Still only available in glorious 240p almost twenty years on, Watskeburt:
This was such a hype when it came out. At the time Sandra and I were living near where parts of the video had been shot, which means seeing it again now, twenty years on, gives me an intense wave of nostalgia. 2005 wasn’t the best of years but did saw us move out from our subrented way too expensive flat into our own apartment elsewhere in Amsterdam Noord and this came out just a few months after we had done so. The first and last Dutch rap song Sandra actually liked.
Seventy years ago this day the worst disaster modern Holland would endure was on its way to the Dutch coast, to arrive that night in the form of storm swept waves overwhelming the coastal defences that for centuries had kept us safe. The results are seen in this video compiled of contemporary news broadcasts:
1835 people died, 750,000 people lost their homes, tens of thousands of cattle drowned alongside their owners. Whole villages, even whole islands swallowed by the water. The flood hit the south-west of the Netherlands, coming through the Channel into the North Sea, its narrow width pushing the water higher and higher until it hit the coast. On the map below you can see how the northern islands in the delta were hit the hardest, the water pushing its way into the mouths of the rivers Rhine, Meuse and the Schelde flowing into the sea there. This is land that has always lived with the threat of the sea, has been conquered from it, that thought itself safe behind the dykes created to protect us from the sea. What happened in 1953, the failure of the dykes to protect us is something that even now, seventy years later, still resonates in the Dutch psyche.
The reponse to the disaster is well known. Drastic measures were made to ensure that this disaster would never repeat itself. Instead of strengthening the existing dykes, something much more radical was done. If the delta was this vulnerable because of its long coast line, let’s just shorten this coast line by damming in the various channels. The idea was to close up all of them except for the routes towards Rotterdam and (grudgingly) Antwerpen. That this would be an ecological disaster was ignored; that it would destroy the livelyhood of centuries old fishing communities likewise. The country must be made safe and even if strengthening the existing dykes was good enough, it would also be far too expensive, so instead the cheaper option of damming up almost the entire estuary was chosen.
As the lesser inlets were dammed up one by one, the fishers and ecologists saw how much of a disaster it was for the wildlife and the fish in them as they became dead, brackish pools with little to no life left in them. I remember liking to swim in one of these blocked up inlets, the Veerse Meer, because there was never any chance of encountering anything icky like jelly fish, let alone any real fish. But for the fishers in Yerseke it was a sign. They were dependent for their jobs on an open Oosterschelde, which also was one of the richest wetlands in Europe, a natural treasure trove, full of wildlife including seals. That would all be lost if the Oosterschelde was to be closed, but the state, province and Waterstaat, the agency responsible for the dykes and water management were all firmly in favour of the closure.
Yet that one small village resisted. A group of fishers, enironmentalists and sympathisers started a resistance campaign. Their reasoning was simple. If the Westerschelde could be made safe by strengthening the existing dykes and be kept open, why not the Oosterschelde? With the former being the entry towards Antwerpen it made sense that it was kept open, while the latter was just not judged important enough for the expense. Thanks to their dogged resistance, their years long campaign to convince politicians, the public and scientists, the Oosterschelde was kept open and the Netherlands got one of the seven wonders of the modern world: the Oosterschelde Storm Barrier, the stormsvloedkering:
I was there when the Stormvloedkering was officially opened, in 1986, as two students from each primary school in Zeeland were invited to it. Back then the political struggle, the role the activists had played in forcing the government and Rijkswaterstaat to this compromise, was kept largely unmentioned. I remember it was all presented as just a normal change of policy, that it was a result of changing insights naturally arrived at by the state itself, not pressure from lowly fishermen and beardy weirdo environmentalists. The Storm Barrier as the ultimate symbol of progress and Dutch innovation, but had it be left to its own devices, an environmental holocaust would’ve happened. Thank god for those Yerseke oyster fishers!
I did not know, but should not be surprised that until about 1938 there were Dutch ships moored in the Thames selling live eels to London.
One Surprised Eel Historian has a nice tread on Twitter on how they were so important that for centuries they’d regularly appeared on maps of London. The boats themselves were special too: “The ships were a well boat…kind of a floating aquarium. The Dutch used them to transport live eels to London from c. 1475 – 1938. There were small holes in the sides of the ship to allow for water flow.” A nice bit of history this, one of those things you never knew had happened but makes complete sense when you learn about it.
In fact, despite this irreverent and slightly louche introduction, the history of the broodje kroket is intertwined with the brutal history of its homeland. Most of the sandwich’s ingredients are bog-standard European, from the chopped beef to the béchamel to the spicy mustard. Today, the kroket can be filled with almost anything (stir-fried noodles, mashed potato, liver and rice, goulash.) But in the recipe I found, the glaring exception to the European-centric ingredients was the teaspoon or so of kecap manis, sweet soy sauce—the most popular condiment in Indonesia. Kecap manis is popular in the Netherlands because the Dutch East India Company conquered what is now Indonesia four centuries ago, and its parent nation held on to the so-called “Spice Islands” for more than three hundred years. That’s why kecap manis is in the broodje kroket, and other Dutch dishes, like zeeuws spek, a marinated bacon.
