Adilkno

Cracking the Movement

Squatting beyond the media


Foreword

by Mik Ezdanitoff, Fashion Philosopher

The squatters' movement, for me as an outsider, formed an intense yet chaotic 
united front of people among whom no disparities existed. This uniform 
solidarity was more than just a trompe-l'oeil-effect caused by the equalizing 
visual overkill which an intently riotous mass or an enthusiastic horde rocking 
by creates. It always had to do with the fact that they actually looked the 
same.

The clothing of the movement looked sexless (thus »masculine«), dirty and 
ripped. There were hard patches and nasty stains on it, PLO shawls, thick 
mountain shoes and motorcycle jackets went with it, and it was complemented by a 
strong-smelling blend of gasoline, sweat and beer traces. Except for the short, 
black, real leather jackets, the squatters' dress did not distinguish itself 
from the big-city street fashion of drug addicts and alcoholics. Just as the 
outfit of wandering junkies and drunks, through falling and getting up from 
obstacles like the gutter, acquires just that extra touch whereby it differs 
from the by-the-kilo fashion of the welfare-case lumpenvolk(ital.), so the 
squatters' clothing acquired its antisocial aura simply by going out squatting. 
Whichever parts the brought-from-home basis collection was assembled out of, 
through DIY, pulling, pushing, lugging and the squatters' slapstick and art, it 
was unavoidably transformed into a complete squat wardrobe.

Squat dress resembled the work clothes of miners, chimney sweeps and tanker 
cleaners. It looked at least as rough and filthy, only it couldn't be traded in 
after work for a designer sweat suit. Because the movement was against social 
power strategies, like the division between the boss' time and free time. There 
were no fixed working hours, or something like that.

Squat dress also borrowed something from survival equipment. It too was all-
purpose clothing, could stand a skirmish, was designed for every atmospheric 
fluctuation and was non-seasonal. While the survival uniform actually sets out 
to be able to stand a confrontation with the elements of wild nature, squatters' 
dress was intended to withstand the material dialogue with the elements of big 
city power culture in a reasonable way. During the disinterested staking of 
one's own body and the throwing of household articles, the displacement of 
furniture from the street and the lighting up of homemade projects, the heavily 
falling-to-pieces and many-layered squatters' clothing offered direct protection 
against the city's obtrusive powers.

Although squat dress was from the street and afforded one an identity, it did 
not become a fashion. It differed in this way from punk attire and the working-
class look. Because the last two made up a part of squat dress, we can talk of 
some scene formation inside the movement. Thus the self-conscious corduroy 
jacket of the public park service could become an anti-society garment. Fashion 
is that which can be bought in clothing stores. Where fashion always socializes, 
squat dress was not available in stores, and was thus antisocial. It hung 
nowhere, lay nowhere, but sat in garbage cans. It demonstrated besides a maximum 
of bourgeois impropriety, and this free of charge at the cost of the taxpayers' 
community. Squat dress was more than action clothing; it was itself an action.

If squat dress wasn't social, what was it? With its dark looks it brought to 
mind the national-socialist fashion hues. Nevertheless, the movement attached no 
value to its dress and, as I see it, dissociated from it in cases of panic, 
while the fascist suit is a strictly personal, symbol-plastered parade costume 
from which separation is psychologically difficult.

Adilkno's Movement Teachings makes no attempt to legitimatize crowd spectacles 
after the fact by giving them a social twist. Neither is it a history book, 
though it's chock full of bizarre and absurd anecdotes; it is above all a 
textbook in which the concepts of mass and movement are set against each other 
chapter by chapter according to the method of applied casuistry. The Teachings 
are thus prevented from turning into social therapy. This is also how they have 
escaped being theoretical acrobatics. The theory, the Movement Teachings, is 
radically raked away and swept together in the opening and closing chapters. 
What remains of theory in the chapters in between is the manner in which certain 
events are or are not described, and the connections between the different 
descriptions. Through this »absence« of theory the engrossing stories which thus 
arise achieve a remarkable clarity. At the same time the Movement Teachings are 
distinguished by a swift pace. They produce a racket bringing to mind the bells 
and whistles of the squatters' acid house parties, while in contrast the new 
social theory prefers the silence of the funeral chamber. The smoke which the 
Movement Teachings (like any good theory) expel smells not of incense, myrrh and 
gold dust, but of tear gas, tires and mattresses. The smoke of the movement is 
not a cloud masking its shortcomings, but a signal that something's going on. 
And we are there.

Ulrum, January 1990


Special Movement Teachings

The Constitution of the Squat Movement

The movement of 1980 appeared at the historical moment when the media had been 
introduced and accepted and were stepping into their phase of total hegemony. 
Without being aware of it, this movement flourished outside the reach of the 
media. For the construction of its structures it did not need the media. Its 
appeal could, moreover, not be expressed by any organ of the press. Literally 
everything which is said and written about it misses the mark. The "injustices, 
insinuations and pure lies" that have been spread about the squatters' movement 
over the years were intended to summon it to pronounce a truth about itself. 
That it ultimately complied, however, actually proves nothing. Once something 
extra-medial is exposed to the media, it begins to become something else.

Characteristic of the post-World War II free west is the disappearance of the 
crowd, which lives in the street and can suddenly form itself into an entity 
that can actively perform. From the beginnings of the modern city, crowds of 
people had hung around in streets everywhere. They were alternately stirred up 
or kept in check through the use of them as bearers of that which is socially 
imaginary, whether in the form of revolutionary or as bit player. This danger of 
the mass as fascist horde or communist proletariat is now being banished by the 
democratic community through the universal introduction of the media which were 
developed in the war: automobile traffic and television. Since the 1950s the 
collective fantasy has been weaned from the historic question within the city's 
ambiance and focused on mass traffic on the freeways outside the city, where 
every individual can live out his longings toward space. The crowds of people in 
the street are being conditioned not to see themselves as a group with the 
potential for independent action.

The pedestrians have become part of a stream of traffic which may not stand 
still, must keep circulating. The individual moves as a singular part in this 
stream. The other becomes a hindrance instead of a potential ally: meetings no 
longer take place in the street. The ideal of free circulation gets allotted a 
vector besides, in the form of automobility. Regulated traffic gives the stream 
a direction. This offers the individual traffic participant the security of 
being part of a collective project: the conquering of space, freedom of movement 
without obstacle. When one has taken one's place in the cabin, the other users 
of the road lose their reality as people who are capable of anything. They are 
absorbed into the only remaining reality, that of traffic as continuous 
movement. In both cases, on foot and in the vehicle, the crowd no longer 
perceives itself as a crowd, but as a medium for transport from a to b. 

The free flow of information on television transforms reality one step further. 
With the introduction of the picture tube the vanished real crowd of street- and 
highway-users is replaced by the imaginary crowd of the fellow viewers. In order 
to function the television must evoke an imaginary reality on two levels. On the 
one hand, it asks the viewers to suppose a reality behind the screen; on the 
other, one is required to see oneself as part of an audience that is tuned in in 
every living room. In the imaginary crowd the other is thought up, while with 
the real crowd the other is swept along.

When the movement of '68 rediscovered the crowd as a potential revolutionary 
subject, it asssumed that this crowd still existed. It had to establish that, 
insofar as formation of a crowd can still be spoken of, it appears only in the 
forms of "merge" signs and viewer ratings. This imaginary crowd was designated a 
consumer society, against which it subsequently went to battle with 
consciousness-altering substances, from mentality-affectors to terrorist 
bombings. In addition it turned on the TV for a phenomenon that dated from the 
age of the newspaper: the action, performed with an eye to the press hounds, 
which must turn into a media event.

Yet in the 60s the real crowd also came to the surface of history a few times. 
There are moments at which a crowd, whether of laborers or chance passers-by, 
without premeditated council becomes overwhelmed by a desire. This desire 
manifests itself by establishing that people are waiting for something. When the 
sign is given, we know what for: the event which is brought about by the crowd 
in order to get rid of its desire at one time. This event can be prepared for or 
thought out, but distinguishes itself, following an initiating action, by a 
chain reaction which exceeds all original intentions. First the event is 
induced, and it subsequently takes things over from the actors. The usual tree 
diagram of cause and effect is then abruptly replaced by a causality carousel of 
incidents and stories in which cause and effect turn out to be interchangeable. 
The event thus acquires a fatal character: it will happen this way, and not 
otherwise; it is one-time, local, ecstatic. During the event a compression of 
time occurs; it takes on an intensity whereby past and future fade into 
insignificance. It appears as the intrusion of the present on the plodding 
advance of history. It is an unexpected return of an earlier reality, which is 
thus experienced as primeval reality. The wholesale chaos during a street riot 
is experienced by the crowd as an elementary reality, which, independent of the 
progression of the civilization process or the state of the technological 
culture, proves indestructibly current.

During such an event, the meeting takes place between the strangers who populate 
the city. The crowd, which as a stream of traffic had become invisible to 
itself, recognizes itself anew and reacts as such: it rediscovers its reality in 
a concrete form. The individuals who, according to Canetti, overcome their fear 
of touch in the crowd, meet each other as bodies and embrace that experience at 
once. And this while in the daily order the other was merely an image, a 
collection of advertising messages regarding lifestyle, status, sexuality, 
subculture. The accumulation of characteristics everyone makes of himself loses 
its disciplining impact on the spot. The meeting is an event without closer 
acquaintance. People just bump into each other and the energy released by this 
collision gives direction to the further course of events. Others whose 
existence you had never suspected declare themselves, unasked, in solidarity 
with your actions, and add through their extreme normality one more scoop on top 
of the oddity of the whole situation. However exceptional the damage caused in 
the stories that make the rounds later, the concrete incidents are shorter-lived 
than the ultimate surprise at how in the world this could have happened. The 
chain reaction has surpassed every initiating action. The amazement over this 
can be hardened into a nostalgic attitude, which demands that the events of the 
good old days, having become inconceivable, will not happen again. But it can 
also be transformed into the radiance of the promise that the adventure can be 
relived, that the same event can be staged more times, from beginning to end, 
but by us ourselves.

The audio-visual media are traffic vehicles like any other. They, like train, 
auto and plane, produce moving images of an outside world with which we can make 
no direct contact. The users of the road and the TV screen, closed up in a 
comfortable cabin or salon, are plugged into the accelerated images with such 
force that it presents itself to them as a unique, individual viewing 
experience. Seated on the throne from which they can survey the world, their 
image of the world is divided into fragments by the constantly changing camera 
angle. It takes a thorough education to convince them that there are more 
participants in this traffic who must be taken into account. Reality only 
returns in the event of a catastrophe: a collision, interference or a blackout. 
For the rest, everything is imaginary, on the tube or through the windshield, 
not untrue or unreal, but autonomous. In the TV image the real crowd has not 
disappeared, but has been reduced to an audience which is shown as scenery for 
the media spectacle, in order to enhance its realistic effect. If that audience 
is left out, due to flood or fire, then it will spontaneously show up a day 
after the event to claim its right to exist in the capacity of tourists of 
disaster.

The media hunt for the event, which is experienced by a real crowd, to bring it 
into a scenario on which the crowd itself has no grip: the media event. The 
reality factor of the original event here appears as the amusement factor of the 
spectacle, which has no other purpose than to keep the viewers tuned in. The 
media event is directed news, and can always take a different course than was 
anticipated, independently of the cameras present. It can be repeated 
infinitely, in slow motion if necessary. It is global, can be received 
worldwide; it has no exclusive bond with the place where it happened, does not 
know the local experience. There is no chain reaction of incidents which branch 
out in all directions to ultimately spin around. In the media event a flow of 
items is set into motion, everything gradually rolls together into one single 
image which will function as a symbol. Whereas the event(ITAL) acquires an 
ecstatic character, the aura of the media(ITAL) event stays limited to the 
broadcast itself. It does not compress time, but strives for a permanent 
timeliness. Insofar as it leads to anything, it leads to the subsequent media 
spectacles. What's attractive is that it's fully without consequences for the 
viewers, "risky but comfortable." It derives its impact not from the attack of 
the present on the rest of time, but from its instantaneous omnipresence, the 
guarantee that it's receivable worldwide and really being watched. Without 
viewers there is no media event; the imaginary crowd of the people at home lends 
the festive character to what would otherwise have just been news. Without this 
mediumistic extra the viewer immediately gets the feeling of being tuned to the 
wrong channel.

The media create the space in which the imaginary crowd is called into being. 
While everyone's individually busy with his own media consumption, the media 
carry out the ideology of contact. They offer information about the world as 
shown by them, without strings concoction instead of connection. The media are 
not out to communicate, but to alienate. They are in capable of making from the 
most mundane incident a strange spectacle, by conjuring the item's place into a 
location. But when the audience turns its back on such a media event and starts 
waving at the camera, this is censored with an instantaneous change of camera 
angle, because interaction with the media disturbs the reality effect. The 
contact brought about by the media is by definition media-tized, and thus never 
more than an introduction, a flood of data. In the media we can get introduced 
to everything and everyone, but meeting them is not included. The meeting, after 
all, only feeds off the information exchange; it takes place itself on another 
level, in the shadow of communication. The meeting is data-free; that gives it 
its unthinkable quality. It is collision, disturbance of the everyday existence, 
destruction of nostalgia and promises; it happens, all at once, instantly. "This 
meeting will not be televised."

