The puppets will dance, the turnips are cooked and the shit has hit the fan. The Amsterdam Museum is replacing 'Golden Age' with the neutral '17th century'. A typical example of oikophobic repopulation and politically correct language purification, or a useful adaptation to a changing zeitgeist? Time will tell, but explosive it is.
For me, it raises questions. That is an expensive way of saying that I seriously doubt the wisdom of this decision by the entire staff of the Amsterdam City Museum. Isn't the term 'Golden Age' precisely a wonderful occasion to tell the story of how the Dutch (for it was mainly the inhabitants of the province of Holland) amassed all that gold and prosperity? That one person's gold always means another person's suffering is a story that cannot be told enough.
Fair
That we told different stories about it until a few years ago is only more reason to come up with those honest stories. Then removing the very word with which the Netherlands put itself on the map for centuries is counterproductive. You suddenly need an extra step in the conversation: 'Do you know why we used to call this The Golden Age and now we don't?' That extra step actually invalidates the debate, because it assumes that - by no longer using the word - we have overcome our past. Which is clearly not the case. For that reason alone.
Imara Limon, as curator now partly responsible for the name change, thought otherwise in 2018 at least. In an opinion piece in the same Volkskrant as now announcing the end of Gold, she argues - it's about naming streets after sea heroes who have fallen off their pedestals - : 'The discussion about it, and the opportunity to use such a statue or street name to look at history and what parts we have collectively forgotten, is more valuable, as far as we are concerned, than the conclusion of whether to keep or remove something.'
I wonder, what has changed in those eighteen months since that article.
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