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On you go, past the walls of the darkened city broken by the pale glimmer from the Showarma joints and the porno-shops and the fuming frites stalls, before you rise over the humps of the canal bridges and hang a right over the cobbles. Bike riders, imperiously reckless, because also lovers – the boy pedalling hard, the girl sidesaddling behind – swoop right and left like maddened swallows of the night, daring you to get in their way, you in your squat taxi, and you’ll get a laugh or a shout, one of those big thick-diphthonged Amsterdam laughs, the deep-lunged teeth-baring indecorous chuckle Rembrandt makes in the double portrait where he poses as the carousing Prodigal Son, Saskia his big-hipped whore on his lap. And the girl will dismount from the bike and stand, impossibly leggy, six feet in her thigh-high boots, bob-cut, leather-jacketed, kohl-eyed, tattooed, an alternation of black and scarlet, and it’s all a bit much and never ever enough, not here, not in the city of laughing money and dangerous design. Welkom in Amsterdam!
And why was this the clever thing to do? Because after all the night action you go to your high bed in the little hotel by the gracht, and after a bit there are no more sounds of smashed bottles or drunken glee or screaming trams bearing the last waiters off home to Muiderpoort, only and always the lap of the water, and you sink into sleep as if barge-born and wake to a Miracle. There it is. Beyond the lace curtains and the table set with freshly boiled egg and brown bread and ham and cheese, echte ontbijtstuk. A place from another century; from 1640 to be somewhat more exact, caught in the time-net like a thrashing codfish, only much, much prettier. Nowhere else in the world that I know of – except of course the Other Canal Empire on the Adriatic lagoon – has this uncanny sense of graceful admission to its built memory. And the waters, history, have been kinder (or its magistrates wiser) to Amsterdam than to Venice. The impoldering, draining large tracts of the Zuider Zee, creating cultivable, habitable East Flevoland, took away the threat of deluge – only to bring a whole new set of problems, social and ecological, for although the city is not dying or descending into the sea, the balance of marine life has been badly damaged. But you’re not going to worry yourself about all that, not this morning when you step outside and face a length of elegant canal houses: vertical, like the girl on the bike but not as broad-beamed, their gables sporting stucco dolphins that ride the roofline billows, the older brick step-gables or the sinuous curved ones shaped like an inverted bell, the klokgevels. Directly below them is the iron hook used to pulley up whatever couldn’t be taken through the narrow street doors, and beneath the hook the shuttered doors to a loft space to store whatever that might have been: a tall mirror, ebony-framed; a heavy chest, from where it could descend to the room that awaited it. And below the shutters the rectangular, leaded windows, two or three abreast and then another storey of them before the main door, painted in gloss black that when opened would lead you into the front voorhuis, its floor chequered black and white, its walls lined at their skirting with tiles; a single low oak buffet, maps and paintings hanging, a many-armed brass chandelier, burnished to an almost golden glow, this hall opening through low doors (such low doors for such an elongated people), left and right into smaller zijkamers, a few chairs covered in watered damask or plush velvet, and at its far end into a grander receiving saal boasting its gold-stamped leather wall coverings, a tall armoire atop which sit Kung Hsi pots. And before you turn round to go down the flight of low stone steps to the street you could swear you caught a swish of petticoats on the tiled floor and the eager padding of a sleek hound.
It will do that to you, the city, pull you up alleys of time. Because the thing about Amstelredam is that no other city in the world rose to fortune so quickly and, once arrived, as if glutted with history’s benevolence, decided not to push its luck and stayed put. There were 30,000 Amsterdammers around 1600; 200,000 a century later, but also 200,000 or even slightly fewer in 1900. There have been surges of fresh building beyond the late seventeenth century, each with its own architectural imprint. South Amsterdam (through which your car rushed) – Amsterdam Zuid – is itself a place of peculiar magic, touched by the genius of Berlage who built the most beautiful Bourse in the world, an encaustic theatre of investment. Inside his building, but also along the façades of the houses and apartments Berlage designed, bricks flow and glide, walls gently swell and dip. So, then, in the heart of the city, here are no skyscrapers, no International Style boxes; and where modernism was given space in the gaps blasted by war, say in the university buildings close to the Waterlooplein, the glass, plaster and brick and steel wear the aspect of intimate merriment, which is – in case you hadn’t figured it by now – the style of the stad.
