The Art of Tolerance

In his book La Scoperta dell’Olanda, or ‘the discovery of Holland’, Jan Brokken turns his gaze to a remarkable chapter of Dutch cultural history, the story of Hotel Spaander in the village of Volendam. Around 1900, this hotel by the Markermeer became an unlikely meeting spot for painters, musicians, and writers from all over the world. They came for the Dutch skies, the landscape, and the chance to exchange ideas. More than a century later, the walls of the hotel still carry their traces; there are over a thousand paintings left by the artists who found inspiration there.

Brokken, who presents himself as a master of a genre he calls ‘literary non-fiction’, approached Hotel Spaander with in-depth research. He discovered the 1,400 names of artists who signed the guestbook. He describes in detail how Leendert and Aaltje Spaander, who ran the hotel from 1881 onwards, received their guests. Their tolerance, curiosity, and business-savviness fostered a space of creativity for artists. Progressive for the time, they welcomed women and men on equal terms. The American painter Elizabeth Nourse, accustomed to exclusion in Paris, marveled that in Volendam she could sit at the same table as her male colleagues.

In conversation with Melania Mazzucco at Festivaletteratura, Brokken places La Scoperta dell’Olanda within his broader career. Since the late 1960s, when he was part of “new journalism”, a participatory and active form of journalism, he has worked with the tools of a novelist to render factual stories with vivid narratives. Early works such as Zaza and the President, inspired by a woman who vanished during the revolution in Burkina Faso in 1983, already shows his fascination with the interplay between individual lives and political or cultural shifts. With La Scoperta dell’Olanda he continues this trajectory, set on telling the tale of “an incredible reality”.

The project was sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Brokken heard that Hotel Spaander might not survive its economic fallout. His concern about what would become of the art, led him to unearth and preserve this story. The result is not only a history of a hotel, but also a story of tolerance: a place where people looked beyond their own borders, open to outsiders and curious about others. As Brokken puts it “that tolerance has disappeared completely from the Netherlands, from Europe, from Italy. We need to reacquire it!”.