In Europe (91 page)

‘In winter 1939 I drove around the United States for a few months, on my own. I had received a scholarship from the American University, and I wanted to see Roosevelt's New Deal for myself. That trip had an enormous effect on the rest of my life. I came from a continent where most people seemed paralysed by Hitler and the Depression, like rabbits caught in the poacher's lights. And then suddenly you find yourself in America, where people dared to do things, where they said: “Let's give it a try anyway, who knows, maybe it will work out.” During my time there I saw that politics could also be something grand. There couldn't have been a greater contrast with the Netherlands. And it drew me in, I developed a kind of determination; it awakened, as it were, the young American in me.

‘This is a letter from my father, from around that time. It was just after Roosevelt's famous speech in which, for the first time, he made clear where he stood: on the side of democracy and against National Socialism. My father wrote, to paraphrase a bit: “Max, it seems to me that the worst is behind us now. The worst, by that I don't mean war, but the capitulation of the entire world – through egoism or indecision – in the face of totalitarian madness. A war does not seem to be ruled out. But that the Caesars in Berlin and Rome will actually seize control of the world seems to me, after Roosevelt's message, more or less unthinkable.”

‘The first time I saw Kathleen was in winter 1940, on the train to Leeuwarden. The next day a few friends and I did the Elfmerentocht, a classic skating tour. We skated the way people did in those days, all holding onto a long stick, the weather was beautiful. Suddenly I saw that girl, the same one I'd seen on the train, skating alone. I was a little shy, but the American boy in me said to her, as we passed by: “Grab hold, if you like.” By the end of the day she and I were playing tag on skates on the lake close to Sneek, by the light of the full moon.

‘The rest of that winter I worked on my thesis, and in early May 1940 I took my final exams in Amsterdam. So, on the night of 9 May, 1940, I went to bed as a reasonably successful young Amsterdammer. When I woke up it was war, a few days later I was a semi-Aryan, a “
Mischling ersten Grades
”. Getting a job in my own professional field, Dutch and history, was out of the question. Could I really do that to her, let her marry the problematic case that I was? She wasn't even eighteen yet. That dilemma played a constant role in my growing love for her – although her parents continued to receive me very warmly in their home. In the letter in which I finally asked for her hand in marriage, written from the detention camp, you can still see that doubt. But you also see that young American, who simply dared and did.

‘My life was very much characterised by the urge to build things anew, after those terrible times. After 1945, we all learned to look ahead, we never did anything else. But I also know, when I on occasion look back on those years before the war, that something was lost for all time. And that certainly applies to Amsterdam. I remember when they arrested me: I was walking through lovely, snowy Amsterdam, the city can be so beautiful at times like that, and when I got to my house on the Amstel the police were waiting for me, my landlady was weeping, and a little later I found myself walking across the bare, icy parade grounds of Camp Amersfoort, with my head shaved. I was lucky that eventually they released me again, but during those three months I still lost twenty-five kilos.

‘Being in a place like that makes it clear that lawlessness is hell. Nowhere else have I ever felt so fully surrendered into God's hands. And yet, that is where the roots of my present agnosticism lie. I remember how one evening I had to drag a corpse from the mortuary, accompanied by a guard and a dog. While I was doing that, it suddenly occurred to me how ridiculous it was: a half-dead man dragging a dead man, with a German and a dog behind him. But the thought uppermost in my mind was whether, when I got back to the barracks, someone would have stolen my bread.

‘In some ways Camp Amersfoort also conferred on me an accolade. There is, after all, a profound difference between being ground to pieces because of one's race and being ground to pieces because of one's political convictions. And if I had not belonged to that latter group – in autumn 1940, by way of student protest, I had read aloud a couplet from
the Dutch national anthem in the university auditorium – then I don't know whether I would finally have dared to propose to Kathleen.