Amsterdam has an undeserved reputation for modest understatement. It’s no Las Vegas, but it’s always blown its own trumpet whenever it could, as if not quite believing its luck. The first full-on eulogy to its glories of untold wealth, fame, freedom was Johannes Pontanus’s Rerum et Urbis Amsteldodamensium, published in 1614, when the city was, compared to what it would become, relatively small beer. Twenty-four years later the city officially received Marie de Medici, the Queen Mother of France, estranged from her son Louis XIII and his government dominated by Cardinal Richelieu. She had been the subject of the most spectacular cycle of allegorical paintings ever made by a Netherlandish artist, albeit a Catholic Fleming, Peter Paul Rubens, in which she features as omnipotent, omniscient, all-benevolent quasi-deity. But in 1638, although greeted with triumphal arches, firework displays, swaggering parades of the militia companies, masques staged on floating islands, processions and banquets, and though celebrated by the city orator, Caspar van Baerle, for the ‘quality of her blood and that of her ancestors’, that distinction was evidently equalled if not surpassed by ‘the greatness of this city in trade . . . the good fortune and happiness of her citizens’. Since the gravamen of the accusations against the Queen Mother in her own country was that, in spite of Rubens’s best efforts, she had brought none of those blessings to her own realm, the back-handed compliment could not have gone unnoticed.
But soon, Marie, like most of those who came to Amsterdam in the golden seventeenth century, was too busy shopping to care, haggling like an old hand with the merchants. And because Amsterdam had indeed become the emporium mundi, there was nowhere else she needed to go to buy anything her queenly heart desired: spices and ceramics from the Orient; perfumed tobacco from America; steel and leather from Iberia (for being at war with Spain was no bar to doing business with its traders); Turkey rugs, Persian silks; Russian sable; or perhaps even an exotic animal for a princely menagerie, one of the lions or elephants Rembrandt sketched.
But Amsterdam’s spectacular fortunes were built on provisioning the bulky commonplace needs, not just the luxuries, of seventeenth-century Europe. Before it could become the place you went to buy Malacca cloves or Brazilian emeralds, it was the place that supplied wheat, rye, iron, cured fish, linens, salt, tar, hemp and timber for markets near and far. Why would you go there if you were, say, from Norwich or Augsburg, rather than just have the things shipped directly from source? Because you knew they would be available and cheaper. And why was that? Because Amsterdam’s merchants had understood that the key to market domination was the transformation of shipping. So they had used their accumulation of capital (the Amsterdam Exchange Bank was established in 1609, the first year of a twelve-year truce with Spain) to finance an extraordinary interlocking system of shipbuilding and bulk carrying. Whole Norwegian forests were bought in advance; harvests of Polish rye likewise, many years in advance, in return for making money immediately available to hard-pressed landowners. Timber, hemp – the wherewithal needed to build a fleet – were consigned to the satellite towns and villages in the countryside north of the city, where each specialised in a particular stage of shipbuilding; some in the yards on the Zaan, as carpenters; others as anchorsmiths, others still as canvas- and sail-makers. The makings of ships, designed to be sailed with smaller crew, and to maximise cargo space, were then brought by barges do
wn to the shipyards on the IJ and the Amstel. Whether a venture was off to the Baltic, to the White Sea or to the Mediterranean, the voyage could be accomplished at a freight cost that made it impossible for merchant fleets to compete. And so the world came to Amsterdam to do its shopping and to take in the outrageousness of a city built to sate the appetites.
