'In schools, you have to feed children literature like they feed geese in France.' With his witty remarks, Tommy Wieringa got the laughs as he lay on the sofa as the personification of the Netherlands with psychiatry professor Damiaan Denys. 'Holland on the sofa' was one of the first programmes of the Saturday night of the literary festival Winternachten in The Hague, and also one of the funniest.
As a psychiatrist, Denys saw through his patient Holland about his complaints, circumstances, ideas about the future, treatment wishes and self-insight. Tommy Wieringa, as patient Holland, clearly explained what is lacking, with sometimes abrasive, witty observations. 'I suffer from strong mood swings,' he sighed. 'The broad middle in which my life took place for the most part has disappeared. These days it's mostly highs and lows.' Whether the highs were as numerous as the lows, Denys wanted to know. 'Well, those highs I made up, they are actually mostly lows.'
Patient was particularly concerned about the "archaic regressive tendency": "Longing back to a time that does not exist, making promises about a time that is not coming, and building a castle on a fictional past. It is a phenomenon he also sees emerging strongly elsewhere. 'I have come to believe in perpetual progress, of ever more. The hysterical dissatisfaction with the little things that don't work, I would talk to you about that for a very long time. Because of unprecedented prosperity, we have become incapable of dealing with shortage. We are a bunch of discontented children," Wieringa sighed. And, he grumbled for a while longer, the importance of literature as a means of education, as a way of instilling empathy in people, is also no longer recognised. After which the image of the schoolchildren and the French geese made the audience burst into laughter.
Denys asked what the right treatment might be for his ailments. 'I'm afraid there's nothing left but scarcity, prolonged scarcity. That will teach me! Prolonged suffering. There is an enormous longing for Nero and Tiberius, for a fine despot, because this democratic process that has been going on for so long. We will want that again later, but first we will destroy everything that has been built up. An Iconoclasm like we haven't seen for a long time.'
Hot topics
'Holland on the sofa' was a good start to a scintillating Saturday night. It dealt with serious and thorny topics, such as the terror of the Islamic State, but there was also plenty of laughter. After the beautiful, personal stories by seven writers about their 'Hidden City'[hints]read, for instance, that of Salena Godden, here on Culture Press [/hints] Carolina Trujillo in 'Ideology as an Act of Fiction' also managed to mention a few cordial measures to make the world a little better. She showed a drawing of cartoon characters on the cross, rich people, Trujillo said. 'Being rich should be criminalised,' she explained briskly, 'because if someone is rich, this means someone else is poor.'
The danger of IS
Next came the most uncomfortable topic of the festival: IS. How exactly should we interpret Islamic State's theatrically depicted atrocities? How dangerous is IS really? And how can the world best deal with it? Not easy questions, and at the table were not the least writers to discuss them.
In the first session 'IS: The Horror Show', writer Hassan Blasim, who fled from Iraq, spoke with Arnon Grunberg and Ian Buruma. Hassnae Bouazza led the conversation lively and with witticisms. Grunberg said that for Europe, populist political parties are a bigger threat than IS. Nevertheless, IS is a dangerous and very violent organisation, and what is the best response to it, opinions differed. Ridiculing them, Grunberg said. Paying much attention to narrative and propaganda, Frank Westerman, author of A word a word, a book on terrorism. 'There is always a whole story preceding the accomplishment of a beheading. IS has a huge need to preach.'
'Don't react hysterically to attacks,' filmmaker Beri Shalmashi added, 'because that is exactly what terrorists want.' Her chilling opening clip - featured on Culture Press this week - made it clear that it is not IS that needs to keep repeating its name. The West has already done that for them.
Like-minded people
The lively conversations, interspersed with poetry, live drawing and music, brought an end to a varied, engaging (and well-attended) Saturday evening. The strength of the Winternachten Festival is that every year it manages to put its finger on social sore spots and also address difficult topics, but does so with a certain lightness.
Still, a question does linger after this weekend. Although there was an interesting exchange between writers, some literally said they did not know any Trump or Wilders supporters themselves. But isn't that precisely where the crux of the divisions in today's West lies? Actually, now that Trump is the new president of the United States and Geert Wilders is high in our own polls, it would have been better if the debate had included a representative of the right-wing vision. After all, real change does not come about just by talking to like-minded people.
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