Chapter 3: Post-decolonization - The First 20 Years

Amsterdam University Press Chapter Title: Post-decolonization: The First 20 Years, 1949-1969 Book Title: Collective Memory and the Dutch East Indies Book Subtitle: Unremembering Decolonization Book Author(s): Paul M.M. Doolan Published by: Amsterdam University Press. (2021) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv209xng5.8 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Amsterdam University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Collective Memory and the Dutch East Indies This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 3 Post-decolonization: The First 20 Years, 1949-1969 Abstract While the German occupation of Holland came to dominate post-war Dutch collective memory, the memories of those repatriated from Indonesia suffered from a loss of place. This caused a traumatic rupture in remembering. During the 1950s and early 1960s, nostalgic remembering in the works of the likes of Dermoût and Nieuwenhuys, as well as feelings of existential angst and victimhood, contributed to unremembering the reality of decolonization. However, memories of military brutality were present in the stories of Beb Vuyk and in the memoirs and novels of some veterans. Unlike American and Australian historians, few Dutch historians showed much interest in decolonization. Despite some promising historical work in the early 1950s, historians and memoirists ignored the reality of warfare. Keywords: collective memory, unremembering, decolonization, nostalgia, Indonesia, Dutch East Indiess The Great Unremembering With the conflict in Indonesia over, there began decades of relative quiet in the Netherlands. Not only was decolonization unremembered, works of fiction and non-fiction set in post-independence Indonesia received little public recognition.1 Marije Goos argues that little attention was given to decolonization in Dutch literary periodicals.2 World War Two and the German occupation came to dominate the Dutch need for commemoration.3 1 2 3 Raben, “De dagen,” 27. Goos, Een hard en waakzaam hond, 185-187. Oostindie, Schulte Nordholt and Steijlen, Postkoloniale Monumenten, 11. Doolan, P.M.M., Collective Memory and the Dutch East Indies. Unremembering Decolonization. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2021 doi: 10.5117/9789463728744_ch03 This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 64 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES Totoks and Indos complained that that no Dutch officials were present when they were liberated from the Japanese prison camps after the Japanese surrender. 4 Three months after the Japanese surrender, most former camp prisoners were still displaced persons. One and a half years after the Japanese surrender, the f irst wave of repatriation had yet to be completed. This was partially due to bad preparation on the part of the Dutch authorities. However, many repatriates came to feel that their suffering had been prolonged by corruption and nepotism.5 Hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens eventually left the new republic and received what some later came to remember as a cold welcome in the metropole.6 The first Indische self-help organizations were camp reunion committees. These provided ways of speaking about their mistreatment by the Dutch.7 Few people in the Netherlands were interested in stories of hardship in Japanese prison camps. There was even less interest in tales of violence during the Bersiap period. The disinterest they faced was similar to the experience of Jews who, when returning from the camps in Eastern Europe or from hiding, found that few wanted to listen to their stories.8 Similarly, the soldiers of the Dutch army arrived home to a country that, shamed by defeat, had lost interest.9 With the experience of World War Two still fresh, the equalitarian Dutch settled into a collective memory that stressed the sameness of the citizen’s experience. The Dutch had suffered under their German neighbour and all had suffered equally. In 1946, respected Dutch historian Jan Romein published an article in which he outlined how the Dutch had reacted to the hardship of World War Two. The Dutch in the East Indies never earned a mention. Even his title, “The Occupation,” was singular.10 (Similarly, his book-length study of Asian nationalisms, published in Dutch in 1956 and in English in 1962, all but ignored the Indonesian War of Independence.)11 The presence of hundreds of thousands of new migrants, most of whom had a skin colour darker then the majority white Dutch, was a reminder of the 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Kristel, “Inleiding,” 8. Brocades Zaalberg and Willems, “Onmacht,” 64-84. Oostindie, Post Koloniaal, 26. Kristel, “Inleiding,” 20. Willems, Van wie, 95. Van Doorn, Gevangen, 38. Romein,” The Spirit,” 169-180. Romein, The Asian Century. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 65 colonial past, but this demographic change worked in a way that reinforced the silence. For some, “repatriation” meant setting foot in metropolitan Holland for the very first time, but 85 per cent of the first wave had been in Holland before. They brought with them a certain amount of cultural capital. Over 90 per cent possessed full Dutch citizenship. They nearly all were Christian, had experience of Dutch values and way of life, and spoke Dutch on a daily basis. A sizable number had been part of the governing elite and had political experience. However, many had had no direct experience of living in the Netherlands for any extended period. The elite had lost their colonial lifestyle and this could not be replicated. Claims for compensation for their loss of wealth and property and claims for back pay for unpaid wages during war years were continually postponed.12 For much of the Dutch public, the “Eastern Dutch” were seen as reactionaries – a spoilt, conservative, colonial class.13 In order to accelerate assimilation many repatriates decided that colonial rule and the failed “police actions” should not become issues of public debate.14 Integration meant, to a large degree, “unlearning what was one’s own: the accepted ‘Indies’ lifestyle.”15 With a minimum of effort on the part of governmental authorities, integration was a success.16 By the mid-1950s, they had achieved nearly full employment.17 By the late 1960s, repatriates had more or less achieved parity with the home-grown Dutch in the areas of employment, education and within church life, but the cost was that their past had not been integrated into the national memory.18 Most Dutch people knew nothing about the distinction between “Indisch” and “Indonesian.”19 The price paid for assimilation was the suppression of memory. Recalling his own experience of mixing with Indisch youths in school during the 1950s and 1960s, historian Wim Willems remembers: “No one told stories of the land they had come from, the other war of their parents, the flight to the Netherlands or the family connections with Indonesia.”20 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Bosma, Terug, 35-131. Oostindie, Post Koloniaal, 25-26. Pattynama, “Herinneringsliteratuur,” 215. Van Leeuwen, “Het Indisch Huis,” 278. Oostindie, Post Koloniaal, 29, 41, 60-61. Bosma, Terug, 123. Bosma, Raben and Willems, De Geschiedenis, 68. Ibid., 139. Willems, Van wie, 87. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 66 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES Loss Indo is the term that came into common usage to refer to Dutch citizens descended from European and Indonesian blood. Since 1828, the criterion in the Dutch East Indies for the right to Dutch citizenship was having a Dutch ancestor.21 Many European men in the colony lived with a native concubine. Children of these relationships, if recognized by the father, gained citizenship.22 The number of mixed marriages between European men and native women (the other way around was almost unheard of) rose from about 13 per cent of European marriages in the late nineteenth century to 27.5 per cent in 1925, tapering off to 20 per cent by 1940. The number of concubinages approximately equalled the number of mixed marriages in 1940.23 Thus, a significant number of Dutch in the colony were mainly descended from locals, but with a (male) white ancestor. Officially, there was no colour bar blocking those of mixed heritage from reaching the highest echelons in society. By the twentieth century, Indos were found at high levels of colonial society.24 Discrimination among the elite existed, though some argue that the criterion for social mobility was based on education rather than colour.25 However, the period from 1942 to 1949 formed a deep discontinuity in this history. Indisch people went from being engineers of colonial policy, to prisoners of the Japanese, victims of Indonesian nationalists and finally displaced persons in the Netherlands. Aleida Assmann argues that places “are of prime importance for the construction of cultural memory,” because they “embody continuity.”26 Places bear traces of memory. In the absence of place, memories remain beyond recollection. Memory is triggered by place because that which is remembered happened in place. We say that events take place. Events takes place within a topography that is meaningful and is appropriated by one’s identity. A catastrophe for memory ensues when an entire social group, through forced translocation, loses their houses and their cities. They find themselves transported to an alien world that knows nothing of their former homes and cities, and demonstrates disinterest in their experiences and memories. Paul Connerton argues that the house and city street provide powerful loci of memory. The house is a memory device, a 21 22 23 24 25 26 Bosma, Terug, 61. Cottaar and Willems, Indische Nederlanders, 14. Ibid. Bosma, Terug, 37. Bosma, Raben and Willems, De Geschiedenis, 36. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 282. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 67 medium of representation that can be read as a mnemonic system. The furnishings within the home “remind us of the shared history,” while the city street forms a web of memories that help to create “a web of public trust.” This is taken for granted until war deprives one of one’s house.27 With the Indisch community forcibly removed to the Netherlands, places that could anchor collective memory had been lost. Major Dutch cities provided constant reminders of colonial times, not only in the form of Indisch shops and restaurants, but also in the form of Indisch buurten or neighbourhoods where all streets were named after islands and cities in the Indonesian archipelago.28 These street names were now markers of an absence. The Indisch community found themselves amputated from their past. Those forced to flee their homeland become, in Salman Rushdie’s words, “haunted by some sense of loss,” but the writers among them share an “urge to reclaim.”29 Among the exiled repatriates, writers like Maria Dermoût, Tjalie Robinson and Rob Nieuwenhuys played leading roles in the “urge to reclaim.” Their work provides an example of what Ricoeur described as mourning for loss by psychically prolonging the existence of the loss.30 Maria Dermoût: Memory and Nostalgia31 In 1951, a novel was published which reflected one writer’s urge to reclaim. Maria Dermoût, born and partly raised in the Dutch East Indies, had left the colony and “repatriated” with her husband to the Netherlands in 1933. The loss of the colony meant that there was no possibility of return for Dermoût, or for the hundreds of thousands of “repatriates.” What could be reclaimed was the literary representation of place by means of memory. Nog pas gisteren (Only yesterday) was her f irst published book and, although she was 63 years of age at the time of its publication, the vivid memories inscribed in the book create the feeling that it was only yesterday that she had left the former colony and her childhood. The first sentence localizes memory: “On Java, somewhere in Central Java, in between the mountains Lawoe and Wilis, but closer to the side of Lawoe, deep in a walled garden under dark green trees, was a house.”32 Similarly, her second novel, 27 28 29 30 31 32 Connerton, How Modernity, 18-27. Nas and Boersma, “Feeling at Home,” 150-156. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 10. Ricoeur, Memory, 72. Most of this section has been previously published: Doolan, “Marie Dermout,” 1-28. Dermoût, Verzameld werk, 9. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 68 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES The Ten Thousand Things, from 1955, opens with the following words: “On the island in the Moluccas there were a few gardens left from the great days of spice growing and ‘spice parks’ – a few only. There had been many, and on this island they had even long ago been called not ‘parks’ but ‘gardens.’” This is followed by a description of the garden as it looks now, as well “as then,” with its “spice trees clustered together, kind with kind, clove with clove, nutmeg with nutmeg, a few high shades trees in between, kanari trees usually, and on the bay-side coconut palms and plane trees to give shelter from the wind.”33 In both works Dermoût emplaces the memory work that follows. The first novel offers an almost cartographical emplacement of the house of memory, the second proceeds by placing the garden of memory on an unidentified Moluccan island, clearly Ambon, and then offers a description of the garden’s layout. In this garden there is a broken-down house, and Dermoût asks, “What was left of all the glory?” She tells us that it is memory that remains: “The remembrance of a human being, of something that happened, can remain in a place.”34 This is why both works are saturated with a strong presence of place – because place holds memory. Furthermore, both novels, in their openings, possess a suggestion of the searching, probing nature of memory work. Only Yesterday, with its vague “somewhere” in Central Java, then its narrowing in to a location between two mountains, then immediately corrected to “but closer to the side of Laroe.” The description of the garden in The Ten Thousand Things, contains the phrase “Now, as then,” linking the present with the past, like the place of remembering linked with the place of the remembered. Both novels attempt to counteract the painful absence, bringing the past into the Dutch present by representing memory at work. Memory, Identity, Place Marc Auge has written that ethnic groups seek identity through the demarcation of soil, creating a myth of a society “anchored since time immemorial in the permanence of an intact soil” and that the group “is established, assembled and united by the identity of place.” When the territory can no longer be read as a marker of identity, the group finds itself, wherever it might be, in a non-place. When a people are forced to migrate, then their place becomes a place of memory.35 The Indisch community had diverse 33 Dermoût, The Ten Thousand, 5. 34 Ibid., 5-6. 35 Auge, Non-Places, 36-63. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 69 origins, but, it was the Dutch East Indies that provided the place of their establishment, assemblage and unity, their “intact soil.” By the 1950s, this homeland no longer existed, neither spatially nor temporally, and they found themselves inhabiting a non-place. This was of great significance in Dermoût’s attempts to emplace her memories in thick descriptions of the landscapes of Ambon and Java. Dermoût was exiled from her territory and amputated from her place; her works attempted to reclaim it by means of the evocation of a place of memory. Only Yesterday Only Yesterday tells the story of twelve-year-old Riek, an only child. Her childhood is near idyllic, with a beautiful house, servants, a loving native baboe or nanny who sleeps on a mat by her bed. She is surrounded by stories that keep her awake at night.36 Sleep arrives only with forgetfulness, a metaphor for the Dutch postcolonial situation in which repatriates will only achieve contentment though forgetting. Riek’s life is surrounded by secrets. Violence is only slightly out of sight. The sultan wants to buy a particular beautiful boy “to play with,” despite the fact that he has over a hundred others (16). Riek is afraid of Arabs (17). Aunt Nancy reads her fairy stories but breaks down in tears because of homesickness (30-31). Everyone seems to have secrets, including Riek, who has spied married Nancy locked in an embrace with bachelor “Uncle Fred” (35). Riek and her mother visit an old, wise man in the mountains; he knows about plants and herbs, astrology and the ancient kingdoms of Java (38-41). When the old man dies, Riek feels the loss deeply, not just the loss of the old man, but also his garden, the mountains where he lived, the old Buddhist temples and Hindu gods (46). It is a premonition of a loss to come. Riek’s childhood is threatened as the native population grows restless and burns sugar plantations. Her family are gripped by fear. “Why do they want to murder us?,” the little girl wonders (49). The burnings stop, but a servant is killed and Riek encounters the reality of murder (50-52). By the end of the novel Nancy becomes a persona non grata, Fred goes into exile and dies and Fred’s devoted manservant, Boeyoeng, overwhelmed with sadness, departs for his home in Sumatra. Riek’s baboe, Oerip, leaves after years of devoted service. Nothing remains, Dermoût seems to be saying. One morning, Riek’s father informs her that she is to be sent to the Netherlands to attend secondary school. She thinks to herself “dying and going away, it’s the same thing” (84). But, before she leaves, she tries to take it all in: 36 Dermoût, Verzameld werk, 14-19. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 70 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES “There was so much: besides all the people, also the other things that she loved – her place on earth until now. […] All of the mountains, the entire range – she knew them all out of her head. Java and her blue mountains, and the surrounding blue sea” (85). The novel ends with the words: “She needed time to lose it all” (85). Dermoût had left the Dutch East Indies before decolonization. The memories that she recalls are of a time further back, in her own childhood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, her work served as a metaphor for decolonization, which explains its popularity among the displaced Indisch population. As Pattynama points out, the ending, “foreshadows the national loss of the Indies.”37 Thick descriptions of nature, sounds, houses and food combine to retrieve the lost and bring it into the present. It is in the periphery of the story we glimpse allusions to colonial cruelty: “When you strike, you must hit hard”38; the oppression of the faceless peasants and the fear of their colonial masters who prepare for revolt (48); the rigid class system (36). Decolonization meant that the place that had provided the group with an identity had been lost. The European rule of Indonesia had passed, just like the rule of the earlier Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms. The memory of this loss is fresh and painful but it too will pass, until forgetfulness is achieved. In the meantime, we have memory. However, the novel unremembers the historical causes of the loss and no reasons are given as to why the idyll had to end. The Ten Thousand Things The Ten Thousand Things appeared in 1955. We have seen how it opens with the emplacement of the story within a garden on an island in the Moluccas, the so-called Spice Islands. This story is told in sections or frames. However, the English translation reworked these frames, to Dermoût’s satisfaction, and thereby “made visible the deeply hidden foundation of the narrative framing.”39 The titles emphasized the importance of place for the localization of memory: “The Island,” “At the Inner Bay,” “At the Outer Bay,” and again “The Island.” The main character, Felicia, is referred to as “the lady of the Small Garden,” rooting her in a sense of place. In the second frame, “At the Inner Bay,” it is not so much the lady of the Small Garden but, as Olf Praamstra 37 Pattynama, “(Un)happy Endings,” 100. 38 Dermout, Verzameld werk, 55. 39 Freriks, Geheim, 85. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 71 has pointed out, it is the garden itself who is the main character. 40 This rootedness in place is an example of Auge’s claim that a group’s identity is united through the identity of place. 41 The Ten Thousand Things is set in Ambon just before World War One. Yet, it is as if Dermoût still dwelled deep within that world. She writes that inanimate objects, manmade or natural, hold memories of the distant past.42 Songs are vehicles of memory (13). Recitation enhances memory (36, 51). Narratives operate as a form of ars memoria (80). Memory is embodied, like when one picks up an implement and the hand remembers (108). Memory is outsourced to written notes (156). Photography acts as a prosthetic memory (160-162). In this world of remembering, forgetting is like a disease, as when a professor complains about his memory and wonders if he has malaria (176). The slave bell is rung every time a boat enters or leaves the bay, but sometimes it is forgotten (7). Stones are erected as markers of everlasting remembrance, but the graves lie forgotten (10-11). A grandmother warns her grandchild: “[F]orgetting is not good” (87). Each frame narrates a story of violent loss. Life amidst the magnificent nature is undermined through dark undercurrents. This sense of loss, had been experienced personally by Dermoût. The lady of the Small Garden is the fifth generation to own the garden; “her son would have been the sixth generation,” but her son is murdered and she is the end of the line (6). Dermoût, too, is descended on her father’s side from a family that had lived in the East Indies for generations. 43 Her son, too, had died violently, in a Japanese prison camp. Like the lady of the Small Garden, “she knew pain, inside and outside – and what is there to still pain?”44 Like Riek in Only Yesterday, Dermoût was raised on a sugar estate on Java within sight of Mount Lawoe. For years, she had lived with her husband in the Moluccas, like Felicia, the lady of the Small Garden. 45 Nostalgia To some extent, Dermoût’s two novels are works of nostalgia – evoking an aching memory that is a bittersweet longing for something impossible to retrieve. Dermoût expresses the dominant mode of memory, nostalgia, experienced by most forced migrants. For the first generation of Indisch 40 41 42 43 44 45 Praamstra, “A World,” 57. Auge, Non-Places, 37. Dermoût, The Ten Thousand, 5, 50. Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies, 256. Dermoût, The Ten Thousand, 199. Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies, 255-256. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 72 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES repatriates, according to Pattynama (herself a child of Indisch repatriates), “there was no deeper emotion than the feeling of loss of and separation from the East Indies and this feeling shaped them into a Dutch mnemonic culture.”46 Dermoût’s works package memories in a powerful manner, sure to impact those suffering from a melancholy brought about by loss. Zofia Rosinska has described the dominant emotion among emigrant communities when confronted with the impossibility of return as being melancholy and that this melancholy becomes closely tied to the group’s identity and memory, supporting community forming and creating a bond by means of collective recollecting. 47 Dermoût’s work, furthermore, was an example of what Ricoeur called “repetition-memory,” the first, but incomplete step in working through the traumatic memory. 48 Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo warns against a so-called innocent imperial nostalgia that, in effect, captures the imagination while concealing its “complicity with often brutal domination.”49 This echoes Rushdie’s anger against the nostalgia of “Raj fiction” in Britain during the 1980s.50 Such representations of colonial times rely on an Orientalist “archive of information.”51 However, Pattynama argues that the nostalgia of the likes of Dermoût was not reactionary, but a vehicle for emotions that otherwise would not have been permitted public expression in the Dutch culture of memory during the 1950s, where colonial guilt and shame dominated.52 Furthermore, she claims that nostalgia is not a simple affair and that there are different forms of nostalgia, serving different goals for different groups.53 Recent research supports Pattynama’s argument. Nostalgia is a complicated form of memory representation. Walder argues that the “suspicion and mistrust with which it has been viewed by progressives […] reflects a lack of understanding.”54 Likewise, while examining the pervasive presence of imperial nostalgia among the formerly colonized, Bissell warns, “any attempt to cast colonial nostalgia as purely retrograde or reactionary seems dubious at best.”55 For instance, Rosaldo’s claim that nostalgia as 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 Pattynama, “‘Laat mij,’” 59. Rosinska, “Emigratory Experiences,” 31-39. Ricoeur, Memory, 79. Rosaldo, “Imperial Nostalgia,” 108. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 87-92. Said, Orientalism, 41-42. Pattynama, “‘Laat mij,’” 58-59. Pattynama, Bitterzoet, 136. Walder, Postcolonial Nostalgias, 3. Bissell, “Engaging Colonial Nostalgia,” 217. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 73 a concept is a Eurocentric one56 is disputed by f indings in psychology, where experimental results in British tests have been replicated in Chinese findings.57 This implies that nostalgia is universal. Indeed, psychologists today see nostalgia as a resource that “strengthens social connectedness and belongingness, partially ameliorating the harmful repercussions of loneliness,”58 something that the displaced Indisch community needed. Furthermore, nostalgia is considered “a fundamental human strength” that helps imbue life with meaning.59 No doubt, the capacity to strengthen social connectedness and ameliorate feelings of loneliness as well as the capacity to foster a new purpose or meaning gave nostalgia its power, and hence its hold over the displaced Indisch community. Dermoût’s works thereby inscribed a form of cultural remembering that helped create a collective identity among a mnemonic community, where the binding element was the nostalgic remembering of loss. But Dermoût’s novels also operated as a screen upon which unremembering took place. They appeared at a crucial time – with the metropole still recovering from German occupation, relations between the former colonial power and the former colony deteriorating, and thousands of repatriates still arriving in the Netherlands. As we know from Halbwachs, the mind does not remember alone but remembers “under the pressure of society,” that is, memories are constructed “on the basis of the present.”60 In the Dutch present, Dermoût’s work provided a recipe for surviving a sense of loss by helping to build a nostalgic community. In the final section of The Ten Thousand Things, the lady of the Small Garden sits alone on the beach, under the moon, as she does every year, and remembers all those who have been murdered on the island. In this battle against forgetfulness, she tries to bring each to mind, until she enters a mystical reverie and contemplates the murderers “without hatred now.”61 In her mystical trance she experiences how all things, people, animals, stones and sea, are linked together and flow into each other in a way that she could not understand, but understanding “was not needed, wasn’t possible, she had seen it – for one moment over the moonlit water” (208). In this acceptance of the absence of understanding, Dermoût represents the loss of the Indies as a loss that can be experienced, but not understood. 56 57 58 59 60 61 Rosaldo, “Imperial Nostalgia,” 108-109. Zhou et al., “Counteracting Loneliness,” 1028. Ibid. Sedikides, et al., “Nostalgia,” 306-307. Halbwachs, On Collective, 57; 40. Dermoût, The Ten Thousand, 206. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 74 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES It will be accepted by forgiving, and by erasing the need for understanding. The lady of the Small Garden is brought out of her reverie when two servants call her to come to bed and to drink coffee: “The lady of the Small Garden whose name was Felicia stood up from her chair obediently and […] went with them […] to drink her cup of coffee, and try again to go on living” (208). So too, the Indisch community had to leave their beautiful archipelago and in their new home would have to “try to go on living.” It is significant that in this final sentence, Dermoût refers to the lady of the Small Garden by her name. Felicia means “happy,” and it is the acceptance of her loss, without the need for understanding or explanations, that makes her, finally, happy. Dermoût’s work represents decolonization as a rupture with the past, the incomprehensible loss of one’s place. It brings with it the challenge to remember, to accept and to go on living. But this act of remembering, as an instrument of unremembering, did nothing to help explore why, suddenly (seemingly), in the years from 1945 to 1949, the native population of Indonesia had turned against their European (Indisch) leaders and the Indisch community had discovered themselves to be strangers in the place they considered their own. Nostalgic representations and collective memories of loss, by reinforcing the dwelling on pain, impeded attempts to remember the roots of the trauma. Cultural Appropriation Leading Indisch intellectuals have claimed Dermoût as an Indisch writer, and therefore not really European or Dutch at all.62 They could not be more wrong. True, Dermoût’s novels reflect a deep interest in the culture, beliefs and lifestyles of the peoples of Indonesia. The Ten Thousand Things is influenced by Chinese thought and the narrative is animated with concepts taken from Moluccan animist folklore.63 Dermoût’s writings combine her own memories with ancient Javanese epics.64 Dermoût presents the reader with an “Eastern view of life” constructed from Taoist, Buddhist, Christian and Moluccan beliefs.65 However, the appropriation of non-Western ideas, motifs and narratives was a common feature of European modernism. Orientalist fantasies were a recurring element in European popular literature and the East Indies as 62 For instance, Tjalie Robinson to Maria Dermoût, 16 November 1955, in Robinson, Schrijven met je vuisten, 256. 63 Thiam, “Een wereld vol geesten,” 81. 64 Bogaerts, “Tussen tekst,” 52-54, passim. 65 Praamstra, “Afscheid,” 194-197. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 75 the Dutch Orient was present in Dutch literature. It is within the context of this European tradition, enabled by the adventure of empire and the appropriation of non-Western narrative, characters and ideas, that we must place the work of Dermoût. At the time that she was working on her novels she was also reading widely. We find her seriously engaged with Dutch poets J.C. Bloem, Marsman and Roland Holst, but also Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, Auden, Yeats, Emily Dickinson, as well as Pound, Tennyson and T.S. Eliot.66 The latter deeply influenced her in his approach to love and death and the attempt to find harmony in life.67 His work supplied her with the epigraph to Only Yesterday. She was inspired by a poem from the modernist Vita SackvilleWest.68 The novelists that she read at this time included those by Kipling, Camus and Forster.69 She described A Passage to India as “one of the most beautiful [books] that I know.”70 Dermoût’s first collection of short stories, published in 1954, was based on a Javanese Hindu epic (in Dutch translation) and contains much exoticism. However, she marked her literary modernism by including a quote from British writer Sacheverell Sitwell in this collection, and, as Salverda argues, below the surface of her prose lies her literary technical modernism.71 Dermoût combined Eastern oral narrative techniques with sophisticated Western literary tropes, making The Ten Thousand Things typical of twentieth-century Western literature.72 Houtzager concludes that Nieuwenhuys’ obsession with squeezing Dermoût into an Asian tradition blinded him to the modern, Western aspects of her novel.73 Praamstra admits that Dermoût’s use of Moluccan motifs in The Ten Thousand Things was taken directly from the works of the great seventeenth-century German naturalist Rumphius.74 One could counter by claiming that The Ten Thousand Things is permeated by “Eastern” thought and Asian motifs. After all, Tjalie Robinson pointed out that the epigraph of The Ten Thousand Things came directly from Chinese philosopher Ts’en Shen.75 The epigraph reads: “When the ten thousand 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 Van der Woude, Maria, 158-162; Freriks, Geheim, 216. Freriks, Geheim, 190. Ibid., 215. Van der Woude, Maria, 145-162. Freriks, Geheim, 205. Salverda, “De dingen,” 221-222. Houtzager, “Maria,” 75-87. Ibid., 87. Praamstra, “Afscheid,” 198-199. Van der Woude, Maria, 184. