Resistance after the War

ABSTRACT

In the turbulent summer of 1969, Dutch editors of the underground newspaper Aloha decided to establish a help and advice center for young people supposedly suppressed by “hostile” laws and authorities. The editors were inspired by the success of the Release center that opened in London in 1967, but argued the need for a Dutch Release with a different, local narrative that referred strongly to Second World War – informed discourses and experiences. This paper explains how, despite intense transnational exchanges and personal connections, Release Amsterdam became a broader-oriented and more radical Release branch that identified itself as a postwar “resistance” group.

KEYWORDS:

• Underground press
• youth advice centers
• Release
• cultural transfer
• transnational movements

Introduction

The goal is: to be sure that people know the law and their RIGHTS and know which social facilities are available. To prevent minority groups from becoming the victim of the current legal system. To help people with troubles. What is needed? People who want to invest some time, a phone number, a space that serves as an office, contacts with sociologists, psychologists, etc.; financial support.¹

Susan Janssens call for a Dutch Release in Aloha, July 25 1969

At the end of 1969, the “alternative” advice and help center Release in Amsterdam was established. Release Amsterdam was modeled after the London organization of the same name. Release London was, according to Arthur Marwick: “one of the great sixties successes which grew steadily throughout the seventies”.² Release, founded by underground community members Caroline Coon and Rufus Harris in July 1967, provided a twenty-four-hour telephone service “to assist those arrested for illegal drugs offenses, particularly students and young people”.³ Release London proved to be an inspiring example: between 1969 and 1974 a loose international network of autonomous Release offices was established in cities such as Hamburg, Heidelberg, Brussels, and Berlin.⁴

Editors of the Dutch underground magazine Aloha played a crucial role in establishing and shaping the Amsterdam Release. Readers of the magazine and its predecessor Hitweek would have been aware of Release London, “the welfare branch of the alternative society,” since its opening in 1967 (Hitweek, September 8 1967).⁵ Release Amsterdam opposed itself to “oppressive” institutions, such as traditional child protection and the police, and tried to take new forms of counterculture seriously. In so doing, Release Amsterdam had a major influence on the debates over the legal position of young people, changes in the field of youth welfare, and the establishment of alternative welfare in the Netherlands throughout the Seventies and Eighties. It is important to stress that, despite the inspiration from London, the personal connections, and the shared urge to challenge the authorities, the Amsterdam Release became a more broadly oriented and radical organization, influenced by a “resistance” narrative evoking the Second World War. This innovative and influential institution’s origins, however, have hardly been researched and have yet to attract due attention in historiography.⁶

This lack of attention also obscures the important role transnational connections played in the adaption of ideas on youth rights and welfare in the Netherlands, despite the increasing attention to the transnational and transcultural aspects of the Sixties cultural revolution.⁷ This article reconstructs the conception of Release Amsterdam and the cultural transfers that lay at its root. The approach is informed by “global microhistory,” focusing on the significance of “global” historical phenomena in a local context. This entails close analysis of primary sources connected to a small group of four key people, a limited time span of a single year (1969), and a spotlight on the Amsterdam countercultural community.⁸

The close analysis of primary sources allows us to zoom in on some key figures’ backgrounds and transnational networks, to provide a deeper understanding of transnational influences on the Dutch debate on youth rights and welfare, while emphasizing the role of individual agency and national discursive dynamics. The use of both oral history and archival records permits the balancing of the sources against each other and details how four key figures in the establishment of Release mediated transnational influences into a national and personal discourse on (youth) rights in a very limited time and space. In doing so, this paper aims to contribute to the history of both the Global Sixties and of social work.

Though the people of Release Amsterdam often perceived themselves as being part of a global counterculture, local controversies and national institutional frameworks to a large extend defined their course of action. The transnational approach “reflects on, while on the same time going beyond, the confines of the nation”⁹ and is a helpful perspective to explain national particularities, but it has been accused of lacking a clear definition. Recently, Sonja Levsen and Kiran Klaus Patel applied a promising three-tier approach to the transnational history of political activism in the long 1970s. This approach deepens the transnational concept by distinguishing three competing spaces of transnationalism: the imagined space of belonging and solidarity, the geographical area in which knowledge circulated, and the space of social experience and concrete political engagement.¹⁰ This spatial approach allows a more refined picture that can distinguish the “global” from the “local” and emphasizes the influence of national and personal concerns that gave Release Amsterdam its specific local shape.

Regarding the conception of Release Amsterdam, the underground press is an institution in which these three spaces overlap: in conveying the imagined international underground community as a space of belonging and solidarity, in spreading and circulating knowledge and ideas on freedom rights in the geographical space, and in connecting real people in the space of social experience. So, besides the personal biographies, the critical role of the underground press as a catalyst at the intersection of the three tiers of transnationality will be the backdrop of this article.

The first two sections that follow provide a rough sketch of the role of the underground press and the establishment of Release London as a backdrop. In the subsequent sections, the biographical aspects, some significant events, and the evaluation of the four key figures’ influence on the creation of Release Amsterdam will be outlined, sharpening the distinctions between the local and the global, the personal and the general.

The media network of the underground community

In his book on the American underground press, Smoking Typewriters,¹¹ John McMillian shows the importance of the underground press in constructing an alternative “underground” discourse that enabled young people to identify and influenced public opinion. McMillian states: “Simply put, much of what we associate with the late 1960s youth rebellion […] might not have been possible without the advent of new printing technologies that put the cost of newspaper production within reach of most activists, or without the institutions they built that allowed their press to flourish.”¹²

In the summer of 1965, the prominent Dutch Fluxus artist Willem de Ridder walked into the showroom of Augustin+Schoonman, one of the first offset printers in the Netherlands, to present his idea of making a newspaper “in which the new generation would not be manipulated again by unscrupulous businessmen, but in which they could speak for themselves. In the absence of editors […], it should be possible for everybody to write or draw everything with the guarantee that it would be printed, without regard for the person.”¹³

One of Augustin+Schoonman’s owners, printing pioneer and publisher Ruud Schoonman, was instantly enthusiastic about De Ridder’s idea, and a brand new four-color offset press enabled De Ridder and his then business partner, Peter J. Muller, to make a revolutionary colorful weekly youth newspaper named Hitweek quickly and cheaply. Schoonman told De Ridder: “We do not work with typeset anymore. You can design exactly the page you desire.”¹⁴ De Ridder recalls that all Dutch newspapers were printed in typeset, and Hitweek made newspapers that were impossible to imitate in typeset, though many of them tried: “Newspapers imitated our inventions on their teen-pages in Hitweek-style. It was pathetic to see how they tried to equal our free photographic cut-and-paste layout in typeset.”¹⁵

