Efteling is a popular fairy-tale-based theme park in the Netherlands that is now at the center of a heated culture war. The conflict centers on the park’s blatantly racist caricatures — but right-wingers claim Dutch culture itself is under attack.
A scene representing Japan in Efteling on August 9, 2023 in Kaatsheuvel, Netherlands. (Pierre Crom / Getty Images)
On an episode of De Avondshow met Arjen Lubach — the Dutch equivalent of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight — the titular host stitches together interview clips with right-wing leader Geert Wilders, to make a comprehensive list of everything the newly crowned election winner doesn’t like. There’s judges, journalists, the Islamization of the West, the Quran, jihadists, refugee centers, mass immigration, the “Moroccan problem,” the Dutch government, left-wing dictatorship, the multicultural elite, Brussels, and Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Asked what he does like, Wilders offers a childlike smile: “I’m a big fan of the Efteling.”
Granted, he’s not the only one. According to surveys, a massive 94 percent of Dutch citizens have visited this fairytale-based theme park in North Brabant province at least once in their lives. In 2018, it attracted a whopping 5.3 million visitors. During its seventy-two-year existence, the Efteling has become so integral to Dutch culture that one reporter spent over forty hours wandering past giant toadstools and gingerbread houses in search of the Netherlands’ “soul.”
The Efteling owes much of its success to its original designer. That was an early twentieth-century draftsman named Anton Pieck, known for his romantic illustrations of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, One Thousand and One Nights, and other lesser-known stories from European and Arabic folklore. Pieck spent much of his career in the shadow of modern art movements that saw his stubbornly traditionalist style — a mix of Hendrick Avercamp and Heinrich Kley — as immature and outdated, more kitsch than kunst. But a breakthrough arrived toward the end of his life, when he agreed to help a parish in the sleepy Brabant town of Kaatsheuvel build an interactive fairytale forest, turning his drawings of Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel into sculptures and animatronics. His art, which critics once derided as cookie-tin decoration, proved a huge success with children and adults seeking escapism in postwar Europe. Today, the Efteling — named after a local inn — boasts over sixty attractions, including numerous dark rides and rollercoasters that give Disneyland a run for its money.
Anton Pieck wanted people to feel like they were entering a different dimension — one where everything that annoyed him about our own world suddenly ceased to exist.
Although the park has received praise for its impressive engineering, the secret of its enduring popularity arguably lies with Pieck’s insistence on immersive theming. “This is too shoddy and cheap,” he would say of construction plans. “We need to build with old stones, real roof tiles, authentic fairytale things.” He could spend days mulling over something as inconsequential as a wall, taking a hammer to make the carefully laid brickwork appear worn and weathered, or surprising the workers with bottles of beer so that the finished product would come out a little crooked. He wanted people to feel like they were entering a different dimension — one where everything that annoyed him personally about our own world, including its rampant consumerism, obsession with progress, and loss of traditional values, suddenly ceased to exist.
Visiting the Efteling as a child, that’s exactly how you feel. But returning to the park as an adult, separating fact from fiction becomes more difficult. Although Pieck claimed to have no interest in real-world politics, his supposedly fantastical drawings are filled with colonial and orientalist imagery that, if perhaps not considered particularly controversial in the 1950s, is causing fierce debate in the 2020s, with activist groups organizing boycotts and calling for the removal of offensive — at times overtly racist — themes. Once a place of escapism, the Efteling has developed into an unlikely battleground of the Dutch culture wars, with politicians like Wilders using haunted houses and spinning teacups as stand-ins for left-wing dictatorship and the “Moroccan problem.”
Hands Off Our Beloved Racist Caricature
Because almost all Dutch citizens have cherished childhood memories of the Efteling, any attempt to expand, modernize, or retire attractions meets with huge resistance. When, in 2022, the park announced plans to shut down the Spookslot — a haunted-house attraction modeled after a ruined Celtic castle, with ghosts dancing to Camille Saints-Saëns’s Danse Macabre — almost ten thousand people signed a petition to save it.
Because almost all Dutch citizens have cherished childhood memories of the Efteling, any attempt to expand, modernize, or retire attractions meets with huge resistance.
The park argued that the attraction — built in 1978 — had become technologically obsolete and unable to keep up with growing attendance. Protesters remained unconvinced; they viewed the Efteling not as a business, but a heritage site that ought to preserve its attractions, not destroy them when they become unprofitable. “The ghost castle is a delightful piece of nostalgia of unprecedented value,” one signatory wrote. “What is the next thing to disappear, the original fairytale forest? Just disgusting.” They would have found an ally in Pieck who, passing away in 1987 at age ninety-two, regretted living long enough to see the park construct its first roller coaster, the Python. A colleague later recounted that Pieck wished for the Efteling to remain frozen in time, a refuge from the unstoppable march of history and technological development. At the park’s entrance, an automated scribe scribbles the same words over and over again onto a piece of parchment:
As long as this feather keeps on writing, the Efteling will keep on surviving. Here every human child finds joy, makes memories not even eternity can destroy.
