Why the Dutch are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the acclaimed guide to travel in Holland

by Ben Coates

and the Dutch accent was said to be the source of the famous Brooklyn drawl.

Further afield, South Africa had Delft, Gouda, Middelburg and Utrecht;

clear memories of the 1944–5 ‘Hunger Winter’ when mass starvation set in. As a result, anniversaries were commemorated not with patriotic pageantry, but with deep feelings of sorrow, regret and even a hint of shame. The Second World War was remembered in the Netherlands similar to how the First World War was in Britain – as a tragedy of unimaginable proportions.

At least one Dutch citizen – Margaretha Zelle, the femme fatale better known by her stage name of Mata Hari – took advantage of the country’s neutral status for nefarious purposes.

If anyone fluffed the pronunciation of Scheveningen, they were presumed to be a foreign spy.

over 600 acres of the city had been destroyed. Most of Rotterdam’s historic core – once said by a New Yorker correspondent to be as idyllic as Oxford’s Cherwell – had been obliterated.

Elsewhere in the country, Queen Wilhemina avoided capture and fled to Britain, accompanied by what remained of the Dutch navy. (‘I fear no man in the world,’ Winston Churchill said, ‘except Queen Wilhelmina.’)

What was unusual about the Netherlands was the depth of suffering experienced by the country’s Jewish population, which was among the worst in the war. According to Hannah Arendt, three-quarters of all Jews living in the Netherlands would be killed. A Jew in the Netherlands was less likely to survive the war than those almost anywhere else in Europe.

Camp Westerbork, a Nazi transit camp located in the far northeast of the Netherlands,

Amazingly, Camp Westerbork was built not by the Nazis but by the Dutch government in 1939 to house some of the thousands of Jewish refugees who had fled to the Netherlands from German oppression. The first group of refugees transported there were anxious at being kept so near the German border and uneasy about the camp’s isolation. ‘A vast and desolate area of bare heathland and sand,’ was how one described it. ‘We were very depressed, but we had to accept it,’ said another.

Was it distressing to see people picnicking and playing football in a place of remembrance, or reassuring to see happy memories being made in a place that had generated so many bad ones?

It was liberated on 12 April 1945 by Canadian soldiers, who found nearly 900 starving prisoners inside. By that time, over 100,000 people had passed through Camp Westerbork. Only 5000 survived.

In early September, Brussels and Antwerp were liberated and the Dutch Prime Minister, Pieter Gerbrandy, mistakenly announced that the liberation of the Netherlands was already underway. Scores of people rushed to the outskirts of Rotterdam carrying bunches of flowers to throw to their saviours, but Gerbrandy (known to Churchill as ‘Mr Cherry Brandy’) was mistaken. A group of ‘liberators’ spotted in Breda turned out to be a British patrol who had crossed the border by accident. In September, an attempt by British parachute troops to capture a key bridge over the river Rhine at Arnhem – Operation Market Garden – ended in ignominious defeat, the crossing proving to be the famous ‘Bridge too Far’. Asked by Gerbrandy if the Netherlands would be free by October, a senior US military officer replied with a single word: ‘impossible’.

As a Nazi army officer wrote in a report to his superiors: ‘no German measure has caused such bitterness in all ranks of society as the confiscation of the bicycles.’

Reporting this latest wave of destruction, the London Times called the suffering of the Dutch ‘worse than those so far inflicted on any other country in Europe’. A letter from a clergyman published in the same newspaper proposed replacing the gongs of Big Ben on the evening news with recorded prayers for the Dutch.

One girl, half Dutch and half English by birth, was trapped in Arnhem during that winter. After an uncle was murdered by the Nazis she joined the Dutch resistance, carrying messages through checkpoints hidden in her shoe and helping to save a British paratrooper who had become stranded during the disastrous invasion of Arnhem. When food supplies ran out, she drank glasses of water in place of meals and spent much of every day lying in bed. ‘It was human misery at its starkest,’ she later told a reporter. ‘Masses of refugees … some carrying their dead babies, born on the roadside, hundreds collapsing in hunger.’ Eventually the girl’s life was saved by the timely delivery of an emergency food parcel, but the experience left its mark. Some fifty years later, visiting a refugee camp in Sudan, she would compare the stretch marks on her ankles caused by childhood starvation with similar marks on the swollen limbs of a famished boy, and cheer when another UN truck fortuitously arrived just in time to save his life too. Her slight frame and prominent eyes had by then helped make her world famous: she was Audrey Hepburn.

