Keywords

Introduction

In the late 1980s, the Indian anthropologist Sanjib Datta Chowdhury spent time in the Netherlands conducting ethnographic research as a student nurse in a residential home for the elderly. He noticed that its elderly Dutch residents inhabited these homes in ways entirely unfamiliar to him. They would gather together in the home’s recreation room and coffee corners but never visited each other’s studio apartments (Chowdhury, 1990, 1995). At first, Chowdhury could not make sense of these codes. It was only after examining the spatial layout of rooms in typical single-family Dutch homes, and these rooms’ designations as either public or private spaces, that he understood the spatial rituals of residential homes.

When Chowdhury published his research, I was writing a postwar history of Dutch homes for the elderly. A historian by training, my specialization at that time was policy analysis. Initially, my narrative entailed a rather traditional overview of national policies concerning these residential homes, largely in the actor terms of policymakers that highlighted good care and independence as key notions. Chowdhury’s spatial-anthropological approach dramatically changed both the type of sources I researched and my analysis. First, I began to more closely examine the architectural plans and photographs of residential homes in policy reports and other publications. Second, the ways in which these plans and photos marked spaces as private, public, or semi-public enabled me to question how middle-class ideas about how to occupy space inspired the layout of residential homes.

This chapter shows how my anthropology-in-history developed and what this contributed to Chowdhury’s interpretations of spatial rituals. At the same time, it offers a more performative reading of this architecture and its representation in plans and photos, as ritualized space, might further enrich the analysis and deepen interdisciplinary integration.

Spatial Rituals: An Anthropologist’s Take on Homes for the Elderly

Raised in India, where older parents typically lived with their children and grandchildren, Chowdhury expected that the elderly people in the Dutch residential home he was studying would be lonely and unhappy. Sociologist Erving Goffman’s work on life in total institutions such as psychiatry wards also informed Chowdhury’s assumptions, most likely because Goffman considered homes for “the aged” as a subtype of total institutions (1961/1991, p. 16). With that in mind, Chowdhury initially looked for the “mortification of the self” and the existence of an “underlife” of inhabitants among each other (Chowdhury, 1990, p. 32).

To Chowdhury’s surprise, he found markedly fewer signs of these phenomena than anticipated. Instead, he made detailed field notes about what he observed to be spatially bound interactions among residents and between them and visitors from the outside world. Although inhabitants of the residential home refrained from meeting in their studio apartments, they did receive family members there, but only by appointment. They often announced such family visits emphatically at the recreation room table; however, the visits themselves remained out of view of other residents. Residents would occasionally go out together or take care of each other’s plants, mail, or groceries in cases of absence or illness. Still, it did not change anything fundamental in their attitude toward visiting private apartments (Chowdhury, 1990, 1995).

Chowdhury also observed the ways that the elderly met each other outside their studios. Women considered it of great importance to be carefully dressed when coming to the recreation room for coffee: the anthropologist noted the use of the bloemetjesjurk (flower dress) for these occasions. In the recreation room, most inhabitants had their own fixed place at a particular table, where they met their friends and conversed with one another. It was not acceptable, though, to complain about one’s personal health. Rather, it was important that the conversation remain light and gezellig (cozy). The residents particularly liked chatting about “supermarket prizes, weekend outings, and visits from children” (Chowdhury, 1995, p. 150, translation KB). Flirting with caregivers and discussing the horrors of the meals served by the kitchen were also widely practiced.

What do we make of all these spatial rituals—of these codes of inclusion and exclusion? Chowdhury did not fully understand how they worked until he began to scrutinize the notion of privacy in the use of space in typical middle-class, single-family Dutch homes. As he explained, these homes have hallways guaranteeing that all rooms are independently accessible. This architectural feature allows household members to meet “external” visitors in distinct ways. If the visitor is someone known to the entire family, the guest will be welcomed into the “public” living room. In case the visitor is an intimate friend of only one of the family members, especially if this concerns one of the children, this friend will be received in the relevant member’s “own” private room.

