The music was so swollen that I thought I ended up in a remake of Arjen Lubachs historical introduction of ‘The Netherlands’ for Donald Trump (“We’ve got Pony Park Slagharen. It’s the best pony park in the world. It’s true.”) Presenter Daan Schuurmans of The story of the Netherlands looked at us very unsatisfactorily. He wanted to talk about “the mountains of gold and the black pages,” “that show us who we are and how we have become.” It was a bit much ‘we’ for me – although I am at the forefront of nationalistically appropriating certain things (Vermeer, Bergkamp, the February strike, same-sex marriage).
The story of the Netherlands (NTR) does not only invest heavily in the music: neither expense nor effort has been spared in a mixture of classical information transfer and re-enacted scenes. The first of ten episodes was devoted Wednesday to the earliest inhabitants of the thawed land after the last ice age. It was full of wild boars and red deer, which the wolves knew how to handle. Just like, continued Schuurmans, “the most dangerous of all, modern man”.
We see a young woman shooting a red deer. Later, when she and her family are looking for edible plants in the forest, the twenty-first century Daan Schuurmans suddenly stumbles into the picture. He explains how the hunters lived seven thousand years ago and that they never really bothered each other. Then agriculture arose; we see how our young huntress commits herself to a farmer. But one evening she walks into the yard, meets another beautiful man by the evening fire and throws off her clothes. In the romantic flame light he also undresses and settles down with her.
Soapy run-up to real discovery
Agriculture caused a population explosion, but also resulted in more and more conflicts being fought out with violence, says Schuurmans. That much is clear, because suddenly we see our heroine’s beloved being beaten to mush with an ax by the jealous farmer. The blood is splashing all around. Our huntress rushes over, one hand supporting her pregnant belly, but it is already too late: he dies in her arms. She flees. We see her wandering through the woods with her baby in her arms. When she reaches her parents, she falls to the ground and dies. Was this Good Stone Ages, Bad Stone Ages?
There Schuurmans is again, now he is in a museum with an almost complete human skeleton. Bones from Nieuwegein, it turns out. In that place, the remains of a woman and a baby were found – apparently we went to a soapy sit and watch the run-up to a real discovery. Archaeologist Helle Molthof talks about the surprise the researchers felt when one of them found a baby jaw with a milk tooth. “The oldest baby in the Netherlands,” Schuurmans notes.
That’s so remarkable The story of the Netherlands: silly scenes (not on Monty Python think, not about Monty Python thinking) are interspersed with historical information that is certainly worthwhile, from makers who sincerely try to give a nuanced picture of history.
For example, Schuurmans explains that the tinted hunters and gatherers we saw in the picture had DNA that only matched ours for 25 percent. That’s because pale faces from the Russian steppes moved east (this sounded quite topical), leaving a trail of burial mounds from Moscow to the Veluwe. Men they often buried with many weapons; struggle and war were important. We share three quarters of our genes with these brutes, which perhaps explains “how we have become.”
In the second episode come the Romans, who “brought new culture and civilization, but also mass murder.” In a pre-fragment we saw a wench on the run from her assailants: Good Romans, Bad Romans.
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