by Peter Berger
Friday, October 7, 1991. On the train heading south. To my surprise, somewhat, I am in a pleasant mood, but yes. It is also October and that is a time of year that can do no wrong with me. And the weather is quite nice now. Herr, es ist Zeit…. But at least I have a goal: Brussels.
Also a charred city, like Antwerp or The Hague. But still of a majestic grandeur. Koot and Bie don’t like the word prestigious. I do. Brussels is a prestigious city. A metropolis in a charming country that is small for such a colossal capital, full of the chaos of beautiful regions, do-it-yourself houses and rusty industry. Brussels. It may be a city full of kitsch, but oh, how I love that overwhelming kitsch, that imperial, that grand gesture, that worldliness. Brussels sits on me like an overly wide, precious cloak, spacious and grand and so mundane. I am a grand seigneur from the Netherlands, born in 1878. And I am on my way to the offices of the Societe Generale. With a pack of shares in my precious valise. In the big parks, there stroll young women in big autumn robes, the queue de Paris waving at their narrow waists, sweet red-wild, feminine and dangerous, the reddish hair put up. I let nothing show, but while pretending to be deep in thought, I casually and lovingly watch their swaying strides. Brussels: dream that always comes true in its own dream of wide squares and proud buildings, oh….
The Martens Cabinet has fallen a bit, but it doesn’t show anywhere. Brussels is a city where, if you order warm white beer, meaning blond beer of six degrees Celsius, in its Flemish way, the waiters don’t understand what you mean. After the meeting, I will order shrimp croquettes – kroketjes the Flemish call them in love – with gray shrimp at my regular little pub there. We in the Netherlands call them Dutch shrimp. I don’t care, salty and sweet as they lie blushing in that lightly fried croquette, next to an amiable leaf of sia. And I’ll order white beer with it, and again the waiters won’t understand me.
Belgium is a country where, for a time, teachers were paid in part in meal vouchers. Finally a currency that held its value. When Dutch officials are received in Flanders they are always received richly. Hence those polite Dutchmen who always say: no, no, we will come to you. It’s so much cozier here. And they mean it from the depths of their stone hearts.
That wonderful Flemish dining with beautiful meats, gentle vegetables, in their dark red splendor lustily slumbering wines stretching sensually in the mouth, like a young woman waking in the fragrant morning, warm and animalistic….
The Flemings also sometimes came to the Netherlands for meetings. And then they could have a bite to eat. In the canteen, now called the company restaurant. In other words, the canteen. That was not appreciated by the Flemish. So we would also go out, with generosity and panache. The girls of the canteen were asked to fry chicken legs, drumsticks that is, and French fries. But oh well. Instead of frozen fries, the girls have bought turnips and poured them into the frying fat. These, after about ten minutes of sizzling, emerge like black dicks from the gaily frying fat. Sobbing and bubbling with laughter, the Flemish colleagues returned home to the civilized world. Since then they have been eating on the basis of reciprocity. I mean, since then the Flemish colleagues here have been served edible food that cooks meant something nice by, probably. But crazy. The Flemish prefer to stay away if at all possible anyway, and the Dutch are always happy to come and travel to Antwerp or Brussels. And so everyone is happy. And so it should be, it’s give and take in the world.
Brussels, that is. As always, I will ask for directions in Dutch, the way I can dream. And eight out of ten will not understand me or even ask: parlee-vous Anglais, mesjeu?
After going through my pieces some more, I take, concerning Roosendaal, from the pile of reading material brought before me the article “The singularity of Dutch culture. By E.H. Kossmann. I hardly ever agree with anyone, myself included. But with Kossmann it is not unpleasant to disagree. And pieces about culture I like to read, it gives the very nice illusion that the world is about something and that life is worth living.
But first read through some magazines. Vrij Nederland. Find only one fascinating piece. The one about Hergé and my beloved Tintin. Sire, are there no Belgians? Sir, look at Tintin. Belgians tend to be a little redder than we Dutch usually are, Belgian too. What to say when I see headlined in De Volkskrant that a piece promises to be about Mahler while it turns out to be about Hindemith. Who cares, as long as it contains music, the editors must have thought. My strange, contented mood has remained. Eccentric.
