“Good thing I never throw anything away”, I muttered to myself as I stood in front of my overcrowded bookcase, with its stacks of double-parked books. We hold on to too much stuff, so my search for two slim booklets took far longer than I’d hoped. But there they were at last, sitting side by side on the bottom shelf like old friends: Maastricht in dertig polemieken [Maastricht in Thirty Polemics] and Maastricht, een ander verhaal [Maastricht: A Different Story].
Both are collections of short stories by well-known and lesser-known Maastricht locals, each writing about an interesting place in the city – from the “inhospitable” intersection of Brusselsestraat and De Kommel to the train station where you enter through “the back door of the town” (meaning the old factory buildings) and De Hoge Fronten, described as the most beautiful garden one could wish for.
Maastricht in Thirty Polemics was published in 1992 as a Studium Generale initiative. In what now feels like an almost comically outdated move, SG invited over thirty men (including my husband and colleague) and just one woman to contribute. Some spirited women felt this called for a response. Nothing too serious, but something light-hearted, “in the form a joke”, as they explained to Dagblad De Limburger when Maastricht: A Different Story was published in 1993, featuring contributions from thirty women and just one man: Professor Hans Philipsen. I was one of those thirty women, writing about the ever-quiet Henric van Veldekeplein, a square tucked away behind the Protestant Saint John Church and the Catholic Basilica of Saint Servatius. A perfect spot for lovers, I wrote – somewhere they could go one step beyond playing footsie under a café table. A place to cherish.
Why this little bit of history? From this week until summer, we’ll be asking students about their favourite spots in the city. This new series has replaced the weekly series in which sexologist Marieke Dewitte answered students’ questions about sex. After twenty instalments, the questions dried up and we went in search of a new topic. In the first instalment, a first-year Economics and Business Economics student from Romania explains why he loves visiting the Bonnefanten Museum. Its local art collection, he says, helps him get to know the city he now calls home. But more than that, art makes him happier: “Art heals both body and soul. It’s essential to learn to see the beauty in the world around you.”
Riki Janssen