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 76 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES things have been seen in their unity, we return to the beginning and remain where we have always been.” Additionally, Dermoût had been intensively reading Chinese poems – but these “Poems of Departure” were Ezra Pound’s translations.76 She also read the old Chinese classic Monkey, in Arthur Waley’s new translation, but only because it had been recommended in The Perennial Philosophy, a work by Aldous Huxley.77 Huxley influenced her profoundly. His claim that oneness “is the ground and principle of all multiplicity,” summarizes Dermoût’s philosophy in The Ten Thousand Things, and his quotation from the ancient Neo-Platonist, Plotinus, seems to have influenced the ending of Dermoût’s book.78 Furthermore, we find Huxley quoting the following words from an ancient Chinese text: “When the Ten Thousand things are viewed in their oneness, we return to the Origin and remain where we have always been.”79 In a letter to her German translator, Dermoût admitted that she had taken this quote for the epigraph [and title] to her second novel, not from Ts’en Shen, but from Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy.80 Contrary to what Robinson thought, having an Asian epigraph to The Ten Thousand Things did not demonstrate that Dermoût was Indisch as opposed to Dutch. Neither did it prove that she had read the Tao Te Ching; rather it proved she had read Aldous Huxley. It was an indication of how she was part of a general European movement that was intrigued, in an Orientalist manner, with aspects of the cultures of colonized people. The irony is that Dermoût herself regularly denied the label “Indisch.”81 The Colonial Point of View Demoût’s books could only have been written from the point of view of Dutch colonial power. To claim otherwise is to deny the asymmetrical nature of power that characterized relationships during imperialism. It is the privilege of the colonial power to tell its own story. Furthermore, it is the privilege of colonial power to tell the other’s story as well, in as much as it touches or overlaps with the story of its own power, like when servants enter the colonial narrative. As Said articulates it: “The power to narrate, 76 77 78 79 80 81 Freriks, Geheim, 311. Ibid., 217-218. Huxley, Perrenial Philosophy, 11. Ibid., 21. Freriks, Geheim, 128. Van der Woude, Maria, 16-18; Freriks, Geheim, 301-311. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 77 or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism.”82 We never read of any of Dermoût’s main characters abusing their power. They are horrified by the brutality of some colonials. They study the ancient cultures of Java and respect native beliefs. In The Ten Thousand Things, the lady of the Small Garden has, it seems, gone native, so to speak, “in her sarong and simple white cotton jacket […] in bare feet on strong leather sandals” and everyone on the island likes her.83 But, Said reminds us that “the rhetoric of power all too easily produces an illusion of benevolence when deployed in an imperial setting.”84 During the first three decades of the twentieth century, while Dermoût was living in the colony, the Dutch colonial government operated under a policy that was meant to be benevolent, aiming to develop the social and economic position of the native, yet this was also the time of the birth of the first Indonesian nationalist movements. The response of the colonial government was to limit political and civil freedoms, detaining suspects for years without charges. By the early 1930s, around the time that Dermoût would leave the East Indies, the leading spokespeople for Indonesian nationalism had been interned in prison camps. In such a system, when criticism is silenced, it is easy to be convinced of one’s benevolence. Much is made of the physical descriptions of the owners of the Small Garden. We learn that the grandmother “was a skinny little woman with a dark complexion, dark hair and dark eyes.”85 We are told that Felicia, the lady of the Small Garden, when a young woman, was “small and strong with a round boyish face, springy brown hair, dark attentive eyes” (39), and her son, Himpies, has “warm brown eyes with spots” (90). There is no doubt that the family is European and the native people refer to the lady of the Small garden as “the little white woman” (89). But the stress on dark complexion and dark eyes seems to indicate that they are of mixed blood or Indos. This is supported by the expression “She herself belonged to the island” (17), meaning, probably, that she is descended from a native Moluccan. Praamstra goes as far as to say that the grandmother was Ambonese.86 He agrees that the strong sense of place in the novel, is a strategic deployment that asserts ownership and colonial hegemony.87 Within the garden, there exists a hybrid society where totoks, Indos, natives – masters as well as 82 83 84 85 86 87 Said, Culture, xii. Ibid., 17. Said, Culture, xix. Dermout, The Ten Thousand, 29. Praamstra, “A World,” 57. Ibid., 57-60. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 78 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES servants – come together in a peaceful, privileged place where respect and toleration are the order of the day. In such a place, hegemony is complete, power remains invisible. A good example is the final lines of the novel, already quoted, when the servants call Felicia to come to bed and to drink her cup of coffee. We are told that she rises from her chair “obediently.” She obeys her servants. However, this relationship is not based on equality. It is her prerogative to obey, or disobey. In fact, the hybrid society that she has created on her property can only exit due to the laws implemented by the colonial government. If the colonial authority would cease to exist, the idyllic micro-society would be doomed. What passes unmentioned in Dermoût’s account, but is pointed out by Praamstra, is that the Small Garden in which European and Asian meet each other with mutual respect is in a space that once was “violently taken away from the original population.”88 Dermoût’s point of view is that of a Dutch colonialist, backed by the apparatus of power which, though kept out of sight, nevertheless, surrounds the narratives and enables their telling. Dermoût does not entirely ignore the ugly side of colonialism. As we have seen, in Only Yesterday the peasants burn down the sugar fields and the planters are gripped by fear. Prisoners are beaten. In The Ten Thousand Things, we are reminded of the former existence of slavery: “My father said once – everyone had slaves, those were the years of slaves, that was the evil of the time, my father said. Every time has its own evil.”89 This passage seems to trivialize the ugliness of slavery as a system. To accept that slavery is bad, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to accord that every era has something bad, trivializes. In addition, if this goes for slavery, then it goes for colonialism as well. Colonialism has its ugly side, but every era has its own form of evil. The important thing is to be good within the system. This interpretation is supported by the words of Maria Dermoût herself. In an interview with Robinson, she voiced her dislike of the label “colonial family,” explaining, “East and West were not a problem. We were spoon-fed the idea that ‘Every person has equal worth.’”90 Regardless of how much she disliked the term “colonial,” we learn that the family of the Small Garden was wealthy, owning a big house with a spice plantation but also a house in the town, which they rented out.91 As a child, the lady of the Small Garden and her parents went to live in the 88 89 90 91 Ibid., 59. Dermoût, The Ten Thousand, 64. Tjalie Robinson, “Maria Dermoût,” De Haagse Post, 5 July 1958. Dermoût, The Ten Thousand, 23. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 79 Netherlands and she returned as a young mother (38-39). In turn, she sends her son Himpies to the Netherlands to be educated and to become a surgeon (85). These are privileges made possible by the colonial system. However integrated the family becomes into the world of the East, they retain the advantages that Western hegemony bestows. Yet the trappings of power that ensure this asymmetrical relationship between colonizer and colonized remain almost invisible in Dermoût’s representations of colonialism. The novels include incidents of violence, but they are excesses, not symptoms of some deeper, political malaise. Silencing Other Stories Dermoût tells us that the land had been in the family’s possession for five generations, but she silences the brutality of its appropriation. She informs us of the earlier existence of slavery, but silences the fact that the Netherlands was a major player in the global slave trade. She tells us that Riek’s parents were sugar planters, but silences the fact that the sweetness and exploitation went hand in hand. These are examples of what anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls “formulas of erasure.”92 He has written that “planters and managers could not fully deny resistance, but they tried to provide reassuring certitudes by trivializing all its manifestations. Resistance did not exist as a global phenomenon. Rather each case of unmistakable defiance, each possible instance of resistance was treated separately and drained of its political content.”93 Trouillot was writing of eighteenth-century Haiti, but his words apply equally to Dutch colonial society. Let us look at three examples from The Ten Thousand Things. Firstly, we learn that during the age of slavery, the first spice growers had employed a Balinese slave girl as the nurse for their three daughters. One day the daughters were all poisoned and the slave was accused of murder and tortured until she was crippled, but she refused to confess and was eventually released.94 The tragic killing of the little girls is a motif that returns. They are remembered. The slave is never referred to again. Secondly, when Himpies becomes an officer in the colonial army he is sent on an expedition – “just a small expedition” – to the island of Ceram, to make a “show of strength for the Mountain Alfuras who had become a nuisance” (97). Note the use of the euphemism “small expedition.” We are not given to consider that Dutch colonial authority might have been a 92 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 96. 93 Ibid., 83. 94 Dermoût, The Ten Thousand, 63-64. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 80 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES nuisance for the Mountain Alfuras. During the “expedition,” Himpies is shot and killed by a single arrow. The killing is described as random, senseless, memorable only for the heroic efforts of his comrades attempting to save the young soldier (106-107). The motivations of the Mountain Alfuras are passed over in silence. The third example concerns a Scottish professor who undertakes a tour of the islands with his Javanese assistant, Suprapto. The professor is murdered by machete-wielding Binongkos or sea tramps (183-184). We learn a great deal about the professor, his family, his naive enthusiasm, occasional wisdom and his positive philosophy of life, which seems to echo Dermoût’s own (168). He dreams of a hybrid space where East and West can be equals. But Dermoût only tells us of the Binongkos that “they were a strange kind of people, speaking a language no one understood; and no one wanted to have anything to do with them” (173). No attempt is made to understand their point of view. They are dressed “in rags, almost naked” with “small, squat bodies” and “black, stupid eyes staring straight ahead” armed with machetes (173). They enter the story to murder and rob the professor. The rest is silence. Dermoût’s novels, widely admired in the Indisch community and beyond, staked a claim to a territory in the past that provided a marker of identity. They helped to construct a collective memory of nostalgia, a melancholy acceptance of irreparable loss, the loss of that place that she had described with loving detail, a benevolent tropical home that had given the group its identity. That place would remain a marker of identity only in as much as it would be remembered. While her memory work served to create a mnemonic community based on nostalgic remembering, Dermoût’s silencing of Indonesian aspirations inadvertently served to unremember the reality of decolonization. Tjalie Robinson: Building Memory for a Hybrid People Hybidity Benedict Anderson characterized a nation as being an “imagined political community” that is “inherently limited and sovereign.”95 For people of mixed colonial descent, such as the Indo, the problem lay in negotiating a position between or within imagined communities. Homi Bhabha has problematized what he refers to as “the irresolvable, borderline culture of hybridity.”96 Edward Said is a case in point: raised an Orthodox Christian Palestinian 95 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 6. 96 Bhabha, The Location, 225. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 81 with American nationality, he was born in Jerusalem, educated in Cairo (attending an English primary school and American secondary school) and gained renown as a professor at an American university. It is not surprising to learn from Said that “the overriding sensation I had was always being out of place.”97 This feeling of not quite fitting in, of in-betweenness, animated Said’s work while also lending it strength. Being able to identify with both sides of the “imperial divide” allows the hybrid to feel that he or she belongs to more than one group, more than one history.98 This challenges the myth of purity. The difficulties of cultural hybridity are compounded when it stems from the unequal relationships of colonialism, developing from, to use Fanon’s words, “the arsenal of complexes that has been developed by the colonial environment.”99 In 1954 there arrived on Dutch shores a repatriate who would come to define, during the following decades, what it meant to be an Indo and whose energetic activities came to shape Indo collective memory: he went by many names but became most well known as Tjalie Robinson. Long before Rushdie, Bhabha or Said, Robinson became a cultural translator negotiating a space between cultures. He recognized that the Netherlands and the Republic of Indonesia had positioned the Indo on the margins of the East-West encounter, but argued that the Indo was not simply a mix of European and Asian, but a separate cultural-historical category. Anticipating the views of postcolonialists, Robinson claimed that what made the Indo unique was not his or her marginalization on the periphery of East and West, but the fact that Indo identity was shaped by living in more than one culture. Robinson quickly became the leading fighter for the Indisch community in the Netherlands, struggling to maintain Indisch culture and confronting an assimilation that would mean disappearance.100 He wrote soon after his repatriation that “there is no possibility of returning home. […] [A] Dutchman exiled in the Netherlands […] is not the problem of Tjalie only, but of thousands and tens of thousands more tropical Dutchmen, […] a conflict of the spirit.”101 With no return possible, the temptation was to find support in nostalgia. Robinson set himself the task to save the Indo from nostalgia and from assimilation. The way to ensure that the culture of the Indo would not disappear, was through the construction of a collective memory. 