Brussels, Brüssel, Bruxelles, Brussels. Asked directions from an MP standing in front of the Flemish Council building. He is wearing a red cap. Heartwarming. Nice mitraillette too. I like guns, as long as it is peace. He, the MP, refers me to his colleague painting in front of another guardhouse. “For das eene van ier”. The MP from here, however, doesn’t know about his health either. Doesn’t even know where the Rue Royale-Rue du Roi is. Almost late at the Arkaden building, due to all that asking for the known way. Just in time, then. Surprise all around. Had a quick look at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier after the meeting.
I think that’s nonsense, an unknown soldier with a flame on his dead belly. In France, in every village you see a plaque with the names of the fallen. I invariably read a few names that are often also on the store window of the charcuterie and quincaillerie. But well, to me those names under those two crossed palm branches are all unknown. Every soldier who died is an unknown soldier, except in his village. And there the death of those soldiers hurts until his generation is also dead, hearts withered, and then sand over it. Still, I find it a venerable monster, that tomb of the Unknown. I keep looking until I notice a sign warning of falling rocks. The tomb, too, is getting a day older.
In Antwerp, a statue of a pair of railroad workers stands in the station, giant stone pincers at hand. For the fallen cheminots. Dead for the fatherland. How do I get back to that? To those men of white stone? Because of the falling rocks, I hurry to my stammineke which is friendly Flemish for neat Brussels estaminet.
In Flanders I always feel at ease. It is written, and this is not from long ago, that Dutch officials feel elevated above the Flemish and look down, yes really, on Flemish literature. As if civil servants were not yet born, or in the nowhere, and not of the world. I am fairly laconic under that and yet.
Memories well up in me. Images. I debate the new realism in poetry with Hugo Brems on a sort of feast day of “Dietsche Warande & Belfort” under the monkish leadership of Marcel Janssens, while my children pitch a tent in the wet park around the castle where it takes place and their Indian cries echo shrilly in the fog, in the three-legged donkey; wipe dry in Pulchri the tears of a dumbfounded Jef Geeraerts, that good murderer, with a dirty snot; editor of a Flemish-Dutch magazine, once, long, long ago I sway and sway with Flemish and Dutch writers through the Antwerp pubs, watch with the Flemish brothers in one of those huge party castles the sun rise quietly and mistily while in the wet silvered canal water swans row; light morning dew or mist of lovely liquor cones or both floats in the parks all around, the bushes, the foliage, and the first crunch of birds in a light red headache.
Been to a café with jos Vandeloo as it is called. In the pinch of Willem Elsschot, I reverently drank Trappist for the first time (“my young one, you shall drink carefully for this gold is eating and drinking at the same time”) and devoutly we then played Willem Elsschot’s beloved baking game, cheerfully and quietly and in sacred melancholy.
Stories, stories. Rain in Wemmel. Wet snow in Ghent. The Fox. Melieveke, do you remember?
My grandmother was born somewhere in Belgian Brabant; my fierce uncle was harbor master of Antwerp and, not denying his distant and god-awful tinker’s origins, later alongside his beautiful and secret Mechelen bitch of a Julia, pub landlord with himself as best customer in Ostend. Until he popped out of the drink brimming with Johnny Walker right behind a lobster cocktail.
And right on the border, in St. Anna ter Muiden where he now, his black anguish of life cried out, lies buried in a sweet and comforting little cemetery under the Zeeuws-Vlaanderen talking trees, buried under a huge, laughable tombstone in the shape of an unwritten book, oh poor one, that poet who couldn’t find the words, that old-fashioned, defenseless, meek frik with his watch chains and his bombazon belly – and right on the border, then, in his old house on the old little square, my grandfather told us, my sister and me, Conscience’s breathlessly great stories about Jan Breydel and Pieter de Coninck in his cozy, warm, West Flemish Dutch. Sweet memories, shining Golden Spurs battles, blood, heroism, triumph of the free Keerlen.
And how hard did he, runaway monk, leave the dear, disgusting life, clinging to the bedposts, screaming it is said, for his God was gone, but his Vengeance remained, beckoning in an eternal night.