This way of distinguishing social relationships through the use of space extended to residential homes, according to Chowdhury. In these homes, the inhabitants’ studio apartments functioned just like the individual rooms of single-family homes: as private spaces. The other spaces, such as the hallway, coffee corner, recreation room, or library, acquired the meaning and purpose of public areas. Unlike the single-family home, the individual studios in the residential homes did not offer the possibility to differentiate social relationships. Inhabitants thus transposed the act of differentiation to other spaces, like meeting friends at the recreation room table or briefly lingering with other residents in the hallway. This was their way to implement autonomy in their companionship with others. They still valued their privacy but associated it with alternative spaces and settings. As living in a single-family home was considered an important achievement for the elderly under study—many of them had experienced much poorer, one-room housing conditions during the prewar era—they treasured this division of space. If a resident were to become less mobile over time, these spatial rituals might result in isolation and loneliness, as Chowdhury learned through interviews. Yet this was the price the elderly paid for their culturally informed designation of particular spaces as “private” (Chowdhury, 1995, p. 159). To situate this theoretically, Chowdhury returned to Goffman’s work—this time, to his notion of the “presentation of self in everyday life” and the differences between those presentations in distinct situations (Goffman, 1959/1987).

I found Chowdhury’s interpretation highly convincing when I first learned of his research. Although difficult to admit today, I had never read work by a non-Western anthropologist writing about Western institutions before the late 1980s. I was familiar with publications by Western scholars on non-Western cultures, which significantly informed my relativist understanding of knowledge. My exposure to Chowdhury’s work, then, was a truly eye-opening experience. It not only made me aware of my complicity with the default neocolonialist attitude of viewing non-Western culture from a Western perspective, but it also inspired me to revisit the ways in which I had previously approached debates about aging populations and housing the elderly.

Living Independently: A History of Discourse on Housing Aging Populations

By the end of the 1980s, nearly every municipality in the Netherlands—village, town, or city—offered a residential home for the elderly with annexed dwellings. These dwellings were small, terraced houses serviced from a main building: the residential home. The home itself commonly had four to eight floors with long corridors, modest one- or two-room apartments, balconies of a few square meters, and orange-colored blinds. Today, one can still find these buildings scattered across the country, some still homes for the elderly. Yet many of the previous homes have been demolished, turned into expensive luxury housing for “seniors” and not-quite-“seniors,” or are patiently waiting for new designations.

What happened in between was the rise of a national policy discourse promoting the importance of independent living for the elderly. Initially, it was my idea to trace the origins of this idea by analyzing national policy reports, parliamentary debates, and expert publications on residential housing and situating these against the background of the rapidly developing welfare state. However, after finding Chowdhury’s article in my office mailbox—placed there by a colleague from the philosophy department—I had to acknowledge that the narratives emanating from the reports invited additional research. I had to do more than merely write a contextualized history of ideas, and I needed to examine architectural plans and photography in addition to the policy reports.

While my initial argument identified a radical shift in Dutch national policies concerning the elderly, from fostering residential housing to independent living—a shift that had already started in the early 1970s and was in full swing by the time Chowdhury conducted his research—my aims changed after reading his ethnographic work. First, in addition to clarifying the shift away from residential housing, I also wanted to understand the rise of the modern old-age home in the first place. Second, I now aimed to unravel how widely embraced postwar residential home policies responded to what these buildings replaced and to what extent such policies already drew on a rhetoric of independence. Until reading Chowdhury, I had either barely noticed or simply dismissed as less relevant references to the notion of independence in the pre-1970s era. I now realized that these should be part and parcel of my argument and that I should write a conceptual-material history, showing that “independent living” had been an ideal defended since the early postwar years, but that its meaning and materiality had radically changed over time. Chowdhury’s socio-anthropological analysis of the cultural connections between material spaces across private-public axes and distinguishing between different social relationships worked as levers for opening up my own analysis (Bijsterveld, 1996).

National policy reports and expert publications on elderly care published in the first half of the 1970s provided the outline for the following “crash-course history” of old age and housing. Once upon a time, elderly people died much younger than they do today and were cared for until then by children and other family members living with them. After World War II, however, the Dutch state began to acknowledge the rapid aging of the population and worried about how to care for the growing demographic of people aged 65+ in an increasingly individualistic world. These conditions fostered the establishment of large-scale residential housing for “old” people, as they were still considered at the time. The country’s daunting postwar housing shortage also played a role, as the single-family homes vacated by the elderly would become available to the remaining population. The introduction of a pension in 1957 for all those 65 and older (de Algemene Ouderdomswet) enabled the rise of residential housing by providing the elderly the means to move to these homes. The introduction of the Algemene Wet Bijzondere Zorg (AWBZ) or General Law for Specialized Care in 1965 facilitated this even further. While in 1950 only 3.8 percent of people aged 65+ lived in residential homes, this figure had increased to 8.9 percent by 1975 (Bijsterveld, 1996, p. 208). In 1950, the Netherlands had 812 residential homes, a number that grew to 1880 by 1970 (Bijsterveld, 1996, p. 209).

