Murder in Amsterdam

by Ian Buruma

  Van Heutsz was not a random target. In a country with no war heroes to speak of since the seventeenth century, when Admirals Tromp and De Ruyter defeated the British fleet, Van Heutsz was regarded as a hero in the second decade of the twentieth century for crushing Muslim resistance against Dutch colonial rule in Atjeh. He accomplished this feat with extraordinary brutality. Women and children were executed, and countless people tortured. The Dutch war against the Atjeh jihadis cost more than a hundred thousand lives. Nonetheless, a large monument was erected in 1935, designed by a Communist sculptor. The NSB was happy to pay tribute to a true Dutch hero. Van Heutsz’s son, J. B. van Heutsz, Jr., later joined the SS.

  The monument was attacked by the Provos just as the veil over the dark side of Dutch history was beginning to be lifted. The first serious study of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, J. Presser’s The Downfall, was published in 1965. My history teacher, an amiable storyteller much loved by his pupils, happened to have been a former NSBer. It was odd, thinking back, that so little was made of this. After all, where I lived, everyone knew that one didn’t buy meat from a certain butcher, since the old man had been “wrong” during the war, or cigarettes from the lady who had had a German lover. We had no idea whether these allegations were true. But we still shunned these people, as though their tainted pasts were contagious.

  Dear Mr. Veenhoven, at any rate, didn’t teach us Nazi propaganda, so far as I can remember. But when the socialist television channel (pillars were tottering, but still alive) broadcast a program about the “excesses” of Dutch soldiers in their futile but bloody attempt to crush Indonesian independence, our teacher could not contain his rage. In class the next morning, he fumed against the program’s producers: “Those red traitors …” Now Veenhoven was a somewhat unusual man, but he was by no means alone in his reaction. And this was in 1969, five years after Zo is het and the beginning of Provo.

  Then again, where Theo van Gogh and I grew up, things did tend to happen late. Provo was really an Amsterdam phenomenon. Harry Mulisch, the famous novelist, who wrote a book about Provo, even described it as an Amsterdam revolt against the provinces. While the long-haired kids in white jeans were attacking the Van Heutsz monument, while the students of Paris barricaded the Left Bank, while Prague had its Spring, and everyone, from London to Tokyo, was protesting against the Vietnam War, we too held a demonstration in our schoolyard. The headmaster, a very conservative gentleman, had, after careful consideration and due consultation with the parents, decided that the nineteenth-century spelling of our school’s name should be updated. Nederlandsch Lyceum would henceforth be simplified to Nederlands Lyceum. This, for us pupils of this venerable institution, was a step too far. And so we stood firm, in our blazers and pearls and Hermès scarves, shouting in brave defiance: “Nederlandsch, Nederlandsch, S–C–H … S–C–H … S–C–H!”

  And still the war cast its pall everywhere—everywhere, that is, except in our history class, or perhaps even there, because of what was left unsaid. The war was not just reflected in the absurd invective of hate-mail writers. Provo was under the same spell. And so were other dissidents in the land of the regenten. Amsterdam was run by a city council dominated by nice Social Democrats. The mayor, who would preside over the royal wedding, was a member of the PVDA. But when the Amsterdam police charged into demonstrators with truncheons, they were jeered as the “Orange SS,” or, in the words of Harry Mulisch, the “Gestapo in clogs.” Claus von Amsberg, the prince-to-be, a man of known liberal disposition, was greeted by crowds of young protesters shouting “Clauschwitz.”

  It was as if the postwar generation needed to make up for the failure of their parents. The sons and daughters of those who had been unable to prevent a hundred thousand Jews from being singled out for murder would fight the new dictators, the Orange SS, the Gestapo in clogs, the German diplomat who had joined the Hitler Youth as a child. There was something pathetic about this belated show of resistance, but also telling. The nation of Anne Frank had not come to terms with its recent and most dramatic past, not with the German occupation, and not with what happened in Indonesia either. The suggestion that the regenten who governed the Netherlands, let alone Amsterdam, were in any way comparable to the Nazis was typical of this. It was doubly unfortunate, for using the Occupation as a polemical tool was a distortion that not only diminished the importance of historical guilt, but also of the bravery of those who did risk their lives to help strangers.