The material passed on to the movement teachings concerns squatting in the 
Netherlands during the last twelve years or so. Characteristic of it was that it 
stubbornly tried to withdraw itself from the decade of which it undesiredly and 
unavoidably was a part. The miracle of the movement squatters was that they, on 
the threshold of the media era, successfully indulged in an extra-medial reality 
and kept the memory of it alive, in a time when that level of reality was 
supposed to have long since disappeared.

Squatting was originally nothing more than breaking open a door. Moving into 
living space without the required permits was considered a fairly normal thing 
to do. It was done in connection with family or neighbors and caused little stir 
because it had been happening since the 1960s, and according to some even as 
early as 1945. No one got excited, except the future residents of the house. No 
police or mass-journalism stepped in. Everything usually quieted down again 
quickly.

When things changed in the late 1970s, in that people began to squat without 
direct relations in or with the neighborhood, that too remained hardly 
sensational. Though sometimes fifty buildings slated for demolition were broken 
into in a few months and newly refurbished for inhabitation, the press still 
couldn't get excited about it. It had little interest in the squatters, and 
ditto the other way around. Insofar as squatters in a neighborhood engaged in 
publicity, it consisted of self-copied information and posters. Squatting stood 
for nothing; it did not present itself as a social protest begging for 
attention. It was not a resistance, fight or reaction, but the beginning of 
something new: the insight that, apart from the political belief in rules, 
concrete problems can be solved practically. This shock released a true craving 
for the event, under the motto "from the one comes the other."

Talking over the squat, its preparation and execution, the hookup of the 
telephone for the alarm network, the collective home repair jobs, keeping police 
or landlords out of the way - that was all part of such an event: a slow, 
unsurveyable, gradually accelerating series of meetings with people about whom 
you found out nothing else except that they would show up in the event it was 
necessary. These unexpected convergences released the energy with which the 
craving for the event was transformed into actions. The meeting gave the 
assurance that you could do almost anything: "Happy Go Lucky Squatting." When 
you'd let things go fully to hell, you could always phone up for the protection 
offered by the other from the shit you'd brought on yourself. The aura you had 
collectively conjured up around yourselves produced the triumphant feeling of 
being able to survive an event. This aura consisted of the potential crowd of 
the fellow squatters, the sum total of all those ready and willing, who appeared 
on certain exclusive occasions as a real crowd at the door waiting for trouble.

In the riot the slow progression of the squatting event in a neighborhood runs 
at an accelerated pace. The chain of incidents at the beginning of the open-air 
play had to be brought about piece by piece in order to keep things going, but 
when the chain reaction gets underway, time is compressed to a series of 
fragments of maximal intensity. This moment arose when the potential crowd of 
squatters appeared in the street for a demonstration or a (re)squat and there 
spontaneously turned into an open crowd to which every bystander could find a 
connection. The riot also took the media authorities by surprise; they could 
only come running in after the fact, and this drove the rioters away. This riot 
is sovereign, because it is not performed for the eye of the media, it strives 
after no propagandist goals, is not aimed against bosses or the state, but 
shrieks over the street for its own sake and ultimately leaves its participants 
behind in the freedom of surprise and the shiver of panic. Afterwards you watch 
the TV news and the papers are studied for their the pretty pictures. The 
reports and commentaries were not skipped over, but were written in a language 
which simply had nothing to do with it. "Hardening," "alienation of progressive 
people," "future of the constitutional state," "marginalization." No debate got 
going with the well-meaning "leftist press," either, because it continued to see 
the "squatters' revolt" through the lenses of its own past. Thus the event, 
withdrawn from the eye by the cloud of media, is recorded in pictures and 
stories that will do service for years to come. This was how the original 
actions entered the imaginary stage.

In the vacuum between event and picture-story the feeling of movement arises. 
This shared perception balances on the border between an extra-medial, 
untransferable experience and the realization that this outrageous occurrence, 
too, will unavoidably be registered in the journalistic expos·Ç·. It is the 
feeling that something is set into motion, without being clear what that thing 
is and what direction it's taking. It is uncertainty about the range of the 
experiences, about the extent of the damage caused in the bourgeois 
consciousness. But a painful apprehension goes along with it, that you have 
become a movement, that the growth of the open crowd has been called to a halt, 
its extent becoming measurable for police and opinion pollers. This course of 
history was countered by planning the next demonstrations, by creating the 
circumstances in which the chain reaction can get going once more, through the 
readiness to be carried away by a chain of events which will go in unforeseen 
directions. Coming events get anti-medial characteristics this way. They will 
try as hard as they can to withdraw from the film-eye, or won't be able to care 
less about it at the moment supr·ä·me. Cameras become associated with police 
spies and evidence, and because of that are required to be cut from the action.

But the longing to see the real crowd grow again can also be a reason to direct 
the focus towards the imaginary crowd. The latter was at the time designated 
"the public opinion," which could not be repelled with overly rough images. 
Otherwise "the sympathisers" would stay home or even turn "against us." This 
attentiveness to keeping hold of the approval of the real supposed population 
shifted as it went to concern for the interest of the snapshot- and 
gossipmongers themselves. They too had slowly but surely become old 
acquaintances. At the same time the notion of a public opinion began to become 
vague. The term coincided unnoticed with what until then had been called "the 
press" and would ultimately become "the media" as such. The media do not so much 
consist of a collection of press contacts, but form rather the unconscious 
knowledge that the image- and sound-carriers are only tuned in in the case that 
the events are staged sufficiently media-genically. Through this the media 
become a bloc, a notion in singular. The media is the realization that 
everything is registered, but that only a few fragments will become items.

From out of the feeling of movement, one was in the first instance suspicious 
about the swift introduction of the title "squatters' movement" in the media, in 
analogy with workers, students, women and the environment. There was a fear that 
you would be required to use the term to give direction, scope and substance to 
your own screwing around, while it had only just begun. In the beginning it was 
obvious that this term suggesting one body was an imaginary quantity, the 
senselessness of which was most sharply proven by the allegation that you could 
join it. It was also clear that "the squat movement" had to be a closed 
subculture, intended to scare others away, and thus ultimately part of the press 
campaign for the "criminalization of squatters." When you felt forced to speak 
Newsspeak, you were inclined to pointedly avoid the word; you preferred to sign 
as, for example, "the assembled Amsterdam squat groups" which were aimed "At All 
Amsterdam People." People who spoke "in the name of the squat movement" or about 
"the squatters' movement" fell flat on their faces. Terms of this sort were only 
used ironically.

But it is unavoidable that eventually a certain pattern is discovered in one's 
own behaviors. They not only act on each other, but interfere as well. Knowledge 
concerning police methods and the mentality of news-gatherers plays as important 
a role in this as the neighborhood experiences, riot experiences, knowledge of 
the outlay of the city and organizational structures. Once this sort of pattern 
is discovered, a frame of reference arises in which future "axions" are 
evaluated a priori on their feasibility and the degree of hassle you bring down 
on yourself with it. Slowly but surely your own activities are thus given a 
goal, and the diffuse whole inside which you operate is given a substance, which 
crystallizes into a code of behavior. In scarcely a year's time the squatters 
had acquired a service record for which, if no compression of time had taken 
place, in a manner of speaking should have taken years of busting ass. All those 
elements counted together gradually became, in the inside language too, equated 
with "the squat movement." This is aimed at the conservation of the codes of 
behavior and prevents them from someday disappearing. The squat movement comes 
into being when squatters are no longer overcome by a desire for events, but 
choose to "go on." That becomes the goal.

In the Netherlands of the 1980s, the picture the press has of its own end 
products becomes an integral part of the information offered. The theory of 
relativity finds general acceptance in the media: reality changes through 
observation. The media no longer see themselves as a mirror of reality or as the 
truth behind public opinion. Press personalities, who with all their technical 
prostheses put themselves on the screen ever more professionally, use the media 
to make it clear to the public that news is a product. We can see and hear every 
day that the media, like other consumer goods, are manufactured according to the 
industrial/creative process. The worth of the product is evaluated according to 
its speed, uniqueness, aesthetic and apocalyptic qualities - in short, its 
topicality - and proven through its viewer ratings - its amusement value. If an 
event wants to appear in the media, it must meet these requirements.

The squatters who got caught up in a series of events, spectacular or not, had 
experienced them firsthand and knew that everything depicted about them in the 
media was a fraud - and that there was a method to the madness. The list of 
demands the media were imposing on themselves was intuitively felt to be the 
standards "registrations" had to meet in order to become news. With those rules 
there was a game to be played; for example, making authority and order look 
jerky. The media itself too, after all, handled these things as attack-weapons. 
And the media caste loved to be considered so important. The real crowd, which 
had once raised hell in the street, became an imaginary factor to be taken into 
account in politics, media and squat bar. The coming-out of the media occurred 
in interplay with the activists' entrance into media-reality. By notifying the 
press agencies in advance about forthcoming events, it was guaranteed that the 
reporters too would be on location on time. They demanded in return that 
mediumistic pictures could be shot. The code of correct squatters' behavior, 
which after the compressed time of the first events became the notion of "the 
squatters' movement," began to coincide with the code for correct media 
performance.

The made-to-fit-the-media incident is the action. This is presented for an 
imaginary audience watching over the shoulders of the press agents. While a riot 
takes over the space it races through, an action is a small explosion in the 
emptiness of normality. If the medial gleam is absent, then it quickly becomes a 
painfully embarrassing display. It must be said emphatically, however, that this 
does not mean that the actions were "soft." To be able to continue penetrating 
the overfed medial consciousness of the viewers at home, the activists found 
that their deeds had to become more and more direct and concrete, or give the 
appearance of being such. The "hard action" became the trademark of the squat 
movement; its effectiveness could be measured against the conquered media-
minutes. The free publicity for their own style of action had the unavoidable 
spin-off that, for example, squatting became a tourist attraction that appeared 
in the world press, municipal propaganda and travel brochures.

A remarkable distance gradually arose between everyday squatting and the media 
event for which the action provided the pictures. Even if you'd been involved 
the whole day, at home for dinner you were outside once more. You yourself were 
then part of the imaginary mass at whom your heavy action was aimed. The medial 
space was elsewhere, somewhere you went, on your bicycle. If people felt part of 
"the squat movement," it became, through the creation of the image which it 
called down upon itself, imaginary itself.

This was the moment at which the dropouts showed up and gave in radically to the 
desire to definitively disappear from the stage. A second group was made up of 
those who wanted to go on, who figured they were able to assume a new form by 
changing the existing structures and using them for something else. To that end, 
under the motto "squatting is more than just living," a diverse collection of 
action themes was launched, which was supposed to give chance solidarities an 
institutional frame. This was also directed against the tendency, inherent to 
the "squat movement" concept, of seeing itself as an old-style revolutionary 
bloc. Ever since the beginning there had been a black helmet brigade which felt 
it had joined battle with the municipal social democracy. They used buildings 
and stray figures as instruments for this higher goal, which they never allowed 
others to bring up for discussion. Finally, another group was busy, outside the 
course of events, throwing up new structures as before by starting up squat 
discussion hours in new neighborhoods, moving into buildings, having actions. 
Gradually the structure of buildings and neighborhoods proved to be transformed 
by this into a collection of scenes which attracted and repelled each other. 
When this was finally designated "the movement," the same mechanism of 
introduction and refusal, acceptance and takeover, occurred as with the "squat 
movement" concept. The movement, once on its way, could no longer be stopped.

The movement is the memory of the event. It is not the sum of adventures and 
groups, but an image, reflection or interpretation of the preceding, for the 
movers themselves as well as outsiders. This creation of an image is by 
definition media-tized, whether it takes place in "inside" or "bourgeois" 
historical writing; that group which is carried along in the events and meets 
each other there knows that the media reports sheer nonsense about it. Those 
who, for whatever legitimate reason, show up too late and have to be satisfied 
by the pictures and stories can all too easily take them to be true. While the 
first group of squatters was overcome by the events, the latecomers claimed that 
they were organized by the first group. The context of the legends would have 
been the result of the political ideology, which was left over in "the movement" 
as a sort of residue of the events. This remnant would have been the source out 
of which the preceding had appeared.

The second and following generations of squatters came across as a collection of 
self-made lawbreakers who were in the middle of the scene-forming phase. The 
squat movement had already long been an imaginary crowd which people still 
thought they could join up with, while it had already transformed itself into a 
"movement," which was concerned with very different things. Within the old guard 
there had long been no talk of a real crowd or a compression of time. The 
actions which were done scene-by-scene no longer relied on mutual interaction; 
even on nights with an enormous accumulation of private initiatives they did not 
begin to strengthen each other, but continued in their parallel existences, just 
like the scenes.  At the most they produced surprise a day later over the fact 
that there turned out to be more people with the same shadowy hobby. People 
sought interaction with the media, not with each other. The real crowd that 
could increase just like that had become something unknown and creepy, a memory 
which was brought up again as the discussion over "broadening," in which 
nostalgia had to be sublimated to the desire for movement. Solidarity, which had 
once swept over you just like the event, now suddenly had to be artificially 
induced through taking action themes upon which everyone agreed anyway (fascism, 
racism, sexism). New initiatives get no further than a remix of good 
acquaintances and old contacts.