97 98 99 100 101 Said, Out of Place, 3. Said, Culture, xxx-xxxi. Fanon, Black Skin, 19. Passman, “Van Tjalie,” 8-9. Robinson, Een land, 148. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 82 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES Robinson’s work focused on remembering, yet ironically it contributed to unremembering decolonization. His work consisted of three strands. Firstly, his prime concern was to create a new, hybrid culture within the Indisch community. Secondly, he intended to salvage the old Indisch way of life in order to construct a collective memory that would form the basis of this new, hybrid identity. Thirdly, this emphasis on recalling the old Indisch way of life would mean unremembering the traumatic years from 1942 to 1949, the period of Japanese occupation and decolonization; remembering colonialism necessitated unremembering decolonization. A Flâneur in Batavia Tjalie Robinson was a pen name of Jan Boon. Born in the Dutch city of Nijmegen in 1911 to a totok father and Indo mother, he moved to the Dutch East Indies when just three months old. From the mid-1930s he worked as a journalist. Biographer Wim Willems comments that even early in his career, Robinson was motivated by the idealistic goal of nurturing an Indisch consciousness.102 During the Japanese occupation, he was imprisoned in the Tjimahi internment camp, where he became editor-in-chief, as well as contributor and cartoonist, of a weekly paper published by the prisoners. He was later transferred to Changi, in Singapore, and finally Johore, on the Malay Peninsula, where he was put to work as a forced labourer. During the decolonization war he was appointed editor-in-chief of a magazine for Dutch military personnel, where he wrote articles using pseudonyms.103 In 1948 Robinson became editor-in-chief of the daily Nieuwe Courant. In a series of articles he called for young Europeans and Indonesians to create a new type of society, in which the double identity of the in-between would not be questioned. That same year he became involved in Orientatie (Orientation), a periodical supporting Indonesian independence, highlighting nationalist Indonesian and Indisch authors. Here, for the first time, he used the pen names by which he would become famous, Vincent Mahieu and Tjalie Robinson.104 Inspired by the mestizo culture of Latin America, he embarked on the task of being the chronicler of this hybrid culture. Thanks to a series of essays published in Indonesia, in the newspapers Nieuwsgier and Het Vrije Volk in the early 1950s, the name Robinson became a renowned, especially when a selection of the essays were published in two volumes in Bandung in 102 Willems, Tjalie Robinson, 121. 103 Ibid., 147-191. 104 Ibid., 217. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 83 1952 and 1954, under the title Piekerans van een straatslijper (Ruminations of a flâneur).105 Robinson recognized that an exiled people lose the loci of their memories and are in danger of losing their identity. Many of these essays find Robertson wandering through the romantic city of his memory, pre-war Batavia. In his attempt to explain to himself and his contemporaries who he is, who they are, he reclaimed the memory of what it meant to grow up in Indisch culture. What that meant must be found in the pre-war period because, as he says, the Dutch East Indies “has been dead since 1939.”106 Consequently, his memory work leaves the period from 1939 to 1949 unremembered. The war is rarely referred to. When it is mentioned, decolonization is represented as a rupture that changed Indisch historical development. So Robinson’s is a literature of salvaging what can be salvaged – the cultural memory, with its smells, tastes and colours, so that, equipped with this memory, the Indisch community can move on. The original articles appeared in newspapers between 1951 and 1955. But few readers preserve newspaper clippings. Memory becomes stabilized through revisiting, and few readers revisit essays in their original medium. Even Robinson himself, when he eventually immigrated to the Netherlands in 1954, no longer had access to the original essays. Instead, it was the selections that appeared in the two-volume Piekerans van een straatslijper that would be read and reread over the following decades. Generations of Indo-Dutch citizens grew up with these stories.107 The Forgotten Essays While researching his biography of Robinson, Wim Willems discovered copies of the original articles of the entire Piekerans series on microfilm. In 2011 he published a selection that had been forgotten. Once again we find Robinson grappling with the dilemma of the in-between. He describes himself as someone with Nietzsche in his head, Mozart in his ears, Malraux in his heart, but also “mosquitoes at my calves and the smell of shrimp paste in my nose.”108 He refuses to reject European or Indonesian culture: “I simply want the best of Indonesia and the best of Paris. That’s all” (146). But the selection also contains essays based on Robinson’s memories of the Japanese occupation and the subsequent war of decolonization. In one, 105 106 107 108 Ibid., 27 and 227. Robinson, Piekerans, vol. 2, 102. Willems, Tjalie Robinson, 9. Robinson, Kind, 145. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 84 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES he gives an account of when he and a comrade sneaked out of the Japanese camp to raid a nearby fruit garden. Robinson unexpectedly finds himself confronted by a guard, who turns out to be Javanese. He is frozen by fear, but then: “It was as if we recognized each other. […] I saw the homesickness in his eyes.” Having stood in silence, the guard slowly turns and returns to his post (124). Back in camp Robinson and his comrade do not share their plunder with others, but devour the bananas and jackfruit, ignoring the greedy eyes and smacking lips of their starving fellow prisoners (125). “We were all stone hard,” he states (126). These confessional essays include dark reflections on what the torturous pain of persistent hunger does to a human being, based on his own experience in Jahore in 1945 (128). He recalls how he and a comrade stole cassava and, back in the camp, ate it themselves, ignoring the pleading looks of their fellow prisoners. He writes: “I am a pig, I am a pig” (130). He tells of privileged gentlemen reduced to eating leafs, grass, snakes and rooting in the rubbish bins for fish heads and peels (131). He tells of men reduced to beasts, sucking the empty eye sockets of a dog’s head, and concludes that as “civilized human Europeans, […] we are deeply ashamed” (130). Signif icantly, he describes how he saw this same sort of starvation and depravity, during the decolonization war in 1949, witnessing masses of naked, starving Javanese standing motionless, their eyes dull, their skin stretched over their bones (127). When he throws them a banana they react “like wild dogs,” striking out, scratching, kicking, screaming as they fight for the banana. They were like beasts, he says. They remind him that he once was a beast (128). Robinson had experienced life at its most debased, an experience that filled him with shame. Willems argues that this convinced Robinson of the negative aspects of nationalism, the narrow choice between Indonesia and the Netherlands, and convinced him that the right choice was a combination of what was worthwhile in both civilizations.109 In his personal life, Robinson seldom spoke to his family members about his war experiences.110 In one essay we find the rhetorical question: “And who likes to think back to times of need?”111 The Japanese experience, and the loss of a homeland resulting from decolonization, for Robinson, was hard to think back on. But he did undertake this memory work. Yet, when his essays appeared in book form, those that dealt with the Japanese occupation and decolonization were not selected. It was Robinson himself who made the selection for inclusion 109 Willems, Tjalie Robinson, 166-167. 110 Ibid., 174. 111 Robinson, Kind, 127. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 85 in Piekerans van een straatslijper. He decided to exclude these pieces that revealed “I am a pig.” It was hard to represent the Indo as anything but a victim of decolonization. But focusing on victimhood was not going to be a useful tool in building a hybrid culture. For that, Robinson needed the memory of the Indisch past, one that had continuity and was heroic. The experience of 1942-1949 formed a traumatic rupture in history. There was nothing there to be salvaged. These were the years characterized by the sense that “we are deeply ashamed.” For the dislocated Indo, decolonization needed to be unremembered in order to salvage the memory of the hybrid culture of pre-decolonization times. Enter Vincent Mahieu But Jan Boon was a complicated human being, hard to pin down, as evidenced by his use of pseudonyms. The February 1948 issue of Orientatie had seen the birth of Tjalie Robinson, fiery journalist and gifted essayist. The following month saw the debut of Vincent Mahieu, storyteller and author of literary fiction. Boon had found another outlet for his creative energy. Mahieu wrote vividly about events during decolonization. Yet, unlike Tjalie Robinson, he is today almost forgotten, both within the Indisch community and among the Dutch reading public at large. When his collected works were published in 1992, Mahieu was described as “a great writer.”112 Near the end of the twentieth century, Het Parool published a hundred declarations of love to the most beautiful books of the century. Mahieu’s work was included. But, Allu Lansu added that it was a scandal that this writer became all but unknown.113 The disappearance of Vincent Mahieu forms a case study in unremembering decolonization. Mahieu’s first published short story, “Op zoek naar eten” (“Looking for food”), appeared in Orientatie.114 We immediately recognize the theme. Four men, prisoners of the Japanese, maddened by hunger, come across a cat and try, but fail, to beat it to death in order to eat it. A second story, called “Sonja,” explores the strange friendship between two prisoners of the Japanese, Marcel Blondeau and Rudi. The name, “Marcel Blondeau” echoes “Vincent Mahieu” and the character shares similarities with Boon/Robinson/ Mahieu – a born storyteller, footballer, boxer, and motorcyclist.115 Although 112 113 114 115 Willem Kuipers, “Met een been in het koele water van de kali,” De Volkskrant, 13 March 1992. Allu Lansu, “De Mooiste: Vincent Mahieu,” Het Parool, 28 August 1998. Mahieu, Verzameld werk, 431-434. Ibid., 355. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 86 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES the theme of the story is the relationship between the two men, this takes place against a vivid background of depravity and Japanese cruelty. Like the example of Robinson’s Piekerans series, occasional publications in magazines seldom become stabilizers of collective memory unless they appear in book format or are remediated in film or television or in another media. Mahieu did have an anthology of his work appear in Indonesia in 1956, and this collection, Tjeis, appeared in the Netherlands in 1958. Dutch critics were unanimous in their praise. The collection was chosen as a “Book of the Month,” garnered literary awards in Belgium and the Netherlands and in 1960 the author was presented with the Novella Prize of Amsterdam on television.116 But when we examine the contents of this first collection, we find, just like with the two-volume Piekerans van een straatslijper, no stories dealing with the period from 1942 to 1949 appear. In other words, “Op zoek naar eten” had not been reprinted, and would not appear in book format until long after his death. The case of “Sonja” is even more pertinent. Mahieu never sent it to be published. So, by the mid-1950s Robinson/Mahieu had, for whatever reason, decided to unremember his memoirs of the Japanese occupation, and to leave the period of decolonization, with the exception of some brief references, unexplored. Yet, in the year of his first television appearance, 1960, Mahieu’s second collection, Tjoek, appeared. Of the eleven stories, three offer lengthy representations of the violence of decolonization. “De Piroes oerat mas” (“The Piroes Oerat Mas”) tells the story of a Chinese-Indo, Teck Eng, nicknamed “The Invincible.” He owed his name to the fact that he seemed indestructible, having survived the war against the Japanese, the massacres of the Bersiap period, the Indonesian revolution; he had survived hunger, unemployment, street fights, bomb attacks and housing shortages, death and insanity. Like other veterans, he had experienced the type of danger that turns your hair white. But he believed that he owed his survival to a precious piece of gold-flecked turquoise that he wore on a chain around his neck, the piroes oerat mas.117 Near the end of the story, an awful truth strikes Teck Eng – the stone offered no protection at all. He had simply been lucky, and some day his luck will run out. “I am lost,” he realizes (230-231). The story “De Muur” (“The wall”) begins with a paragraph that sums up something essential about Mahieu’s representation of war: Nothing particular ever happens in a city under siege. People live as normally as possible between the attacks. […] [W]hoever is dead, or 116 Willems, Tjalie Robinson, 351. 117 Mahieu, Verzameld werk, 223. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 87 abducted (which turns out to be the same), the siege is over. For good. Especially in besieged cities, life is far too urgent to waste time on useless emotions concerning the disappeared. […] [M]any discover that in fact they have been liberated from another type of siege: that of the endless obligations of an organized, respectable society. Where death also comes at some point, but where life is already dying. Here, everyday is life. (235) The real enemy is not the barbarity of war, it is everyday life, with its stifling duties. The story is set around the time of the second “police action,” “as it’s called” (236). The prose evokes the intensity experienced during war. The main character, Paul, is driving though enemy territory: They’re getting the machine gun ready. They’re priming the mine. There by this corner. The next corner. The next corner. The next corner. The next corner. Suffocate death. In the city they call you glass-hard. And sometimes courageous. People in the safe city are brainless, bloodless, nothing. They’re lousy bastards. When you really think about it, you’ve just got one hatred. Your hate isn’t meant for the enemy. He lives just like you. Not for the clerk from social services who you’ll soon shoot dead, that’s just settling a score. No, the hate is for weak, pasty-faced, eternally nice talking people from the safe city. With their whining about humanity, love of animals, morality (236). Paul witnesses civilians “who draw suffering like a vagrant draws lice.” He has experienced too much brutality in the war and reflects: “I wish I could forget everything. I wish I wasn’t Paul, wasn’t a European, wasn’t a horror. […] I’m fed up with the tiredness of centuries of Europeanness. […] I’m tired of working dreaming working dreaming working dreaming” (241-242). Paul meets a young native woman who, since age thirteen, has lived with men, a Japanese commander, an Indonesian rebel commander, and others (244). He is drawn to her himself, but, as a married man, he doesn’t want to give into his feelings and he tells her that we must never compromise our principles of trust and purity, while he thinks to himself that civilization is collapsing and if he was completely honest, he should shoot her dead. He realizes that he is a hunter among men: “[W]e kill the most beautiful thing that we can have. Look out, you. Look out, me” (248). The house that they are in comes under heavy attack and they seek to comfort each other. Paul seems to give into fear, feeling helpless and sinking into forgetfulness, waking up to find the girl asleep next to him. The next morning, standing outside the house, he looks back at the place where he This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 