She was born nearby. Oud Zuid was then a center of Jewish Amsterdam. It still is to some extent, but the war ripped the heart out of it (there were 80,000 Jews in the city in 1940; today there are about 15,000). Frieda’s childhood home was an apartment on a wide boulevard that was then called Zuider Amstellaan but that after the war was renamed Rooseveltlaan. The apartment was on the second floor, facing the street. On my computer I have a scanned copy of one of Frieda’s most cherished possessions: a photograph, taken at the dining room table in that apartment, of her extended family, seated for a meal in celebration of her grandfather’s seventy-fifth birthday. Of the seventeen people at the table, twelve died soon after, most of them at Auschwitz. The very furniture that filled the room—except for a bureau that stands behind the chair where Frieda normally sits as we hold our weekly chats, which her mother managed to track down after the war—was ground under the wheels of history.
Before the war, Frieda knew her neighborhood with the intimacy of childhood: nooks that adults ignored, who came and went. And she knew everyone. Just around the corner from her childhood home is a triangular park rimmed by small apartment buildings. On the second floor of one of these—at 37 Merwedeplein—lived a Jewish couple and their two daughters. She remembers the family as rather chique mensen, stylish people, perhaps because they had emigrated from Germany some years earlier and so seemed slightly exotic. The elder girl, Margot, was two years younger than Frieda. The younger, who was four years her junior, would eventually become the most famous girl in the world, Anne Frank. Frieda remembers Margot as quiet and Anne as a neighborhood scamp bristling with intelligence. But mostly they were “just normal girls.” She jumped rope with them. Her most vivid memory of the Franks is of being invited by Anne up to their apartment. In the stairwell, Anne scolded Frieda to be quiet because her mother was taking her afternoon nap. The scene lodged in Frieda’s mind because the idea seemed somehow extravagant; her own mother never took naps.
It might make sense to freeze the narrative here and to say something about why I was moved to write a book about the city I have lived in for more than five years: to begin to explain, anyway, why an American who grew up in western Pennsylvania and spent his more recent life in New York City should come to find this European city so fascinating—or necessary, even. If we stand back far enough from that scene, it’s possible to see the two Jewish girls whispering in an Amsterdam stairwell, circa 1938, with no worldly notion that the weight of their century was about to collapse onto them, as representing something larger than even the vast fame that one of them would achieve. The threat both girls were about to face—and they would meet up again, in Auschwitz, where through a twist of fate the one who was closest to death would end up living a rich, full, complex life—was against a way of life that is commonplace to most of us and that is under a variety of new threats today. As it happens, the origins of that way of life—the origins of much that we think of as “modern”—are intimately associated with my adopted city.
That association is not immediately apparent. Mention to someone that you live in Amsterdam, and you may receive a low chuckle in response. The eyes may dart to one side as your friend peers through a haze of memory for recollections of a student-era trip to the city. Amsterdam, you will be told, is a crazy place.
That is not only true, it’s more or less official policy. Job Cohen, who was mayor of the city from 2001 to 2010, told me one evening as I interviewed him in the eighteenth-century mayor’s residence on the grand Herengracht (“Gentlemen’s Canal”), “In Amsterdam, craziness is a value.” He meant it as a good thing, though many would dispute that, including some of its residents. The squatting of buildings—forcing your way into a place that isn’t yours and inhabiting it—was legalized in 1971, provided the building has been unoccupied for one year, and though the law was changed in 2010 it is still relatively common to see dilapidated facades hung with banners proclaiming the inhabitants’ defiance of authority. The city has between 5,000 and 7,500 licensed prostitutes in a given year, most working in streetside windows, the rest in authorized brothels, and if you are nervous and confused as to how to engage a prostitute in the red light district you can ask one of the police officers on the beat for help. At a coffee shop (as opposed to a café), you order marijuana and hashish from a menu, where products may be divided into categories such as Indoor, Outdoor, and Foreign, and from there into varieties with names like Shiva, White Widow, and Elephant. While prostitution is legal and regulated (only EU citizens can prostitute themselves, since, as with any other job, a work permit is required), the marijuana trade falls under the curious Dutch classification gedogen, which means “technically illegal but officially tolerated.”
So yes: a crazy place, where you might think the sky would be perennially in danger of falling from the sheer weight of mayhem. And yet, most parts of the city have such a blanket of conventional calm on them, such an utter paucity of craziness, that one might think the only drug consumption in the vicinity was some kind of middle-class sedative. The secret truth about the Dutch is that they are a deeply conservative people, from their relentlessly (and, it must be said, rather tastelessly) manicured gardens to their seemingly insatiable need in the workplace to hold meetings, including meetings whose purpose is to schedule further meetings. The craziness fits into such a culture in a couple of ways: the city is proud of its tradition of tolerance, and there is the logic that says it is better to legalize and regulate activity that will happen anyway. No one claims that the approach has been entirely successful. In the case of both the sex and the soft drug trades, it has long been recognized that being essentially the only place where such products are officially tolerated leads more or less inevitably to the city’s becoming something of a global headquarters for black marketeers.
