The Low Countries. Jaargang 9

The Death of the Village
Geert Mak's Jorwerd

Literary non-fiction is thriving in the Netherlands today, with a lively output of essays, historical studies and biographies, of popular works in biology, psychology, science and philosophy, of books on ethics, euthanasia, art, film, animals, the environment, sport and travel. And, increasingly, these works find their way abroad through translation. A good example is the work of the Dutch journalist Geert Mak. A few years ago, the Harvill Press published his charming historical portrait of his home town. Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City (1997) (see The Low Countries 1996-97: 277-278). Now it has brought out his counterpoint to this, Jorwerd. The Death of the Village in Late Twentieth-Century Europe, an account of the slow death of the small village in the northern province of Friesland where he spent his youth. I would hope that in the near future Harvill will also publish his latest book, The Century of my Father (De eeuw van mijn vader), a family chronicle of the twentieth century.

Jorwerd opens with the poem ‘What the Poet Should Know’ by the Frisian author Obe Postma, and closes with another of his poems, ‘All the Joys of my Life’. In between, the language and literature of the Frisian-speaking minority in the Netherlands are mentioned only in passing, though Mak is quite good on the oral culture of the village, the anecdotes and story telling, the gossip and conversations going on in the shops and in the pub. Himself a city dweller, Mak has a very good ear for the differences that exist, even today, between townspeople and country folk in the Netherlands.

Mak begins with a portrait of the village as it was around 1950, teeming with variety and life everywhere, in the shops and pubs, in the church, the post office and the school, in the bank, the library and the sollicitor's office, on the farms, around the harbour, the market and the bus stop. He then goes on to paint the slow but steady disappearance, accelerated from 1970 onwards, of almost all of this: the departure of the horses and the farm hands, the blacksmith, the petroleum man, the huntsman, then the fire brigade, the district nurse and finally the shopkeepers; the closing of the harbour; and the preservation of the church as a monument of cultural and historical rather than religious significance.

In the process, Mak charts the enormous changes that have taken place in the Dutch countryside since the joint forces of mechanisation, European Agricultural Policy and the banks brought about a relentless rationalisation and modernisation. The central theme of his book is the change from a traditional farming community and its daily struggle with nature, into today's struggle of lonely farmers with regulations, paperwork, mortgages and subsidies. Mak is especially good on the human consequences of this ‘silent revolution that swept through Europe between 1945 and 1995’, and he describes the downward spiral many farmers are faced with today - of ever increasing debt,

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guilt, shame, isolation, depression and suicide. In this respect, the village of Jorwerd has a lot more in common with villages in Britain and Germany - high suicide rates, for example - than with a town like Amsterdam.

Mak's book is an essay in the cultural anthropology of village life that is comparable to the writings on European villages by the cultural critic John Berger. At the same time, Mak offers the reader an oral history of Jorwerd, its rituals and traditions, its customs and conventions. The anecdotes and stories Mak recounts - e.g. of Old Peet, who has never left the village, and his friend Folkert - mark the loss of collective memories and the fading knowledge of the past. There is the stoic resilience of country folk, and the tenacious survival of local clubs and associations, e.g. the summer performances of the open air theatre group. There is also the loss of the silence and emptiness of the Frisian landscape, and the decline of Christianity, in the chapter ‘How God disappeared from Jorwerd’ which ends with the funeral of old Tsjitse Tijssen. In his last chapter, Mak gives a fascinating account of the disappearance of the traditional Frisian storyteller from village life.

There is, to be sure, a degree of idealisation in Mak's portrait. For instance, he does not really acknowledge that a village could also be a place of small-minded enforcement of social norms and unforgiving long memories; a place where ‘newcomers’ from the towns were often not particularly welcome; and where the natives sometimes had good reason to leave, to emigrate and try their luck elsewhere. Another idealisation is Mak's view of change, and the pervasive sense of loss in his book. This grand Romantic theme is undoubtedly one of the key attractions of his Jorwerd - as could be seen in the Summer of 2000 when this English translation was published, just in time for the great home-coming reunion of Frisian emigrants from all over the world.

All the same, Mak is right to say ‘This is not a nostalgic history’. In his Epilogue he gives a hard-hitting account of the ongoing crisis in the countryside, of the devastating consequences of the industrialisation of agriculture, of what happened to the countryside and village life when these were modernised away in the late twentieth century. This is the story of the terminal decline of the village, not just in Friesland, but all over Europe.

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Geert Mak, Jorwerd. The Death of the Village in Late Twentieth-Century Europe (Tr. Ann Kelland). London: The Harvill Press, 2000; x-274 pp. isbn 1-86046-803-9.