But it might also come for freedom. More than anywhere else in the world, Amsterdam and the Dutch saw that becoming a world city – providing living space for those who were confined to ghettos elsewhere, or who were allowed only a clandestine life – Jews, Mennonites, Muslims – was also good for business. Sefardi Jews in particular brought with them from their half-life as Marranos in the Spanish world a great chain of personal and commercial connections from the tobacco and sugar colonies of the Atlantic, to the great bazaars of the Maghreb. In Amsterdam they became (as they could not in Venice) merchant princes of the city, allowed to build spectacular synagogues and handsome dwellings in the heart of the Christian metropolis. Amsterdam became the hub of liberty in other ways, too – the centre of a free printing press and international book trade.
By the time that Jacob van Campen’s great Town Hall, with its Maid of Peace holding her olive branch over the Dam, was completed in the 1660s, and the rotunda topped off, did the ‘regents’ of the great families who dominated Amsterdam politics – the Huydecopers, de Graaffs, Backers and Corvers – believe all this would last for ever, that somehow a great mercantile empire would be immune from the laws of hubris that had laid low others of that ilk to whom they constantly compared themselves – Carthage and Tyre and, more recently, Venice? If endurance as the unrivalled world city were just a matter of business, they could be confident of their staying power. But that was never the case. Immense riches generated envy, fear and hatred from neighbours. Even within the United Provinces and the state of Holland, there were plenty who despised Amsterdam’s habit of throwing its weight around; wanted the republic to be as strong in land power as Amsterdam insisted it should be at sea; and who thought the great city’s pragmatism a drag-weight on building a secure state. In 1650 the Stadholder William II had actually marched on Amsterdam to impose his will on the imperial city. But providence had, at least temporarily, smiled on Amsterdam. The Prince of Orange’s soldiers got lost in a fog; the siege was barely begun and the Stadholder died shortly thereafter, precipitating an anti-dynastic coup in which the decentralised nature of ‘Holland’s Freedom’ was institutionalised.
There was no sudden Carthaginian destruction (although the incursion of Louis XIV’s armies into the republic in 1672, combined with an English naval attack, came close to it). If you went to Amsterdam in the middle of the eighteenth century, you might have noticed more beggars and street whores; the houses of correction full, and as the poor got poorer, the rich swaggered in a more international way, with stone facings, pedimented and pilastered, Frenchified double-doored buildings on the canal houses; more in the way of perruques and Italian singing masters catering to the plutocrats. But in most essentials, the lives of Amsterdammers, copiously fed, riotously entertained, went on in much the same way. Voltaire may have been churlish to the place where he could get published, calling Holland the land of ‘canaux, canailles et canards’. But there was still true grandeur, bravery and business in the printing of freedom.
It was only the long, grim wars of the French Revolution and Napoleonic periods that sent the city, for a while, into smoky obscurity and hardship. Amsterdam became something the regents of the golden age could never have imagined: a poor city, a church-mouse commonwealth; cheese and beggary. The klokkenspel carillons still sounded from the graceful church spires, but the clamour of the place had – temporarily – faded. For a while, during the decade of the Batavian Republic from 1795 to 1805, there was an upsurge of patriotic euphoria, a sense of the city taken back from the regents by its citizens. But as the brutal reality of Amsterdam’s subjection to French military needs became apparent, that optimism disappeared in the mundane desperation of survival. The ‘wonder of the world’ – the Town Hall – was converted to become a palace for the younger brother of Napoleon, King Louis, who surprised the Emperor by taking to his people so enthusiastically that he became Koning Lodewijk.
Amsterdam had bent history to its purposes, but an age of mass mobilisation and munitions was rolling over Holland. The city suffered the most humiliating of all fates: quaintness. It became, in the nineteenth century, a cosy nook of Europe: tulips, clogs, skaters, pot-bellied stoves, pancakes and street organs; old boys in flat caps puffing at their pipes while barges filled with nothing anyone cared about drifted along from one more important place to another. For a long while its luck lay in not unduly inconveniencing the Big Boys; not getting in their way; doing them the occasional favour in regard to banks, diamonds, cigars, Indonesian rubber. Live and let live. But then there were some Big Boys who took offence at this very principle and who wanted, for example, Holland’s Jews not to live. But what is so thrilling amidst the tragic horror of the great war memoirs – and if you’ve read Anne Frank then you must also read another masterpiece of resolution, Etty Hillesum’s Interrupted Life – is the unquenchable sense of breeze-driven vitality, standing against the guns and the gas; something sweet waiting for its moment of rebirth.