88 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES spent the night with her. Suddenly he orders his servant to gather their things and they drive away quickly, along lonely roads with “hopefully – a landmine. The landmine” (251). In these two stories, Mahieu offers us a representation of war in which conflict is not something alien to humans. Instead, war highlights that which is always present, but which we do not see, burdened by the trivialities of everyday life. Normal life suffocates. War confronts us with ourselves. It forces us to choose, to say yes or no. Teck Eng can recognize and acknowledge his own vulnerability, or take refuge in a fairy tale. Paul can accept his animal nature, or choose self-hatred. War provides the opportunity to test our virtues. To become confronted by the certainty of our own death, and to accept or embrace this fact, is to grow stronger. Teck Eng and Paul fail the test. But in another story, entitled “Madjoe,” Mahieu presents us with an unnamed protagonist who passes the test. The protagonist is a man, travelling in Java with his son and his driver in a military pickup soon after the second Dutch “police action.” He is a hardened warrior, not easily given to sentimental emotions. In the desolated landscape, they see a crowd of Indonesians, naked and starving, and when they throw them scraps, the crowd turn into screaming, fighting wolves (254). The protagonist wonders why he is never shocked by the brutal scenes that he encounters, even when he comes across body parts of Dutch soldiers blown up by a mine (255). Suddenly, there is an explosion, their vehicle is blown up and he sees his driver, blood oozing from his nose and ears, dead. He hears his son crying. At first the son is thrilled to see his father: “‘You’re the best Dad.’” But, the son calls out that he is afraid. The father holds him, tells him not to be afraid: “Dying is just going through a door. […] [W]ait on the other side of the door. I’ll come straight after, […] hunting in the eternal hunting fields,” and he sees the young face grow rigid in death (257). When the father stands up, he is surrounded by the crowd, who are armed with primitive weapons. As they move in for the kill, he thinks of his son’s words, and he calls out “Madjoe” and attacks the crowd himself (258). The protagonist in this story has no time to mourn the death of his son; instead, he is motivated to attack the threatening crowd by the pride he feels in remembering his son’s last words. He has accepted the inevitability of his own death. Years after the death of Robinson, his wife, Lilian Ducelle, recollected that all of the stories of Mahieu were written when the couple had been living in Borneo in the early 1950s.118 This means that Mahieu penned his 118 Frits Abrahams, “Leven met Tjalie,” NRC Handelsblad, 28 March 1992. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 89 fictional representations of the decolonization conflict before he went into exile, and before his first collection was to receive so much acclaim. It means that, although they were not published until 1960, he wrote them around the same time that he wrote, under the name Tjalie Robinson, his essays based on his memories of the war. Yet, just like with the essays, this was his first and last effort to articulate these painful memories in writing. In other words, Robinson/Mahieu, before repatriation to the Netherlands, had created a small but powerful oeuvre of essays and stories representing the war of decolonization. Upon arrival on Dutch shores, this ceased. Rather than remember, he choose to unremember. The Silencing of Vincent Mahieu One reason for this unremembering was that, once arrived in the former metropole, he found himself a stranger in his new home – “A Dutchman exiled in Holland,” as he expressed it.119 He discovered that this sense of deep alienation was one that he shared with tens of thousands of his compatriots, totok and Indos.120 He repeatedly described how it felt to be an outsider in Holland.121 Anderson described how the creoles of the Americas had developed the “capacity to imagine themselves as communities parallel and comparable to those in Europe.”122 However, the Indisch community had failed to earn themselves a position parallel to the native Dutch. Upon arrival in Holland in 1954, Robinson encountered his chief enemy, assimilation.123 He committed himself to forging a new, expanded version of what it meant to be Dutch. Far from stressing purity or authenticity, this new definition would be open to embracing difference, permitting a space for the Indo. He feared that the attempt to assimilate, promoted by Dutch authorities and many Indo leaders, would mean that Indisch culture would disappear totally. He argued that although you could find many Indonesian faces on the streets of Holland, “the face is the only thing that is Indonesian.”124 Robinson now found himself in the role of what Beekman calls “spokesman for and guru of the exiled Indo society.”125 With the preservation of Indo culture at stake, 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 Robinson, Een land, 148. Ibid. Ibid., 46. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 192. Willems, Tjalie Robinson, 374. Robinson, Een land, 25. Beekman, Troubled Pleasures, 511. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 90 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES creating literary representations of the war and decolonization must have seemed a form of narcissism. Robinson, with characteristic energy, threw himself into the battle to save Indisch culture among the diaspora. He took over the editorship of a small Indisch magazine, Onze Brug (Our bridge), which he commandeered as a vehicle for creating an archive of collective memory for the Indisch community. He saw the magazine as a way of waging war against the loss of Indisch memory and identity. By 1958, he had reinvented the magazine in a new format with a new name – Tong-Tong.126 The following year, Robinson founded the Indische Kunstkring Tong-Tong (Indisch art circle Tong-Tong), later renamed the Indische Kuturele Kring (Indisch cultural circle), in order to stimulate Indisch literature and arts. He became one of the initiators of an annual festival of musical performances, dances, readings and interviews, the Pasar Malam Tong-Tong, that grew to become the largest Eurasian festival in the world.127 In other words, by the time Mahieu was honoured on television in 1960, Robinson’s energy and focus had turned away from writing fiction based on decolonization. His mission had become the shaping of Indisch identity, through the means of the three institutions that he had founded. Nothing more would be heard of the literary writer of fictionalized war memories, Vincent Mahieu. Mahieu had to die in order for Robinson to live and to carry out his task of salvaging Indisch culture. Ducelle maintained that Indische people devoured Robinson’s essays, but they had little time for the sort of literature that Mahieu had written. Consequently, he killed Mahieu, “the greatest tragedy of his life.”128 Representations of the period from 1942 to 1949 were pushed to the periphery of collective memory. Thus, Robinson became an agent of remembering the colonial world of the Indo and, simultaneously, an agent of unremembering decolonization. Rob Nieuwenhuys Few will dispute Rob Nieuwenhuys’ influence upon postcolonial literature in Dutch. Pattynama refers to Nieuwenhuys as the patriarch of Indisch literature while Beekman calls him “the single most influential force for the dissemination of Dutch colonial literature in the Netherlands.129 His 126 127 128 129 Willems, Tjalie Robinson, 373-379. Ibid., 397-407. Quoted in Abrahams, “Leven met Tjalie,” NRC Handelsblad, 28 March 1992. Pattynama, Bitterzoet, 539. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 91 book Oost Indisch Spiegel (Mirror of the East Indies) was a milestone in the academic study of Indisch literature. Nieuwenhuys played a key role in the progressive literary journal Orientatie, where he worked with Tjalie Robinson and Beb Vuyk. However, in 1952 he found himself exiled from the place of his birth. As with Robinson, his tweeslachtig (dual) cultural position would come to colour his vision and work.130 Faded Portraits Nieuwenhuys began writing his only novel, Faded Portraits, in a Japanese prison camp. He finished it ten years later in Holland. Faded Portraits appeared in 1954 under the pseudonym E. Breton de Nijs. The title suggests we are dealing with a memory work, an attempt to view portraits before they fade away completely. This is enhanced when reading the epigram that precedes the novel, written in English: “Two sisters keep this little shop; Jane Memory and Ann Reminder; When Jane’s asleep or not yet up, Or out or absent, Ann must find her.” In other words, we distinguish between memory as a reservoir of past experiences and memory as the act of recollection. When the reservoir of memories begins to fade, than a conscious act of recollection must be undertaken to salvage what can be retained. Faded Portraits is such an act of recollection, an effort to salvage the world lost through decolonization. The opening sentence signals the death of the main character: “Aunt Sophie Hortense Cecile Doblijn, née De Pauly, passed away in 1940 in Batavia.” We are told that nothing indicated the approaching end.131 Inevitably, we think of the sudden death of the colony in 1940, cut-off from the metropole. In retrospect, this marked the end. Breton de Nijs evokes the last days of imperialism seen through the eyes of a narrator who bears the characteristics of Rob Nieuwenhuys. We are repeatedly reminded that this is a memory work therefore, an inexact reconstruction: we are told that the oldest memories are inexact, memories are unsatisfactory, memory involves forgetting, memories are hazy, foggy or have been wiped away (38-59). When memories resurface involuntarily, they are usually provoked by place or by people. Echoing the 130 Nieuwenhuys, Tussen Twee, 226. 131 Breton de Nijs, Faded Portraits, 13. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 92 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES ideas of Halbwachs and Connerton, the narrator tells us, “I cannot separate Aunt Sophie from her house or her garden, and certainly not from her family” (42). In a passage reminiscent of Dermoût, we get a description of a house and a typical colonial garden. House and garden form a memory palace populated by the novel’s characters (26-27). The narrator’s recollections are helped by photographs. He remembers one of a girl who had died aged sixteen. We learn that the album and photograph were lost during the Japanese occupation, so it is the memory of the photograph that remains. The memory seems too authentic, because memory can falsify photographs. The opportunity to check memories with other witnesses has elapsed because they are deceased, or unreachable. The memorialist admits that even the chronology of the narrative is an illusion, determined by act of writing which is shaped by the imagination (54-60). What Nieuwenhuys is describing is an account of how recollecting works, stimulated by objects and other people, layered and (re)constructed though the imagination, structured by language. Similar to Halbwachs’ argument that our memories are not entirely of our own making, the narrator admits: “[M]y impressions are mixed with Aunt Sophie’s stories” (74). The account of the colonial world is that of the upper echelon of Indisch society, the Indo ruling class, “accustomed to giving orders” (48). Nieuwenhuys’ novel represents this insular society as one obsessed with social status, European education, the impertinence of the natives, and shades of skin colour (100-134). The colonial elite now find themselves on the cold streets of The Hague, “betrayed and abandoned.” The old house is still standing, but decayed and has “lost its purpose” (151-152). The old empty house is the colony itself. Its current, decayed state symbolizing the loss that the Indisch community endures. What can be salvaged is memories, and this is the task that Nieuwenhuys has set himself – to paint a vivid picture of the world that has been lost. The cause of the loss, the Indonesian revolution, is referred to only once in passing. For Nieuwenhuys, the task has not been to explain decolonization. Like Robinson, his task is to memorialize the world of the Indisch elite in its heyday, before the ugliness of the Japanese occupation and the trauma of the Bersiap. Faded Portraits used photography as an extended metaphor. The title in Dutch, Vergeelde portretten uit een Indisch familiealbum (Faded portraits from an Indisch family album), makes the symbolic reference to photography even clearer. Tempo Doeloe and the Power of the Photograph In 1961, Nieuwenhuys went beyond metaphor, and used the medium of photography directly. Tempo Doeloe: Fotografische documenten uit het oude This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 93 Indiё 1870-1914 (Olden days: Photographic documents from the old Indies, 1870-1914) was the first of what became a series of collections of photographs from the old colony, drawn from public and private collections. Out of the thousands perused, Nieuwenhuys, again using the pseudonym Breton de Nijs, selected just over 200 photographs, based on his own subjective choice.132 Marianne Hirsch argues that for people in exile, photographs provide an “illusion of continuity.”133 Images of people lay a direct connection between the exiled and the person photographed.134 Robinson and Nieuwenhuys came up with this project in the late 1950s when, in Robinson’s magazine Onze Brug, they called for readers to send in all sorts of personal documents that might be used for recording the Indisch past.135 They wanted to collect the immaterial legacy of the Indies, in the form of memories (the task of Robinson), as well as material documents, including photographs (the task of Nieuwenhuys). This would provide the basis for the future historiography of their hybrid people.136 In 1960, Nieuwenhuys made another public plea, this time in Robinson’s magazine Tong-Tong. He begged readers to search for old photos, the sort of photos one would find in an Indisch family photo album, and to send them to him. He wished to produce a book that “will amaze and astonish Dutch people and that will allow you and me to again relive that land where we spent ‘the best years of lives.’”137 Pattynama argues that the Dutch public formed his primary intended audience.138 His collection of photographs would insert itself into the national collective memory. Geoffrey Batchen argues that photographic albums are not simply objects with sequenced images but are “prompts for speech, an excuse for friends and families to gather, for stories to be exchanged, incidents to be recalled, biographies to be invented.”139 People sit around an album, page through photographs and exchange anecdotes, provoking conversation in a relaxed way that leads to social bonding. The photo album returns us to an oral tradition, shaping the way we speak and remember. No doubt, Nieuwenhuys knew this and hoped that it would lead to renewed conversations among repatriates and the Dutch nation at large. Indeed, the interest that his 132 Breton de Nijs, Tempo Doeloe, 8. 133 Hirsch, Family Frames, xi. 134 Ibid., 19. 135 Tjalie Robinson, “Heeft ook Indisch Nederland historie? En hoe kunnen we helpen haar op te tekenen?,” Onze Brug (2 August 1957): 2. 136 Seriese, Finding History, 9-10. 137 E. Breton de Nijs, “Oproep,” 7. 138 Pattynama, Bitterzoet, 209. 139 Batchen, Forget Me Not, 49. