by Geert van Istendael
Dutch culture does not exist. Therefore, it cannot be defended. The Dutch language does exist. It urgently needs defense.
Les pays francophones, even those countries that are only partially francophone, have created a powerful international organization to defend their language. Os paises lusofonos, the countries where the official language is Portuguese, are members of a similar alliance.
They stand up for a language and not a culture. The latter would be very difficult, since Portuguese is used in countries as diverse as Angola, Brazil and Portugal. And French is so widely spread around the world that just by transcribing the list of French-speaking states I could fill a good portion of the space allocated to me in this volume.
Do we necessarily have to follow that Latin model and start defending our language tightly, centralized, jacobean and pretentious? I don’t know exactly which model we should follow. I am convinced that the Dutch language deserves defense, and the reasons are there for the taking. It is beautiful, unique, therefore irreplaceable, and, above all, it is not very big. What about English then, which flourishes and grows and it does not defend itself. That English saves itself. There are more than enough people who speak and write it daily and so you will find more than enough who care for their language, professors from Oxford, Lagos or Sydney or writers languishing in Antibes or an ordinary greengrocer from Poughkeepsie. Because English is so widely used, it has an almost irresistible recruiting appeal. And finally, let’s not forget that English possesses a colossal commercial device that mercilessly targets young people anywhere in the world. The remedy is simple: exclusion, isolation. You either adore Anglo-Saxon music, movies, police novels, movie stars or you don’t belong to the groups you so desperately want to belong to. Throughout the world, English, especially Amenkanian English, is the language of money, therefore the language of power, therefore bearer of a coveted cultural model. Whoever has dough speaks English. English is the language of the boss and is therefore the boss.
I recently spoke with a Hungarian translator. I don’t know Hungarian, she speaks excellent Dutch. Hungarian publishers don’t want to translate anything from Dutch anymore, they ask only and exclusively for translations of English and American popular books.
Anyone who has ever seen what brilliant books the Hungarians, despite censorship, published until recently, knows immediately that the Anglo-Saxon cultural model is now penetrating even into areas from which it was hitherto excluded. My Czech, Roman Catholic friend, a real dissident, he belongs to Vàclav Havel’s personal circle of acquaintances, my friend so has a daughter. At her school in Prague, the parents had to choose which foreign language would be taught from now on, Russian or English. Everyone chose English, except my long before 1989 dissident friend and lone Communist. No, English defends itself.
Dutch, despite its colonial past, is neither ubiquitous nor expansive. When I see how Dutch politicians and businessmen perform mating dances around English, when I hear how Flemish rulers and industrialists work on Dutch with blunt instruments of torture, I begin to fear that Dutch is defenseless. “Everything of value is defenseless” writes Lucebert, that archetypal Dutch poet. It is high time for the defense to be organized.
First, we kick false modesty out the door. In Europe, Dutch is not a small language. Not even three times more people speak French, English, Italian, Spanish. Polish is slightly larger than Dutch, German decent, Russian much larger. Smaller are Czech, Slovak, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Slovenian, all Scandinavian languages combined, and certainly all Baltic or Celtic languages combined. Romanian is about the same size.
So those who look down on Dutch because it is supposedly such a small language are wrong. Nobody finds it strange that Swedes speak Swedish or Finns speak Finnish. But it seems as if it is taken offence that we speak Dutch, worse, it seems to me that the Dutch and the Flemish themselves take offence at the fact that they speak Dutch. We each have our own way of doing that.
We Flemings bask with abandon in the dank warmth of our Vloms. Vloms, of course, does not exist but we like to pretend it does. That West Flemish, Kempen or Voeren dialects have much more to do with Zeelandic Flemish, North Brabantese or Maastrichtish than with each other doesn’t bother us. And I don’t want to hear a bad word about those dialects, they are all equally strong, dignified and, at times, exuberantly cheerful. That’s not what this is about. But we stubbornly try to forget that three-quarters of our cozy moron language is Belgian, i.e. half-digested and crookedly translated French and not a dialect. It’s ours, it’s so familiar anyway and, huge advantage, we don’t have to make the slightest effort for our language. Surely we have already made that effort or don’t you know our language struggle? No, we can sit lazily on our Vlomish asses and taste the juicy Vlomish fruits, even if they are pudgy. Our smacking sounds delightful but our jaws are sticky.