But if the craziness is true, so is this: Amsterdam is the same size as Columbus, Ohio (that is to say, modest, at 800,000 inhabitants), and it lies on the same latitude as Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (that is to say, remote), yet it has influenced the modern world to a degree that perhaps no other city has, and its imprint on the United States in particular goes to the core of the American identity.
Both of these observations are true for the same reason. Amsterdam is famous for one thing (besides canals, and cannabis cafés, and prostitutes): the tattered, ancient, much-misunderstood word liberalism. Amsterdam is, by most accounts, the most liberal place on earth. It is often laughably liberal or shake-your-head-in-disbelief liberal. In saying this I am using the definition of liberal as synonymous with free, open, and permissive. But the word has another, deeper and higher meaning, which is in fact related to the other.
Liberal, of course, comes from liber, the Latin word for free, which also underlies liberty, libertarian, and libertine. Liberal is one of those words that through history have been mercilessly pulled in various directions. Its first known appearance in written English is in the Wycliffe translation of the Bible, circa 1384, where a passage from 2 Maccabees (part of the biblical Apocrypha in many traditions) says the people of Tyre were “most liberal” in permitting the burial of men who had been unjustly put to death. Here, John Wycliffe, the medieval Church reformer who prefigured the movement to make the Bible available in common tongues, translated dutifully from the Latin liberalissimi, but the word was already in English at the time. Chaucer uses it repeatedly, generally to mean abundant, as in “youre liberal grace & mercy.”
From early on it had both low and high associations. In Othello, Shakespeare’s Emilia, defying her husband, Iago, who has ordered her to be silent (and who is about to murder her), cries, “No, I will speak as liberal as the north,” that is, with wildness and abandon, the way the north wind blows. In Henry VI, Part 3, Shakespeare uses the word to mean generous:
In them I trust; for they are soldiers,
Witty, courteous, liberal, full of spirit.
And he even referred to “the liberal arts,” using the term in something like the way we would today. It a
lso came to mean physically large, as in “her liberall brest” or “One big fat man, with a stack of chins on his shirt front and a pair of pince-nez eye-glasses awry on his liberal nose.”
A difficulty that the word suffers from today is that it has seemingly opposite meanings in the United States and in Europe. That is because its root meaning—free—can apply to very different things. The nineteenth-century Europeans who took to using liberalism as a term for their politics were businessmen who wanted freedom from tariffs—that is, limited government involvement in public affairs. In the United States, it was more vigorously and specifically applied to social causes and individual freedoms and so meant more government involvement to enforce those freedoms. The free-market platform of the Dutch Liberal Party would thus be considered more or less the opposite of liberal in an American context.
Add the -ism to the word and it becomes something broader still, an umbrella of grand ideas each of which ties to other, no less grand concepts. The pedigree of liberalism in English is not so ancient. It first pops up in 1816 in the Morning Chronicle (the London newspaper best remembered for publishing Charles Dickens’s early works), in an article about the King of Spain’s condemning “fifteen persons accused of the crime of liberalism” to “hard labour, banishment, &c.” The King of Spain’s usage relates to the political sense of the word and the idea of individuals being free to choose their government. So liberalism is closely associated with democracy. It also has an economic meaning, according to which capitalists claim that a basic component of individual rights is the right to own property.
What all uses of liberalism go back to is the centrality of the individual. In this sense—the sense I will employ in this book—the word describes a fault line between the modern and the medieval: it represents our break with the Middle Ages and from the philosophy that has knowledge and power centered on received wisdom from the Church and the monarchy.
Historically, then, liberalism involves a commitment to individual freedom and individual rights, and not just for oneself but for everyone, every human being who breathes the air. And liberalism’s roots are intertwined with those of Amsterdam. It might be possible to go further, and say that liberalism was born in Amsterdam. Of course, a statement like that can be attacked. I’ll attack it myself. Liberalism is a diffuse concept comprising a number of equally diffuse ideas—about justice, ethics, private property, and so on. It can no more be pinpointed to a particular place than oxygen can. A list of the indisputably great theoreticians of liberalism would include John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Jefferson. If we were to be serious about assigning geographic medals, we could give them to Paris, London, and Jefferson’s Monticello estate in the Virginia hills.
All of this is true. Yet ideas have histories and origins; they are embedded in people and their struggles, their bodies, their physical or emotional turmoil, their hunger for new fashions and flavors, their yearnings to be free from whatever they may feel bound by. Psychoanalysis came into being in the genteel drawing rooms of fin de siècle Vienna; jazz was born in the early years of the twentieth century, when waves of black southerners, descendants of slaves, fled Jim Crow oppression and took up new lives in the vigorously industrial cities of the northern United States. Likewise, a remarkable number of forces came together in Amsterdam in the century or so beginning in the late 1500s that would spawn a new way of thinking about people and their relationship to one another and to the state. The story of the city’s golden age is one of history’s classics, on the same level of vividness and import as the story of the American Civil War or the classical period of ancient Greece. The city’s rise was so sudden it startled even those living through it. The elements and individuals that constituted it are iconic, but more than that they are linked: there are natural tendons connecting the founding of the world’s first stock market, the development of secular art with Rembrandt and his contemporaries, the crafting of a groundbreaking official policy of tolerance, the fostering of an atmosphere of intellectual freedom that brought thinkers from all over Europe and that created the world’s most dynamic publishing center, and the physical transformation of the city: the digging of Amsterdam’s famous canals. There is even a case to be made that our modern idea of “home” as an intimate personal space goes back to the Dutch canal houses of this period.