Inevitably, some showed gratitude to their liberators in the most traditional way. Soldiers were showered with kisses from grateful Dutch girls. Eventually, a staggering 40,000 Dutch war brides would move to Canada with their new husbands.

I thought the buildings fairly hideous, but they were perfect examples of the post-war school of Dutch architecture that emphasised concept over context. To my untrained eye, the rule seemed to be: design something provocative, and then build it anywhere you can find a gap, without worrying too much about whether it fits in with its surroundings or matches its neighbours.

In Rotterdam, a resurgent city soon adopted a new post-war motto: Sterker Door Strijd, or ‘Stronger through Battle’.

In keeping with the pro-American principles of the Marshall Plan, much of the city was redeveloped in typical American style, with grid-like streets and one of the world’s first dedicated shopping centres.

The fact that cyclists had no legal obligation to wear a helmet meant the fashion-conscious were not deterred from cycling, while strict legal liability laws meant that if an accident occurred, car drivers almost always took the blame.

In other pioneering research, a doctor in Den Haag, Willem-Karel Dicke, noticed that children on his wards who were suffering from coeliac disease appeared to have recovered more quickly during the wartime shortage of bread and cereals. Dicke wrote his findings in a series of influential academic papers, and the gluten-free diet was born.

Anne Frank, for example, became a national and international symbol of bravery in the face of cruelty, her house in Amsterdam reminding the world of how the plucky Dutch had bravely hidden her from the Nazis, only for the evil Germans to capture her anyway. Less remarked on was the fact that the Franks were actually arrested by three Dutch policemen, at least one of whom continued serving in the Amsterdam police force until 1980.

When I happened to pay a visit to Denmark, I couldn’t help but notice that a comparison of the two countries’ wartime records did not present the Dutch in a favourable light. Danish authorities largely cooperated with the Nazis – but only on the condition that Jews in the country were not treated too harshly. In one famous incident, the King of Denmark told his prime minister that if the Nazis made Jews wear yellow stars then he would wear one too, forcing the occupiers to scrap the plan. The Danish police refused to assist in rounding up Jews and when the Nazis announced plans for mass deportations, the entire Danish government resigned. Partly as a result of such actions, around 1 per cent of Jews in Denmark fell victim to the Nazis, compared to around 75 per cent in the Netherlands.

Also punished were the Dutch women, sometimes called Moffenmeiden, or ‘kraut-girls’, who were believed to have had sexual relationships with occupying German soldiers.

The national railway company formally apologised for its role in transporting Jews to concentration camps, and municipal authorities in Amsterdam announced that they would consider refunding the money paid by Jewish residents who had returned to the city from concentration camps, only to be issued with ground rent bills by the authorities. But there was still a way to go. In 2012, for instance, Prime Minister Mark Rutte refused to apologise for the Dutch government’s policy towards Jews during the war. Browsing a slick, government-funded website commemorating the Rotterdam air raids, I couldn’t help noticing that every section had been carefully translated into English apart from one: ‘Collaboration’.

Perhaps the most famous example of Dutch hostility to their eastern neighbours concerned the royal princesses’ unfortunate habit of marrying Germans. Princess Juliana – the current King’s grandmother – married the German Prince Bernhard in 1937, overlooking the fact that he had served in the SS. As Bernhard’s official biography later put it, with some understatement: ‘the news that Princess Juliana was going to marry a German prince was not received with unmitigated joy by the Dutch people.’

