Exploring the Congo in Tervuren

If I seem a bit preoccupied with history, well... it's probably because I am. I was a history major in college, and I'm fascinated with the past. Strangely enough, I was never that interested in American history, but focused my studies on medieval Europe. Which makes living in Belgium an absolute joy, what with all that was going on here in the Middle Ages.

Maybe it's because I didn't grow up here, but I find myself getting more and more interested in the Belgium's modern history too. I grew up hearing about George Washington, the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence, blah blah blah, year after year. It was all so boring... And yet I knew nothing about the history of Belgium when I arrived here three years ago! Nothing at all! It's all so new and exciting and surprising.

Take, for instance, Belgium's involvement in the Congo. Sure, I'd heard of Joseph Conrad's famous novel, Heart of Darkness (which I confess I've never read), and I even knew that it was the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now (which I've never seen). But I did NOT know that the novel was set in the Belgian Congo, or that it was inspired by Conrad's own experience working for a Belgian trading company in the Congo.

In fact, I didn't know anything at all about the history of the Congo before I came to Belgium. Which is one of the reasons I was so eager to visit the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren before it closes for renovations at the end of November. So a couple of weeks ago, an American friend and I made the trip out to Tervuren, on the outskirts of Brussels.

The building itself is a grand, Neoclassical palace, built to showcase the natural resources of the Congo to the rest of the world when it was still under Belgian rule. Stepping through the front doors, we found ourselves in a huge, marble-clad entry hall surmounted by a tall dome. There are gilt sculptures of idealized Europeans bringing charity and civilization to poor African children. It's not just a museum of African art and artifacts, but of colonialism itself.

Some of the exhibit halls look as though they haven't changed since the last museum renovation in the 1950's. Other rooms still have their original painted murals and wooden cases from 1910. Even the organization and display of the collections is like something out of the last century, with shelves of specimen jars and stuffed animals posed in “lifelike” scenarios. It's incredible that such an important institution has managed to fall so far behind current museum standards.

I can't help but wonder if the decades of neglect had something to do with Belgium's unwillingness to take a good, long look at its colonial legacy in the Congo. It seems to me (as an outsider) that the history of the Congo is something that Belgium is doing its best to forget. In any case, I haven't seen or heard much about it since I've been here. I've even heard a couple of Belgians say something to the effect of, “Well, we don't have the problem with race/a history of slavery like you do in America.”

I hope that the renovation of the Africa Museum means that the Belgian government is ready to take on the issue of the Congo, and that the reopened museum will be a place where Belgians and foreigners alike can come to terms with what happened there under Belgian rule. I look forward to returning in three years and learning more about central Africa... but I do hope they leave those beautiful murals and at least some of the creepy specimen jars.

(A version of this post appears on the website of Fans of Flanders, an English-language TV show about expat life in Dutch-speaking Belgium.)

A country steeped in history

It all started with “Downton Abbey.”

I've been watching the British TV series from the beginning and fell in love with the period it portrays, especially (I confess) the clothes, but also the nostalgia and romance of what seems to be a lost world. There's a sense that a certain style of living was coming to end, and that the twentieth century was about to start in earnest—with the outbreak of World War I.

Soon after “Downton Abbey” became a hit TV show, the BBC produced another miniseries set in the period around WWI. “Parade's End” was based on a British novel and filmed in part here in Belgium. It also focuses on the loss of innocence and privilege among the British aristocracy during the war years, but it takes a more serious approach than “Downton” and shows more of the horrors of the war.

I happened to end up working on the set of “Parade's End” for a couple of scenes shot in Flanders, and had to quickly learn about dining habits and recipes in the years 1914-1918. I was hired (at the last minute, out of desperation, I think) as the food stylist, which meant prepping meals for actors to pretend to eat on camera. It was a crash course in Edwardian cuisine and manners.

My curiosity about the Great War grew out of my interest in these TV shows and for the world they portray. I confess I was never very interested in military history and knew very little about WWI. I didn't even know that much of the fighting took place in West Flanders, or that Belgium was the site of the Allies' last European defenses, until I moved here.

Of course, now that I live in Belgium, I can't help but be aware of the great impact both World Wars had on the history of this country and the role that Belgium played in the military strategies of the great European powers. And with the centennial of the outbreak of WWI just around the corner, Belgium is gearing up to receive visitors coming to pay their respects at the battlefields and monuments along the former front lines in West Flanders.