If the movement is the memory of an adventure, the scene is the memory of a 
meeting. This is ascribed afterwards to a shared lifestyle, and the scene 
becomes the plateau for the spectacular staging of it. Through the use of the 
word "movement," a larger context and a historic continuity are suggested, which 
legitimatize and block the behavioral codes of the scene. As lifestyle pur sang, 
however, it would not need the past; it could shine in the ecstatic experience 
of its manifestation. But the movement scene cannot see itself apart from the 
squatting past, because it faces the dilemma that the squat movement has never 
wanted to trace its own end, or stage it. The scene no longer succeeds in 
shamelessly turning the present upside down; the dead weight of history makes it 
insensitive to the prevailing circumstances of the now. The scene is still 
waiting for the meeting and the event. In order to keep alive the memory and its 
promise, they still, after laborious reunion discussions and months of 
preparations, sometimes take part in "medium-sized actions" in connection with 
organizations. When an event takes place, it overtakes the scenes like a natural 
disaster. Such a catastrophic riot is actually still unleashed only by absolute 
beginners who are enthusiastically willing to fetch and carry materials for some 
totally unknown purpose.

The media does not know metamorphosis. It constructs and distributes mass-
produced identities and requires everyone who comes into contact with it to show 
his or her papers. It challenges its users from series to quiz show to look at 
themselves on the screen. It has replaced the classic model, in which every 
individual could be socially placed on the basis of work and sex, with the 
identities market, where you can be anything you want, as long as you're 
something and let it show. Activists figured out over time that you couldn't 
stay permanently current, but that you could get back into the media, as long as 
you presented yourself time after time under another name and organizational 
form. Being elusive for press and police was achieved through playing off the 
media norm of name and intention against itself. Thus it also became less and 
less lucrative to appear as the squat movement, however staunchly loyal you 
remained to it in your own circle. This desire to become imaginary resulted in a 
knowledge of media-machinations, which became second nature, an automatism in 
which the action only exists once it's been an item. The entry into medial 
space, to the neglect of the extra-medial, resulted in the forgetting of the 
possibility of metamorphosis, which was accepted without a thought by the 
squatters in the early days. One can consciously and at will switch over from 
one identity to the other. But metamorphosis has nothing to do with desire or 
consciousness, with choosing from myriad options. The transformation is possible 
when one enters the emptiness at the right moment in order to appear elsewhere 
as something different, without it being established what. The medium of the 
metamorphosis is the body, the matter itself, and not only its image, or 
identity. Thus the individual changes into, for example, a crowd-person through 
breaking with the fear of touch, through a sudden acknowledgement and 
appreciation of his own and others' bodies, through wiping out the will and the 
personal biography. The desire for change is not enough for a transformation; 
once underway the process acquires its own tempo, takes a turn and carries you 
along. The metamorphosis short-circuits with reality and thus maximizes its 
intensity. The meeting during the event is the moment of the turn. By accepting 
the succession of images and identities in the media as some kind of reality, 
the activist segment of the nation lost the potential to disappear from the 
stage and lose itself in the process of unforeseeable transformations.

The movement teachings tackle this puzzle of appearances and disappearances in 
extra-medial reality. Movement teachings are a way of seeing as well as a book, 
and present delayed insights without asking themselves what good it might do. 
They are not out to dig up all the stories. There has already been so much 
written about some events. But their selection is not a judgment of quality. In 
the material which they have thankfully been granted, the movement teachings 
seek the moments at which the patterns manifest themselves. The rest is history.


Squatting in the Beginning

The Wonder of Local Space Travel

Out of the anonymity of the city an address has appeared. At once the nameless 
building loses its inconspicuousness; the vacancy inside is recognized. And the 
decision is made. We're going to squat.

Then the heroes appear. They've already part of the other reality, to which we 
are still en route. They give us a hand as we cross. Their matter-of-fact D-I-Y 
attitude can be more closely read about in the guide, available at the 
squatters' consultation hour. We've been waiting for this for years.

The group, ready to step inside the shadow-reality once squatting, saw these 
figures appear in the form of the handymen. Every neighborhood had a few. They 
knew how to break open a door, install gas, water and electricity, barricade a 
building, what you had to say to a ranting muscleman or the lady next door, or 
what to do in case of club-waving flat hats. They brought out stories of 
unbelievably wild events from times long past. They had know-how, tools. They 
knew what could be done. The heroes didn't see squatting as a protest action, 
but taught you that a building should only be squatted for immediate use. After 
a few days they vanished again.

Sometimes nothing more happened after that; squatting ended in domesticity, 
lease, residence permit. But for the same money it could become a treacherous 
journey that cut straight through the curriculum vitae. Radical naivete, just do 
it, aggressive innocence, the future to the winds, topical indignation, not a 
care for the law, disbelief in their violence...Only like this could you really 
start exploring the space outside the existing order, whether of free will by 
placing yourself on the emergency phone tree, or »alarm list,« and being at the 
neighborhood meeting, or under pressure of circumstances: a gang of thugs sent 
by a property owner, court action, or a sudden en masse visit by squatters from 
your street.

In the middle of the city, amid the concrete shapes of the daily tedium, you 
stepped into a space of unlimited possibilities. The point was not to create 
something new, but to use the old to depart for somewhere else:

»Oscar, Wouter, Bear and I knew each other from the Stuttel Bar, where we spent 
the evening when we had nothing better to do. We were all looking for a place to 
live and squatting seemed like fun. Oscar had seen an empty house in the 
Spuistraat. That was nearby, so after an evening in the Stuttel we went to have 
a look. We looked at the corner building after I'd kicked in the door and were 
enthusiastic about the space. The next day we got hold of some mattresses and 
blankets. We slept in the building next door, which we'd also found empty when 
we entered this house on the roof via the window and gutter.

After further exploration over the roof, the four of us found out we had a 
gigantic complex at our disposal, with all kinds of weird-looking rooms where 
here and there the lights were still on. We intended to keep it among friends, 
so that you'd always meet people in the building who you knew and who had the 
same attitude - I mean we four thought living was something subordinate; that 
you have fun is much more important. We picked out the best rooms and bombarded 
the NRC into a general gaming den.« The former NRC Handelsblad building, now 
legalized, rent-paying and renovated, is still a landmark, and an empty section 
of it was resquatted in 1991 after sitting empty for too long.

That was the squat experience: that behind a kicked-open door an incredibly 
large complex could be found, with here and there »the lights still on.« Even 
stronger, it was the only thing the assembled squatters had in common. Squatting 
formed not a historical mission, but an extra-historic space with as fourth 
dimension the play. It offered sensory sensations. Entry into it was of a 
violence which could only be conjured up through a fixed series of actions.

It began with waiting for the address of an advance meeting point, the tools 
which were rounded up, the arrangements and instructions. The small crew which 
will break the building open leaves, then the rest, who feel that they stick out 
like sore thumbs on the way to the building. The din of a break-in with crowbar 
and hammer resounds through the street and puts you even more on show. Then the 
moment of the running, a spurt of 50 or 100 meters which, necessary or not, you 
always make: the door was the sucking-point through which you're pulled across 
the border into the other space. The violence against the door was the 
transgression of the law which gives life its fixed form. This primal violence 
came out of the fact that the door was suddenly no longer a symbolic division, 
but a concrete object. The daily reality and the other reality came into contact 
with each other in the door.

The first thing done after the squat was to repair the door, put in your own 
lock; a prefab cardboard renovation door was immediately replaced by its 
massive, solid wood predecessor. This replacement of the door was a consequence 
of the fact that breaking open the door was the only prosecutable action, but it 
was also the confirmation of the building's being put into use. The key to the 
new lock made the house, which initially had only been broken into, into your 
own home.

The door was in short not only part of a rite of passage, but also of the 
protection of your own existence. Even if the space to be squatted was full of 
drafty holes, if the window was open, the door was the magic point around which 
the squat proper organized itself. While the house often remained minimally 
furnished for weeks, the door was equipped with the most elaborate accessories, 
from builders' props to armorplate. Even if the building was legalized, a strict 
door ritual might be observed for years after. The door, which in open society 
was declared trash, was rediscovered, and even when squatters went breaking 
through walls and tearing down portals, they stayed friendly with the door. It 
did multifunctional service as tabletop, bed, back wall, barricade material, 
shield, or was put away for awhile in the meantime.

Everyone places the beginning and end of »the squat movement« somewhere else. 
This is because everyone stepped into the collective space at a different place. 
For one this happened with the breaking open of the door to his or her own flat, 
for the other while wandering around in the immeasurable emptinesses of the 
complexes which were squatted city-wide. Every squatter can point to the place 
where she or he personally crossed the threshold and stepped inside a collective 
space. Something happened which was qualitatively different from »standing up 
for your housing rights« or »resistance against the repression of the state,« 
something other too than the unleashing of the rage built up over the years over 
speculation and failing policy.

The space was not opened as the result of objective social circumstances. If the 
house got symbolic value, that happened almost by accident, in the course of the 
squat itself and not beforehand. It took the residents by surprise, left them 
wondering astonished how they could get out of it again. The longing for space 
can no better be explained with psychological drives; there is no reason why 
people who seek a community experience should exactly squat. Even as squatters 
sought the security of a self-designed life, it was continually disturbed by 
incidents from outside, from compulsory housemates to eviction notice. S/he who 
takes justice into her/his own hands lives as no other. But that's part of the 
pleasant side of the collective space; it is also an exemption from the prospect 
of having to lead one(ITAL.) existence of your own. How the space was left, days 
or years later, is mostly more diffuse: a trip to Africa, a rental house in 
Huizen, going off to study, a solidarity, an overdose...Some drift further in 
other circuits, from Alpine meadows to cyberspace. Others just stayed. No one 
who has been inside the space can ever leave again; at night in your dreams you 
go back.

During squatting property rights were gradually forgotten, and the state 
monopoly on violence ignored. But simultaneously the »Western Civilized Shame« 
was parasitized, without anyone worrying too much about principles and ideals. 
»Being consistent is dead tedious.« There were materials enough; sleeping 
Holland was just switching over to the double waterbed with wooden frame, and 
the street was full of handy narrow bedsprings that could be tightly screwed 
into the window frame with rawls (size 7). The inner city streets were 
folkloristically surfaced besides, so that workmen's huts and other toolboxes 
were everywhere waiting to be used. Salary came from social services, telephone 
lines via the neighbors, energy from cut-open and later overturned electric 
company meters, information from the land registry and GDH archive, houses could 
be found everywhere, the tools streamed in via urban renewal and mail order, 
barricade material came from a building site, the delicatessen from the 
proletarian shop, liquor from behind falling glass, tiles from the doorstep, and 
police in case of a thug threat...The handymen taught besides that you could 
also just request telephone or electricity under a false name or someone else's. 
There was no talk of illegality; the existing rules and possibilities were just 
craftily used.

»Their legal order« was unable to captivate anyone much. You had »your« 
attorneys for that, who tried to arouse interest for their employ with slogans 
like »Justice is whoever can lie the best.« The squat groups became engrossed in 
the development of their own pro deo system. Attacks on it were paired with 
righteous indignation and justifiable rage: »I accuse the speculators, the city, 
the police and Justice all at once of: Blackmail, Swindling, Evasion of Housing 
Distribution Laws, Disturbing the Domestic Peace, Falsification of Documents, 
Attempted Manslaughter, Violation of Human Rights, Sexism, Adultery, Deception 
of the Public, Sedition, Undermining the Legal System, Inflicting Grave Personal 
Injury, the Destruction of Human Happiness, Perjury and Corruption. How dare a 
prosecutor subpoena us?« Your own game could flourish through a gay innocence 
towards the malice of the outside world. »What are they doing? They can't do 
that!«

Inside the space of squatting there was no talk of historical development; as it 
wandered it only cropped up in more and more places, to the strangest out-of-
the-way corners of the city. After entry came the surprise that there were so 
many more people in the same place, just as crazy as you, just as radical, just 
as amateurish. Surprise over the cool pragmatism with which the most burning 
urge for action was carried out.

The space was to be found literally in and outside the »dominant system.« »The 
city is ours,« because it's assimilated into an inside topology with secret 
beacons: houses, cafes, leaders of the packs, bicycle routes, streets and 
bridges, symbols, signals, posters, style of dress and coiffure. The smell of 
clammy leather jackets and showerless houses, cat piss, plastic bags with car 
mirrors, ripped-loose traffic signs, meetings, demos, »manis,« advance meeting 
points, alarm lists and gangs of thugs, incomprehensible and long-winded phone 
calls, first names and alarm entry numbers. A spiderweb of back gardens, 
landings, coffee and drinking sessions, joints and trips, flyers, stolen books, 
press lists, radio and TV break-ins, helmets and clubs, breaking tiles, vans and 
wagon-bikes, posts and visits to the neighbors. But also the pathetic state of 
the TV news, of city council members and concerned critics (»They still don't 
understand.«). The swiftness with which you changed from student to rioter, from 
rioter to passerby, from passerby to brick-thrower and then braggart, nurse or 
lover.

