Herman van Veen has great admiration for actress and comedian Fien de la Mar, she was someone you went to. He already had that as a child. There are different types of actors: those who come to you on stage and those to whom you want to go, Van Veen explained to Simone Kleinsma. That division became a common thread Classics with Kleinsma (MAX, NPO2), where the actors who came towards the viewer were left behind. Van Veen’s fascination with song and cabaret was shown through images and recordings of big names from the past.
Although Van Veen did his best to draw the viewer in on Sunday evening by talking about his last conversation with Paul van Vliet or getting a bit emotional about Wim Sonneveld’s anti-marriage song ‘Lieveling’. In his heyday, Sonneveld hid his homosexuality for fear of losing his audience, and according to Van Veen we had to interpret ‘Lieveling’ as a disguised autobiography. Kleinsma couldn’t do much with it, there was little time to show all the fragments, and Van Veen also seemed to be looking too much into ‘Lieveling’: there is little homoerotic desire hidden behind the biting portrait of a stale marriage.
Van Veen’s chosen fragments were beautiful: Dutch glory was discussed, while the values of history and remembering were embraced. Only the fragment with Wende Snijders deviated somewhat, because there was little substance to the memory of her performance. Van Veen admired her versatility and called her an “exciting woman”.
Long-haired recruits
Would Wende Snijders be suitable for the army? It was a question that briefly arose while watching the program Media logic Willingness to fight and die (Human, NPO2). Defense has difficulty finding recruits. You would almost forget that in the past, Defense was not always happy with conscription recruits. There was no shortage of recruits in the times of Dutch Glory, but they were also long-haired boys who made fun, and who were also not prepared to fight for their country.
Recruiting for a job with a high risk of trauma, mutilation or even death: how do you do that? Defense has been struggling with this for several years. Until the Ukraine war, the films were mainly focused on the humanitarian soldier, says military historian Christ Klep: “Many soldiers who went to Afghanistan were surprised that they ended up in a society dominated by violence.” As far as he is concerned, the videos could have been a bit more honest.
Defense wants to recruit 9,000 people next year, of which it hopes that around 30 percent will be women. It is not only the number that is a problem, but also the representation of women. The army is a man’s world, and for example Irina Tziamali – who had already left – was given six tips as a recruit on how to function as a woman. One of them was: “no provocative underwear, think of HEMA boxers.”
Emotions were also forbidden. 9,000 young people, of whom around 2,700 are women: that will be complicated, but Sven Vening, CEO at a marketing agency, knows a solution. The Netherlands needs to become a little more proud of its army. In addition, typography, photography and color can give Defense a different face. Then the “new identity of Defense” everything will automatically become less harsh and less masculine, he predicted.
Hopefully Sven Vening also took a look at Van Veen, who had once learned three life lessons from Wim Kan: “don’t waste, empathy, don’t think it can be done tomorrow.” Here is the ideal slogan for the army from someone who knew very well what war traumas were and did not run away from it in his 1972 song (also shown at Kleinsma) about his forced labor on the Burma railway: ‘There are almost no more people who can ‘tell the story’.
Toef Jaeger replaces Wilfred Takken this week