Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  Indeed, in Amsterdam, an artist named Robert Jasper Grootveld was already involved in related activities, though on the face of it the connection may have been hard to see. Grootveld’s father was an anarchist who had instilled in his son the evils of the consumerist system. Grootveld focused his attention on the cigarette. Tobacco, he believed, was the root mechanism through which global corporations made slaves of ordinary people. (The fact that he was himself a chain-smoker apparently enhanced his zeal.) In a space near the Leidseplein in the city center that had been donated by a local businessman who liked his message, Grootveld started doing what today would be called performance art. He dressed himself like a kind of mad twentieth-century version of an American Indian, painted his face, and pranced around a fire. Students and others came to watch and participate. Grootveld led them in a chant that went something like “Ugge-ugge-ugge!” It was meant to sound like a smoker’s cough.

  Where Van Duijn was personally shy and bookish, Grootveld was a flamboyant exhibitionist, but there was an overlap in what they believed. The victory of capitalism over Nazism had transformed society in fifteen-odd years into a herd of “despicable plastic people,” as Grootveld said. This was true throughout the West, but in the Netherlands the irony was that the blending of the two strains of liberalism had helped to turn the capitalist-labor conflict, which at least had had some spice in it, into a bland mono-class, all the members of which ended their workday vacantly gazing into the blue light of their televisions, then went to bed dreaming dreams of the products they saw advertised there.

  Van Duijn, the theorist, got his initial inspiration from late-nineteenth-century anarchists, writers like Mikhail Bakunin, but he was disappointed to find their philosophy out-of-date. He got a job at the Amstel brewery, hoping to pick the brains of workers in order to jump-start a proletariat revolution, but learned that they were not interested in revolt. “I realized that the working class and their employers all had the same aim: economic growth, nothing more,” Van Duijn told me. “We thought, we need to look beyond, to a politics of freedom and creativity and playing. So I started looking for which class would support a revolution in society.” He found it, and a new word was coined: provotariat. The provotariat were young people who had come of age since the war, who had no vested interest in the system that had come into being, who saw it as a threat to individualism and creativity, and who wanted to provoke a change of consciousness.

  There is an odd little statue in the middle of the Spui, a public square in central Amsterdam. The skinny bronze image is of a young boy; it’s called Het Lieverdje, “The Little Darling.” It was cast as a monument to Amsterdam’s street urchins and unveiled in 1960 by Mayor Van Hall’s wife. In 1964, after Robert Jasper Grootveld had, on one particularly rambunctious night, burned his antismoking temple to the ground (and been arrested for it), he moved his happenings, as they quickly became known, to the square. The fact that Het Lieverdje had been built with donations from a cigarette company made the statue, for him, the logical new center of his theatrical world. Every Saturday at midnight, beginning in June 1964, Grootveld performed at the statue’s base. First a dozen or so people watched. Eventually the crowd grew into the thousands.

  Roel van Duijn showed up at one of the happenings with copies of an alternative magazine he had typed and printed himself. It was long and skinny, and the cover showed a brick wall with the name scrawled on it graffiti style: Provo. Provo was short for provocation. Van Duijn’s experiences with the authorities reinforced what he and others had already understood: while officially there were such things as civil rights in the Netherlands, in practice the authorities were like the regents who ran the city in the seventeenth century: they could do more or less as they pleased, and they did whatever it took to maintain their society and their power. Such was the case elsewhere, of course. This was precisely the time of the Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama, where state troopers used clubs and tear gas on civil rights marchers. In Amsterdam the reaction to abuse of power had its own local inflection, which had to do with the disconnect between what young people believed to be the Dutch heritage of liberalism and the reality of sometimes brutal police action, including arrests, beatings, and searches without due process. The authorities had to be provoked to show their true nature. That was the thinking behind Provo the magazine and Provo the movement.