It was the space of the continual metamorphosis. The forms assumed could be 
classic (and thus be parasitized) or different and never before seen (and thus 
experimental): someone who because of his »Labor Party face« managed to get 
inside a committee meeting went afterward to go find Breeze blocks; today's 
heavy was tomorrow's super nerd. Standing there plastering, all thumbs, throw on 
a raincoat to go to a riot. Everyone unexpectedly turned out to be able to do or 
be anything, especially what or who you had never been. Your own life was made 
into fiction and instantly converted again into reality. You could assume any 
appearance without deriving an identity from it.

This was the freedom in which people who barely knew each other flung themselves 
into actions based on a blind mutual trust: tough, vague, friendly, disturbing, 
disturbed. It didn't matter that there were no plans for the middle distance; 
the journey counted, the expanding space of your own life rhythm - where it was 
going wasn't even of later concern (no future). An explosion, caused by the 
savory consumption of the here and now.

Historic conditions? Causes? Result? Just yell. »No one had a house and that was 
really mean!« Unused spaces were, through a small forgetfulness in the law, 
there for the using, without the owner being able to start anything with the law 
in hand against the anonymous users. Fortunate too was that owners and city 
planners, through their naive belief in property rights and authority, let their 
houses endlessly sit vacant, even when plenty had already been squatted: »Homes 
for the homeless!«

The first group, mostly students who grouped around the handymen, had originally 
taken a look around in leftist circles, but these turned out to speak a language 
you couldn't do anything with. Analyses of society, self-realization, future 
planning, changing the world and yourself, strategic debates, marching through 
institutions or lecture notes, social responsibility, conscious security, 
relationship discussions, ideals, big stories: it had become unbearable...

They couldn't find the energy anymore to wait any longer for the change in the 
other's mentality and the fruits of working on yourself. »The crisis of Marxism 
is not ours.« The taboo on the immediate realization of the democratized desires 
had created a discussion culture around emancipation and integration. University 
council work had become the training ground for the meeting culture in the 
institutions of the future. When you refused to march on any longer on this 
prescribed route, it was a question of logic that political business as a whole 
was written off. The aversion against the left, of whom something was still 
expected, became as great as that against the right, which you wanted nothing to 
do with anyway. The terms began to lose their meaning.

The handymen had another view of things. The ex-democrats among them saw from 
their political viewpoint the squat wave as an opposition to the vacancy law, 
which had to be averted or changed. That was their trip. A second group, 
unconscious Leninists, brought the banner down from the attic: »The worst of all 
are the rightists disguised as leftists. They're worse than the rest - avoid 
them like the plague.« That slogan too fell outside the space experience of the 
fresh squatters; every political current was, when push came to shove, part of 
»their« parliamentary democracy. Making social conflicts manageable wasn't our 
problem. No one dreamed of revolution or strove for the general good. One's own 
housing problem was much simpler to solve.

The term »politics« had been denied its monopoly on the public sphere by 
feminist criticism and since then penetrated to the most intimate places. 
Everything quickly became political and the word thereby lost its action-
inspiring charm. The squat contribution to the waning political culture limited 
itself to screaming, smoke bombs, stolen documents and scale models set ablaze. 
The »primacy of politics« would be replaced by the robust term »power,« but by 
that time the squatters had already abandoned the intellectual atmosphere in 
order to explore, in place of French theory, their own space.

The idea of politics as goal-oriented action, as feasibility research, was also 
held at a distance. Social opponents were not addressed; there was no realistic 
ideal over which to negotiate. »Parking garages = war.« This anarchism born of 
practice fused with that narcissism that belongs to everyone who takes a place 
that cannot be found inside society. Without realizing it, the inalienable right 
to one's own local experience was discovered. This anarchism, a combination of 
rage, self-pity and being right (»They can tear down our house, but not our 
ideals«) turned out to be the fuel with which local space travel could be 
driven.

Squatting's appeal was that it offered no alternative, no view of a better world 
that had to legitimatize and argue itself. No one spoke for anyone. »We won't 
leave« was not a demand but an announcement. No consensus, no compromise, no 
discussion. Anyone could step into the noncommittal atmosphere to do their 
thing. You lived amid the remnants and ruins of an order that had become alien 
in one fell swoop. It was no accident that preference went to ramshackle houses, 
scrap autos, war-era leather jackets, furniture found on the street. Everything 
that had been cast off and thus ended up outside the traffic of society existed, 
as it were, by definition in the »outside system« to which the squats granted 
shelter. And everything which defined itself within respectable efficiency stood 
outside it.

No one thought in strategies, principles. Abstract theoretical terms were taboo. 
The ideas were not words but things: steel planking, rocks, actions. »They« were 
thought of in terms of interiors to dismantle, destroyable riot vans, outposts 
and whatever else came along. There was also no ideology. The question was 
how?(ITAL) and never why?(ITAL) »We've begun already to live how it's good, and 
let their laws disturb us as little as possible. And we fight against injustice. 
And that(ITAL) they don't like! It's okay to talk in the meantime. But living by 
the old Dutch saying, "Not words but deeds!" isn't allowed.«

It all had an expressionlessness that worked well with the neighbors. The need 
to tell the world what it was all about for you was not felt. This silence 
concealed no secret, there were no spokespeople, simply because there was 
nothing to state. It was limited to a flyer for the neighbors containing some 
hard info about the speculator and an invitation to come drink a cup of coffee. 
No paper culture, in which insiders' discussions were held, historic roots 
exposed and nice stories collected, took off. The experience was too fragile to 
capture in a consistent argument.

The land registry, the Chamber of Commerce, the files on the neighbors and the 
municipal archive were worked through to dig up the history of the building. 
There were always connections with mala fide real estate agents, dubious 
mortgage banks, martial arts academies, empty corporations, post office boxes on 
Aruba, underhanded arrangements with the city, laundered heroin money, weapons 
traffic. These were described in detail in the neighborhood papers and exercised 
a great fascination on squatters, while outsiders usually couldn't make heads or 
tails of it. The disconcerting stories the neighbors told about pre-war rent 
strikers, people in hiding during the war, divorces, cases of suicide and 
isolation, cults and illegal pensions remained reserved for internal use. The 
building became a case where the blues of oral history converged with globe-
spanning conspiracies, adding a nice touch to the adventure you'd ended up smack 
in the middle of.

The space that was hereby created was the space of the experiment. Since unity 
had already been unmasked as a dictatorial conference trick for ironing over 
differences, the unity that was experienced during the action gained the 
mystical explosiveness of spontaneity. It was brought about with little trouble, 
but was observed with surprise or taken for granted. If the phenomenon appeared, 
if the meeting with the space-mates came into being, the experiment had been 
successful.

Prerequisite for any meeting is the distance between the individuals. Those who 
are permanently close to each other never run into each other. A secret rule for 
the organization of squatting was this absence of unity and identity, or even of 
regular contact. The different squat groups were at a distance from each other 
in their own neighborhood; squats were universes where the residents did what 
they felt like, without landlord, neighbors or fellow squatters having anything 
to say about it. You had geranium owners, teachers, dykes, »vague-os«, art-
makers, punx, English, Zealanders, people from IJmuiden. There was a collected 
mess of neighborhood groups who organised themselves at their own discretion 
depending on the characteristics of the developed area. It wasn't the vacancy 
that produced squatting; the vacancy only became visible if you looked at it, 
and then you discovered more and more of it, a habit you can never again break, 
just like fleetingly peeking into dumpsters full of household articles or 
building material. It was pure chance which neighborhood you ended up in; after 
the squat it was inconceivable how a building could have stood vacant for five 
years. Why no one had plunged into this adventure before now remained a mystery. 
Some neighborhoods were never squatted; it would be years before anyone hit on 
the idea to move into factories in the harbor district.

As far as an identity came into being, it developed apace, contingent on the 
interaction with the constructed surroundings. Breaking open a boarded-up block 
slated for demolition for a cooperative leads to a completely different squat 
group than the appropriation of majestic houses in an elegant area, or squatting 
second-rate condominiums one by one. Peaceful living on a street where nary a 
riot police clearance happened led to unheard-of heavy or chaotic behavior at 
city-wide actions, but just as easily to total disinterest in them. Residents of 
beautiful canal houses were sometimes sooner inclined to negotiate with city 
officials than those who were camping in sagging jerry-rigs, but the reverse 
could just as well happen: being aware that you stood to lose a lot led then to 
a fundamental attitude. Characteristic was that someone who was nicely at home 
in one neighborhood was promptly way off target at neighborhood meetings 
elsewhere.

Inside differences between neighborhoods were stimulating so long as the 
unfamiliarity with each other was taken into account. If your own neighborhood 
was no longer invigorating, you could always move to another one and cross over 
from one identity to the other. Many a squat neighborhood arose besides when 
infighting in one of the disorganised squats in one neighborhood forced a number 
of residents to go live a street further. Precisely that distance between the 
insiders made it possible to drag out the craziest things in confrontations. 
Motivation and discipline are not necessary if no one asks you what business you 
have somewhere. As long as you don't know each other you may and can be 
anything. Anonymity among insiders prevents the forming of rigid scenes and 
social control. Everyone is welcome who knows the code.

That code consisted not of a secret password but a certain sort of casualness. A 
recognition which opened doors that for others stayed shut. Reporters who 
offered speed as entrance fee were requested to come back with gold. But if you 
rang the bell of aÐvÐåheavily barricaded building and quickly said hello, you 
were let in right away. At action meetings you said which neighborhood you came 
from and then it was okay. There was no fear of spies. A group can protect its 
secret, and at the same time grow by leaps and bounds, by shaping its own 
normality which is open to everyone but leaves those with the wrong normality 
mercilessly out in the cold.

The big events which squatting was always equated with played themselves out at 
a remarkable distance from the individual squatters and neighborhoods. In squat 
space two levels could be distinguished: that of the neighborhood you yourself 
had ended up in through squatting, and alongside that, the city-wide level, 
which was where you ended up when squatting a large building or during a heavy 
riot, a mass outburst of hate or rage against the riot police as a symbol of the 
whole collection of authority figures. Someone who rioted along with the rest 
one morning could afterwards simply remain an office manager, just as squatting 
did not have to lead to losing yourself in shared space: it could always end 
afterwards. But it could also be an initiation into space travel, provided that 
afterward a material, less fleeting basis for crossing the border was found in 
the form of phone alarm list or squatted house. The other way around, the city-
wide riots all too often meant departure from your own neighborhood, or even its 
complete disintegration. Adventurous exploration in squat space was then 
advanced on a city-wide scale or further left for what it was. The organization 
of the city-wide spectacles had to be set up incident-by-incident and was 
determined by the location of the building and the characteristics of the shell. 
The production was in the hands of the »individual residents,« and whoever 
happened to come along. The performance itself could then be spontanteously 
taken over by the police, passersby or whoever else responded to the alarm. 
Squat space at its most expansive transformed the city into a circus, with 
bumbling cops, smoke production, running fires, scanner reports over the radio, 
tailings, drawn pistols, contagious skirmishes, boarded-up shop windows, broken-
up streets and overturned site huts. Post-production facilities, like the 
arrestee support group, were courtesy of the city. From beginning to end the 
spectacle in no way resembled your own street. If you went after the riot in the 
city to squat a flat in your own neighborhood and the neighbors griped about 
»that senseless destruction,« the answer was that you had nothing to do with it, 
even if you'd been going around smashing in windowpanes for hours and brought 
back the model airplane from a travel agency as a trophy. 

Such a pronouncement had a high truth content: you are where you are. Self-
awareness was connected to the place where you found yourself, instead of to 
your »own« identity or the image the outside world has of you. The 
responsibility for your own actions was not derivative in the »change the world, 
begin with yourself« style; »think globally, act locally« does not do justice to 
the uniqueness of the events that are happening specifically to you in this 
place. The only necessary alertness consists, when you happen to be present in 
the place where something is about to happen, of your actually doing it, whether 
it's a frontal attack on the riot police, the freeing of arrestees or a 
conversation with passersby. This is not heroism or action of the will; you're 
only tuning in to the event and the place, in order to become part of squat 
space. That also determined the character of the legends that were told 
afterwards; it was not machismo which underlay this, but surprise that it had 
been us who had gone through this. That caused the chatter. »Did you expect 
this?«

The vacancy that housing seekers said they were fighting against was cherished 
by no one more than squatters. Squatters were artists because they moved into 
the empty space to play in it and on no account to »furnish« it. They 
transformed their own house into the rectum of the welfare state. As if by 
itself the house accumulated a collection of uncertain objects to which asylum 
was given. The house turned out to be a magnet for objects, where things were 
valued for their peculiarity, instead of being consumed. When it was squatted 
the house first had to be emptied, so it could then be propped full of junk that 
you found on the street yourself. Wooden ironing boards, ovens, sinks, a car 
door, flasher lights, bedsprings, fluorescent tube lights, mannequins, collapsed 
couches, bicycle halves, chests, amputated furniture, cabinets, TV sets, depth 
gauges, iron buckets, a leaden elevator motor...On the way to the squat 
collection was already in progress, because »the more junk, the less easily 
there can be a clearance.«

The rubbish was not recycled out of thriftiness, but for an indefinite time 
afforded peace outside social circulation, after which it was given back to the 
street. Since the things did not impose on anyone to be used, they posed no 
threat to the present emptiness. Just like the residents, they had, released 
from every social usefulness, enough in themselves. Insofar as there was talk 
here of culture, it was one of non-aesthetics. There was no urge to package 
oneself for display. Gray, disarming, uninteresting, not out for expression, 
difference or transmission of group codes, uninterested too, vacant, without 
fantasy, vague, inoffensive, asexual, hardly attractive: »People with taste must 
be able to appreciate this.« The company logo missed any clear line, had gone 
beyond the boundary inside which things can still be found pretty or ugly. The 
squatters' symbol of the circle and the broken arrow aimed at an upward slant 
possessed too that sloppy meaninglessness. It missed the transparency of 
pictogram language and derived its mystery from that.