  3.

  A Saturday afternoon, sometime in the early 1990s. My friend Hans had got us two tickets for the Ajax-Feyenoord game at the old Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam. This was always an event fraught with mob emotion, even violence. Amsterdam versus Rotterdam; the capital against “the peasants”; the city of arts and culture against the city of honest toilers; Mokum, the erstwhile Jewish city, against the Dutch salt of the earth. These are the clichés in which urban rivalries trade.

  Soccer partisanship is often rooted in ethnicity. Many European capitals—Berlin, Budapest, London, Vienna—had clubs that were once associated with a Jewish following, and these legacies die hard, even when there is no more factual basis for them. Ajax had had a fair number of Jewish members before the war, but most of them were killed. There were a few Jewish Ajax players after the war, but not enough to make a difference. Nonetheless, just as postwar Amsterdam still had several Jewish mayors, Ajax still had Jewish owners, at least some of the time. The phantom of Mokum still haunts the city, and has been given a strange new lease on life in the soccer stadium.

  After Provo and the first critical discussions of the Holocaust, to be Jewish in some Dutch circles became rather chic. At least until the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel was widely admired. And Israelis still warmed their hearts with the myth of the gallant Dutch who stood up for the Jews in their darkest hour, of the doughty Amsterdam workers who, uniquely in occupied Europe, went on strike in protest against the Jewish deportations. The strike had indeed taken place, in February 1941. It was inspiring, even though it did no good. At a time, decades later, when people would rather not think about the past at all, it could still produce a spark of pride.

  This spark went into the mystique of the great Ajax teams of the 1970s. Something in the freedom of their play, the swagger of their “total football,” was attributed to the urban myth of Mokum. The fans from rival cities sensed this and began to refer to Ajax as “the Jews,” or rather “the rotten Jews,” “the cancer Jews,” “the filthy Jews.” This had little or nothing to do with ancestry, or with the war. Every supporter of the “Jew club” had to be a “Jew.” Things began to escalate from there. The more supporters from Rotterdam, Utrecht, or The Hague cried “Jew!” the more the myth of Mokum, and by extension Israel, was evoked. By the 1980s, Ajax fans turned up in their stadium wrapped in Stars of David and the Israeli flag.

  When Hans and I arrived at the Olympic Stadium, it was soon clear that a terrible mistake had been made. Hans was an Ajax supporter, but through some unfortunate error our tickets put us in the middle of the Feyenoord block. This meant that we had better keep our heads down. Things were already getting heated at the gates. Cops on horseback tried to keep the supporters in line with truncheons and sticks. Thousands of men, rowdy from drinking beer since the early morning, had to be pressed through one tiny gate. “Fucking Jews!” they shouted as they were being herded toward the stands.

  “Fucking Jews!” they went again every time an Ajax player touched the ball, even if he was a black Surinamese. “Cancer Jew!” they shouted when the blond referee from the northern province of Friesland whistled for a Feyenoord foul. And then I heard it for the first time, a sinister hissing sound from hundreds, maybe thousands, of beerflecked mouths. I didn’t know what it meant, until Hans explained it. The sound got louder: the sound of escaping gas. In Budapest soccer stadiums, players of a side owned by a Jewish businessman were greeted by rival supporters shouting: “The trains to Auschwitz are ready!” In the Olympic Stadium of Amsterdam, the fans wer
e a touch more inventive.

  4.

  When he was thirteen, Theo van Gogh was taken, much against his will, to a cemetery in Overveen, a place in the dunes on the North Sea, where the Germans took their political prisoners to be executed. Commemorating the war dead on May 4, an annual Dutch ritual, had always filled him with embarrassment, perhaps even disgust, for these occasions reduced his father to tears. The only person who could talk to Theo about the war without causing embarrassment was his maternal grandfather, whom he adored. Theo visited him many times in the hospital before the old man died in 1967. The trip to Overveen, however, turned out to be meaningful after all. For there among the names of the resisters was that of his uncle Theo, which impressed him deeply. Soon he was reading everything he could about the war.

