Driven in the cause of political freedom - Geert Horringa

My father is dead in the “crisp” September air, as he liked to call it.

Because that’s how he was, with his capacity for enjoying life – to walk, to enjoy the air, and then to react to something in the physical environment with some wording of his own, making it possible for others to participate in the way he felt.

I remember our walks in the Ardennes (which Margje just mentioned): he stands still, says ”there are fly agarics here” (or some other kind of mushroom – that he would know the name of); he moves aside some leaves, and there the fly agarics would be.

Margje just used the words “sweet” and “impossible”, from the announcement of his death – which by the way stem from Gemmie and were immediately recognized by all of us as perfectly suited. So you have the contradiction between those two things, and the riddle – of his being those two things at the same time- which I’m sure no one ever found the key to.

I want to say something about that gentle side. A parent needs to have something in his nature, that at crucial points in your life helps you to see how to go on. He had it, and it came to the fore in decisive moments during that whole bizarre period of the disintegration of our life in The Hague: that he would remain in balance during the several crazy episodes, and took a firm stand against the worst irrationality of it. In that way he made it possible to feel that the entire world had not yet gone completely berserk.

There is also the other side, his impossibleness, the “absent father”; there were big oscillations in his and my contacts through the years, with several big collisions; I have realized at several instances during my life that I have been damaged by how he was. I have spoken out about it to him; something of it also, I think, came home; other things probably didn’t.

After such interruptions there were – as Dirkjan has also experienced so clearly – the “rediscoveries” of him, in several succeeding phases in our life after our youth. There also was something to discover.

I came to know him during the last nine years as the not great but intriguing thinker he was, with his books and papers on the Dutch economy (which, by the way, by now really shouldn’t exist any longer; so that didn’t turn out as bad as that).

He was intelligent, and he knew that that involved a certain degree of loneliness. And he would be accepting of that, and not harbour any bitterness. He had the same attitude in the last years of his life, under the increasing strains of old age. He simply remained warm and social, creative, and in a creative way resigned, and he didn’t force the terms of his accidental interests on life, when life started to work against those interests.

There are all kinds of things on this paper that I didn’t mention at all. The catch-phrase was “Driven in the cause of political freedom”. That would involve, among other things, the repression which in his view came with European social democracy. Or it would involve the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, or of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe after 1989. His involvement with these historical hairpin bends would always be warm and personal, he would actually “live” them, and in this also he carried over a sense of commitment to all of us.

Within this frame of reference I would like to announce, as a musical interlude, the song Asma Asmaton, “Song of Songs”, about the havoc wrought on people by political cruelty, to music by Mikis Theodorakis, the insurgent composer cherished so much by him and Boetje, of the period of the Junta of Greek Colonels in the seventies.