If, for the Dutch, water is the ever present and relentless force of nature to reckon with, the Second World War and its aftermath is the historical event that continues to reverberate, both in individual psyches as well as in the collective consciousness. Like in other parts of Europe, this episode in world history left an immense scar on the conception of humanity and its relation to the world. As the Dutch poet Lucebert expressed powerfully: ‘In these times, what one used to call beauty / beauty has burned its face.’ The unimaginable atrocities and cruelties of the Nazi regime entailed a profound break with a fundamental trust in the idea of the progress of modern man. If rational and systematic use of technology and meticulously efficient administration systems could be used to decimate entire population groups, how can there ever be any hope for humankind again? Made twenty years after the end of the war, Jean-Luc Godard's science fiction alias film noir ALPHAVILLE (1965) is perhaps still one of the saddest expressions of this dystopian despair, reflecting the cruelty of modern technology and the extinction of all that is human. The film is set in some distant future, but in fact the whole setting is modern Paris of the 1960s where people are still deeply and traumatically marked by the effects of the Second World War and which has turned into a ‘capital of pain.’

There is no beginning and no end in describing the countless and complexly entangled events and effects of this war. Making sense of the rubble and ruins that left large parts of the world shattered and torn 70 years after the fact is even more difficult. Film scholar Thomas Elsaesser and historian Frank van Vree, among others, have shown how history is dynamically related to memory, often mediated by literature, film images and other audio-visual monuments that reflect and co-construct the evolving ways in which we are in touch with the past. Immediately after the war there was a need to clear the debris, to rebuild and move on, leaving the war behind. Based on Harry Mulisch's novel, the film THE ASSAULT (DE AANSLAG, Fons Rademakers, 1986) reflects the gradual release of memories in the story of a young boy who loses his parents and brother during the war.