Flanders with its Lys. Those trees reaching up into the sky, and down into the still water. Flanders, do I love that land, deeply love in all those half-lost memories. Feel silent. A bit sad now too. Flanders. Flanders country…
Bachelor and divorced men’s habit. I always read while eating. Since I have conversed enough in misunderstandings with Brusselsians, I order my beer but international. A pale ale. Lifelike beer: black and bitter.
In the Netherlands, we have been taught not to call Flemish people Belgians. That would be sensitive. When a member of parliament spoke of the Belgian Mr. Sis and Mr. Mezo, he blushed all over his politically hardened head, and half-sinking, so to speak, from embarrassment, he recovered with: the Flemish Mr. Sis and Mr. Mezo, of course.
Natural? Life is more complicated than we are taught. In the “Weekend-Knack,” Flemish magazine, the headline reads, “Belgian fashion used to have the reputation of being very boring. Now people accuse us of extravagance”. Us Belgians, in other words. It is exactly as I thought. Once the Flemish have cultural autonomy, they can also feel self-consciously Belgian, in a kind of proud neo-Belgicism. If Belgium does not stay together in one form or another, fox Martens notwithstanding, it will be a political business accident. This brings me to a reflection by Flemish Prof. Nieuwborg in the communications bulletin of the Dutch Language Union.
As one knows, it is very terrible to say that the Dutch and the Flemish have two different cultures. Especially when it is said by the government. Well, Nieuwborg has been to Indonesia and has the newsletter print what he has been teaching his Indonesian audience. And what did he teach his audience? That Flanders has its own cultural consciousness. His criteria for what the nature of a people is appeal to me. The author writes: “the nature of a people is certainly largely determined, on the one hand, by the space in which it lives and the way it uses that space and, on the other hand, by its experience of time, its vision of the past, present and future.” He substantiates this with a number of proverbs, for example, which refer to the experience of time and space.
The remarkable thing now is that it includes many proverbs that are also in vogue in the Netherlands. Does that now prove that the Dutch and the Flemish have the same culture? Yes, you could say. No, you could also say, if you assume that it shows a great discrepancy that this scholar apparently does not know that these proverbs are shared by Flemish and Dutch people and he considers them typically Flemish. Of course, it could also be that he hasn’t been thinking. I won’t interfere with that any further. Much more salient is that Nieuwborg also feels like a Belgian. Not heavily. But he experiences a kind of Belgian national feeling, anyway. He experiences that about the Belgian Royal Family. Or experiences that when the Belgian soccer team has won. That is remarkable. One should not make light of it. Because these are typically the national symbols. And that these are experienced lightly goes without saying. What civilized person experiences his national symbols intensely, and vehemently, when it is not necessary and therefore when the nation is not threatened? In the now-read piece by Kossmann – wasn’t easy, by the way, that article – there is a nice example. That of Jan Romein. In 1940 and 1941, Jan Romein gave two lectures on the Dutch spirit and Dutch national character. After the war, Romein did not return to them. Didn’t have to. The Dutch flag only acquires the value of a fierce symbol of Dutch togetherness when it is threatened. Or that we remember that it once did. To me, the national anthem has meaning only on one day of the year. On May 4. When I hear that hymn come rustling across the Waalsdorper plain, tears spring to my eyes, if not worse. Everyone of my generation and older has an Unknown Dead person sleeping in their heart who wakes up once a year in his terrible emptiness and who, in agony, wants to live on in our memory, only to sink back into the oblivion that we are, while we still stand sobbing a bit, poor, helpless, doomed with our puny bunch of flowers in hand. The Last Post goes solemnly shrieking like silence making noise in its mortification. The sky breaks.
Nagel thinks national hymns are bullshit. I don’t. Do I hear on Sempre the Waldhorn….
But when I hear that song, the Wilhelmus, on the radio on other days, I turn it off. Because I am selective in my patriotic feelings, and when the Dutch team won the European Cup I fled the pub. The joy was innocent, but I don’t like that innocence, I know that. It is related to an atavistic innocence that is dangerous. Life-threatening and deadly.
