Andere Tijden

Lots of coughing and lots of homesickness. In the sixties and seventies, young children with asthma were sometimes placed in a home with other asthma patients for years to get their asthma under control. There was a constant search for the right treatment methods for asthma. Children from that time look back on that time; torn from their families and placed outside of society. One of them is actor/writer/director Edwin de Vries, who was placed in a home in Davos, Switzerland, for almost a year when he was nine. He sent desperate letters home and tells what that time meant to him.

In the mid-1990s, Utrecht counted hundreds of homeless people. There were few facilities for this group. Constand de Jonge and Sylvia van Woudenberg wanted to improve the living conditions of the homeless. They had to be able to generate an income, feel better about themselves and they wanted to give them a face. Together they founded the Utrechtse Straatnieuws, the first homeless newspaper in the Netherlands. It became a resounding success, but nowadays the newspaper is in dire straits. What has changed?

In the late sixties, the centre of Arnhem is confronted with an explosion of violence, intimidation, prostitution and undermining of authority. The underworld rules and both entrepreneurs and residents are terrified. The police are laughed at and cannot get a grip on the matter. Things get so out of hand that, for the first time, a special police unit is created. The Group Special Assignments, under the inspiring leadership of the then very young Jan Wilzing, must put an end to this. And they do. Their unorthodox methods quickly earn the group the nickname Het Gelders Bloedorkest.

In the 1960s, the Netherlands faced a major shortage of nurses. To make the profession more attractive, special nurse flats were built at many hospitals. They were also called the Turtle Dove or the Hunker Bunker. These residential complexes offered young women a protected environment during their nursing training. While their contemporaries celebrated freedom in those years, these women worked 45 hours a week. The responsibility was great and both physically and mentally challenging. How did this period shape them?

Once, in the heyday of the Cold War, the Netherlands had almost a thousand tanks. But after the Fall of the Wall, there were fewer and in 2011 the last tanks disappeared from the Dutch army. What is hard to imagine for the average citizen: the old tanks still evoke nostalgia among the tankers, as the crew is called.

At a time when concerns about AI, big tech and social media are growing, we look back at the early days of the internet.