  For it quickly became a movement, blending with Grootveld’s happenings. Saturday, midnight: University students gathering around the statue—and he appears, headdress, war paint, a wig, a woman’s fur coat; he dances, starts to sing about the nicotine hell god. The kids laugh, chant: Ugge-ugge. Someone is pounding a drum. And here come the police, slowly rolling in on motorcycles, nightsticks at their sides. Kiki Amsberg, my former landlady, took part along with her husband. They watched from the terrace of Café Hoppe—one of the oldest in the city, dating to the seventeenth century. “We stood there watching and laughing at the police,” she said. “They had no clue how to deal with this. Then suddenly, the police went into action. They turned and went into the crowd and started lashing people with a bullwhip, and people ran in panic.”

  Upstairs at his house, in his tiny library, Roel van Duijn slid something out of a plastic sleeve to show me. It was the first number of Provo, which he had pounded out on his Erika typewriter, dated July 12, 1965. If someone were to compile a top ten list of 1960s artifacts, this first edition of Van Duijn’s homemade rag might well be on it. Its narrow pages are packed with angry, playful, absurdist rant. Van Duijn turned to a page and showed what I had asked to see. In every copy of the first number he had taped a couple of toy gun caps—the little strips of paper with pellets of explosive that make a pop when struck. “Grab a hammer and start the revolution in your own life with a bang!” his text said. “That got me arrested too,” he informed me.

  The authorities did not understand the happenings, which of course was the point. People were beaten and hauled off to prison for such nonoffenses as laying flowers at the foot of the Lieverdje statue. One of the most famous provocations involved a female coconspirator handing out raisins to people in the crowd. She went to jail. Grootveld played other games, too, to provoke the authorities. He scrawled a giant letter K (for cancer) on cigarette posters around the city. He substituted packs of faux-marijuana cigarettes for regular ones in Automat machines. He invented something called the Marihuette game, one version of which involved having participants in his happenings roll cigarettes that contained something other than marijuana or tobacco and smoking them in front of policemen; the objective was to get arrested for doing something legal.

  While Grootveld ran the show and drew crowds, Van Duijn sought ways to harness the energy. Provo announced a series of “white” initiatives. The most famous was the White Bicycle plan. The automobile having been declared tobacco’s demon twin, Provo decreed that the city of Amsterdam should banish cars and make a fleet of white bicycles freely available to all who wanted to use them. They would be available, unlocked, at points around the city; residents would hop on one, ride it to their destination, and leave it there for the next person. The Provos purchased the first fifty, painted them white, and presented them to the city. Whereupon the police confiscated them.

  As a pointed follow-up, the Provos declared their White Chicken plan. Kip (chicken) was Dutch slang for a police officer; the plan called on the city to make the police into true servants of society by providing them with supplies of condoms, Band-Aids, and fried chicken drumsticks to distribute on their rounds. (The White Chicken plan did not fly.)

  By the summer of 1965 the Provo phenomenon dominated Dutch news. Provo declared Amsterdam “the Magic Center,” the place from which a new consciousness would come into being. And Spui Square was the center of the Magic Center. Curiously enough, the square sits just in front of the Begijnhof, a little courtyard nunnery that dates to the period of the city’s first fame, in the aftermath of the so-called miracle of Amsterdam, so that testaments to the two pe
riods of the city’s international renown—medieval piety and flower-power revolt—stand side by side.

  The crowds at the happenings had by now grown exponentially. “Youngsters started to show up in Amsterdam from other parts of the country,” Van Duijn said. “All of a sudden they had long hair. It was so surprising to see. This was 1965—you didn’t see this sort of thing in Berlin or Paris until 1967. It still surprises me, because after all there were only ten or twelve of us doing this.”

  As the happenings swelled and the international press swept in to report on the curious youth movement under way in Amsterdam, the participants—who included members of the still small antiwar and anti–atom bomb movements as well as anarchists, beatniks, artists, and droves of generally disaffected young people—were more vigorously attacked by the authorities. Some spent a month or more in prison for nonexistent offenses. The police violence led the Provos to focus their attention on the mayor. “Van Hall ten val!”—Bring down Van Hall!—became a Saturday night chant. Steadily, Gijs van Hall, the hero of the resistance, was sucked into a cross-generational vortex.