But Nieuwborg. In my opinion, with him there is that neo-Belgicism. I already mentioned a remarkable fact. Namely, that the speaker apparently did not know that numerous proverbs presented as Flemish are also in vogue in the Netherlands. The second remarkable fact is that he tells Indonesia that there is a Flemish culture of its own, and that in a Taalunie publication. Nobody noticed, let alone got indignant about it. That is crazy. Because when Minister d’Ancona had such a thing said by one of her officials at a General Dutch Congress, the bear was on the roof and the house was too small. But the truth that is chased out in front of the house returns from behind.
I continue on that Belgicism for a while. By now my croquettes are gone, and, to stay in the more realistic beers, I order a Mort subite.
“In search of the Belgian man.” This headline in that Flemish magazine “Weekend Knack” catches my eye and I read further in the cuff, “Belgian men have the reputation of being very boring when it comes to clothes. An undeserved reputation it is. A Frenchman tells us they like to spend a lot of money on clothes. An Italian tells us they have good taste. And even a Belgian stares in amazement at his own countrymen”.
Remarkable. The second article already, in which a Fleming who apparently feels Belgian wants to settle with his own reputation to create a new, self-confident, worldly one. “Flanders is alive. And Belgian compatriots. Complicated.
Then I switch to the real magazine “Knack”, the weekly. The headlines there are as lousy as in the Netherlands, at least in this morning’s De Volkskrant. The lead of an article: “An American Venus probe discovered even more similarities between this neighborhood planet and Earth.” Never knew our neighborhood planet was an American Venus probe. But nevertheless, the culture here is in full swing. One is fascinated by its image. Its self-image. I said, complicated it is too.
Nieuwborg is part of the Dutch-speaking cultural field, but also feels he is a participant in a culture that is perceived as typically Flemish, and also feels a bit Belgian. The Fleming speaking in “Knack” calls himself a Belgian so obviously that I believe you have to be a Dutchman to find it strange, or remarkable. Are there more like this? Yes indeed. But then again, didn’t Paul van Ostayen once give a lecture on “Le renouveau lyrique en Belgique”?
What strikes me, again and again, is, that publicists dealing with the relationship between Flemish and Dutch culture don’t last very long in order not to contradict themselves. I think: precisely because of that strange truth. That elusive truth.
I remember that a Flemish journalist made a dig at the speech that Mrs. d’Ancona had one of her officials give on the occasion of the ANC congress that had become known, that affront didn’t it, in which quite a few more moderate things were said than, for example, Nieuwborg said. Because what the minister claimed was au fond that Flanders and the Netherlands had two cultures in the sense of two cultural-political systems that are difficult to integrate.
That Flemish journalist then, who had his say in NRC Handelsblad. Beliën. Paul Beliën. If I have it right, the journalist ended his article with the statement that Flanders and the Netherlands do not form a political cultural community. But, in his opinion, there is a cultural community. I had drawn a line under two observations in the article. The first is, that Beliën says that Flanders is currently in a deep identity crisis. I note: The Netherlands is not in a deep cultural identity crisis. Further: an identity crisis is a cultural crisis. So the Fleming is struggling, Beliën claims in effect, with his cultural identity. And since the Dutchman has no trouble with that, with his cultural identity thus, the Fleming and the Dutchman experience culture differently. Now, the criterion for unity of a culture is, I think, on good grounds, that all cultural peers experience that culture in one and the same way. Otherwise they are not fellow-culturists. Culture is above all the experience of a common identity. And that experience is therefore not common when it comes to Flemish and Dutch people. Ergo: we are dealing with two cultures. At least in Beliën’s way of thinking, if we extend this logically.
Under yet another passage I had drawn a line. Beliën writes that for many Belgians the world does not go beyond the village. Later, consulting my old newspapers, the passage reads as follows: “The Flemish historian Arthur Vermeersch [points out] that the Netherlands is an open society and Flanders (Belgium) a closed society. For many Belgians, the world stops outside the village, the neighborhood or the family circle. Belgium is therefore a cozy country where people feel safe, protected and cherished.”