Around 1970, however, the tone of the policy documents changed. In the context of deteriorating economic prospects, policymakers considered the costs of these facilities too high; increased costs resulted from the rapidly increasing average age of residential home inhabitants as well as rising staff salaries. Policymakers also acknowledged that it had not been such a good idea after all to accommodate the elderly in large institutions, thus leaving them inactive. Instead, the elderly should live as independently as possible for as long as they could. This would keep them mobile, benefitting both their health and happiness. The key notions in thinking about housing for the elderly thus shifted from dependence to independence, from intramural to extramural, and from segregation to integration into social life (Nota Bejaardenbeleid, 1970, 1975).

These historical overviews in policy reports were rather Whiggish, however. They assumed that the idea that seniors could take care of themselves and “live independently” was a novel invention or ideal identified by policymakers. As I myself initially believed, following this account uncritically, the dominant narrative about residential homes was that they had been meant to take care of the elderly entirely, making seniors inactive and dependent as a result.

Ritualized Space: Residential Homes as Family Homes, Hotels, Villages, and Suburbs

However, while the building of residential homes was indeed put to a halt as of the 1970s, the idea that the elderly live as independently as possible for as long as possible was not new at all. The only thing that changed, in my view, was the materialization of that idea. As stated above, it was Chowdhury’s attention to space that inspired me to study the initial plans and architectural layout of residential homes in more depth, as well as the way in which these plans and their accompanying texts designated different spaces as private, public, or semi-public.

My alternative history began with the idea that residential housing for the elderly actually had quite a long history. As early as the late medieval era, unmarried women or childless widows, usually poor, could find shelter in hofjes of their respective religious denominations. In the nineteenth century, foundations for poverty relief and philanthropy, both municipal and private ones linked to churches, established asylums (gestichten) for the “invalidated” (including people of old age) on a larger scale. By the late nineteenth century, the Netherlands also witnessed the rise of commercial homes for the elderly, as their number had exceeded what religious foundations could accommodate, notably in urban environments. This was further stimulated by the establishment of modest old-age pensions for the poor and “invalidated” (Invaliditeitspensioen). Like the asylums, these homes commonly offered one room for men and one for women. Each also had a “father” and a “mother”—usually a couple—whose official duty was to care for the elderly, although they often asked for as much rent as possible in exchange for as little care—sometimes authoritarian and denigrating in nature—as possible. The material conditions of these homes were often quite dreadful as well.

By the 1910s and 1920s, some philanthropic institutions noted that the elderly population in need of care was changing in character. Some who had once been “better situated” or “middle-class” were impoverished due to interwar inflation. Such people did not really belong in asylums or commercial homes. The institutions, then, fostered the idea of classificeering (classification) and established a new type of guest or boarding house for the “civilized” or “dignified” classes. These homes offered housing for some 80–140 elderly residents, were often backed by churches, and offered sliding scale fees. Some inhabitants paid a fee while others received support from church diaconie (poor relief departments). The higher the class, the higher the prices and the more privacy one would be entitled to: less elderly people per room, distinct chambrettes (alcoves in large bedrooms), or a room of one’s own. Competition between religious denominations also inspired the establishment of these homes (Bijsterveld, 1996, p. 162). The basic idea, however, was to couple class and income with levels of privacy enacted through space.

Some of these guesthouses were rather small in scale (25–30 inhabitants) and even situated in richly decorated villas surrounded by lush, park-like settings. As they were meant to function more like hotels, these upper-middle-class guesthouses were known as pension-tehuizen. The foundations (Pro Senectute, Vredeheim, Ons Thuis) that funded these homes were explicitly against commercial exploitation and aimed to offer a more traditionally home-like environment with a less patronizing tone than their poorer equivalents. Additionally, the preservation of the elderly’s “untouched independence” was a key goal. Making these homes homelike was similarly important—for instance, by providing a gezellig zitje (cozy corner) or a sun lounge, as I have underlined in my analysis of photos and captions published in venues by and for social care professionals (Bijsterveld, 1996, pp. 210–16).