The classic ideals attributed to rebellious youth, from angry young to clean-cut 
and cheerful, serious but fun, glanced off this unperceived, reassuring 
superficiality. They succeeded in shirking the obligation to conquer the world, 
or even to start up a subculture. This low culture profile with its simultaneous 
high action level guaranteed a perfect unfamiliarity with tradition, including 
your own. The mechanism which produces culture from a break with what came 
before, which people are supposed to forcefully shun, could be avoided like 
this. Cultural consumption limited itself to borrowed arts like punk, new wave, 
political street theater and commotions. Artists in a squat always meant 
trouble. The expression of the I is difficult to combine with topical living.

Once squatting you found yourself confronted with the palette of nuances that 
the preceding decades had contributed to the state of the house. Not only the 
ten layers of paint, the three ceilings, the slabs of plastic foam, scrap iron 
and the cork on the mantelpiece, the whole miasma of stuffiness and failure 
pervaded the buildings. In the case that it was missing, on entry into offices 
and freshly produced luxury apartments, this was a sign of evil that was 
exorcised by immediately turning it into a dump. This was the end of the line 
for the buildings. Once sucked up by the vacuum behind the front door you landed 
in a time gap left behind by the history of the premises. The back-owed state 
you found the rooms in provided the building blocks for the new palace. Our 
squatters knew an ironic relationship with comfort. The semi-permanent rehousing 
of the doomed flesh brought a total package of temporary provisions along with 
it. Garden or fire hoses as water pipes, electrical wires hanging above the 
street, gas heaters with sagging lids, blankets acting as a door, a wooden 
framework under the sink...»Squatters are renovating the city here too.«

In this encampment the garbage question was permanent. Because the rigid 
functionality of the house blueprint had been abandoned, a state of continual 
rebuilding could establish itself. This metamorphosis of the space was further 
fostered when half the building was emptied in preparation for the house party, 
in order to be filled by nocturnal events. The open house, packed full of 
uninvited visitors, presented itself as general rehearsal for a threatening 
eviction, or a celebration if the threat was averted. Excessive consumption of 
beers and joints, combined with noisy dramas, a whining wall of sound, little 
scuffles, exhausted dogs, guaranteed that by about one o'clock the police would 
reunite the partygoers in the street. The whole route from garbage heap to 
lifestyle residence and back could thus be covered in 24 hours. The lines of 
building up the house and letting it go to pot crossed at the least excuse. The 
delightful transience of existence was ecstatically lived out with the 
clumsiness of the year zero.

The right to housing by which squatters legitimatized themselves was their 
answer to the emptiness's invitation to move in. The emptiness opened itself as 
the field of tension between action and shiftlessness. It was alternately gaming 
den, exit base or breeding ground for the refusal to function in society. Until 
it suddenly found itself smack in the middle of history. There was violence in 
the air. The broken-open emptiness had to be protected again with barricade 
material. The house was becoming a growing collection of objects, acquaintances, 
phone numbers, addresses, the neighborhood an unsurveyable network of cafes, 
community centers, contacts with building workers, city-wide meetings, and the 
city an impenetrable tangle of actions, research collectives, press contacts, 
purchase groups, and sudden phone alarms. Time after time prehistory is 
surprised by spectacular events.


The Groote Keyser and the Vogelstruys

Under the House's Spell

»Spring was coming. The most beautiful houses were being squatted everywhere, 
sometimes for the biggest idiots. We'd come back to the Groote Keyser after one 
of those squats, and there we were staring at those steel plates again. Cozy, 
you know, outside the sun's shining. So we conceived a plan to squat one of 
those nice canal houses ourselves, with more or less the whole Keyser group and 
a few people from the city center around the canals, just from the neighborhood. 
We found a place on the Herengracht that turned out to go through to the Singel. 
And that was the Vogelstruys.«

The Groote Keyser consisted of six offices on Amsterdam's Keizersgracht, 
squatted on November 1, 1978, and was named »groote« (big) in contrast to the 
Little Keyser across the water. In December 1979, the squats had in a very short 
time become national symbols of revolt against Amsterdam's »betrayal of the 
53,000 homeless and complicity in development, vacancy and luxury apartments.« 
An eviction order was pronounced on October 26, 1979, with which the 50 
squatters had to comply within a month. This was enough for the majority of the 
residents, and they slowly but surely abandoned the complex.

Right then, in fact, the squatters' neighborhoods, which had been blossoming up 
all over the city, had gotten mature enough for a city-wide search for a place 
where everyone could collectively go onto the offensive. It was time for a 
speculator's property that could be used to make the step between passive 
resistance and active defense. The Keyser was big and empty, and everyone fit 
inside it.

To the surprise of the canal-area group, it was the drooping Keyser which was 
now barricaded shut and stampeded by the city. It was not strange in itself that 
a big squat should be adopted by another squatters' neighborhood; that had been 
known to happen. But why should those houses whose front-door keys had been 
handed around by tourists just last summer, houses that had had Israelis 
barbecueing on the floor, start to function as a symbol of the people's will? 
The Keyser owed its notoriety in squatters' circles to the paranoia surrounding 
Harry Gouwswaard's gang, and from resident Paul van Wissen, who was a spy for 
the owner. Beyond that there was nothing special about it.

Two months later, in mid-December 1979, it had still not been evicted, and 
rumors flew about »a big squad of riot police« that was preparing for combat. 
Then the city council was assailed by fireworks, smoke bombs and 100 
demonstrators. »They were people from all over the city, making their first 
effort in a long time to transfer the misery they suffer daily because of their 
living situation to those who so willingly take political responsibility for 
it.« The action lasted no more than fifteen minutes, but was dubbed »D-Day« 
because it amounted to a declaration of war on politics. The wait was over and 
momentum was picking up. But eviction day just wouldn't come, though barricading 
and acquisition of weapons were stepped up to ever-greater heights. The 
ammunition room was filling up, the radio station The Free Keyser was set up and 
went on the air from the squat, and the bedsprings were replaced by welded-
together steel planking, supported by builders' props. A whole 
counterintelligence system was set up. By posting people at police stations and 
riot police training grounds, the squatters could find out in time when the 
eviction would take place. The neighborhoods also divided up the bridges 
surrounding the Keyser, each to defend one by its own devices. Hundreds of 
people were on constant standby. In a demonstration at the end of January 1980, 
3000 people marched past the houses as those inside waved flags decorated with 
squat symbols from the roof. But January's second big threat was survived.

The tension built up around the symbol was released in February in a series of 
incidents with the police: skirmishes, raids, smaller evictions, arrests. This, 
it was decided, had to be stopped, and some people resquatted a previously 
evicted house in the Vondelstraat at about 5 p.m. on Friday, February 29. The 
head-on street clash with the riot police which had been expected at the Keyser 
finally happened. The squatters won the battle on the corner of the van 
Baerlestraat and Vondelstraat, and the intersection in front of the recaptured 
building stayed barricaded all weekend. When tanks came to wipe the streets 
clean the following Monday morning, an energetic riot spread across the city. 
But there was no action from out of the house itself, and it was otherwise left 
alone. On practically the same day came the announcement that Queen Beatrix was 
to be crowned in Amsterdam on April 30th. April was proclaimed action month, 
which opened with the squatting of 52 luxury apartments on the Prins 
Hendrikkade. The squatting wave was reaching its crest. Everyone was up and at 
it day in day out, and new squatting groups appeared in neighborhood after 
neighborhood. Attention for the Groote Keyser ebbed away amid the storm of 
events.

Throughout this time a group was hovering between occupying and living in the 
Keyser. Barricade materials had overrun the house; the one small kitchen was a 
wreck. No daylight got through to the bottom floors. »It wasn't a question of 
living then, but of surviving, around electric heaters,« wrote a paper a year 
later. »Experimentally living together at its most extreme, you might say; the 
threat of eviction hanging constantly over your head, working on the house 
however you could. Trying to clean up a bit, going out for a good action or a 
drink, freaking out over the cold and there always being so little to eat, 
having fun with a little shoplifting, anarchistic eating, and so forth.« More or 
less vague characters were constantly walking in, making the place a sort of 
open institution. »The people who helped with the barricading just stayed there. 
I was living somewhere on the canals, I came there, and in a rush of 'this is 
where it's happening' I sort of lived there from then on. I never moved in. You 
were just there.« This is Max. »Since they just wouldn't evict us, we stayed on 
watch on the roof kind of like faithful dogs, and we set up a scanner team to 
sit in a house in the neighborhood in case of an unexpected eviction, so 
everything could be defended. The people who were kind of trying to keep the 
Keyser running, about ten or twenty - more and more kept dropping out, it was 
driving them crazy - stayed with it pretty consistently until about April 30.« 
Until then there were countless meetings about the Keyser. Max: »After a while 
no one knew what to do next. It was so falling apart at the seams and so heavily 
barricaded that you couldn't do anything with the building anymore, publicity-
wise either. Then we were like: that's great, hang onto that Groote Keyser, but 
we're leaving.« The indoor crew broke into the basement, barricaded the inside 
stairs to the living area and organized a six months' threat party with bands 
and flat boats on the canal. »That long hall in the basement looked great after 
the punks had stood there spray painting the hell out of it all day.« A week 
later, on May 31, they squatted the Vogelstruys.

When tension builds up around a point, it will always discharge itself, there or 
elsewhere. The Groote Keyser, on rational grounds, was declared a symbolic 
squat: it was to be the first big eviction of »1990: Year of the Eviction?« when 
many other houses would follow. To fulfill its function as pioneer, the house 
was sacrificed to a series of military measures, from heavy barricading of the 
house itself (for the first time so thoroughly), and stoning teams with 
ammunition galore at their disposal, to a comprehensive defense strategy for the 
surrounding streets, and a network of sentry posts reaching far beyond the city. 
Without anyone studying for it, the squatters discovered the three central 
principles of fortification formulated by Maarschalk van Vauban at the end of 
the 17th century and put them into practice. Vauban proposed, first of all, that 
defense should take place on a number of lines placed one behind the other; in 
the second place, that the particular characteristics of the place where a 
fortress is planned are employed in entrenchment and the eventuality of sorties; 
and in the third place, that an imbalance is created between the entrance and 
the exit: it must be difficult to get in and easy to get out. Normal social life 
in the houses had come to an end; at the most, people camped, awaiting coming 
events. From the moment of fortification, the tension was fed from two sides: 
the other squatters in the city attached their fate to that of the Keyser, and 
the inside crew prepared to go to all extremes in the defense of the houses. The 
Keyser, in contrast to nuclear plants or army bases, was a symbol you were for, 
one that summed up your whole story. That story could not be told to completion, 
because the authorities were afraid to take up such an extreme challenge. The 
Vogelstruys was to redeem the promise of the Keyser - an active defense from the 
inside out. By mid-1980 the squatters had gotten acquainted with street 
confrontation, but where such active defense would lead to, no one could say.

Frits was hanging around a lot with the Keyser group. »I had heard which house 
they wanted to squat and it was in the middle of Amsterdam South. You drive by a 
real estate agency, those photos are hanging there and you always check if 
anything in the neighborhood's still empty. The Vogelstruys happened to be up 
there too.« So it was definitely for sale. The Vogelstruys consisted of two 
houses, Herengracht 329 and Singel 370, connected to each other by a passageway. 
On the day of the squat, May 31, 1980, it was in possession of the B·î·schen 
family, »black marketeers from World War I,« who were trying to make a 
speculation profit of fl 360,000 on it. »We assembled that Saturday afternoon in 
the Spuistraat. A crew went on ahead to break in, but didn't have any luck. 
Crowbars didn't work. I happened to have this heavy straight one-and-a-half-
meter bar with me, not subtle in the least, and we rammed the door open with 
that and then the alarm went off. That shut us up; the barricading was passed 
along and the hammering began. Along with the bedsprings, we used boards. It all 
took a bit longer than usual.« Max: »Then we were inside; the police were 
already arriving too, but there were so many people, it was OK. It was really 
cozy too - finally a familiar downtown squat again. Lots of people you knew; it 
had its atmosphere. As 50 squatters were ramming in a door, with leather jackets 
and all, an angry little man came running out of the neighboring house and said, 
'You can't do that, that's not your property!' He was pushed away, like, you go 
play somewhere else.« A banner with »RETEKETET we've squatted« on it was hung on 
the front of the house. Some musicians happened to be walking down the 
Raadhuisstraat in riot police uniform and came to blow their tune at the door.