Beliën thus tries to argue that Flanders and the Netherlands form a cultural unity. But in glaring contradiction to this, his reasoning with which he tries to substantiate this points in the opposite direction. He gives food for thought that not only do the Netherlands and Flanders form two cultures with two different cultural identities but also, more strongly, that Flanders is part of a very own Belgian society, a typically Belgian society with also a very own Belgian culture of seclusion. Because this Belgian security is of course essential to a Belgian cultural identity that is also expressed in a typically Belgian lifestyle, building style, club life, parochial life and so on. Let me point out that it was not I who wrote Belgium after Flanders in parentheses there. It is Beliën who declares Flanders to be Belgian in a cultural sense with great ease and completely self-evident.
It’s very complicated. But we encountered it before, that hovering between participating in a Dutch-speaking culture, a Flemish one and the feeling of Belgian solidarity. Look at that wonderful book by Geert Van Istendael, “The Belgian Labyrinth.” Note: Belgian.
When you cross the border, he writes, you are in Belgium. I recognize that. That is a change in culture, which is sensorial. It is a constantly striking experience: you immediately read the culture of another country from the landscape, the houses, the villages, the cities. Van Istendael experiences this Belgian-ness in a love-hate relationship that is truly breathtaking. Deep identity crisis? Maybe so. But perhaps it is part of Flemish cultural identity that there is a certain brokenness inherent in it; it seems quite conceivable to me that a person shares in several cultural identities. Indeed, it seems to me impossible not to be part of several alternating cultural identities.
Now if all those self-contradictory publicists had thought of that instead of choosing so firmly, how much clearer it all would have been. And how nice not to live with it. Perhaps that brokenness is the only way to have a cultural awareness that is realistic, sensitive, nuanced and interesting. Van Istendael has a feel for that, for that multiplicity of cultures. In a lecture in Dordt in April 1990, he listed how many cultures one can already participate in. It is easy to fill in. What disappointed me about this intelligent man was that he acted so serious and possessed, so biting. Van Istendael: The officials of the Language Union just had to – I summarize the tirade – take subversive action on-dem. And there should not be two culture ministers, but one!
What’s that, I wonder. Some zealot may have talked about treason in an article in NRC-Handelsblad in connection with language politics, but we are not living in the occupation and there is nothing scandalous about it. Surely a surely not unworldly journalist should know that an official who in normal times in conscience disagrees with policy has only one thing to do: resign. Come on. Can’t we be a little more down-to-earth when it comes to culture? Everyone thinks something different, but everyone is almost as excited. And firm. And convinced that they are right. And always that strange inner contradiction. It just won’t stop.
In my clippings later, the first and second international secretaries of the Dutch Labor Party first tell the reader in NRC Handelsblad that culture is dynamic and exists by the grace of contradictions. Then, not too much further into the argument, they postulate that cultural mixing should be the starting point of any cultural policy. A question mark is appropriate here. If culture exists by the grace of opposites, in this light this mixing is a policy aimed at cultural destruction. Are the secretaries just contradicting each other? Or are they both contradicting themselves as well?
So many souls, so many opinions. According to one, there is no European culture. Others are equally sure there is. Like the director of the Social and Cultural Planning Bureau, Adriaan van der Staay. At least, he is for a flourishing European culture and is apprehensive of a neo-nationalism that will become the ideological refuge for some national guilds. I think by guilds here he means countries. Like the Netherlands, for example. Diametrically opposed to this is, for example, the opinion of a former journalist of NRC Handelsblad, Eric Boogerman. He fears in “Ons Erfdeel” that the disappearance of the European borders (the slob obviously means the national borders and not for example the border between Europe and Asia) will have serious consequences for the cultural identity of the Dutch-speaking region. And that, he further fears, if the government leaders only pay lip service to Flemish-Dutch cooperation, the defense of Dutch identity will remain sadly lacking. In the context in which this is written, it cannot be understood in any other way than that Boogerman equates the cultural identity of the Dutch language area with the Dutch identity. Surely the Flemish must not like that very much, having just fought for the cultural autonomy of Flanders. And indeed. While the Language Union Treaty still speaks of the Dutch cultural community in Flanders, they no longer want to speak of it. It has become: Flemish Community. Officially. To the dismay of Geert van Istendael, who in “Het Belgisch Labyrint” thinks it should have stayed with the name “Dutch Community in Belgium”. And so I come back to Van Istendael. He is not right, but he is consistent. After all, he says: we do have one language in the Dutch language area. But not one culture. Nor two: one Dutch and one Flemish. We have countless. The corollary of that is, therefore, in my opinion, there are no Flemish with a Flemish identity and Dutch with a Dutch identity. So the Flemish Community had to be called the Dutch Community in Belgium. Because it is the Dutch-speaking community in Belgium. These Boogermannian follies have the effect of allowing me to call my Flemish brothers Dutch. After all, they speak Dutch ?
