When I think of the Netherlands, windmills, tulips, and bicycles are the first things that come to mind. Although the Netherlands is much more than this, these things do play a role in Dutch culture. Each cliché has its own specific meaning in terms of the culture. “Bricks paved roads built on dangerously soft ground; tulips thrived in the silty reclaimed soil; cows grew fat on rich, moist grass; glasses of milk and beer were safe to drink when clean water was in short supply; people grew tall from drinking all the milk; and thick wooden clogs kept farmers’ feet dry when trudging through the boggy fields” (Coates 8). Dutch history has transformed these items into being primarily “Dutch” things. One specific thing that surprised me was …show more content…
In Why the Dutch are Different, the author visits a church that had been bombed during the war. He describes it as, “only the shell of the church remained, its hollow clock tower pointing accusingly at the sky from where the bombs had rained” (Coates 127). This reminded me of a similar scene from The Reader (although set place in Germany), in which a church was bombed killing all the innocent women inside, most of whom happened to be Jewish. I was shocked to discover that “a Jew in the Netherlands was less likely to survive the war than those almost anywhere else in Europe” (Coates 138). I definitely want to dive deeper into my research to figure out why this could be. One real life example of this was the Frank family, of whom only the father, Otto Frank, survived. “In Amsterdam, the young girl with the diary, Anne Frank, had moved with her family into a secret annexe hidden behind a bookcase in her father’s office building” (Coates 145). While in Amsterdam, I will be visiting this secret annexe, which is another reason I am interested in learning more about this topic. I have always imagined what this place would look like, and now I get the chance to see it in real life. This chapter specifically related to my previous reading of The Reader as well as my current research topic on Jewish history in the