Fire devours one single residential block. Water batters through the dikes of one single polder. An earthquake reduces one province to rubble. So-called fast-onset disasters can usually be pinpointed in time and space. ‘Something terrible and disruptive happens at one moment, in one place,’ explains historian and Adapt postdoc Adriaan Duiveman. ‘Yet, when we speak about them, disasters are not confined to that single moment and that single place. What I study is how people “stretch” disasters.’
Duiveman distinguishes two forms of this stretching: social and temporal. ‘Or, put differently: across people and across time.’ Take the North Sea Flood Disaster of 1953. ‘Dutch authorities and media elevated it to a national catastrophe,’ says Duiveman, ‘a disaster that struck the entire nation. On the basis of the numbers alone, a cynic might wonder why. The 72,000 evacuees together represented less than 1% of the Dutch population, and they were all from one corner of the country. Yet people on the other sides, in Groningen and Limburg, felt compelled to send relief supplies.’
Why was that? ‘Apart from the immense suffering the disaster caused,’ Duiveman emphasises, ‘those people in Groningen and Limburg felt connected to their fellow compatriots.’
That sense of connection was achieved by stories. Through photographs, film footage, radio reports and newspaper coverage, the Dutch learned about the fate of those affected. ‘The stories emphasised that these were not just random people, but fellow Dutch citizens,’ says Duiveman. ‘And so the disaster was stretched socially.’
Stories also stretch a disaster in time. ‘By that I mean that communities can tell stories about past disasters for decades and even centuries after the actual events. A new disaster is placed within a series of disasters, such as earlier floods. And writers can also use old disasters to warn of new ones. This also happened in 2023, when the seventieth commemoration of the North Sea flood was not only about history, but at least as much about the risks of future flooding due to climate change.’
As a historian, Duiveman studies these social and temporal stretchings of disasters. To do so, he currently examines the role of churches in twentieth-century flood events. ‘Proper historical research,’ he says, ‘with archival work.’ At the same time, he is also conducting a study into something more experimental: climate fiction. ‘Because the stories we tell today about our future contain far more history than you would expect.’
Background
- Historian at Radboud University
- Obtained his PhD at Radboud University
- Worked as postdoc at KU Leuven and as programme maker at Radboud Reflects.
Former dream job
- As teenager: journalist, but only after studying history
- As a child: astronaut, and I wanted to run a pancake restaurant build of actual pancakes
Cultural recommendations
- Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter: a fascinating, absurdist and ultimately unsettling novel in which people, and eventually entire nations, retreat into the past and turn back time.
- Trevor Noah’s recent Netflix special Joy in the Trenches: aside from being a genuinely funny show, Noah also makes some sharp and profound observations on the philosophy of history.