Nor can Van Istendael use this theory to explain to me why he has a love-hate for Belgium and the Belgians. Correcting the first proof of this text, I read in today’s NRC Handelsblad, Saturday, November 23, 1991, under the headline “Martens takes biggest risk of his career,” this observation by Fokke Jensma: “Brussels is an obvious choice for Martens. Belgium is looking for a new focus for its schizophrenic Flemish-Walloon identity in the new federal Europe.” Where did we come across that already? That schizophrenia?
I as a Dutchman am beyond that. Van Istendael is not. He has at least a Flemish cultural identity. He is Flemish. So not a Dutchman. Fleming. How do I know that? I know that because I don’t have my eyes and ears in my pocket and notice that every so often he speaks of “we Flemish people” and of the Dutch mentality and the “Flemish” mentality and the differences between them. That indicates two distinct clearly identifiable cultural communities. And how can that be, when the existence of numerous cultures within the Dutch language area contradicts the existence of those two clearly nameable cultural communities. That is possible because the existence of subcultures does not refute the existence of a national culture or the culture of a people with a cultural self-awareness or, even stronger, a cultural autonomy. And that’s why I don’t call a Fleming a Dutchman. Besides, they would already see me coming there. Menneke, menneke.
So many souls, so many opinions I said. Are Flanders and the Netherlands separate cultures or not? Anyone who thinks at all cannot maintain that they are one culture. But neither is it a coherent cultural area. Flemish literature, which in my opinion is its own literature, is rightly discussed in our press as partner-literature in the larger context of one Dutch-language literature. And if that does not happen, it is not right, so that I find it annoying that Gerrit Bussink has just sent a booklet with only Northern Dutch proseists into the Anglo-Saxon language area. One can defend it, by pointing out, as he does, the Calvinist cultural background of the Dutch. But why would one want to defend that when there are so many more good reasons to present Flemish and Dutch writers as Dutch-language writers abroad? If we want to be nuanced, we have to come up with something other than just one culture.
There is a difference in culture, says Heldring in NRC-Handelsblad. At least, if you look at culture in an anthropological sense. Then you have to deal with your own Flemish and your own Dutch culture. But culture in the narrow sense is not different, according to him. But do we come out of this in a satisfactory way? Is it indeed true that culture in the narrow sense can be separate from culture in the broad sense? Sometimes yes, in international cultural phenomena. But how essential is that? I mean this. There are cultural expressions that are clearly not international. A lot of literature, for example. Now suppose there is a Dutch-language literature. That is then culture in the narrow sense which, according to Heldring, one can therefore think separately both from Dutch and Flemish culture in the broad sense. Let’s give it a try.
The only possible consequence then is that the only difference from French, German, English and Chinese literature would be that that Dutch-language literature is written in Dutch. However, it is impossible to maintain that national literatures differ only in language. There are simply cultural differences in the products of culture in the narrow sense. Reve, for example, sells poorly abroad because people do not understand the typical Dutchness of his books. Many Dutch big sellers cannot be sold abroad. Courtesy of this, I will refrain from giving examples. Adriaan van der Veen lived in America for many years. And so he once told in a lecture at the Haagse Kunstkring, in that foreign perspective, looking through foreign glasses, that he suddenly saw, how terribly stereotypically Dutch Dutch Dutch literature was and how similar in their Dutch orientation those for him in the Netherlands so different works suddenly were. Introverted inner-veteran literature by inert self-reflectors who barely set foot outside the door. There is, to paraphrase Anbeek, remarkably little street noise.
