Less than two weeks ago, the Netherlands was still delirious with the fever surrounding the World Cup. The Dutch unexpectedly achieved third place. Dutch nationalism, usually muted, was briefly turned into mandatory enthusiasm, as the Dutch team racked up victories over Spain, Australia, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and, finally, Brazil. On Twitter, a soccer commentator who ventured a few critical remarks about the Dutch team received comments to the effect that he should be thrown out of a plane.
Then, on Thursday, while en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down in eastern Ukraine. Of the 298 passengers and crew members who were killed, 193 were Dutch nationals, among them a famous AIDS researcher, Joep Lange, and a senator and legal scholar, Willem Witteveen. The compulsory enthusiasm so rampant during the World Cup — at least until the semifinal match against Argentina — quickly switched to compulsory mourning. “Everyone knows at least someone,” the usually sober newspaper NRC Handelsblad proclaimed on its front page.
Dutch leaders were more circumspect. Over the weekend, Prime Minister Mark Rutte expressed outrage at the “utterly disrespectful behavior” of pro-Russian separatist rebels, who had refused to release most of the victims’ bodies, housed in refrigerated boxcars at a decrepit railway station — a ghoulish limbo. But he has avoided any outward expression of grief. So has the new king, Willem-Alexander, who has offered his condolences but stopped short of anything like calling for a national day of mourning. Which was a wise decision: Mourning is not the government’s business.
It’s a cliché that the Dutch are “sober.” Sobriety is a part of Dutch identity, but — especially after the gay right-wing populist politician Pim Fortuyn was killed in 2002 — the country also displays symptoms of hysteria. When I was growing up in Amsterdam in the 1970s and 80s, nationalism was considered evidence of bad taste. There are historical reasons for this, including the collaboration of many Dutch officials with Nazis during the Holocaust and the history of Dutch colonialism in modern-day Indonesia, Suriname, South Africa and the like.
Yes, when the national team played soccer (especially against Germany), a modicum of cheerful nationalism was allowed; when a Dutchman excelled in the Tour de France, a certain amount of national pride was permitted. Beyond that, however, nationalism was considered a throwback.
All this changed after 2002, and especially after 2004, when the film director Theo van Gogh was killed by a son of Moroccan immigrants. Newcomers, particularly Muslim ones, were accused of a lack of patriotism. Of not being really Dutch, or even worse — according to Geert Wilders of the extreme-right Party for Freedom, most Dutch Muslims were out to transform the kingdom into a caliphate.
Fanned by the news media and on social media, emotions are increasingly exhibited in public. Those who display nothing, who refuse to take part in this emotional exhibitionism, are suspected of being psychologically defective.
But is it really logical for the Dutch person to feel more for his 193 dead countrymen than, say, for the four Belgians and four Germans who were also on that flight? For a Dutchman, do 200 dead strangers call for greater dismay than 200 dead Iraqi or Afghan strangers killed in a bombing? To reply in the affirmative would be to fly in the face of humanism. The Dutch people killed on the flight did not die because they were Dutch. As far as we know, pro-Russian separatists perpetrated a fatal blunder.
Like the World Cup, a tragedy like that of Flight 17 seems to be an instrument to promote collective identity, to pretend that Dutch sovereignty still exists, to feel something together, as a group. The sad thing about mourning is that it really is quite unshareable, that it involves an extremely individual emotion. People have the right not to show their emotions and not to share them, even when it comes to soccer and calamity.
From this, it follows that we also have the right to admit that we sometimes feel nothing at all. The whole world puts a claim on our feelings, from the lady next door to our family members and the panhandler on the street, from the news about Gaza and on to Ukraine, from Congo to Syria. Our emotions are constantly being claimed.
That these claims have a numbing effect on us, that we are often indifferent, that we are busy enough as it is trying to provide emotional succor for those closest to us, and often don’t even succeed in doing that, seems to me not so much a sign of our inhumanity, but of our humanity. Were we to actually allow the world’s suffering to sink in, we would quickly become psychiatric cases, lulled by the power of psychotropic medications into a state of detachment.
Collective mourning contains within it an escape from loneliness, but a “we” always needs a “they” — who can quickly become the enemy, marked for annihilation. National mourning is a not entirely innocuous form of flirting with nationalism. Those who publicly advocate that obligation also refuse to acknowledge that people are sometimes simply unable to mourn. I recognize the tragedy, I realize that you are mourning, but I can’t mourn along with you, not right now; today’s just not my day. And conversely, when it’s my turn to mourn, I won’t force you to mourn along with me either.
Correction: July 22, 2014
Arnon Grunberg is the author of the novels The Jewish Messiah and Tirza. This essay was translated by Sam Garrett from the Dutch.