‘Those years working for my first boss were good ones. My dealings with Queen Wilhelmina were marked, of course, by a certain distance. Her sense of duty, her grandeur, temperament and loneliness all made her a person who touched you to the quick. She hated the royal birthday celebrations on 31 August; she would never allow anyone to congratulate her, she always shrunk from that. But on 31 August, 1947 she said to me without preamble: “Next year, on this day, I will step down.” When it finally came to that point, she dreaded the coronation ceremonies. She was very fatigued, and deeply disappointed by certain things.

‘On the day of her abdication, a special train rode from the Hague to Amsterdam-Amstel Station. I was in her Pullman car, and I saw little more than a tired, rather difficult old lady. On the way to the palace on the Dam we were in the coach behind hers, and when we got there that old lady climbed down from the train, and suddenly she was the queen again, Queen Wilhelmina, and she strode past the honour guard and she waved to the crowd. She was grand, truly grand. And even if she hadn't been born a queen, but the daughter of a washerwoman, Wilhelmina would have been a grand woman.

‘It was in summer 1947 that I first went back to Germany. It was a wasteland. Cologne, Kassel, all you saw was debris. Some of the cities were teetering on the verge of starvation. The children who came crawling out of the piles of rubble in the morning carrying their book bags, you couldn't hold them responsible for Amersfoort or Auschwitz, could you?

‘It was quite a shock to set foot on German soil again, but I travelled around the whole time knowing that this country must someday come back to life again, and deal with itself in peace. I also had the feeling that we, the Dutch, were also to blame, if only for the way we hadn't wanted to know. When the first roll-call was held in Amersfoort, I heard someone behind me in our group say: “Can this really be happening?” That was in 1942!

‘As a survivor, I felt guilty myself as well. The fact that you emerged alive from the camp and the occupation meant that you, too, had occasionally looked the other way when someone was in trouble. I have never been able to adopt the self-assured stance of the “pure angel” with regard
to an “evil” Germany. I have often thought about the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, and about Lot's wife who was allowed to flee and who, despite God's warning, stopped and looked back at the destruction and was turned into a pillar of salt. Of course we must never forget, but I had no desire to turn into a pillar of salt.

‘After Queen Wilhelmina stepped down, I became an assistant to Dr H. M. Hirschfeld, the man who supervised the introduction of the Marshall Plan to the Netherlands. He also advised the government on its relations with Germany. Holland was in a tough situation in that regard. As long as the German hinterland was still in ruins, it was impossible really to reconstruct our country. We all knew that. But how could we keep history from repeating itself, how could we keep the industry of the Ruhr from once again producing bombs to destroy Rotterdam? That was our dilemma.

‘Then, on 9 May, 1950, the Schuman Plan was launched. That date is now regarded, rightly, as the start of the process that ultimately led to today's European Union. For us, that plan, which was named after the French foreign minister, Robert Schuman, was truly a revolutionary breakthrough in the vicious circle we found ourselves in. It abruptly changed the whole context, it made the problem of Western European coal and steel production an issue that could and should be arranged together. Conflicting interests were suddenly transformed into a common interest that had to be dealt with jointly. Because, don't forget: in those days Germany could easily have become a plaything between East and West, any enduring subordination of Germany carried the risk of a new war. We had to safeguard that country for the West, at all costs.

‘I was invited to join the Dutch delegation which was negotiating for all this, and it was there that I first heard a speech by Jean Monnet, the chairman of the French delegation and the plan's intellectual father. That was in June 1950. I was deeply impressed. It was very clear that this meant so much more to him than simply the regulation of coal and steel production. It meant putting a lasting end to the conflicts that had twice plunged Europe into war, turning national issues into common European ones. As everyone knows, a compromise is not always the best solution. And now we were truly trying to achieve the best, for all Europe.

‘This way of working was ultimately to embrace the entire international community. That too was one of Monnet's premises, from the
very start. “The six European countries have not launched a great enterprise intended to tear down the walls between them, in order only to build even higher walls between themselves and the world around them,” he wrote in the early 1950s. “We are not connecting states, we are connecting people.”

