“Europe, in its history, is contained in this fishing village. Those who flee persecution do not forget. But tolerance is not an achievement. Freedom is not an achievement”. At the heart of Jan Brokken’s latest book lies a small mystery – one that doesn’t concern just the hotel at the center of his story, but in some way, all of us. Us, as participants in a civilization. In the guest registry of Hotel Spaander, in the Dutch town of Volendam on the shores of the Markermeer inland sea, about 1,400 artists from nearly every European country – as well as from the United States, Canada, Russia, Japan, and New Zealand – have left their signatures. Founded in 1881 by a visionary philanthropist and patron of the arts, the hotel fits into the deeply European history of grand hotels as free ports and cosmopolitan outposts. These were places where a “happy little international set”, in the style of Edith Wharton or Nabokov, gathered for decades to exchange ideas, yearnings, and torments – like the Grand Hotel in Vevey, the Montreux Palace, or Cortina’s Miramonti, Cristallo, and Savoia hotels, all the way up to the Berghof, where Hans Castorp gets trapped amid the grand spectacle of the European elite’s decadence and decline. But Spaander is something more. As Brokken – author of the beautiful Baltic Souls and now De ontdekking van Holland (The Discovery of Holland), both published in Italy by Iperborea – recounts with cultured sharpness beneath his amiable and calm appearance, the first thing that greets visitors entering the hall is a sign painted with a smiling man and the words: “Welcome, artist”. Unlike vacation resorts or Alpine sanatoriums, this was a place intentionally created to welcome a colony of artists. A space of freedom – for Signac, Kandinsky, Joseph Beuys, George Hitchcock, and also for Ravel, Proust, and hundreds of others.
“Let’s start with a surprising fact”, Brokken told Il Foglio. “Most artist colonies last five, ten years at most. But this one endured for an astonishingly long time – from 1881 to 1932, when it ceased to be an artists’ meeting place. That’s still half a century, during which time Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, German Expressionism, Belgian Symbolism, De Stijl, and the early Abstract movement all came and went. How did it last so long? I wondered”. How was it possible to sustain an experiment in coexistence that even survived the First World War? The Netherlands remained neutral, and Belgian painters who fled here stayed through the entire war. Then came the British, Germans, French, Austrians – all together, sometimes clashing fiercely, but no one was ever expelled”. Maybe it has something to do with the Netherlands – not just the bête noire of Michel Houellebecq (who in almost every novel includes cheerful and hysterical rants against those “merchant” Dutch, denationalized and pride-less, in his view), but above all the country of Spinoza. Where Descartes found long refuge. The place where Oliver Sacks, a young gay man from London, went in the early 1950s (after a brief stint in a kibbutz) with the joyful aim of losing his virginity – feeling safer in the Netherlands than in his own London. It was in the Netherlands – and specifically in Spaander Hotel – that the Zuelzer sisters, Jewish women from Berlin, found a safe haven and refuge (at least initially) from persecution, which eventually caught up with them during the war. Where did such openness come from? “When I began my research”, says Brokken, “I thought about Volendam as a village of poor fishermen. Predominantly Catholic, in a Protestant-majority region. Deeply religious people. One must imagine this austere, conservative population watching for years as all these eccentric, strange-origin artists paraded through – with their tempers, too. Artists are not the easiest people in the world…”
What must the inhabitants of Volendam – “rough but kind-hearted,” simple fishermen sailing the cold North Sea waters on their fragile and fearless botters – have thought of all those people? From Baden Powell to Eleanor Roosevelt, the exiled German Kaiser Wilhelm II, even Alfred Dreyfus, who stayed there shortly after his 1906 exoneration?
“Think of the more than two hundred female painters who stayed in Volendam for long periods. That’s quite incredible, considering that at the end of the 19th century, women weren’t even admitted to most artist colonies. They weren’t even allowed to paint male subjects”. At Spaander, they were. “I kept asking myself: why there? In villages, intolerance often thrives. Locals tend to be introverted and reserved. Why was Volendam different? I pieced together the clues. One stood out: many people there have very dark hair”. Many theories were proposed. Two local historians ruled out the most common hypothesis – that there had been a barracks of Spanish soldiers near Volendam in the 17th century, with predictable consequences – or that many were descendants of French painters. No. But they discovered something else. “A good number of Volendam residents were descendants of Sephardic Jews. Fleeing Portugal in the 1600s, the wealthier ones – like Spinoza – settled in Amsterdam. Street vendors, weavers, and fishermen tried to build new lives in Edam, Monnickendam… and Volendam. The historians reviewed 5,000 surnames and 20,000 first names. Jewish names like Salomons or Tavissen had become Snoek and Tuyp. Some Tavissens even became Molen or Butter, like Hille Butter, who had shiny black hair and gray-blue eyes”.
This is a story of the persecuted. Of migration in search of refuge in freedom. “Yes, absolutely. That experience, centuries later – maybe even unconsciously – has shaped the local mindset. The Sephardim, with centuries of persecution behind them and uncertainty about how the Dutch would react to their arrival, tried to hide their origins and integrate as quickly as possible into a society that offered work and shelter”.
But here idealism ends. Brokken recalls two uncomfortable truths. First: to ease integration, it didn’t hurt that the Sephardic fishermen recovered gold from the wreck of the Lutine, a ship that sank off Volendam. The brave sailors retrieved its treasure from the sea floor. So yes, integration and goodwill – but also money, cleverness, initiative, and barter. Second: the Netherlands of today. In Volendam, the latest elections were won by the far-right, populist, nationalist PVV party. “Tolerance is not an eternal value. You have to rediscover it every decade. Freedom is not a permanent achievement. I think back to the most beautiful moment in Europe during my life – me, watching on November 9, 1989, the televised images of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The end of oppression. Aside from a few isolated killings in Romania and elsewhere, it ended peacefully – without major bloodshed. Think of the Singing Revolution in the Baltic states, the other peaceful revolutions across Europe that brought down socialist regimes… That glorious period ended in 2014. When Russia occupied Crimea”.
Brokken is the son of a Dutchman and a Russian woman. His mother read him Doctor Zhivago and Anna Karenina at bedtime. He wrote De gloed van Sint-Petersburg (Flashes in St. Petersburg), another sentimental journey through music and childhood memory. “I saw ’89 and believed even Russia might become a democracy, that I could travel freely to St. Petersburg, to Moscow. I was wrong. That all of this is now over is absolutely terrible to me.” Even if Putin were to win a battle in Ukraine, Brokken says, he has lost the war – because no one in any nation has any respect or interest left in today’s Russia. “We are truly at the end. Of Russia.”