  He also became increasingly hard to handle. Theo always was an eccentric child. Standing in the garden giving loud speeches to “my fellow countrymen” was certainly odd. And making a short film on 8mm of his friends eating excrement (simulated by pulped gingersnaps) was mildly unusual. But his desire to shock, to stir things up in the sleepy suburbs, escalated. When he set off firecrackers in the classroom, he was forced to find another school.

  Much had changed even in the four years since I had left school in The Hague. And not everything Theo did was designed to outrage. He ran a helpline for classmates who had bad trips on LSD. This turned into a battle of wills with his headmaster. Theo refused to back down. At home, he argued endlessly with his parents, dominated every conversation, smashed the neighbors’ windows, and drank his father’s best wines in all-night parties with his friends. None of this was criminal behavior, more the manner of a bored Wassenaar brat. Theo’s favorite movie was Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, about a gang of ultra-violent teenagers. By the time he finished high school, his mother had had enough and told him to leave home.

  Now I sat with his parents on the same lawn where Theo had once addressed his fellow countrymen, in the shade of a large oak tree, and moved on from afternoon tea to a fine dry rosé. “He was always different,” said Anneke, her eyes brimming with affection, “always going against the grain.” When the hippie fads of the early 1970s had reached even Wassenaar, most of Theo’s friends traveled to Nepal or India. But not Theo. He went to the United States. “Theo always loved America,” said his mother, “even when it was not popular at all. He adored it. New York!”

  In Amsterdam, where he claims never to have felt at home, Theo led a drifting bohemian life, drinking, doing drugs, sleeping at different addresses, always in the safe knowledge that he could return to Wassenaar on the week-ends, his bags filled with laundry. He applied twice to the film academy, submitting a short film about a master stabbed in the eyes with the stem of a wineglass by his vengeful slave, and was told to go and see a psychiatrist. After trying and failing to be a law student, he got work as a stage manager. Then, in 1981, with the help of friends and rich Wassenaar contacts, he made his first film. Luger was a black farce about the kidnapping of a millionaire’s wheelchair-bound daughter. The film received some attention, not least because of two remarkable scenes, one of which shows a man shoot off his gun into a woman’s vagina, and another where the same man stuffs two cats into a washing machine. He went on to make twenty-three more films. Some, such as A Day on the Beach (1984), Blind Date (1996), and Interview (2003), have been acclaimed for their boldness and originality. Van Gogh worked fast, with several cameras at the same time. And he was good with actors. This gave a freshness to his best work, but often he was in too much of a hurry, as though he were terrified he would crash if he stood still.

  Although he came of age only in the 1970s, Van Gogh was still a provocative child of the 1960s, an heir of the Provos. But at the same time, he was part of the reaction, of the rebellion against the rebellion. One of the reasons soccer hooligans from Rotterdam called their Amsterdam counterparts “filthy Jews” was ignorance. Another, possibly more compelling reason was that it was the most shocking thing one could say in post-Holocaust Europe. They may not have realized quite why, but the hooligans knew they were breaking a taboo. They were shouting something out loud that respectable people would not even have dared to mutter under their breath, especially in the 1960s, when the Jewish genocide got widespread attention for the first time.

  Something of that sort may have driven Theo van Gogh, not at all an ignorant man, to abuse a number of Dutch Jews. It was never easy to get funding for independent films in Holland, so perhaps his attacks on contemporaries such as Leon de Winter, a filmmaker and novelist, were partly inspired by jealousy. When De Winter, the son of orthodox Jewish parents, had some success with stories inspired by his family background, he was accused by Theo of using his Jewishness for self-promotion, of getting rich by shedding fake tears. In a movie magazine entitled Moviola, Theo wrote that De Winter could only satisfy his wife by wrapping barbed wire around his penis and crying “Auschwitz!” when he came. De Winter’s alleged sentimentality was ridiculed in visions of diabetic Jews being gassed, giving off the smell of caramel. “Yellow stars copulating in the gas chambers” was another line in the same piece.