It is therefore going too far to say that culture in the narrow sense is so separate from culture in the broad sense. Goya is Spanish to the core, so is Bunuel, so is Lorca, so is El Greco, so is Tapies. And didn’t Busken Huet write, I read at Kossmann’s, that the arts are pre-eminently the expression of what is peoples’ own? Now just because Busken Huet says that doesn’t necessarily make it so. But still, to simply postulate that culture in the narrow and broad sense are separate, that seems boud. I note that the Ghent curator of that wonderful museum there, Jan Hoet, reads Flemish-ness and Belgian-ness from the modern visual art of his country. I also note that Flemish literary scholars such as Dr. Herbert van Uffelen and Hugo Brems explain the differences between Dutch and Flemish literature from different cultural backgrounds.
Karel Jonckheere teaches us in “De Vlaamse letteren vandaag,” that is as early as 1958, that the “pressure exerted on the Flemish spirit in the course of time and the nippiness that was the male response to it, (…) have given the Southern Dutch literatures an extremely peculiar accent.”
In short, anyone who argues that culture in the narrow sense and culture in the broad sense are generally separate will have to come up with strong arguments. No doubt it is much, much more nuanced. And that is precisely why people so easily contradict themselves when they make firm, unequivocal statements about culture. Reality always slips in. For example, in his commentary on Mrs. d’Ancona’s ANC speech, Heldring says that no doubt the Flemings were not only disturbed by its content. It will literally turn out to read, “…..mevrouw d’ Ancona’s evidence contradicts what she wants to claim. This will not have escaped her Flemish listeners, for however much WVC officials may look down on the Flemish (if we are to believe the former ambassador for cultural affairs, Maarten Mourik), the Flemish have at least been introduced to the French mode of reasoning at school and in their almost daily contact with French-speaking compatriots.” Now, in “L’Express” not long ago I read statements by great Gallic minds about Père Staline and related monsters. I have great admiration for Sartre, Mer-leau-Ponty, Aragon and such great sons of the land of Descartes. French clarity? Anyway, let’s do Descartesian then.
If it is the case that the Flemish are so up-to-date, and they differ from the Dutch in that respect, then that, mind you, marks a formidable difference in culture in the narrow sense. Because the sense of logical consistency learned in education and interaction is part of the culture in the narrow sense. It is the very domain of thought and consciousness. And if the Flemings can think more clearly, what difference is there not between their culture in the narrow sense and the Dutch one. Where is Heldring now with his unity of culture in the narrow sense? Further: according to Heldring, the Flemish have gained a sense of logic through their contact with their southern neighbors. But the Flemish, in turn, are our southern neighbors animated by that sense of logic. Why then, in all these contacts, has that again not transferred to us?
Unlike Mourik, Heldring believes that one should not worry so much about the dangers that threaten our culture. Well, that’s where his reasoning comes in, then our culture will just be pushed into the background. It doesn’t mean that much, does it? If I were Mourik, I would not want that text as a recommendation in my booklet, but that is none of my business. By the way, I myself do not think that our culture is threatened at all, and in all this concern I hear a lot of hysteria whistling along. That doesn’t matter, because it shows a healthy cultural self-importance that only rears its head when one thinks there is danger. But if I really thought there was danger, the only attitude evidencing civilization – and I also say this in response to Hans van den Bergh’s opinion – is to fight. Why? Just read Max Weber’s “Wissenschaft als Beruf” on it. Cultures, he says, cannot be compared. German culture is no better or worse than French culture. Nor do I care if French culture, for example, is more grandiose than Dutch culture. I guess so. Or not. Or here and there. But my culture is my culture, the culture in which I learned to think and feel, in which my emotions are rooted and my sadness and happiness. I don’t want to lose that culture, I don’t want to miss it and I can’t miss it. In another culture I am a stranger. And if there were a foreign culture about the Netherlands, then my children would be foreigners in it as well, and their children again. For in that other culture they are cut off from their cultural roots.And a culture without historical roots is like a man without a memory: it has no more spirit and no soul. It doesn’t exist. And that is exactly what I have against Abram de Swan’s world culture system as well. That is a culture of Zombies.
