Subcontractors

The Dutch and Water

On i September 1996 the radio discontinued its daily reports on water lev-els. Shipmasters and bargemen could get the necessary information betterand more quickly via other channels. No consideration whatsoever was giv-en to their numerous compatriots for whom the daily ritual of an arcanedance of figures, attached to exotically named river villages, gave themsomething with which to cheerfully face another day: `Lobith 919... minus20; Eefde aan de IJssel 383 ... minus 6; Grave 499 ... no change.'

The wide range of numbers lent the whole proceedings that mythic in-comprehensibility required by all rituals. Furthermore, tension was built upby a pause of a couple of seconds before the announcement of yet anothersurprising final result — usually a minus to my recollection, but very occa-sionally a plus and sometimes a very disappointing `no change' . That run-up followed by a short silence was absolutely essential. When asked aboutthis, one of its readers explained: `You had to introduce that gap, that si-lence. You had the idea that if you rattled off the water levels too quicklya boat would run aground at Lobith.'

This comforting ritual of secular prayer, now so sadly missed, is just oneexample of the many things that, for better or worse, we Dutch owe to thewater. Almost everything that we think or do has its roots in the water. Andis not just a matter of the Delta Works, but also our remarkable predilec-tion for boring parliaments, our raising ordinariness to the level of a lifestyleand our ability, by suggesting a `sandwich lunch' , to destroy any expecta-tion of something decent to eat or drink.

Nowadays, any speculation about — let alone praise for — the history of oursettlement in the region, or our common language and form of government,is not particularly popular. This reflects a pragmatic attitude that has muchto do with a collective mentality forced upon us by our water management.Which seems a good enough reason to ask how it is possible that so manyof our national traits, in our own eyes as well as in those of others, all seemto be linked directly to the water that surrounds us.

The floodgates of the damnear Grave, one of those`exotically named rivervillages' whose namesfigured in the daily radioreports on water levels.

The Rhine enters theNetherlands in Lobith.The sign shows thehighest known water levelon this spot (19.93 m) andthe height of the dike(19.10 m).

Busy beavers

It was in this marshy delta that one of the greatest discoveries of the MiddleAges was made. Nowadays nobody is much interested in it and, more to thepoint, hardly anybody is even remotely aware of it. The discovery in ques-tion was that an artificially low water level could be created by diggingparallel drainage ditches, and could be maintained by building dikes. Sothroughout the Middle Ages our ancestors were constantly hard at work, ina way reminiscent of busy beavers; the difference being that beavers alwaysbuild the same kind of dam while we have now progressed to the DeltaWorks.

All that ceaseless toil produced another equally forgotten monument,namely the West-Frisian Ring Dike, about 115 kilometres long, many partsof which can still be seen and even touched. Not only did the work on thisdike take longer than that on the pyramids, the cathedrals or the ChineseWall, but during those centuries it gave rise to more disputes than any otherconstruction project in the world.

But in the Netherlands, `lieux-de-mémoire' are not in fashion, eventhough we have plenty of them: Heiligerlee, Mokerhei, Bartlehiem, the per-fectly preserved States Chamber in Dordrecht where the Holland Estates forthe first time met freely in 1572 in what was effectively the birth of theDutch state. Compared with the theatre in Philadelphia, a reconstructedbuilding full of shop-window dummies, by which Americans commemorate

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Salomon van Ruysdael, their Constitution of 1779, it demonstrates straightaway that the Dutch willRiver Landscape with have nothing to do with that kind of show.a Ferry. r 656.Canvas, ío5.4 x 134.6 cm. Neither do many people have any interest in the stream that runs past myThe Minneapolis Institute garden in Bussum through the Naardermeer in the direction of Muiden, theof Arts. Karnemelksesloot (Buttermilk Ditch). It is not difficult to find where in this

ditch the nobles murdered Count Floris v in 1296 as the peasants from theGooi were about to rescue him. But though it is not surprising that no onenow knows much about the event, some token to mark a memorable momentof Holland's history would not have gone amiss.

This indifference also extends to our appreciation of the landscape. It isstriking how defensive even our poets become when the beauty of our coun-tryside is involved. Our back-up national anthem `Holland', by the nine-teenth-century E.J. Potgieter, illustrates this well. He starts by mentioningthe grey sky, the stormy beaches, bare dunes and monotonous landscape, butafter acknowledging the shortcomings of the landscape he then goes on toglorify it because quite obviously God could have had little or no hand in itscreation: `You created nature with a stepmother's hand /And yet I love youdeeply, 0 my land!'.