»When you came in on the Herengracht, it was all street level, no stairs or 
anything. There was an elevator to a sort of fake apartment on the second and 
third floors. The elevator had been installed for the previous owner's mother, 
an invalid lady. There was a telephone in the elevator and it worked at first 
too. The funny thing was that the detectives from the Lijnbaansgracht police 
station who'd been by had gotten hold of the number. They called up in the 
evening to tell us the recommendation they'd given, that they had established 
vacancy, and so we wouldn't be evicted for breaking the domestic peace. I stood 
in that elevator with the telephone and said, 'Well, that's great, but could you 
maybe tell me what my number is?' A few days later it was disconnected. After a 
while we deactivated the elevator. When there was an emergency, an 'alarm', and 
we used the phone tree, and a lot of people came, there were punks who would 
play with the elevator. It had one of those trap doors in it and those guys 
would climb through it. You can't have one of them accidentally getting 
squashed.«

The building was quickly inspected. Frits: »There were some old books; other 
than that it was empty. Except for an apartment on the second floor on the 
Herengracht side with some pseudo-antique furniture, a bath, a built-in kitchen, 
plus a little room with a big bed, all to suggest that it was lived in. And 
there was a mysterious room on the ground floor that you could only get to with 
the elevator. That was pitch, pitch black, a gigantic black hole, without 
windows or doors, creepy.« Max: »It was really one of those old mystical 
Amsterdam houses. Downstairs there was this old kitchen with a hearth and those 
little tiles. Underneath was a vaulted cellar with a cesspit. Then another 
basement went to the Singel side. No one had ever lived on that side; there was 
nothing there but centuries-old dust. It was a very ghostly, romantic house. It 
had a beautiful attic, and I decided to live up there. It had a door that opened 
onto a flat roof between the two houses. There was a door to the Herengracht 
side, where you could walk along to a back part of the house with an annex, all 
built onto each other with different levels. Underneath you had more passages 
connected to each other.« And he continues: »I and several others moved all our 
stuff to the Vogelstruys. We'd never done that in the Keyser. There you just 
slept on a mattress somewhere behind the armorplate. But now we thought: This is 
it, we're going to live here.«

»Around 11:00 some vague guy came by, a Czech, Michael Schmaus, who claimed he 
worked for the owner. He said, 'B·î·schen is busy getting together a gang and 
they're coming tonight around 12:00.' We said, sure, always those panic 
stories...And at exactly 12:00 they started to hack in the front door with axes, 
while we were sitting there kind of stoned drinking beers.« Frits was alone 
upstairs. »There were a lot of bricks by the windows. Suddenly there's a huge 
racket. I see the thugs coming in. They were builders, not martial arts school 
types. They were on the street. First I threw a big brick down, but missed on 
purpose. Next a small rock, missed by accident. Sietze and a few other people 
went running up to them yelling and then they ran like hell. For me that was 
important, because all three times that I'd stayed overnight after a squat 
before, a gang had come. I was scared to death, but here, just throwing stuff 
and seeing them running away, my fear was immediately gone.« That same night the 
windows of the owner's house, almost on the same canal, were smashed. »That 
didn't need much discussion.«

An threat existed unabated the first few weeks. There was talk of the formation 
of a gang of 60, accompanied by still heavier barricading, squatters sleeping 
over, keeping watch, and actions against B·î·schen. Right after the squat he'd 
filed a report of a breach of domestic peace, which was still being dealt with 
despite the report from detective Erhard, who had established vacancy on his 
visit. Frits: »I went again with Max to the Palace of Justice on the 
Prinsengracht, in search of Asser, the acting District Attorney. There were 
rumors that there would be an eviction that day. We were going to ask what was 
going on with that breach of the peace and to tell them they really couldn't do 
that. Because meanwhile two ads had appeared in the newspaper offering the 
Struys for sale. That was also evidence that there was no breach of domestic 
peace. Plus my story that I'd seen it for sale at the real estate agent's.« Max: 
»At one point we got to speak to Fehmers, the DA who had had weekend duty during 
the squat and had to decide whether to adjudge breach of the peace. He seemed 
hurried and accepted the information. Nothing more happened that day.«

There were indications that police or thugs would come over the roof by way of 
one of the neighboring houses. On the landing from the roof to the Singel side a 
fort in the round was built out of bedsprings and barbed wire. Two canal 
searchlights were set on both corners, in case the thugs came at night. Frits: 
»I'd taken one of those nice big lamps that light up the trees along the water 
from in front of the house. An annoying guy lived next door, one of those 
subservient geranium specialist types, and he'd seen this. The next day I was 
carrying the lamp away with a carrier bike, right out in the open, and he saw 
that too and warned the police. But they were too late.« The whole house was 
full of bricks and clubs. »The tension was good.«

For Max it was the season of the Duvels. »We stayed home a lot to look after 
things and someone would go pick up some beers at the Ace of Cups; we had a deal 
with them. We mostly sat in that apartment on the third floor, where there was 
also a fireplace. There was also a panel that made a sort of closet. It was 
June, but pretty cold despite that. So we set that whole wooden board on fire, 
drinking a Duvel, watching the fire and just talking a bit about how things 
were. I was also quite in love in those days, with Claar, and she was living 
there too.« Frits: »We played a lot of Doors, smoked joints, lit fires, that 
atmosphere. We ate light brown sliced bread in plastic bags, with a hunk of 
cheese from the Albert Heijn supermarket; we stole everything there. Now and 
then someone would cook. You were on watch the whole night on group duty, and 
that went on for weeks in a row. That's all you do then. Those weren't the type 
of people to have meetings; except for one they weren't intellectual types. I 
knew those people very well and the neighborhood group feeling was very strong. 
It was your neighborhood, your block. You were there and you helped them. And 
you spent as much time as it took.«

Max: »We had brought along an idea with us from the Groote Keyser like: if 
anything happens we'll fight. That was like an unwritten rule; we all knew it of 
each other. In those days we were sick to death of all those meetings, at the 
Keyser too, where no one could agree with each other. And then at the 
Vogelstruys it was suddenly: this is how it is. Everyone was on the same 
wavelength. It was extremely clear. People did talk about it, but everyone 
adjusted to each other; it happened pretty automatically. And besides, around 
the canals and the Jordaan, the Vogelstruys was something more personal. It was 
on a somewhat smaller scale. It was also a breather for a lot of people - that 
we didn't discuss what would or wouldn't happen. The press never wrote about it 
either before the riot.«

Yet a number of residents left, not wanting to end up in the whirl of actions 
and guard duty again. »When we were out of the Keyser, Hein from the 
Staatslieden district took charge of the house, to get the whole thing back on 
its feet, with new residents and all. He got a couple of us involved and worked 
on their feelings. He appointed them sort of lieutenants whose task was the 
reconstruction of the Groote Keyser. Hein paid no attention at all to the fact 
that there was much more going on in other places in the city at the time. At 
the Keyser there was actually nothing going on at all. In the first few days, 
for example, we had picked up gas masks, fireworks and some smoke bombs from the 
Keyser. Hein insisted that the stuff go back. What a misconception. If gas masks 
were useful anywhere, it was at the Vogelstruys. We argued like hell about that. 
A kind of half animosity developed.«

The stenciled brochure which presented »The Groote Keyser Kampaign« of Hein and 
consorts to the neighborhoods put it this way: »Having to sit amid the debris 
did not benefit the residents' psychological condition. This caused a few old 
residents to temporarily drop out. These people coming back again, as well as 
enthusiastic new residents coming along, has ensured that motivation is optimal 
once more.« They began by emptying the fort and setting up an info center in the 
basement of the Keyser. The radio continued broadcasting out of the squat: »The 
Free Keyser is really free. For Christ's sake, let's not lose this, but expand 
it. It's one more reason to do our extreme best to keep the Groote Keyser.«

At about 11:00 on the morning of Thursday, July 3rd, Max was lying in his bed in 
the attic of the Struys. »Suddenly I heard shuffling and thumping on the roof. 
So I get up and I see all these big fat guys, taking down the barricades bit by 
bit. We'd set glass plates in the gutter on the roof and they were stealthily 
passing them through to each other. I thought at first they were the owner's 
gang.« Max fled through trapdoors and hallways to the Herengracht side, where 
there was a walkie-talkie in the living room. It was there for an emergency call 
to someone on the outside who'd sprained his knee and was always home. But on 
this particular day he was visiting his mother in Friesland. »I went in the 
bathroom with that thing, locked the door and called him, 'Sietze, a gang! God 
damn it, come on! Aren't there any batteries in this thing?' After a few minutes 
I hid the walkie-talkie behind the toilet. I'd grabbed some kind of iron bar, 
and I went out of the bathroom and snuck downstairs to warn the others. I went 
around a corner and there was a cop. And then you think: oh, a cop, better that 
than a gang. So I throw the bar away and say: let's just talk about this. Then 
it turned out that plainclothesmen had come in over the roof and had opened the 
door downstairs. Now there were vans, and cops in the hallway.«

Chief District Attorney Messchaert, after returning from his vacation, had 
ignored the report of the detectives who'd visited the Vogelstruys after the 
squat and adjudged the B·î·schens' breach of the peace. Besides, Commissioner 
Toorenaar had just been demoted from Narcotics to the Lijnbaansgracht station 
and he wanted to prove that he was still good for something. So for the 
eviction, he chose the day when the court case was to come up against the 
residents of the luxury apartments on the PH-kade («because important people 
from the squat movement were at the trial,« according to a newspaper). Max: »Six 
of us were in the house, and when we were brought outside handcuffed, there were 
people standing there yelling. They'd been to warn everyone at the courthouse on 
the Prinsengracht.« Karel: »Judge Borgerhoff Mulder was only just getting 
started when someone ran into the courtroom with the announcement that the 
Vogelstruys was being evicted. We dashed out of the courtroom to the 
Herengracht. There we ran into Toorenaar who was strolling back to the station 
by himself. So we yelled, 'Asshole, you can't do this!' He answered, 'Go squat 
in the red light district, then I'll have some respect for you.'«

Frits: »That morning I was standing with Patrice at police headquarters, waiting 
with paint bombs for the police vans filled with the people who'd been picked up 
for smashing in an owner's windows in Landsmeer. First we went to go get Max, 
because he was always late. The doorbell must not have worked. Anyway, they 
didn't open the door, they just wouldn't wake up. We threw rocks against the 
window. Time was running out, so the two of us went to the police station to 
wait for the vans. They never came and when we were back home we heard that the 
Struys had been cleared. It turned out everyone really had been sleeping when it 
happened. They must have really had a lot to drink. I was standing on the 
Northern bridge on the Singel side. It was already blocked off by cops. I was 
furious because not a damn thing was happening. The alarm call started to work, 
but very slowly. No one dared to break through. There were too few of us.«

The police had let in some builders cum thugs, and left themselves after an 
hour. The squatters walked around both sides of the house to assess the 
situation and heard loud hammering going on inside. Joep had never heard 
anything about the Vogelstruys: »I was home alone and I'd just handed in my last 
paper for my history studies that morning before I quit, when I got the alarm 
call. I went there on my bike, without any preparation. Everyone was gathering 
in front of the house. There were no meetings or discussions, there was no flyer 
or banner. The question was when there were enough people.«

More people came gradually biking up, and it began to sink in that they were 
completely among their own, with the police nowhere in sight. The last riot had 
been April 30th, when thousands of people had thrown rocks and had a blast and 
every connection with squatting had seemed far away. There had been every 
indication beforehand that the coronation day would end in a general assault on 
authority; the call to the front during »April Action Month« had been a great 
success. Having been afraid of this, the squat groups had opted for a defensive 
gesture and redubbed the coronation day national squatting day. Buildings were 
to be squatted outside the city center, and other squatters were organizing a 
party in the Sarphatipark. A poster also went up calling for a demonstration 
against the coronation spectacle. In the midst of a media war squatters seemed 
to be internally divided about what should be done with the slogan »No 
accommodations, no coronation:« simply do some squatting, or actively disturb 
the ceremony.