This is exemplary of what John McMillian calls the “Offset Revolution,” which made newspaper production suddenly easy and inexpensive. Before the mid-Sixties, many printers were dependent on costly and difficult-to-handle machines and processes requiring experienced and technical skilled personnel. The Offset Revolution allowed young people, like Willem de Ridder, to vent their creativity, creating and disseminating a counter-narrative, in periodicals where “prose could be fitted around swirling drawings and photo collages.”¹⁶

Initially inspired by international pop magazines like Melody Maker and Record Mirror, Hitweek developed into one of the Netherlands’ most influential underground newspapers. First predominantly covering popular music and the counterculture, the paper gradually shifted its focus to societal issues with a progressive, libertarian perspective. A new name marked this change in topics in May 1969: Aloha.¹⁷ Susan Janssen, a former Aloha editor and Release Amsterdam founder, later described the kitchen of the paper’s editorial office on the Alexander Boerstraat as “the center of the Amsterdam counterculture” and “an open house”.¹⁸

The underground press was a transnational movement that contributed to shaping an imagined space of belonging and solidarity. It flourished thanks to, from a Schumpeterian perspective, the “creative destruction” of the Offset Revolution, but also the exchange of people and texts. These factors allowed it to establish a shared musical taste and exchange ideas on civil rights and social services for youth, thereby also creating space for knowledge circulation and social experiences.

The output of the international underground press circulated with unprecedented freedom after the establishment of the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) in June 1966, which connected underground newspapers throughout the whole Western world. Under the condition that underground papers send a copy of every edition to all other members, they could use each other’s stories freely. Hitweek/Aloha joined UPS and published a substantial amount of translated copy from other underground newspapers, predominantly Anglophone, including articles about feminism, sexuality, civil rights, and social services.¹⁹

Besides networking institutions like the UPS that paved the way for the free circulation of knowledge, news, trends, and ideas, there were the personal networks that arose through the international exchange of people in the underground community. British-born pioneer John Wilcock moved to the US, where his work at the Los Angeles Free Press (Freep), East Village Other, and Village Voice significantly influenced the establishment of the International Times (IT), one of London’s first underground papers. Jim Haynes, one of IT’s founders, was from the United States, as was his friend William (Bill) Levy, later the editor of IT and the Amsterdam-based SUCK, as well as husband-to-be of Susan Janssen.²⁰ Just one ferry crossing away, Hitweek/Aloha journalists also visited the “Swinging London” scene frequently, where personal contacts were forged with IT journalists, such as between Hitweek’s Willem de Ridder and Jim Haynes.²¹

Release in London

In a 1969 interview with Time magazine, Release founder Caroline Coon explained that the organization would act as a buffer between the establishment and the counterculture:

You have to contain the drug problem […], but you have to find ways to do it without alienating a whole section of youth. Drugs have brought an entirely new kind of people into contact with the police. […] [I]t is alienating them very rapidly. And that’s where we operate. We can function where the straight social work agencies can’t because the young people know we’re on their side. We think like they do; we dress and talk like they do, and besides we’ve proved ourselves in court.²²

The 1967 establishment of Release in London must be seen in the context of the significant increase in arrests for drug abuse as defined by the 1965 Dangerous Drug Act, which allowed the police to search anyone they suspected of carrying drugs.²³ In 1967, such arrests peaked due to the rise of cannabis use in the underground culture, and an increasing share of the countercultural (white) youth thus encountered law enforcement. In contrast, previously, the use of cannabis was mainly limited to immigrants from the British West Indies.²⁴ In a report, Release pointed out that “young people with long hair may be stopped and searched for no other reason than they are perceived as being of a suspect generation.”²⁵ Besides that, the underground community faced increasing oppression targeting all visible aspects of the subculture, from underground newspapers and art galleries to slang, clothing, and hairstyles.²⁶

After a series of protests against the strict application of drug laws, Caroline Coon and Rufus Harris took the initiative to start Release. ²⁷ Coon and Harris knew from the start that they would need to “play the game” by the rules and codes of the establishment, taking a professional, bureaucratic approach in pursuit of its “underground-ish” mission.²⁸ Soon after Release London was established as a legal aid center for young people having issues with drug use, its “sphere of activity expanded to include the whole spectrum of problems encountered within the so-called alternative society.”²⁹ But there was no explicit mistrust in the legal institutions of Great Britain; the group’s stance was that those institutions needed only to be adjusted and reformed to meet the interests of young people.³⁰ This positioning, acting as a “buffer” between counterculture and establishment, was a significantly different starting point than Release Amsterdam would have.

As early as September 9 1967, the Dutch audience of Hitweek could read about the work of Release in London. But it was not until 1969 that Aloha editors Dick Arendshorst, Koos Zwart, and Susan Janssen began to address legal issues in the Netherlands in connection with that work. What London youth experienced seemed very similar to their counterparts’ experiences in the Netherlands. Arendshorst, a former law student, and Janssen, a Film Academy student, wrote several articles about the mistreatment of young people around drugs, long hair, and the like. Arendshorst, in his position of “legal editor”, also provided legal advice in Aloha.

Inspired by articles that Susan Janssen read about Release in London in the IT, and through the underground-press network of Willem de Ridder, contacts were established with Rufus Harris. This resulted in a visit to Release by Janssen in April 1969, which was followed by regular correspondence and exchange of ideas between Harris and Janssen.³¹

Another critical ‘branch’ of the same transnational network was the establishment in the summer of 1969 of the ‘first European sex paper’, SUCK, in Amsterdam by, among others, IT editors Jim Haynes and William Levy and Aloha’s Willem de Ridder. In this environment, Levy (who was present at the first Release meetings in London) and Janssen began a love affair and formed a professional relationship. Janssen joined the editorial team of SUCK, under the pseudonym ‘Purple Susan’.³²

This closely knit transnational network that came into existence in 1969 made it much easier for Janssen and Arendshorst to tap into the London underground community directly and strengthen ties with the founders of Release in London.³³ Identifying with the London fight against “oppression” and sensing an urgent need for a similar initiative in Amsterdam, they decided that merely writing about Release would not suffice. In the previously quoted July 25 edition of Aloha, Janssen emphasized that in the Netherlands drug law enforcement was also becoming increasingly strict, foreigners were discriminated against, there was a housing shortage, and young people with long hair were excluded from many jobs. She proposed an organization that would have (like Release) a twenty-four-hour telephone hotline, law library, and help service.

The summer of 1969

Having established how and through which networks the Amsterdam underground became familiar with the concept and operation of Release in London, we shift our focus to the concerns of the Dutch initiators of Release and how they shaped the initial principles of Release Amsterdam. In the sources, a few people stand out that substantially influenced the adaptation of the “original” Release concept to the local Dutch situation: Susan Janssen (b. 1946), Dick Arendshorst (b. 1945), Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh (b. 1933), and André Schmidt (b. 1925). We now take a close look into the biographical features and contemporary sources related to these persons to explore how personal, national, and “global” concerns defined the birth of Release Amsterdam.

