Jorwerd: The Death Of The Village In Late C20th Europe

Geert Mak

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Review

Once in a while one starts reading a book from idle curiosity which is out of place with one’s usual fare, and then gets hooked.  It can be very rewarding, as I found with Jorwerd, ‘the biography of a village during the silent revolution that swept through Europe between 1945 and 1995… and all the other villages in…the rest of Europe.’  In many ways it is a familiar tale.  A rural agricultural community, which has pottered on without significant change since time immemorial, encounters modernity: butcher, baker, blacksmith, haulier, cobbler, library etc disappear one by one.  New farming methods squeeze out traditional, labour-intensive husbandry.  A population of 650 in 1900 is down to 420 by 1950.  The bus service is discontinued in 1979 and in 1994 the church is bequeathed to an association for the preservation of old buildings.  By 1995 there are just 330 residents, many of whom have moved there from the city.  Only a handful of isolated stalwarts still have anything to do with farming, and their concerns have more in common with computer scientists and accountants than their forefathers.

An English reader is liable to think immediately of Ronald Blythe’s classic, Akenfield pbk £7.99, but Mak’s project is rather different.  He is not nostalgic.  Although he records a way of life that has disappeared in immense detail, his object is to show what has changed rather than to celebrate the way things were.

It might be asked why on earth anyone outside the Netherlands should wish to read a book about a Frisian village, but Mak’s initial claim that his book applies to villages everywhere is valid.  For while not every village has “tilting” as their local traditional sport (knocking a ball off part of a cartwheel ‘by means of the ingenious throwing of a stick’), most have their counterparts of such activities, just as each has their own traditional costume.  Quoting John Berger’s observation that the ‘conservatism of peasants is “a conservatism not of power but of meaning,” Mak explores the struggle to retain meaning in a life through radically changing circumstances.  And if meaning is no longer to be found in traditional forms then it will be sought elsewhere.  This remarkable book does not pretend to have answers, but it presents questions in their true complexity. - review by Johnny de Falbe