?
Anyone who walks through Hordijkerveld or Kreekhuizen on a beautiful day can still taste the tranquility of the garden village, risen in collective optimism.
Little reminds us that this neighborhood was recently the hunting ground of – very un-Dutch – a serial killer. A sniper who shot three people in the head on the street. The atrocity prompted police to warn residents not to take to the streets. Media camera crews rushed in to fish for shocked vox dolls, to their disappointment, especially those of the pitiful, hysteria-free Rotterdam variety.
But how ‘un-Dutch’ was this? Cracks have long since appeared in the pleasant mirror that Hordijkerveld holds up to himself. Like the rest of South Rotterdam, this neighborhood has also been the subject of endless municipal concerns and painfully slow plans for demolition, renovation or new construction. Already in 2001 a Masterplan Hordijkerveld drawn up for the aging neighborhood, once set up for families of workers and low-level civil servants.
The multicultural neighborhood protested – we don’t want less greenery and no expensive new construction – but little by little things were improved. The Prussian-gray porch apartments where the serial murder suspect later hid were given a colorful paint job. “It’s quite nice to live here,” said my acquaintance – who had long since seen her first neighbors die or leave for suburbs.
Politically, the unease is also simmering nicely. In the most recent House of Representatives elections, the PVV emerged head and shoulders as the winner in Hordijkerveld. Followed at a distance by Omtzigt’s NSC and, in a single polling station, Denk and the SGP. Not that Wilders can count on much enthusiasm among his voters, because “why does it have to be so rude, about girls with a headscarf?” , according to another acquaintance. But: “At least he is doing something about it.”
To what, then? The feeling that Hordijkerveld, or the whole of Rotterdam South, no longer matters.
Sjoerd de Jong is editor of NRC. He writes a column here every other week.