I didn’t actually know that we used ketjap in kroketten, but it’s not surprising. Indonesian food, often thoroughly altered to suit Dutch tastes, is one of the staples of our national diet and as Lavin notes, impossible to decouple from our violent colonial history. If there’s one thing the Dutch are good at though it’s ignoring painful realities. For decades after the liberation of Indonesia any debate about our colonial past was steeped in deep nostalgia for a world in which ‘we’ were still important. It took until February this year before the Dutch government officially acknowledged and apologised for the brutal attempts to suppress Indonesian liberation in 1948. Though, as Reza Kartosen-Wong notes in Het Parool, the excuses are limited purely to the “exceptional violence” used in the war, not for waging a war to re-enslave a nation itself, let alone for the Netherland’s wider colonial past. We still want to pretend our colonies just accidently happened to be ruled by us, that we did that out of the kindness of our own hearts and not that rape, murder and genocide are the foundations of our wealth.
Last Monday Henny Vrienten, frontman of the Dutch pop group Doe Maar, passed away and with him a little bit of my youth.
If you’re not Dutch, you’ll likely have never heard of him or Doe Maar, so it may be hard to understand how insanely popular the band was from 1981 to 1984. Every single was a hit, every album went paltinum and every concert had thousands of teenage girls screaming their heads of. Comparing it to Beatlemania would be an understatement. When the band announced they would stop it was the first item on the main television news broadcast that day. I was not even ten when they split up, but I had the buttons, the pink/green scarf and everything. Everybody in my primary school was a fan, not just the girls, the boys too. If you were a child in the early eighties, Doe Maar was the sound track to your youth.
In hindsight the popularity of Doe Maar is utterly bizarre. This wasn’t a manufactured hype, but something that sponteneously erupted at a time the band had almost decided to quit already. Doe Maar was founded in 1978 by a group of musicians in their late twenties, each with a history of playing in other bands; when Vrienten joined in 1980 he was already thirty. Their first hit with him as singer, sinds een Dag of Twee, was about him how strange it was to be falling in love again when you’re thirtytwo. Hardly the stuff that makes teenyboppers swoon. Furthermore their record company at the time had so little faith in them it had shelved their second album. It was only by accident that Dutch radio diskjockeys started playing the single and promoting the album, but it was enough to start the Doe Maar hype. From that point onwards they would become the most popular Dutch band of all times.
What made Doe Maar’s success even more improbable was that at the time, serious Dutch pop music was just not done. Sure, there were people singing in Dutch, but these tended to be either serious folk singer types, or people from the light entertainment world. But if you wanted to be taken seriously as a pop or rock musician, you had to sing in English. Doe Maar never did this. In fact, they’d made their debut on the legendary compilation album Uitholling Overdwars (1979), put out by the Stichting Popmuziek Nederland to promote Dutch language pop music, which also included several other groups that would make it big in the early eighties alongside Doe Maar. That may be Doe Maar’s biggest legacy, making Dutch language pop music respectable and relevant. What made Vrienten’s singing also important was the distinctive Brabant accent in his voice, rather than using the somewhat artificial standard Dutch of your usual light entertainment singer. ‘Provincial’ voices were rarely heard until then, unless in purely regional bands with little national appeal.
What made this small revolution possible was of course punk. The D.I.Y. aesthetic and attitude of punk rock meant there was space to break with the established traditions of ‘serious’ rock and all over Europe you saw bands move away from English towards their own language; most well known being the Neue Deutsche Welle movement of the same time. Nevertheless Doe Maar was never a punk rock group, even if some of the songs on their first eponymous were at least punk in style, like Wees Niet Bang Voor Mijn Lul. No, the secret sauce of Doe Maar’s success was something else entirely: ska and reggea. While on that first album it was all a bit Kinks’ Apeman style parody including dubious accents, from when Vrienten joined Doe Maar it was taken seriously. As a bass player Vrienten himself contributed a lot to the new Doe Maar sound. He even produced an actual dub version of their third album, Doe de Dub in 1982.
I can still remember the frustration and sadness of Doe Maar just deciding to stop at the height of their fame. It was the only thing we talked about on the playground next day: why did they have to stop, why now, why. It didn’t make sense to me then, but it was the best decision they could’ve made at the time. That popularity must’ve been incredibly scary, night after night seeing 13 and 14 year old girls screaming themselves hoarse at you to the point of fainting. Vrienten himself had said that he feared that one day it would all go horribly wrong and somebody would be killed in the crushes that happened during their concerts. The pressure of so much popularity didn’t help relationships within the band itself either and when Doe Maar realised they could just …stop, it must’ve come as a relief.
At the time Doe Maar quit, Vrienten had already brought out his first solo record. Post-Doe Maar he would not only record, but start a new career as a writer of movie music, having been one of the two composers within Doe Maar as well. Movies and musicals would be the main focus of his music, but he also featured in various side projects with other famous Dutch musicians over the years. Doe Maar itself would re-unite in 2000, just as the generation of teenyboppers that were their fans in the early eighties were now in their thirties themselves. It was never quite the same as before, but they did release a new studio album and held regular new tours ever since. In fact, Vrienten’s illness led to the cancellation of their last tour, which would’ve been held last year.