In his own words, Dick Arendshorst was a smart student from the Twente region in the eastern Netherlands. Coming from a poor family, in grammar school he developed a loathing for spoiled classmates from rich textile families. Soon after his graduation, he moved to Amsterdam, which he simultaneously viewed as “Sodom and Gommorah” and a place where “things happened.” While he “engaged” in the youth protest culture, including Provo and the anti – Vietnam War movement, he was mainly a passive follower during his first five years in Amsterdam. This changed when a fellow student asked him to join in the operation of his record store at the famous alternative youth clubhouse Fantasio. Here, he gradually moved into the circle of underground movers and shakers like cannabis activist Koos Zwart and Willem de Ridder. He subsequently became a regular contributor to Aloha and the libertarian cult magazine Gandalf and editor of the youth page of the established newspaper De Tijd.³⁴ He met Susan Janssen at the Aloha editorial office. Janssen was the daughter of a Dutch mechanical engineer with the Holland-Amerika Lijn and an English mother who met during the Second World War in Great Britain when her father could not return to his occupied homeland. She was raised in a bilingual environment in Rotterdam, speaking English at home and Dutch at school. Her father brought a variety of American magazines from his work trips to the United States, enabling Janssen to immerse herself in Anglo-American culture. In grammar school, she flourished in the intellectual atmosphere, but found it hard to adapt to the elite lifestyle of her classmates. Janssen moved from Rotterdam in 1966 to study at the Amsterdam Film Academy, were she became a “rebellious hippie.” During a traineeship at the editing department of the NTS (Dutch Television Foundation), she befriended cameraman and Aloha editor Paul van den Bos, whose friend Willem de Ridder motivated her to write for the periodical.³⁵

These events and contacts enabled both Janssen and Arendshorst to move into more active roles in the vanguard of the Dutch underground scene. With a fellow Fantasio staff member,³⁶ Arendshorst established the Maatschappij tot Redding van de Maatschappij (MtRvdM, Society for the Salvation of Society)³⁷ in early August 1969, which stayed closely linked to the Fantasio network. In the established Dutch press (Het Parool, August 2 1969; De Tijd, September 20 1969), the MtRvdM called themselves “leading semi-intellectuals and failed artists” and “the thinking part of the longhaired, work-shy scum”. In a newspaper interview (De Tijd, August 6 1969), the MtRvdM observed:

Twenty centuries and longer, people have built systems to live together. Systems in which violence, oppression, and reprisals are built in as a matter of course. Despite all these systems evidently falling short, one does nothing else but think of new ones.³⁸

In another newspaper interview (Het Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, September 9 1969), Arendshorst stated that, in the near future, the MtRvdM would start a “contact desk” that would provide advice for everybody that was in trouble with the government. He even claimed to have financiers for this initiative.

Arendshorst’s activist outlook resulted in the MtRvdM’s most notable achievement: the role it played in the debate on the “Damslapers”.³⁹ In the summer of 1969, Amsterdam was a popular destination for hippies from around the country and the West; due to a lack of cheap accommodation many of them slept on the National (Second World War) Monument in Dam Square. This led to public unrest, and the widely read conservative newspaper De Telegraaf paid considerable attention to this, from their viewpoint, undesirable situation and the police raids aimed at the Damslapers. According to the popular opinion represented (among other newspapers) by De Telegraaf, “longhaired, work-shy scum” were defiling the Netherlands’ most sacred war memorial and the authorities should handle this problem the hard way (e.g. De Telegraaf, August, 13, 1969).

The police responded by arresting the Damslapers during the nights of August 12 and 13. In reaction to the arrests, Arendshorst and Janssen organized a playful cleanup of Dam Square by the hippies themselves on August 23. Pamphlets handed out during the cleanup were signed “De stichting”45-’69 ter herdenking van de na-oorlogse slachtoffers’.⁴⁰

This made-up name referred directly to the Stichting 1940–1945 Foundation that represented the interests of Dutch war victims. The comparison between the current youth oppression and the oppression during the Second World War stands out in the pamphlet’s text. The monument as a symbol of freedom was used to underscore the hippies’ striving for freedom:“although the monument is a symbol of freedom, they [the establishment, EB] do not grant their freedom to the youth. […] The cordoning off of the streets with police assault vans and the combing out of young tourists are methods that remind us to the cause why the National Monument is actually in Amsterdam.” The authors of the pamphlet also sought to connect with the public debate about the Dutch authorities’ questionable attitude toward the persecution of Jews in Nazi-occupied Netherlands during the war: “The raids are well underway. Every night certain neighborhoods are cordoned off (are these the new ghettos) to deport youngsters without legal justification.”⁴¹

An article Arendshorst and Janssen wrote for Aloha in early September sheds light on how they framed their concerns about the rights of young people within the Dutch legal system. In the September 3 piece “Slapen met de laars in je nek”,⁴² Arendshorst and Janssen elaborate on the legal position of the “Damslapers”, among whom were many foreigners. They argue that the strict Dutch Alien Act was induced by the stream of refugees coming to the Netherlands during the First World War, “who would only cause danger for the public order, the peace and the national security”.⁴³ They argue that the same law was applied to refugees coming to the Netherlands in the advent of the Second World War “among others, the Jews”,⁴⁴ ensuring that just a few, mainly wealthy refugees, were granted asylum. Arendshorst and Janssen concluded this section: “NOW THIS ARRANGEMENT IS BEING USED IN THE SAME WAY AGAINST LONG HAIRS”.⁴⁵ They continue with the claim that the Alien Law was being used only on a specific minority group: “We know these practices longer than today! LONG HAIRS ARE JUST THE NEW JEWS!”⁴⁶

Historian Chris van der Heijden argues in his influential book on the aftermath of the Second World War in the Netherlands, Dat nooit meer, that between 1961 and 1980 interest in the war increased, not least among the baby boom generation. The war provided a useful and appealing dystopian image. The baby boomers discovered that this specific interpretation of the war could aid their emancipation struggle. Van der Heijden limits this argument to the Provo movement and argues that Second World War comparisons were merely provocative and playful, just as Niek Pas does in his comprehensive study of Provo.⁴⁷ But the case of Release Amsterdam shows that the founders’ concerns were rooted in the real fears of an authoritarian tendency in Dutch society, and they perceived the youth they imagined to represent as being vulnerable to the same persecution methods as had been used in the Germany of the Thirties. The Second World War – informed image was a real experienced antithesis. Subsequently, the first Amsterdam Release volunteers perceived themselves as modern “resistance fighters”, even turning to veteran WWII resistance members for document forgery.⁴⁸

By the end of September 1969, the MtRvdM disappeared into anonymity, apparently because Arendshorst and Janssen were now engaged in a more practical legal assistance initiative: Release. But the MtRvdM and the discourses Arendshorst and Janssen practiced can be seen as encouraging the more serious attempt to establish Release in Amsterdam. In their public statements, Arendshorst and Janssen expressed concerns about a culture that oppressed young people “doing their own thing.” Rather than a clear political-ideological perspective, they pursued a legal perspective aimed at emancipating young people and securing their freedoms against an inherently authoritarian government. In this they connected to the imagined space of belonging and solidarity with, in particular, the London countercultural community. But to substantiate this sense of oppression locally, they used the compelling, imaginative power of the Second World War, and in in a much more serious way than Provo ever did.

Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh: unexpected support

Janssen’s article in Aloha and Arendshorst’s efforts to flesh out his idealism coincided with a plea made in an op-ed by Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh in the July 5 edition of Vrij Nederland, a progressive mainstream newspaper that had started as an underground newspaper during the Second World War.

In the article, Van Benthem van den Bergh draws a direct line between events in the US – specifically the May 1969 “Battle of People’s Park,” a protest by students at the University of California, Berkeley – and how the Dutch authorities handled youth protests, like the occupation of the Maagdenhuis (the administrative seat of the Universiteit van Amsterdam) that same month. Though he expected that social conflict would not go as far in the Netherlands, he warns that:

there is the danger that the reaction to democratization demands and the emergence of new standards for individual and social behavior will not be the creation of matching democratic structures and new legal criteria but the attempt to suppress those new demands and norms.⁴⁹(Vrij Nederland, July 5, 1969)

The Dutch authorities were vulnerable to these authoritarian temptations, he argues, based on how they had dealt with youth protests like those of Provo. In his view, the authorities were trying to isolate radical minorities through stringent criminal prosecution, which would result in a vicious cycle of repression and radicalization: “the rule of law is still used to enforce morality […] but also here a period is imminent of a lot of conflicts, much repression and little progress in the much-needed experiments with new structures.”⁵⁰

Van Benthem van den Bergh advocated the establishment of an organization for the protection of democratic rights. “Such an organization should provide assistance to everybody facing troubles because he’s committed to political demands or lives according to new norms.”⁵¹ The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Ligue pour la défense de droits de l’homme could serve as examples, but the organization he envisioned would go well beyond them, addressing the new political and cultural demands just as the labor unions had responded to social-economic demands in the era of industrialization.

Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh, a progressive Dutch intellectual, editor of the long-running De Gids literary periodical, and scholar at the International Institute of Social Studies, was shaped by his experiences in the United States, where he conducted research on a Fulbright scholarship at the Center for International Affairs of Harvard University and UC Berkeley for over a year between 1964 and 1966. There he witnessed the victories of the civil rights movement, the anti – Vietnam War protests, and the rise of student movements. Influenced by these events, he viewed the US government as increasingly repressive.⁵² After returning to the Netherlands, he developed a theory based on his American experiences and the US legitimization of the Vietnam War: the “ideology of the West.” According to this, the assumption that Western political culture could be characterized by an open interpretation framework that was objective and pragmatic was a myth. On the contrary, he argued in a newspaper interview (De Volkskrant, December 18 1967), it was:

a completely closed system that condemns every nuance as naivety. The anti-communist ideology is a kind of diabolism; the opponent always has the worst imaginable intentions. […] There is no nuance anymore when the devil is at the door.⁵³

In the second half of the 1960s, Van Benthem van den Bergh presented himself as a productive, progressive intellectual who was a member of the “New Left” movement within the Dutch Labour party (PvdA) and expressed sympathetic views of youth activism such as Provo and the student movements, in whom he saw the vanguard of a new social order.⁵⁴

His concerns overlapped with Arendshorst’s and Janssen’s regarding the enforcement and broadening of fundamental (democratic) rights, appealing to more or less the same “space of solidarity and belonging,” though Van Benthem van den Bergh based his argument on the supposed analogy between contemporary events in the Netherlands and the United States and did not bring in the Second World War comparison at this stage. But a year later, in an essay in De Gids, he also draws a direct line between the current oppression he perceived and the prewar regime in which national socialism took root. He argues that the ouster of the Nazis in 1945 was not a real liberation but a restoration of “the same order that spawned the horrors of national socialism. Vietnam, Brazil, Greece are the most recent cases in which that order transforms into a reign of terror to turn away the threat of real liberation.”⁵⁵

In the Netherlands, the occupation of the Nazi regime was followed by “liberation” and subsequently by “occupation” by the Dutch state: “The liberation from was not allowed to become a liberation to, as the resistance’s finest had hoped. The new order was expelled to restore the old. The Netherlands resurrected.”⁵⁶ The postwar Dutch culture was one of “social constraint by self-constraint and could not support cultural experiments with alternative sexual practices, new relationship forms, new stimulants, new appearances, and other standards of conduct, much desired by especially young people.”⁵⁷

Van der Heijden coined the term “war generation” for intellectuals such as Van Benthem van den Bergh – old enough to have memories of the war, but too young to be involved in it as an active subject. Due to the growing importance of the media in the public debate, representatives of this generation were able to wield considerable influence. For these intellectuals, the war was the yardstick to measure current issues. Van Benthem van den Bergh was one of these critical intellectuals who, according to Van der Heijden, formed a close-knit subculture centered around progressive newspapers and magazines such as Vrij Nederland, Het Parool, Het Vrije Volk, De Volkskrant, and De Groene Amsterdammer, literary journals such as De Gids, and broadcasters like VPRO and the VARA.⁵⁸

Uvrij-Ufree?

André Schmidt, a former advertising executive and courier for the underground newspaper Trouw during the Second World War, can also be regarded as an exponent of Van der Heijden’s “war generation.” After building a career as a marketing executive and partner at Schmidt & Kirschner Company, a publicity agency, in 1966 Schmidt broke away to engage with the anarchistic youth.⁵⁹

In a 1970 newspaper interview (De Telegraaf, May 16 1970), he recalled a pivotal event that drove him into this engagement. One spring evening in 1969, he was planning to drink whiskey at the Leidseplein with some friends. Looking for a parking spot for his red Jaguar sports car, he noted that a police car was double-parked in front of the police station. When he entered the Leidseplein police station and asked if the police car could be appropriately parked, he was instantly arrested and detained. If a “clean-shaven marketing boy” with the letter of the law on his side was treated like this, he wondered, how did police handle the “longhaired scum”? He instantly decided to grow his hair and immersed himself in civil rights and cybernetics, “the science of communication and control,” because “the world is messed up” and there was no “real communication.” Schmidt aimed to pursue a “brand new world” with much more understanding and information “to begin to love the youth all over again.” Given his professional background, the emphasis on communication and marketing was not surprising.⁶⁰

