NOTES FROM THE WORKING CLASS: The Silence of the Dutch

I grew up in the city of Yonkers. Many people outside of the New York Metropolitan Area regard Yonkers as a funny sounding name, but I knew the city had been named by the Dutch. Jonkheer, which translates to young gentleman or young lord, was shortened to Jonker; the plural is Jonkers, thus, we have Yonkers. Once known as the city of gracious living, Yonkers provided safe harbor for many young gentlemen, first the Dutch and later the British.

I had not given much thought to my Yonkers-Dutch connection until I found myself in Amsterdam. I went there to see the work of the German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. The Stedelijk Museum and the Van Gogh Museum have collaborated to create one major exhibit for the work of Anselm Kiefer. “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” features over twenty paintings, numerous drawings, several sculptures, and three films.

Born a few months before the end of World War II, Kiefer’s early years were spent in Donaueschingen, a German town in the Black Forest that had been ravaged by bombings. All around him was the devastation of war but so were the trees. It’s no surprise that his work should manifest life’s mutable nature in stories told through the imagery of sticks, straw, axes, and trees. 

As a young art student, Anselm Kiefer was astonished that in Germany no one spoke of the Holocaust. It was as if World War II had not happened. To mention the war was not thought-provoking, nor was it thought to be a way to gain insight. Bringing up what had happened was a dangerous provocation and good reason to be shunned.

At the age of eighteen, Kiefer was profoundly influenced by Vincent Van Gogh. He traveled to the places where Van Gogh had worked in The Netherlands, Belgium and France. The drawings that Kiefer made during his journey were often inspired by Van Gogh and even today they influence his work.

The two artists are very different. Kiefer uses materials such as straw, lead and gold leaf, whereas Van Gogh favors oil paint, watercolor and gouache. Many of Kiefer’s paintings are enormous in scale and take up an entire wall. The scale of Van Gogh’s paintings are modest by comparison and are roughly the same size as those works created by other Dutch Masters.

At the Van Gogh Museum, the works of the two artists are juxtaposed, and often thematically related. Van Gogh painted a series of “Sunflower” paintings. The Van Gogh Museum’s “Two Cut Sunflowers” is placed near Kiefer’s “Sol Invictus,” a towering sunflower that is connected to the stars but moves its head against the sun. “Sunflowers are a symbol of our condition d'être,” said Kiefer.

Both artists create expressions that depict our reason for being, and share an affinity for telling stories about nature. Van Gogh is thought to use nature as a way to conjure emotion. Kiefer, on the other hand, uses nature as a witness to relive history, sometimes circumventing the past to immerse in the present, or to predict, somewhat fatalistically, what is yet to be.

The thorny issue of war, destruction and death is never far from Kiefer’s solo exhibition. The Stedelijk Museum celebrates Kiefer’s close relationship with The Netherlands. The Stedelijk acquired his painting Innenraum, which long ago bolstered his career. Kiefer’s 1981 painting Innenraum (Interior) is of the innermost chamber of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, where Adolf Hitler met with his staff to plan the destruction of Europe.

Kiefer wasn’t ostracized per se due to his propensity to ask questions about what had happened during World War II, but he wasn’t welcomed home to Germany as its Prodigal Son. And why should he apologize for asking the questions that still need to be addressed today?

In his masterful search for meaning, Anselm Kiefer’s work illuminates the darkness of our current times. Two days prior to the opening of Kiefer’s solo exhibition, he said, “We don’t know why things repeat all the time. We have a situation now like in 1933 in Germany, it’s horrible.”

There is also another voice that attests to the cultural memory that is ennobled by the Dutch. Author Anne Frank lived in hiding for two years with her sister and parents, and four other people, in the secret annex of a warehouse building. A moveable bookcase designed like a swing door kept them hidden from the Nazis.

The Frank family had left their home in Germany, wisely so, to seek refuge in Amsterdam. The German Jews were being routinely rounded up and sent away to be killed. Life in Amsterdam is at first a relief and a sanctuary. Once the Nazis invade The Netherlands, Anne Frank and her family are no longer safe.

Anne Frank describes the progression of requirements the Nazis demanded of the Jews in Amsterdam. It begins with children only being able to attend Jewish schools. Curfews are imposed to control the times of the day when Jews are allowed to be in public. Then the Jews are no longer allowed to ride public transportation. The restrictions culminate with Jews having to wear gold stars on their clothing. It is imminent that the knock on the door will come in the middle of the night and the family will be taken away.

