Epiloog

¡Go-Go-Go-Go-Goooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaallll!!!!!!!!!

I just finished reading De eeuw van mijn vader aka My Father's Century by Geert "Big" Mak. What a ride.

Normally, you can judge a book by its cover. It's called marketing. They're designed that way. In a language other than your own, it's different. It's unlikely that you will have the background knowledge to know what you're getting into. The less you know, the more surprises you get. This also means you're taken places you didn't want to go. It goes beyond new and interesting points of view. Still, I'm in favor of exploring.

I leave this book with Geert Mak looking back at the last century in Spring 1999. At the time, the Balkan wars were raging. Although there was a lot of heated rhetoric at the time, he points out that the last century meant the early death of some 115 million Europeans, 54 million of whom were Russians who died due to internal persecution and famine. He compares the collapse of the Soviet Union to the collapse of Czarist Russia and the Kaiser's Germany, saying that it all happened from within.

He uses statistics to point out that the Dutch in 1999 lived like kings compared to 1899, when his father was born.

Of course, the closing chapter, like many of the others, includes a lot about politics within the Dutch Reformed Church. He spotlights the more liberal groups in the fragmentation process. A lot of what other Christian groups would consider to be basic doctrine was called into question or thrown out. Still, some social activism kept going.

At a one to nine week temporary job I just started, I met a member of the Dutch Reformed Church. I asked him about what I have read and my conclusions. He agreed that there is a Reformed identity that goes beyond the splinter groups, but mentioned that his own branch of the faith is yet another new one.

I can identify the Reformed paradox, but I can't explain why it exists. Everyone looks back to Abraham Kuyper, the great unifier, but new divisions arise all the time. It seems even more strange when you consider that the denomination was never very big to begin with.

My colleague laments that many Reformed people here have moved into megachurches that are, "Just entertainment."

Mak uses his own family to show that the Reformed in the Netherlands are moving away from religion entirely. Each generation moved further away from the whole idea, though in 1999, one person was a Moslem.

The section about Dutch identity was thrilling. I have no stake in the matter, but part of the joy of another language is reading and hearing what's intended for other audiences. After pointing out the decline of religion and other things, he said that, "Civic Religion," was the way to go. He used the American term in English.

I was surprised. Civic religion has declined in the United States to the point where some groups are at the point of deassimilating. Education spending has steadily declined for many years, and consequently, fringe groups who, "Don't believe," in science and other things proven as fact are now more mainstream. Home schooling exacerbates the trend. After news articles about immigration, one often finds hysterical comments about the need to defend our language. Often, they are shot through with spelling errors.

Civic religion has had its measure of success in the US, because it was well thought out at the beginning. While revisionists deride early America as overwhelmingly WASPish, it was diverse for its day. Also, as the percentage of WASPs becomes smaller, comemmorating their contributions may become necessary to carry them forward. They, after all, gave us our civic religion, leaving a framework so that others could be included over time.

The main challenge for the success of civic religion anywhere is transmittal. It still happens in some school settings and in the military, but it does not happen nearly enough.

The book ends on a personal note. Mak looks back at his parents' wedding picture, standing on the steps in 1924. He talks about how he can still see his fathers hands, spotted and veiny, "Like a landscape."

This blog will have two more posts. Next week, I'll take the Dutch to English test for TSF and report where I am linguistically. After that, I'll take a last look at this whole project.

Finished with Chapter 15

The summary will come later.

While reading this, I was thinking of Geert Mak's identity. Maybe I'm seeing too much through the lenses of American tribalism, but I believe I have it figured out.

He's Reformed. Although he might rarely set foot in a Dutch Reformed Church, I think that informs who he is to a great extent. The Reformed are his people. He writes about his family and friends with great affection. The Reformed world and its increasingly byzantine politics was too small, too narrow minded at times, even ridiculous, but it was and remains his own.

Looking back on the book, it's clearer now. Each time the Dutch Reformed Church split, part of the Mak family identity went with it. I think at the core, there is a Reformed identity that supersedes the past century and longs for the unity that Abraham Kuyper preserved.

The snake's speaking, Chapter 4

I finally finished it. Chapter 4 was very hard. The snake is the one in the creation story. It fits for the section on women described earlier and what came after that, which was an in-depth analysis of politics within the Dutch Reformed Church. In the 20s there was a big split between creationists and liberals who thought that the creation story wasn't to be taken literally. The liberal wing eventually broke away completely in 1946.