Schmidt contacted Van Benthem van den Bergh after reading his op-ed. On August 6 1969, an orientation meeting took place in Schmidt’s bungalow in Amsterdam-Buitenveldert. In attendance was a remarkable group of fifteen people from two generations who had responded to Van Benthem van den Bergh’s call. Along with the host and Van Benthem van den Bergh himself were Aloha’s Dick Arendshorst and Koos Zwart, law professor Herman Maas of the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, Gandalf founder Guus Dijkhuizen, and pop music journalist and Aloha editor Jan Donkers.⁶¹

After establishing that all the participants had similar concerns regarding civil liberties, the central issue to be discussed was how an organization addressing those concerns should be structured. Schmidt recommended following the organizational example of Amnesty International and the British National Council for Civil Liberties. Van Benthem van den Bergh made the case for an organization dedicated to

a) the legal protection of individual freedoms, b) [the provision of] advice, financial support, and various assistance (e.g. after the model of “Release” in England), c) the collection, processing, and dissemination of information, d) the coordination of the activities of informal action groups for the extension of democratic rights.

The most effective structure would probably be a) a permanent (by telephone) accessible office for advice, support, and information processing.⁶²

He further suggested forming working groups to explore the prospective organization’s purpose and philosophy, legal form, publicity, scope, finance, and external contacts. André Schmidt came up with a provisional name: Unie voor Vrijheidsrechten (Union for Freedom Rights),⁶³ abbreviated to “U-vrij”. Koos Zwart offered the use of Aloha’s publicity infrastructure with an eye on reaching thousands of potentially interested young people.⁶⁴

On September 9, in a second meeting, the committee “ter oprichting van een Unie voor Vrijheidsrechten”⁶⁵ discussed freedom rights. According to the minutes of this meeting, Van Benthem van den Bergh advocated that the goals of U-vrij should be protecting existing freedom rights, protecting people striving for the extension of freedom rights, striving for the extension of civil rights and freedoms, elimination of misunderstanding about the lifestyle of “others”, and influencing public opinion. All the participants agreed. As a rule of thumb, they concurred, U-vrij should support everyone’s desire for freedom, unless it would cause avoidable harm to others. But this last caveat highlighted a variety of complications: were former resistance fighters harmed by the Damslapers’ exercising their rights to sleep on the National Monument? Did right-wing people suffer harm from U-vrij’s support for anarchists? Another crucial point was the explicit addressing of how women needing an abortion were dependent on illegal practices, and what U-vrij could do about this.⁶⁶

A revealing detail in the minutes is the fear expressed about a possible hostile takeover by undefined “others”. Koos Zwart, Dick Arendshorst, Guus Dijkhuizen, and André Schmidt also worried that in the slipstream of the increasing hostility toward the Damslapers, a witch hunt against long hairs might occur and that the authorities could break up the “subversive” committee for the establishment of U-vrij.⁶⁷

On October 2, the committee called a public meeting in the conference room of the Mozes-en-Aäronkerk, open to any interested parties. The meeting attracted about 40 people, and the working groups presented their findings. The attendance at the meeting was deemed sufficient to proceed with U-vrij. On October 23, in the Amsterdam pub De Prins, the committee agreed to establish the Unie voor Vrijheidsrechten, per the minutes at 9:05 p.m. precisely.⁶⁸

The ideology of U-vrij and Release Amsterdam

Up to the plenary session in the conference room of the Mozes-en-Aäronkerk, the primary source of ideas and direction had been Van Benthem van den Bergh’s op-ed and the September 9 discussion. Now André Schmidt was inspired to write a memorandum with a proposal for the purposes and philosophy of U-vrij, which argued that the established order tended “to systematically curtail the freedoms and freedom rights of others -in particular, new generations” and that it was self-evident that “an urge and development towards self-management will also occur under increasing information and communication.” U-vrij considered “testing against historical standards (however common) in any way as objectionable. U-vrij emphasizes looking ahead.”⁶⁹

Schmidt went on to analyze the opportunities and risks involved in establishing the new organization’s public image. He proposed an introductory media campaign: “Make 1970 the first year of Freedom: U-vrij.”⁷⁰ He argued that, despite the war having ended twenty-five years ago, the mental attitude of the elderly was still one of “after the war.” Liberation was celebrated, but freedom was neglected; the youth were deprived of freedom to a greater extent than the elderly had been when they were young.⁷¹ Schmidt rejected what he called the “war cult,” explaining:

The fact that our country still commemorates the war every year has long had an extremely forced character. Nowadays, people do not hesitate to persecute today’s youth for the interests of the elderly (prestige, etc.) who maintain those commemorations (Damrazzias, etc.). […] Cult phenomena: showcasing former heroism, contemporary suffering, enforcing respect for old age, wanting to claim the gratitude of later generations, to put extra force into today’s interests against new.⁷²

Schmidt heavily relied on the Second World War memory narratives, like Van Benthem van den Bergh in his pivotal De Gids essay: the liberation was only beneficial for the “old” generations; for the young generations, the boons of liberty were beyond reach, and they were persecuted for the sake of their elders.

At the invitation of Susan Janssen, Rufus Harris of Release London visited Amsterdam from November 9 to 13, meeting several times with the U-vrij committee. Harris brought attention to the aims of Release London, and to the committee’s satisfaction their ideas matched quite well with these principles. Harris authorized the committee to use the name “Release,” gave further practical advice, and pledged close collaboration in the future.⁷³

Though the discourse of civil rights “under pressure” seemingly provided a common ground for the U-vrij founders, it quickly became evident that, for most committee participants, Schmidt was a difficult man to work with and his membership had become a hindrance to the development of U-vrij. Schmidt’s modus operandi was described as “provocative” and “uncooperative” by the others. Even Rufus Harris doubted whether the committee should be allowed to use the name “Release” after having met Schmidt on his Amsterdam visit.⁷⁴ Arendshorst and Van Benthem van den Bergh regarded him as an “obstacle” and a “liar”.⁷⁵ This led to a breakup on November 27 1969. Having coined the name U-vrij, Schmidt established a short-lived organization with the same name. Most of the of the initial group organized under a new name, Bond voor Vrijheidsrechten (BvV, League for Freedom Rights).⁷⁶ Under it would be a working foundation providing legal and social assistance: Release.⁷⁷

Freedom rights defined

The articles of association based on the preliminary discussions were adopted at the November 27 meeting, by which point the Bond voor Vrijheidsrechten had been established. It differed from Release London in its twin structure. The BvV would function like a civil rights union and engage in reporting abuses regarding the rule of law, influencing public opinion, and campaigning for more extensive freedom rights. The working foundation Release would limit itself to individual assistance for those in trouble with the law and be the “antennae in society,” so it could provide the Union with material to support its mission. This dual structure was inspired by Nederlandse Vereniging Voor Seksuele Hervorming (NVSH, Dutch Association for Sexual Reform),⁷⁸ which comprised a foundation and separate, independent family planning clinics.⁷⁹

