The six chords, each spaced with a rest of about a second, came crashing down in the resplendent home of Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The audience sat transfixed. Seated in the rear balcony, I was listening to Santtu-Matias Rouvali conduct Jean Sibelius’ 1919 fifth symphony based, like Beethoven’s, around a four-note motif. The opening of Beethoven’s fifth has been called “the knock of fate” and the conclusion of Sibelius’s—with its six thunderbolts—evoked it. At a moment when Europe is at a crossroads, the conclusion of Sibelius’ symphony seemed to represent as much of a challenge as a declaration.
While spending a week in the Netherlands, I pondered the question of whether Europe will rouse itself to meet the challenges of a new era or slip back into its cozy bourgeois habits. There’s plenty of evidence either way. Amsterdam itself remains an oasis of calm with its lovely canals and extrusion of cars from the city center. If you want to get around, you can hoof it, jump on a tram or join the bevy of bicyclists. In Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks, Amsterdam functions as a haven for the young Gerda Arnoldsen, a violin virtuoso who announces to her schoolmate Toni Buddenbrooks that she’s not eager to get married: “I don’t see why I should. I am not anxious. I’ll go back to Amsterdam and play duets with Daddy and afterwards live with my married sister.”
The Amsterdam town hall, built in 1648 after the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War and the Eighty Years’ War with Spain, features a woman bearing a staff of Mercury and an olive branch. Trade, not war, has been the raison d’être of the Netherlands for several centuries (though it remained a colonial empire through a good part of the 20th century).
Overt reminders of a darker European past are also present. One comes in the form of the Anne Frank house which is located on a canal in central Amsterdam called the Prinsengracht. The spareness of the Secret Annex to the house, where the Frank family and several friends hid for several years before they were betrayed to the Gestapo in August 1944, underscores the abyss that the Nazis created in their fanatical quest to destroy European Jewry. Otto Frank, who survived Auschwitz and ensured that his daughter Anne’s diary was published, decreed that the furniture and other goods that the Nazis had stripped from the house not be returned to it after World War II ended.
Then there is an ambitious two-part anti-war exhibition of the German artist Anselm Kiefer’s work at the Van Gogh Museum and neighboring Stedelijk Museum. Kiefer, who was born in 1945, has long been preoccupied with confronting the Nazi past. “Kiefer’s work,” Simon Schama has observed, “seems to share the historian’s version of the Hippocratic Oath, to wage war against forgetfulness.” At age eighteen, he traveled across the Netherlands, Belgium, and France to retrace the footsteps of his hero Vincent van Gogh. “Every single one of his forceful brushstrokes,” writes Kiefer in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, “is an eruption, a manifestation of defiance.”
The exhibition deftly traces Kiefer’s indebtedness to van Gogh and is called “Where have all the flowers gone?” It focuses on warfare, ranging from several enormous canvasses called “Field of the Cloth of Gold” (which evoke the 1520 meeting between Francis 1 of France and Henry VIII of England) to military uniforms hanging around the staircase of the Stedjelik museum. To slot Kiefer in as an artistic propagandist, though, would be to do violence to his own vision–his focus on decay and rebirth, not to mention his fusion of the ambiguous traditions of German mythology and romanticism into his monumental paintings.
Those traditions were misused, or at the very least exploited, by the Nazis. Kiefer offers a reminder of the dark past but also leaves open-ended just how German myths should be interpreted today, something that comes through in a mesmerizing painting called Waldsteig, or forest path, that is based on a romantic novel published by the Austrian writer and painter Adalbert Stifter in 1845.
At a press opening for this new exhibition, Kieger observed that he wasn’t trying to proselytize about the Ukraine war. In viewing Kiefer’s canvasses with their focus on wheat fields and looming conflict, however, it’s hard not to think about the carnage taking place in Ukraine, where Russia has embarked upon a revanchist war to extirpate Ukrainian culture and sovereignty. Russia’s assault offers a potent reminder that the most effective anti-war measure is to possess an adequate deterrent, a lesson that Poland and the Baltic States never needed to relearn and that Western Europe must.
Both the war and the rise of Donald Trump have upended Europe. Unlike the Alternative Party for Germany, which remains close to Russia, both Geert Wilders, the leader of the far right PVV party in the Netherlands, and Marine Le Pen, the head of the National Rally party, are backing Kyiv. This past week, Wilders said, “The PVV naturally supports Ukraine with conviction.”
But the real action is taking place in Germany. The incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz is seeking to shuck off the caution, even timidity, that has characterized Germany since 1945. “Germany is back,” Merz announced on March 14 after the Greens joined the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats to pass a historic funding proposal of 500 billion euros for infrastructure and the Bundeswehr, or German army. It also permits the current chancellor Olaf Scholz to distribute three billion Euros in additional aid to Ukraine. Merz has also stated that he intends to talk with France and the United Kingdom about creating a wider European nuclear umbrella. Already Merz is demonstrating that, in contrast to the hapless Scholz, he intends to become a consequential German chancellor.
The stakes could not be higher. As David Brooks observes in the New York Times, “Europe will either revive or become a museum….Europeans know that that this is their moment to cut the security cord with America and revive their own might.” They do indeed.
If what I heard at the Concertgebouw is anything to go by, more thunderbolts may be in the offing in Europe.