Three decades later, when Bernhard and Juliana’s daughter repeated the trick, the reaction was even less positive. Princess Beatrix (whom I later saw resign the throne in Dam Square) announced her engagement to the German Klaus van Amsberg in 1965. Tall and good-looking, Klaus was a scion of a noble family and not a bad catch for a young woman like Beatrix. Unfortunately, he had also been a member of the Hitler Youth and served in the German army during the latter stages of the war. Just twenty years after the Nazi occupation of their country had ended, this was a bit too much for even the tolerant Dutch to bear. Swastikas were daubed on government buildings and German cars smashed in the street. Several government ministers threatened to resign, but the Princess stuck to her guns and Parliament – which still had an effective veto over royal weddings – eventually voted to allow the union. On the day of the wedding, in 1966, thousands of soldiers lined the streets of Amsterdam, facing around two thousand protestors shouting ‘Claus, ‘raus!’ (‘Claus, get out!’) As the golden carriage carrying the happy couple passed by, youths threw bicycles into the street, followed by homemade smoke bombs. In the city where fleeing German soldiers had stolen thousands of bicycles, Beatrix’s husband-to-be travelled to his wedding past banners and placards declaring ‘Mijn fiets terug!’, ‘Give me back my bike!’ In time, the Dutch view of Claus/Klaus mellowed. However, a popular joke suggested ...

Nevertheless, traces of the old enmity endured, and outright hostility was not uncommon. Close to the German border it was still possible to see old wartime bunkers adorned with graffiti aimed at visiting Germans: ‘Zimmer frei!’, ‘Room available!’ Sports events were common flashpoints. Commentating on a strong German performance at a winter Olympics biathlon event, a Dutch television commentator famously said: ‘Shooting and running through the forest – that’s a sport Germans are good at!’ Residents of Dutch seaside towns inundated with German tourists could sometimes be heard complaining that the Germans celebrated the wartime invasion of the Netherlands by doing it again every summer. On the very day I visited Westerbork, I flipped on the television to be greeted by a Dutch sitcom character discussing, against a backdrop of riotous canned laughter, his reasons for buying a new truck. ‘No, grandpa, it’s not so I can gather up all the Germans in our country and take them away!’ ‘The best kind of recycling?’ an old Dutchman once asked me on a train to Dusseldorf. ‘A German eating pork!’

I also harboured suspicions that the wartime experience of hardship and destruction might have encouraged Dutch habits of thrift and frugality. It was not for nothing that the practice of splitting restaurant bills down to the last penny was known internationally as ‘going Dutch’. Amsterdam had its snappy dressers, for sure, but overall the Dutch had a strong inclination to frown on conspicuous consumption. Tipping in restaurants was viewed as unspeakably decadent; there were strict limits on daily withdrawals from cash machines; and the Dutch word for ‘debt’ (schuld) was the same as the word for ‘guilt’. The Netherlands was even the proud birthplace of the ‘bottlescraper’, a long-handled plastic spatula designed specifically to remove the last traces of mustard or mayonnaise from the bottom of the jar.

Dutch thrift had deep roots in the Protestant work

ethic, but it was easy to believe that it had been strengthened by wartime exposure to hardship.

The list of world-famous Dutchmen was a short one, but included several footballers: Ruud Gullit, Dennis Bergkamp, Robin van Persie, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Marco van Basten.

Perhaps more importantly, the Dutch had pioneered a new style of football that transformed the way the game was played around the world.

In the 1960s there was a revolution. Freed from the shackles of war, the Dutch economy was booming, and when the rigid system of religious ‘pillars’ crumbled a new generation began to embrace new freedoms. As Amsterdam gradually became a more playful, creative, cosmopolitan place, its main local team – Ajax – followed suit. Starchy, disappointing football was replaced by something altogether more exciting.

The most revolutionary change, though, was in tactics. Determined to increase the fluidity of play, Michels introduced ‘position switching’, which allowed players to swap places on the pitch at will during the course of a game. An Ajax player usually stuck in defence (for example) could surge forward and attack if he saw the chance, while frontline strikers fell back to defend the goal. Michels encouraged his players to break formation and use every inch of the pitch, including the air above it. In a tactic known as ‘pressing’, defenders were also encouraged to range much further upfield than normal, luring opponents into the so-called offside trap if they ventured behind the Ajax lines. For coaches and analysts usually obsessed with debating the merits of different fixed formations, the Michels approach represented a sea change, opening up new possibilities for players to move diagonally across the pitch and chase the ball through gaps in the defence like water trickling through the streams of a polder. To Ajax’s opponents, the new style was fast, fluid and impossible to predict. The club quickly became famous for its players’ flamboyance on the pitch, and for their determination not simply to win, but to play well. To Michels, the beautiful game really should be beautiful.