Now that Schmidt had left the organization, the remaining members of the the BvV board could more precisely articulate their perspective on freedom rights and how to expand them. In a brochure for the general public from the first half of 1970, the BvV stated that, when discussing freedom rights, one must begin with an understanding of humanity. For the BvV, the most fundamental characteristic of humankind was that it could imagine a future and act according to this vision. But currently, this was possible only to a minimal extent because culture, society, and state severely limited the space for humans to pursue their desired visions. According to the BvV, many of these limitations on human freedom were unnecessary – not justified by the measure that the freedom of one does not harm the freedom of the other. Only in such circumstances was the government justified in constraining freedom. The BvV believed the criterion that human freedom should not unnecessarily be restricted could only be established by “experiment.” Release would help individuals who were “trying to usurp a greater freedom than the state, culture or society now tolerate and who get into trouble as a result.”⁸⁰

To summarize, the BvV/Release saw the current “culture” and the rule of law as unable to adapt to new ways of life because the present system was cast as inevitable by the establishment. The BvV took a “pluralistic” viewpoint: they did not suggest that it is possible to create a single form of society that gives the most personal freedom, but that human freedom is best realized when there is a plurality of ways of life, communities, and working opportunities. The BvV thus sought greater tolerance for “deviant” behavior by minorities and other individuals. Moreover, the BvV aimed to appeal to the frustration among majorities as well, for example, those in unequal power relationships such as citizens to the government or employees to employers.

The BvV distinguished a set of priorities that needed particular focus: fundamental rights related to the constitution. The constitution had to be adjusted to new developments such as the right to demonstrate and privacy rights. Moreover, judges should be able to test new laws against the constitution, which was impossible because the Netherlands lacked a constitutional court. Another priority was the extension of fundamental rights, including a right to information, encompassing a constitutional right to gain access to governmental documents; free speech rights, extended to modern media such as TV and radio; the recognition of the right to demonstrate; the constitutional protection of life principles; the constitutional protection of one’s own body (as in cases of abortion, suicide, and organ transplant); protection against eavesdropping; the right for the parliament to hear civil servants; phasing out prison sentences and replacing them with other measures; and abolition of pretrial detention.

In the BvV/Release marketing materials intended for the general public, the Second World War discourse was excluded, but as a former Release Amsterdam volunteer said:

We were resisting a bit against the older generation that had lived through the war, and that was, of course, their big story. Of course, deep down in our hearts, we were insanely jealous of that […]; we were jealous of the heroism, and on the other hand, we felt that everything was wrong and we would all do it right this time. […] [W]e all wanted to join the resistance in 1970, but unfortunately, it was all over […]. So Release was also a wonderful opportunity to relive those feelings.⁸¹

Conclusion

The establishment of Release Amsterdam shows how a seemingly transnational space of belonging and solidarity was adapted to the Dutch “couleur locale” and the essential role the underground press played as a real and symbolic focal point of transcultural exchange regarding the protection and reform of civil rights within the counterculture. In addition, academic exchange could serve the same purpose, as the biography of Van Benthem van den Bergh shows. All the four discussed key persons could therefore identify with the imagined transnational space in which the discourse of “oppression of the new youth by an authoritarian-leaning government” shaped the common ground for action. Nevertheless, the materializing of these images was connected to a specific national “prehistory”⁸² rooted in both the Dutch experience of the Second World War and the remembrance culture, which provided the enticing image of participation in a “resistance” group. But this war narrative also enabled Schmidt and Van Benthem van den Bergh as “war generation” exponents to sympathize with “baby boomers” Janssen and Arendshorst and vice versa. There is insufficient biographical evidence to characterize these four persons as nonconformists, but all certainly shared the experience of “being different” and the struggles that entailed.

The solidarity and imagined connection with Release London evolved into both the real exchange of knowledge and the social experience of the underground press network. The Anglocentric orientation of three of the founders, the vicinity of London, and the dominance of the Anglo-American underground press are crucial to explaining the direction in which they sought their inspiration.

The London Release was a spontaneous initiative in response to a clearly defined set of events centered around drug policies that took a high toll in the London underground community. Release London had only a rudimentary ideological base in protecting civil liberties, probably because there was no time for such considerations, and there were only two leading figures. Release London displayed a fundamental faith in the British legal system and sought ways to bond with crucial persons representing this system in order to function as a “buffer” between counterculture and establishment. To the contrary, Release Amsterdam (being a part of the BvV) mistrusted the Dutch establishment in general, due to the assumption that the Dutch government could revert to authoritarian impulses, as it seemingly did before and during the Second World War. Self-evidently, the British had a totally different experience of the war.

The Dutch mistrust was underpinned by the experience of the Second World War and the recent “similar” experiences with the oppression of young people pursuing new lifestyles in the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States. In the transnational space of belonging and solidarity, these foreign events seemed interchangeable. For the Dutch founders, the Second World War was the “national” frame in which this oppression was placed, not in a merely rhetorical way, but as an event that happened under conditions that were still present in Dutch society. In fact, the danger of authoritarianism was seen as constant. This explains the more radical and skeptical attitude of Release Amsterdam. The rudimentary ideological and pragmatic attitude of London was broadened in the Netherlands to an extensive ideological foundation encompassing all who came into conflict with the law through the exercise of their lifestyles. This was partly because of the large number of initiators who all wanted to play a part in the ideological shaping of Release Amsterdam. But they all shared one thing: a strong awareness of the imaginative power of the Second World War in debates around human freedom, partly rooted in personal experiences, partially used as a discursive tool. This “war discourse” provided the founders of Release Amsterdam with a robust discursive lever that would work only in this nationally oriented discourse.

The imagined transnational space that bound and would keep the two Releases together was the focus on civil rights and the structure of the Release office: a twenty-four-hour advice center staffed by idealistic volunteers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek.

Notes

1. Original quote: ‘Het doel is: Er zeker van te zijn dat mensen de wet en hun RECHTEN kennen en weten welke sociale faciliteiten er beschikbaar zijn. Te voorkomen dat minderheidsgroepen het slachtoffer worden van het bestaande rechtssysteem. Mensen met moeilijkheden te helpen.

Wat is er nodig? Mensen, die er wat tijd tegenaan willen gooien; een telefoonnummer; een ruimte, die als kantoor dienst kan doen; contacten met sociologen, psychologen ed.; financiële steun.’