I decided that I should learn more about WWI, not just because it's important but almost out of a sense of embarrassment that I know so little. I started with Wikipedia and then decided to read a book for a more thorough account of the war. After perusing a few dozen titles, I chose The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman as my starting point, in part because the book won a Pulitzer Prize and in part because it covers the outbreak and first days of the war, which seemed a good place to begin.

It's slow going. I'm reminded of the reasons why I never liked this part of history class in school: the jumble of foreign general's names, the descriptions of troop movements, the dissection of military strategies. And yet, I find myself getting drawn into the story, in large part because I now have a context for the events I'm reading about.

When Tuchman talks about King Albert I deciding to stand and fight, I can picture the equestrian statue at the foot of the Kunstberg in Brussels, and I feel I know this man. When she describes German troop mobilization towards Luik, I understand, for the first time, exactly where they are headed, and I understand the role that the mighty Maas river played in the armies' troop deployments.

This is the difference between learning about history as a bored American high school student, hearing about far-away, long-ago events in places with strange names... and learning about them as a resident of and visitor to those places, with a concrete grasp of the underlying geography, the culture, and the people who live there. Suddenly the events of August 1914 seem very real to me.

So I recommend that you expats and natives alike take the time to learn more about the history of Belgium, whether it's World War I or some other period. Read a book, or visit a museum. So much has happened within the borders of this little country, and I truly believe that you have to study the past if you want to understand the present.

Plus, as one of my American friends said during a visit to Belgium, “Europe: It's where the history comes from.”

(A version of this post appeared on the website of Fans of Flanders, an English-language TV program about expat life in Dutch-speaking Belgium.)

History comes to life in Bruges

I've always said that ending up in Belgium is my punishment for complaining about the weather (or lack thereof) in Southern California: one of life's little ironies that seemed funny at first and now just seems cruel and unusual. Let this be a lesson you all: Be careful what you wish for!

On the other hand, there is also a sweet serendipity in my move to Belgium that I only discovered gradually. You see, I adore history and art. The older, the better. I majored in history at university, and then went on to study art history in graduate school. My favorite period is the Middle Ages. But aside from the occasional museum, the only place I could see medieval art and architecture was in books.

It turns out that Belgium is a fantastic place for anyone who loves medieval history. Some of its greatest artistic achievements date to the Middle Ages, and the medieval Flemish cities of Ghent and Bruges were among the richest and most populous in the world. There was a time when Belgium was at the very center of the power struggles that shaped modern Europe.

I never get tired of wandering around the old city centers of Flanders, gawking at the step-gabled houses and Gothic churches. My Belgian friends tend to take these things for granted, having seen them all their lives... but once you've lived in Los Angeles, where an "old" building dates from the 1930's, it seems incredible that structures built seven or eight hundred years ago are still standing--and still being used.

The problem, of course, is that the people who built and lived in all those ancient houses are long gone. The richly-dressed men and women captured in all those fifteenth-century panel paintings: Who were they? What were their lives like? What did they eat? How did they think? Historians have answers to these and many other questions but it still takes a feat of imagination to see them as real, living people.

This weekend, a new attraction opened in Bruges that attempts to bring the medieval history of Flanders to life for the ordinary visitor. Historium combines walk-through environments with a story told through narration and film in order to immerse the viewer in fifteenth-century Bruges. Special effects like fake snow, the scent of burning wood and wind add to the experience.

On an ordinary day in 1435, the painter Jan Van Eyck is working on a commission from a church official, a Madonna and Child with saints and a portrait of the donor. (The actual painting hangs in the Groeninge Museum.) His assistant, Jacob, has been sent to the harbor to meet the young lady who will pose for the Madonna, and to retrieve an exotic green parrot who figures in the painting as well. But the girl and the parrot escape and Jacob must try to find them...

Upon entering the attraction, you are given an audio guide which provides the narration and dialogue in your chosen language (seven are offered). In the first room, a darkened set simulates the waterfront in Bruges and a short film plays on the large video screen. Here you meet Jacob, the girl and the parrot as the story begins.

When the scene ends, you are directed to the next room, where you find yourself standing in the entrance to Van Eyck's studio. A life-sized, animatronic Canon Van der Paele snores in the corner as the scene plays out on a screen framed in a doorway, creating the effect of watching the action unfold in the next room. This was my favorite room, in that it successfully integrated the physical environment with the story and created a believable illusion.

