In Europe

by Geert Mak

  Maria was, as she put it, ‘forty-seven years old, but then the other way around,’ and she lived in a constant state of infatuation. She caressed my friend, grabbed his hand, hinted at wild and promising events from a misty past. She served us the first wine of the year from a plastic cola bottle, it was still murky, little more than grape juice. ‘Trink, trink, Brüderlein trink!’ Maria sang, rocking back and forth with her glass. She was one of the last few of the elderly here who still understood a few words of Swabian, a German dialect brought here by immigrants 200 years ago and pretty much ground back into silence in the last century by Hungarian nationalists. She did not actually speak the language any more, but there were still a couple of German songs living in her head, ones she had learned on her father's lap, a long time ago. The air in the village was autumnal, smoky, sour and pungent.

  Two days later I drove on, heading for the Austrian border. Along the way I picked up a hitchhiker, Iris, a little woman with lively eyes and a thin face. She spoke German and English fluently, she had once been a civil engineer, she said, but the state-owned company she worked for had shut down. After that she and her husband had started an advertising agency, then her husband died, and now she helped out at a stable. Her bicycle had been stolen a month ago, she did not have enough money to buy a new one, so now she had to walk three hours to work each day. ‘They're good creatures, horses are,’ she said. ‘They comfort you.’

  On 19 August, 1989 she had taken part in the Pan-European Picnic, a bizarre event held on the border close to Sopronpuszta, where Hungarians, Austrians and East Germans demonstratively broke open the Iron Curtain for the first time. ‘When it came right down to it, the notorious border was only a wooden gate with a sliding bolt,’ she tells me. ‘We had it open in no time. Fortunately the border guards understood that there was no way to stop that crowd.’ Even then she had been amazed by the East Germans and the way they left everything behind: Trabants, family photos, teddy bears. ‘I remember thinking: these people have brought their last, cherished possessions with them here, and now they are leaving even those things behind in order to cross the border.’

  Together we went looking for the spot again, in the rolling fields behind the border town of Sopron. Today there is a small monument to the famous 1989 picnic, and an unmanned gate for bicyclists and farm vehicles; you can walk right into Austria there. It was the first time she had been back since 1989, she was a little sad about the way her life had gone. ‘Capitalism was much less charitable than we ever realised,’ she said. ‘Back then we thought: now everything is going to be all right.’

  Chapter FIFTY-ONE

  Brussels

  ‘I HAD RIDDEN OUT TO ZAANDAM ON A BICYCLE WITH WOODEN TYRES. When I got back, there was a car waiting in front of our house: the queen wanted to talk to me. It was May, Holland had been liberated only two weeks before, Kathleen and I were living in a little attic room for students along the Amstel in Amsterdam. We were dumbfounded, but we climbed in and were driven to the south of the Netherlands, which had been liberated for a long time already. Queen Wilhelmina had her residence there, at Breda. It was like a dream for both of us: we were put up in a hotel, in Breda the street lights came on at night as normal, you could buy strawberries in the market, the sheets were white instead of yellow. The next morning the queen asked me to be her private secretary. Which is how Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands became my first boss.

  ‘The Dutch government at that time applied the following rule of thumb: if you hadn't been bad, you were good. The queen saw it precisely the other way around: if you hadn't been good, you were bad. I remember the first time she came back to her Noordeinde Palace in the Hague, hopping mad, and how the mayor and the aldermen of the city were all standing there in a row. Queen Wilhelmina walked up to the first one, and the only thing she asked him was: “Which concentration camp were you in?” And she asked the same question of everyone who was there that day. I didn't have the faintest idea what those people had actually done in the war, but it became awfully quiet in that reception hall.

  ‘Look, this is a photograph of my father, he's the big, handsome fellow with the beard and the aristocratic air. Philip Kohnstamm, physicist, later professor. Due to all kinds of family complications, he grew up in the home of his uncle, the Amsterdam banker A. C. Wertheim, completely immersed in that atmosphere of assimilated Judaism. My father was a man of exceptionally broad interests: he was a private tutor of philosophy, he was deeply interested in theology, and later in educational theory, and of course in politics, both national and international.