2. Marwick, The Sixties, 788.

3. RA, “The Purpose of RELEASE”.

4. Stephens, Germans on drugs, 184; RA, “Inter Release bulletin no.1.”

5. Coon, “We were the welfare branch,” 183.

6. There are a few are exceptions, mostly written by non-historians: e.g. Faché et al., Jeugdinformatie en Advieswerk, 119–141; Gerritsen et al., Hulp in nood; De Beer, “Wij verrichten.”

7. Recent examples: McAdams et al., Global 1968; Lian et al. The Routledge Handbook; Buelens, De jaren zestig.

8. Ghobrial, “Introduction, seeing the world like a microhistorian,” 15–16; Magnússon et al., What is Microhistory?, 5.

9. Clavin, Defining Transnationalism, 434, 438.

10. Levsen et al., “Imagined transnationalism?,” 374–375.

11. McMillian, Smoking Typewriters.

12. Ibid., 4–5.

13. De Ridder, “Bakermat van Hitweek en Uitkrant” Original quote: “waarin de nieuwe generatie niet opnieuw gemanipuleerd werd door gewetenloze zakenlieden, maar waarin ze zelf aan het woord konden komen. Dus ook geen redacteuren […] iedereen moest alles kunnen schrijven en tekenen met de garantie dat het allemaal, zonder aanzien des persoons, geplaatst zou worden.”

14. De Ridder, “Bakermat van Hitweek en Uitkrant” Original quote: “Wij werken niet meer met lood. Je kunt precies de pagina ontwerpen die je wil.”

15. De Ridder, “Bakermat van Hitweek en Uitkrant” Original quote “Dagbladen imiteerden onze vondsten op hun tienerpagina’s in Hitweek-stijl. Het was aandoenlijk om te zien hoe ze met lood onze vrije fotografische knip-en-plak-lay-out probeerden te evenaren.”

16. McMillian, Smoking Typewriters, 6–7.

17. Righart, De eindeloze Jaren zestig, 239–242.

18. Interview by the author with Susan Janssen.

19. Fountain, Underground, 47; Vethman, “De Telegraaf van de zogenaamde supkultuur,” 52.

20. Green, All Dressed Up, 148–149.

21. Interview by the author with Dick Arendshorst; Malcolm Hart [director], “William Levy. Beyond criticism” [documentary film], 4:10–5:20.

22. “Ex-model Caroline Coon runs an underground with office hours,” Time (August 22, 1969).

23. d’Agapeyeff, Release: a progress report, 2.

24. Green, All Dressed Up, 161.

25. Coon et al., The Release Report, 13.

26. Interview by the author with Caroline Coon.

27. Gannon, “Getting it straight,” 4:10–4:21; Greene, All Dressed Up, 190.

28. Interview by the author with Caroline Coon; Coon et al., The Release Report, 11–13.

29. d’Agapeyeff, Release, 2.

30. Interview by the author with Caroline Coon.

31. RA, Letter from Rufus Harris to Susan Janssen, May 2, 1969; RA, Postcard from Susan Janssen to Rufus Harris, April 1969; interview by the author with Susan Janssen. Interview by the author with Dick Arendshorst.

32. SWC, unpublished interview with Susan Janssen; “The Only Woman I’m Interested in Liberating Is Myself,” Richi Abrams and Andrea Dworkin, March 1972; “The story of SUCK by Bill Levy,” introduction to the SWC at the IISG-website, https://iisg.amsterdam/en/news/the-complete-bill-levy-archive-suck?back-link=1 (visited July 4 2022).

33. Interview by the author with Dick Arendshorst.

34. Ibid.

35. Interview by the author with Susan Janssen.

36. Ruud Tegelaar.

37. Translates as “Society for Salvation of Society”.

38. Original quote: “Twintig eeuwen en langer hebben mensen gebouwd aan systemen om samen te leven. Systemen waarin geweld, onderdrukking en represailles als vanzelfsprekend zijn ingebouwd. Ondanks het feit dat al deze systemen duidelijk ernstig te kort schieten weet men niets anders te doen dan nieuwe systemen te bedenken”.

39. Translates as “Dam-square sleepers.”

40. RF, Call for the Dam cleanup, untitled, undated, translates as: “the memorial foundation”45-’69 for the postwar victims’; RF, Pamphlet, “Informatie over het waarom van de schoonmaakaktie”, n.d., Stichting ’45-’69 ter herdenking van de na-oorlogse slachtoffers.

41. RF, “Informatie over het waarom van de schoonmaakaktie” Original quotes, 1: “hoewel het monument een symbool van vrijheid is gunnen zij [the establishment EB] deze jongeren hun vrijheid niet.,” 2: “Het afzetten van straten met overvalwagens en het uitkammen van jonge toeristen zijn methodes die ons doen denken aan de oorzaak waarom het nationaal monument juist in Amsterdam staat.,” 3: “de razzia’s zijn al in volle gang. Elke nacht worden bepaalde stadsgedeelten afgezet (zijn dit dan de nieuwe ghetto’s) om jongeren af te voeren zonder enige wettelijke motivering.”

42. Translates as “To sleep with a boot on your neck.”

43. Original quote: “die maar gevaar opleverden voor de openbare orde, de rust en de Nationale veiligheid.”

44. Original quote: “o.a. de joden.”

45. Original quote: “NU WORDT DE ZELFDE REGELING OP DE ZELFDE MANIER GEBRUIKT TEGEN LANGHARIGEN.”

46. Original quote: “We kennen deze praktijken al langer dan vandaag! LANGHARIGEN ZIJN GEWOON DE NIEUWE JODEN!.”

47. Van der Heijden, Dat nooit meer, 330, 334, 398; Pas, Imaazje, 79–80.

48. Interview by the author with Geert Mak, a former volunteer of Release Amsterdam.

49. Original quote: “Maar ook in Nederland bestaat het gevaar dat de reactie op democratiseringseisen en het ontstaan van nieuwe normen voor individueel en sociaal gedrag niet het scheppen van daaraan aangepaste democratische structuren en van nieuwe rechtsnormen zal zijn, maar het pogen om die nieuwe eisen en normen te onderdrukken”.

50. Original quotes: “De rechtsorde wordt nog steeds gebruikt om moraal af te dwingen” and “maar ook hier dreigt een periode van veel conflict, veel repressie en weinig vooruitgang bij het zo hoog nodige experimenteren met nieuwe structuren”.

51. Original quote: “Een dergelijke organisatie zou bijstand moeten kunnen bieden aan iedereen die in moeilijkheden komt omdat hij zich inzet voor de politieke eisen of leeft volgens nieuwe normen”.

52. Interview by the author with Godfried van Benthem van den Bergh, May 26, 2021; Van Benthem van den Bergh, De ideologie, 1; Donkers, “In gesprek met … ,” 210–213.