Recently, I saw a Dutch TV video showing a creationist who has built a replica of Noah's Ark.

It looks like Mak's father was a minister. The chapter ends with a sermon and the family setting sail for the Dutch East Indies, called Indië.

Reading this, the old European attitude that, "Everything else is India," strikes me as strange. Columbus Day was recently celebrated here, and we always hear the story of how he was looking for India. Consequently, we have the West Indies and the East Indies, which includes places in Asia found by Europeans that weren't India itself or China.

Linguistically, this is still very rough going. I still do a lot of dictionary work. I am on page 125, which means I am 1/4 of the way through. There have been a few breakthroughs listening, in which I understand everything for a minute or so, but often, I don't understand what is being said at all.

Welcome

In December I thought I might go to Holland. I started learning Dutch through the media. Although that part of my trip fell through, I decided to keep up with the language and test my theories of language learning. I am a teacher and Spanish interpreter, who is forever in search of a job.

Before leaving it seemed necessary to do some reading. I started with language books from the library. For learning any language, British books are the worst. One book provided a lot of laughs with such useful phrases as, "Don't talk to me like a schoolmaster! Do I look like a schoolmaster?" I did five chapters worth of exercises in a book by a guy from Holland.

From there, it was time to get some real content. I started a search for Dutch authors. I thought that Geert Mak's De Eeuw van Mijn Vader (My Father's Century) would be a good place to start. Wikipedia said that he was a journalist. Reporters usually write in an easy to read contemporary way. I was expecting a short overview of the 20th century in the Netherlands that would be easy to read.

Geert Mak is Mr. Vocabulary. Often searches for words yield "Geen resultaat" (No results.) in Van Dale's online dictionary. Often his sentences are 10 lines long. Sometimes the words he uses are part of Van Dale's professional edition. I search for words in Google and also use The New Routeledge Dutch Dictionary.

One problem with books made in Europe is that they fall apart if you actually read them. My 400 year anniversary edition of Don Quixote from Spain was in pieces by the time I finished it. Similarly, my Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, is also falling apart. I had to send my first copy of my Dutch dictionary back, because it too fell apart. My second copy is holding up better, but we'll see for how long.

Most of this blog will be about Geert Mak's book. I will also report on other Dutch media, which I follow through podcasts. The blog will most likely end when I finish the book.

Some general comments:

The Dutch media presents a self-image of the old Dutch stereotype. People are calm and businesslike. Conformity is a given. With that in mind, I wonder how Amsterdam happened. The Netherlands seems like an unlikely place to put the vice capital of Europe. Sure it's a port, but not all ports are like that.

The story of Santa Claus there is pretty interesting. At Christmastime I heard all sorts of songs about Spain. I couldn't figure it out. Using English sources, I found out that Sinterklaas chills in Spain, until coming to the Netherlands with Black Pete to visit all the good children. I suppose there's more to do in Spain then in the North Pole.

The book so far:

I'm on page 91. I'm reading ISBN 90 450 0127 6, in case anyone wants to follow along.

Right now Mak is describing the 1920s. It is very interesting to read about world events from a perspective I knew nothing about. For example, radio came to the Netherlands in a way that aligned with the 3 tribes Mak describes: Catholics, Protestants and Socialists. KRO, VPRO and other media powerhouses endure to this day.

One major problem Mak has is very common with his generation. He can't stand religion. As a result, he beats the Dutch Reformed Church to death. It was through Mak's book that I noticed this problem. I grew up in the US, just behind the same generation. They always had and still have opinions against religions I know well. Mak's book made me see his generational bias, because I have never had contact with the Dutch Reformed Church and have no opinion about it. In particular, the fundamentalist wing, with which his family broke away around 1900, bothers him. Consequently, all roads lead back to Abraham Kuyper. It's really distracting.

I was not aware that the Netherlands was neutral and made money during WWI. Mak points out that 19th Century thought wasn't swept away as it was in other countries. There wasn't a Lost Generation, and the ground wasn't fertile for Fascism or Communism.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the Maks were in the sailmaking business. It was a tenuous existence. The Netherlands was like descriptions I have seen of Portugal in much of the 20th Century, a backward place with lots of poor people and a big empire far away.

My goal is passive comprehension of the Dutch language. It's about reading and listening. There are a few Dutch festivals in Southern California, but not much else.