Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  But the deepest roots are not to be found in city streets. Liberalism comes down to individual freedom and thus to the importance of the individual human being. So this book is about people. Some of the personalities who fill its pages—Rembrandt, Spinoza, Anne Frank—are world famous. The lives of these world-historic individuals revolve around the theme; liberal is what they all have in common—that, and Amsterdam. Other people whose lives are central to this book are not so famous. The names Wouter Jacobszoon, Catalina Trico, Geertje Dircx, and Frieda Menco may not be well known, but the lives of these people are also bound up with Amsterdam and its liberalisms. And because I couldn’t seem to avoid it, in a small way the book also traces the path of an American writer who came to call this city home.

  CHAPTER

  2

  THE WATER PROBLEM

  It was May 1971, and the sun was shining on the oily green surface of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal, one of the most ancient canals in Amsterdam’s medieval center. Kiki Amsberg, a thirty-two-year-old journalist for Dutch public radio, was walking, bell-bottomed and tie-dyed, along the canal with her husband. They paused before a grand four-story brick house that dated from the early seventeenth century. Upstairs was an apartment for rent.

  It was, of course, a time of freedom: of expression, from authority. In many ways it was a time of fallout from battles over freedom and the excesses of freedom—fallout from the sixties. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix had recently died. The New York Times, citing the principles of freedom of information and society’s right to know what its government was doing, was about to publish the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military’s secret history of the war in Vietnam. Antiwar demonstrations were unfurling across college campuses in the United States and around the world.

  Amsterdam in 1971 was two cities. Its bones and its guts were still of the postwar era: it was a conservative, religious (Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish), working-class, keep-your-head-down kind of place. Much of the city center had remained as it had been during World War II, its ancient canal houses boarded up and unused. At the same time the postwar fever for freedom had hit Amsterdam with unique force, and Kiki Amsberg had been in the middle of things: miniskirts, peace signs, antinuclear rallies. The city’s role in it all seemed to be cemented when John Lennon and Yoko Ono held their “bed-in” at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel, which so captivated Kiki and her husband that they staged their own bed-in. The philosophical center was the Provo movement (as in “provoke”), which used nonviolent means to taunt the authorities. Its magazine outlined the Provo demographic in a way that gives a toothsome feel for the city’s counterculture. The magazine’s first issue proclaimed that it was for “anarchists, provos, beatniks, pleiners, scissors-grinders, jailbirds, simple simon stylites, magicians, pacifists, charlatans, philosophers, germ-carriers, grand masters of the queen’s horse, happeners, vegetarians, syndicalists, hustlers, pyromaniacs, santy clauses, kindergarten teachers, and don’t forget the secret police.”

  Shortly after Kiki Amsberg and her husband, Nic Brink, a drama teacher, moved into their apartment, they learned the building had been put up for sale. They were upset because they had just put money into it: they had installed heating, relocated the toilet, which had been placed, tenement style, right beside the kitchen, and added an attic window. When the real estate broker suggested they buy the place, they scoffed. “We were leftists,” she said. “We were against authority and ownership. Buying real estate was for patsers.” (The word doesn’t translate well, but “establishment assholes” gets close.)

  On reflection, though, they decided that their reason for being there was to be part of the takeover and revitalization of the city center, so having a stake in it made sense. Besides, real estate was cheap; even with their small salaries they were able to get a loan to buy both the large town house and the small achterhuis, or back house, that adjoined it, in which a family was already living.

  Kiki’s life played out in the building. Her daughter was born a year later. She joined in antiwar demonstrations and protests to stop the city’s planned demolition of much of the city center. She campaigned for urban greenery and won a battle to have a small dock, with two park benches, placed along the canal in front of the house.

  As a journalist, she covered the story of the evolution of liberalism in her city. There was the “white bicycle” experiment, in which the city provided free bicycles to be used by anyone, without restrictions. There was the actie tomaat (“tomato action”), in which students threw tomatoes at actors during plays as a way to call for a more socially engaged theater. Kiki began interviewing feminist leaders from the United States and around Europe (Nancy Friday, Kate Millett, Nancy Chodorow, and others) and in 1982 coauthored a book, Thinking About Love and Power, that was the top nonfiction best seller in the Netherlands for six months. It shook up what had been (and in many ways remains) a very traditional society when it comes to the role of women. Meanwhile Kiki’s personal thoughts on love and power played a part in the breakup of her marriage.