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 94 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES pictures provoked among the Indisch community was immediate, affecting widespread enthusiastic responses.140 The collection begins with images of steamships arriving at Batavia.141 It ends with passengers embarking on the return journey to Holland and a photograph of four Indische planters standing on the beach in Scheveningen (190-191). The purpose is to lure us onto a journey by means of a visual narrative from Holland to the Indies and back again. It is also a return journey from the 1960s to the period predating World War One. The final page offers us a photograph of the neglected gravestones of dead colonials somewhere in the Indies. Nieuwenhuys writes: “We can no longer read the names, they have been erased; we can only offer the stereotypical formula – ‘Rest in Peace’” (192). Thus, Nieuwenhuys brings us on a journey to a chapter in history that is finished. All that remains is memory. One effect of leafing through Nieuwenhuys’ photographs, is that they instil a feeling of melancholy. They honour a lost world. There is no hint of the disasters that will overwhelm colonial society. The viewers of the 1960s examined these photographs with a knowing eye, unlike the subjects who stare at the viewer innocently. Susan Sontag has reflected on how overwhelming it is to look at photos of life in Jewish ghettos in Poland in 1938, knowing that these innocents are about to perish.142 Something similar occurs in Nieuwenhuys’ collection. The subjects are unaware that they are doomed. Sontag argues, “death haunts all photographs of people” because those whose image is preserved have already moved closer to their death.143 The uncanniness brought on by looking at old photographs comes from the contradiction that they offer simultaneously some sort of presence and an irredeemable absence.144 Barthes used the phrase “That-has-been” to describe the almost magical presence that a photograph offers, arguing, “the presence of the thing […] is the living image of a dead thing.”145 More than his fictionalized prose memoir, Nieuwenhuys’ selection of photographs of people, colonial buildings and tropical landscapes promoted that contradictory bind, of simultaneous presence and absence, “that-has-been” and that which is no more. 140 141 142 143 144 145 Pattynama, Bitterzoet, 208. Breton de Nijs, Tempo Doeloe, 11-16. Sontag, On Photography, 70. Ibid. Ibid., 15-18. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 77-79. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 95 One of the first photographs in the collection was a group portrait of passengers and crew members on board a ship, taken in 1897. Nieuwenhuys informs us that the lady on the far left is “no one less than the dancer Mata Hari.”146 We look at her eyes, knowing that the famous dancer will be executed as a spy. We see her innocent face through the lens of her future violent death. It is like examining a fingerprint or a death mask. This is not an innocent choice. The tone is set for the rest of the book. The photographs carefully frame a visual narrative of a flawed but beautiful society pushing forward to the inevitable ending that gives to the whole its meaning. That meaning is decolonization, the ruin of this world. One family portrait shows a mother and father seated on bamboo seats in the tropical garden with their two sons. The caption reads, “the newly appointed director of the Hotel des Indes with his family, in 1912. The older of the two boys is the compiler of this book” (29). We find photographs accompanied by passages taken from the novel Faded Portraits, by E. Breton de Nijs (32). Thus, Nieuwenhuys shows that his earlier, fictional work can be used to provide a meaning for the reality-based images, while conversely, the images can be used to illustrate his fictional text. Twinned, both provide a stabilizer for memory. These photographs enact what Sontag calls “a way of certifying experience.”147 They offer what Barthes called “a certificate of presence” in which “the past is as certain as the present.”148 Nieuwenhuys may have been living near the shores of the North Sea in 1961, but his childhood had been lived in a place of tropical splendour. Though this place no longer existed, it remained in memory. Evoked and shared in prose, in these photographs, these stencils of the past, lived-in-time is made present again. We also find images that reveal a hard underside of the colonial project: deforestation in Java, police officers abusing a young native boy, a mass execution. Six photographs with scenes from the brutal Aceh War are included.149 One shows a group of dark-skinned Dutch soldiers with white officers. They stare at the camera with the dead bodies of the foe piled at their feet (76). Nieuwenhuys tells us that one officer, Van Daalen, had a reputation for showing no mercy, sometimes killing everyone in a conquered settlement and then photographing the dead (68). The most disturbing image shows Van Daalen and his men, posing before the camera on the parapets 146 147 148 149 Breton de Nijs, Tempo Doeloe, 13. Sontag, On Photography, 7. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 87-89. Breton de Nijs, Tempo Doeloe, 51-116. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 96 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES of a small wooden fortress. Sprawled on the ground below lie the bodies of the dead enemy. Next to one soldier sits a baby, surrounded by corpses (77). Paul Bijl suggests that Nieuwenhuys’ inclusion of these violent photos, alongside those showing the relaxed tropical lifestyle of the upper-class colonials, did not hinder the development of nostalgia. This was due to “the book’s compartmentalized structure in which a nostalgic perceptible order and an imperial perceptible order […] could exist next to each other.”150 He argues that Nieuwenhuys compartmentalized the photographs of violence within the frame of public life, while the world of tempo doeloe, the period of Dutch colonization in Indonesia, was framed within the private sphere. Here, the violent photos “were no longer a threat to his main story on the Indies.”151 Nieuwenhuys wrote that the greatest possible research topic for the historian, sociologist and literary scholar would be to examine the origins of the hybrid society where, at its root, we find a native woman – the house servant or concubine of the totok male.152 Dozens of photographs show family life among some of these Indisch families (121-171). We see ethnically mixed families at parties and on holidays, enjoying parades, hunts, commemorations and amateur dramatics. Among these is a photograph of the young father and mother of Tjalie Robinson (125). We also find photographs illustrating the lives of totok couples and their children (172-189). From the look of their clothes, they have gone native. We find a half dozen or so scenes of families sitting together in their garden and on their veranda drinking tea. Susie Protschky has studied hundreds of family albums from the Dutch East Indies, where the colonial gaze has turned consciously upon itself. Photographs of families drinking tea in the garden or on the veranda are especially common. Protschky notes that such self-representations served the function of framing the domestic ideals for which the Indisch families wished to be remembered – “bourgeois respectability, conjugal civility, the romance of familial contentment and unity.”153 Anderson coined the term “tropical Gothic” to describe the colonial lifestyle that mimicked that of old European aristocracy. The images show an enviable lifestyle of playing the aristocrat, “against a backcloth of spacious mansions and gardens filled with mimosa and bougainvillea, and a large supporting cast of houseboys, grooms, gardeners, cooks, amahs, 150 151 152 153 Bijl, Emerging Memory, 137. Ibid., 165. Breton de Nijs, Tempo Doeloe, 119. Protschky, “Tea Cups,” 46-65. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 97 maids, washerwomen, and, above all, horses.” This was made possible by metropolitan capitalist power, “a power so great that it could be kept, so to speak, in the wings.”154 Whatever Nieuwenhuys’ intentions were, his photographs became triggers for nostalgia. Near the end of his life, this came to plague him. Celebrating Nieuwenhuys’ 90th birthday in 1998, Carl Peters wrote that Nieuwenhuys always resisted nostalgia, but that nostalgia was an “unavoidable and greatly unintended” consequence of his photo books.155 The following year Nieuwenhuys died and was obituarized in the national press. Pieter van Zonneveld remarked that Nieuwenhuys had resisted nostalgia.156 Kester Freriks quoted Nieuwenhuys as declaring: “Nostalgia, homesickness: these are terrible words. […] I have no homesickness for the old East Indies. That is passed, it is dead, sunk.”157 Rudy Kousbroek, admitted that nostalgia was a point of disagreement between him and Nieuwenhuys: “it was as if nostalgia for him [Nieuwenhuys] was something undignified, an admittance of weakness.” In contrast, Kousbroek concluded that Nieuwenhuys’ photo books were among the most nostalgic in all of Dutch literature.158 Aleida Assmann argues that constructive forgetting can be “the foundation for a spiritual innovation, change in identity and a new political beginning.”159 Nieuwenhuys’ collection forces us to understand that photographs, on their own, do not necessarily tell us anything. The story often depends upon the framing, including the captions. With a couple of hundred old photographs, he had created a work of salvaging, directed towards building a new future. Nieuwenhuys had provided a family album for the Indisch community to help them recollect together, strengthen their social bond and survive loss. His novel and photographic collection were rooted in the world before decolonization. Decolonization is only the ending that gives the memories their poignancy. Nieuwenhuys joined Dermoût and Robinson as an agent of unremembering. All three directed their gaze through decolonization, not at decolonization. Decolonization formed the rupture that for Dermoût invoked sadness and nostalgic remembering of 154 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 150-151. 155 Carl Peters, “Op afstand van de kletstafel: Rob Nieuwenhuys 90 Jaar,” Vrij Nederland, 11 July 1998. 156 Peter van Zonneveld, “Godsamme: Afscheid van Rob Nieuwenhuys,” Vrij Nederland, 20 November 1999. 157 Kester Freriks, “Bezield door Indië: Rob Nieuwenhuys (1918-1999),” NRC Handelsblad, 12 November 1999. 158 Rudy Kousbroek, “Heimwee is eeuwig,” NRC Handelsblad, 19 November 1999. 159 Assmann, Formen des Vergessens, 59. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 98 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES what had been lost. For Robinson and Nieuwenhuys, decolonization was an aberration in the historical development of the Indo. Their memory work was a salvaging act, directed through decolonization, into the colonial world in order to build for the future. Beb Vuyk: The Memory of Cruelty Beb Vuyk was born in Rotterdam in 1905. As a youngster, she strongly identified with her unknown Indonesian grandmother. Dark skinned and feeling like an outsider, the young Vuyk was a victim of racist-tinged verbal abuse, accentuating her sense of loneliness and alienation.160 By her mid-20s, she was the author of short stories, but instead of building her career in the Netherlands, she immigrated to the Dutch East Indies. On the voyage to the colony, she met the man who would become her husband, a man born of a Dutch father and an Ambonese mother. By the outbreak of World War Two, she had published two full-length books and was working on a third, partly finished in a Japanese internment camp, which was published in 1947.161 The Yearbook of the Society of Dutch Literature describes her post-war work as deviating from the norm because, in her vision, “cruelty, betrayal and vengeance was practised with equal conviction on both sides of the demarcation line.” Furthermore, her work on “this dirty war” contained “no stereotype image of the enemy,” but depicted “the war atrocities and race madness [rassenwaan],” in which cruelty is some sort of sickness.162 This makes her representations of decolonization unique among Indisch authors of the time. Vuyk admitted that her experience of the war had brought about a change in her writing. Life in the Japanese internment camp and six weeks as a prisoner of the Japanese Kenpeitai had caused “the fear of human cruelty” to enter her life, while the onset of the Indonesian revolution meant, “atrocities were committed not by strangers and enemies, by Germans and Japanese, but by our own people, Dutch and Indonesians.”163 The stories that she published during the late 1940s and 1950s were concerned directly with the Japanese war or the war of decolonization. These were published in 1947 under the title De wilde groene geur (The wild green scent) and in 1958 with 160 Vuyk, Verzameld werk, 425-432. 161 Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies, 273-274. 162 “Beb Vuyk,” in Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde te Leiden, 1991-1992 (Leiden: Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, 1993), 181. 163 Vuyk, Verzameld werk, 444. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 99 the title Gerucht en geweld (Rumour and violence). Vuyk admitted that they were all concerned with human cruelty (445). “Verhaal van een toeschower” (“Story of a spectator”) contained events based on her own experience and referenced experiences relayed to her by the Indonesian leaders Hatta and Sjahrir, as well as Tjalie Robinson.164 The story demonstrates, firstly, that cruelty flows forth from an abundance, a form of madness that overwhelms individuals under certain circumstances, regardless of nationality. Secondly, one can survive the loss of loved ones by means of cultivating memory, but, when one’s place is destroyed, it becomes difficult to retain a purpose. The narrator tells how he and the protagonist, Hermans, spent years together as prisoners of the Japanese.165 Hermans was an uncomplicated Indo, married to a local woman (364). The two men meet again as patients in a hospital in West Java. Next door is the police station, where the Dutch execute suspected Indonesian fighters (365-369). Another patient, whose wife was killed by Indonesian nationalists, calls for the shooting of all natives and shouts: “Have you ever opened a pit where ten women and children were murdered? And before they were killed. Do you know what was done to them before they were killed?” (369) Hermans had found himself fighting alongside newly recruited Dutch troops against Indonesian nationalists. The young Dutch had volunteered for service, committed to the idea that they would be fighting the Japanese, but found themselves forced to confront local nationalists. Their initial reluctance evaporated, however, when they found the mutilated bodies of some of their comrades. They were suddenly willing to carry out extrajudicial executions (368). Hermans tells of how his wife was murdered by a band of anti-Dutch pemudas, one of the first victims of the decolonization conflict. Hermans tells: I knew what had been happening here in Asia over the years. The slow current of the past 40 years was accelerated by the war. Asia is liberating itself. When the first reports came in, I tried to explain it to our people. They shouted me down. The republic was a Japanese puppet, Sukarno and his pemudas Japanese murderers. I argued against this (371). 164 Scova Righini, “Een leven,” 195-196. 165 Vuyk, Verzameld werk, 362. