NSB officer Tobie Goedewaagen and subsidies: the faulty founder of a good system

The Dutch system of art subsidies was set up in 1942 by NSB leader Tobie Goedewaagen, who also founded the Kultuurkamer. Typical of a fact that had been known for a long time, but which people preferred not to talk about. Benien van Berkel, an arts marketer with a past at Theatre Carré and the Holland Festival, obtained a doctorate in 2012 on research into the life of the cultural NSB Goedewaagen. On 24 April 2013, the book resulting from that research was presented: 'Tobie Goedewaagen, an incorrigible national socialist'. At the presentation in debate centre De Nieuwe Liefde, representatives of the cultural sector were invited but not present.

The presentation took the form of an interview with the writer by Ad van Liempt, editor-in-chief of the historical TV programme 'Andere Tijden'. In that interview, van Berkel explained in no uncertain terms why she had come up with this research: "It fascinates me how someone with the intellectual quality of Goedewaagen can simultaneously be a supporter of the most reprehensible ideology you can think of". The fact that he was both the inventor of the Kultuurkamer and that his ideas on art subsidies were adopted almost unchanged in post-war Holland makes the history even more fascinating.

Distance

Whether she had kept sufficient distance from her subject was a question that came up pregnant during the follow-up interview. After all, in her book, but also during the interview, Van Berkel had regularly attached positive qualifications to Goedewaagen: he was a passionate policy maker and was praised for his didactic qualities, including by the students of the night school where he tutored almost until his death in 1980. In addition, he was an extremely meticulous and truthful autobiographer, as Van Berkel said was evident from the autobiography Goedewaagen commissioned war historian Lou de Jong to write during his detention in the years after the war.

Van Berkel acknowledged that she had struggled at first with her position on her subject, but that in the end it was not difficult to take a moral stand. 'He was extremely racist and stuck to his views until his death. He had a blind spot for the babarism of the system he so admired.'

Arts grant

Remains: art subsidy. Is this now a Nazi ideology perpetuated by the 'left-wing church', as PVV ideologue Martin Bosma claims, or is it more nuanced? In the concluding section of her book, van Berkel briefly addresses this issue: 'From 1941 to 1944, the arts budget was increased fifteenfold to get politically "right" art off the ground while improving the socio-economic conditions of artists. This overturned Thorbecke's 'Art is no business of government': not only did the government moderate a strong judgment on art and drive it in a National Socialist direction, but it also generously supported the arts with subsidies. Although most did not subscribe to National Socialist ideology, actors and musicians accepted their greatly increased salaries and improved working conditions without protest, and the bulk of artists joined the Kultuurkamer, even if they knew that this meant exclusion and dismissal of their Jewish colleagues.'

This nuance of mythical artist resistance is grist to the mill of the current anti-subsidy lobby, and perhaps the reason why so few people from the art sector attended the book launch. Yet a further nuance is quickly made. Just as the German Autobahn is not wrong, or Volkswagen is unsustainable solely because they were conceived and set up by the Nazis, art subsidies and good facilities for artists are 'wrong'. It is only advisable to delve into how things come about, and how good ideas can come out of bad people and vice versa.

Revolution

Van Berkel, incidentally, debunks Goedewaagen's own argument that his subsidy system brought about a revolution and cultural flowering. Indeed, before the war, Dutch artists did not perform that badly at all, even if funding was extremely meagre. She mentions the broad classical and modern theatre tradition, composers like Escher and Pijper and visual artists like Rädeker, who were and are highly regarded nationally and internationally.

At the same time, it is to be feared that without that fifteen-fold increase in the art budget under Goedewaagen, the Netherlands would have remained at a disadvantage after the war compared to the countries around us, where government support for the arts had been commonplace for much longer: 'If the Goedewaagen money had not been available, the Roman-Red government formed in 1946 would have had to hold a fundamental discussion about the role of government in the arts. [...] Moreover, with an art life in which unity and persuasiveness were far from the case, it is doubtful that that discussion would ever have got off the ground. But the idea that a government has a formative and stimulating role in the promotion of culture in society has not been absent from any coalition agreement since.'

At over 400 pages, the book offers a surprising insight into the motivations of a thoroughly flawed Dutchman, who played a decisive role in our cultural history.