Guidebook

Angie came back with two steaming mugs of coffee. She nodded at the guidebook "Any good?"

"Interesting” replied Bob. “The person who wrote it is obviously a pig headed idiot. He’s obsessed with what he call 'the Dutch mercantile instinct' which apparently informs everything a Dutchman does. It’s very funny. Listen to this."

And he read from the book.

The canal and the dyke are the central symbol of Dutch life. Infact, they illustrate neatly the psychological landscape of the Dutchman. The canal is a trade route, a means of moving goods to and from markets, of course, but it is also a symbol of what a Dutchman sees as good: it is orderly and calm, in a word, regulated.

Regulation appeals to the Dutchman, who is at heart organized and likes control. The dyke separates the ordered world of Amsterdam from the chaos of the sea. On the one side, nature tamed and ordered, regulated to mercantilism by Dutch ingenuity and pragmatism. On the other side, a mass of uncontrollable water, that threatens to overwhelm the dykes and wash away all the order and commerce that the merchants of Amsterdam have so carefully built up.

He put the book down in disgust. "It frightens me that people actually think like that. I wonder if he actually came here at all, or just wrote down stuff that he thought was true."

Angie shrugged. "Quite frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn."

*

"We need to plan a bit more, I think" said Angie. "Maps and stuff. Work out where we want to go, and not dawdle on the way. Does this book tell you anything useful, like where to go and how to get there?"

"'fraid not," Bob replied. "Though here on page 96 it does tell you about van der Vondel. Including what he wanted on his tomb." He showed her the couplet and read from the book:

Van der Vondel has been called Amsterdam’s Shakespeare, which is to say he is Shakespeare with a merchant’s sensibility. It is not surprising to learn that he was a merchant and often composed verses to order for the city council, celebrating the success of the city as a port and centre of trade, nor to discover that this verse was of a regular style suited to the ordered tastes of his fellow citizens. Nor is it surprising to learn that the composer of verses found the market for his wares diminishing and died in poverty, eking out his final years as a doorman until he finally froze to a miserable death.

"Shakespeare made most of his money as a grain merchant, and he wrote sonnets to order. So your book is wrong, completely." Angie looked at the cover of the book. "'Trailblazing Travel'" she crowed. "By J Traill. Geddit? What possessed you to buy this book?"

"It was very cheap, much cheaper than the Lonely Planet. I think I know why. At least it has a map."

"Tomorrow you buy a proper book, by someone who actually did more than sit in a café and drink absinthe. In fact, I'll buy it, I couldn’t trust you to not find something even more batty."

*

They went back into town. Angie wanted to see the red light district. Their tram deposited them outside Central Station and they crossed the canal and approached the infamous streets where the city fathers had tried to contain the vice that they could not – or did not want to - expunge.

Bob read again from 'Trailblazing Travel,' which he refused to abandon in spite of Angie’s vehement protests.

Nothing could represent the Amsterdammer’s attitude to commerce than their tolerance of prostitution. The Dutch are not a naturally immoral people, but because prostitution is immorality couched as a business proposition they feel it has to be respected. Anything goes in this city, as long as it is conducted in the form of a business transaction.

Not naturally lecherous, the Dutch accept the presence of lechery in their capital city because there is a market for it. In this, they are less hypocritical than most nations, even those more usually described as liberal or even lax in their moral standards. The Dutchman does not scorn the whore who plies her trade under his nose, if anything he envies her as she is operating on some purer commercial level than he is. She has turned her entire body into a commodity to be bought and sold, something the upright Dutch bourgeoisie can only long to do – in an abstract sense, of course.

"Of course" sniggered Angie as they turned a corner, and it seemed, crossed an indefinable dividing line which transported them from the world of the 'upright Dutch bourgeoisie' into the world of the whore.

*

They visited all the recommended sights. They visited Anne Frank’s House. Mr Traill’s guide book described it thus:

Anne Frank’s House represents an inversion of Marx’s maxim that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. In the 16th century, Holland experienced one of its occasional fits of national prejudice – much rarer here than in other countries, as prejudice runs counter to the mercantile instinct – and proscribed Catholicism.

With that wonderful streak of pragmatism that marks the Dutch, however, the ban was only a façade and adherents of the Roman faith could worship in private, as long as they did not make any public advertisement of the fact. The most significant of these semi-clandestine chapels is now the museum called the Amstelkring, also known as ‘Ons Lieve Heer Op Solder’ which translates literally as ‘Our Dear Lord in the Attic’ which is situated on Oudezijds Voorburgwal. Here Catholics could meet discretely to worship.

The similarities with the story Frank family’s doomed attempt to elude the Nazi butchers are immediately striking, a grim parallel with the older tale. But farce is reworked as tragedy. The token proscription of Catholicism strikes us as farcical, but the story of the Jews of Amsterdam, represented by the fate of the Frank family, is utterly tragic. And while Catholics were eventually permitted public expression of their faith, the Franks, and many more like them, were annihilated.

Oddly, it is only in the 20th century that Jews experienced such anti-Semitism in this city. Before then it was a refuge of comparative tolerance – the Amsterdammer recognising and respecting the mercantile skills of the children of Abraham and, as a true merchant, not resenting the competition. It is strange to reflect on how our moral sense seems somehow more primitive and under-developed than it was some four hundred years ago.

Reading this, Bob remarked to Angie "You know, I think he might actually have said something sensible there. Some of it, anyway."