  As the 1980s and 1990s rolled along, the city center gentrified. The fires of leftist liberalism dimmed. Pleasure boats became commonplace on the canals. And real estate prices shot up dramatically. Kiki took to renting out the first two floors of her house.

  In 2008, when I was beginning research on this book, I became one of her tenants. I needed a transitional home, one that would serve as a refuge and pondering point, for I was in the middle of a divorce and my wife was planning to return to the United States with our two daughters. So while I spent a great deal of time pacing the ancient floorboards of the second-floor apartment of Kiki’s house, more of that time involved marveling at the ridiculousness of my own life than considering the history of Amsterdam. It was, however, an excellent locale for either activity. The apartment overlooked the canal; a snapshot taken from the living room window would make a salable postcard. It was a view that contained several of the classic elements of the city’s charm. There was the trough of languid water, the little boats moored to the quay, the row of tilting gabled buildings on the opposite bank, and, on any given day, a couple dozen bicycles chained to the railing of the humpbacked bridge.

  One day, while researching a sixteenth-century Augustinian prior named Wouter Jacobszoon, who wrote one of the first diaries in the Dutch language, in which he chronicled the pivotal moment in Amsterdam’s rise to greatness, I suddenly realized that Brother Jacobszoon’s home had been the Sint-Agnieten Convent. Next door to Kiki Amsberg’s house is the Sint-Agnieten Chapel, which is all that remains of a religious complex that dates to 1397. Or not quite all that remains: the convent, at its height, encompassed much of the block, including the land on which Kiki’s house now stood. While the convent was disbanded after 1578, and Kiki’s house dates to about 1620, dendrochronology tests reveal that some of her house’s beams were cut in the early 1500s, so that they were most likely recycled from the convent. That is to say, what I realized was that Brother Jacobszoon had lived right next door. He had looked out in the same direction across the same canal as me. From this same vantage, then, Kiki Amsberg witnessed the high (and low) point of liberal expression, late-twentieth-century style, and, four centuries earlier, Brother Jacobszoon experienced the beginning stage of liberalism in its broader and deeper meaning. I was living at a place where Amsterdam’s—and for that matter the world’s—two liberalisms converge.

  It was not an auspicious beginning to the city’s rise that the monk observed. He witnessed such horror he was convinced the maw of hell was opening up to swallow the city. The spiraling chaos compelled him to put quill to paper. His journal is remarkable in being unusually personal for writings of its time; it gives an intimate perspective on what it felt like to be caught between the tectonic plates of shifting historical forces.

  Mostly, the monk felt terror. He was not a native of Amsterdam—in fact, he had only arrived in the city a month before, traveling through a landscape of war. He was a man of fifty who had spent most of his
life in the Augustinian monastery of Stein, near the little cheese-making city of Gouda. He had become the prior of that monastery twenty-two years earlier. His long service in that post, and the style of his diary, suggests that he was a man of duty and routine—not a great thinker or visionary, and certainly not an adventurer, though he was an acute observer. His diary seems to have been written as part of the practice of Augustinian monks to record their observations during meditation.

  War—sharply sectarian war—had reached Gouda the month before, making the city unsafe for those in Catholic orders, and the monk had made his way to Amsterdam, where he found refuge among the nuns of the Sint-Agnieten Convent and began serving as assistant to the rector.

  But mayhem followed him into the city. Brother Jacobszoon spent his nights in his new home lying awake in his cell. He worried over the ominous reverberations of what sounded like distant drums but were in fact the thrum of artillery. From the window he saw fires burning on the horizon. People with nowhere else to go took to living in the streets; as winter set in, they froze to death. A woman was found dead in a ditch with her baby still suckling at her breast. “We only hear talk of robbing, murder, arson, and hangings,” Brother Jacobszoon wrote. He believed that Judgment Day was near.