  ‘He was born in 1875, my mother in 1882. Her father was J. B. A. Kessler, director of the Koninklijke Nederlandsche Petroleum Maatschappij (KNPM), which later became the Royal Dutch/Shell Group. But when my mother was still young, the family was not at all wealthy. In those days the KNPM was only a small company with an oil concession in North Sumatra, for the production of kerosene for lanterns and things like that. My grandfather would go into the jungle and come back with a couple of barrels of oil, that's what it boiled down to. Petroleum was only a troublesome by-product, they couldn't earn anything with it, “that terrible stuff that's always bursting into flames” as he wrote in one of his letters. He brought Henri Deterding into the venture, and together they salvaged the firm. He himself was always travelling back and forth to the wells in the Indies, he was a real jungle hand, but it ruined his health. And when he would get home – you can detect that in his letters as well – it was always a bit of a disappointment. A tragic life.

  ‘My mother was crazy about him, though. When she turned sixteen, he gave her a bicycle. She was furious with him: “You shouldn't do that, you don't have the money for it, you have to work so hard for what you have.” But when he died at the age of forty-nine, he was one of the richest men in the Netherlands. The first cars had begun to appear around 1900, and “that terrible stuff” became a highly valued commodity.

  ‘My father first met the Kesslers in summer 1899, during a holiday at Domburg on the North Sea coast. I still have a picture of them, on the hotel tennis court. My mother was seventeen then, my father seven years her senior. They married, that hundred-per-cent Jewish Kohnstamm, and that Kessler girl from the Hague's wealthier business circles. Mixed marriages like that were quite rare then. But I never heard of there being any fuss about it. My parents remained very close all their lives.

  ‘The nineteenth century lasted in our home until 1940. Our whole neighbourhood in Amsterdam was dominated by the narrow, somewhat impoverished and entirely Jewish Weesperstraat. I remember the commotion from early in the morning till late at night, the tram edging its way through the quarter. And then the silence on Saturday, the men in their high hats and the neatly dressed boys walking to the synagogue. Did people discriminate? People told jokes sometimes, and because he was Jewish my father wasn't allowed to join one of those elitist clubs, which he wasn't interested in anyway. But there was no real sting in it yet. The tone it took on in the 1930s and 1940s, the thing we all see before us now when we think about it, that wasn't yet there.

  ‘In winter 1939 I drove around the United States for a few months, on my own. I had received a scholarship from the American University, and I wanted to see Roosevelt's New Deal for myself. That trip had an enormous effect on the rest of my life. I came from a continent where most people seemed paralysed by Hitler and the Depression, like rabbits caught in the poacher's lights. And then suddenly you find yourself in America, where people dared to do things, where they said: “Let's give it a try anyway, who knows, maybe it will work out.” During my time there I saw that politics could also be something grand. There couldn't have been a greater contrast with the Netherlands. And it drew me in, I developed a kind of determination; it awakened, as it were, the young American in me.

  ‘This is a letter from my father, from around that time. It was just after Roosevelt's famous speech in which, for the first time, he made clear where he stood: on the side of democracy and against Nati
onal Socialism. My father wrote, to paraphrase a bit: “Max, it seems to me that the worst is behind us now. The worst, by that I don't mean war, but the capitulation of the entire world – through egoism or indecision – in the face of totalitarian madness. A war does not seem to be ruled out. But that the Caesars in Berlin and Rome will actually seize control of the world seems to me, after Roosevelt's message, more or less unthinkable.”

