Murder in Amsterdam:  The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance

by Ian Buruma

New York:  The Penguin Press, 2006.  Pp. 278

Reviewed by Dr. Susan K. Hedahl

            While Americans face off on their own issues related to immigration, Buruma's book offers a well-documented and complex look at a case study in Holland.  In November, 2004, a

young man, son of Moroccan immigrants, murdered the filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh.  Buruma's work looks at the history of Holland, the primary characters in the drama and the role of the press and racism as people responded to the murder. The picture is intricate and often profoundly ugly.

            Van Gogh was, by any accounts, a provocateur on the national landscape. He used the media, including his own films, to challenge " everything from the alleged exploitation of the Holocaust by Jewish celebrities to the dangerous presences of a Muslim "fifth column" operating in Dutch society." ( 2) Buruma does a re-read of the famous Dutch intellectual, Johan Huizinga's essay, written in 1934.  What was it about the Dutch mentality that had created such changes in the culture, producing people like Van Gogh?  Huizinga concluded that, despite Holland's problems, it also was obsessed with being "satisfait, and it is our duty to remain so." (11).   This bourgeois sense of stability carried over into the twenty-first century in such a way that Buruma notes Van Gogh and those like him have (mistakenly) found themselves content with  "the finest, freest, most progressive, most decent, most perfectly evolved play ground of multicultural utopianism." ( 11)

            Buruma seeks to describe the factors in Van Gogh's life and in the Dutch culture to explain the tremendous problems with discrimination against immigrants played off against individual and Dutch national interests.  One strand in the national debate has to do with Dutch guilt over its inability to protect the Jews during World War II.  Van Gogh used his personal, public actions and film making to challenge Jewish elements of Dutch culture as well.  Buruma notes Von Gogh's challenges produced some negative results:  "The nation of Ann Frank had not come to terms with its recent and most dramatic past...It was doubly unfortunate, for using the Occupation [of the Nazis] as a polemical tool was a distortion that not only diminished the importance of historical guilt, but also of the bravery of those who did risk their lives to help strangers. (83-84).

            Another area in which Van Gogh worked was that of Islam and women.  He collaborated with Ayann Hirsi Ali in a film called Submission. The film's contents were short-circuited or dismissed in some quarters; in others, claims Burma, it also deepened the rift between immigrants who were too uneducated to their new surroundings and those "immigrants who have the education, intelligence, the social connections, and the ambition, to do well as individuals and assimilate...." (181)

            Burma has done a masterful job in using Theo Van Gogh's life and murder and the Dutch cultural milieu, to highlight the major turbulence going on in Holland and the rest of Europe in relationship to the issue of immigration. Buruma describes the plight of Holland and all of Europe by noting that "immigration in the twentieth century is also a story of horror, opportunism, postcolonial obligations, and an odd combination of charity and indifference." (19) The recent trip of the Pope to Turkey was a blighted one, given his earlier remarks on the relationship between Christianity and Islam. This is one such reminder of what Buruma has described. This book is excellent. It is balanced and perceptive in terms of looking at the people, political parties, symbols, histories and cultures that are continually impacting our lives together in the global community.