False Mountain

By LJ Kessels:

When I think of the word mountain, I think of home. Which is ironic, as I come from the Netherlands, from Limburg in the south, the dangling leg bit, treated by the rest of the country as its forlorn relative, with a funny accent, customs, and catholicism. It is a place of poverty, corruption, melancholy, and exuberance. An exuberance generally described as bourgondisch, in reference to the enjoyment of life, wine and hearty food. The people in Limburg are an alienated people, both from one town to the next, and then together, against ‘The Hollanders’.

In the south of Limburg is the Vaalserberg, a hill just over 300 metres above sea level and the highest point in mainland Netherlands. Vaals sounds like False, or the Dutch word ‘vaal’ meaning less bright or washed out, like a shirt that was washed too many times. There are stories that the hill used to be higher, but that it sank due to mining activities underneath it. In actuality it was first mentioned in 1041, and comes from the latin in Vallis, meaning in the valley. Due to the run of history three countries (Belgium, Germany, and The Netherlands) claim part of the Vaalserberg. 

Nevertheless, it was the highest ‘mountain’ in the Netherlands, until this source of pride was taken in 2010 with the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles. The Caribbean island of Saba was incorporated into the Netherlands and with it Mount Scenery , nearly 900m above sea level and the new highest point on Dutch soil.

I only went to the Vaalserberg once, my roots are more towards the ‘armpit’ of the province, in the swampland of The Peel. I grew up in Nederweert-Eind,  a small village, close to the city of Weert. In Dutch, Weert is a piece of low land surrounded by water. During 1944 Nederweert-Eind was the front line of the war, and completely shot to bits. So much so that when my step-grandmother arrived in the village after the war, she described it as the place where the world literally had ended. 

I like that story as it describes what it felt like growing up there: life was flat and bleak, stuck in the cyclical nature that comes with life in the countryside. A life that echoed the seasons: work, eat, sleep, repeat. After Christmas comes Carnival, after Lent comes Easter. The summer ends with a fair. Repeat. For some it is reassuring, for others it gives them the feeling there is no way out. Of never making it to higher ground. 

The first question people ask around there is where are you one of? What family do you belong to? You don’t answer with your surname, as that is only how you are ‘written’, in reference to the time of Napoleon where people had to ‘pick’ a surname. Instead, you provide your family nickname. This can be a name referring back to the old family homestead, an infamous character in a family's history, or (as in my case), just a succession of patriarchs. Like an instant family tree. 

As a kid I told my teacher, I could not wait to be older, have my own place, and be able to make ends meet. I had more ambition than small town life, where everyone knew everyone’s business all of the time. I felt alienated in that place. My first escape attempt came when I decided to move to Amsterdam at 18 and study philosophy. For the daughter of a working class, illiterate single father, this was unheard of. All of a sudden I became a person. I was no longer the daughter of so-and-so, or the little sister of so-and-so. I was taken out of my context, where everyone knew your entire family history by simply knowing what family I belonged to. For everyone I met, I was the single point of reference, and became my own person. This became more clear to me the moment someone had asked me to spell my surname. A strange question when you grew up in a place where nearly every third person has the same surname. Then my second attempt to escape came in 2016, when I boarded a train with two bags and a bike, and moved to Berlin.

Remember my step-grandmother who arrived at the village of my childhood shortly after WWII? A war-torn place in the throws of trying to (re-)build. Another aspect to this story is that she was in her early thirties when she arrived at this place, around the same age I am now. She had met a widower with seven children, and decided to leave the comfort of her family home, to move to a small village, and become a mother to a brood of traumatised children. She would remain there, mainly accompanied by her mentally disabled step-daughter, until she got too old, placed into a care home, and died not long after.

Life goes on, up and down, like the outline of a mountain. Wanting to climb it, also means the risk of falling down. Something that in a flat country, where I might have stayed, rarely happens. As a reminder of my own ambition I have a tattoo of a mountain on my forearm. To give myself a push. For when I’m afraid. To remind me to listen to my own saboteur. To push myself further and not fall down the valley, or sink back into the muddy waters. 

***

LJ Kessels is a writer based in Berlin, Germany. She has a MA in Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and has worked for various (film) festivals, events and whatchamacallits across Europe. Her work has previously been published in Bull & Cross, OF ZOOS, and Stadtsprachen Magazin. 

