Why is it that Germanic nationalism and folklorism never developed that much in Holland?

Maoistic

Banned
Of all the European nations where a Germanic language is spoken by the vast majority, Holland always struck me as the least interested in any kind of strong Germanic identity. We never see anything like the Brothers Grimm, Wagner or Tolkien emerge from there, nothing like the Aryosophy of Austria, or the revived interest over the Vikings in Scandinavia, all figures or movements dedicated to glorifying the Germanic culture and "civilisation" of pre-Roman and pre-Christian times. Why is this?
 
Of all the European nations where a Germanic language is spoken by the vast majority, Holland always struck me as the least interested in any kind of strong Germanic identity. We never see anything like the Brothers Grimm, Wagner or Tolkien emerge from there, nothing like the Aryosophy of Austria, or the revived interest over the Vikings in Scandinavia, all figures or movements dedicated to glorifying the Germanic culture and "civilisation" of pre-Roman and pre-Christian times. Why is this?

Probably because for the Netherlands the golden age, when the Netherlands was at the top, basicly its myhtical age was the 17th century.
 
And because Germanic does not mean German.

English also is mainly a Germanic language. And however England or Britain is not German.

History just made that the Netherlands developed a distinct identity soon enough not to feel German. And before developing this Dutch self-consciousness, they had never felt German, except maybe for a tiny minority. Before a Dutch self-consciousness emerged, most people in what to become Netherlands felt local.

And it could not be different because historically Germany was the result of the progressive germanization of local Celtic and other local population by a minority of Germanic tribes, the autochthonous peoples progressively adopting or developing a Germanic dialect.

The concept of Germany itself is a Roman invention, mainly of Caesar, to draw a frontier between the area ruled by Rome and the area not ruled by Rome.
 
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ar-pharazon

Banned
Of all the European nations where a Germanic language is spoken by the vast majority, Holland always struck me as the least interested in any kind of strong Germanic identity. We never see anything like the Brothers Grimm, Wagner or Tolkien emerge from there, nothing like the Aryosophy of Austria, or the revived interest over the Vikings in Scandinavia, all figures or movements dedicated to glorifying the Germanic culture and "civilisation" of pre-Roman and pre-Christian times. Why is this?
I don't want to go off topic-but Tolkien wasn't German. He was British. He did study and have a passion for Anglo Saxon and Germanic literature-but he wasn't from or related to Germany or German speaking peoples.

And he didn't glorify pre Christian Germanic civilization so much as try to work in its literary tropes with Christianity Catholic Christianity in particular.
 
Guys who is talking about Germans here? OP only spoke about Germanic, that is pre-Christian and Early Medieval mythology and national myths.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
The premise that such a thing doesn't exist in the Netherlands is incorrect. It just got discredited very quickly. Part of the reason, I've always suspected, is that the proto-romantic-nationalists actually arose early in the Netherlands... and aligned themselves with the French Revolutionaries. After the 'French period', they were discredited. Consider that the Dutch 'patrior movement' in the latter decades of the 18th century came up with the whole 'Batavian myth': the idea that the Dutch had descended from the Germanic tribe of the Batavians, who had floated down the Rhine from "Germany proper" in hollowed-out tree trunks in some mythical past. This highly intrepid explorer-people then founded what became the Netherlands, and their explorere-mindset served to explain why the Netherlands became a mercantile trader nation.

It was all nonsense, by the way. Never happened. But they still named their French-backed state, established when the House of Orange was deposed and forced to flee, the "Batavian Commonwealth". If this state had existed through the early 19th century, you may bet that there would have been a lot of Romantic fake history created for the Netherlands and its "Batavian" people. But in OTL, during the heyday of such Romantic nations, those exact ideas had just been very discredited in the Netherlands. The people involved in the patriot movement didn't want anyone having a reason to recall that they had been on the wrong side during the French Period... so they certainly never mentioned any Batavians again!
 
I don't want to go off topic-but Tolkien wasn't German. He was British. He did study and have a passion for Anglo Saxon and Germanic literature-but he wasn't from or related to Germany or German speaking .

Fun fact: He was. His Fathers family originated from lower saxony. ( But a long time prior JRR ). And Tolkien was therefore (like he himsself speculated) probably the anglized Version of Tollkühn.
 
IIRC there was a Dutch unit in the Waffen SS. Anyone know what sorts of ancient markers of Germanic identity the Nazis appealed to to recruit them? (or did they simply play the Crusade Against Bolshevism angle?)
 

Skallagrim

Banned
IIRC there was a Dutch unit in the Waffen SS. Anyone know what sorts of ancient markers of Germanic identity the Nazis appealed to to recruit them? (or did they simply play the Crusade Against Bolshevism angle?)

Just the regular "common Germanic identity" thing. The big man supporting it within Dutch national socialist circles was Meinoud Rost van Tonningen. He was the leading anti-semite within the Dutch national socialist party, and explicitly wanted the Netherlands to be absorbed directly into a greater German(ic) Reich. (This as opposed to the majority of Dutch national socialists, who were initially far more in line with Mussolini's brand of fascism and weren't even that big on anti-semitism and pan-Germanicism.) We may untimately say that the real "Germanicists" in Dutch national socialist circles never developed any typically Dutch identity for their cause, but instead deliberately stressed their belief that the Dutch were really just an estranged type of German, and should be "re-absorbed" into Germany.
 