53. Original quote: “een volstrekt gesloten systeem dat iedere nuance veroordeelt als naïviteit. De ideologie van het anti-communisme is een soort duivelsleer; de tegenstander heeft altijd de slechts denkbare bedoelingen. […] Er is geen nuance meer mogelijk, wanneer het communisme, de duivel, voor de deur staat”.

54. Van Benthem van den Bergh, “Studenten en politiek,” 51–70.

55. Van Benthem van den Bergh, “Orde terreur en verdringing,” 3. Original quote: “dezelfde orde waaruit de gruwelen van het nationaal-socialisme zijn voortgekomen. Vietnam, Brazilië, Griekenland zijn de recentste gevallen waar die orde zich transformeert in een terreurbewind om de dreiging van werkelijke bevrijding af te wenden”.

56. Ibid. 4. Original quote: “De bevrijding van mocht geen bevrijding tot worden, zoals de besten uit het verzet hadden gehoopt. De nieuwe orde was verdreven tot herstel van de oude orde. Nederland herrezen.”

57. Ibid., 9.

58. Van der Heijden, Dat nooit meer, 414–421.

59. Corthals, De geschiedenis, 6.

60. Original quotes: “de leer van communicatie en besturing,” “de wereld heel rot in elkaar zit.,” “Er is geen ware communicatie.,” “een geheel nieuwe wereld,” “Helemaal opnieuw beginnen met erg lief zijn voor de jeugd”.

61. ASUV, “Aan de leden en belangstellenden der vereniging U-Vrij, 26 november 1969;” AGT, “Beknopt verslag oriëntatievergadering 6 aug. 1969”.

62. AGT, “Beknopt verslag” Original quote: “a) de juridische bescherming van individuele vrijheden, b) het verstrekken van adviezen, financiele steun en velerlei bijstand (bij. Naar het model van ‘Release’ in Engeland), c) het verzamelen, verwerken en verbreiden van informatie; d) het coördineren van de activiteiten van informele aktiegroepen voor de uitbereiding van de democratische rechten.”

De meest doeltreffende structuur zou waarschijnlijk zijn: a) een permanent (telefonisch) bereikbaar centraal buro voor advies, bijstand en informatieverwerking; b) een stichting voor de bundeling der juridische activiteiten; c) een vereniging met regionale en locale afdelingen ter organisatie van een achterban. […] [T]ot de activiteiten zouden o.m. kunnen worden gerekend: bijstand buitenlandse arbeiders; uitzettingen; BVD; Damslapers; opsporen misstanden overheidshandelen en bedrijfsleven; het gevoel stimuleren “dat men rechten heeft;” ruchtbaarheid geven aan gevallen; proefprocessen aanspannen en jurisprudentie in moderner richting stuwen.’

63. Translates as “Union for Freedom Rights.”

64. AGT, “beknopt verslag”.

65. Translates as “the committee to set up a Union for Freedom Rights.”

66. RF, “beknopt verslag vergadering comité ter oprichting van een unie voor vrijheidsrechten, U-Vrij, op 9 sept. T.H.V. M. Luning en L. Esmeijer, A’dam,” 1.

67. RF, “beknopt verslag (…) 9 sept.,” 3.

68. AGT, “Plenaire vergadering van comité, belangstellenden en introducés op donderdag 2 oktober 1969 in de vergaderruimte van de Mozes-en-Aäronkerk, Amsterdam;” ASUV, “Besluitenlijst plenaire vergadering dd 23 okt. 1969, café ‘De Prins,’ Amsterdam”.

69. ASUV, “nota door André Schmidt, 16 oktober 1969;” original quote: UVRIJ onderkent dat de “gevestigde orde” zowel door special ingrepen van hiertoe te rekenen individuen en organen, als door haar aard de neiging vertoont de vrijheden en vrijheidsrechten van anderen -meer in het bijzonder de nieuwe generaties- stelselmatig te korten. […] UVRIJ acht het vanzelfsprekend dat mede onder invloed van de toenemende informatie en communicatie een drang en ontwikkeling naar zelfbeheer ontstaat. In de dynamische maatschappij-ontwikkeling acht UVRIJ toetsing aan historische normen (hoe gebruikelijk ook) alleszins verwerpelijk. UVRIJ legt het accent op het vooruitzien.

70. Ibid. Original quote: “Maak 1970 het eerste jaar van de Vrijheid: UVRIJ”.

71. Ibid. Original quote: “We leven thans nagenoeg 25 jaar na het einde van de Tweede Wereldoorlog. De mentale instelling van de ouderen is nog steeds een van ‘na de oorlog.’ Men viert nog steeds ‘de bevrijding,’ maar verwaarloost de vrijheid. De door ouderen gevoelde toename in tolerantie is in sommige opzichten absoluut gezien wellicht aanwezig. Maar ten opzichte van de behoefte aan vrijheid en de stellige aanwezige ‘potential mastership of freedom’ is er geen reden tot vreugde. Er is een relatieve achterstand die niet vermindert, doch nu juist groter wordt. De jeugd van vandaag wordt daardoor in sterkere mate tekortgedaan, dan de ouderen in hun jeugd”

72. Ibid.

73. AGT, Nota taakverdeling vereniging/stichting, November 8, 1969.

74. RF, letter from Rufus Harris to Susan Janssen, December 8, 1969.

75. Interviews with Van Benthem van den Bergh and Arendshorst.

76. Translates as “The League for Freedom Rights.”

77. ASUV, “Aan de leden en belangstellenden der vereniging U-Vrij, 26 november 1969;” ASUV, “besluiten van de oprichtingsvergadering, gehouden op 27 november 1969 in de Mozes-en-Aäronkerk te Amsterdam”

78. Translates as “Dutch Association for Sexual Reform”.

79. AGT, “Verslag van de activiteiten in het eerste halfjaar 1970;” AGT, “Over de Bond voor Vrijheidsrechten en haar stichting Release”.

80. AGT, “Vrijheidsrechten en grondrechten, Wat zijn vrijheidsrechten?,” original quote: “zich een grotere vrijheid proberen toe te eigenen dan staat, kultuur of samenleving nu tolereren en die daardoor in moeilijkheden komen”.

81. Interview by the author with Geert Mak, a former volunteer of Release Amsterdam. Original verbatim: “we waren ons een beetje aan het verzetten, tegen de oudere generatie die de oorlog had meegemaakt, en dat was natuurlijk hun grote verhaal en wij waren daar diep in ons hart natuurlijk waanzinnig jaloers op […] waren we jaloers op de heldenmoed en van de andere kant voelden we dat er van alles niet deugde en wij zouden dat allemaal wel eens een keer goed doen. […] We wilden ook allemaal anno 1970 in het verzet, helaas was het echt allemaal voorbij. […] Dus Release was ook een prachtige instantie om die gevoelens opnieuw te beleven”.

82. See, for the “prehistory” concept, Levsen et al., “The spatial contours,” 554.