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 100 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES He adds that the murder of his wife changed nothing. He doesn’t accuse the Indonesian nationalists of being particularly cruel. On the contrary, he has witnessed brutality among the Dutch, as well as among the Indonesians. “Cruelty is a form of possession, a madness,” he concludes (374). At the end of the story, the narrator visits Hermans in West Java. Hermans admits that he longs for his own island, far to the east, but the coconut plantations are destroyed, leaving him nothing to return to: “You can return to a dead one. I have my memories,” but “I cannot live in a dead garden. […] I don’t dare to return.” He admits he can find no purpose to living (377-379). Vuyk represented the conflict as one of great violence, but made clear that no state has a monopoly on violence. The Japanese inflicted cruelty on European prisoners, the Dutch shot Japanese prisoners without a thought, Indonesian nationalists murdered colonials and the Dutch effortlessly shot nationalist suspects. Vuyk offered a merciless analysis of the colonial mindset that only recognizes its own suffering. “There are people” she writes, “who are still obsessed with their time in the camps. […] The white who has been humiliated by the coloured race, that still eats away at many.”166 The exclusive focus on their own suffering is the preeminent characteristic of the mind of the colonialist, according to Frantz Fanon.167 Vuyk’s story revealed the European myopic obsession with their own suffering, rooted in the racist inability to deal with the humiliation of having been the helpless prisoner of non-whites. Vuyk’s representation of decolonization reflects a sensitivity towards Indonesian nationalism, sympathizing with its aspirations, refusing to condemn its violence. Her story “De jager met zijn schietgeweer” (“The hunter with his gun”), also demonstrated sympathy for the Indonesian point of view. It highlighted the predicament of the Indo as the “in-between” victim of colonialism. He identifies with his superior European status, but is rejected by European civilization because of his dark skin colour. In this story, the female narrator meets an acquaintance, the Indo captain of a ferry. With the War of Independence drawing to an end and the handover of sovereignty looming, he will be serving a newly independent Indonesian population. The captain asks if she agrees that the way to deal with Indonesian revolutionaries is to kill them all. She answers that Indonesian nationalists are part of a pan-Asian phenomenon: “If you want to solve it in that manner, you will have to massacre all of Asia” (400). She explains that she plans to take Indonesian nationality. Astonished, he asks, “You and your husband 166 Ibid., 368. 167 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 15. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 101 want to become natives?” She replies, “No, Indonesians” (402). This is the choice that Vuyk and her husband had taken after independence.168 The captain argues that white civilization is superior and he has worked hard to become a captain within the colonial system, and did not want to play the role of servant to the “black lads, the lazy, indolent Asians with their stupid black mugs.” She replies, “What have you against blacks, Captain? Aren’t you black yourself?” He reacts vehemently, pulls at his own skin and screams, “This black skin, my own skin that I want to tear off. It is the Asian in myself that I hate.”169 In Fanon’s classic study of the delusions inherent in colonialism, he argues that the person of colour internalizes European unconscious racist attitudes in which black symbolizes original sin: “The white man chooses the black man for this function, and the black man who is white also chooses the black man.” This creates a neurotic ambiguity.170 It is this self-hatred that Vuyk articulates. Political decolonization had taken place, but the captain remains colonized. His self-hatred is not his own doing. Shaped in the colonial environment, it was brought to light by decolonization. Fanon makes a distinction between those who are black and those who are of mixed heritage. Fanon refers to the former’s desire to turn white as “lactification,” while the latter possesses the added anxiety of “slipping back” into blackness.171 As represented by Vuyk, decolonization had aggravated the Indo fear of relapsing into blackness. In Vuyk’s story “Full of sound and fury,” (the title is in English) we are confronted with cruel incidents from the decolonization conflict. Dutch soldiers torture prisoners, beating them with splintered bamboo sticks, while Indonesian forces kill an accused informer with a Japanese sword, having forced him to dig his own grave.172 The power of this story stems from its harrowing yet dispassionate account of brutality, based on Vuyk’s own experience of the Indonesian revolution, as well as her time spent as a prisoner of the Kenpeitai, the Japanese political police.173 Four years after the appearance of Gerucht en geweld, Beb Vuyk published another story that dwelled on the cruelty of decolonization. “De laatste waardigheid” (“The last dignity”). A man shows the narrator a photograph of a pile of corpses of women and children. His own wife and daughter had 168 169 170 171 172 173 Scova Righini, “Een leven,” 193. Vuyk, Verzameld werk, 404-405. Fanon, Black Skin, 147-148. Ibid., 33-38. Vuyk, Verzameld werk, 411-420. Nieuwenhuys, Mirror of the Indies, 270-272. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 102 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES been murdered by a radicalized gang of youths.174 The irony is that this man’s sympathies, like Vuyk’s, lay with the Indonesian nationalists. However, the murder of his family had forced him to choose the Dutch. He explains: “It is terrible to be a native, automatically the lesser of any arbitrary Dutchman. The feeling burns under your skin, it eats away at you. Nationalism gave us a new attitude.”175 In these stories, Vuyk gives voice to the underdog, whether the “inbetween” Indo, or the Indonesian victim of colonialism. The absence of nostalgia make the representations all the more powerful. In each story, we encounter depravity. The enemy is subsidiary to the atrocity of the war itself. There are no heroes, yet no one is entirely evil, either. Protagonists are intimately entangled within huge historical forces; options are limited and shaped by conditions. Decolonization is a pan-Asian movement towards liberation. The personalities are not the instigators; rather the European imperialist system has produced its dialectical opposite, a movement for liberation. The Dutch refusal to accept this unleashes the madness of violence and the violence of gangs of Indonesian youths begets the systematic violence of the Dutch war machine. At the same time, there is nothing exceptional in Dutch imperialism. As she said in an interview near the end of her life: “[M]y work is to a great extent autobiographical.”176 Biographer Scova Righini argues that after the ending of the Japanese occupation and Sukarno’s declaration of independence, together with sociologist Wim Wertheim and Jacques De Kadt, Vuyk called for the immediate Dutch recognition of an independent Indonesia. From that point onward, she became subject to surveillance by the colonial intelligence agency as well as the Dutch domestic intelligence service.177 Her critical stance led to her patriotism being questioned and the awarding of a minor book prize was temporarily suspended.178 In the late 1950s, her return to the Netherlands led to a minor scandal in a section the conservative press.179 Vuyk’s work, formed a dissonance against the established discourse. Even today, she evokes widely different responses among scholars. Professor Praamstra, for instance, recently accused Vuyk of being yet another colonial, 174 175 176 177 178 179 Vuyk, Verzameld werk, 452. Ibid., 457. Interview in NRC Handelsblad, 30 August 1991. Scova Righini, “Een leven,” 162-174. “Beb Vuyk kreeg toegekenden v.d. Hoogtprijs niet betaald,” Het Parool, 1 March 1947. Scova Righini, “Een leven,” 226-227. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 103 but one who hid behind a “chameleon-like attitude” towards colonial life.180 Such a view I think, is erroneous. I side with David van Reybrouck’s verdict. He argues that Vuyk was one of the very few Dutch in the colony who looked beyond her own suffering and that of other Europeans, to discover the far greater suffering of the Indonesians themselves.181 As I have argued elsewhere, her stories offer us a window, “through which we are forced to glimpse the uncomfortable reality that is the death-throws of a colony and the birth pangs of a new state as experienced by myriad groups of participants.”182 During the 1950s and 1960s Vuyk’s work found a mixed reception in the press. Het Vrije Volk judged Gerucht en geweld successful in portraying the confusion and senselessness of violence, but added that the book was chaotic and confusing.183 De Tijd judged the work unimpressive.184 One critic noted that she lacked the talent for the complexity of a novel.185 Another commented that Vuyk was not really a writer, and her stories missed the penetrating insights of Vincent Mahieu.186 However, De Groene Amsterdammer named Gerucht en geweld its “Book of the Month” and some reviewers praised her sober prose and suggestive descriptions.187 De wilde groene geur received a positive review in De Volkskrant.188 Influential critics Hans Warren and Fred Pfeifer praised her work.189 In the Friese koerier, a reviewer claimed Gerucht en geweld should increase her readership.190 The Algemeen Handelsblad judged it to be of uneven quality, but admitted that the stories set during decolonization raised the quality of the whole.191 Influential journalist Kees Fens praised the collection highly, expressing admiration for how Vuyk had converted the stuff of personal experience into literary stories.192 180 Praamstra, “‘Going Native,’” 45. 181 Van Reybrouck, Revolusi, 245. 182 Doolan, “Reservoirs,” 65 183 Victor Varangot, “Geweld bij Beb Vuyk, rust bij Frits Huel,” Het Vrije Volk, 21 November 1958. 184 K., “Novellen van Bep Vuyk,” De Tijd/De Maasbode, 5 February 1960. 185 H.A. Gomperts, “Avonturiers en Slachtoffers,” Het Parool, 5 January 1963. 186 Anne Wadman, “Novellen van Beb Vuyk: De Geur van het Avontuur,” Leeuwarder Courant, 30 November 1963. 187 Scova Righini, “Een leven,” 224. 188 A. van de Marke, “Avonturen in Indië en op de Prinsengracht,” De Volkskrant, 25 October 1947. 189 Scova Righini, “Een leven,” 241. 190 “Verhalen van Beb Vuyk,” Friese Koerier, 29 November 1962. 191 D.M., “Dimensie Meer?,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 12 December 1962. 192 Kees Fens, “Boekenweek Nadert: Verhalen van Beb Vuyk,” De Tijd/De Maasbode, 16 March 1962. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 104 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES How is it that a woman who had been compared to a traitor and whose stories presented reminders of Dutch brutality, could be reviewed in such moderate terms? Firstly, many reviewers did not mention the content of the stories. Fens’ review analyses the formal literary merits, ignoring the content. More importantly, the answer can be inferred from the wording of a number of these reviews. Varangot mentioned that the stories themselves focus on the human aspects and not the political or historical.193 Another critic wrote that the stories appealed to those looking for human-interest problems associated with Indonesia after the separation from the Netherlands.194 A reviewer in the Algemeen Handelsblad claimed that the “very impressively written stories” would bring clarification to those interested in how great historical turning points can influence the individual.195 Vuyk’s work contends that human depravity is always just a whisper away, and therefore the violence of the Dutch was simply an aspect of being human. This is what the reviewers noticed. Some could pass over the content in silence. Others could reference the Dutch cruelty that emanates from her stories, but dismiss the cruel excesses as a universal, not particularly Dutch, phenomenon. Unremembering held sway in Dutch society. Haasse’s Oeroeg entered the reading lists of Dutch secondary schools, not Vuyk’s Gerucht en geweld. Vuyk provided an addition to the work of remembering decolonization, but few listened. The Existentialist Albert van der Hoogte’s novel Het Laatste Uur: een kroniek uit het na-oorlogse Indonesië (The final hour: A chronicle from post-war Indonesia) was published in 1953. A certain Opzomer, who works as a prosecuting attorney in a district court, narrates the story. Having spent World War Two as a Japanese prisoner, he discovers that his two sons died in a Japanese camp. Opzomer finds himself alone, confronting an existential dread amidst a decaying, rotting colonial society. He tells us: “The old East Indies no longer exists; what there now is, is ravaged, a sad skeleton.”196 Opzomer admits to himself, “Cowardice and lack of personality are my most significant characteristics” 193 194 195 196 Victor Varangot, “Geweld bij Beb Vuyk, rust bij Frits Huel,” Het Vrije Volk, 21 November 1958. K., “Novellen van Bep Vuyk,” De Tijd/De Maasbode, 5 February 1960. B.S., “Het boek: Gerucht en Geweld,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 28 April 1960. Van der Hoogte, Het Laatste Uur, 25. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 105 (89). He fulfils his duties, but has lost his belief in the justice of colonial law: “Indonesians are wiser than we are” (92). The centrepiece of the novel is formed by the so-called Doyle case. A group of Indonesian peasants set upon a Dutch soldier and his Indo girlfriend. The soldier escapes, but his girlfriend is abducted, severely beaten, gang raped, mutilated and killed, then thrown into a hastily dug grave, possibly still alive. Scores of Indonesian villagers, women as well as men, sing and dance with joy and shout support to the rapists and killers as they watch the brutal spectacle. Van der Hoogte supplies us with a detailed account of this harrowing incident (95-108). When Opzomer interrogate the suspects, he realizes that such collective violence goes beyond reason (111). Yet, he is convinced that in a year’s time, back in Holland, “I will hardly be able to remember it,” like how the Dutch will unremember the details of their war (115). Opzomer goes through the motions and gets the death penalty for the main perpetrators (124-125). A group of soldiers carry out the executions. Their officer explains that republican guerrilla fighters had captured three of their comrades, mutilated them horribly, then tortured them to death. The execution provides the opportunity for revenge. Yet, Opzomer, when describing the execution by firing squad, gives us an ambiguous picture, as if it was Calvary that he was witnessing (136-150). Opzomer visits a district that is terrorized by republican guerrillas. Indonesian representatives of Dutch rule live imperilled lives (182-183). He witnesses the solemn burial of three Dutch soldiers, victims of a mine explosion (187-191). Soldiers live in dread of these devices. In the final section of the novel, Opzomer regains consciousness in a hospital. He discovers that he has been the victim of a detonated mine. Gradually it becomes clear, that he is fatally wounded (193-200). The “final hour” in the title turns out to be Opzomer’s final hour, as well as that of the colony. Opzomer is dying, but accepts his being-towards-death. The notes that he is writing, that we are reading, become his expression of existentialist authenticity. Rob Nieuwenhuys referred to Van der Hoogte’s writing as being high quality, specifying that the scene describing the execution of the seven murderers could never be forgotten.197 Justus van der Kroef, described The Final Hour as “a first-rate novel […] that captures the swan song of the Dutch colonial community.”198 The book received positive reviews in the national 197 Nieuwenhuys, Oost-Indische, 451. 198 Van der Kroef, “The Colonial Novel,” 230. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 106 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES press and was reprinted five times within four years of publication.199 German and French translations soon appeared.200 Writing in De Telegraaf, the conservative C. Gerretson mourned the fact that Van der Hoogte had ignored the wonderful years of empire, yet, admitted that this was “the work of an artist of quite some talent.”201 The Leeuwarder Courant judged the book to be “a serious attempt to offer […] a representation of the situation.”202 Nico Verhoeven of De Tijd referred to it as “the most revealing work of the imagination” to be written about the Dutch-Indonesian conflict.203 A few years later, he described it as a historical document and an unparalleled modern “classical tragedy.”204 In the liberal De Gids, Emmy van Lokhorst claimed that the book provided an “unforgettable representation” of the period.205 The book won the prestigious Vijverbergprijs book prize for its “outstanding representation of the time.”206 When Van der Hoogte read a passage from the novel at the official prize giving, the audience, including the mayor of The Hague, was moved to silence, forgetting to applaud.207 Novelist Pierre Dubois described The Final Hour as “one of the most moving books in our language about the break with our colonial past.”208 One critic who disagreed was Beb Vuyk. Writing in the Indonesian newspaper De Nieuwsgier, she accused Van der Hoogte of failing to capture the revolutionary energy of the time, pointing out that the Indonesians in the novel were all either “fearful federalists or the accused in murder cases” while the narrator was so involved with himself that he failed to demonstrate the slightest social curiosity.209 Van der Hoogte provided a representation of a rotten, colonial society during its dying days, where even civil servants no longer believe in the system. Soldiers f ight a sordid war that politicians in The Hague have given up on. Law courts are a sham. The Dutch army consists of lonely and 199 Swart, “De waardigheid,” 133. 