AMSTERDAM.

On the eve of the First World War Amsterdam was an extraordinarily full city. The population had roughly doubled since the mid-nineteenth century, to some 700,000, and continued to grow. Some new neighborhoods had been built during the 1870s, most notably the working class neighborhood De Pijp to the south of the city. Likewise, a number of wealthy commuter villages such as Bloemendaal and Hilversum had developed. These expansions, however, were not nearly enough to house the increasing population. Although Amsterdam's population growth slowed markedly during the twentieth century, the city was more than three times as large, geographically, in 2004 as it had been in 1914.

The first decades of the twentieth century saw new developments that, unlike the new neighborhoods of the late nineteenth century, were carefully managed by local governments. The first and largest new expansion, Plan Zuid, designed by the architect Henrick Petrus Berlage (1856–1934), was approved in 1917. It was one of the first such large-scale expansion plans in The Netherlands and had a great influence on similar projects in other cities. The plan also offered an opportunity to modernist architects such as Berlage and to the newly developed Amsterdam school of architecture. Compared to the rather stern modernism of Berlage's architecture, the Amsterdam School stands out for its curvy, Jugendstil-inspired style, which still dominates much of the southern half of the city. During the interwar years, the first garden cities were built. Farther away from the city center, these oases would offer the working classes a healthy living environment, with ample fresh air and green surroundings. To the north of the city, across the Het IJ waterway, neighborhoods arose with alluring names such as "garden village" and, to modern tastes at least, less appealing ones such as "concrete village."

Quantitatively, however, the greatest urban expansion took place after World War II. During the 1950s and 1960s, new residential areas were erected on all sides of the city, more than doubling the built surface. In the early 1970s, the Bijlmermeer district was constructed in the southeast of the city. The Bijlmer was seen by many at the time as the answer to the housing problems of the modern city, but the high-rise apartment blocks soon became notorious for housing criminals and drug addicts. Moreover, Amsterdam began to expand beyond its formal borders, as people moved to Amstelveen and other neighboring towns and commuted to Amsterdam. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new city, Almere, was built in the newly acquired land of the Flevopolder, housing much of the population spillover from the city. Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, Amsterdam continued to face a serious housing shortage, often leading to serious social tensions.

IMMIGRATION

Amsterdam was always an immigrant city, and it experienced a number of smaller and larger waves of immigration during the twentieth century. During the 1930s, numerous Jewish refugees from Germany came to Amsterdam, among them, in 1934, five-year-old Anne Frank. The quick and successful integration of the Frank family into Amsterdam's economy and society was not, however, entirely typical. Relations between the local Jewish community and newcomers were often tense, as were relations between newcomers and non-Jews. There has been continuing debate about the prospects of survival for the Netherland's roughly twenty-two thousand foreign Jews, the majority of whom lived in Amsterdam, during World War II. Foreign-born Jews were among the first to be deported and very few of them returned to Amsterdam after the war.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Moroccans and Turks moved to Amsterdam in considerable numbers, finding housing in often decrepit nineteenth-century housing blocks. Although initially immigrants consisted mainly of young men, family reunification eventually led to the establishment of sizable Turkish and Moroccan communities in Amsterdam. Relations between these immigrants, and their children and grandchildren, and the ethnically Dutch inhabitants of the city never were ideal and reached an absolute low in November 2004 when the film director Theo van Gogh, after releasing a controversial anti-Islamic film, was murdered by a fundamentalist Muslim of Moroccan descent.

After the independence of Surinam in 1975, numerous Surinamese came to Amsterdam. Because their arrival coincided with the building of the Bijlmermeer, where relatively cheap housing was available in considerable quantities, the newly built neighborhood came to house the large Surinamese community.

While newcomers moved to the city, many among the native population were moving out. The ethnically Dutch moved out of the city, to Almere, Purmerend, Amstelveen, and other commuter cities. The places they left open in the city were filled partly by foreign immigrants and partly by the highly educated and affluent Dutch, many of them without children.

