ABSTRACT
Harry Mulisch remembered his involvement in what had been the cause celebre of the 1969 Holland Festival: Reconstructie, a large-scale music-theatrical work concocted by a collective of several writers and composers, all of whom had been bound by their antagonism towards institutionalised power – ‘the bastards’. This chapter proposes Jacques Huisman’s commissions – Hyperion en het geweld, and the ‘morality play’ Reconstructie – in relation to their intended political effect: anti-establishment opposition. For the anti-communist Organization of American States, the assembly indicated a reorientation of tactics that, after the failure of rural guerrilla warfare on which Fidel Castro had insisted sought to mobilise urban elites to ‘overthrow established governments’ through ‘ideological penetration and violence’. Once Marcusean speculations are set aside, an image of the 1960s polder emerges in which establishment and its dissenters were bound in an interdependent and mutually beneficial relationship, and in which avant-garde resistance, if anything, was tolerated – and facilitated.
