AMSTERDAM

ON April 30, 1980, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was succeeded by her daughter Beatrix. That day was marked by violent rioting in Amsterdam. Under the motto “Geen woning, geen kroning” (No roof over our heads, no crown on yours), squatters and anarchists railed against the new queen’s coronation and the country’s housing crisis.

I was 9, and I sat with my mother watching it all on TV. The smoke bombs and riot police made more of an impression on me than the coronation itself. My father was as unimpressed with the squatters as he was with the queen, and spent the day immersed in his stamp collection.

My parents, German Jews who fled to Holland in the 1930s, were not exactly what you’d call royalists. But my mother had a certain weakness for royal families, and especially for the scandals that go hand-in-hand with monarchies.

And when it came to Queen Juliana, my mother got her fill of scandals. Juliana’s husband, Prince Bernhard, was a notorious philanderer who sired any number of illegitimate children and was accused of accepting bribes from Lockheed in the 1970s, forcing him to surrender his status as inspector general of the Dutch armed forces.