But why? `All that thou art is our forefathers' work / Wrought froma marshland through heroic toil ...'

And so on.Actually this reveals not just pride but a high degree of arrogance. We, in

contrast to the rest of the world, have created our own land.

Vomit of the sea

The rest of the world has also shown little appreciation of the Dutch land-scape, which has always been associated with the state of mind that it evi-dently generates in its madcap inhabitants. The Roman historian Tacitus re-peatedly warned against the stinking marshes on the other side of the Rhine(`brushwood-choked forests and rotting swamps'), where the soil con-ditions contaminated the minds of the Germanic natives with rebellious andfractious attitudes. His contemporary Pliny simply described the Low Coun-tries as a kind of cheese with holes, congealed along the banks of the nu-merous river channels on their way to the sea.

This perception continued to prevail. Even Napoleon could do no betterthan famously to dismiss Holland as alluvium deposited by a number ofgreat rivers that originated in his France. The English poet Andrew Marvell,during the bitter Anglo-Dutch struggle for hegemony in Europe, went somewhat over the top in 1653 when he described the Dutch as slime dwellers:

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,As but th' off-scouring of the British sand;... And so much earth as was contributedOf shipwrack'd cockle and the mussel-shell;This indigested vomit of the seaFell to the Dutch by just propriety.

Holland, said another Englishman, was never intended by the Creator forhuman habitation. After all, the first condition that land should meet is toprovide bread to eat and wood and stone for building. So whoever lives theremust be a profiteer who wants to rob fish of their habitat. Or frogs, as some-one else added.

Here you are pitilessly forced to wade through mud in continuous windand rain, complained Erasmus's friend Cuthbert Tunstall in 1517 when he

A i 7th-century tile pictureof ships in the Texel road-stead. Maritiem en Jutters-museum, Oudeschild(Texel).

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reluctantly found himself on the island of Walcheren. His complaint appearsto have become the model on which all later complaints about and criticismsof the Dutch countryside and its abominable weather were based. He beganwith the all-pervasive smoke of burning peat in the towns that attackedthe nose, head and chest. Which is why he went looking for some fresh air:`But if you go walking in the country, you immediately sink in the mud sincethe lightest shower makes walking difficult. And you can't walk in the mead-ows because, wherever you go, your way is blocked by ditches. You can onlywalk comfortably along the sea dikes, except that it's almost impossible to

Master of the St ElisabethPanel, The St Elisabeth'sDay Flood (right panel).C.1500.

Panel, 127 x 11 o cm.Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

reach them. To reach them, you have to cross hundreds of flax pools, wherethe rotting flax creates a stench far worse than the worst sewer. Further-more, you always have to retrace your steps so that any pleasure you mighthave experienced is undone on the way back. So you return as bored and de-pressed as when you set out.'

The miserable conditions of the land and weather are consistently asso-ciated with a corresponding state of mind. Surely only flattened spirits couldlive in such a flat country. Moreover, the inhabitants of this apology fora country, stolen from the fish and the frogs, must be incorrigible profiteers.After all, they could only survive through trade since they had no alterna-tive. And the almost exclusively negative connotations of the adjective`Dutch' in the English language vividly illustrate how others chose to judgetheir activities: `Dutch' usually means tight-fisted, greedy, frugal, grasping,slick, cunning and deceptive.

In the seventeenth century the relationship between land, weather andstate of mind was considered to have been scientifically proved by the so-called theory of the humours. A person's physical and mental condition wasbelieved to be determined by the balance between the four chief fluids, orhumours, of the body. For Netherlanders this balance was upset from birthby an excess of water, both in the ground and falling from the sky. It madethem develop spongy brains, a condition which was aggravated by their ea-ger consumption of dairy products. As a result, a 'waterlander' could per-manently absorb external impressions and images that were stored up in the`sponge' in his head. When required, this sponge could be squeezed dry anddeliver a true copy of what had been stored there. This explained scientifi-cally how the Low Countries could produce such excellent painters. Afterall, the essence of painting was to be able to produce exact replicas of dailylife. At the same time, it explained why our literature attracted virtually nointernational interest. Literature involves a level of abstract conceptualisa-tion for which such spongy brains were inherently unsuitable!

