And they don’t do things that much differently there either. Another fascinating recent google find I came across recently is this this Flickr gallery of 1930’s colour photographs of Amsterdam by colour wizard Bernard Eilers:
From the Stadsarchief Amsterdam:
Bernard F. Eilers (1878-1951) […] was held in high regard as an art photographer both in and outside the Netherlands. He owed his greatest successes to his photographs of Amsterdam, that exude much atmosphere and make one think of a painting by Breitner or Witsen. His free work is pictorial and seems to belong in the nineteenth rather than the twentieth century. In his photographs, Eilers achieved exceptionally high quality by his practically unequalled mastery of the means offered by modern photographic techniques. His photographs paint a nostalgic picture of the Netherlands in years gone by.
Yet Depression Amsterdam as portrayed by Eilers, particularly when neon-lit, didn’t really look that different at all: other than a bit of rebuilding, some insertion of technology and a few cosmetic and stylistic updates central Amsterdam looks more or less now the same as it did then. Now, this shop is a Tie Rack, but it looks almost the same, if not so chic.
That may be why as my taxidriver navigates the concentric rings of Amsterdam’s architectural history, shortcutting through the Golden Age to skirt the Belle Epoque and cruise down the tidy boulevards of the Amsterdam School to the dialysis unit by the ill-matched, half-empty yet prizewinning skyscrapers on Amsterdam’s southern outskirts, that I find it so easy to imagine the tramp of jackboots, the bark of Nazi officers and the avid expressions of their Dutch enablers, as they scoured the grachten and sanitised the belle epoque suburbs of unwanted aliens, jews and dissidents.
At the hospital I see any number of very old Dutch people, people in their eighties and nineties, who’d’ve been adults then. As I look at those sharp-nosed, heavy-jawed faces can’t help but wonder, was it you?