Anne Frank’s House in Amsterdam is still famously there. If you climb the impossibly steep steps up the narrow hallway to the small rooms of the family’s confinement, you will find cramped quarters, a container that transcends time, keeping the family’s memory alive, and demanding silence among the visitors.

Artists bring meaning to our lives through their art, and give us the chance to join them in sharing a collective memory, even if that recollection is only for a brief time. Anselm Kiefer has given us the ephemeral nature of the trees close to his childhood home in the Black Forest. Anne Frank brought us her glimpse of the horse chestnut tree. She stood on tiptoe and peered to the outside world from her only window in the secret annex. “Anne Frank could see the sky, birds and a majestic chestnut tree. ‘As long as this exists,’ Anne wrote in her diary, ‘how can I be sad?’”

Anselm Kiefer asks, “What should we keep remembering?” I remember the Yonkers of my childhood, studying the history of the Lower Hudson Valley. The names of neighborhoods and streets have evolved from the Dutch. The Broadway that runs through Yonkers, the Bronx and Manhattan is from breede wegh, meaning broad road. Coney Island in Brooklyn is from Konijneneiland, meaning rabbit island, and Flushing, Queens is from Vlissingen. Then there is Harlem (Haarlem), Wall Street (Waal Straat), and the Bowery (Bouwerij).

In the Bronx, named for Jonas Bronck, my favorite Dutch name is Spuyten Duyvil. From Grand Central Station, the Metro-North Railroad wends around the tracks in a precarious turn to get to the Spuyten Duyvil station. Growing up, I knew kids who hopped onto trains for a ride and then jumped onto the tracks. It was dangerous but no one ever got killed. By that time Yonkers was no longer the city of gracious living; it had become a working-class town and everyone knew that Spuyten Duyvil didn’t mean the devil’s whirlpool. It really meant the devil spits in your eye. The days of young gentlemen were gone.

I was a child in Yonkers when I first learned of the Holocaust. The stepfather of my friends Annette and Arlene Frier was a Rabbi. I often played at their house and from them I learned about what had happened during Nazi Germany. That same year there was a big fire in Yonkers. Nine children and three adults attending a music class died in a fire that swept through the Jewish Community Center. The fire was caused by arson. My neighbors who lived behind my childhood home used to garden in the summer, wearing sleeveless shirts that showed numbers tattooed on their forearms. Everyone knew they had been incarcerated in Auschwitz.

While I was in grade school, I saw the documentary film Night and Fog made by Alain Resnais. Juxtaposing color and black-and-white footage, much of it filmed by the Nazis, Night and Fog drives home the horror of the Holocaust. Documentary filmmaker Alain Resnais intentionally included footage of a mountain of bodies being bulldozed into a mass burial pit. By showing young students Night and Fog, our teachers were trying to raise our consciousness, to teach us a lesson, but, given our collective memory as Americans, that lesson was never learned.

Kiefer’s never-ending exploration of what he calls the “morbid precision” of the Nazi killing machine is a gift to humanity. Anne Frank’s move to Amsterdam brought her two more years of life, enough time for her to write her story.

Between the childish prattle of a teenager who is experiencing hormonal pangs and her adolescent crushes, there is the starling maturity of a young girl whose words of wisdom about love, life, truth, beauty and the discovery of meaning, still astonish the world.

There is a clandestine sense of serenity that pervades the secret annex of the Anne Frank House, where a young girl once climbed the impossibly steep steps through narrow halls, up and down, down and up, day and night, silencing the sound of her own footsteps.

Among the Dutch, Anselm Kiefer and Anne Frank, there is a connection that is found in silence. On Sunday May 4, 2025, a two-minute period of silence brought the city of Amsterdam to a halt. The two-minute silence was meant to commemorate Liberation Day—The Netherlands’ liberation from the Nazis eighty years ago. The streetcars stopped running. The streets emptied. No cars, bicycles or people. Boats stayed moored on the canals. The trees across the road in Vondelpark appeared still. The sun seemed to hide behind the clouds. Life did not stir for two minutes. Two minutes is an eternity.

I found great meaning in this experience. The work of Anselm Kiefer and Anne will endure for as long as we have a civilization that is able to recognize the value of their art. I have learned more about what cannot be explained and why we still need to ask questions. In America, we have borrowed so much from the Dutch. Their footprints can be seen all over New York. If only we learned to respect those memories that should never be forgotten. If only we could embrace the silence of the Dutch.