The police, led by Commissioner De Rhoodes, launched a frontal attack that 
morning on a neighborhood party organized by squatters in the Bilderdijkstraat 
in the Kinker district in celebration of the squat of an empty office building. 
The crowd of squatters realized that the large-scale brawl they had feared for 
was coming. But shortly after the riot broke out, the police, with horses, water 
cannons and all, suddenly pulled out. This got everyone in the mood for the 
festivities that had been planned for the rest of the day. That afternoon the 
police attacked again, at the incipient anti-coronation demonstration on the 
Waterlooplein. When the police were driven away here too, there was a run down 
the streets Damstraat and Rokin on the church where the coronation was being 
held. Most of the squatters went along with abandon, angry and relieved that the 
police had given them their riot that day after all. But the street fights, in 
which a large part of the police equipment was helped to the scrapheap, had 
attained such proportions that the squatters felt the riot wasn't theirs any 
longer. »It was just harrassment, drinking a beer and then back on the street 
going after the ME, and then back in a bar watching them going by through the 
window.« (Max) »That wasn't squatting any more, that was a wholesale movement 
where everyone could blow off steam about whatever they wanted.« (Joep) The 
driving force behind April 30 came from more than just the squatters' corner; it 
was all getting too big for them. After the holiday this led to intense and 
persistent infighting, which was unloaded specifically on an NRC resident, who, 
according to a press organ, had distanced herself from the riots »on behalf of 
the squat movement« (she said, »We think what happened was senseless.«).

Now, on the street in front of the Vogelstruys, the squatters found each other 
suddenly back on a surveyable playing field, in a small but familiar group and 
with a clear goal: a house. The local experience was functioning again. »It was 
just about squatting and speculation again and we were completely within our 
rights.« (Joep) They were moving collectively through the familiar squat space 
once again and they knew it. The obvious thing seemed to be to resquat.

A resquat is an extreme squat. When a gang of thugs is driven out, there is the 
air of a civil war; »taking justice into one's own hands« calls up images from 
the 1930s. The opinion processors like to present it as a sign that democracy 
will soon go under. Furthermore, the recapture of a building emptied by police 
is the farthest-reaching form of denying »their legal system.« You can't claim a 
single right anymore; you've lost or given up on all your trials. You've been 
thrown out on more or less legal grounds and have only the moral right of the 
strongest still on your side. The resquat instantly makes a building a highly 
intense symbol. The Vondelstraat was one of these resquats. It led to great 
riots, but the house itself played a less important role. The occupation of the 
intersection had overshadowed the entire resquat and the building did not 
ultimately need to be defended from inside. The Groote Keyser had created the 
prospect of a terrible battle, but it got too convoluted to ever be realized. 
The Vogelstruys offered the same promise, but on a practical scale. The whole 
story about speculation and thugs was so obvious here that it no longer needed 
to be told. The house was worth more than a quiet eviction with a few cops; it 
had been established that there would be a violent defense. Now that, thanks to 
Toorenaar's sly moves, this had failed to happen, they wanted to give themselves 
a second chance. What was more, after having seen each other in an argumentative 
atmosphere for two months, Amsterdam squatters met each other again without 
feeling any need of debate, and consequently they could surrender themselves 
completely to the event. It took them up on the offer.

At 1:00, when there were enough people and the police were still nowhere in 
sight, there turned out to be too little equipment to go into action. Helmets 
and crowbars were fetched, and on the Singel side the first windows went in. A 
group hesitantly formed and tried to yank open the cellar door there with a 
crowbar. Frits: »That door opened outwards, so it was pointless. We'd even 
barricaded it. The thugs started to fling things down from the third floor, 
rocks, a piece of sewer pipe, and a chair. Some people had helmets on and pieces 
of wood in their hands, but it was too dangerous and we quit. I walked around to 
the Herengracht and there was a big group of people there too. Rocks were thrown 
back and forth. There was no way to get to the door; their aim was right on the 
mark. Since we knew we couldn't get to it that way, a couple of us rushed to the 
Keyser with a carrier bike. Because we knew how much material there was inside 
the Struys. On the way we picked up a big door from a trash container. It had a 
round hole in it and we wanted to set legs under it at the Keyser and lay a 
bedspring on top, so heavy things would sort of bounce back. A nice 
construction, but there were no tools at all in the Keyser. It had gotten so 
desolate there that we couldn't even find any nails. Time, time, time, hurry. It 
got really rickety. It could just take the weight if we stood right under it, 
but that was it. With a lot of trouble we got the thing onto the bike and pushed 
it to the Herengracht. There with united strength we got it on its feet, then 
under it and shuffle, shuffle, shuffle forward.«

Karel was also on the Herengracht side. »We were hiding behind trees and cars; 
we were standing in a group hurling sharp street rocks that were being beat with 
a hammer to a handy size a little way away. When the door on legs started 
moving, a tremendous rain of rocks flew from the street at the house to keep the 
heavies at a distance. While the windows clattered down in shards they threw 
back just as hard. We inched to the right-hand window where there was already 
the beginning of a hole in the barricading. Thugs were standing behind it ready 
to let loose. Then all of a sudden it started going really fast. The gang just 
disappeared and within a minute the front door was rammed in with beams and 
traffic signs.« By 3:00 the people were streaming inside one after the other.

Frits: »We'd made a big trap door between the ground floor and the second floor 
and it was closed. We were standing packed together under it. I knew that there 
were refrigerators and washing machines upstairs waiting to be set on top of the 
trap door; we'd put them there. It was highly probable that the thugs had shoved 
them onto the trap door by now. Suddenly there was someone with a circular saw, 
and the person just started sawing into that trap door. I mean, who would have 
something like that with them? Maybe it was just lying there. I was scared 
because a huge mass of people was standing on the stairway. We yelled to the 
thugs that they had to leave, over the rooftops, and they should avoid a 
confrontation. Because they were lynched. Finally the trap door did break, and 
thank god, there was nothing standing on it.«

They ran from the Herengracht to the Singel side to throw open the door. There 
Joep entered the house: »I was astounded by a mess of Italians from the 
Oosterpark who came in a bit later and - I'd never seen it before - had iron 
catapults with them. Amid screaming and yelling we fired lead shot in the round, 
narrow stairwell towards the upstairs, where some of the thugs were still 
sitting. They escaped by way of the roof. We wondered for a while whether 
everyone was really gone. We'd only find out later. The owner had a crippled 
stepson. One of those amazing stories that came out during the trial was that we 
had held him hostage in some dark little room by the elevator. I heard he was 
outside and we'd had telephone contact with him. Those were the kind of things 
we didn't know for sure. After that the alarm call was repeated several times 
and some tools were sent for.«

After the euphoria, the event went into a lull, and after its mass attack on the 
building the group fell apart. People like Karel and Joep, who hadn't been 
inside before, sprinted through the house and paid a speedy visit to the roof to 
inspect the escape routes. Joep pulled off the barbed wire that was stretched 
over the roof escape route, »but I didn't look further than the end of my nose 
on that.« Frits went with a friend to drink coffee on the Spui. Those inside 
busied themselves with fortification. The door that had served as a shield was 
nailed provisionally behind the smashed window. Bedsprings were brought in 
through the Singel side. Word came that the riot police were approaching. The 
squatters inside the Vogelstruys realized that the moment had finally come to 
defend the house from inside, and begin to inwardly prepare, to get their nerves 
under control. Across the Herengracht canal a whole crowd had gathered and stood 
watching, and the tourist boats kept going by.

Max was still in the cell on the Lijnbaansgracht. »At one point the PA in the 
station said all riot police personnel had to go and report. Then I thought: 
hey, wait a minute, who knows. Then at about 3:00 was my interrogation. 'Do you 
have anything to state?' 'No.' 'Then hurry up and fuck off to your buddies.' I 
didn't know what was going on, so I just walked back to the Vogelstruys and I 
see all these people throwing rocks...I got there right when the riot police 
were standing pressed up against the house.« 120 riot cops had been rounded up 
posthaste and sent without any briefing or knowledge of the situation to the 
Herengracht address. A vanful of riot trainees were first, tearing up from the 
Raadhuisstraat; they blazed a trail through the surge of rubberneckers on the 
other side of the water, turned onto the Huidenstraat bridge, drove blindly up 
the piece of canal in front of the Struys, piled out and started a 200-meter-
long charge.

Joep and Karel were still inside. Joep: »The minute the police come you have to 
decide: stay in or go out. For me the main reason to stay was, once you start 
something you have to finish it, no bitching. But of course you also have this 
vague feeling inside you do have a bigger chance of getting busted. But it was 
mainly to be consistent. They were your buddies, you stuck by them. They were 
squatters, but also people who knew each other well from these situations. The 
tourists and Italians just gave it an extra dimension. There were also some 
people busy collecting household stuff that had been left behind. That might 
have been a reason for them to stay inside too. Of course there are also people 
who stay to make sure it doesn't all get out of hand, take care of the wounded 
and all that. There were 30 or 40 people. When the fighting got really hefty on 
the Herengracht, the door on the Singel side just stayed open. Fantastic.«

Max was busy on the Herengracht. »There was a fight every meter. There were 
relatively few people, or they were pretty spread out over all those bridges and 
corners. Five of you stood there with rocks, and then throwing as hard as you 
can and the cops PAF! And then they charged again, and then someone came forward 
and scared the shit out of 12 riot cops all by himself with a steel bar. The 
cops started throwing rocks too. Then I heard that you could still get in on the 
Singel and that's what I did.« Karel: »I had decided to stay inside, but I 
suddenly lost the people from my neighborhood. I walk outside onto the Singel to 
tell them that I'm staying inside and see them all just then running to the 
corner. I run after them, but I think again that I want to be inside. As I run 
up the steps to the house, I see Joep just pushing a beam behind the door. He 
says sorry anyway. I ran around the northern side to the Herengracht.«

Frits came walking up from the Spui and landed in the middle of the fray. »It 
drove me crazy that I wasn't inside. We knew for sure 30 or 40 people were in 
the building. You couldn't get through anymore. It was sealed shut and they were 
like mice in a trap. Only the Singel side wasn't blocked off yet with cops. 
First I was on the corner of the Herengracht and the Oude Spiegelstraat. A row 
of cops was standing on the canal. We ran forward, around the corner, threw 
rocks and ran straight back. Preferably bouncing off the ground, because they 
had shields, but if they bounced they couldn't tell where they were coming from 
anymore. That was the only time I saw a woman throwing rocks non-stop, too. The 
cops couldn't take it; they were standing there jumping and throwing back. They 
came tearing at us on the bridge in a van. In a split second a rock's coming 
straight at me. I see it just a meter away in front of my face and duck away. A 
minute later they sprayed tear gas behind me, huge clouds, as the riot squad was 
charging in front of me. I held my breath and ran straight through it. That'll 
make you sick.« In the meantime the rest of the riot squad arrived, including 
the tear gas unit, which sprayed - instead of the CS gas which the squatters had 
gotten acquainted with on April 30 - the old CN gas which had been banned since 
May that year. Karel: »The gas came into the alley where we were standing. We 
didn't worry about it because we had scarves on. It suddenly turned out to be 
much stronger than we'd thought, and we ran back retching over the Singel. In 
one of the streets we went to a greengrocer's to buy lemons, which we had cut 
and then squirted into each other's eyes to get the gas out. When we'd gotten 
over it, we found everything blocked off.«

Inside the house, Joep and Max ended up on the third floor. Joep: »You couldn't 
see out very well. We mostly heard what was going on on the canal. Crashing, 
rock-throwing, yelling. When the street had been cleared you could see bunches 
of riot cops standing by trees with shields. We opened the windows and started 
throwing stuff. There were three or four of us. And the Free Keyser was on the 
air. We had a radio and they were playing the eviction tape, 'Street Fighting 
Man' and 'Anarchy in the U.K.' - that added to the festivity. I was like, 'They 
always play the same thing! Can't I make a request?' The material to be hurled 
outside were at the ready. Whole bedsprings were going down, chairs, tables and 
heaters, really everything. Finally it just couldn't be heavy enough; it didn't 
matter for shit anymore. I do remember I said to Max, 'Should we do that?' But 
he said, 'What does it matter if you throw a one-pound rock or a six-pound bed?' 
He's completely right, of course.«

In principle, the police followed the same tactic during this second eviction as 
the squatters had applied that afternoon. At the water's edge, behind the trees, 
stood tear gas marksmen who shot as many tear gas grenades as possible inside, 
to keep the crew inside away from the windows. At the same time, a group inched 
forward with the shields over their heads, in order to get back inside the house 
through the right-hand window. Max: »It was really pretty Asterix and Obelix 
(like a cartoon) with those shields. On the second floor they managed to shoot 
gas inside, because there were large windows. But we were behind a pretty small 
window and we were holding a mattress in front of it, which we pushed aside 
every now and then to throw stuff.« Joep: »It wasn't worth it to push that 
mattress aside for just a rock, so at one point we chucked a whole box of bricks 
down and finally a bedspring when we left. It's also a question of efficiency, 
optimal use of gravity. You have no time at all for crazy schemes. The only 
thing you stop to think about is, how do I survive this?« Max: »I sat there 
yanking on the washbasin since there was nothing left to throw. The thugs had 
already dumped half of the throwing material out on the resquatters, so the 
ammunition was just used up. It got pretty quiet. From the second floor we heard 
nothing more; we got the feeling that the people there had fled. No tear gas had 
come in where we were yet, although you could smell it. There fumes got so bad 
we couldn't take it anymore. Then it was like, we're going to have to try to get 
away; this isn't going to work.« 

Michiel and about 15 other people were throwing rocks down from the second floor 
on the Herengracht side when tear gas was shot in from the street. »We ran out 
of the room and stood in the marble hallway on the third floor. From the room on 
the Herengracht we saw big yellowish-white clouds drifting towards us, but we 
couldn't smell it yet. Then we decided to leave via the Singel. We took the 
barricades away from the front door, which took a long time. Things were really 
quiet on the canal, a strange contrast with inside. There were lines of cops 
left and right with their backs to us. It took at least another minute before 
they saw us. 'Let's break through the lines,' someone yelled. We went to the 
right, it was about a 100-meter walk. When we were halfway the line turned 
around and rushed at us. We ran back but there we came up against the line from 
the other side. Then almost everyone either jumped or was knocked into the 
water. I got hit right as I jumped into the canal. On the other side were flat 
barges with lots of people standing on them cussing at the police and they 
hauled us out.« The ones who didn't jump into the water passed Commissioner 
Toorenaar on the bridge, standing there encouraging his men with a »beautiful, 
beautiful!« to lay into the passersby some more.

