The Netherlands Open-Air Museum

 

A lovingly recreated 1970s Amsterdam cafe 

The Nederlands Openlucht Museum, near Arnhem, is huge operation. More than 150 reconstructed buildings, over an area of 44 hectares, in fact an area so big there is a regular tram service (with vintage trams) all around the site (staffed by very welcoming tram drivers, I should add). It is a whole-day visit, since it will take you several hours just to get round the site. A major bonus is that several of the buildings don’t just have volunteers to describe that house and activity, but several of the major buildings are fully operational, such as the butter factory, powered by a boiler driving a pulley system for all the various activities involved with making butter and cream, and the steam laundry.

Is it an unqualified success? Not quite. The scope of an open-air museum is incredibly broad. Sadly, one challenge of the open-air museum is because its very existence is the least of all evils. Open-air museums came into being to house the buildings that planners and authorities wanted to demolish. The resulting resiting of the building is often in a meaningless location, for example, a water pump where there is no natural need for water to be pumped. The most recent example for the Netherlands Museum is a residential block from Amsterdam that was for years inhabited by immigrant workers, largely Turkish. It was rebuilt here because Amsterdam didn’t want it at the original site. However, in recreating the buildings, it was difficult to recreate the original living conditions, which are in contradiction to the rather grand façade of the building. Only a handful of the rooms are open to the visitor; there is one room, with bunk beds for multiple workers, which is moving; but I can’t help feeling that some eye-witness and/or autobiographical accounts would be better still. Some things just can’t be recreated very well.

There is a guidebook, but this simply repeats the information on the captions for each building. This information is very light on regional patterns and variations, and indeed there does not seem to be any attempt to create a representative survey of all the regional building types. Nor, of course, are the buildings from one region placed near each other. But the Museum makes things more difficult still by trying to accommodate all views. Thus, they try to consider the users of the buildings, as well as the buildings. This means a 17th-century building used as a Chinese restaurant is recreated as the restaurant, not for its original use, and the result is quite confusing. Similarly, the first Italian ice cream parlour (from the 1960s) is loving recreated, even though it was situated in a fascinating 17th-century building. This takes the museum into anthropology and social history, and the result is something of a hotchpotch. The hotchpotch is summed up by a house devoted to Indonesians in the Netherlands, that doesn’t attempt to give any idea of Indonesian or Dutch colonial history, but instead includes a few items of nostalgic value for that community – popular LPs by Indonesian artists that were released or at least available in the Netherlands.

If you want to find out any more about the building history of the Netherlands, you will have problems finding anything in the bookshop. The Museum guide (available only in Dutch) tells you only what is already shown on the captions available at the site.

I could find nothing in the Museum shop that provided background information on the buildings, the social history of the Netherlands, the everyday life of the people. Such books (and websites and stories) no doubt exist, but the shop seems devoted to games and trivia.

Similarly a “Green Cross” building shows public health provision from around 50 years ago. The building is of little interest, but the recreated interiors and fascinating. You can smell the surgery-like atmosphere, and even see a man (discreetly arranged) having a bath in the bathhouse.

So, I loved the site. I loved the dedicated staff and volunteers, who were unfailingly helpful in answering questions in a foreign language. I can’t really complain if the incidental items overwhelm the bigger picture. Young people can get excited by the former and, hopefully, they can revisit the subjects in more detail later. I object to the story-book view of history, and the jumbling of periods between the original buildings and their later users. But I don’t doubt that the museum probably turned more people into historians than any number of textbooks.