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  • A Profusion of PerspectivesThe Year in the Netherlands
  • Hans Renders (bio) and David Veltman (bio)

The biographical tradition in the Netherlands is blooming and inspiring biographers to think of new ways to explore well­known subjects. In what follows, we will discuss the tendency of the Dutch biographers to write a biography of someone who has already been the subject of a biography, which used to be a rare occurrence. We also see an increased interest of foreign biographers in writing about Dutch subjects. Finally, we will argue that choosing to focus a biography on a figure from abroad may lead to controversy, as was recently the case with two Dutch biographies of Nazi war criminals.

In 2019, two biographies of Nazi criminals were published: Josef Kotalla: De beul van Amersfoort by Richard Hoving and Albert Gemmeker: Commandant van Kamp Westerbork by Ad van Liempt. Van Liempt's biography was received positively by the national press in Holland.1 Van Liempt was already a renowned scholar of the Second World War when he began his PhD research, having published a dozen studies on the Holocaust in the Netherlands, for which he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Amsterdam. In 2019, he was accused of plagiarism in an official complaint lodged at the University of Groningen, but an investigation by the University's Academic Integrity Committee in August of 2020 cleared him of these accusations (De Vries). When the research into this biography was examined by the Netherlands Board on Research Integrity, the findings of the previous investigation were confirmed.

In recent years, biographers have not only been criticized when factual mistakes appear in their books but also when their accounts are judged to be ideologically flawed. Far too often, biography becomes an instrument to acknowledge an existing view of someone's personality. The Dutch Queen Máxima—who is of Argentinian origin—was heavily criticized in 2007 when she argued that "Dutch identity does not exist" ("Máxima"). In a globalizing age, Dutch biography apparently needs a solid set of national characteristics to help make a clear distinction between "us" and "them," or between "good" and "bad." [End Page 119]

In this respect, it is interesting when a biography appears of someone who defies this duality. In Jan Willem Regenhardt's 2019 biography Louis van Gasteren: Seismograaf van onze tijd, documentary filmmaker Louis van Gasteren is not the only subject. In fact, Louis van Gasteren is a group biography, showing that the various members of the Van Gasteren family played a pivotal role in Dutch twentieth­century art, politics, and cinema. In 1943, Van Gasteren murdered Walter Oettinger, a Jew who lived in his house to escape the Holocaust. Regenhardt defends Van Gasteren's claim that the murder was an act of despair, arguing that because Oettinger kept going outside during his stay at his hiding place, and even visited the barbershop and other public places, Van Gasteren was afraid that other Jews would be betrayed by this lack of caution. In 1944, he was sentenced by an Amsterdam court of justice to four years in prison, but after the war, in 1946, he was granted amnesty. Then the Grand Committee of Advice of the underground movement recognized that the murder could be seen as an act of resistance.

In his biography, Regenhardt takes a multilayered perspective on his subject. Although Van Gasteren preferred to call himself an artist, he became widely known for his documentary films, in which he protested against all kinds of social injustice. He inherited this engagement from his mother Elise Menagé Challa, who was an opera singer as well as a militant communist. His father, the actor Louis van Gasteren, taught him how to live like a bohémien: for example, members of the family were involved in many love affairs.

During the wedding ceremony of Crown Princess Beatrix and her husband Claus von Amsberg in 1966, Amsterdam was the scene of various riots. Van Gasteren directed a movie about the violent suppression of a gathering of youth by the police. This film was used as an indictment against the mayor of Amsterdam, Gijs van Hall, who had to resign in...

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