Max and Joep were still in the third-floor apartment. They heard nothing more 
from below and went to have a look in the hallway. Max: »We open that door - a 
white fog of tear gas. And through that onto the flat roof.« Joep: »On the roof 
we hiked to the attic on the Singel side, and there we ran into people from 
other parts of the house who'd also come onto the roof. I stayed in the 
stairwell a minute to check where the rest were. We didn't know for sure when 
the police had gotten inside. Before that we'd seen them busy outside, but when 
you suddenly realize they're inside, there's sort of a moment of panic. Because 
it makes a whole different sound. An riot cop standing outside is very different 
from a riot cop in your own house. The space is different, the acoustics are 
different. You don't see people from above under their shields and helmets, but 
on the stairs face to face. Then it's suddenly about your own ass, whereas if 
you're outside or throwing stones from above, then it's about the building. When 
they're inside you're not thinking anymore about attacking or defending, just 
about saving your own ass, that was how it was for me. Getting into hand-to-hand 
combat with the riot police was out of the question.«

To get onto the neighbors' roof the group had to jump over an alley one meter 
wide and twelve meters deep. »So we had to get over that and that went OK 
because the ones who still more or less had their cool hung onto those who were 
really wobbling. Two stayed behind on the roof.« Joep: »We stepped inside the 
neighbors' house through a kitchen window. It wasn't open; I believe we had to 
use some force there. But it was also necessary, because we were pretty dazed. 
That gas really affected our breathing, everyone had red sweaty faces. We were 
kind of dizzy, groggy, couldn't make it any further. We needed to drink water in 
the kitchen, dry off. Then a little old lady appeared out of a bedroom; she was 
all upset, but she was sweet.«

Claar had come onto the roof out of the Singel house and jumped with the others 
over the alley. She told a newspaper later: »When I was half inside the window 
of the neighbors' house and glanced backward, I saw that the police had reached 
the roof by then too and were grouped around the two who'd stayed behind. When I 
was inside I sat for a minute to get over the gas. Then we all went into a 
living room on the first floor. No one was there; as compensation for the use of 
the room a few people laid money on the table plus an apologetic note.« Max: »We 
ended up right in the house of that guy who had rushed outside during the squat 
and was totally against it. That guy came running outside and said to the chief 
of the riot squad, 'There they are!'« Joep: »We saw the police there on the 
street running back and forth. We went to the john, washed up and checked if 
there was anything to eat or drink. We discussed what we should do, break out or 
stay there. What could they do to us if we were in there? We were going to 
explain to whoever lived there what our situation was. I took my jacket off and 
stuck it under a bed. I waited there about 20 minutes - an amazing silence, very 
relaxed, that alternation between intensity and calm. Until the cops came with 
Wagenaar, the resident. They hammered on the door and I opened it with the story 
that they had to understand our difficult situation - wham bam, out. 'This is my 
house!' He already thought he'd lost his house. The cops went crazy and hammered 
us down the stairs, out of the house. They were whacking us on the head. I kind 
of lurched up the street and saw cops with long batons coming towards us, they 
thought, 'Hey, where did those squatters come from?' Running the cop gauntlet, 
maybe I'll get away; but it didn't work.«  Max: »Claar was walking in front of 
me. The cops were pushing so hard that everyone tumbled off the stairs; she fell 
and then she was taken inside by the downstairs neighbor and didn't get 
arrested. She knew the woman because her dog, who she'd had in the squat for 
awhile, had been bitten by this neighbor's dog, and the woman had paid the 
veterinary bill. In the chaos no one noticed that she rescued her.« A reporter 
saw the rest staggering up the street. »'Kill them, kill them, those scum,' 
yells a man from a neighboring house. On the street corner a boy lies crying, as 
a group of eight riot police beat on him: 'Mercy, mercy, oh please.' A girl with 
bleeding head wounds is kicked into a police car. Others are dragged down the 
street by their hair.« Despite heavy head wounds, a number of people managed to 
escape in between the police into the crowd of onlookers standing further down 
in the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat. Others were arrested and transported to police 
headquarters. The two stragglers on the roof were smacked across the roof and 
back into the house by the police. One was so seriously injured that he lost 
consciousness. He was dragged unconscious from the hall behind the Singel door 
into a room. The woman, who had also been kicked, had to lie next to him on her 
stomach with her hands behind her neck. »After about 45 minutes we were pulled 
up by our hair. In the hall they put handcuffs on us and tightened them very 
painfully. We were dragged out the window by our hair and pulled into a riot 
van.« Two hours later they were already free. A total of 16 people were arrested 
in and around the building, of whom ten were quickly released.

In the meantime, someone took the people who'd been fished out of the water to 
the NRC building. Michiel: »But no one there wanted to let us in, because they 
didn't want anything to do with the riot, an aftereffect from April 30. Finally 
they did let us take a cold shower. We borrowed clean clothes somewhere else and 
went back to the riot, where we ran into lots of people we knew who were 
surprised we hadn't been picked up.« During the eviction the riot in the street 
carried on with great ferocity. The offices had let out and City Radio had come 
on the air, so lots of people came to get a look. Frits: »We roamed around for 
hours. On the other side of the Herengracht, we, this bad-ass group in black 
going on an expedition, terribly conspicuous among all those onlookers, walked 
to the Boschen house to smash windows. We stopped to rest on the Spuistraat. You 
couldn't get to the house anymore, the cops were still standing there. A couple 
of days later I went on vacation.« Karel was standing by one of the Singel 
bridges where a platoon was being pelted from two sides. »Then the group to the 
right of us attacked, at which the police rushed forward, so that we could 
bombard them from the side. There were lots of misses, by us as well as by them. 
All the stores, coffee shops, cars, and just about everything got smashed to 
smithereens in the process. Plus the riot vans had already smashed up the bikes 
that had been locked to the bridge. The police were covered from head to toe in 
paint. The audience was sitting in the cafes there on the canal, beer in hand, 
cheering us on and cussing us out: 'Where are those 50,000 homeless anyway? I've 
never seen them.' When one of them started to take a picture we threw a rock 
into the bar. Eventually you couldn't tell bystanders and squatters apart 
anymore and there were also lots of plainclothesmen. We went home then.« Late 
that night Claar snuck out of the neighbor's house. She walked to the Groote 
Keyser, the closest squat, and was refused entry. Max: »One of Hein's new policy 
lines was that only residents and people who had a temporary duty in the 
building could be walking around. I heard that from Claar later when I was in 
the can. You really start hating someone like that.«

The squatters were evicted and the riot was won. The monotony of the months of 
waiting for the Keyser's eviction had been broken. The squatters had proven to 
themselves that what they had endlessly been talking about was no bluff: they 
really were crazy enough to stake their lives on defending a building and 
unleash an unheard-of amount of violence in the process. That they lost the 
house in question did nothing to alter that. Without any preparation or 
discussion among themselves, everyone let the event carry them away. It had been 
waiting for them for a while already and was now unexpectedly being kicked off 
by the radical naivete of one Toorenaar, clueless as to the trip he was 
interfering in. The pretension of spontaneous rage over housing was made good 
here without a sound about media, symbolization or advance planning. The 
squatters broke through their fears and entered into total confrontation, 
without hesitations regarding goal, feasibility, purpose or future perspective. 
Vacancy, chaos, violence and fun: »You really got away from it all.«

On July 3, 1980, a terminus was reached; in their minds the squatters had 
crossed the boundary separating civilization from wilderness. It had not been a 
game, but not an embittered final battle either. The break with the everyday 
legal order that had made squatting possible in the first place had been taken 
to its most extreme consequences. Many wanted no part of it anyway. Others, who 
had experienced the extremity and survived, knew now what it meant. They had no 
reason to go so far ever again. At the same time, the outside world thought that 
from now on squatters were prepared to defend their houses like this forever. 
That made them able to keep this shadow up their sleeves in future evictions.

The six remaining Vogelstruys arrestees were taken into custody. Joep: »At that 
point it started to happen rationally. The high and the haze, the automatism and 
the mechanism were over and I thought, now I have to start thinking strictly 
legally, or strategically. It was a different level. The cell was the next step 
in the struggle, continue consistently, stay militant and prepare for what's 
coming. Don't say your name, be a nuisance and make things pleasant for 
yourself.« The arrestees' group sent mail and packages and organized »noise 
demos« outside the jail for the people inside. The »Struysvogel Politiek 
[Ostrich Attitude] Work Group« declared the building contaminated and sent out a 
communiqu·Ç·: »People fighting against the housing shortage are being abused in 
a fascist way and arrested.« The B·î·schens fled to Germany, »scared to death of 
reprisals.« The Free Keyser made jailhouse radio and Max got a visit. »Some 
total hippie came into my cell, who I couldn't tell if he was looking at me or 
not. And that was my attorney. Then the guards came to bring something every 
hour, a magazine or a bunch of grapes with notes. It was driving them crazy. 
Sunday my attorney comes back to go over the arraignment, and that stupid guard 
suddenly brings in another package. Claar had baked a cake, it was still warm. 
The pan wasn't allowed in the cell, so the guard starts to pick the cake out of 
it. And he actually manages to get the damn cake out in one piece. So I say to 
my attorney, you want a bite? and he says, must be a hash cake, but what the 
hell, it's Sunday. So I break a piece off, and they've baked a file in there, an 
old rusty wood file. We were falling down laughing. I was transferred to the 
jail in Haarlem, I was standing there with all my bags and everything was 
searched. That pan was in one of the bags and I'd stuffed the file in a sweater. 
The guy says, what's this? How...how...or what? I go, don't ask me.« The 
arrestees were scattered all over the country and remained in custody for six 
weeks. Squatters had never been locked up for so long. Joep designed the trial 
strategy in letters to the others: »It would be ideal if we could make a 
combined play among us, the attorneys and the audience - testimonies, expert 
witnesses, pleadings and supporting theater in the gallery. If the judge should 
start being difficult, then of course we will too: keep talking and talking, 
retract our statements, argue, swear. I think it would be good to pull a good 
joke when the verdict is announced, like Bas and Max have suggested (puking, 
shitting, standing on your head, fainting, pointing out a zit to the judge, 
etc.).« »That to me is the essence of a political trial. Not so much the 
testimony you give, but that you see it as a fight: who's determining the order 
here?«

At their arraignment on August 14th their temporary remand is suspended until 
the 18th. When they are released that day, the first thing they do is to 
liberate fellow arrestee Bas from a hospital in Haarlem where he's in for his 
appendix. Two days later, the first day of the trial is scheduled, but none of 
them shows up, since they are suffering from »collective appendicitis«. They do 
show up in the club Paradiso the same day, at the squatters' court, pronouncing 
judgment on speculators, the city, the police and the law (with demonstration 
afterwards).

In the six intervening weeks of city-wide meetings a change in course was 
decided for in reaction to the Vogelstruys, among other things. A direct 
confrontation with the riot police could be prevented by placing evictions in an 
economic context; from now on they had to start costing the authorities as much 
money as possible. The strategy was two-pronged: on one hand the house had to 
pose enough of a threat that the police would be forced to deploy the maximum 
amount of personnel and equipment. On the other, the riot had to be got under 
way in order to do as much damage as possible to banks, the city, real estate 
agents and other nasties. Thus the concept of the scripted riot was born, a 
logically planned havoc under their own control. It would speculate on police 
strategy, involve the media in the game and dictate to the people who respond to 
the emergency alarm what they had to do. The squatters needed to go through a 
learning process to stop hanging around the squat; they had to cut the tie to 
the local experience and spread throughout the city.

In a long series of city and neighborhood meetings they talked over what ought 
to be done, and when, about the next approaching eviction: the PH-kade. At the 
same time, however, it stayed unclear whether the house was actually going to be 
defended from the inside. This was used as a threat, but no one could determine 
whether it was intended for media agents or fellow squatters. The PH-kade's 
having been set up as a »political squat« was now taking its toll. In preparing 
for the squat in April no one had worried about putting together a stable group 
of residents, and this did much to divide the discussion over the manner of 
defense. Some raised the issue of the loss of public support, while others 
prepared a military response and started training programs in order to be better 
ab