Then again, droves of Dutch people are embarrassed that they have to speak Dutch, that godforsaken gossip from the sticky polders. They switch panically to English when they suspect a foreigner a mile away, and among themselves they haven’t made up their minds yet whether the use of Dutch is still fashionable or at all an issue worth while to brainstorm about it . Being proud of your language, there is a laughable belated response to that. Being proud of your language, well, you might be better off walking around as an adult in Boy Scout pants. Or else the reaction is hostile, being proud of your language, that smells of blood and soil. Or else the reaction is one of incomprehension and indifference. Who is proud of his language anymore? You must be retarded, tomorrow everyone will be speaking English anyway.
In addition, in the Netherlands, and especially in the Randstad, you find an even more narrow-minded view of language than in Belgium. Every word that does not fit into the Randstad vocabulary is wrong, does not exist, is Flemish, is dialect. Every time I hear such comments, I go and look in Van Dale and time after time I find that very ordinary, beautiful Dutch words are not tolerated by the Dutch speech community, beestig for example or the verb guarantee or a word like uitstalraam.
Both forms of laziness I abhor, the first because it threatens our language in its very existence, the second because it amputates large parts of our language. Neither Flemish nor Dutch laziness is something we can afford. If we assume that the Dutch language deserves defense, then the first line of defense is already the unity of the language. Is that unity not evident then? Forget it. Even eminent Dutchmen tell us that surely the language in Flanders is very different from the language in the Netherlands. They have established this scientifically. Wonderful. We should read their scientific work, with attention, but certainly not with much reverence. At least then we will know where the problems for our defense lie.
Surely it is very strange that the unity of the German language, for example, is never challenged even though German is spoken in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and Belgium. If you were to apply the criteria of our Dutch speakers to German you would have three or four languages and yet there is only one German. The Austrians never cared about that. Kafka? A Czech Jew, belongs to German literature, wrote Prager Deutsch. Stefan Zweig, a Jewish Austrian of Moravian descent, among others, belongs to German literature and was good friends with René Schickele, an Alsatian, first German, then French, the French always wrote his name Schickelé, but he belongs to German literature. Am I here making a brown-colored plea for Gross-Deutschland? Not at all. I shiver at the mere thought. I am merely saying that people who come from different countries and very different cultures can still speak one language, even if they do not live in the same country, and that you can very well participate from all sorts of unexpected angles in the cross-border cultural forms associated with that language.
The French like to defend la francophonie outside the borders of the French Republic. But they do not like to hear that in a few eastern departments hundreds of thousands of people speak German. That’s not German, c’est tout-à-fait différent, that’s alsacien or lorrain, vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine, anything you like but no German. According to this view, any deviant language becomes a regional language, thus inferior, and the predominance of official French can more easily be maintained.
It is precisely this trick that the French-speakers in Belgium once tried to play on Dutch. When ignoring was no longer possible, when brutal oppression no longer helped, they tried to divide and thus rule: “Surely you don’t want to claim to speak Dutch!?!!! Ah, non! C’est tout-à-fait différent! You speak Flemish!”
You could hear that from the mouths of people who barely knew Dutch, at most a few words of dialect.
The incredible thing is that both Dutch and Flemish still use this distinction every day, a distinction invented by people who tried to destroy our language and, when that failed, wanted to reduce it to a folkloric phenomenon. Fortunately, the Flemish emancipation movement opted very early on for the unity of the Dutch language. Unfortunately, in the first half of the last century, this was no easy matter. The language particularists, for example Guido Gezelle, vehemently opposed it, often out of Roman Catholic conviction. And although the Belgian constitution officially recognizes Dutch rather than Flemish in Belgium, Belgian Dutch speakers still adorn themselves with the narrow-minded, complacent and historically thoroughly false name of Flemish community. Indeed, the Belgian French-speakers use the group name “Communauté historically through and through false name Flemish community. De Belgique française de Belgique”. We were not and still are not that logical. A political discussion about this embarrassing mistake does not exist. The stupidity is simply not recognized. So it is not so surprising that the first line of defense, the unity of the Dutch language, the very necessary thing, is so neglected.
Fortunately, the Language Union Treaty exists. It is therefore a shame and a pity that the Taalunie’s main, say only, goal is to raise the production of printed paper in the Benelux to impressive heights. Where are the sharp, official protests when some foreign Beotian dares to talk about Dutch and Flemish?
Where is the magazine that defends the Dutch language abroad? Why does the shining example of “Septentrion. Revue de culture néerlandaise” of the Stichting Ons Erfdeel and especially of the indefatigable Jozef Deleu does not find an imitation in English or German? And I don’t knee-jerk about that word “culture” with which I disagree.