These guesthouses set the example for the rise of residential homes for the aged (bejaardentehuizen) in the 1950s and 1960s. After World War II, the Dutch government emphasized that housing for the aged had entered a new phase. No longer was it a form of philanthropy but should be seen as specialized housing for those who were entitled to it given their age and health conditions. This specialized housing could remedy some of the housing shortage but only to a limited extent, as most elderly people would leave bad-quality housing, abandon commercial homes, or end cohabitation. Like guesthouses, the new residential houses were designed to both preserve their inhabitants’ independence and freedom and to provide service, sociability, and community life. This independence and freedom combined with service and companionship were put forward to contrast with the lack of freedom and private space in the earlier asylums and commercial homes. With aims thus focusing on both the individuality and collectiveness of the elderly, albeit with variations in degree, the private foundations and corporations behind the homes began fostering conceptions of the homes as family homes, hotels, villages, and suburbs. This happened both explicitly, through discourses on housing, and more implicitly, as I will show below, through photography and architectural floor plans.

Initially, national authorities expressed a preference for a clear choice between either small- or large-scale guesthouses. The small ones, with about 30 residents, could still preserve the character of a big family and would remain embedded in a neighborhood. Larger homes, with 100–300 inhabitants, had to abandon the notion of a family and were better conceptualized as hotels. In practice, however, economic considerations inspired a trend toward grander homes with more provisions. Interestingly, Catholic and Protestant foundations expressed different ideas about what they should offer. The first highlighted the importance of creating a genuine, village-like community that would enable the elderly to remain there until their death. This implied that the residential home should include a hospital within its walls. In contrast, Protestant organizations approached residential homes as suburbs. The homes should function more like neighborhoods, where residents could keep their own general practitioners and be able to go to hospitals of their choice. Architects subscribing to this suburb version went so far as to present floor plans of homes featuring studio apartments with separate entrances along street-like hallways, whereas the village option came with front doors that opened onto a circular or distinctly colored space designed to evoke a central village square (Bijsterveld, 1996, pp. 217–20).

Nearly everywhere, however, the residential homes grew bigger in the 1960s and 1970s, often featuring granny flats as well. By providing rooms with private entrances, nameplates, letterboxes, and doorbells, the rooms developed into small apartments (Bijsterveld, 1996, pp. 187–88). To underline the independence of the apartments, their doors opened onto open-air corridors that grew longer and longer, due to the sheer number of rooms. Through “smart furnishing,” rooms could include living and dining areas and even a piano (Anonymous, 1955, as cited in Bijsterveld, 1996, p. 218). In addition, this suburb might have a (cigar) shop, hairdresser, billiard table room, recreation room, theater, television room, library, telephone booth, church, and mortuary. The entrance of the mortuary should be out of sight, although one director of a residential home noted that watching funerals was often the “event of the day” for the elderly (Rubbens-Franken, 1957, as cited in Bijsterveld, 1996, p. 178).

In line with both the village and suburb approach was that the relationship with the world outside the residential home had to be that of “sheltered connection.” The elderly should be able to experience city life without enduring any of its nuisances. For that reason, high-rise buildings were considered most appropriate. Garden design should focus on use by the elderly, that is, to be looked at more than to be walked through: “Sitting in the garden will be rare, unless special wind screens of glass make this very appealing on a nice day” (Anonymous, 1949, as cited in Bijsterveld, 1996, p. 186). While creating combinations of shelter and openness was relatively easy for the architects to do by applying glass and high-rise constructions, creating both privacy and a sense of community was more challenging. After all, the massive size of the buildings made it hard to express coziness or togetherness. Architects, therefore, tried to soften the monumentality of their designs, for example, by emphasizing horizontality or by offering inhabitants a pleasant lobby (Bijsterveld, 1996, p. 186).

Whether seen as family homes, hotels, villages, or suburbs, connecting the notion of independence to a range of spatial solutions dominated the discourse on residential housing during the entire postwar era until the moment that the homes lost their appeal to policymakers. Thereafter, residential homes were only offered to a limited percentage of the elderly—a maximum of 7 percent, which was further reduced over time. By the mid-1970s, however, residential elderly homes already dominated the landscapes of Dutch villages, towns, and cities, inspired by and materializing in a spatial representation that I would like to call “ritualized space.”