A while back I read a wonderful book by lan Buruma. The name escaped me for a moment, that’s what you get from being around protagonists of Zombie culture. And in it he describes one of those dead wrong Eastern countries where people have lost their cultural past and therefore their cultural reality and identity. One tries to breathe an artificial fake culture. But that, of course, cannot be done. A spiritual hell is that country. And the people know it and feel it. And suffer because of it. Culture is the oxygen of a society. And culture is rooted in a communally experienced history. In a story.
I feel I am a Hagenaar. Out of sentiment and choice, and because I have come to live in the immortal and wistful soul of this city. Am I proud of that? Certainly! Had I been born and raised in Antwerp, I would have been a Fleming, and proud of it, of my Antwerp identity. And I might have started acting like the people’s soul as a stereotype there, that soul of the people, that soul that doesn’t exist and yet exists. Amai!
I don’t have a Calvinist nature. But in Flanders, in Brussels, in foreign lands, I always notice well, how a Calvinistic national history works in me.
I am sometimes caught in a Hollander. Just as a fierce Haagsheid can capture me. Or sometimes suddenly, when I read a poem by Simon van Wattum, and hear what he means when he writes “och mien laivert,” and a poignancy takes hold of me over so much tender restraint that can only be expressed in that dialect of his, then a gust of Groningerness comes over me, the Sterrebos in the rain, the wet trolley buses. Claassen’s cake.
And if a Japanese man asks me the way, wouldn’t he be addressing a European? A giant, that is, of 1 meter and 72 centimeters in height?
Had I been born in Antwerp, oh, how strange I would have looked at the person I am now. No, to all those I can be. To this stranger in Flanders who can be there at home, strangely enough.
One lives in his identities as one lives in his city, his region, his country. His language.
Identity is a sudden perception of the world in the environment, in the other and in others; it is a smell, a recognition, a being. On the edge of speechlessness. Moving is it and wanderlust.
Culture is experiencing. Living in the only conceivable form of a consciousness that appears in looking and feeling, in the senses. In the kaleidoscopic reality of our experiences, which are always cultural experiences, we can be villagers or city dwellers and compatriots and linguists. And always only for a moment.
And perhaps facing Americans we can even be Europeans, facing Easterners we can be Westerners, in ever expanding and shrinking cultural circles.
But the smaller circle of culture can also always be encompassed by a larger one. One may also be stronger, more deeply rooted than the other. And perhaps that alternation of strength and weakness can also vary.
And nationality can be a strong bond. European-ness a weak one.
I can’t possibly be aware of being a Hagenaar in my city if I don’t also, vaguely, participate there in the way something Dutch permeates its Hague manifestation of something Dutch. Which can suddenly become fierce, sometimes. I cannot be in my city without participating in what I unreservedly call Holland as an idea.
And without sharing in the soul of the Dutch language, a house. That house that is half in Flanders.
I checkout and go sad with wealth nowhere to go.
In October, night fell.
Some references:
E.H.Kossmann. See the volume: “Broadcasting a concern”.
E. Nieuwborg: The Flemish and the Dutch language in Belgium, past and present. Publikatieblad Nederlandse Taalunie, jrg. 3, no. 1, October 1989.
Paul Beliën: Political culture separates the Netherlands from Belgium. NRC Han-delsblad, June 23, 1990
Jan Marinus Wiersma and Piet Zelissen (Foreign Secretaries of the Labor Party: Cultural mixing should be the starting point.
NRC Handelsblad, Oct. 14, 1991
Adriaan van der Staay: European cultural policy needs more power of imagination. NRC-Handelsblad, October 29, 1988
Eric Boogerman: Dutch identity in a United Europe. Ons Erfdeel, jrg. 1990 no.4
J.H.Heldring: The cult of WVC. NRC-Handelsblad, May 18, 1990
The book by Buruma to which I referred is called “God’s Rubble.”
