The Low Countries. Jaargang 11
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The Low Countries. Jaargang 11 bron The Low Countries. Jaargang 11. Stichting Ons Erfdeel, Rekkem 2003 Zie voor verantwoording: http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_low001200301_01/colofon.php © 2011 dbnl i.s.m. 10 Always the Same H2O Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands hovers above the water, with a little help from her subjects, during the floods in Gelderland, 1926. Photo courtesy of Spaarnestad Fotoarchief. Luigem (West Flanders), 28 September 1918. Photo by Antony / © SOFAM Belgium 2003. The Low Countries. Jaargang 11 11 Foreword ριστον μν δωρ - Water is best. (Pindar) Water. There's too much of it, or too little. It's too salty, or too sweet. It wells up from the ground, carves itself a way through the land, and then it's called a river or a stream. It descends from the heavens in a variety of forms - as dew or hail, to mention just the extremes. And then, of course, there is the all-encompassing water which we call the sea, and which reminds us of the beginning of all things. The English once labelled the Netherlands across the North Sea ‘this indigested vomit of the sea’. But the Dutch went to work on that vomit, systematically and stubbornly: ‘... their tireless hands manufactured this land, / drained it and trained it and planed it and planned’ (James Brockway). As God's subcontractors they gradually became experts in living apart together. Look carefully at the first photo. The water has struck again. We're talking 1926. Gelderland. The small, stocky woman visiting the stricken province is Queen Wilhelmina. Without turning a hair she allows herself to be carried over the waters. She is the embodiment of the stubborn Netherlands, the country that knows how to keep its feet dry. And look at the other photo, taken in ‘that sullen swamp’ that was Flanders between 1914 and 1918. The horses are going up to the front. The wounded are coming back. The eternal movement to which mankind appears to be condemned. There is a fatalistic serenity about this photo. These men have learned to live with water. Do they still notice it? The sky seems to repeat itself in the mud. The theme of this book, then, is water. In all its forms it keeps turning up where you don't expect it. Can you paint water? Flemish painters have tried it with a modest river, the Leie. Can you live on water? In the Netherlands they've specialised in that, from houseboats to floating brothels and new neighbourhoods and whole towns wrested from the sea or built defiantly next to or on it. The Dutch East India Company was a sea-borne multinational that wasn't too strict with its employees. Amsterdam's ring of canals at last gives up its secrets. The epic of the Frisian Elfstedentocht and other heroic deeds are paraded before you. In the poems it is freezing, snowing or foggy. In the prose the storm is apocalyptic. But there is more than water in this book. It overflows with writers and painters, with Johan Cruyff and Eddy Merckx, the Greens in the Belgian and Flemish governments, conductors, musicians, architects and organs, airports and slave-traders, cabaret, and English that is actually Dutch. All this and much more you can read in this eleventh edition of The Low Countries. They haven't yet been swallowed up like Atlantis. Come and see. The Editors The Low Countries. Jaargang 11 12 God's Subcontractors The Dutch and Water On 1 September 1996 the radio discontinued its daily reports on water levels. Shipmasters and bargemen could get the necessary information better and more quickly via other channels. No consideration whatsoever was given to their numerous compatriots for whom the daily ritual of an arcane dance of figures, attached to exotically named river villages, gave them something with which to cheerfully face another day: ‘Lobith 919... minus 20; Eefde aan de IJssel 383... minus 6; Grave 499... no change.’ The wide range of numbers lent the whole proceedings that mythic incomprehensibility required by all rituals. Furthermore, tension was built up by a pause of a couple of seconds before the announcement of yet another surprising final result - usually a minus to my recollection, but very occasionally a plus and sometimes a very disappointing ‘no change’. That runup followed by a short silence was absolutely essential. When asked about this, one of its readers explained: ‘You had to introduce that gap, that silence. You had the idea that if you rattled off the water levels too quickly a boat would run aground at Lobith.’ This comforting ritual of secular prayer, now so sadly missed, is just one example of the many things that, for better or worse, we Dutch owe to the water. Almost everything that we think or do has its roots in the water. And it's not just a matter of the Delta Works, but also our remarkable predilection for boring parliaments, our raising ordinariness to the level of a lifestyle and our ability, by suggesting a ‘sandwich lunch’, to destroy any expectation of something decent to eat or drink. Nowadays, any speculation about - let alone praise for - the history of our settlement in the region, or our common language and form of government, is not particularly popular. This reflects a pragmatic attitude that has much to 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 many of our national traits, in our own eyes as well as in those of others, all seem to be linked directly to the water that surrounds us. The Low Countries. Jaargang 11 The Rhine enters the Netherlands in Lobith. The sign shows the highest known water level on this spot (19.93 m) and the height of the dike (19.10 m). The Low Countries. Jaargang 11 13 The floodgates of the dam near Grave, one of those ‘exotically named river villages’ whose names figured in the daily radio reports on water levels. Busy beavers It was in this marshy delta that one of the greatest discoveries of the Middle Ages was made. Nowadays nobody is much interested in it and, more to the point, hardly anybody is even remotely aware of it. The discovery in question was that an artificially low water level could be created by digging parallel drainage ditches, and could be maintained by building dikes. So throughout the Middle Ages our ancestors were constantly hard at work, in a way reminiscent of busy beavers; the difference being that beavers always build the same kind of dam while we have now progressed to the Delta Works. All that ceaseless toil produced another equally forgotten monument, namely the West-Frisian Ring Dike, about 115 kilometres long, many parts of which can still be seen and even touched. Not only did the work on this dike take longer than that on the pyramids, the cathedrals or the Chinese Wall, but during those centuries it gave rise to more disputes than any other construction project in the world. But in the Netherlands, ‘lieux-de-mémoire’ are not in fashion, even though we have plenty of them: Heiligerlee, Mokerhei, Bartlehiem, the perfectly preserved States Chamber in Dordrecht where the Holland Estates for the first time met freely in 1572 in what was effectively the birth of the Dutch state. Compared with the theatre in Philadelphia, a reconstructed building full of shop-window dummies, by which Americans commemorate The Low Countries. Jaargang 11 14 Salomon van Ruysdael, River Landscape with a Ferry. 1656. Canvas, 105.4 × 134.6 cm. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. their Constitution of 1779, it demonstrates straightaway that the Dutch will have nothing to do with that kind of show. Neither do many people have any interest in the stream that runs past my garden in Bussum through the Naardermeer in the direction of Muiden, the 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 the Gooi were about to rescue him. But though it is not surprising that no one now knows much about the event, some token to mark a memorable moment of Holland's history would not have gone amiss. This indifference also extends to our appreciation of the landscape. It is striking how defensive even our poets become when the beauty of our countryside is involved. Our back-up national anthem ‘Holland’, by the nineteenth-century E.J. Potgieter, illustrates this well. He starts by mentioning the grey sky, the stormy beaches, bare dunes and monotonous landscape, but after acknowledging the shortcomings of the landscape he then goes on to glorify it because quite obviously God could have had little or no hand in its creation: ‘You created nature with a stepmother's hand / And yet I love you deeply, O my land!’. But why? ‘All that thou art is our forefathers' work / Wrought from a 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. The Low Countries. Jaargang 11 15 Vomit of the sea The rest of the world has also shown little appreciation of the Dutch landscape, which has always been associated with the state of mind that it evidently generates in its madcap inhabitants. The Roman historian Tacitus repeatedly warned against the stinking marshes on the other side of the Rhine (‘brushwood-choked forests and rotting swamps’), where the soil conditions contaminated the minds of the Germanic natives with rebellious and fractious attitudes.