Just the regular "common Germanic identity" thing. The big man supporting it within Dutch national socialist circles was Meinoud Rost van Tonningen. He was the leading anti-semite within the Dutch national socialist party, and explicitly wanted the Netherlands to be absorbed directly into a greater German(ic) Reich. (This as opposed to the majority of Dutch national socialists, who were initially far more in line with Mussolini's brand of fascism and weren't even that big on anti-semitism and pan-Germanicism.) We may untimately say that the real "Germanicists" in Dutch national socialist circles never developed any typically Dutch identity for their cause, but instead deliberately stressed their belief that the Dutch were really just an estranged type of German, and should be "re-absorbed" into Germany.

What did the more Mussolini-style fascists base Dutch identity on? The 17th century mercantile empire? Maybe a hyper-masculine and intolerant Calvinism? ;)
 

Skallagrim

Banned
What did the more Mussolini-style fascists base Dutch identity on? The 17th century mercantile empire? Maybe a hyper-masculine and intolerant Calvinism? ;)

As far as I'm aware (although I'm hardly an expert) they didn't really stress the matter. Anton Mussert was a respected engineer before he became a fascist, and he tended to think like one. His initial "Programme" for what should be done in the Netherlands was very business-like, dropping the racial stuff and all that. He demanded strong government, the abolition of democracy, the institution of corporatism as a socio-economic model, the subservience of economic interests to the well-being of society, a duty to work paired with a right to social security and a radical limitation of "liberal freedoms" like the freedom of the press.

...yeah, it was pretty much the most under-dressed, most business-like version of fascism ever. That's the Dutch for you: even when some among us go for the most hysterical, shouty ideology in history, we still manage to be very Dutch about it. Maybe that's why wild romantic nationalism never worked out here in the Netherlands: our who national identity is based on such phrases as "just act normal, that's crazy enough".
 

yamatokreig

Banned
I don't want to go off topic-but Tolkien wasn't German. He was British. He did study and have a passion for Anglo Saxon and Germanic literature-but he wasn't from or related to Germany or German speaking peoples.

Tolkien's family was actually from germany, though his family had been in the UK for generations. They came from 1756 in Saxony fleeing war and several families still do have the Tolkien surname in Lower Saxony.
 
The one thing I've noticed about the Dutch in particular but also other small northern European countries is that you "punch above your weight" culturally, in sport, usually niche wise without being jerks. Even the Scandinavians show the Germans "this is how you do pan Germanic nationalism" right without all those annoying bad habits like invading most of Europe.
 
My answer would be that the Netherlands already had a very strong national identity forged in the late 16th and 17th centuries, so when Romantic nationalism became a thing in the 19th century it already had something to fall back on, quite unlike Germany which hadn't been nearly as succesful at forming one (not even in the 16th century, where proto-nationalism as an alternative to religious identity was widely attempted*). In the Netherlands there were already humanists intellectuals repurposing Julius Civilis' Batavian rebellion of the first century to provide a national epic centuries before the Germans did the same with with Arminius. And that's just on an 'intellectual'/artistic level. 19th century Romantic nationalism differed by being popular too, but for that the Netherlands also had a long tradition of Orangism, which had always held widespread lower-class appeal.

There was simply very little need for anything resembling a new Völkisch approach to nationality in the Netherlands. There were already well-established traditions, including ones about Germanic antiquity, to fall back on, if the need ever arose for a story to stretch national unity. And of course, with the Netherlands being neutral throughout most of the 19th century, there was little need for a strident anti-Roman/French saga either, as was the case in Germany.

Consider that the Dutch 'patrior movement' in the latter decades of the 18th century came up with the whole 'Batavian myth': the idea that the Dutch had descended from the Germanic tribe of the Batavians, who had floated down the Rhine from "Germany proper" in hollowed-out tree trunks in some mythical past
The Batavian myth in some shape or form goes back much, much further than the 18th century patriot movement (all the way back to the Guelders Wars, last I checked), although I agree that the Patriots put their own spin on things. Mind, these are the same people that tried to repurpose the Dutch maiden into a Marianne analogue.

*Partially because the Dutch population was so well-educated and literate, the Dutch Republic managed to become one of the few countries on the continent where the politiques didn't lose out completely.
 
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Maoistic

Banned
I don't want to go off topic-but Tolkien wasn't German. He was British. He did study and have a passion for Anglo Saxon and Germanic literature-but he wasn't from or related to Germany or German speaking peoples.

And he didn't glorify pre Christian Germanic civilization so much as try to work in its literary tropes with Christianity Catholic Christianity in particular.
I know he wasn't German, that's why I said Germanic, and Britain developed a highly Anglo-Saxon identity, that is, Germanic identity, and his country, England, speaks a Germanic language.
 

Maoistic

Banned
Guys who is talking about Germans here? OP only spoke about Germanic, that is pre-Christian and Early Medieval mythology and national myths.
Yes. This. People are confusing German with Germanic. Germanic, to be more specific, refers to everything related to the Germanic nations, not to Germany alone. Anglo-Saxons, Frisians, Swedes, are all Germanics. That's why I mentioned Tolkien and the Scandinavian interest in Vikings.
 
The one thing I've noticed about the Dutch in particular but also other small northern European countries is that you "punch above your weight" culturally, in sport, usually niche wise without being jerks. Even the Scandinavians show the Germans "this is how you do pan Germanic nationalism" right without all those annoying bad habits like invading most of Europe.

To be fair, in our case we mostly did that in the 17th century, and would likely have continued attempting to do so into the 18th if other countries hadn't caught up in terms of mass mobilisation.
 
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