ECONOMY

The economic backbone of Amsterdam, and arguably its raison d'être, has long been its harbor. During the twentieth century, however, the relative importance of the Amsterdam harbor to the Dutch and European economies declined. The rise of Rotterdam, since the 1870s, as the region's most important harbor, gradually reduced the port of Amsterdam to a junior status. The port of Amsterdam declined but did not disappear altogether. Certain products, such as tobacco, cocoa, and timber, long continued to be landed in Amsterdam in considerable quantities.

Another important economic function of Amsterdam stemmed from its position as the nation's financial center. The Amsterdam stock exchange, built on the Rokin by Berlage in 1903, served as the main stock exchange in the Netherlands, and it attracted considerable financial and banking activity. It nevertheless employed but a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people who lived in Amsterdam. During the first decades of the twentieth century, the city's considerable industrial activity employed the bulk of the population, but it was never a center of industry on the order of cities such as Enschede (textiles), Eindhoven (electronics), and Rotterdam. Still, metallurgy and textile manufacturing were prominent, offering employment to many of Amsterdam's residents.

The production of pharmaceutical drugs, cigars, and beer were typical industries for the city, but they did not retain their links to the city after the Second World War. The influx of Jewish textile workers, refugees from Nazi Germany, helped in the expansion of the textile industry, an expansion abruptly ended by the German invasion of May 1940. Another predominantly Jewish, Amsterdam-based industry also deserves notice. The diamond processing industry formed a reasonably large part of the prewar labor market, and was notable as the first unionized industry in the Netherlands. Socialist politics in prewar Amsterdam, and in the Netherlands generally, owed a considerable debt to the diamond workers.

One industry that remained centered in Amsterdam throughout the twentieth century was printing and publishing. Most of the main newspapers were based in Amsterdam, and the many newspaper mergers during the twentieth century further strengthened the dominance of the city within the Netherlands. Publishing houses, like Dutch cultural life in general, remained very much an Amsterdam affair. This is also indicative of the position of Amsterdam within the Netherlands. The city was not a major industrial center and no longer the nation's main harbor or its seat of government. Among the "softer" industries, and especially as the center of opinion-making and culture, its position remained dominant throughout the modern period.

From the 1960s onward, Amsterdam attracted large numbers of tourists. The city's liberal attitudes toward prostitution and illegal drugs were attractive to some, alluring the young and pleasure seekers from around Europe and the United States to the famous Red Light District and cannabis coffeehouses. Less visibly, the city also became an important attraction for older, more culturally inclined tourists. The relatively intact city center, the Rijksmuseum National Gallery with its unsurpassed collection of Dutch masters, and the Van Gogh museum were among the main attractions for the millions of tourists who visited the city annually during the second half of the twentieth century. This development contributed to the formation of a strongly service-oriented economy.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Compared to the other major Dutch city, Rotterdam, Amsterdam had a relatively easy start to the German occupation. The Luftwaffe bombarded Rotterdam, destroying much of the city and leaving more than two thousand dead. Amsterdam was hit, on 11 May 1940, leaving fifty-one people dead, but the devastation was not comparable to that experienced by Rotterdam. The fear that Amsterdam would be bombed in the manner of Rotterdam was one reason why the Dutch government capitulated. The city fell into German hands largely unscathed, and troops marched into Amsterdam unhindered and without meeting any significant resistance from the populace.

The fate of Amsterdam was to be far worse than some might have anticipated during those first weeks. Home, as it was, to the bulk of the Jewish population of the Netherlands, Amsterdam became the main theater of isolation, discrimination, and ultimately deportation of tens of thousands of people. This process was partly organized by the "Jewish council," led by eminent members of the Jewish community Abraham Asscher and David Cohen. The Jewish council proved to be a highly effective organ for organizing the genocide that followed. Careful to avoid an intensification of German aggression, the council supported cooperation and collaborated both with policies of isolation and, to some degree, administered the deportation. In the process of isolating and deporting the Jewish citizens of Amsterdam, the Germans could also count on a remarkably loyal civil service and especially a highly cooperative local police force.

