In this examination of Amsterdam's soul, part history, part travel guide, the Dutch writer Geert Mak imaginatively depicts the lives of the early Amsterdammers and traces the city's progress from a little town of merchants, sailors, farmers and fishermen into a thriving metropolis. He also provides his own insights into the psyche of Amsterdam's citizens: their concern for free speech and the rights of the individual, their characteristic sobriety and how their famous tolerance was put to the test and found lacking under the German Occupation, when many of the city's Jews (most notoriously Anne Frank) were betrayed by their neighbours.
Mak's Amsterdam is a city of dreams and nightmares, of grand civic architecture and magnificent monuments, but also of civil wars, uprisings, and bloody religious purges. In his instructive journey through the city and through time, Mak displays an eye for the bizarre and the unexpected: a medieval lady's shoe unearthed during building work; a Rembrandt sketch of a hanged girl; a graffito foretelling the city's doom on the wall of a mansion, daubed by a deranged burgomaster with his own blood.