Renate Rubinstein was a columnist the likes of which I have never met again

The TV movie in two parts Tamar You absolutely have to go see Renate Rubinstein, which will be broadcast on NPO 2 on Wednesday evening and Thursday evening. Director David de Jongh worked hard on it and turned it into a beautiful film.

Renate Rubinstein (1929-1990) was a columnist the likes of which I have never met again. She had three passions: men (love), writing and politics, in that order. Indeed, to speak to him was to discuss. She stood against you for everything and anything until you let it go. If you said something she didn’t like, you were excommunicated, but just as well, a month later, without cause, you were reinstated in grace. She wrote meanly about me, but also sometimes very nice.

When I lived in a building with Jop Pancake – him upstairs, me downstairs – she sometimes came to eat with us, because Jop was a good cook. Jop could also play the piano and Renate could dance a lot, but she spoke better. I used to compete with her to see who was less Jewish. We both had a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. Mine was called Hamstra, one of his was called Hamm. Kosher ham we were. ‘But’, I say, ‘your mother is German and in ham German it is ‘Schinken’. Near the Eifel, Hamm seems to mean something like “dike”. You laughed a lot with her. These days, where the basic rules of irony are barely understood, she would struggle.

I had a big argument with her twice. The first time was when I Free Netherlands interviewed the philosopher Jaap van Heerden, whom she had divorced some time before. UN then placed the interview and the Tamar column on the same page. She immediately took her mobile phone to the editorial office of the Raamgracht, where the windows flew out of the sheds as soon as she entered.

The second time, of course, was about Weinreb, the miracle rabbi who claimed to have saved many Jews with his lists. Eventually, he turned out to be a common swindler who got rich from the suffering of the persecuted. She edited her books and supported Weinreb even when investigations revealed that Weinreb had cheated on her as well. Incidentally, De Jongh’s film features the recently deceased Igor Cornelissen, who claims to have noticed Weinreb. But this is not true. Cornelissen was a believer from the start. Willem Frederik Hermans, who was one of the first to see through the deception, called him a “slow admirer of Weinreb”. The Weinreb affair shattered Renate’s reputation and possibly her health.

Her tragedy is that she ended up projecting feelings of loyalty and togetherness that she had pursued all her life onto someone who turned out to be a con artist. The break she took to reconsider everything lasted the rest of her life. It is nonetheless admirable that she was still able to write valuable plays afterwards. Physically weak, she registered against a wall of suspicion. Never again on Weinreb or politics, but especially on herself, a subject in which she was unrivaled. Her example Carry van Bruggen, to whom she gave the title of the book Contemporary feminism once said: “Wisdom is the enemy of vitality”. In the Weinreb case, this applies very well to Renate in many respects.

An omission in the film is her relationship with Hugo Brandt Corstius (1935-2014). As a columnist he was a many-headed monster, writing under various pseudonyms in various newspapers – including Stoker on the front page of that newspaper. After she broke up with him, he continued to harass her, even with anonymous phone calls. In UN he started writing to her, a ridiculous way to get her attention. He ended up calling her an anti-Semite, indicating that he had become a jogger himself. The problem had all kinds of repercussions, inside and out UNBut you don’t see that in the movie.

At the end of her life, I sat for a while at her sickbed, where she was nursed by her dear cousin Maurits, for whom life, in all its malice, foresaw the same disease from which died. Renate. Today, I drive daily in the street where Renate came to live with her family who had fled Berlin. Number 43. If I had a hat, I’d take it off, though the thought of Weinreb sometimes prevents me.

Kudos to biographer Hans Goedkoop on seeing the film. He has a huge archive, but it’s not progressing and what I’ve read from him so far hasn’t impressed me much.