Free Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma Page B

could have turned her into a snob, but in fact she remained firmly onthe Left, as did Anneke’s father, who joined the Resistance with a number of other socialists. Arrested for helping Jews and working for an underground newspaper, he spent time in a concentration camp, was freed in 1944, and immediately resumed his illegal activities. “He was relentless,” Anneke explained. “He would never give up, just like Theo.”
    In a country where only a small number of people were active resisters, as opposed to minding their own business, this made Theo’s family unusual. They were also keen members of the Society of Humanists, now a defunct institution, founded in 1947 as a kind of pillar for people who sought a spiritual life without believing in God. Instead of the Bible, they read Voltaire, the secular saint of dissident literature. Theo’s grandfather made sure that Dutch soldiers had the benefit of humanist “counselors.” Dutch radio on Sunday mornings used to be almost entirely devoted to sermons, given by a variety of priests and ministers. At 9:45, a humanist would hold forth about the life of the spirit without God or Jesus.
    Calvinism, socialism, humanism—all left their marks. Perhaps this explains why Theo’s father was not only a spook, but a man of quixotic missions, such as his resistance to the planned residency of the Dutch crown prince and his family in a particularly leafy part of Wassenaar. Why should a prince be allowed to hog so much land? So off he went, from door to door, eighty-year-old Johan, campaigning fora hopeless cause. He never gave up. It was, after all, a matter of principle.
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    A s a child, Theo couldn’t have cared less about the war, or the heroics of his ancestors. When his father read him a children’s story about a class that refused to go swimming after the Jewish pupils had been barred from the pool, he refused to listen. Theo was nine at the time, so this would have been in 1966, the big year of rebellion in Amsterdam, when the city was turned upside down by Provos in white jeans throwing smoke bombs at the royal coach bearing Princess (now Queen) Beatrix and her bridegroom, Prince Claus von Amsberg, a German diplomat who had joined the Hitler Youth as a schoolboy. There was nothing unusual about this; most Germans of his age had. Certainly nothing about Prince Claus suggested that he harbored any residual Nazi sympathies. Quite the contrary. But celebrating the royal wedding in Amsterdam, city of rebels and republicans, was seen as a provocation.
    Provocation was what the youth rebellion was all about, * provocation of the authorities, to expose the authoritarian instinctsof the regenten class, staging “happenings” and demonstrations, waiting, even hoping, for the police to reveal the heavy hand of authority. (Exposing “repressive tolerance,” as Herbert Marcuse, a guru of the student Left, put it.) Similar mutinies broke out all over the world, in Paris, Prague, London, Berkeley, Berlin, Tokyo. What they had in common was youth; youth against the middle-aged. But, as with the response to political Islam, there were national differences, reflecting national histories. In Prague, the revolt was against Communist dictatorship. In Amsterdam, it was against “consumer culture,” against slavery to TV and the family car, against the boredom of affluence. But this being Holland, it was also against the pillars of religious and political authority that had held society together for so long.
    The revolt actually began with a television program, broadcast in 1964. I was reminded of it when a woman in her forties remarked to me one night in Amsterdam that it was, in her words, “impossible to imagine people in our culture getting violently upset over religion.” (We had just been to see two Muslim actors, discovered by Theo van Gogh, perform in a theater near the mosque where Mohammed Bouyeri used to worship.)