At other times, though, it’s the visitors who call for the removal of an attraction. Walt Disney “Imagineer” (the official title for artists and engineers designing the company’s theme-park attractions) Maria Mondloch’s 2020 trip started off positively, wandering through Pieck’s fairytale forest and riding the Flying Dutchman coaster. She even enjoyed shoving her trash inside the mouth of “Holle Bolle Gijs,” the Efteling’s signature talking garbage bin, shaped as an overweight manchild with a gaping mouth calling out “paper here!” to passersby. But then Mondloch walked past a spinning-teacup ride called Monsieur Cannibale, where guests seated in cooking pots swirl around a giant, black-skinned cannibal with a giant chef’s hat and a ladle piercing his septum.
“Hey Efteling,” an astounded Mondloch later wrote on Twitter/X, “what do you think of getting rid of this extraordinarily racist attraction? These pictures are so disgusting I’m ashamed of having them saved on my phone.”
On the spinning-teacup ride Monsieur Cannibale, guests seated in cooking pots swirl around a giant, black-skinned cannibal with a giant chef’s hat and a ladle piercing his septum.
Her comment invited further criticism from other American observers, with journalist Gisela Williams, who saw the attraction back in 2014 while visiting the Efteling with children, calling the attraction “a racist return to the days of the Dutch East India Company.” Even filmmaker David Lynch gave his opinion, noting — in truly Lynchian fashion — that, “Though I love the Efteling, this attraction defies good taste.”
Monsieur Cannibale first sparked controversy during its construction in 1988. Designer Henry Knoet told Efteling fan magazine Eftelist that a journalist who was offered a sneak peek went on to contact a discrimination hotline in the nearby city of Tilburg. Back then, historians and anthropologists already understood that the practice of cannibalism was an overblown myth, spread by Western imperialists to discriminate against African cultures and justify Europe’s colonization of the ostensibly uncivilized continent. Knoet gave the attraction’s centerpiece a giant ice-cream cone to suggest he was a vegetarian, but failed to address the character’s other, equally offensive aspects, including its stereotypically large lips.
Calls to remove Monsieur Cannibale mounted in 2016, when activist group Stop Oppressive Stereotypes wrote an open letter accusing the Efteling of promoting racism. “The stereotyping within these attractions is focused around gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation,” the letter stated, referring to Monsieur Cannibale and another attraction called Carnaval Festival, an It’s a Small World–inspired boat ride that featured African animatronics with round lips and nose piercings, and Asian ones with slanted eyes and buck teeth. “Since your park attracts more than 4 million visitors annually, of whom most are children, we conclude that you have a large influence when it comes to maintaining racism and polarizing ethnic groups such as the African and Asian diaspora’s [sic]. You claim that you are focused on giving children a joyful experience, while actually; you exclude non-white children by ridiculing them and reducing them to stereotypes.”
The Efteling, fearing even greater backlash for changing the attractions, responded by saying that most visitors “understand that it is a happy caricature, as there are more caricatures in our park. It is an enlargement, not the world as it really looks. Also, not all Dutch people walk on clogs, as in the Carnaval Festival.”
Theirs was a flawed argument. “This emphasis on the stereotypical image of the Dutch is interesting,” Lara F. Severens, a researcher at the University of Radboud, noted in a study titled “Modernising Fairyland,” “since it disregards the layers which make caricatures and stereotypical representations so problematic . . . the image of the cannibal is rooted in colonialism, whereas the image of a Dutch person with clogs has no context of historical oppression of a comparable sort.”
‘Monsieur Cannibal must stay!’ right-wing leader Geert Wilders declared on Twitter/X, adding that ‘this leftist push for inclusivity and politically correctness must come to an end!’
The park ultimately decided to demolish Monsieur Cannibale, replacing it with a different teacup ride themed after the One Thousand and One Nights story of Sinbad the Sailor. As expected, though, the decision sparked another, equally vehement wave of protest from those who did not regard the attraction as problematic enough to warrant its removal. “Monsieur Cannibal must stay!” Wilders declared on Twitter/X, adding that “this leftist push for inclusivity and politically correctness must come to an end!” In less than an hour, his post had generated almost a thousand likes.
Ghosts of the Past
All this Efteling drama sheds light on the complicated feelings that underpin conflicts over identity politics. Perhaps these people defend this or that ride not because they love its racist design — though this surely could be the case for some — but rather because they have fond memories of the park as a whole. “I still see myself as a little girl standing pressed against the body of my father, looking through his arm,” a person who signed the petition to save the Spookslot says. “My father has since passed away, but I still like to reminisce.” A similar argument could be made for Monsieur Cannibale — or, indeed, Black Pete, the black-faced or alternatively soot-covered helper of the Santa Clause–like Sinterklaas. His central role in recollections of holiday gatherings, gift-giving, and time spent with loved ones helps explain why so many Dutch citizens want him to stick around regardless of his objectively derogatory appearance.
