Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City
Russell Shorto, Doubleday
( Disponible Bibliothèque de Côte-des-Neiges)
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Critiques
Amsterdam: a great city built on ‘luck, ruthlessness and ingenuity’. Photograph: Fraser Hall/Getty Images
here he looks at the deeper roots of Amsterdam’s liberal exceptionalism and its significance for the wider world, from the city’s origins as a squashy medieval mudflat to its current glowing reputation among the ignorant as a sort of sex/bong Shangri-La. It is inevitably a less original book and suffers from the usual problems of history focused on a single city, but Shorto is an excellent storyteller and rootler of strange facts, and Amsterdam should be issued as standard kit for anyone visiting the city who is not entirely corroded by vice.
Amsterdam’s luck lay in its dreadful location. By the time it was founded in around 1100 all the more desirable sites in Europe had long been parcelled up and covered in a dense web of lay or religious aristocratic ownership. For obvious reasons a shambles of shifting mudflats in which handfuls of fishermen and reed-cutters slithered around were not viewed as a high prize. Locals banded together to improve their lot, developing ever more elaborate systems to control the water that so often engulfed their rather unpleasant homes. In 1200, a dam was built across the Amstel river, giving the settlement its final name and marking the centre of what became through luck, ruthlessness and ingenuity a great city. It was this mix of seigneurial indifference to the area and enforced co-operation (which extended to other neighbouring areas such as Zeeland) that gave the region from its very beginning a unique social as well as geographical flatness.
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Of course, Amsterdam’s most famous and tourist-friendly regulations involve prostitution and marijuana, the lax marijuana laws prompting more quotable statistics. The book cites an assertion that 40.3 percent of Americans have used cannabis, while only 22.6 of the Dutch, who can use it legally, have tried it. But Mr. Shorto does not compare marijuana use in, for example, Amsterdam, with its “hippie-hazy” image, with its use in The Hague. He does cite Dutch intolerance when it comes to both tobacco smoke and prescription drugs.
Other major sections in this enjoyably crowded book address eclectic Amsterdam architecture and the great importance of Dutch art. Mr. Shorto favors the trick of describing a young man’s early history while withholding the fact that the young man is, say, Vincent van Gogh. But many of the stories he tells are about Dutch crusaders, eccentrics and visionaries who are not well known to American readers. “Amsterdam” ought to change that.
In a book that easily fuses large cultural trends with intimately personal stories, Mr. Shorto pays much attention to Frieda Menco-Brommet, Anne Frank’s close childhood friend. He revisits her memories of the Frank family — and, more originally, writes of Ms. Menco-Brommet’s later life and her decision to live “on the very block where her family had been brought after their hiding place was discovered and where her Auschwitz nightmare began.” Ms. Menco-Brommet’s response to having this matter dredged up provides “Amsterdam” an unexpectedly lovely ending.
Mr. Shorto ultimately concludes that Amsterdam, despite its spectacular history, is a relatively “poky” place in today’s era of global expansion. “It is small in population,” he writes; “in terms of geographic area you could tuck the whole of it into a corner of Shanghai or Karachi and it probably wouldn’t be noticed. It has no skyscrapers. But the advantage of a modest skyline is the seemingly limitless horizon.”