For the Observer Magazine of 25 April 1971, Charles Bloomberg wrote about the ‘extraordinary phenomenon’ of Amsterdam’s ‘gnomes’ who had declared a ‘jovial war’ on the conformity of the once stolid city (‘What’s going on in Amsterdam?’).
Where there were ‘bearded pipe-puffing barge captains’ now there were ‘startling new figures’ – ‘long-haired gnomes in gas masks, disrupting peak-hour traffic, pixies reading fairytales at council meetings, celibate priests marrying in defiance of the Vatican, and wolf-whistling women’s liberationists pinching men’s bottoms’.
These developments went far beyond the ‘sex, psychedelic or hash revolutions’, said Bloomberg. ‘Amsterdam is erupting with a passionate search for change.’ One hero was the villager who couldn’t sleep because of a noisy chemical disposal factory. ‘He tape-recorded it and broadcast the recording over an amplifier outside the mayor’s house at 4am.’ He may well have accidentally invented avant-garde ambient music, too.
The most colourful of the new movements were the kabouters (gnomes), whose mission statement was: ‘What society treats as a joke, we take seriously; what society takes seriously, we treat as a joke.’
It had 12 departments of state. Its Ministry of Transport disrupted peak-hour traffic as part of a campaign to create car-free zones; the Ministry of Housing broke into long-vacant houses to make them habitable for the homeless.
‘Everyone treated the gnomes as an endearing joke,’ wrote Bloomberg, ‘until they won 11% of the vote in the city’s municipal elections.’ But one gnome councillor could see they had become useful idiots for cynical politicians. ‘It’s a question of repressive tolerance,’ he explained. ‘The gnomes have become a glamorous advert for authority – an authority that boasts it can even tolerate anarchists in its midst.’ Such tolerance had become intolerable.
