A fun day of sightseeing in Arlington, Virginia. The big hill overlooking Washington DC served as the antebellum slave labor camp of General Lee’s wife, which makes it pungently symbolic terrain. It is now Arlington National Cemetery. More affecting than the stiff ritual around the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was the lightly playful quality of the interwar monuments, for example the tribute to Air Force Nurses:
Exiting the northern end of the cemetery was immediately relaxing. The quasi-religious patriotism subsided, and I watched the unruly school groups that encircled the Iwo Jima Marine Corps monument. Sunbathers lounged around the Netherlands Carillon, a 127-foot tall bell tower.
I thought that the first week in May would be dewy and fragrant, but in this lowland city the Netherlands-referencing tulip garden was already scorched. After a morning of marble and granite, the Carillon’s sharp steel felt hypermodern, though it dates back to 1960. The silent bell tower loomed technocratically: a smooth and rectilinear trinket from a doggedly rationalist people.
The dedication on the face of the Carillon has a very Dutch directness: “From the people of the Netherlands to the people of the United States.” No particular historical moment or aspect of Dutch-American friendship is mentioned. Of course, it doesn’t take a history buff to remember where two recent world wars took place, and who-all was involved. But the Carillon doesn’t mention liberation or victory.
No, the timing of Queen Juliana’s gift coincides with the Cold War, and the rebuilding of Benelux as a bulwark against Communist encroachment. The perfect steel surface of the bell tower announces mastery of time and space, and efficient allotment of resources. Not for nothing did the architect come from Rotterdam, the port city razed during WWII and almost entirely rebuilt with smooth, snappy architecture.
I loved the lions in front of the Carillon, who represent the Dutch royal family. Round and figurative, they provide some of that interwar swagger. If the bell tower is a coldly efficient machine, the lions harken back to the old regime, archaic and prideful and voluptuous. Long may they reign.
Further Reading:
National Park Service, Netherlands Carillon.
Ted Fertik, “Geopolitics for the Left,” nplusone, March 11, 2019.