Het verhaal van de Zuiderzee en haar kustbewoners ( )

This is a book that came out of an oral history project sponsored by the Zuiderzeemuseum: Vriend discusses the social history of the fishing communities around the former Zuiderzee over the last 150 years or so, weaving in the personal stories of four fishing families, from Volendam, Wieringen, Urk, and Spakenburg respectively.

The image of the Zuiderzee fishing village, where the women "still" wear their traditional costume with its long skirts and improbable starched caps and the men their baggy breeches, striped blouses and clogs, has been an icon of Dutchness at least since Henry Havard published his bestselling travel book Voyage aux villes mortes du zuiderzeé in 1874. And it's probably the first image of Holland you saw at school (give or take a windmill). The idea of the "villes mortes" also appealed to the ethnologists and anthropologists of the early 20th century, who saw them as a reservoir of pure, untainted Batavian racial excellence, and had great fun for a few years measuring skulls and calculating IQs (disappointingly, neither turned out to be appreciably different from the rest of the Dutch population).

But there's also the other great image of Holland, Cornelis Lely and his mighty team of civil engineers with their steam shovels closing off the last gap in the Afsluitdijk in 1932 to turn the dangerous, tidal Zuiderzee into the tame, respectable IJsselmeer. That shortened the coastline, reduced the danger of flooding, and created the potential to drain vast areas of land that had been lost in the floods of medieval times and turn them into polders farmed efficiently and in the straightest of straight lines by progressive young pioneer farmers schooled in the latest techniques.

Vriend — who grew up in the polder and has written a previous book about these pioneers — explores the way these contradictions worked themselves out in the years after the dyke was closed, with the fishermen deprived of their former livelihood but also unwelcome in the new polders. The herring and anchovy they used to catch couldn't get through the dyke, obviously, and the new, much reduced, lake couldn't support enough freshwater fish for anything like the 3500 boats that were working there previously. Many had to move to other trades, but a surprising number stuck to fishing, working on North Sea boats when there was nothing for them on the IJsselmeer.

What Vriend finds particularly interesting is the way a few communities, like the Catholic enclave of Volendam and the very Protestant former island of Urk, managed to retain their collective identities through all the social and economic changes. In Volendam half the town went to work for one former fisherman who started a construction company just as the post-war housing boom was taking off; the other half (which Vriend tactfully doesn't say much about) opened bars, restaurants and souvenir shops to turn their village into the Torremolinos of the North. Urk, on the other hand, stuck to fishing: the money its fishermen had made during the black-market boom of the war was not put in ungodly savings accounts, but invested in modern North Sea cutters, a new fish market, and processing plants, with the result that it still counts as the main fishing port of the Netherlands. Even though very little fish is actually landed there nowadays, almost everyone in the village still works on the North Sea or in a fish-related occupation on shore.

There are a lot of very positive things in the stories Vriend tells us about the way these closed communities work, with people looking after each other without the need for much intervention by doctors and social workers, financing community projects and business ventures, and generally maintaining a happy and secure community quite different from what most of us experience in the modern, urban world. But there's also a dark side: enormous peer-group pressure to conform, contempt for outside ideas, with low rates of participation in higher education and high illiteracy; early marriage and big families, with very strongly defined gender roles (the men go to sea, the women stay at home, do the books, and look after their many babies); racism, xenophobia, homophobia, support for right-wing parties, etc., etc. It's not clear whether you can have one side of this without the other: communities that turn in on themselves are probably always going to end up with an unhealthy contempt for the outside world, but on the other hand they probably aren't quite as radically different form the rest of us as we like to imagine them.

Vriend certainly tries to nuance her account: she clearly found a good rapport with the fishermen and their families, and she stresses that many of the stereotypes we have are still based on the prejudices of the scientists of a hundred years ago, who clearly didn't have much understanding of how fishermen actually work. One thing I wasn't expecting was the way all the families she describes had moved around between ports to some extent, following the needs of the work, and how it wasn't in the least unusual that (say) a fisherman from Urk would marry a fisherman's daughter from Makkum. The ports around the Zuiderzee clearly had more in common with each other, and more contact across the water, than they ever did with the hinterland, even before the polders came.

Another thing I hadn't fully realised was how much it was deliberate policy to keep the old ports separate from the polders. Not only were the fishing families unwelcome on the new farmland, but the planners also foresaw neat central villages for the shopping needs of the pioneers: it wasn't at all the intention that they should go to Urk or to Medemblik to buy their bread and newspapers. Urk faced endless delays before it got road access to the dry land that had removed its status as an island, and even longer before it was grudgingly allowed some of the new land to build houses for its growing population. Similar, even more absurd situations arose with former ports like Elburg, Harderwijk and Bunschoten-Spakenburg, which were now entirely surrounded by land, but were not meant to be trading with that to the north of them.

Very interesting, but probably only if you know the area quite well to start with. ( )