That sweetness did burst forth again after the war, and how it exploded! Long delayed to shelter the pearly old city, a technological revolution happened and Holland and Amsterdam went from sleepy cuteness to explosive modernism in the wink of an eye. Quaintness disappeared and sharpness rushed in. Suddenly, Amsterdam was at the cutting edge of design, architecture, painting, writing. In the Sixties only London could rival the Dutch city for no-holds-barred creative mayhem, the old and the new hooked up on a dope-happy blind date. The club where you went to hear hard rock amidst swaying, sweating bodies was just off the Leidseplein and since it was housed in a disused church was called, naturally, the Paradiso.
Amsterdam once more revelled in a cosmopolitanism that looked out towards the world without ever forfeiting its intricate, domestic peculiarity. How was it – and the rest of the Netherlands – to know what was coming? That was: anger, hatred, murder; the unforeseen blow-back of precisely the liberal pluralism that, as a matter of principle, had kept its hands off the Muslim culture that moved into the city along with mass immigration. All of Amsterdam’s traditions predisposed the city to believe that Turks and Moroccans would subscribe to the mutual toleration, the easy-going heterogeneity that had been at the centre of the city’s culture since the seventeenth century. And that the habit of Amsterdammers to take ferocious satire, pungent polemics, on the chin would extend to this latest generation of citizens. Those assumptions died the death with Theo van Gogh’s knife-pierced body lying in an Amsterdam street, assassinated by a Muslim zealot for making a film savagely and, in his eyes, indecently critical of the strictures of his religion. I’ve known the great, beautiful, raucous city for more than forty years and this is the first time that its humanism is on the defensive against competing waves of fear and fury.
But this too will pass, I believe. Amsterdam has endured fire and flood, armies sent to besiege it; an army of brutal occupation. It has always been able to sponge up trouble and wring it out again. Long after this essay is published, long after its author has been forgotten, there will still be crowds spilling out on to the evening streets, smoking, drinking and laughing while a carillon chimes and a convoy of bikes bounces along the cobbles, pedalled by the sheer elation of being an Amsterdammer.
Washington DC
An abridged version of this essay was published in John Julius
Norwich’s, The Great Cities in History, 2009
Are there any city avenues more inhumanly broad than those of Washington DC? For they are not really boulevards at all, these immense expanses at the centre of the institutional city. There are no sidewalk cafés with coffee-drinkers whiling away the time as they check out the evening strollers – and for the reason that th
ere are no strollers. What there are, are Visitors to Our Nation’s Capital, disgorged from tour buses, pointed at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, or the Washington Monument, and gathered up again when their business is done. Even new buildings like the East Wing of the National Gallery, perfectly beautiful on the interior, manage to have a broad, low stepped plaza in front of them, complete with massively monumental sculpture that sucks all human life out of the space. Bow your head, revere, and enter the temple; so the message goes. Mandatory solemnity at the expense of the human swarm was there right from the beginning. The engineer who drew up the first plan, Pierre Charles l’Enfant, prescribed avenues not less than 160 feet wide. That’s what you get when you hire a French classicist; someone who doesn’t notice that the place gets broiling in the summer and for whom narrower, densely tree-shaded streets might have been a kinder idea that might have encouraged some ease of street life. But what l’Enfant valued in his royal prospects were (in his endearingly strangled English) ‘reciprocity of sight, variety of pleasant ride and being to ensure a rapide intercourse with all the part of the city which they will serve as does the main vains in the animal body to diffuse life through smaller vessels in quickening the active motion of the heart’.