Talent-spotted by Michels, Cruijff made it into Ajax’s first team at the age of only seventeen. If Michels was the mastermind of the position-switching style, Cruijff quickly proved to be its on-pitch conductor, constantly pointing teammates to

Cruijff was also a revolutionary player off the pitch. In an era when many players had still come up through the staid old semi-professional system, he made waves by demanding a top salary, plus insurance, and by refusing to wear officially approved clothing provided by team sponsors.

His clashes with the Dutch footballing authorities embodied the late-1960s rebellion of the young post-war generation against the rules and hierarchies of their parents. Cruijff’s willingness to challenge the established order set the tone for a future in which players were superstars, and expected to be treated as such.

He could be something of a know-it-all, reportedly even advising a surgeon who later operated on his heart on the best way to go about it. You could either choose his way of...

With Cruijff on the pitch and Michels directing from the sidelines, Ajax went fr...

The team won the Dutch national championship three years in a row, in 1966, 1967 and 1968, and made the fin...

In 1971, it won the European Cup at Wembley; it won again the next year, and again the year after that. In the space of a few years, Ajax had gone from a team of middling semi-professionals to one of the best clubs in the world, and the agil...

By the mid-1970s, the new style had acquired a new name: ‘Totaalvoetbal’, or ‘Total Football’.

I was also reminded of the curious Dutch habit of using medical terms as swear words, whereby ‘kanker!’ (‘cancer!’) and ‘tyfus!’ (‘typhus!’) were common responses to a fluffed goal or clumsy foul.

Cruijff announced his retirement in 1978, but he didn’t stay away from football for long. Three years later, he delighted the Dutch (or at least, those who supported Ajax) by returning to his old club in Amsterdam. This marked the beginning of a period known to sports reporters as Cruijff’s ‘Indian Summer’, a glorious winning streak in which he, by now well into his thirties, helped Ajax win the double of the Dutch league and cup titles. In 1983, though, he broke Ajax hearts for a second time by committing the ultimate heresy of transferring to Feyenoord, where the Indian Summer continued with another double of league and cup titles. In 1984 he hung up his boots once and for all, joining the Ajax coaching team the following year. Within a few years, the club had won the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup.

In some ways the two men represented competing views of how football should be played – van Gaal thought that teams should be run with military discipline, while Cruijff believed that individuality was key. The quarrel peaked in 2011, during a

backroom power struggle at Ajax rather melodramatically known as the Velvet Revolution.

He had also, for the Dutch, come to embody some of the values and contradictions at their heart of their country: hard-working and plain speaking, sometimes offensive, but always motivated by a basic underlying decency. He was a strict disciplinarian who cried when introduced to a terminally ill child on live television, nearly quit football when his wife died of cancer, and wrote heartfelt poems to read out at press conferences. He was, like the anarchic Dutch themselves, brilliant and slightly crazy at the same time.

The rivalry between Feyenoord and Ajax was an instructive example: an enmity rooted in Amsterdammers’ and Rotterdammers’ shared belief that the other came from a strange and distant place. Rotterdam’s snootier residents sometimes claimed that their city was ‘the Dutch New York’. Thanks to the docks, a better analogy would be Detroit or Pittsburgh: Rotterdam was a grimy, sprawling city of doers, not thinkers, salt-of-the-earth types who rolled up their sleeves and relished hard work. Rotterdammers were predictably scathing about those living in other, more refined cities, viewing people from Den Haag as slick, insincere beancounters who spent the day counting problems rather than solving them. Amsterdammers were even worse: effete, shallow, bohemian and celebrity-obsessed;