  The pitch of terror rose. Young men roved in gangs. People were impaled, drowned, beheaded. Marauders targeted priests and nuns in particular: stripped them naked, paraded and humiliated them, tortured them, killed them. The body of a priest was found with the genitals hacked off. “Who wouldn’t be reduced to screaming, crying, and howling?” the monk wrote, perhaps in commiseration with his Catholic brethren or maybe to excuse his own behavior.

  If we could pull up and away from the Sint-Agnieten Convent in the year 1572, we would see masses of people, desperate to escape, thronging around the Regulierspoort, the nearby gate in the medieval city wall (the gatehouse still exists in my Amsterdam, and houses a pretty shop selling blue-and-white delftware). As we traveled over and beyond the city wall, we would see corpses swinging from trees along the main roads. Farther afield, the marauding patrols would give way to phalanxes of soldiers in proper armor, wearing the distinctively curved helmets of the Spanish army and shouldering pikes and matchlock muskets.

  Pulling back farther still would reveal events unfolding as if on a war-gaming map. For Europe in 1572 was indeed a battlefield, the Dutch provinces were central pieces in a geopolitical power struggle, and the city of Amsterdam was a fulcrum on which an age would ultimately turn.

  To appreciate the fulcrum and the monk’s horror—the horror of the Catholic citizens of Amsterdam in the late sixteenth century—requires taking another step back in time.

  In the family of European capitals, Amsterdam is one of the younger siblings. Even if we set aside Romulus and Remus, archaeological evidence suggests that Rome started with herders and farmers settling the cluster of hills along the Tiber around 900 BC. Athens goes back staggeringly farther than that, into the Neolithic predawn. Amsterdam, by contrast, with its inhospitable geographic position discouraging human settlement, began life circa AD 1100, when, in an effort to stop the sea from remaking the shoreline every year, a few hundred farmers set to heaping up earthen dikes along the edge of the marshy wilderness they had chosen to call home.

  Indeed, early humans, in their migratory roaming, sensibly stepped around the whole corner of Europe known as the Low Countries. Looking at the planet not from the perspective of human beings but merely in terms of its own processes, one might say that this region was meant to be purely for drainage purposes, for what is today the Netherlands is one vast river delta. Three of northern Europe’s largest rivers—the Rhine, the Meuse, or Maas, and the Scheldt—having variously swept down from the Swiss Alps, rolled across German plains, and twisted through northern France and the forests of the Ardennes in Belgium, reach here to meet the sea. In its natural course, this drainage is a complex process that keeps the boundary between land and sea constantly shifting. Starting around AD 1000, the early inhabitants of what became the province of Holland began to interfere with nature. The peaty land was good for farming, provided the peat—which is essentially spongy decayed plant material—could be drained. The inhabitants built up dikes to keep out the sea, then cut channels in the peat bogs, which allowed the water contained in them to flow down into rivers. That strategy led to further difficulties, since once the peat loses its water it begins to sink. Eventually the peat level falls below the water level, whereupon the land is once again in danger of flooding, which necessitates more dikes as well as pumps. Medieval Hollanders—and their neighbors in Zeeland to the south and Friesland to the north—thus set off a never-ending struggle against nature, one that continues today. This—the water, the perils, the bravery, the absurdity of the geographic position, and the development of complex communal organizations to cope with the situation—explains much of Amsterdam’s history and provides as well a backdrop to the development of liberalism.

  The Dutch writer Matthijs van Boxsel gives his perspective on this history in an idiosyncratic book called The Encyclopedia of Stupidity, in which he characterizes the historical predicament of the Dutch and their battle with water in terms he makes clear in the title. I don’t exactly agree that “stupidity” is the right word, but I do find it compelling that he and other Dutch writers see the historic struggle against water as formative to a cultural ethic of cooperation that created a society strong enough for it to impel, curiously, a commitment to value the individual.

  But I wouldn’t stop there. I think we can see the position of the Dutch—and of Amsterdam in particular—as mirroring the wider situation of the Western world. We have all by now mirrored this “stupidity”: we’ve used up resources, jerry-rigged our environment, gotten ourselves into a place where we value individualism and yet need vitally to cooperate. We demand our personal freedom but we have to work together. So perhaps this is a working hypothesis to keep in mind as we explore the foundations of liberalism: individualism, as a theory and an ideal, is related to extreme conditions and, seemingly paradoxically, to the need to band together.

