I love Amsterdam. I'm an American, but over four decades I've spent five years here. I've watched the city change from the early 1980s to the early 2020s. Lately, I've gotten interested in its history, and I have read pretty widely to learn.

Mak's book is simply the best of the genre that I've encountered. He wrote it in Dutch, but I read Phillip Blom's excellent English translation.

The book begins in the very early life of the city, in the late 1200s and 1300s, as permanent settlers move onto the marshes at the mouth of the Amstel river into the Zuiderzee. Mak's prose is lively and moves right along. You get a great picture of the city and its people as the story progresses, but you never get bogged down in any period of history.

Mak writes about language, technology, culture, immigration, war and trade. He describes both how and why the canal system that defines the city was constructed, including the "grachtengordel," or canal ring, that's so instantly recognizable.

He describes the city's ups as well as its downs -- how it grew and prospered, and when it declined and suffered, and why.

I have to call out especially his next-to-last chapter, The Last Stop of Train 11537. I've lately learned something about Holland and Amsterdam during the Second World War. Many here take a real pride in the resistance to the German occupation, and the work done to save some of the Jewish population. But the complete story isn't always heroic -- there were active collaborators with the Germans, and a vocal indigenous National Socialist party. Many Amsterdammers just averted their eyes and kept quiet.

Mak writes about all of that, really movingly, in the chapter I mentioned. It's some of the most thoughtful and affecting writing I've ever read about those years. He's made me better-informed; I am both more proud of the Dutch resistance, and more realistic about the failure of the non-Jewish population to protect their neighbors.

I'm grateful for this book! I'd love to sit down and talk with Geert Mak. I bet there's a lot of fascinating detail that he didn't have room for. ( )

Kevin

A DUTCH DOZEN

1. Amsterdam has a long history of thriftiness, of modesty. In the eighteenth century, Widow Pels, the city's richest inhabitant, had no more than five servants. In the 1990s, a local executive wrote to airline KLM to ask them to tone down their business-class service: ‘A cheese sandwich and a glass of milk are more than enough as far as I am concerned.’

2. If you want to ward off witchcraft, you can follow the example of one medieval Amsterdammer, who hung ‘a pot full of new needles into which she had pissed’ over the fire. (It may not have worked – she ended up confessing to having bewitched cattle, and was burned at the stake on the Dam.)

3. At the height of the tulip mania of the seventeenth century, the most prized variety was called Semper Augustus. It had ‘impeccably white petals with small veins of a fiery red running though them, the base of the bloom as blue as the skies’. A single bulb cost 5,000 guilders, which was about the same price as a house with large garden. (Presumably a garden with no Semper Augustuses in it.)

4. The poor in early modern Amsterdam had two ways out. For women, prostitution (natch); for men, the near-suicidal VOC ships to the East Indies. These were supplied with crews in large part through groups of pressgangers known as zielverkopers (soul merchants), and between shipwrecks and disease little more than a third of sailors would make it back alive. The prostitution, meanwhile, was even then something of a draw for the city, with the best girls having their own well-known nicknames: ‘The Northern Cat’, for instance, or ‘Sweetie Cunt’.

5. Actually, all women in Amsterdam society were known for their forwardness. When Casanova visited in 1759, he was amazed to be placed in a closed carriage alone with a beautiful 14 year old; ‘Here we learn to be independent,’ she said, seeing his surprise. When he tried to kiss her hand, she merely said, ‘Why my hand?’ Instead, according to his memoirs,

she gave me a kiss that went straight to my heart. However, when she told me she would do the same in the presence of her father, should I enjoy it, I did not pursue the matter any further.

6. The nineteenth century was surprisingly quiet given the artistic and social upheavals taking place in other parts of Europe. While various modernisms were being explored in Paris, Willem Bilderdijk and Da Costa founded a society in Amsterdam called ‘Misgivings About the Spirit of the Age’ (!). In 1848 some Communists organised a jobless rally; but when hundreds of people actually showed up, they were so surprised that no one dared to address the crowd, and eventually everyone wandered off home again.

7. Amsterdam has a marked absence of monuments or state buildings; Mak refers to this as its anti-monumentalism, and he considers it characteristic of the city's undemonstrative psyche, not just a function of confused civic planning processes. ‘The number of monumental buildings in Amsterdam dating from the nineteenth century can be counted on the fingers of one hand.’ The main surviving example now is Central Station, which was pushed through from The Hague and widely regarded by authorities in Amsterdam itself as a disaster, ‘an eternal and irreversible mistake’. It finally cut the old town off from the IJ, destroying its character as a true port city and ending the vistas of ship's masts and rigging that had previously dominated locals' and visitors' impressions of the place. This was followed by the filling in of nearly twenty canals, generally to become new streets.