‘His “Algiers memorandum” of 1943 showed that, even in the throes of the Second World War, he was toying with the first rough draft of the Schuman Plan for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). That community was meant, in any event, to include Germany, France, Italy and Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg). He wanted to make sure that Germany, France and the other European countries could never fall back into their old pre-war rivalries. But his ultimate goal went further than that: he was aiming for “an organisation of the world that will allow all resources to be exploited as well as possible and to be distributed as evenly as possible among persons, so as to create peace and happiness throughout the entire world.”

‘The contacts at those meetings were extremely personal, there were only six small delegations present at the negotiations. The atmosphere was also very different from the rock hard bilateral negotiations we'd been accustomed to, especially in those poverty stricken post-war years. It was a liberating experience for us as negotiators: we were engaged in creating completely new structures. Everyone saw that this was about much more than just a coal and steel community involving a handful of European countries. The discussions were open, it was about the goal itself and not about all kinds of hidden agendas; it generated a dynamism we hadn't seen before.

‘That wasn't easy for the Netherlands. In essence, we were not a continental country, we had always focused more on the sea and the west. When the enemy came, we relied on the water to make an island, at least of Holland. In 1940 we still had strips of land that could be flooded as lines of defence. Would the Netherlands now, for the first time in history, have to establish unequivocal ties with the European continent?

‘The first European communities were therefore the product of a generation which had experienced first-hand what international insecurity and instability could mean, and how important concepts like freedom, civil-isation and the rule of law could be. We knew what it meant: law as the
only barrier between us and chaos. I wrote to Kathleen that this was what, in a certain sense, I had been preparing myself for in all the years that had gone before, in Amersfoort, Germany and the Hague.

‘Jean Monnet was a unique individual. He was not a politician, nor was he a civil servant or a diplomat. He himself often said that all the positions he had occupied were ones that he had invented himself. But at the same time, even before the war, he had been one of France's most important strategic thinkers. And after the war, he was one of the most important in Europe. He reminded us again and again: once you start thinking that a peace treaty is something final, you're in trouble. Peace is a process that requires constant work. Otherwise everyone will do what comes naturally; the strong ones will exert force, the weak ones can only submit.

‘According to Monnet, the drama of European history, that endless series of ceasefires punctuated by wars, could only be circumvented by building something that transcended national borders.

‘In 1952 he became the first president of the ECSC, and I followed him there. That is how I became one of the first European officials. There were ten or twelve of us, and our offices were in the former headquarters of Luxembourg Railways. I was secretary to the High Authority of the community and had daily contact with almost all the members, as well as the top officials. In that position, I was also involved in the expansion of our little European regulatory organisation. That is how I met Winrich Behr. The first thing he said to me was: “I want you to know that I was a professional soldier throughout the war.” I said: “We're not here for the past, we're here for the future.” Later I heard that he was one of the last to be airlifted out of Stalingrad. At that time, in the detention camp at Gestel, we hoped that no German would make it out of Stalingrad alive. Now we were working together, and we remained friends all our lives.

‘It was hard work there in Luxembourg. Monnet was extremely inspirational, but hierarchy and official structures were not, let me put this mildly, his cup of tea. One time, after a hard-fought decision, I remember him coming into the office and saying: “The high authority has to meet again to reconsider things. Last night my driver said something we should think about. And he was right.”

‘In 1954, the French scuppered their own plan for a European Defence Community. That seemed like a major blow for the new European integration process. But Jean Monnet and men like the Belgian Paul Henri Spaak and the Dutch Johan Willem Beyen were soon making new plans. Those plans finally led to the establishment of the European Economic Community (EEC), the forerunner of the European Union, in Rome on 25 March, 1957.

‘One year before that I had resigned my job at the High Authority. I began working with and for Monnet on his action committee for a United States of Europe. That committee consisted of representatives of all the major trade unions and political parties – with the exception of the communists and the Gaullists – from the six member states.