Review of Welvaart in zwart-wit

I wish I had read this book when I had begun my own research into the Dutch 1960s some ten years ago. With its broad overview of developments in the Netherlands in the first decades after the Second World War, I found reading the book, a decade later, an invaluable learning experience, contributing to the broadening of my own vistas in Dutch postwar history. There were many details I enjoyed reading about of which I knew little or nothing, such as the apparently ambivalent relationship the Dutch had to the automobile in the 1950s (especially in contrast to American views of the automobile), or the structure of Dutch emigration policy in the 1950s, or the high international standing of Dutch astronomers. Such details stimulated my reading Welvaart in zwart-wit. In more structured terms, the book Welvaart in zwart-wit widens the scope of the historiography on the postwar Netherlands. It attempts to place social, economic, political and cultural events in an international context more than many histories of the period have hitherto done. In this respect, it more closely resembles general postwar histories of Western Europe, with their emphases on socio-economic and political reconstruction, often with a particular eye to Americanization. Thus it signals a noticeable departure from the way most 'national' histories of the postwar Netherlands have been written, with their traditional emphasis on religion and ideology, on party or (from the 1960s on) grassroots politics, and on popular and youth cultures. These traditional foci are relatively deemphasized in Welvaart in zwart-wit. Instead, the authors stress what we might call here 'high' politics — the politics of functionaries who made beleid— and of 'high' culture, whether in the sciences, letters, or especially the arts. Some historians may understandably lament the lack of attention to every day life and to the beliefs of ordinary Dutch people, but the book does serve to draw attention to important terrain long neglected by most historians. This is particularly true of 'Deel B. De reconstructie van Nederland', where the authors provide readers with a highly stimulating history of planning in the Netherlands. Finally, the authors have succeeded in inverting the way that historians have typically viewed the 1950s and 1960s. Historians, including myself, have often seen important continuities between what occurred in the 1950s and what happened in the 1960s, but the focus has usually been on the 1960s, with the 1950s serving as a kind of prelude to the Main Event. In this book, it is the 1950s that are at the forefront, with the 1960s as a kind of incremental extension of earlier developments. One might be tempted to a say, as I shall suggest in a minute, that the 1960s almost seem like a postlude in this book. In any event, the authors' downplaying of the 1960s, made possible by focusing on socio-economic than on (small-'c') cultural developments, justifiably raises the question of whether historians have had an undue fixation on the magical Sixties. In