God’s Subcontractors. The Dutch and Water

Subcontractors The Dutch and Water

On i 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 is 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 floodgates of the dam near Grave, one of those `exotically named river villages' whose names

figured in the daily radio reports on water levels.

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).

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-mĂŠmoire' 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

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Salomon van Ruysdael, River Landscape with a Ferry. r 656.

Canvas, Ă­o5.4 x 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, 0 my land!'.

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

/

Wrought from

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 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. His contemporary Pliny simply described the Low Countries as a kind of cheese with holes, congealed along the banks of the numerous river channels on their way to the sea.

This perception continued to prevail. Even Napoleon could do no better than famously to dismiss Holland as alluvium deposited by a number of great rivers that originated in his France. The English poet Andrew Marvell, during the bitter Anglo-Dutch struggle for hegemony in Europe, went some what 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 contributed Of shipwrack'd cockle and the mussel-shell; This indigested vomit of the sea Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.

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

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

A i 7th-century tile picture of ships in the Texel roadstead. Maritiem en Jutters museum, Oudeschild (Texel).

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reluctantly found himself on the island of Walcheren. His complaint appears to have become the model on which all later complaints about and criticisms of the Dutch countryside and its abominable weather were based. He began with the all-pervasive smoke of burning peat in the towns that attacked the 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 since the lightest shower makes walking difficult. And you can't walk in the meadows because, wherever you go, your way is blocked by ditches. You can only walk comfortably along the sea dikes, except that it's almost impossible to

Master of the St Elisabeth Panel, The St Elisabeth's Day 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, where the rotting flax creates a stench far worse than the worst sewer. Furthermore, you always have to retrace your steps so that any pleasure you might have experienced is undone on the way back. So you return as bored and depressed as when you set out.'

The miserable conditions of the land and weather are consistently associated with a corresponding state of mind. Surely only flattened spirits could live in such a flat country. Moreover, the inhabitants of this apology for a country, stolen from the fish and the frogs, must be incorrigible profiteers.

After all, they could only survive through trade since they had no alternative. And the almost exclusively negative connotations of the adjective `Dutch' in the English language vividly illustrate how others chose to judge their activities: `Dutch' usually means tight-fisted, greedy, frugal, grasping, slick, cunning and deceptive.

In the seventeenth century the relationship between land, weather and state of mind was considered to have been scientifically proved by the socalled theory of the humours. A person's physical and mental condition was believed to be determined by the balance between the four chief fluids, or humours, of the body. For Netherlanders this balance was upset from birth by an excess of water, both in the ground and falling from the sky. It made them develop spongy brains, a condition which was aggravated by their eager consumption of dairy products. As a result, a 'waterlander' could permanently absorb external impressions and images that were stored up in the `sponge' in his head. When required, this sponge could be squeezed dry and deliver a true copy of what had been stored there. This explained scientifically how the Low Countries could produce such excellent painters. After all, the essence of painting was to be able to produce exact replicas of daily life. At the same time, it explained why our literature attracted virtually no international interest. Literature involves a level of abstract conceptualisation for which such spongy brains were inherently unsuitable!

Tinkering with creation

This flood inundated large parts of the Biesbosch and Land of Alteng on 18-19 November i 42 i Over sixty villages and thousands of people were engulfed overnight by the water of the Maas. .

The concept of objective beauty in one's own landscape is illusory. Such a leap in perception is brought about by the discovery that we are here talking of a human creation, which in a sense turns us immediately into God's subcontractors. This idea was very popular in the seventeenth century but it had deep medieval roots. God had deliberately left Creation incomplete. As one of His chosen people, we had a duty to finish His work, especially since this muddy, marshy delta was so obviously unfinished. That this was God's intention was manifest from the fact that we survived so many floods, a familiar instrument of God's wrath ever since the time of Noah. There were many indications that this was part of the divine plan, for after every flood there were reports of babies floating in baskets who presumably would grow up to be a new Moses.

This theology of superiority served as propaganda for the great drainage works of the seventeenth century. The Netherlands, under an exclusive commission from God, was to be created by its inhabitants. As a result, the Netherlanders have had an obvious and irrepressible urge right up to the pre-

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The great flood of i February 1953 resulted in i 853 casualties in the provinces of Zeeland and South-Holland. Photo from The Disaster (De ramp, I953), a `national edition' with a foreword by the Queen of the Netherlands.

During the winter e vi nce of 1 995 the Dutch province Limburg was under attack by the Maas.

sent day to keep tinkering with their own creation, to map it out and regulate it more closely. Any suspicion of wilderness, be it uncultivated land or freely running water, has to be tamed and cut back to create a garden, nature reserve, canal or pond. And in Madurodam we get a convenient overview of the way in which the Netherlands has been tamed and organised, in a replica that is deceptively close to the real thing.

