HOLLAND'S RENEWAL
By CECIL NORTHCOTT
NEARLY every Dutchman I met was aware that something extra- ordinary was happening in his greatest picture gallery—the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam. Not only was the Rijks being re- organised under its energetic new director, but its proudest possession, Rembrandt's Night Watch, was being cleaned. I was admitted privately to see the new splendour which a mountain of cotton-wool and a secret cleaning preparation had wrought on the three-hundred- year-old picture. I am no picture expert, but I remembered the heavy gloom Rembrandt left on my mind fourteen years ago when I last saw the picture, and the cleaner gave me a piece of smoked glass to reproduce it again. The new brilliance is astonishing. Shadows and the dark flurry of Rembrandt's magic are still there, but the gnarled faces of the burghers, the flourish of movement and the captured sunlight (the picture has nothing to do with night) fling out a welcome challenge to Dutchmen.
Not everything you see in Holland nowadays is so sparkling or so conident as the renewed Rembrandt, but Dutchmen have a lift at the heart as they think of the picture as a symbol of their renaissance. Leading out from Rotterdam, the great waterways into the heart of Europe are beginning to stir with life again. No one can pack as much on a barge as a Dutchman, but the amount they have to pack is sadly diminished. Before the war 3o,000,000 tons of goods passed annually through Rotterdam alone, and from• their commissions as carriers, brokers and bankers the Dutch drew im- mense wealth. Now the trickle is down to 8,000,000 tons "a year, and there is one short answer to the problem—Germany. Never culturally allied with the Germans, the Dutch yet know that eco- nomically they cannot live without a revived Germany. However much they hate the Germans—and " occupation memories " will live long—the Dutch must trade with them, and until the barges begin to thicken on the Rhine there can be no firm economic future for Hol- land. But Rotterdam is beginning to prepare for that day. Its spacious harbour equipped, and almost fully restored, is ready to welcome the world, and in its shattered central portions they are driving in the piles to make new foundations for stores and ware-
houses. In fact, as far as one could tell, Holland seems to be putting public buildings before private houses in its rebuilding programme.
There is a brave shabbiness about most middle-class homes— patched clothes, patched sheets, worn carpets, enough simple food to go round, but few extra resources to supplement the rations. " Only the black-market rich " can afford to eat in restaurants, I was told, and to judge by the emptiness of restaurants that seemed to be true. There are rich and ample menus in the Amsterdam and The Hague restaurants, but it needs at least fourteen shillings to buy a substantial meal. In homes the `..` bread meal," with all the varie- gated things that the Dutch put on bread, seemed to hold first place, taking turns with potatoes and minute pieces of meat. But how fresh and rosy the children look on it!
All over Holland there are the returned planters, business-men, officials and missionaries from the Indies. Many of them suffered cruelly at the hands of the Japanese. Families were separated in different internment camps, men were set to forced labour, and nearly every Indies family has a long tale of physical impoverishment hardly paralleled by British experiences in Japanese camps. These families and their connections help to form the climate of Dutch opinion about the Far East, and many of them have good grounds for their conservative fears about the ability of the new Indonesian govern- ment to govern wisely and liberally. There is a special fear amongst some that religious liberty may be in danger in a State dominated by Islam. In Leyden I talked, in his quiet study near the university, with Hendrik Kraemer, the Dutch Christian leader who has shared notably in the reawakening of Protestant church life. After mission-. ary service in the Indies, Kraemer became a professor at Leyden on the eve of the Nazi invasion, and at once opposed Nazi claims. By regular and risky travel over Holland during the occupation he stirred the Dutch Reformed Church to ask itself why it was a church, what its congregations were doing, and what was the business it was conducting—temporal or eternal? This was a re-evangelism of the church itself, and the success of it made the Nazis hold Kraemer as a hostage. Out of it came Kraemer's ideal of " congregation-build- ing," in which the local congregation is taught to see itself as con- cerned with life as it is lived by the people. For a century, I was told, the hundred bulky volumes of the synod of the Dutch Reformed Church contain no mention of the scientific, social and moral struggles of that period. It has lived its life apart from the world, and has grown steadily remote from the common life of Holland. In the words of one of Kraemer's group, " The church had no eyes, no mouth, no hands, no feet, no spine."
In the last six years the Dutch Church—still the largest religious force in Holland—has been discovering a new purpose, and has been shaping new organisations for bringing religion to the people and identifying Christianity with family, economic, governmental and world issues. New central " brains " have been provided in head- quarters councils, and there is a general eagerness to reach out into the life of Holland and find points of contact between religion and adult schools, factories and public institutions. One of the boldest inventions is the establishment at Driebergen, near Utrecht, of the " Church in the World " institute, which owes much of its vision to a younger Dutchman, Dr. Eykman, who died as a result of his Buchenwald experiences. He saw in Nazism the last phase of the road of de-Christianisation, and believed that the Church must re- gain for the Christian religion the lost grip on the scientific, artistic, social and political realms of life. At Driebergen about fifty young men and women are being trained as a spearhead force for the re- evangelisation of Holland. Some will be used as parish workers, but they will mostly be placed at the strategic meeting-points of ordinary life-schools, clubs, institutes, universities and industrial organisations. Over two hundred people between the ages of twenty and thirty-eight applied for places in the institute, where there is a well-balanced academic training in the hands of five directors, of whom only one is ordained. The leadership of the laity is a marked feature of the Dutch religious renewal, and in many cases plans are being forged in face of theological conservatism—the bane of Dutch religion. Driebergen's plans are only just beginning, but they are conjuring up enthusiasm and inventiveness such as the Dutch Church has rarely experienced outside its traditional theological disputations.
Politics are still dominated in Holland by the rents in religion which affect all aspects of Dutch life. It was hoped that the new Labour Party, to which younger people in both Protestant and Roman Catholic churches were drawn, might rise above church domination. But the call to fight Communism drove the Roman Catholics into their camp, and the Protestants rallied to the Conservative-Traditional party, with the result that the Roman Catholic party is the strongest in Parliament with Labour second. But Labour is plainly winning to itself the more liberal, intellectual spirits, many of whom are sharing in the revived evangelistic passion of Dutch Protestantism.
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