Where is the radio broadcaster who tells you in half a dozen languages how wonderful and important Dutch is? Whining about powers should not be tolerated. Language Union officials should bang their heads against their powers until the ministers of culture get a headache. And speaking of ministers of culture, why don’t Ms. D’ancona and Mr. Dewael together establish a culture council for the entire language area? When I was writing this, Mr. Dewael was creating a new cultural council for Flanders, against the pillarization, homage, homage. We will see if this original initiative is not nipped in the bud. Political Flanders is beginning to look more and more like the last bastion of Eastern European narrow-mindedness and incompetence. The last thing tolerated is independence, boldness, an act or word that deviates from the rigidity decreed from above on the pillars. So I wish the non-pillarized Cultural Council the very best. I expect the very worst. But “point n’est besoin d’espérer pour entreprendre…”
Only that Culture Council was unfortunately limited to the (brrr) Flemish Community? In the meantime, a Committee of Sages, by order of the Permanent Joint Committee to implement the Cultural Treaty between the Netherlands and Belgium, has finished a report in which it is deemed desirable to establish a “Dutch-Flemish Cultural Council.” The Flemish and Dutch governments have been given that report, excuses the politicians no longer have. But the Dutch shouldn’t be too officious for once and the Flemings should forget their maddening political scheming. There should be a limited number of wise women and men in this council; not too wise, but self-willed, averse to politics, a bit cheeky and literally pushing back frontiers.
The Dutch language area in Europe lies almost exclusively in two countries. Our line of defense shows a lil old crack. The population of the kingdom of the Netherlands is two and a half times larger than the Dutch-speaking population in Belgium. So the numerical superiority of one group over another is not as crushing as that of the French over the French-speaking Swiss or Belgians or that of the united Germans or the alemannic Swiss and Austrians. The smaller group of Dutch speakers will not let anything be imposed on them by the larger one, partly because in that smaller group there is a sense that it has preserved and defended the Dutch language all by itself without much help from its larger linguistic counterpart. The highly developed state consciousness of the northern Dutch speakers led them in the past to turn to the other state, i.e., Belgium, no matter how French-speaking it was officially and no matter how much it threatened the survival of the Dutch language. The Dutch kingdom greatly distrusted the Flemish emancipation movement. Moreover, it lacked interest in the most basic facts about the area below the southern border.
In recent years I have noticed an increasing focus on Flanders among Dutch journalists accredited in Brussels, among Dutch publishers, writers and theater people, in newspapers, radio and television. We taunt each other so readily and so easily. Neither is big and strong enough to silence the other, and there is no third to point out our follies.
The Dutch may excel at tactlessness – in Flanders we are only too happy to cultivate a grievous inferiority complex. “The Dutch abandoned us when our language was threatened by French and now they despise us.” There is truth in both accusations but it is not the full truth. That thanks to the Dutch Reign (1815 – 1830) and thanks to the autocratic, Dutch King William I, the Dutch language in Belgium was saved from total destruction, we conveniently forget. Without William I and the all too brief union with the Netherlands, hardly more Dutch would be spoken in Belgium today than in the vicinity of Steenvoorde and Hondschoote, that is, in the Département du Nord in France, you know, la Flandre française. That we broke away from the Netherlands in 1830 because we were backward and believed our Roman clergy, who, what did you think, served not the interest of the parishioners but that of the Church, that sometimes escapes us, Flemish people.
That almost all of our Flemish literature was only published thanks to Dutch publishers, do we really know that? No Claus, no Boon, no Elsschot without the Bezige Bij, the Arbeiderspers and Van Kampen. Behind me in the bookcase is the collected work of Van de Woestijne – thanks to the good care of C.A.J. van Dishoeck of Bussum. And the antics and jokes of Felix Timmermans elicit the famous generous Flemish laughter from the genial Flemish thanks, again, to P.N. van Kampen & Zn. of Amsterdam. There was no other way. The Dutch language in Belgium was too preoccupied with the harsh fight to save its naked life. And for the rest, especially in the Flemish country, there was the Church that did control the moral standard of the books. Although the battle is largely behind us and the Church controls less and less, Dutch publishing houses continue to attract Flemish people. Nolens, De Kuyper, De Martelaere, Hemmerechts, Lanoye, Van Vliet, Van hee and Uw dienaar feel perfectly at home with these Dutchmen.
