Discord Consensus

some 180,000 people in all, were summarily ejected by the German military
command, followed by the wholesale looting and destruction of
the city. And of all this –​that is, of the heroic Allied defeat, of the terrible
toll on occupied Holland during that last winter, and especially of the
enduring Anglo-​Dutch solidarity in the fight against Nazi Germany –​
‘Arnhem was and is the symbol’, as Kamphuis concluded. 6
It is now twenty-​five years since Kamphuis gave his presentation,
and today we know a lot more than he could have presented. It is time,
therefore, to try to take his topic further, going beyond battlefield history
and focusing on the aftermath of this battle and its impact on the
people of Arnhem.
The wider perspective of this contribution is defined by the theme
of discord and consensus in modern, post-​war Dutch history –​a theme
with wide-​ranging socio-​cultural and political ramifications –​witness
phenomena such as Verzuiling (pillarisation), its counterpoint in the
polarisation of Dutch society in the 1970s, and the consensus-​oriented
ways of the poldermodel. 7
Here, the grand narrative which the Arnhem case presents runs as
follows. Before the war Arnhem was a provincial town of comfort and
leisure. Severely jolted by the German onslaught of May 1940, it had to
suffer four years of Nazi occupation, until the battle of September 1944,
followed by evacuation and the almost total destruction of the city.
When Liberation came in April 1945, there were only ruins in Arnhem;
it was a dead city with almost no people. But over the next quarter of a
century, the united efforts of rebuilding and renewal have ensured the
rebirth of Arnhem, rising Phoenix-​like from its ashes, as a new and modern
model garden city of the post-​war era. 8
Within this overall narrative, however, we encounter markedly different
visions. There is a considerable distance between, on the one hand,
the narrative of the destruction of Arnhem in the work of Van Iddekinge
and Kerkhoffs, both published in 1981, and on the other hand, the way in
which Van Meurs et al. in 2004 have portrayed the Second World War as
almost a blip in Arnhem’s twentieth-​century history. 9 For many people,
the battle and its aftermath have been a deeply shattering experience,
a catastrophe triggering a lifelong quest for answers as well as a strong
and living tradition of commemorations. For others, however, the war
and its consequences are something of the past: ruins and devastation
have been replaced by a beautiful new city, and in these modern times
what we need is to move forward rather than dwell on the past.
These different views may well reflect the very different experiences
of people from different generations. But for the historian looking
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DISCORD AND CONSENSUS IN THE LOW COUNTRIES, 1700–​2000