  No one knew at the time that Van Hall was to some extent caught in the middle; like Amsterdam officials of earlier centuries, he was trying to mediate between free expression in his city and distant superiors—in this case the national government in The Hague—who wanted the nonsense to end. And few of the young people knew or cared about Van Hall’s valiant past. “In fact, he was a brave man,” Van Duijn told me as we chatted in his apartment. “But I didn’t know this then. I didn’t know his part in the resistance. It was probably good that I didn’t know because then I would have had respect for him. And the fact was, as mayor, he was patronizing, he considered us to be evil, trash. He was like the father and he wanted us to shut up.”

  One of Robert Jasper Grootveld’s chants was Klaas komt! Klaas is Dutch for Saint Nicholas, the forerunner of the modern Santa Claus, who has his own holiday in the Netherlands. “Klaas is coming!” started appearing as graffiti around the city. It prophesied, apparently, that the end of the corrupt establishment was at hand and a time of peace and love and magic would soon follow. The crowds loved the chant, and may have believed it, but people were stunned when Klaas actually did arrive. In 1966 young Princess Beatrix announced she was marrying. Her fiancé was Claus von Amsberg, a German nobleman who had been in the Hitler Youth and served briefly in the Nazi army during the war. Grootveld’s happy-times prediction seemed to flip upside down. Provos considered the Dutch monarchy the epitome of the reactionary old guard; that the princess was going to marry a onetime member of the occupying power, and that his name collided with that of their supposed magical savior, was a provocation of the Provos. Something had to be done.

  The White Rumor plan went into effect as the royal wedding neared. People heard that the Provos were going to put LSD in the drinking water prior to the ceremony; they were going to spread lion dung along the parade route to make police horses bolt. The wedding was going to showcase Amsterdam, and the Netherlands, to the world. Mayor Van Hall and the authorities in The Hague couldn’t afford trouble. They lined the route with twenty-five thousand police officers.

  There were also rumors of Provo bombs being set off. These rumors turned out to be true, but they were smoke bombs. Many of the police were from outside the city; in the confusion, and with their edginess, as white plumes of smoke went up they started clubbing people seemingly at random. The pictures on TV were less of the royal couple in their gilded coach than of street chaos.

  The wedding marked a turning point in the Provo movement: a critical mass of Amsterdammers in effect joined Provo. Many had understood the feelings of anger at the idea of the wedding in a city that had suffered so much at the hands of the Germans. Eighteen city council members had voted to boycott the ceremony. Now on television people saw the official overreaction.

  Gijs van Hall—who had been considered a tyrannical beast by the Provos and a timid nonleader by officials in The Hague—was forced out of office soon after the wedding. With him went the old order. In a flash, Provo had won a strange kind of respect. “There came a breakthrough,” Van Duijn told me. “People started to get the joke. The smoke bombs were not to hurt anybody but to make the TV picture go white so people couldn’t see the royal wedding. They understood the nature of Provo. Suddenly we were getting invitations to speak, in London, in Paris, in Prague. I gave a lecture in Ljubljana on Provo and ecology. It started to spread.”

  It spread most decisively in Amsterdam itself. Historian Hans Righart calls 1966 the rampjaar, the disaster year, echoing the term for 1672, when war brought the golden age crashing down. In the rampjaar of 1966, Provos won five seats on the city council. One of the nation’s still existing political parties, D66 (as in “Democrats 1966”), came into being on a platform to bring a truer form of democracy. Every institution felt its foundations tremble. Journalism had previously been staid and self-stifled; seemingly overnight, it changed, became aggressive, investigative.

  The decade culminated in Amsterdam with two events in the spring of 1969, one that shook the city internally while the other rebranded Amsterdam globally as the liberal capital of the world. The first began with students of the University of Amsterdam demanding a say in all university matters; when the president rejected the demand, seven hundred students staged a sit-in at the Maagdenhuis, the central administrative building of the university (which happened to sit directly opposite the Lieverdje statue). As was the case with similar sit-ins elsewhere, the action brought home to many the starkness of the generational divide.