This almost obsessive orderliness has, since the earliest times, also produced forms of democratic self-government. Drainage and land reclamation constant consultation. NobodyY could undertake such ( imp olderin g) required q work only for his own plot of land because his neighbours would immediately find themselves up to their knees in water. So from all that local consultation arose the dike reeve, not a nobleman as his name in Dutch suggests (`dijkgraaf - dike count), but an officer appointed to carry out a function that has continued for some seven centuries.

Furthermore, the structure of the land prevented the establishment or development of a powerful noble or ecclesiastical authority. There are no large uninterrupted 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 trade were the obvious strategies for survival, and that is how it has been from the early Middle Ages. So instead of great palaces and abbeys one got numerous little towns with merchants' houses and canals.

For the same reason, there was no place for barricade-storming on matters of principle because that was no way to keep the commercial pot boiling. Trade requires good will, understanding, genuine and pragmatic toleration; 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 late Middle Ages, which was most widespread and popular in the Low Countries. Employers and employees developed a strong feeling of solidarity within 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 equal and dependent upon each other, with forms of administration that prefer to give responsibility to a consultative board, usually with a spokesperson rather than a leader. This means that any `leader' should not claim in public to have superior knowledge or insight to the rest. The painter Karel Appel is a master of this approach, describing his artistic work as 'just messing around' After which we knew in our hearts that he was an incomparably great painter.

In the Netherlands we like to hear that kind of language from the truly great. We know full well that they are exceptional, but for us the important is the ritual of ordinariness that has developed over the centuries from thing a self-image that is now unshakeably rooted in our collective consciousness.

And it is precisely those who are most prominent amongst us, whether artist, scientist, politician or even prince, who are subjected to the closest scrutiny.

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 extent that they are able to appear most ordinary. That is why the 1998 businesswoman 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 ordinary 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 was well aware of this.

Politicians in particular excel in declarations of ordinariness. And obviously the prime minister takes the lead. So former Prime Minister Wim Kok, an extremely exceptional person, regularly let it be known that he enjoyed camping and, of course, in a pup tent, a lowly shelter tent that one rarely sees nowadays but which expresses the height of humility in the face of the modern family caravan. The tone had been set by one of his predecessors, the late Joop den Uyl, who is probably the only political leader in the world to have 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, so long as it's from long ago, in the name of a waterbus, a neglected street or a messy square. Usually the hero' s name will no longer be recognised, as is the case with Willem Park in Amsterdam.

KLM (the Royal Dutch Airlines) names its larger aeroplanes after exotic rivers. In fact, the less Dutch you appear to be, the greater the impact on your own circle. None of our national heroes, starting with Floris v, can expect commemorations, national feast days, rituals or other expressions of warmth and solidarity. On the other hand, one detects a certain degree of sympathy for prominent lame ducks from the past, people who meant well and usually paid for it, somewhat clumsily, with their lives. One thinks of Jan van Schaffelaar, who for no good reason jumped off a tower and is now forever remembered in popular and children's rhymes. And the same applies to the poor orphan child Jan van Speyk, who blew himself up when the Belgians threatened to take over his ship in i 83 I. We also like to remember how irresistibly ordinary these so-called heroes .

Outline of a polder, with at the top a pumping station (r.) and a discharging sluice (l.). It also shows the circular canal and the enclosing dike around the drained lake. Drawing from The Dutch and their Dikes

(Amsterdam, 1956).

;

—

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

This all has to do with our lowlands bourgeois society of merchants and farmers, who from the late Middle Ages conducted their own little affairs (note the use of the word `little') with the help of an impenetrable network of committees, councils and boards. In this, there was no place for the vertical hierarchy of powerful leadership in Church and State. From the outset, we were able to do without emperors and cardinals. Furthermore, our national past has been carved up by a long history of the bizarre but harmonious system of `pillarisation', which is lubricated by a readiness to compromise. It therefore could not tolerate the divisive triumphalism of different religious and social groups celebrating their own heroes.

The Dutch are always sure that they know best, and sometimes even better, which tends to give rise to scornful comments by foreigners about our finger-wagging. There may be something in that, but it's a price we gladly pay for having embraced super-democratism, together with its companion, the spirit of equality. No country in the world has such a relatively large number of organised and recognised amateur practitioners of the arts and sciences. One out of every fifty Netherlanders takes part in amateur dramatics. And a recent survey revealed that these amateurs do not believe that they are any worse than professional actors. Illustrative of this know-it-all confidence in one's talents is the popularity of the quiz show. Unlike in America where the main figures are generally exceptional all-knowing enthusiasts in a specialist area, here it is always an ordinary man who glories in being asked questions about the world in general. His appearance suggests that, in principle, everything can be known by everyone, since in the sitting room we can always get the better of him. After all, aren't we all supposed, in principle, to be equally learned? And although these rituals of ordinariness and democratised erudition give an impression of naivety, there is surely a direct link between this and the absence of the usual bloodbaths when Protestants and Catholics meet and which continue to this day, even in a corner of Europe.

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