Why My Book Exists: Christmastime in a Cemetery

When I entered my PhD program, I was primarily interested in the history of the far left in American political life, notably the history of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), including the reactionary attempt to squash far left politics through vehicles such as the Smith Act, loyalty oaths, or McCarthyism. I had written my Master’s thesis on John Howard Lawson, a playwright who became a leading screenwriter in the 1930s and 40s, the doyen of the Stalinist left in Hollywood, and the ringleader of the group of screenwriters and producers who would in 1947 become infamous as the “Hollywood Ten.” Through Lawson I broadened my interests into Hollywood and American cinema history. At one point I even thought I might write a dissertation on the history of American drive-ins. But all that changed in a cemetery in the small town of Amersfoort, The Netherlands. In an instant one cold December afternoon I became a diplomatic historian.

In 1999, over the Christmas break, I took my first visit to The Netherlands. Christmas in northern Europe, as I would come to learn, is a magical time. Open-air Christmas markets chase away the winter cold with hot cocoa, bright yule stalls, and the spicy warmth of the Glühwein. Americans love Christmas, but we don’t do the season nearly as well as the northern Europeans. The Dutch have a word that doesn’t quite translate into English for the coziness associated with a roaring fire, a quality cocktail, and the affability of close friends: gezellig. It is the highest compliment a Dutchman can pay a hostess, that the affair or the company or the dinner had been gezellig. Christmastime in The Netherlands is the height of gezelligheid.
 
I was in the company of my then-fiancée, meeting her family for the first time. They live in a tiny village called Ermelo, right on the edge of the national forest, the Hoge Veluwe. In the summers the place is overrun by caravan-shelled holiday-makers. In 1946 talks between Dutch officials and the independence movement known as the “Republic” took place at the Hoge Veluwe, attempting to solve the East Indies Crisis. Those talks failed, to tragic consequence. The Hoge Veluwe also houses the Kröller-Müller Museum, one of the great open-air art museums in Europe. Otherwise not much happens in Ermelo.
 
It had been a gezellig visit regardless. After a week or two we took a short trip to the provincial town of Amersfoort. Amersfoort is the number two city in Utrecht province, just northeast of Utrecht itself, nearly in the center of the country. The Hoge Veluwe is further to the southeast, Amsterdam about a 45-minute car ride to the west (only an American would measure Dutch distance thusly). As far as the Netherlands goes, Amersfoort is in the center of everything and yet seemingly cut off from the world. It is also the family seat of my then-fiancée’s paternal side.
 
We made the visit to lay some flowers at the grave of the matriarch of the family, Oma Tetje. I was touched to be invited to this informal family ceremony. I learned that owing to the population density of The Netherlands, graves are often repurposed: burial sites in municipal cemeteries are typically rented for ten or twenty years, after which, if the lease isn’t renewed, a fresh occupant moves in. The Dutch aren’t sentimental about much, including the corporeal remains of other Dutch.
 
As I contemplated this particular form of squatters’ rights, we wandered the grounds. My eye soon caught sight of a meticulously groomed plot a little way off, a rigidly flat expanse connected to, yet clearly distinct from, the rolling grounds of the municipal cemetery. In this little plot I discerned row after row of uniform headstone, presided over by a memorial obelisk at the head. This was clearly a military cemetery, and I strode over to get a closer look.
 
I had not yet started my Dutch language studies, so I needed some help with the marker board at the fenced entrance to the site. As my fiancée translated, I learned that the soldiers interred here were in fact Soviet soldiers, more than 800 of them. While Amersfoort is placid today, during the war it housed a notorious Nazi transit camp, Camp Amersfoort. Many Dutch Jews were routed through Camp Amersfoort on their way to Buchenwald or Auschwitz or elsewhere.

