Abram de Swaan: ‘Amsterdam is a metropolis’
Since 2007, when he turned 65, Abram de Swaan has been an emeritus university professor in social sciences at the University of Amsterdam. “Emeritus means you are retired, retired. You don’t want that title at all. But university professor is very honorable.”
Do those titles mean anything else?
“Titles and awards are especially important if you don’t have them. When you have them, you think: oh well. We want to be an egalitarian society, but with those titles we are perpetuating an outdated system. That’s abrasive. It is almost impossible to write me a letter. Dear Abram, you can. Or how I was once addressed by a student: hey, can I call you a professor? Most learned lord: that has arisen has become.”
Sitting at one in De Ysbreeker, he points to the left. Ruyschstraat 1, on the corner with Weesperzijde, where the parental home was. De Swaan included a quote from the surrealist painter Melle Oldeboerrigter, who worked under the name Melle. “In 1928 he said: the Jews are crossing the Amstel. A nod to the Bible. For the first time, from the Weesperstraat, the Jodenbuurt, eventually to the other side, to the Beethovenstraat and the Rivierenbuurt.”
“The Weesperzijde was the first bourgeois street after the Jewish quarter. For the people who could leave the ghetto behind. Behind this, in the Weesperstraat, everything was demolished in my youth. During the Hunger Winter, the abandoned houses of Jews had been emptied to be demolished so that it could be fired up. Wibautstraat was also open. I played there and didn’t think about why it was like that.”
Abram de Swaan was born in 1942. “I was eight months old when I went to stay in Beverwijk. Alone, yes. My parents are inferior to something else. Let’s skip this chapter or I’ll have to explain and I don’t feel like it.”
After the war, the whole family returned. “My sister was born a year later. I thought that was unnecessary. Wasn’t I already there? To compensate, I got a new scooter, with hard tires, which hardly anyone had at the time. A reasonable offer, but maybe I should have negotiated better.”
“My father kept calling himself even when he had a large company, in new and used burlap sacks. He had grown up very devoutly and wanted absolutely nothing to do with that religion.”
Is Amsterdam a Jewish City?
“It used to be, but not anymore. If you look at the minorities, it has become a city with a lot of black and Muslim people – and some Jews.”
Now he points the other way, to the Namenmonument in the Weesperstraat. “There are the names of all the people who were called Jews by the Nazis. Before the war, there was nothing for Jews here to become the United States, there were also strong anti-religious currents. Those 102,000 names include enough people who don’t feel Jewish at all.”
“My mother was the daughter of a provincial freethinker from Coevorden, she also had nothing to do with the faith of Zionism. Freethinker, I think that’s a nice term. The division was like this: my father could get excited about it and opposed Judaism, mother had nothing to do with it.”
One problem arose at the Montessori Lyceum. “After the holidays, I spent the first few days happily talking about what I had experienced. Until someone started talking. That was the teacher. In plain words: I was an annoying kind of shit. My primary school was also Montessori, I had a problem of authority.”
“Fortunately, the Montessori Lyceum had room for separate students. It was a bad time. My father passed away in the third grade. Then I started working hard and became very good at school. I want it to be easy for me, if I do my best.”
Why did you want to become a scientist?
“I couldn’t do anything else.”
Not everyone can do it.
“This was what I could do.”
Why did you choose the UvA?
“The VU was not very obvious, it was a Reformed stronghold. Moving to Leiden, I had no affinity with that either. I wanted to study political science, which was only just beginning. And I knew people who taught there. Lucas van der Land, the political scientist, was a friend of my father.”
“Economics, law, sociology, political science and history: it was five courses for the price of one. Later I also did the psychoanalysis course. Those studies were two extremes, sociology was in the middle. I later became a professor of sociology, but never studied that subject. Don’t tell anyone.”
Has the UvA changed?
“Very. It was the municipal university, in there you had the senate, the professors, almost all men. Being a professor was an honorable position. They were very confident in their own weight. That patriarchal exercise of power has been broken, women are now everywhere in the organization.”
“Furthermore, the UvA has expanded enormously, university districts have been built all over the city. At first it was a college, but very dignified. Now Amsterdam has really become a university city. The amazing thing is that the population is not an explosion or explosion. At that time, 700,000 people already lived here. The size of the city has grown, and entire neighborhoods have been built. Only now there are fewer people in a house.”
How is the UvA known in the world?
“You have those university rankings, I don’t know about them. Of the thousand universities in the state of Amsterdam, this is among the top fifty. So it must be a good university. But is that ranking really something? I suspect that they think: the Netherlands is a rich country, it must be good there.”
How does the UvA use the VU?
“I’ve never had anything to do with the VU, those separate worlds. I have seen that they opened the doors to Muslims much earlier. The parents of those students had taken the faith there seriously. That at the VU people did not go to lectures in a miniskirt with a joint in hand.”
“They really put in a lot of effort to get those students in. That did not work out well at the UvA. The emancipation of women does, and I now also see students with headscarves in the lecture halls, but there are still far too few black students. The connection with Amsterdam-Zuidoost never materialized.”
You were visiting professor in New York, Paris and Budapest. How does Amsterdam relate to those cities?
Like Budapest, it is a metropolis. Much smaller than a city with five out of ten million inhabitants. However, cosmopolitan, open to the world. Just like in Paris, our city center has become uninhabitable due to mass tourism.”
“I grant all those people their trips, but it commercializes and vulgarizes a city. What happens in the Red Light District: that is not possible. A kind of artis of half-naked women who are stared at by crowds, they stand there in a bikini. It’s degrading, that’s the right word. You should be shyly walking past there at night, not thousands at a time.”
Was retirement a big change?
“No. When the time came, I was also often scribbling something. I continued to write, only I gave much less lectures. For writing, 65 is a young age to retire, you are certainly able to continue working until you are 75.”
“I then propose a tandem system, in which an older teacher takes over part of the education from a younger one. When you are in your thirties and forties at the university, you have to make sure that you publish, that’s how you get higher. Education does not contribute to that. In the time that was released, the development could write.”
Many colleagues have died. How is that?
“Sad. I always hung out with older friends. They’re all dead now. It is an essential part of aging.”
The city of… Abram de Swaan
Real Amsterdam
“Long evening walks through the city center.”
accent
“I think it’s just ABN. Just say: slightly poked.”
Partner
“She was not born, but raised in Amsterdam.”
Rent from sale
“Buy. I had enough money for that at the time.”
Import
“Some were already Amsterdam before they came to live here. It is a mentality that not all Amsterdammers have, but certain people from outside do: live and let live.”
resume
Abram de Swaan (Amsterdam, 1942) became professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam in 1973. In 1977 he became a professor and in 1997 a university professor. He was co-founder and co-director of the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research.
Series
Amsterdammers like to complain about the rapidly changing city, but still want to continue living here. How does that work, writer Robert Vuijsje wonders in a general interview series with well-known and lesser-known Amsterdammers. This is episode 22. Read all episodes here.