That is not to say, however, that there was no resistance whatsoever. On 25 and 26 September 1941 members of the clandestine Communist Party instigated a general strike against the discrimination against Jews. The strike, and the demonstrations that came with it, made a great impression on the people of Amsterdam and the Netherlands and continues to be commemorated annually. Nevertheless, the strike was unsuccessful, and on 26 September German troops violently put an end to it. The importance of the strike for the Jewish population of Amsterdam was that it awakened, in some, a sense of duty to help. Children were smuggled out of the city and hidden. A minority of the Jewish community went into hiding with the aid of non-Jewish citizens. Still, the number of Jewish Amsterdamers who survived in hiding were far outnumbered by those who saw no other option but to report for deportation when so required. On 29 September 1943 the last razzia, or roundup, occurred, and the Jewish council was disbanded. Apart from those who remained in hiding, and a small minority who had escaped persecution through marriages, the eighty-thousand-strong Jewish population was gone. Only a handful returned after liberation.

As the occupation progressed, deprivation increased. Shortages of textiles, fuel, and shoes gradually developed from a nuisance into a severe problem. Economic hardship reached its peak in the winter of 1944–1945, when the combination of a train strike, German aggression, and the freezing of canals disabled the supplies of food to Amsterdam and other large cities. As food stocks ran dangerously low, a serious crisis ensued. Long lines of people took to the countryside to buy or barter food from farmers. Black market prices soared. Those who were socially and economically weak, notably the elderly who lacked the support of family or friends, fell victim to starvation. An eruption of infectious disease took even more lives. To avoid freezing, people ravaged their home interiors for firewood, as well as (perhaps primarily) the interiors of others. By the time of liberation, the "hunger winter," as it was known, had led to thousands of deaths in Amsterdam alone.

ART

Amsterdam had long been the center of art and culture in the Netherlands, and the twentieth century brought an intensification of this dominance. During the interwar years, Amsterdam boasted a lively cultural life, including painters of repute. The Concertgebouw was widely recognized as one of Europe's finer concert halls and housed an excellent orchestra. Still, Amsterdam's international appeal was limited. Although the once common view, that the Netherlands were particularly backward in things artistic during the interwar years, has been refuted, it is clear that the city could not compete with Paris, London, or Vienna as a cultural center. The relative importance of Amsterdam in the international cultural scene did increase markedly after the Second World War.

Special mention should be made of the Stedelijk Museum, or city museum. Founded in the late nineteenth century, the Stedelijk became a center of avant-garde art during the tenure of Willem Sandberg as director (1945–1962). Sandberg modeled the museum on New York's Museum of Modern Art and introduced a number of modern artists to the Dutch public, often to both their disgust and that of the press. The 1949 exhibition of members of the CoBrA group was groundbreaking, as were exhibitions of work by the artists of the movement called De Stijl (Dutch for "the style"), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Joan Miró (1893–1983). Not only did Sandberg change a somewhat provincial local museum into an important center of modern art and develop a magnificent collection, he also did much to make modern, and especially abstract, art respectable (or even palpable) to Dutch audiences.

More generally, the 1950s and 1960s were an era of great cultural and artistic upheaval. Modern jazz found an audience among the bohemians, intellectuals, and artists of Amsterdam. Musicians moved to the city, not least because of the prevailing liberal atmosphere. In 1968 Paradiso, the city's main venue for pop and rock music, was established in a former church and proved able to attract many international stars. In 1973 the Bimhuis, a venue for jazz and improvised music, was opened, with a likewise international outlook. In combination with the Concertgebouworkest, Amsterdam became host to an exceptionally wide range of musical styles and genres.

REVOLUTION?

Amsterdam was never a politically quiet city. Before World War II, the city experienced considerable political upheaval especially during the years of economic hardship of World War I and the crisis years of the 1930s. Compared to the Netherlands at large, Amsterdam was (and remained) a city of left-wing sympathies. During World War I and the 1930s, when economic hardship struck the working classes, the city was rocked by rioting. Although communist and other revolutionary political movements were involved in agitating among the impoverished unemployed during these troubled times, much of the rioting of 1917 and 1934, when the biggest eruptions took place, had a more or less spontaneous character.