Postcards and Architectural Photography

Revisiting my interdisciplinary approach today, however, I do not think I traveled far enough down the anthropological road. That I only went so far is partially understandable: we cannot project ethnographic research back in time. The most obvious alternative, an ethnographically informed oral history project, could not materialize because most of the relevant elderly people were deceased by the time I developed an interest in their experiences from the 1950s and 1960s. Interviews with staff or former staff of residential homes could have been an option (Greubels, 2020) but would not have resulted in a first-person perspective of how inhabitants enacted or experienced spatial rituals and ritualized space.

Something close to a historical ethnography of residential homes would have been possible with earlier published prosopographies, that is, group biographies or ethnographies of residential home inhabitants. In the mid-1960s, a participant observation study of six Dutch residential homes focused on their ideal size but was unable to provide conclusive advice in this respect (Nierstrasz, 1965). Recently, there was a group portrait of residential home inhabitants albeit in the form of a fictional narrative, penned under the pseudonym Hendrik Groen (Groen, 2014/2018, 2018/2020, for a critical reading, see Swinnen, 2019) and turned into a highly popular television series (Oliehoek, 2017–2019). At the time, however, I did not have access to such a source, nor to the kinds of questionnaires that proved highly useful in understanding previous experiences of unmarried elderly women (Bijsterveld et al., 1992, 2000) or drivers’ experiences of highway noise barriers (Bijsterveld et al., 2014).

I had entirely overlooked a wonderful source, however. Once again, two writers with educational backgrounds very different from my own brought this source to my attention. In 2019, musician and designer Sonja van Hamel and graphic designer Robert Musa published We mogen niet klagen: Kaarten uit het bejaardentehuis (We Shouldn’t Complain: Postcards from Residential Homes). The authors collected hundreds of postcards sent in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and featured 138 of them, posted from all over the Netherlands, in their book (Van Hamel & Muda, 2019). They likely did not select these postcards in a systematic or representative manner; after all, they were not historians but professionals with an eye for the design of the buildings and the postcards themselves.

Nevertheless, the postcards provide a very rich source for historical study. In retrospect, they enabled me to reinterpret Chowdhury’s conclusions as well as my own. The texts on the postcards represent first-person narratives written and mailed by residents to friends, former neighbors, and family members. At the same time, the postcards’ images captured the homes’ design in optimal forma, showing the residential homes’ preferred self-image in their most colorful version, bathed in sunlight, with all or nearly all the orange-red blinds—along with some green or blue ones—drawn.

Studying this published collection, Goffman’s work on the presentation rather than the mortification of the self appears to me just as relevant as it was for Chowdury’s eventual analysis of residential life, but with a twist. Goffman analyzed everyday interaction in dramaturgical terms, showing differences between the front region, or front stage, and backstage communication—think of differences in communication between employees of a car repair business on the shop floor (backstage) versus employees and customers in the shop (front stage). He was particularly interested in the precautionary work invested in preventing disruptions of how teams present themselves at the front. Rather than interpreting front-stage behavior as superficial and back stage as authentic, he considered both sides real and key to the social fabric of life. He also saw the use of front-stage language as the “absence (and in some sense the opposite)” of what was informally accepted backstage language (Goffmann, 1959/1987, p. 129).

Some of the writing on the postcards reflected the behavior that Chowdhury had identified as appropriate table conversation among residents—“we shouldn’t complain”—thus preserving front-stage behavior. Yet most texts expressed an ambivalent mixture of pride, tentative adaptation (to perhaps reassure those left behind), and a somewhat concealed desire for company. “I have already begun to get used to it here,” one resident noted, “so I invite you to come and see my residence.” Others wrote: “Here I am in this residential home. Other than that, I am doing quite well”; “I have added a small dot [on the front of the postcard] to mark my floor, room 1.14 … Bye”; and “I am doing reasonably well. I go out for a walk each day and I read a lot.” In a humorous tone: “We are doing reasonably well as long as we act like real ladies and don’t do too much!” Interestingly, they did write about their health, although most of them, in Chowdhury’s notes, remained silent on this topic at the dinner table: “We are doing well here … but Herman isn’t very fit, it seems like bronchitis”; or “I had a bile attack last week, due to a flu shot” (Van Hamel & Musa, 2019, n.p., all translations KB). Here, the front-stage language that was the norm within the “public” space of the homes was dropped in communication with people who were close to the postcard writers but outsiders to the homes themselves.

