Murder in Amsterdam Read Free

most progressive little enclave of Europe.
    2.
    Forty Moroccan, Dutch, political, religious, and homosexual organizations from Amsterdam distributed posters with the slogan: “We won’t take this.” People are invited to sign a manifesto on the website www.wewonttakethis .
    NRC HANDELSBLAD, NOVEMBER 16, 2004
    I t was at this point that I decided to spend some time in the Netherlands, where I was born in 1951 and had lived until 1975. I had known Van Gogh slightly. We had mutual friends and did the odd radio show together. He invited me to be on his TV talk show, called A Friendly Conversation, which, in fact, it was. Not being a member of Amsterdam café society or the local literary scene, I had escaped the lash of his often venomous polemics. His behavior to me was invariably polite, even though his loud, high-pitched voice, always striving to be heard, could be wearisome.
    I arrived with an American magazine assignment in time for Verdonk’s attempted handshake, but too late for the memorial party organized by “the Friends of Theo” according to the precise specifications of Van Gogh himself, drawn up while planning a trip to New York a few months earlier (he suffered from a fear of flying). There was a rock band and there were cabaret acts. Pretty cigarette girls in miniskirts plied their wares, as in a prewar movie theater. Female guests wore strings of pearls and twinsets, a style that Theo had found a turn-on. Since one of Theo’s favorite terms for Muslims was “goat fuckers,” well-known comedians made jokes about fucking goats, and two stuffed goats stood on a makeshift stage, ready for “those who might feel the urge.” A large wooden coffin, supposedly containing Theo’s corpse, was placed on a revolving platform flanked by magnum bottlesof champagne, and large phallic cacti, the trademark of his television chat show. One Friend of Theo, present at this wake for a more frivolous age, predicted to me that if the Muslim radicals weren’t crushed soon, there would be a civil war in Holland.
    There was something unhinged about the Netherlands in the winter of 2004, and I wanted to understand it better. Hysteria, after all, is the last thing people associate with a country that is usually described by lazy foreign journalists as “phlegmatic.” I had always known this to be a caricature, but had still found it too placid for my taste, too reassuringly dull. This, clearly, was no longer the case. Something had changed dramatically in the country of my birth.
    One of the first things I read after arriving in Amsterdam was an essay by the great Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga, written in 1934, another time of crisis, when fascism and Nazism were looming close to the Dutch borders. But extremism would not seduce the Dutch, he said, and even if it did, against all the odds, it would surely be a “moderate extremism.” Even though Holland was not immune to the dangers of modern propaganda and the crumbling of faith in democratic institutions, the stolid Dutch burghers were simply not given to excesses. As Huizinga saw it, the “mental basis” for collective illusions was a “political sense of inferiority” grounded in centuries of failure and oppression, and a deeply felt loss of ancient glory. Exasperated nationalismis the usual result, filled with a desire for revenge. Such was not the case in the Netherlands, for “as a nation and a state we are after all satisfait, and it is our duty to remain so.”
    Huizinga’s view on the national character, though not exactly wrong, did reveal a certain complacency. Bourgeois satisfaction is by no means to be despised; indeed, it is a recipe for peace and orderly contentment. It is also, perhaps, a trifle boring. Heinrich Heine did not mean it as a compliment when he said that he would head for Holland when the end of the world was in sight, since everything in that country happened fifty