Postcard from... Papaverhof, The Hague

By Kelly Merks:

I was riding my bicycle when I first saw the Papaverhof. The sense of place I felt is unforgettable: with the simple motion of turning a street corner, my 1930s brownstone neighborhood ceded to a horseshoe-shaped row of low-lying but imposing white concrete blocks. I froze in fascination, and my bike slowed gently to a stop.

“It’s De Stijl! In real life!” my head clamored. My eyes followed the geometric masses of white that tumbled down the street, hemming in short and bold lines of black, blue and yellow. The scene recalled Piet Mondrian’s iconic Tableau and Composition series; the buildings mimicked the paintings’ cubic rhythm and primary colors. This unique housing development, the Papaverhof, was like nothing else I had ever seen, and my modest district of The Hague was not the place I would expect to see something like it... but here it was. 

The discovery was only a personal one, of course, because people have been living in the Papaverhof for almost a century. It’s a housing development that represents a unique moment in Dutch and local history, yet many people in The Hague don’t know about it. 

After the First World War, Dutch cities faced a shortage of adequate housing and building materials. In 1917, before the war ended, a 25-hectare (61.7-acre) plot between The Hague and an adjacent village called Loosduinen was created as a suburban extension and given the name Daal en Berg after the farmland it occupied. This new development was meant to help alleviate the region’s crowded urban living conditions, and is seen today as an early example of Dutch suburban social housing. Later the same year, Daal en Berg became a Coöperatieve Woningbouw Vereeniging Tuinstadwijk — roughly translated, a Cooperative Housing Garden City Association. I found no evidence that this garden city initiative was influenced by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Movement. Daal en Berg’s reality, in fact, was closer to that of a mini garden suburb. Garden suburbs are built on the outskirts of cities and are typically absent of industry, density, or connectivity: the antithesis of Howard’s garden city dream. 

Daal en Berg’s social housing complex—called the Papaverhof in keeping with the area’s botanical street names, like Rozenstraat, Magnoliastraat, and Irisstraat—went from concept to creation under the direction of architect Jan Wils. In 1919 Wils was favored in a design competition by the cooperative’s commissioner, Hendrik P. Berlage. Berlage is regarded as the patriarch of Dutch modernist architecture. He was especially enamored with Frank Lloyd Wright’s work after a 1911 tour of the American Midwest and east coast, and he became a liaison between Wright and “both the expressionists of the Amsterdam School and the rationalists of the De Stijl movement,” according to the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust. 

Indeed, the Papaverhof is not only one of Wils’ and Berlage’s important works, but bears the fingerprints of other contemporarily and regionally influential artists and architects: Gerrit Rietveld, Vilmos Huszár, Piet Mondrian, and the De Stijl movement founder Theo van Doesburg, who lived at Daal en Berg (on Klimopstraat, across from the Papaverhof) for 20 years. 

The Papaverhof is also an exemplar of a short-lived architectural movement called Nieuwe Bouwen, or “New Building”—an offshoot of Functionalism that centralized economy of scale and relied on modern technology. If De Stijl provided the development’s aesthetic, Nieuwe Bouwen concerned itself with materials and organization. It was a response to the interwar demands of economic and demographic expansion. Nieuwe Bouwen reorganized the home to provide more light, air, and space, focusing on efficiency and modernization instead of ornamentation. “Form follows function” lives on at the Papaverhof.

Despite its architectural and social importance, the Papaverhof’s 128 units were initially slow to sell. People were wary or just turned off by the large open garden in the center. But this problem doesn’t exist anymore; residents tend to stay for decades, and the waiting list to buy is long. The Papaverhof is among the top 100 national rijksmonumenten, or heritage sites, and one of only 11 in The Hague. 

Today the city has subsumed Daal en Berg. The once-suburban satellite is now well within city limits and sits only a short walk from the Laan van Meerdervoort, the longest avenue in the Netherlands at 5.8 km (3.6 miles). To celebrate Daal en Berg’s 100th anniversary in 2017, residents of the Papaverhof have created a virtual tour of a model home, and hope to eventually recreate for virtual tour a home as it was designed by Jan Wils in the early 1920s. 

(Follow this link to take a virtual tour of the Papaverhof)

Kelly is an American enjoying life on the frigid North Sea after a few years in Japan, having swapped great sushi for better beer in the Netherlands. As the daughter of an aerial photographer and a geographer, she grew up in a home of mapping equipment, old globes, and atlases that have informed her search for hidden contexts of the landscapes we travel and live in. You can find her on Twitter at @flaneurie and read more of her work on her blog, Bullet Trains and Bike Lanes.