The Donkey Trial

The building in front of you went up in the seventeenth century as the Aalmoezeniersweeshuis, an orphanage for the children of parents without citizen's rights, and gained its severe front in the nineteenth century when the courts moved in. This is where Gerard Reve stood trial.

In 1966 the public prosecutor charged the writer with scornful blasphemy, after questions in parliament about passages in which God returns in the shape of a donkey and the narrator makes love to him. Reve pressed for the case to go ahead and wrote to the prosecutor asking him not to drop it. In October of that year the court discharged him from prosecution, a half measure that satisfied neither side, after which he conducted his own defence on appeal. On 31 October 1967 the court of appeal acquitted him, and in April 1968 the Supreme Court let that ruling stand.

The trial made Reve the best-known writer in the country and put his homosexuality on every front page, in his own words and without a word of apology. The judges left for a new building by the IJ in 2013, after which this house became a hotel.

We cross the Prinsengracht and follow the water north, until we come to a halt between the bridges at number 587.