The images of the postcards told quite another story. Nearly all photographers used low-angle wide shots (to borrow cinematographic terminology) of the residential homes, positioning their high-rise features center or just off-center. This served to give the high-rise building, the heart of the residential care facilities, pride of place. The linear quality and stillness of the photographs (and this is a more semiotic reading) also flag the architectural modernity and monumentality of the homes. At the same time, the homes hardly ever had a visible environment other than their own garden. Some of the postcards featured images of the homes’ interiors, but only a few of these included residents in the frame. Half were men, despite the fact that 75 percent of all residents of these homes were women in 1985 (Chowdhury, 1995, p. 148). Those postcards that did have pictures of interior rooms only showed public spaces such as the dining room, lobby, or billiard room.

These photographs resemble what architectural theorist Sonit Bafna has called “imaginative,” rather than “notational,” drawings of buildings—depictions that invite an imaginary-perceptual mode of attention to architecture and often create a particular focus, for instance through metaphor (Bafna, 2008, pp. 536–41). Bafna and his colleague Myung Seok Hyun underline that an awareness of the “properties of the medium, of what effects are produced” in the making of architectural photographs helps to read them and to understand their performativity (Hyun & Bafna, 2019, p. 784). Indeed, the postcards that include pictures of the residential home interiors in addition to their exteriors reference postcards of hotels, even though these hotels were not temporary holiday accommodations but last resorts. Like other depictions of architectural structures, inhabitants are usually absent. Normally, this enables potential residents to project their future selves in the building. In this case, however, the postcards also express something else: by showing units of the same size and blinds of the same color, and presenting the homes without an environment, the pictures underline the anonymity, uniformity, and isolation that the inhabitants attempted to negate through their use of space and postcard narratives (Fig. 1). The postcards thus staged the ritualized space of the residential home as hotel and autonomous suburb but also suggested the type of massiveness that made Chowdhury start from Goffman’s work on total institutions in the first place.

Fig. 1
A drawing of the residential homes that are ritualized.

The ritualized space of residential homes © Bijsterveld

Full size image

Conclusions

Borrowing insights on spatial rituals from a non-Western anthropologist’s study of a Western institution inspired a gestalt-switch in my interpretation of the history of postwar housing for the elderly. Rather than repeating the standard history of a shift in national policies from promoting dependent living to independent living, I was able to show that independent living had already been the ideal since the early postwar years but became associated with changing conceptions of space. Focusing on these spatial ideals, cast in concrete by architects, revealed the ritualized space of residential homes in the concepts and materialities of the single-family home, hotel, village, and suburb.

This anthropological-architectural perspective subsequently helped me to recognize the postcards as a source that could either enrich the existing analysis or potentially provide a fresh point of view. It did both: it confirmed some of Chowdhury’s earlier claims about the ways in which residential home residents presented themselves differently to distinct groups of people. The fronts of the postcards, however, highlighted the residential home’s hotel-like and suburban features rather than their communal aspects, foregrounding anonymity and isolation. In fact, the postcards may not have functioned as the positive advertisement their makers had in mind, perhaps contributing to the gradual demise of the residential home for the elderly from the mid-1970s onward.

While conducting my research, I did not just develop into an interdisciplinary scholar. Delving into anthropology and, subsequently, sociology and architecture also made me more of a historian. While policymakers stressed discontinuity, I found continuity, a phenomenon historians are, in principle, just as willing to find as discontinuity. I would not have been able to capture the substance of that continuity, however, without familiarizing myself with the anthropological method. Chowdhury had set the example, though working in the opposite direction: he strengthened his ethnographic understanding of a subculture by incorporating both sociology and the architectural history of housing. This illustrates that interdisciplinarity does not necessarily water down disciplinary virtues and skills—an assumption to which some scholars, as we elaborate in the introduction to this book, seem to adhere when arguing against interdisciplinarity as a scholarly practice. Paradoxically, interdisciplinary work can strengthen such disciplinary virtues and the skills connected to them.

The author of the foreword to the postcard book turns out to be the fictional residential home inhabitant Hendrik Groen. Ironically, he complains that he has not received a postcard for years and that his residential home has not issued one. In fact, the end of the television series portrays the closure of the home where Groen had made so many new friends.