Kamp Amersfoort

In 1941, the Germans transferred approximately 100 captured Soviet POWs to Amersfoort. They had been captured on the Eastern Front, and were now being transported halfway across the world, to Amersfoort, The Netherlands, apparently to be used as (semi) living propaganda devices by the Nazis. There had been a nation-wide uprising in February 1941 throughout the occupied Netherlands to protest the regime’s treatment of Jews; hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens took part. Perhaps the occupying authorities had this in mind when they brought the unfortunates to Amersfoort. In any event, many of them perished under miserable conditions in the camp, and then in April 1942 more than 70 of them were summarily executed. In time, after the war, several hundred more Soviet dead were exhumed from the Margraten Cemetery, which was made exclusively American, and reinterred at this place. The Sovjet Ereveld (Soviet Field of Honor) was officially opened in 1948, presided over by Minister of War W. F. Schokking. All of this I would learn subsequently.
 
In 1999, walking up and down those rows, however, I was struck by a singular thought: The Netherlands was (and as of this writing, remains) a staunch member of the anti-USSR North Atlantic Treaty Organization—NATO. And yet it had found some capacity to maintain in Dutch memory a place of honor for the fallen soldiers of what had been for decades an implacable foe. I wondered if, even allowing for the accidents of history and geography that had brought these soldiers to this place, I could ever imagine the Americans maintaining a field of honor for fallen Soviet soldiers. Most Americans I know can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that the United States and the Soviet Union had fought as allies in World War II, let along carve out space in collective consciousness to maintain a dignified respect for the honored dead. And that difference, not political but cultural, sparked a question: is it possible that whatever the Cold War meant to and in America, that it had meant something different in The Netherlands?
 
That is the moment I became a diplomatic historian, in that cemetery, on that field. When I returned home I began to scour the literature. I learned that not only was there (obviously) a robust literature on the Cold War, and on American diplomatic relations with Europe in the making of the Cold War, but that there was also a robust literature on bilateral relations between the USA and all the major and minor allies: US-UK relations, US-France, US-Germany, US-Austria, US-Scandinavia, even US-Ireland. But no one had studied US-Netherlands relations during the early Cold War. Voilà.
 
When I started my work the reigning paradigm in the scholarship was “Americanization”: the seemingly overwhelming, perhaps irresistible power of American culture to make other places and other people more American, perhaps more American than they might want. Sure enough, everywhere I looked in Dutch-American relations I saw evidence of Americanization, of Dutch people becoming more like Americans, politically, economically, even culturally. Every McDonald’s in the country, every Hollywood film, gave evidence of the unavoidable magnetism of the Americans.
 
But if Americanization explained bilateral relations between the USA and other countries, then how could I explain the Soviet cemetery? I knew enough about the Cold War to know that if American influence was as overweening as proponents of Americanization theory claimed, then it would have precluded a place of honor for Soviet soldiers.
 
As I looked more closely more cracks began to appear. Where I had been accustomed to seeing influence, now I began to see opposition and resistance. But even opposition and resistance was insufficient to describe the patterns I saw. What was becoming more and more clear to me was something that was neither irresistible influence nor rank opposition. I began to see a certain kind of accommodation, a third thing that was neither influence nor resistance, and which was animated by a creativity organic to the Dutch themselves.
 
What I saw was American power being solicited, shaped, and used by the Dutch, for Dutch purposes. The Americans proposed, but Dutch officials and Dutch citizens disposed. Where the Americans wanted to instill market behaviors, economic growth paradigms, and American-style democracy, the Dutch put American largesse and economic aid to Dutch policies of economic restructuring and welfare state rights expansion. Where the Americans wanted to import US-style productivity doctrines, the Dutch maintained their own ideas about work and craftmanship and what constituted the good life. Where the Americans wanted to fund an anti-Soviet bulwark in NATO, the Dutch built a security paradigm that solved a host of other foreign policy dilemmas peculiar to them. And sometimes the relationship worked in the other direction: where the Dutch wanted to enlist U.S. support for Dutch policies, notably in the East Indies, the Americans repurposed that support for alternative ends.
 
What I saw was the instrumentality of American power: its importance, vitality, and transformative effects, but in the service of a purely Dutch national agenda. That was not Americanization. This was a complex process of solicitation, resistance, and accommodation that I came to call “clientelism.”
 
And that is how and why we have this book: because of the accidents of war, the Nazi determination to place a notorious place of horror in a sleepy country town on the edge of the national forest, a warm Christmas, and a small, adorable proprietress of an Amersfoort curtain shop named Tetje.

--David J. Snyder