Tinkering with creation

The concept of objective beauty in one's own landscape is illusory. Sucha leap in perception is brought about by the discovery that we are here talk-ing of a human creation, which in a sense turns us immediately into God'ssubcontractors. This idea was very popular in the seventeenth century but ithad deep medieval roots. God had deliberately left Creation incomplete. Asone of His chosen people, we had a duty to finish His work, especially sincethis muddy, marshy delta was so obviously unfinished. That this was God's

This flood inundated large intention was manifest from the fact that we survived so many floods, a fa-parts of the Biesbosch and miliar instrument of God's wrath ever since the time of Noah. There wereLand of Alteng on 18-19November i 42 i . Over sixty many indications that this was part of the divine plan, for after every floodvillages and thousands of there were reports of babies floating in baskets who presumably would growpeople were engulfed up to be a new Moses.overnight by the water ofthe Maas. This theology of superiority served as propaganda for the great drainage

works of the seventeenth century. The Netherlands, under an exclusive com-mission from God, was to be created by its inhabitants. As a result, theNetherlanders have had an obvious and irrepressible urge right up to the pre-

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The great flood of sent day to keep tinkering with their own creation, to map it out and regu-i February 1953 resulted late it more closely. Any suspicion of wilderness, be it uncultivated land orin i 853 casualties in theprovinces of Zeeland and freely running water, has to be tamed and cut back to create a garden, natureSouth-Holland. Photo from reserve, canal or pond. And in Madurodam we get a convenient overview ofThe Disaster (De ramp, the way in which the Netherlands has been tamed and organised, in a repli-

`nationalI953), a edition'with a foreword by the ca that is deceptively close to the real thing.Queen of the Netherlands. This almost obsessive orderliness has, since the earliest times, also pro-

duced forms of democratic self-government. Drainage and land reclamationDuring the winter

vi ncee

of1 995 the Dutch province of im olderin required constant consultation. Nobody could undertake such( p g) q YLimburg was under attack work only for his own plot of land because his neighbours would immedi-by the Maas. ately find themselves up to their knees in water. So from all that local con-

sultation arose the dike reeve, not a nobleman as his name in Dutch suggests(`dijkgraaf - dike count), but an officer appointed to carry out a functionthat has continued for some seven centuries.

Furthermore, the structure of the land prevented the establishment or de-velopment of a powerful noble or ecclesiastical authority. There are no largeuninterrupted stretches of land. Everywhere one can find a ditch, a canal,a river, or a waterway to form an easily defensible boundary. Similarly,there is neither the space nor indeed the ambience for large hunting parties;it is almost impossible to ride out without getting wet. Business and tradewere the obvious strategies for survival, and that is how it has been from theearly Middle Ages. So instead of great palaces and abbeys one got numer-ous little towns with merchants' houses and canals.

For the same reason, there was no place for barricade-storming on mat-ters of principle because that was no way to keep the commercial pot boil-ing. Trade requires good will, understanding, genuine and pragmatic tolera-tion; in short, what is generally meant nowadays by the term 'poldermodel'in Dutch politics. Its origins go back to the urban guild structure of the lateMiddle Ages, which was most widespread and popular in the Low Coun-tries. Employers and employees developed a strong feeling of solidaritywithin a particular craft, and resolved any problems themselves.

Perfectly ordinary people

That is why we are not fond of heroes and leaders. After all, we are all equaland dependent upon each other, with forms of administration that prefer togive responsibility to a consultative board, usually with a spokespersonrather than a leader. This means that any `leader' should not claim in publicto have superior knowledge or insight to the rest. The painter Karel Appel isa master of this approach, describing his artistic work as 'just messingaround' . After which we knew in our hearts that he was an incomparablygreat painter.

Outline of a polder, with In the Netherlands we like to hear that kind of language from the trulyat the top a pumping station great. We know full well that they are exceptional, but for us the important(r.) and a dischargingsluice (l.). It also shows thing is the ritual of ordinariness that has developed over the centuries fromthe circular canal and the a self-image that is now unshakeably rooted in our collective consciousness.enclosing dike around the And it is precisely those who are most prominent amongst us, whether artist,drained lake. Drawing fromThe Dutch and their Dikes scientist, politician or even prince, who are subjected to the closest scrutiny.(Amsterdam, 1956). In the Netherlands, `ordinary' is certainly not `common' ; `ordinary' is no

more and no less than how it should be.So if you want to be admired in the Netherlands, you cannot be ordinary

enough. In fact, even the most talented receive recognition only to the ex-tent that they are able to appear most ordinary. That is why the 1998 busi-nesswoman of the year, a far from ordinary person in most people's eyes,exclaimed to the TV cameras immediately after her award: `I'm a very ordi-nary person, you know!' Of course, we know better. And more to the point,so does she. But we still like to hear her affirm the opposite. And she waswell aware of this.