  A young Jewish academic named Evelien Gans described Theo’s attacks on De Winter as “theme envy.” Theo immediately lashed out against her too. Gans, he wrote, “gets wet dreams about being fucked by Dr. Mengele,” the Auschwitz doctor. De Winter later lamented that only a few Jews bothered to complain about Van Gogh’s remarks. In fact, Van Gogh was sued by the Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel. The case dragged on for years. It went to the supreme court. Van Gogh accused his judges of being corrupted by Jewish money. He was found guilty, only to get in trouble again by insisting on republishing the offending articles in a collection. This time, somewhat inconsistently, the courts upheld his right to do so. He went on and on, publishing the same stuff. He would never give up.

  The Jews were not the only ones to feel Theo’s fury. Irate Christians took him to court for calling Jesus Christ “that rotten fish from Nazareth.” Sometimes the invective was just personal. His oldest friend, Thom Hoffman, who acted in Theo’s first film before going on to work with more commercial directors, was publicly denounced as a “walking tube of Vaseline.” A well-known actress who mourned the death of her child was ridiculed for “making a career out of her grief.” Various politicians and public figures who crossed him were told to die slowly of terrible diseases. Mayor Cohen was called a collaborating mayor under the Nazis. And so on, and on, until the Muslims attracted his particular scorn and were subjected to a constant barrage of abuse, of which “goat fuckers” was the most quoted but by no means most offensive example.

  Despite being a huge celebrity in a small country, with columns and personal appearances in pretty much every newspaper, magazine, and television program at one time or another, Van Gogh always craved more attention. It was not enough to be a well-regarded filmmaker. He had a permanent hunger for publicity. Perhaps his personal attacks were inspired less by theme envy than attention envy. He did not like others to get into his limelight. His problem, as a columnist and TV personality, was that he rarely lasted anywhere for long without being shown the door. His last, and perhaps most widely read, column, The Healthy Smoker, appeared on his own website, theovangogh.nl, and in Metro, a free paper handed out on trains.

  There was, however, another side to his character. He could be a gracious host, always insisting on picking up the tab in restaurants, or, perhaps a little too ostentatiously, ordering rounds of champagne at the bar. But his best quality was his curiosity. This made him a receptive, indeed generous interviewer, asking probing questions without imposing his own views. As a guest on one of his television shows, I was so seduced by his good manners and intelligent interest that I quite forgot about the vile cold I was nursing. But I saw the other Theo, too, when we were both on a radio show hosted by his friend Max Pam. One of the other guests was a quiet-spoken museum curator in a dark suit, who had just put on a huge exhibition of Mondri
an paintings. “Wasn’t this a typical example of arrogant elitism?” asked Theo. Who wanted to see so much abstract art? Shouldn’t popular taste be taken more seriously? “Well,” said the man, very politely, “perhaps the public should be educated …” He wasn’t able to finish his sentence. “Educated?” Who the fuck was he to … Fucking elitist crap! Get out of here! And so on, without relent. The curator looked crushed. I stared at the floor. Pam looked content. Good show. Typical Theo.

  The design of The Healthy Smoker tells us as much about Van Gogh as the website of the Palazzo di Pietro does about Pim Fortuyn. The contrast could not be greater. If Fortuyn was all piss-elegant classicism, Van Gogh’s style was all adolescent outrage, very much in the spirit, in fact, of the Dirty Paper of his primary schooldays. The first thing you see is a color photograph of Van Gogh wearing a red bra over his eyes, and then a coat of arms showing three swords and a slack pink penis above the words Luctor et Emergo, “I Shall Struggle and Stand Up.” If Fortuyn was a preening dandy, Van Gogh made a show of his unwashed, disheveled, overweight ugliness: the huge pink belly straining under old T-shirts, the nicotine-stained teeth, the nose picking, the scratching, the general disdain for personal hygiene. Fortuyn aspired to class; Van Gogh played his own class down.

  Van Gogh clearly saw the endless feuds and tirades as part of his lifelong struggle, but for what? The personal element is perhaps most easily explained. He could be a loyal friend, but demanded total loyalty in exchange. The slightest lapse, or perception of a lapse, was seen as a betrayal, and led to total war. That is why Thom Hoffman, an early comrade-in-arms against the commercial film industry, could not be forgiven for joining it. He had to remain a comrade, a fellow outsider, a man of principled opposition, a resister. If not, he was the enemy.