BULLYING

by Tom Kando

During the 1950s, Amsterdam’s Montessori Lyceum was one of the city’s most elite schools. Its 13-to-18 year old students were the children of Holland’s upper crust: The curator of the Rijks Museum, the conductor of the Concertgebouw orchestra, the CEO of Holland’s number one movie studio, Amsterdam’s mayor, senators, physicians, lawyers, etc.

Many students’ last names were “double” names, like Van Regteren-Altena, Rutgers-van der Loef, Posthuma-De Boer, Korthals-Altes, Van Asperen-de Boer, etc., indicating ancient, noble families.

Like everywhere else, these youngsters organized themselves into mutually discriminating groups. Nowadays, such groups are sometimes called “gangs,” especially when they are lower class. At Amsterdam’s elite Lyceum, the most prestigious group was called the “Clique.” Its value system was not one that would resonate today, certainly not in the United States. The “Clique” assigned prestige for excelling in the arts - poetry, composition, painting, photography, music. Its members impressed girls by reciting Rimbaud and De Maupassant, quoting Henry Miller, Truman Capote, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Radiguet or Anton Chekhov. They got together in lofts above their parents’ apartments, smoked cigarettes (or pipes, preferably), and played recordings of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, Alban Berg’s Lulu and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

 The 17-year old kids all had great intellectual and artistic ambitions. Everyone had to be an aspiring composer, painter, poet, photographer or pianist. The subculture was the reversal of American high schools. The (aspiring) intellectual and artist was cool, he got the girl, and the jock was the ostracized buffoon. For example, Johan made the big time: He published his first photo book titled “We are Seventeen” when he was seventeen, and it was a national best-seller.

 There were parties every weekend, with lots of smoking, wine and necking, and some dancing.

A boy by the name of Feiko Van Asperen De Boer desperately wanted to be a member of the Clique. He, his parents and his beautiful sister Frederic lived right around the corner from the school, near the posh Beethoven street.

For some reason, Feiko became the Clique’s whipping boy. He was bullied relentlessly, week after week, at every party, at school and in every other possible setting. Occasionally the Clique bullied some other member, but no one like Feiko. He was contemptuously called “de Veek,” which is pronounced exactly as “the fake.”

Most of the time, the insults and the violence were verbal. But I also saw him punched mercilessly and beaten to a bloody pulp by others, sometimes at parties, once on the street in front of a house where a party was being held. The sadist on that occasion was a popular aspiring theater star by the name of Gerben.

Did Feiko do anything to deserve this? I couldn’t detect the slightest justification for the bullying, the gossip about him week after week, people ridiculing everything he did, said and wore. But he was desperate to belong. As I saw it, he dressed exquisitely, wearing beautiful fur winter hats and vests, always impeccable in manner and in attire. His forte was Russian literature. He could recite Turgenev and Gogol from memory. His humor was as sophisticated as that of others.

But the Clique required a punching bag. Was he Piggy in Lord of the Flies? I don’t think so. He was too charismatic, too handsome, too normal. I never understood why he was “the one.” Maybe it was sheer random accident. It could have been any one of us.

I have often wondered why Feiko continued to subject himself to such torture, and whether he ever got free and recovered. I recently googled him. I discovered that he became a famous history professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam and that he died in 2009, at the age of 71. Hopefully things turned out well for him
leave comment here

© Tom Kando 2014