We’ve been watching a drama series about the Dutch royal family, Beatrix, Oranje onder vuur, and it’s clear that there are significant gaps in my Dutch history.
I know the basics like Juliana and Bernhard being Beatrix’s parents and Wilhelmina being Juliana’s mother (although I did just check that one to make sure) but what I am missing is the experience of events that happened before I was living here; events I would have experienced if I had grown up here.
What I’m missing therefore is less of a textbook history, although that’s missing too, and more of a experiential history.
It reminds me of those programmes where they talk about your real age as opposed to your chronological age, programmes that generally involve tracksuits, gyms, teeth-whitening and cosmetic fillers.
In terms of experiential Dutch history, my real age is 14. Obviously, this mismatch between chronological age and real Dutch age doesn’t hamper me in daily life. It’s not like I’m always being laughed at or shot because I don’t know who the prime minister was in 1986. However, it does render one slightly childlike when one hasn’t experienced the same history as ones contemporaries.
Returning to Beatrix, Oranje onder vuur, the actors haven’t been chosen due to an astonishing likeness to the person they are playing, so it’s a guessing game working out who they are supposed to be anyway. I can work out the contemporary figures such as Balkenende, Wilders and Willem Alexander (and gain extra trivia points for knowing that he’s played by Bastian Ragas who used to be in a boy band and is now married to Tooske thingy) but once we go back in time I’m lost.
Husband and my mother-in-law sat through the first episode going ‘is that supposed to be bla bla bla? Oh no it’s bla bla bla’ and a name would occasionally ring a small, distant bell. So we had Lubbers, who I know as a former politician who worked for the UNHCR. It turns out he was prime minister of the Netherlands until 1994, just three years before I was ‘born’ in the Netherlands.
Lubbers being prime minister makes sense in terms of a tradition of prime ministers with comedy names: he was after all followed by Wim Kok. Whether it was a long-standing tradition, which was broken with the advent of the non-comedy-name Balkenende era, is something I’d have to look up.
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