8. Sex work attempted to become slightly more discreet in the twentieth century. Two personal ads from the 1910s weekly Pst-Pst:

FOR RENT: A SPACIOUS SITTING- AND BEDROOM IN THE PIJP, RENT 200 FLORINS A MONTH, INCLUDING USE OF GAS LIGHT AND OF A CHARMING 18-YEAR-OLD LADY. LETTERS UNDER NUMBER…

I NEED AN HEIR. MY HUSBAND IS NOT IN ANY STATE TO PROVIDE ONE. WHO WILL DO SERVICE AS CREATOR? LETTERS UNDER "CREATOR" TO NUMBER…

9. Mak is scathing on Amsterdam's self-image as a city that was full of resistors during the German occupation, noting that most authorities complied with the Nazi regime unquestioningly. Many saw themselves as minor bureaucrats, arranging for a certain train to run from A to B; the fact that the cargo was Jews did not concern them. In fact the train used to transport Jewish Amsterdammers to the camps in Germany and Poland was the same one every time, and some passengers realised this and hid letters on board for others to read. They tell of the arduous journey, how one girl sang songs, how a man told jokes to keep people's spirits up.

But always the last sentence of these notes is the same. ‘We have stopped at Auschwitz. We have to get out. It is a large factory city, because you can see a lot of chimneys.’ Or: ‘In the distance there is a building which is lit. 'Bye everyone, we'll be back soon.’

Of the 80,000 Jews in Amsterdam before the war, 5,000 were left alive when the city was liberated in 1945. Mak notes that ‘proportionally more Jews were deported from the Netherlands than from any other Western European country’.

10. In the 60s the city had its own crazy countercultural group known as the Provos (not to be confused with the Provisional IRA; in this case the word came from ‘provoke’). They liked to shout incomprehensible slogans at the police, like ‘Gnot!’ or ‘Smurf the ones who smurf the smurfs!’ Indeed, they had a plan to turn the local policeman into a sort of social worker who would carry ‘matches and contraceptives and also oranges and chicken drumsticks for the hungry proletariat’. When they protested at Princess Beatrix's wedding, a marijuana expert, Kees Hoekert, succeeded in throwing a live chicken at the golden state coach. He had managed to convince security guards that ‘the bird was called Eibertje Vos and that it wanted to have look at the queen’.

11. The city has developed its own uniquely Amsterdammer interpretation of the law, by which authorities are entitled to prosecute a crime but are not obliged to do so – especially in cases where its prosecution is deemed more damaging than the offence itself, as with soft drugs or prostitution.

12. This book is richly researched, well annotated, and comes in a fluent, unimposing translation by Philipp Blom. It makes me feel that I need to read more Dutch history; how can you not love a place where major upheavals are called things like The Hook and Cod Wars and The Eel Uprising? ( )

Geert Mak is an excellent observer and writer of vignettes and people. This book about Amsterdam is at its best when Mak narrates Rembrandt drawing an executed woman, exploring both the plights of that poor woman and the ups and downs in the life of the famous artist. While the book offers a good account of the ebb and flow of Amsterdam's economically driven development, it fails to situate Amsterdam in relation to its neighboring cities and the states. Amsterdam's position within the Holy Roman Empire as well as part of the Habsburg Empire are hardly mentioned. Its rivalries with The Hague, Utrecht, Rotterdam and London are also missing, as are many of the world's greatest minds and artists (Spinoza, van Gogh, Mondrian, ...). Amsterdam thus comes across as a rather plodding city. Curiously, Mak doesn't mention Amsterdam's football club either. Overall, a good if sketchy portrait of the city. ( )

This is a highly-readable history of eight centuries of the history of Amsterdam. Dutch journalist Mak makes great use of hooks upon which to build each chapter of Amsterdam's history such as an archaeological artifact, a sketch by Rembrandt, primary source writings, paintings and photographs. I get the sense that the translation is a bit off in places and the place names are hard for an Anglophone out-of-towner to keep up, but these things largely do not impede my reading or enjoyment of this work. This is a good introduction to the city I hope to visit next month.

For other reviews check out The Hieroglyphic Streets. ( )