Hans van Manen timeline

In October 1940, mother Marga moves house with her two sons to Ruwiellaan, in Amstelveen. Soon afterwards, she gets a job as a typist at the Amsterdam Job Centre, but as she has no accommodation in Amsterdam yet, she sends Hans to Wuppertal, in Germany, to stay for a while with her parents, whom he meets for the first time.

After his eleventh birthday, partly as a result of the war, Hans barely goes to his new primary school: the Prinsenschool at Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. While his mother is at work, he spends a lot of time on the street, often with two neighbour’s children, and is looked after regularly by the downstairs neighbours, the lesbian couple Saar and Ageeth, and other neighbours in the Marnixstraat premises. Saar and Ageeth teach Hans to crochet and knit, and Hans sets up a home theatre in the part of the attic belonging to the third floor, where he teaches himself juggling, tightrope walking and balancing on a ball. Through his brother Guus, he comes into contact with Wim Sonneveld. He sometimes goes to Sonneveld’s house at Keizersgracht, where he also meets people like Albert Mol. Possibly stimulated and confirmed by what he sees and experiences in Sonneveld’s house, Hans also discovers his own homosexuality in this period.

In 1943, brother Guus goes into hiding in Bussum, probably to avoid the Arbeitseinsatz. This means that Hans has more household chores to do. “I did the housekeeping”, he says later in an interview. “I made sure there was coal and something to burn in the primus stove.” For that purpose and to gather food, he and the children from his neighbourhood often go ‘on the prowl’ in the latter years of the war. In the Vondelpark, they go in search of flammable bits of anthracite, and on and around the Leidseplein square they take wooden blocks from between the tram rails and dig up bulbs from the flower beds in front of the American Hotel. Hans also earns a bit extra by selling crocheted bags and dolls he makes himself, by making new bikes out of stolen bike parts and selling them, and by doing shopping for the neighbours. Later, Van Manen has often said that all of this formed him and that he had an ‘exceptionally enjoyable childhood’. “Doing everything that was forbidden gave me extraordinary freedom, which I also kept up after the war.”

Around the age of twelve, Hans realises he wants to become a dancer, but has no idea how to go about it. At the time, he sees the circus as the most obvious path to take. At home, he organises complete dance performances, with his mother as the audience. And he regularly piles up bricks in front of the windows of the Stadsschouwburg, the theatre near his house, so he can stand on them and watch the dance rehearsals taking place inside. Meanwhile, the last years of the war take a heavy toll on him. Hans is severely weakened by poverty and hunger, and lacking shoes he walks barefoot through the city for months on end (“It was perfectly possible, but your feet got incredibly filthy, of course”).

After the war, Hans has to return to the Prinsenschool, where he only sticks it out a couple of days, partly because he is given a rough time there for being the son of a German woman. His mother sympathises with the situation and, taken by Hans’ fascination with the theatre world, she manages to get a job for him, through people she knows, at the beginning of 1946. At the age of thirteen, Hans is apprenticed as a curling boy to Herman Michels, the hair and make-up artist at the Stadsschouwburg, in Amsterdam. Hans works in his studio at Huidekoperstraat, but mainly at the theatre itself, where he does the hair and sometimes the make-up of actors and singers, and also learns to make crowns and hairpieces.

From around the age of fifteen, Hans also discovers the night life of Amsterdam. He goes to the jazz cafés where his brother Guus – by then a celebrated jazz pianist – performs, and he reveals himself as a passionate dancer.

In January 1949, Michels lets his youngest pupil take part in the competition for hair and make-up artists in the Minerva Pavilion, in the Amsterdam-Zuid district. For his creation Méphisto, Hans wins first prize in the make-up category, consisting of a hundred guilders, a silver trophy and a diploma.