  ‘The first time I saw Kathleen was in winter 1940, on the train to Leeuwarden. The next day a few friends and I did the Elfmerentocht, a classic skating tour. We skated the way people did in those days, all holding onto a long stick, the weather was beautiful. Suddenly I saw that girl, the same one I'd seen on the train, skating alone. I was a little shy, but the American boy in me said to her, as we passed by: “Grab hold, if you like.” By the end of the day she and I were playing tag on skates on the lake close to Sneek, by the light of the full moon.

  ‘The rest of that winter I worked on my thesis, and in early May 1940 I took my final exams in Amsterdam. So, on the night of 9 May, 1940, I went to bed as a reasonably successful young Amsterdammer. When I woke up it was war, a few days later I was a semi-Aryan, a “Mischling ersten Grades”. Getting a job in my own professional field, Dutch and history, was out of the question. Could I really do that to her, let her marry the problematic case that I was? She wasn't even eighteen yet. That dilemma played a constant role in my growing love for her – although her parents continued to receive me very warmly in their home. In the letter in which I finally asked for her hand in marriage, written from the detention camp, you can still see that doubt. But you also see that young American, who simply dared and did.

  ‘My life was very much characterised by the urge to build things anew, after those terrible times. After 1945, we all learned to look ahead, we never did anything else. But I also know, when I on occasion look back on those years before the war, that something was lost for all time. And that certainly applies to Amsterdam. I remember when they arrested me: I was walking through lovely, snowy Amsterdam, the city can be so beautiful at times like that, and when I got to my house on the Amstel the police were waiting for me, my landlady was weeping, and a little later I found myself walking across the bare, icy parade grounds of Camp Amersfoort, with my head shaved. I was lucky that eventually they released me again, but during those three months I still lost twenty-five kilos.

  ‘Being in a place like that makes it clear that lawlessness is hell. Nowhere else have I ever felt so fully surrendered into God's hands. And yet, that is where the roots of my present agnosticism lie. I remember how one evening I had to drag a corpse from the mortuary, accompanied by a guard and a dog. While I was doing that, it suddenly occurred to me how ridiculous it was: a half-dead man dragging a dead man, with a German and a dog behind him. But the thought uppermost in my mind was whether, when I got back to the barracks, someone would have stolen my bread.

  ‘In some ways Camp Amersfoort also conferred on me an accolade. There is, after all, a profound difference between being ground to pieces because of one's race and being ground to pieces because of one's political convictions. And if I had not belonged to that latter group – in autumn 1940, by way of student protest, I had read aloud a couplet from the Dutch national anthem in the university auditorium – then I don't know whether I would finally have dared to propose to Kathleen.

  ‘Those years working for my first boss were good ones. My dealings with Queen Wilhelmina were marked, of course, by a certain distance. Her sense of duty, her grandeur, temperament and loneliness all made her a person who touched you to the quick. She hated the royal birthday celebrations on 31 August; she would never allow anyone to congratulate her, she always shrunk from that. But on 31 August, 1947 she said to me without preamble: “Next year, on this day, I will step down.” When it finally came to that point, she dreaded the coronation ceremonies. She was very fatigued, and deeply disappointed by certain things.

  ‘On the day of her abdication, a special train rode from the Hague to Amsterdam-Amstel Station. I was in her Pullman car, and I saw little more than a tired, rather difficult old lady. On the way to the palace on the Dam we were in the coach behind hers, and when we got there that old lady climbed down from the train, and suddenly she was the queen again, Queen Wilhelmina, and she strode past the honour guard and she waved to the crowd. She was grand, truly grand. And even if she hadn't been born a queen, but the daughter of a washerwoman, Wilhelmina would have been a grand woman.

  ‘It was in summer 1947 that I first went back to Germany. It was a wasteland. Cologne, Kassel, all you saw was debris. Some of the cities were teetering on the verge of starvation. The children who came crawling out of the piles of rubble in the morning carrying their book bags, you couldn't hold them responsible for Amersfoort or Auschwitz, could you?

