Historians have been surprisingly quiet about the sounds and soundtrack of history. The question inherent in the photo is: what kind of soundtrack accompanies the scene? Could it be a Duke Ellington number? One of the latest swing, jive, foxtrot, or jitterbug dancing hits? Or perhaps something completely different, unexpected? What is expressed here are gratitude for the new-won freedom from occupation, a vital approach to deal with loss and the destruction surrounding the scene. Children sit in a church alcove slightly above the piano observing with many other bystanders the lively scene at the public place at the intersection of Gerard Noodtstraat and Van der Brugghenstraat in downtown Nijmegen: young men and women dance with each other celebrating the end of the war. The piano player sings and flirts with a woman standing next to him. A piano has been pulled from a nearby house to the space in front of the Nutsschool at Hertogplein. The feeling of being free again becomes visible in seemingly spontaneous, improvised performances. The photo was taken the following year on that memorable 5 May when the liberation of the Netherlands became official. We see people gather in front of a large brick building, singing and dancing. I recently came across a remarkable image from the city of Nijmegen, which was liberated during Operation Market Garden in September 1944 (see fig. These scenes have entered the Dutch collective memory of the liberation and have been remediated in newspapers, magazines, documentaries, feature films, on social media platforms and innumerable Internet sites. In the Netherlands, the picture of a Canadian Seaforth Highlander on a motorbike with two laughing girls on the backseat on the Amstellaan in Amsterdam (after the war the name of this street was changed to Vrijheidslaan/Freedom Lane) became one of the most popular images of the liberation. In the United States, the iconic snapshot of the homecoming sailor kissing a nurse at Times Square in New York at V-J Day comes to mind, or: the liberation of Paris with crowds of French patriots lining the Champs Élysées to view Allied tanks and half-tracks passing through the Arc de Triomphe on 25 August 1944, the flag raising by Soviets over the Berlin Reichstag during the Battle of Berlin on 2 May, the liberation of concentrations camps in Auschwitz, Dachau or Buchenwald (by the US Third Army in April 1945), as well as photos of civilians greeting home-coming soldiers and the liberators of the Allied Forces. Photographs of victory and liberation of 1945 have entered the collective memory of contemporary viewers.
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