  Sometime after the year 1200, then, in order to control flooding, the inhabitants of a region of marshy soil at a juncture of two bodies of water—the spot where a river flowed into a vast bay that connected with the North Sea, fifty-odd miles away—built a dam on the Amstel River. The dam would ever after mark the center of the city, and it gave the community a name: Amstelredamme.

  Perched on the far northwestern flank of the Continent, soaked by rains, beaten by winds, ravaged by tidal currents, it was destined to remain a distinctly minor urban hub, home to farmers who grew barley and rye to make their porridge and bread and to fishermen who caught pike, eel, and carp in the marshy inlets, all of them living in wooden huts with straw roofs and clay floors sloped to let rainwater flow through rather than puddle. Even among other cities of the Dutch provinces it was a, well, backwater. In part because of the rivers connecting Germany and central Europe to the North Sea, other cities had long held a certain strategic importance. Utrecht was the bishopric of the region; Nijmegen and Maastricht to the east had been population centers since the Roman era.

  But in the year 1345 a miraculous change overtook Amsterdam. The adjective should be taken literally, for on a frigid Tuesday night before Palm Sunday in that year, the ordinary circumstance of an old man quietly dying at home took a strange turn. Shortly after the man was given the sacrament of Holy Communion, he vomited, and the women who were attending him were confounded to see that the Eucharist reemerged from his mouth whole. They threw the vomit on the fire, presumably reasoning that flames offered the least sacrilegious way of disposing of its holy contents, but, lo, the host did not burn. The town’s clergymen processed to the church bearing the wondrous wafer—which seemingly behaved with a supernaturalness akin to the body of Christ that Catholics believed the Eucharist to be—and a miracle was declared. An imposing church was built on the site of the man’s house, a
nd when it later burned to the ground, not once but twice, and each time the host survived the fire, the “miracle of Amsterdam” became a medieval phenomenon.

  If you were to look at a typical map of Europe circa 1400, you would probably find it traversed by inexplicable meandering lines, which in turn would probably be the most intelligible thing about the map to a person of the time—for holy pilgrimages held more meaning than latitude and longitude (the latter of which of course did not exist then). People did not do the Grand Tour; they didn’t see the sights or travel for the experience of foreignness. They sought out holy places in search of relief for their suffering and forgiveness of their sins. The rocky hillocks of Wales were dotted with markers guiding the way to Shrewsbury and Llandderfel. The shrine of the murdered saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury was the obvious goal of English pilgrims. People believed that walking prescribed routes to Jerusalem and the holy city of Santiago de Compostela absolved virtually any sin.

  The miracle of Amsterdam put the city on the map. The miracle became the subject of religious art, with all the elements—the berobed old man ejecting the contents of his stomach into a vessel, the attendant women, angels gathered around the fire, the glowing host—committed to paint, ink, and bronze. According to one story, the city’s popularity ratcheted up to another level following a celebrity cure: Maximilian of Austria, the ailing son of the Holy Roman emperor and himself a future emperor, arrived at the shrine as a pilgrim in 1489 and was healed.

  Thousands came from all over the Continent, bearing their sick. Into the city they streamed, via a street that became known as the Holy Way. Today the outer portion of the street, called Overtoom, is a gritty, Broadway-like stretch of drab shops and rental car outlets, but the final block still bears the name Heiligeweg, despite being chockablock with an unholy assembly of jewelry stores and designer shoe shops. The pilgrims turned left onto Kalverstraat (whose name preserves the memory of a cattle market that was held there—today it is the city’s central pedestrian shopping street) and so came to a stop at the shrine that housed the host that had defied the flames. In one of those odd twists of history that defy fiction, the site of the miracle—what was once one of Europe’s holiest spots—is today the home of a hypercheesy tourist attraction called the Amsterdam Dungeon. The pilgrimage itself—after being banned when the city officially converted to Calvinism in 1578—was reinstated in the late nineteenth century, and now every March several thousand devout Dutch Catholics make an all-night procession around central Amsterdam.