Politicians in particular excel in declarations of ordinariness. And obvi-ously the prime minister takes the lead. So former Prime Minister Wim Kok,an extremely exceptional person, regularly let it be known that he enjoyedcamping and, of course, in a pup tent, a lowly shelter tent that one rarely seesnowadays but which expresses the height of humility in the face of the mod-ern family caravan. The tone had been set by one of his predecessors, thelate Joop den Uyl, who is probably the only political leader in the world tohave made an official state visit from a camping site — in Portugal I believe.Heroes and heroines are not very fashionable here. At most they live on, solong as it's from long ago, in the name of a waterbus, a neglected street ora messy square. Usually the hero' s name will no longer be recognised, as isthe case with Willem Park in Amsterdam.

KLM (the Royal Dutch Airlines) names its larger aeroplanes after exoticrivers. In fact, the less Dutch you appear to be, the greater the impact on yourown circle. None of our national heroes, starting with Floris v, can expectcommemorations, national feast days, rituals or other expressions of warmthand solidarity. On the other hand, one detects a certain degree of sympathyfor prominent lame ducks from the past, people who meant well and usual-ly paid for it, somewhat clumsily, with their lives. One thinks of Jan vanSchaffelaar, who for no good reason jumped off a tower and is now foreverremembered in popular and children's rhymes. And the same applies to thepoor orphan child Jan van Speyk, who blew himself up when the Belgiansthreatened to take over his ship in i 83 I.

We also like to remember how irresistibly ordinary these so-called heroes

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actually were. So Floris v lives on primarily as `der keerlen God' or in oth-er words, a peasant king. We learn in school that Vondel, one of our great-est writers, sold stockings; that Admiral Michiel de Ruyter originally earnedhis living on the treadmill in a rope factory; that Multatuli (the author of thefamous Max Havelaar), as a minor civil servant who couldn't count, cut cor-ners; and that Vincent van Gogh was just mad and therefore went to live inFrance. That these simple men attracted attention because they had extraor-dinary talents was taken as read and something which it was embarrassingto mention. Even the well-known song about Admiral Piet Heyn, who fa-mously captured Spain's Mexican treasure fleet, begins by mentioning thathis name is rather short, before going on to celebrate his achievements. Andeven here the use of a `folksy' vocabulary serves to emphasise that his au-dacious `pranks' were after all really quite ordinary.

This all has to do with our lowlands bourgeois society of merchants andfarmers, who from the late Middle Ages conducted their own little affairs(note the use of the word `little') with the help of an impenetrable networkof committees, councils and boards. In this, there was no place for the vertic-al hierarchy of powerful leadership in Church and State. From the outset, wewere able to do without emperors and cardinals. Furthermore, our nationalpast has been carved up by a long history of the bizarre but harmonious sys-tem of `pillarisation', which is lubricated by a readiness to compromise. Ittherefore could not tolerate the divisive triumphalism of different religiousand social groups celebrating their own heroes.

The Dutch are always sure that they know best, and sometimes even bet-ter, which tends to give rise to scornful comments by foreigners about ourfinger-wagging. There may be something in that, but it's a price we gladlypay for having embraced super-democratism, together with its companion,the spirit of equality. No country in the world has such a relatively largenumber of organised and recognised amateur practitioners of the arts andsciences. One out of every fifty Netherlanders takes part in amateur dramat-ics. And a recent survey revealed that these amateurs do not believe that theyare any worse than professional actors. Illustrative of this know-it-all confi-dence in one's talents is the popularity of the quiz show. Unlike in Americawhere the main figures are generally exceptional all-knowing enthusiasts ina specialist area, here it is always an ordinary man who glories in beingasked questions about the world in general. His appearance suggests that, inprinciple, everything can be known by everyone, since in the sitting roomwe can always get the better of him. After all, aren't we all supposed, inprinciple, to be equally learned? And although these rituals of ordinarinessand democratised erudition give an impression of naivety, there is surelya direct link between this and the absence of the usual bloodbaths whenProtestants and Catholics meet and which continue to this day, even in a cor-ner of Europe.

Only sports heroes and heroines are eagerly locked into our hearts, andwe have no problem in loudly worshipping them. But here it is still em-phatically all about the triumph and veneration of ordinariness. After all,we're talking about boys and girls from down the street; hence the friendlyuse of first names, preferably in the diminutive. Above all we recall theirhumble origins, but the sluice gates of emotion are only fully opened if, af-ter their sporting career, they return to an ordinary life.