Lack of interest, mutual recriminations, complacent and somewhat contemptuous views of the other from behind the safe national border, no. If we want our common language to survive in Europe, we had better abandon this mutual misunderstanding very quickly. We should together defend our language in Europe because it is the bearer of a heritage that Europe should not, even cannot, miss.
The Dutch language, like no other in Europe, except perhaps Hungarian, umbrella the split between Calvinism and Roman Catholicism. In your own language you keep bumping into the other side, that other, that strange vocabulary, that extraordinarily bizarre, so different world. In the Dutch poetic tradition you find Achterberg and Gezelle, Gerhardt and Kemp, Revius and Claus. You don’t have to switch to a foreign language to roam from incense to psalm, from predestination to confession.
In the Dutch language area, the most important revolt against royal authority and papal corruption in European history succeeded and failed. The rebels initially came mainly from the south, from Steenvoorde, already mentioned, the south that later fell prey to the Spanish occupiers. And centuries later, the most daring and innovative books on Roman Catholic theology that Europe ever saw would appear in our language, written, among others, by a Fleming living in the Netherlands.
In the Belgian part of the language area, Dutch threatened to disappear but was saved by dogged, peace-loving and democratically structured resistance, often from very ordinary people. I do not want to gloss over any faults of the Flemish emancipation movement here but I maintain that non-violence and respect for parliamentary democracy are at the heart of the Flemish emancipation struggle. Europe can learn a lot from this, especially now that in the countries that have recently renounced socialism, the nationalism of sub-regions with often ancient civilization is violently opposed. It is no coincidence that Eastern and Central European delegations come to Belgium to see how to solve a thorny issue of nationalities without bloodshed. You can also communicate that in Dutch.
In the Dutch volume, there is an age-old, broad-minded, generous and meticulous publishing tradition. From the “Principia Philosophiae and the “Discours de la Méthode” of Descartes to the letters of Belle van Zuylen, Dutch publishers prove that from the evolution of the European cultural tradition, they cannot be ignored. Well, those people spoke, spoke, wrote, wrote Dutch in everyday life, in the publishing work of every day.
Although in the eighteenth century the entire European nobility had elegant French conversations, I still think that nowhere else were contacts with the French language and culture as intense as in Flanders. So intense was the contact, so long did it last, deep into the twentieth century, that we almost died from it. But even the most threatening oppression can have benefits. One might even say, somewhat rancorously, that we lost our best writers to the French language-Charles de Coster, Emile Verhaeren, Maurice Maeterlinck, Michel de Ghelderode. Yevgeny Yevtushenko once told me that in his younger years the Russian translation of “La légende d’Ulenspiegel” was his favorite book. Only he did not know that Charles de Coster had written it in French, so Flemish, Brabant, Dutch so that book is. I think that deep contact with French should be cultivated in our linguistic region, if only to disenchant the beate worship of English.
I could talk here about the very different cultures of women in our language area, about the immigrant cultures that are struggling to find their way between adaptation and preservation of tradition. We could consider the contribution that all kinds of cultures make to our one Dutch language. Dutch writers have proclaimed Antwerp’s Anna Bijns a symbol, a cross-border prize bears her name. Surinamese, Moroccans, Turks and whatever brothers and sisters are still plowing through Flemish clay or Dutch mud, they are beginning to enrich our language and literature in an extremely interesting way. That deserves support, help, encouragement. We owe it to the great history of our Dutch language.
In fact, the Dutch language daily embraces the French and a range of other European and overseas languages and it does so in the largest city in our linguistic region, bilingual Brussels. I do not claim and have never claimed that this coexistence is without problems. If you want to read something about the clashes between Dutch and French take “Het Belgisch labyrinth”.
All I want to say here is that both Flemish and Dutch people have little or no idea that in Brussels, the Dutch language and the cultures it expresses have to compete with a range of other European and non-European cultures every day. This sometimes has bizarre consequences. In Dutch-speaking Brussels schools there are twenty, thirty, it can be as high as ninety percent children who do not speak Dutch at home. I know schoolgirls who watch RTBF and France Trois at home and also devour the books of Paul Biegel and Tonke Dragt. Dutch-language theater, so admired in Holland, gets appreciative reviews in Brussels French-language newspapers. In Brussels, Eurocrats from Greece, Denmark or France hear Dutch for the first time, at work, certainly, but just as much on the streets and in the metro. In Brussels, Dutch is open to Europe. The Brussels Capital Region has a well-balanced bilingual statute, yet another example of meticulous Belgian measuring and fitting to guarantee the rights of the two languages. This is a promising starting point. Now it is urgent that Flanders and the Netherlands together begin to design a cultural policy that self-consciously takes advantage of the opportunities offered by a large city with many cultures. You won’t find a comparable cultural space easily. Oh yes, there was once Czech-German-Jewish Prague, the brilliant capital of Masaryk’s republic of many peoples. But only the memory remains of that society. Brussels can offer a new opportunity. Until now, Europe in general has meant, for the benefit of powerful financial and industrial conglomerates, the creation of an economic space in which they can enrich themselves unrestrainedly and, in the European capital of Brussels, the brutal and wholesale destruction of everything within the reach of the European institutions.