Underlying all these various breakthroughs—conceptual or physical—is the unleashing of the individual, which has its origins in the Protestant Reformation and the first wave of scientific experimentation and which relates too to Amsterdam’s geographic and social conditions. These ingredients went to make up a new kind of place: a breeding ground for liberalism.
These forces coalesced in the mind of a young Amsterdam Jew of the seventeenth century. Probably more than any other major philosopher, Baruch Spinoza is looked to as a guide by serious thinkers today: theologians, computer scientists, philosophers, people who dare to grapple with the really big questions. I think one reason has to do with his being at the epicenter of modernity as the forces of liberalism, and the worldview of thinkers of today, came into being. Just as Shakespeare could only have emerged at his time—after the English language had absorbed the Latin of the High Middle Ages, the medieval French of the Norman invasion, and other influences that made it so richly expressive—so too Spinoza’s revolutionary philosophy, which has influenced modern political thought, ethics, and theology, could arise only in the Amsterdam of the late seventeenth century, after the city had forged its principles of tolerance, of the placement of secular powers over church powers, and of the first truly modern free-trading culture. Spinoza took part in the philosophical debates that raged in coffee shops and bookstores; he was fascinated by public anatomical demonstrations, by the sight of the bending lines of fluyts and yachts beating sail from the harbor toward all points of the globe, by the idea of popular representation. All of this—the fruits of Amsterdam’s fecund, nutritionally rich heyday—was boiled, condensed, and distilled into his philosophy. And from there—as well as from many other sources—it made its way into the wider world.
So while this is a book about a city, it is also about an idea. Amsterdam’s history belongs to all of us, for those of us who live in Western democratic societies—wherever we place ourselves on the political spectrum—are all liberals, who depend on liberalism as a foundation of our lives.
Yet while liberalism is one of our most precious cultural possessions, it can also be overstretched, belittled, squandered. For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much—constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade—that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out.
My weekly bicycle trip in my Amsterdam neighborhood bears out James Baldwin’s observation that “people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.” Frieda Menco’s life is remarkable in part because she survived the greatest overt threat to liberal values that we have ever faced. There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might “go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation”). Eventually, the overwhelming nature of Hitler’s threat brought the liberal heritage more sharply into focus. And victory, the triumph of liberal ideals over totalitarianism, resulted in the world we have inherited. In the postwar period, Amsterdam blossomed in a new, exuberant expression of those ideals—a celebration of them, even—as it became a center both of late-twentieth-century progressivism and of global finance. Indeed, the decades from the 1950s through the 1990s were what some think of as a new golden age, when the city threw off the vestiges of the Dutch Reformed Church and other conservative structures and developed into the twentieth-century version of a liberal capital. It became a laborator
y for new ideas, from gay rights to gay marriage, from free love to free bicycles.
My other regular morning routine—bringing my son to his Moroccan Dutch caregiver and experiencing some of the difficulties her family faces—touches on another side of Amsterdam’s liberal heritage, and another threat to it. But where the Nazi threat to liberalism was clear, this one—which much of the world is facing today—is harder to grapple with. The concept of a mixed society has for a long time been part of the terrain of liberalism. The idea of multiculturalism—meaning a belief that society should actively accommodate and support its cultural minorities—came into being in the 1970s, and the Netherlands, and Amsterdam in particular, led the way. The city not only welcomed non-Western immigrants but paid them to keep up their languages and traditions. Multiculturalism proved to be a failure. It was leading not to a mixed society but to a multiplicity of ghettoized communities living next to but cut off from one another: the very opposite of a “society.” So how, in an increasingly interconnected world, do we integrate and still keep our values? The debate about tolerance relates to the theme of this book: what is the status of liberalism now, how has it been misconstrued or overextended, in what sense is it elemental to Western values, and what is its future?
This may sound like a political essay, but I don’t want it to be. Liberalism is an abstraction but its roots, some of them anyway, can be located in a real place—the city in which I happen to live. The past impresses itself on you in all sorts of ways as you move through Amsterdam. There is the inexpressible, soft-heavy sadness that the sight of gulls careening above a medieval canal in gray weather can summon. There is the mysterious pleasure you feel climbing into the attic of the former West India Company warehouse, where clotted old beams still mildly reek of the tobacco leaves that were packed into the space four centuries ago, an odor that evokes the exploitation and unfathomable adventure that brought our world into being.
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