True revolutionary zeal developed after liberation from the Germans, albeit without ever posing a truly serious threat to the official, democratic political order. In the 1946 elections, the Communist Party gained so many seats that it wasable to forma coalition with the Social Democrats, but in the longer run its following was too small to constitute much of a threat. In 1956, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Communist Party office was besieged by an angry mob. Although it remained a radical voice in the city until the late 1980s, communism was not a particularly potent political force in postwar Amsterdam.

Nevertheless, Amsterdam did experience a considerable amount of militant left-wing activity in the years following liberation. The nation's capital city became the focal point of politically inspired unrest. During the early 1960s, a loose federation of young, highly heterodox activists began to rebel against the status quo. Cigarette smoking, which had only recently been found to cause cancer, became something to rebel against, along with the atomic bomb, NATO, and many other things. The demonstrations and other activities carried out by militants briefly united under the name Provo—an anarchist youth movement and also the name of an anarchist magazine (1965–1967)—elicited considerable police violence but were not initially seen as particularly threatening. This changed on 10 March 1966 when a smoke-bomb was thrown into the wedding parade of crown-princess Beatrix and her German husband, Claus von Amsberg, and shocked the nation.

The significance of Provo in the history of Amsterdam and the Netherlands stems to a large extent from demographic circumstances. The movement itself did not survive the mid-1960s, but it did inspire the baby boom generation that was then reaching adolescence. The sheer number of adolescents in the country, and their eagerness to come to Amsterdam, ensured that the counter-culture would be there to stay. The city seemed engulfed with activism against the Vietnam War, against local policies, and against the establishment in general. Students occupied the university, people slept in the street, and marijuana was consumed in ample quantities. Amsterdam was gripped by the 1960s counterculture. The city changed visibly, but the true confrontations with the authorities were yet to come.

The hard clashes between activists and the authorities, interestingly, did not normally concern issues such as NATO or South African apartheid or other vexing issues, but city policies. The main trend in urban planning had been toward the spatial separation of urban functions, large-scale projects, and a more practical urban infrastructure. The Bijlmer, the Metro, the new city hall, and the opera theater rallied the cities' radicals to violent resistance. The postwar view of urban development, inspired by the likes of the Swiss-born architect and artist Le Corbusier, met little enthusiasm among the extreme Left in Amsterdam. Attempts to move people out of the overcrowded, badly maintained, and ill-planned old neighborhoods and into garden cities farther away seemed socially sound, but many people begged to differ.

The radical Left in the city opted rather for the "compact city" in which various urban functions (working, living, shopping) were to take place in the same space, and large projects and demolition were taboo. From 1970 onward, this movement was strengthened by an energetic and very vocal movement of squatters. Squatting in empty houses and other buildings was, under certain conditions, not illegal. Moreover, at first the squatters could count on considerable public sympathy. The image of the homeless squatter pitted against the heartless landlord was a heroic one, but squatters rapidly lost public sympathy due to the often violent confrontations with the police. The low point in this period was the coronation of Queen Beatrix on 30 April 1980, when she was once more confronted with an unruly city; squatters and the police spent the afternoon in seemingly endless and violent battle. During the later 1980s and 1990s squatting declined, although it never totally disappeared. Along with it, large-scale rioting against urban planners has been marginalized. This is at least partially the result of changed views on what Amsterdam should become. Many of the views of the radical Left on the use of the public space, most notably that of the compact city, have become incorporated into mainstream policies.

See alsoFrank, Anne; Netherlands; 1968; World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mak, Geert. Amsterdam: Brief Life of the City. Translated by Philipp Blom. Cambridge, Mass., 2000.

Moore, Bob. Victims and Survivors: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands, 1940–1945. New York, 1997.

Roegholt, Richter. Amsterdam na 1900. Amsterdam, 1993.

Ralf Futselaar