  ‘It was quite a shock to set foot on German soil again, but I travelled around the whole time knowing that this country must someday come back to life again, and deal with itself in peace. I also had the feeling that we, the Dutch, were also to blame, if only for the way we hadn't wanted to know. When the first roll-call was held in Amersfoort, I heard someone behind me in our group say: “Can this really be happening?” That was in 1942!

  ‘As a survivor, I felt guilty myself as well. The fact that you emerged alive from the camp and the occupation meant that you, too, had occasionally looked the other way when someone was in trouble. I have never been able to adopt the self-assured stance of the “pure angel” with regard to an “evil” Germany. I have often thought about the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and about Lot's wife who was allowed to flee and who, despite God's warning, stopped and looked back at the destruction and was turned into a pillar of salt. Of course we must never forget, but I had no desire to turn into a pillar of salt.

  ‘After Queen Wilhelmina stepped down, I became an assistant to Dr H. M. Hirschfeld, the man who supervised the introduction of the Marshall Plan to the Netherlands. He also advised the government on its relations with Germany. Holland was in a tough situation in that regard. As long as the German hinterland was still in ruins, it was impossible really to reconstruct our country. We all knew that. But how could we keep history from repeating itself, how could we keep the industry of the Ruhr from once again producing bombs to destroy Rotterdam? That was our dilemma.

  ‘Then, on 9 May, 1950, the Schuman Plan was launched. That date is now regarded, rightly, as the start of the process that ultimately led to today's European Union. For us, that plan, which was named after the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, was truly a revolutionary breakthrough in the vicious circle we found ourselves in. It abruptly changed the whole context, it made the problem of Western European coal and steel production an issue that could and should be arranged together. Conflicting interests were suddenly transformed into a common interest that had to be dealt with jointly. Because, don't forget: in those days Germany could easily have become a plaything between East and West, any enduring subordination of Germany carried the risk of a new war. We had to safeguard that country for the West, at all costs.

  ‘I was invited to join the Dutch delegation which was negotiating for all this, and it was there that I first heard a speech by Jean Monnet, the chairman of the French delegation and the plan's intellectual father. That was in June 1950. I was deeply impressed. It was very clear that this meant so much more to him than simply the regulation of coal and steel production. It meant putting a lasting end to the conflicts that had twice plunged Europe into war, turning national issues into common European ones. As everyone knows, a compromise is not always the best solution. And now we were truly trying to achieve the best, for all Europe.

  ‘This way of working was ultimately to embrace the entire international community. That too was one of Monnet's premises, from the very start. “The six European countries have not launched a great enterprise intended to tear down the walls between them, in order only to build even higher walls between themselves and the world ar
ound them,” he wrote in the early 1950s. “We are not connecting states, we are connecting people.”

  ‘His “Algiers memorandum” of 1943 showed that, even in the throes of the Second World War, he was toying with the first rough draft of the Schuman Plan for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). That community was meant, in any event, to include Germany, France, Italy and Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). He wanted to make sure that Germany, France and the other European countries could never fall back into their old pre-war rivalries. But his ultimate goal went further than that: he was aiming for “an organisation of the world that will allow all resources to be exploited as well as possible and to be distributed as evenly as possible among persons, so as to create peace and happiness throughout the entire world.”

  ‘The contacts at those meetings were extremely personal, there were only six small delegations present at the negotiations. The atmosphere was also very different from the rock hard bilateral negotiations we'd been accustomed to, especially in those poverty stricken post-war years. It was a liberating experience for us as negotiators: we were engaged in creating completely new structures. Everyone saw that this was about much more than just a coal and steel community involving a handful of European countries. The discussions were open, it was about the goal itself and not about all kinds of hidden agendas; it generated a dynamism we hadn't seen before.

  ‘That wasn't easy for the Netherlands. In essence, we were not a continental country, we had always focused more on the sea and the west. When the enemy came, we relied on the water to make an island, at least of Holland. In 1940 we still had strips of land that could be flooded as lines of defence. Would the Netherlands now, for the first time in history, have to establish unequivocal ties with the European continent?