Flanders and the Netherlands have a duty to stand up together for the cultural value of Europe precisely in Brussels, if only because Brussels was originally and actually until recently an almost exclusively Dutch-speaking city, but just as much because institutional Europe lacks culture and because our language and our cultures are extraordinarily strong examples of Europe’s cultural value par excellence, diversity.
The Low Countries have an exceptionally rich tradition of cultural diversity, and our medium-sized language is the bearer of this. Anyone who wants the lesser languages in Europe to be replaced by English or French should therefore be opposed. And if Dutchmen or Flemings save that from now on university lectures should better be given in English, we will not throw them into a damp dungeon just because we are humane thanks to Dutch tradition and because we love the freedom of speech. But the limit of what is permissible has been reached. Surely you cannot allow your very existence to be questioned. Well, the people who want to replace Dutch with English because Dutch would be unsuitable for international travel threaten us all. Their brain is as developed as the inside of my p.c., this is to say it is unimaginably primitive. In this Dutch book I sound a warning. We in Flanders know exactly what it means when people come and tell you that your language is not fit to be used in the big, serious world. For decades they have told us that in French, the people who despised us deeply, who wanted to force us to spend eternity in the back kitchen or even better in the stable.
English is not a hair better. French and English, they are great languages. Their disadvantages are as big as they are. Dutch is much smaller and that is an advantage. Not only does our cultural richness allow us to compete quietly with the larger cultural areas of Europe. Above all, our advantage is that we are much less self-centered. Instead of drowning in English, we learn French and German and Spanish and Russian and Slovenian for all I care. But we must not give up Dutch, ever.
So I am unashamedly advocating language nationalism here. At school, pride in the whole language, in the whole literature, should be ingrained in the minds of students. I read recently that high school students in the Netherlands have almost no interest in books by Flemish writers. That is intolerable, there are enough good books written by Flemish people, there is enough choice after Ruyslinck or Lampo. Actually, there should be no difference in the language and literature teaching of the two countries. Textbooks and teachers should be completely interchangeable.
It is an abomination that the Translation Foundation went broke. Flemish Minister of Culture Dewael, when presenting his recent book “The Warm Hand,” said that since then the Flemish Community has been doing much more to promote Flemish authors abroad. Of course it is wonderful that Flemish authors are read abroad but this separate approach is wrong. Foreigners do have to think that there is a Flemish and Dutch literature and therefore also that there is a separate Flemish and Dutch language. Again, linguistic unity is and remains the first line of defense. We cannot afford a scattered order of battle, let alone two armies. So the Flemish authors belong together with the Dutch to be advertised abroad by a single Foundation for Translation. A petty squabble such as the one that has ruined the Translation Foundation is out of the question.
One Fund of Literature we need, one subsidy system for drama, I said it, one magazine, one radio broadcaster making our language known in all kinds of other languages, one in short, we need one minister of culture. Now I do know that the two ministers are each accountable to their own parliament and that each parliament controls how the tax dollars of its sovereign people are spent. But perhaps an original, weird Belgian solution is possible. To ailing coal mines and steel foundries, we had super experts come from abroad at the time. In those companies there were billions of public money, so also taxpayers’ money. Yet those were entrusted to a gentleman who was not elected at all. Oh, he was controlled by the government, he consulted regularly with the elected representatives of the people, but in fact he did what he thought was right.
Cooperation is in full swing. It is mostly hampered by national structures, by narrow-mindedness and inertia. This is, of course, terribly annoying, but it can be overcome. Minister Dewael, Minister D’Ancona, top officials of the Language Union, they are all completely unimportant. What is important is what I see happening now, in publishing houses, in books, in magazines, on the shelves, in conversations between Dutch and Flemish people. What is important is that our movingly beautiful, sensitive, supple, jarringly rich Dutch language endures in Europe.