  The second event took place in Suite 902 of the Amsterdam Hilton. In the three years since the wedding of Beatrix and her German beau, the rest of the world had caught up with Provo Amsterdam. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the My Lai massacre, and the crushing of the Prague Spring had shaken the foundations of things. The Summer of Love had come and gone. The Beatles had produced Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, and the so-called White Album.

  Beatles fans started to get nervous when John Lennon diverted his attention away from the group to focus on atonal musical projects with Yoko Ono. After their marriage in Gibraltar, in March 1969, John and Yoko began their honeymoon in Paris, where they had lunch with Salvador Dalí (they played a screechy song for him, and he turned the tables by biting the head off a grilled bird) and met a Dutch record producer named Hans Boskamp. Vietnam, war, and peace were on their minds; they wanted to harness the international media attention their wedding had attracted. Boskamp suggested that Amsterdam, the city of Provo and the happenings, was the place to demonstrate. “That’s a good idea,” Boskamp remembered Lennon saying. “You look for a good hotel and we will do the rest.” So Lennon and Ono hopped in their white Rolls-Royce and drove to Amsterdam.

  From March 25 to 31, they occupied a suite at the Amsterdam Hilton. They taped handmade posters to the windows—BED PEACE, said one; HAIR PEACE, said another—and announced that a happening was going to happen in their bed. Whereupon the Amsterdam police, fearing this might involve a public display of lovemaking, issued a notice: “If people are invited to such a ‘happening,’ the police would certainly act.”

  But that wasn’t the plan. Instead, John and Yoko reinvented the sit-in by stitching it to the honeymoon concept and inviting the world press corps. Jan Donkers, then a young correspondent for VPRO radio who would go on to become a renowned Dutch pop journalist, remembered getting a call from someone at EMI Records: “We told them we had a radio program every Friday evening. Could we broadcast live from their bedroom for a whole hour? They said yes! Incredible.” Thus Donkers found himself not quite in bed but sitting on the bed with the newlyweds. In his answers, Lennon said the bed-in concept was “the most effectual way of promoting peace that we could think of.” But people didn’t seem to want to dwell on Vietnam. A listener asked if Lennon had seen the musical Hair. “I thought it was crap, but I thought the idea was
all right,” Lennon replied. “We walked out after the nude bit.” Someone else asked, “At what frequency are you vibrating in Amsterdam right now?” He shot back breezily, “Oh, about two million frequencies per second. Watch out!” Donkers told me his main impressions during the hour were of how insistent Ono was to be heard and how relaxed and funny Lennon was. Lennon held himself back while Ono gave a long, windy statement about peace and cosmic energy; he waited a beat and said with his Liverpool twang, “She’s foreign, you know.”

  A month later, Lennon enshrined it all in the lyrics of “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” which the Beatles released as a single a month after that:

  Drove from Paris to the Amsterdam Hilton,

  Talking in our beds for a week.…

  The bed-in, which brought journalists from all over the globe, didn’t do much for world peace but it may have been just the thing to cement Amsterdam’s reputation as the center of the new liberalism. The energy of the 1960s got fused into the city even as the decade itself was passing. By the time John and Yoko checked in to the Hilton, the Provo movement was already officially dead. Provo’s purpose had been to irritate the establishment. By 1967 both the police commissioner and the mayor had lost their jobs amid controversy over their handling of the provocations, leaving the Provos bereft of their antagonists, and, as a kiss of death, some establishment types were now signing on to the Provo program. (After a former government minister openly offered his support, Van Duijn said that if the minister had really wanted to support the movement he would have cracked down on it.) The leaders held a meeting to dissolve Provo. Within months after the bed-in, meanwhile, Paul McCartney announced that the Beatles were breaking up and everyone turned the page on their wall calendars. The 1960s were over.