Liberation Day 2007

Yesterday, May 5th, we had Liberation Day in the Netherlands. Normally this is a national day off. The media pay attention to the earthquaking happenings that took place in May 1945, they keep our minds busy. For two nights one after another we went to bed at around two AM because of emotional movies broadcasted on TV. During Saturday most houses in the streets were showing the red, white and blue of the national flag. We had my mentally handicapped brother staying with us, who cannot understand such things and only liked the flags. We decided to go to Harlingen, “watching boats”. We went by train because he is always transported in a car, and this was for a change which he much appreciated (when I was a child it was the other way around). It took 45 minutes to get there. I like the place, because the 18th century is omnipresent: history, houses, authors, etc. and of course the harbour. What New York is for the U.S., Harlingen is for Friesland. In the 18th and 19th century it was an important trade harbour, nowadays a tourist harbour filled with 19th century fishing and cargo boats rebuilt for pleasure use. One can rent these ships for group sailing trips on the Waddenzee, the water between the Dutch islands and mainland. Many sea-sailors use the harbour with their yachts, ready to head for the U.K., Denmark and France. Harlingen has also a Freemasons’ Lodge I visit one in a while, of course housed in an 18th century small building. Another 18th century building contains the Hannema House which we paid a visit for its collection of Frisian silver, its room memorizing Simon Vestdijk (1898-1971, http://www.svestdijk.nl/al/wpengels.html ) who wrote dozens of novels and about whom it was said that he read “page turning”: he only needed to look at a novel page for a second to fully read it.
The museum used to be a dwelling house belonging to the Hannema family, one of the influential Harlingen families, busy in salt mining and genever production and other commercial activities. The last member of the family living in the house donated the house to the municipality, and with the efforts of many money-donating foundations and the government it was turned into a beautiful small museum, specialised in earthenware tiles. Tiles were used for home decoration (not only floors, but mainly walls) and their production yielded beautifully decorated little paintings about all areas of life that people found important to be reminded of. Harlingen and Makkum were the places of industry where they were produced, and in Makkum they are still produced.
I was also reminded of the bitter conflicts between the Orangists and the Patriots after Napoleon had found his Waterloo resembling much the conflicts between the Orangists and collaborators with Nazi-Germany in 1945-1950. The Patriots were persecuted after Napoleons defeat by the Orangists who were happy to have the first Orange king of the Netherlands inaugurated, helped by the Congress of Vienna who decided that the Netherlands had to be a strong kingdom as a barrier against France. They added Belgium and Luxemburg also to this kingdom so the Netherlands also contained these two small countries after 1813, until 1830 when the Roman Catholic South obtained a separation and Belgium was born. The victory of the Orangists resulted in a mass fleeing of Patriots to Groningen and to Germany because they weren’t sure of their lives anymore. The Orangists were the rank-and-file working people, together with the old nobility and government and agricultural elite. The Patriots were mainly recruited from the intellectuals and “nouveau riches” in commerce and industry: they saw the advantages of the fruits of the Enlightenment Era, but were less powerful at the time.
Harlingen contains many things remembering these conflicts. The Orange Royal Family has always been a great impediment for revolutionary changes in the Netherlands, and still nowadays they exert a big influence behind the screens on public life. They are enormously popular, and also the intellectuals and business people fully accept their authority, not in the last place because the first king, William I, did very much to industrialize the country with railroads, canals and other infrastructural works, also in Belgium which belonged to his kingdom, too. He had much more formal power than our current queen Beatrix. Every now and then there are politicians who grumble something that this medieval foolishness has to be ended or at least reduced to normal proportions like in Sweden, but She and after Her Prince William-Alexander will remain the formal Head of Government.

This king William I is said to be a descendant of the Prince of Orange who leaded the resistance against the Spaniards. Everybody assumes he is, but it's never proven because during the French occupation he kept hidden in Britain and was eager to accept the crown, before Waterloo, nobody checked his CV. Anyway, he was a good king.

Our national anthem stresses that the Oranges are from outside the Netherlands, one of the lines of the first verse runs: "I am of German blood", referring to one branch of his ancestors, the county of Nassau; the other branch came from France, the principality of Orange. Since then this French-German blood has been mixed with all other kinds of blood, except Dutch blood, since our country didn't have nobility available assessed high enough to marry into the Royal Family. Nowadays this is changed for we have now several non-noble princesses married, our future queen will be an Argentinian lady, her father was a member of the Videla-régime, but that wasn't her fault.

In my heart, I’m a republican or patriot myself. But as long as they represent the national identity, I will respect them as well and celebrate their special events. I get always stuck in the remembrance of the beheading of the very skilfull and dedicated 17th century statesman Johan van Oldenbarneveldt by the Orange Prince Maurits (his pupil, like Nero did with Seneca), the slaughtering of the patriotic brothers De Witt by the Orangist mobs, tolerated by the Orangist police and the installation of the family as kings of the Republic by foreigners, the Vienna Congress. Our kings or queens are not “crowned”, like in the U.K., they are simply installed or, using a more formal word, inaugurated. The late husband of our current queen, Prince Claus von Amsberg (a German, again, almost all Oranges are foreigners) once said in public, that the Netherlands were “the only Republic with a king”). The people want it, the people get it, and politics have to tolerate it. I’d rather have a Republic, I think it urges people to think more of what their country means to them, instead of leaving most things to the authorities, incorporated in the National Symbol of a Family. On the other hand, I can imagine that once there is such a family, it can better function as a symbol spreading stability and peace than a Republic can because a Republic finds its roots in the divergence of views and opinions, which paradoxically are bound together in one over-all view by an abstract force, not by a tangible and visible group of persons. It’s what one prefers, and I am glad to live in a country where I can state this preference in public without fear to get arrested for it.