After the first two scenes, the story starts to fall apart and the sequence of rooms starts to feel disjointed. You visit a paternoster bead seller, a tavern, a public bath house and the customs office at the harbor. The bath house seems particularly gratuitous, in that it indulges in a kind of erotic fantasy with lovely, naked ladies staring languidly into the camera while shot with soft lighting and lots of candles.

Worst of all, midway through you must exit "medieval Bruges" and climb an ordinary, modern staircase to get to the second floor, where the story continues. This completely ruins the mood and reminds you that you're actually  in the 21st century, wearing headphones and watching a fictional story.

There were other things that bothered me: The English-language audio script didn't sync up with the actors' speech, and the scenes often had a stilted feel to them, as if the characters themselves couldn't hear each other very well or didn't know their lines. The video in one of the rooms was jerky and kept freezing, so I hope they were able to fix those kind of technical issues.

My main complaint, though, is that the outdoor scenes all seemed to take place at night, on streets and squares that were deserted, aside from the main characters. The creators claim that they hoped to bring the fifteenth century to life, but the Bruges they depicted seems curiously dead. I wanted to see the frenzy of commercial activity at the harbor, the foreign merchants and their ships, the people of all walks of life who populated one of Europe's biggest and richest cities.

I also wish they'd depicted more recognizable and real settings. The highlight for me was the last scene where the parrot flies through the Waterhalle, which for 500 years occupied the very spot on the Markt where Historium now stands. Nearly 100 meters long, it straddled the canal (also long gone) so that boats could unload their wares inside, under its vast roof. The 3D depiction is based on historical and archaeological documentation.

Despite my quibbles over some of the details, Historium definitely fills a need for the visitor to Bruges: It attempts to show the real history of the city in living color, making the past vividly present instead of an abstraction best left to the scholars. It's all too easy to see the medieval streets of Bruges as a sort of Disney-esque fantasyland of Ye Old Europe where tourists can buy chocolate and lace doilies made in China... Instead of the enduring traces of a once-thriving and dynamic metropolis.

Upon exiting the attraction, another room resembling a traditional museum exhibit gives more explanation about the people and settings depicted in the story. From there you pass through the Duvelorium, an ultra-modern and stylish bar sponsored by the Belgian brewer Duvel Moortgat. Downstairs, a gift shop and a chocolate shop are open to the public without ticket purchase. There's also a new tourist information office for the city of Bruges housed in the same building.

A medieval abbey in Brussels

Yesterday I went to Brussels to visit Bruxella 1238, a museum with the remains of a Franciscan abbey buried under street level in the middle of the city. It's only open once a month (on the first Wednesday) with a guided tour, and there's only one tour in English. I'd known about it since last year but this was the first time I'd finally been free on the right day and made the effort to go.

I'd invited a friend from my Dutch class to join me and we took the train together from Hasselt in the morning. We bought our tour tickets at the Maison du Roi in the Grand'Place, then walked over to the museum entrance next to the Bourse. There were four other people on the English tour besides us. The site is small so a small group is ideal.

The guide gave us a lot of historical background on the early development and medieval history of Brussels and led us through the archaeological site along permanent walkways. The walkways and stairs took us over the ruins, but where we had to cross the walls of the abbey, we actually had to climb over the walls themselves, stepping on top of the stones.

The site, underneath and alongside the Bourse, was discovered during roadwork in 1988. After they'd excavated the foundations of the medieval abbey, it was decided to make it a permanent museum rather than cover it up again. It's now covered by a glass roof and you can look down into the site from the street, but most people walk by without noticing it.

You have to use your imagination to picture what the abbey might have looked like in the Middle Ages, since we can only see the foundations and subterranean levels of the buildings now. Several skeletons--monks who were buried beneath the abbey--give the site a funereal air and bear witness to the real people who lived and died there.

Afterwards, we returned to the Maison du Roi, where our tour tickets were also good for admission to the Museum of the City of Brussels. On the first floor there's a scale model of Brussels in the thirteenth century that shows the abbey in relation to the rest of the medieval cityscape. On the ground floor, you can see sculptural fragments from some medieval buildings, although not from the abbey.

As our guide explained, Brussels had its origins in the Middle Ages. There was no settlement, nothing but swampy marshland and meandering tendrils of the River Senne, before the 11th century and the first city walls were built in the 13th century. The abbey founded in 1238, therefore, is one of the oldest remnants of the city's past. Definitely worth taking a look if you're in Brussels on the first Wednesday of the month, or happen to be walking along the north side of the Bourse and remember to look down.