This desire to hold on to one’s memories, and filter the bad and the ugly through rose-tinted glasses, also applies to the art of Anton Pieck. Like J. R. R. Tolkien or Walt Disney, Pieck felt out of place in the twentieth century, seeking refuge in the fairytales and folklore that had comforted him in childhood. Whereas his twin brother and fellow artist Henri produced art deco pamphlets for the Communist Party and eventually became a Soviet spy, Pieck stuck to traditional draftsmanship, working as a high-school drawing instructor so he would have the financial stability to refuse commissions that did not suit his personal sensibilities, and only accept those that did.
The desire to hold on to one’s memories, and filter the bad and the ugly through rose-tinted glasses, also applies to the art of Anton Pieck.
Tellingly, during World War II his traditional drawings — poorly received in peacetime amid the rising tide of modern, abstract art — were warmly received by Nazi occupiers, who allowed him to stage exhibits even as countless others creatives, including his brother, were forced to put down their pens and paintbrushes. (For his communist ties, Henri would be imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp).
Pieck wasn’t all bad. He ultimately refused to join the Kulturkamer, the censorship body set up by Joseph Goebbels to determine which writers and artists were allowed to showcase their work; he broke off friendships with fascist sympathizers, and even risked death by hiding his Jewish neighbors. Still, the German appreciation of his art provides important context for discussions about the Efteling today. Even if Pieck himself was an apolitical and well-intentioned person, as is the consensus of his biographers, there has to be a reason for why his drawings — and the attractions they went on to inspire — resonate so deeply with political conservatives past and present.
Pieck’s depiction of foreign cultures, inspired by art from previous centuries, produced when people had different conceptions about what and wasn’t considered acceptable, could play a role in this. Although Pieck did not design Monsieur Cannibale or Carnaval Festival — both were built after his passing — his style nonetheless set the parameters for the park’s visual identity, offering a blueprint for the designers that followed in his footsteps. Having previously illustrated editions of One Thousand and One Nights, he created several attractions that, though inspired by the Middle East and Southeast Asia, presented these distant places through a distinctly European lens. These include the Flying Fakir, a Sufi ascetic soaring on a floating carpet, and the Indian Water Lilies, an animatronic dance show based on a fable that, while set in ancient India, was actually written in 1955 by the then queen of Belgium, Fabiola Fernanda.
For the preshow of the Spookslot, Pieck designed what he referred to as an “Eastern Ghost,” a towering figure inspired by demon statues found in Hindu and Buddhist temples, with a large, round nose, sharp fangs, and braided hair. A spiritual precursor to the maneater of Monsieur Cannibale, Severens argues the ghost can be “interpreted as a classic example of orientalism in the way that Edward Said defined the term: as the way in which the ‘West’ constructs the ‘East’ as the Other against which they relate their own identity.” While the West is presented as rational, the East becomes mysterious, magical, sexualized, threatening, and comical — often at the same time.
Unchanging Identity
Diving deeper, Pieck’s status among conservatives might be explained simply by his distaste for modernity and progress, which found expression in his longing for an idealized, romanticized, yet ultimately fictional yesteryear. “For Pieck,” a reporter of the Flemish newspaper De Standard once wrote, “there exists no future, only a history which — through the polish of his imagination — is turned into the here and now. It’s a history that can only be described as those ‘good, old times,’ a place where — though it certainly knows its share of good and evil — nobody really needs to worry about anything.”
The reporter isn’t wrong. Where Disney carefully erased the violence and horror present in the Brothers Grimm and other storytellers of old, Pieck acknowledged and indeed embraced these elements, balancing the picturesque charm of his illustrations with a creepy undertone that anyone who has visited the Efteling as a child will instantly recognize. (It’s an alluring yet frightening place for young people, some of whom are even scared of depositing their empty juice box inside Holle Bolle Gijs). However, what may not be immediately obvious to them is that, although his work alludes to poverty, cruelty, discrimination, and many other unpleasant parts of the human experience, it treats these not as social problems that could or should be solved, but rather as aesthetically pleasing details — so many cracks and crevices adding character to a brick wall.
Not all Dutch citizens of color take issue with the Efteling’s representation of foreign cultures. One Moroccan Dutch journalist commented positively on a recent visit in an op-ed for Trouw, writing he “had an amazing day and didn’t feel bothered by the cannibals or happy-looking Chinese figures at Carnaval Festival: a visit to the Efteling is the ultimate form of integration.” Still, a growing number of white Dutch people are clearly angered by the changes being made to a park that — through Pieck’s nostalgic art style as well as their own childhood experiences — they have come to view as an integral part of their own culture and identity.
They say that they no longer recognize the Netherlands they grew up in because of mass immigration — and likewise claim to longer recognize the Efteling they grew up with. If they cannot save one, maybe they can still save the other. But perhaps that’s the real fantasy: for the Efteling, like Dutch society itself, cannot remain stuck in time.