200 Ibid., 141-142. 201 C. Gerretson, “Het Laatste Uur,” De Telegraaf, 8 August 1953. 202 W.E., “Het land dat wij achterlieten: Romantiek en journalistiek over Indonesië,” Leeuwarder Courant, 10 October 1953. 203 N.V., “Geest en Leven,” De Tijd, 19 November 1953. 204 Nico Verhoeven, “‘Huis van de Nacht’ nieuwe roman van Albert van der Hoogte,” De Tijd, 2 June 1956. 205 E.v.L., “Nieuwe Boeken,” De Gids 119 (1956), 393-394. 206 “Literatuurprijzen van Jan Campertstichting,” De Telegraaf, 16 November 1956. 207 “Jan Campert Prijzen Uitgedeeld,” De Telegraaf, 1 December 1956. 208 Pierre H. Dubois, “Albert v.d. Hoogte zestig jaar,” Het Vaderland, 1 December 1969. 209 Beb Vuyk, “Laatste uur van een somber man,” De Nieuwsgier, 22 July 1953. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 107 homesick men, many infected with syphilis. The book is populated with colonials who have questionable points of view. The Final Hour is not only an existential novel, but also a posteschatological one. The greatest problem for the colonials is that they once tasted the privilege of what it was like to be a white colonial in a European empire, the good old days of tempo doeloe or what Anderson called “tropical Gothic.”210 Now the end has come, but they are doomed to continue living. Opzomer articulates this, realizing that those who survive are incurably sick, like “displaced persons.”211 This is worsened by the fact that it was all brought to an end by a Japanese invasion. Those “small yellow men have not disappeared; they are still standing behind us, with their squinting, slanty eyes under the peak of their stupid caps and with their bamboo sticks in their hands” (126). He adds, “We experienced the end of the world and our fate is that we survived this ending. We carry on as caricatures” (126). One thing that made it possible for reviewers to give the work a positive reception, is that the brutal violence in the book comes from Indonesians. The rape scene reveals the Indonesian peasants as barbaric sadists. As Maria Dermoût wrote: “[T]he abduction, rape and torturing, before her death, of the very young Indo girl Betty Doyle, is of an inescapable horror.”212 Dutch violence, on the other hand, is institutional and legal. The protagonist’s sense of duty forces him to implement the law, even when it means applying the death penalty. Dutch soldiers are victims. They never burn kampongs or torture prisoners. Even the loss of belief among colonialists can be blamed on Asians. Thus, even Carel Gerretson could find much to like in the novel, and Beb Vuyk could find much to dislike. Furthermore, The Final Hour provided no historical explanation for the fall of the Dutch empire in Asia. Ultimately, the imperfectability of humans accounts for the extreme violence of the conflict. Despite the prize winning and the positive reviews, interest in Van der Hoogte’s work waned, as did interest in the history of the colony. Reviewers described it as unforgettable. Yet, time proved them wrong. Van der Hoogte published one more novel set during decolonization, but, some decades after publication, they slipped out of public interest and out of print, becoming 210 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 151. 211 Van der Hoogte, Het Laatste Uur, 126. 212 Maria Dermoût, “Twee boeken over Indonesië: de liefde voor een land is niet te peilen,” Vrij Nederland, 30 June 1953. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 108 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES no more than “a footnote in the history of Dutch literature.”213 Yet, The Final Hour did have an afterlife. In 2002, Stef Scagliola published Last van de oorlog (Burden of the war). In her attempt to understand what drove Dutch soldiers to commit violent excesses, she examined some of the most brutal acts committed by the nationalist Indonesians. Scagliola refers to a terrible incident from 1945 when a Dutch woman is gang raped, mutilated and murdered. Her source was a memoir from Dutch veteran, Joop Hulsbus. Scagliola quoted over 30 lines from the statement of the chief perpetrator of the crime, as related by Hulsbus.214 However, in 2004, Esther ten Dolle published a devastating critique, showing that Hulsbus, in a case of near plagiarism, had lifted his description from Van der Hoogte’s novel. As Ten Dolle concluded, “without knowing it, […] the historian here used a fragment from a novel […] as a historical source.”215 Scagliola had concluded that the murderer had been “encouraged by an entire crowd to abuse in the most cruel manner and murder a Dutch woman,” then compounded her error by using this incident to argue that “violence from the Indonesian side that went beyond what Dutch soldiers could imagine.”216 Furthermore, in a brilliant piece of detective work, Ten Dolle located the original incident, finding it reported in the Indische Courant between May and August 1948. Even the names of some perpetrators are the same as in The Final Hour. Like Van der Hoogte’s fictional case, the historical case was heard at the district court of Surabaya, where Van der Hoogte himself was working. Ten Dolle’s argues that Van der Hoogte made use of the court documentation to write his fictional account. Significantly, there is no reference to villagers who shouted their support of the rapists. This was an addition of Van der Hoogte’s.217 Van der Hoogte’s fantasy provides an example of Said’s “already existing structure of attitude and reference,” whereby imaginative writing on the Other is limited to certain imaginaries, assumptions and intentions.218 It drew on colonialism’s cultural archive of the brutal native, and this resonated among readers who had been inducted into the same family of ideas. Fifty years later, Scagliola transposed the incident to the Bersiap period in 1945, where it became a politically motivated brutal killing of a Dutch woman. Van der Hoogte’s work provides an inaccurate, 213 214 215 216 217 218 Swart, “De waardigheid,” 134. Scagliola, Last van de oorlog, 84-85. Ten Dolle, “Een moord,” 5-6. Scagliola, Last van de oorlog, 85. Ten Dolle, “Een moord,” 8-9. Said, Culture, 248; Said, Orientalism, 201-201. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 109 even racist, representation of Indonesian violence. Van der Hoogte’s fictional representations of Indonesian violence may have been forgotten, and his work out of print, but its trace still shaped representations of Indonesian violence in the twenty-first century, providing an explanatory framework for Dutch military brutality. Victimhood Within the Dutch political elite, the transfer of sovereignty to the Indonesian revolutionary government was difficult to accept. In 1950, former wartime Prime Minister Piet Gerbrandy wrote of “a great calamity, […] the deprivation of my country of […] a vital part of its being, under pressure exercised by Britain, the United States and U.N.O.”219 He blamed the “meddlers” who “stuck their clumsy fingers in the pie” (72). Gerbrandy, leader of the Protestant Anti-Revolutionary Party, had led the Dutch government in exile in London during World War Two. After the liberation of the Netherlands, he had stepped aside. As the grand old man of Dutch politics and the leader of the forces that eventually triumphed over the evil of Nazism, his prestige was vast. Gerbrandy did not dilute his praise for Dutch colonialism with Calvinist modesty. He judged that the fair-minded Dutch colonial state echoed “the Garden of Eden before the Fall” (40). This was due to the Dutch “genius for colony-building” (20) in combination with their “most admirable and altruistic motives” (34). This “unique excellence in the sphere of colonial relationships” (42) caused men’s minds to open wide, leading to “years of rapid but sensible expansion in very field” (23). The colony was a unique community, free of racial prejudice (34). Gerbrandy denied that the authorities had encroached on personal liberty, arguing that the Dutch permitted absolute freedom of speech, except when seditious, maintaining that the colony was a Free State (41-47). However, the Great Depression was an economic blizzard that caused hardship, creating fertile ground for a totalitarian ideology that took its cue from Russia and Japan (24). This was led by a small group of self-seeking collaborators who “would sell their souls to the devil” (55). Although the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies was a severe blow, Gerbrandy believed recovery was possible. Alas, a combination of Dutch errors and interference by ignorant outsiders resulted in disaster 219 Gerbrandy, Indonesia, 11. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 110 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES (11). Men of influence proved to be a “thorn in the side” because they had been members of the “avowedly separatist” De Stuw group (90). The main culprits in Gerbrandy’s view were Minister for Overseas Territories Logemann, followed by Van Mook (94). He described Van Mook as “utterly misguided” (135). This situation was aggravated by the fact that during the Catholic-Socialist coalitions between 1946 and 1949, the Socialists were the more influential; the willingness of the Catholics to compromise proved to be tragic (83-89). Most of Gerbrandy’s ire was reserved for foreigners. The British could have stabilized the violent situation, but Mountbatten and General Christison made errors, leading to the appeasement of the Indonesian republican leadership. Consequently, the work of generations of Dutch colonials was lost (95-105). He criticized the UN, which “trained its guns on the Netherlands” after the “police action” of 1947. The result of the UN’s pressure meant that the Netherlands, “an ancient sovereign State,” was forced to “refrain from taking police action against evildoers” (108-110). Finally, he blamed the Americans for their interference, having been confused by public opinion (117-120). Gerbrandy held international public opinion in low esteem: “It is a fantastic world in which, of all countries, the Netherlands […] is singled out and driven to part with our overseas territories” (80). Furthermore, the Dutch “who have builded [sic] sensibly, without the aid of megaphone and microphone, braggartry or bluster, have been stripped and robbed of our birthright in broad daylight” (80). Gerbrandy argued that politicians in The Hague had failed to protect the rights of the peoples who opposed the Indonesian nationalists and had failed to ensure that these peoples could exercise their right of self-determination. He accused parliamentarians of abandoning their colony and reducing the Netherlands to the status of a minor power, predicting that Indonesia will fall prey to Islamic fanaticism and Soviet totalitarianism (175-183). Despite his sense of victimhood, Gerbrandy finished on a positive note. Not all was lost because the Netherlands retained West New Guinea and he called upon the Dutch nation to convert New Guinea into “a haven for those who wish to live in conditions of safety and tolerance” (185). He recognized that the Dutch can still “render Western Civilization a service by remaining in New Guinea,” tasked with keeping “the flame of civilization burning in the Far East” (190-191). Gerbrandy’s sense of betrayal did not appear out of nowhere. His conservative party, along with the Liberals, had vehemently opposed negotiations with Indonesian republicans. When things went wrong, they made the This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 111 Labour Party and Van Mook the scapegoats.220 Gerbrandy had been incensed by the Linggadjati Agreement of 1946. This led him to found the right-wing extraparliamentary movement the Nationaal Comité Handhaving Rijkseenheid (National Committee for Maintaining State Unity). In an emotional speech on the radio, Gerbrandy condemned the bandits running amok on Java and the Dutch statesmen who would betray the nation. He appealed to the Dutch people, saying that they were about to lose World War Two.221 His movement rapidly collected 300,000 signatures of citizens opposed to their parliamentary representatives.222 Historian Joop de Jong argued that the committee’s extreme views reflected the opinions of a large number from Gerbrandy’s party as well as Liberals.223 Van Doorn points out that repatriated colonials could rely on Gerbrandy for support.224 Gerbrandy came to champion the rights of minorities in Indonesia, especially the South Moluccans, in his attempt to retain Dutch influence in the archipelago.225 In this context, Gerbrandy’s Indonesia echoed the views of a substantial minority of Dutch citizens. However, the reviews were far from positive. Paul van ’t Veer of Het Vrije Volk gave the book short shrift, pointing out Gerbrandy’s lack of balance and clear reasoning.226 The Protestant Heerenveense Koerier found the scapegoating of the members of the De Stuw group hard to accept, wondering why Gerbrandy would cheat the Indonesians of what the Dutch already had – national sovereignty.227 One exception was the extended, positive review from Gerretson in De Telegraaf.228 He supported the thesis, consistent with his 1946 Indië onder Dictatuur, that the blood of Dutch soldiers had been spilt due to the selfish manipulations of the leftist De Stuw group. But then, Gerretson was one of Gerbrandy’s co-founders of the National Committee for Maintaining State Unity. Described by De Jong as “foul” (vileine), Gerretson’s views on colonialism were as extreme as Gerbrandy’s.229 If he had expected his book to have influence, Gerbrandy must have been disappointed. By the 1950s, few were listening except the colonial die-hards. 220 De Jong, Avondschot, 118. 221 Van den Doel, Afscheid, 350. 222 Bosma, Terug, 17-19. 223 Ibid., 118. 224 Van Doorn, De laatse eeuw, 325. 225 Bosma, Terug, 23. 226 P.v.’t V., “Prof. Gerbrandy over Indonesië,” Het Vrije Volk, 31 March 1951. 227 F.S., “Gerbrandy over Indonesië,” Heerenveense Koerier, 21 March 1951. 228 Prof. Dr. C. Gerretson, “De Ondergang van het Koninkrijk,” De Telegraaf, 10 February 1951. 229 De Jong, Avondschot, 292. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 112 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES The Adventurer After the Indonesian War of Independence had ended, the man held responsible for the worst mass killings, Captain Raymond Westering, had become the stuff of legend. In national and regional newspapers throughout the country, and in Dutch-language newspapers in Indonesia, it seemed like his every move was reported on during the 1950s and early 1960s. This included reports of his arrest (and release) after months of a manhunt;230 decisions on whether he should be deported to Indonesia;231 rumours of his attempt to infiltrate back into Indonesia to start a counter-revolution;232 descriptions of his attempts to create a new ultra-conservative movement;233 even accounts of his career and failure as an opera singer.234 In 1982, journalist Peter Schumacher claimed that Westerling’s name had become “synonymous with the cruelties inflicted by the Dutch soldiers during the police actions.”235 His life seemed like that of a character in an opera. Indeed, in 1995 the opera Westerling premiered in Amsterdam.236 An inquiry and subsequent report in 1948 had justified Westerling’s methods as necessitated by the emergency situation in South Celebes. Frans Goedhart had managed to get a parliamentary motion passed in early 1949, calling for an independent commission to investigate Westerling’s use of extreme violence. However, by the time the report was delivered in The 230 “Illegaal reisje in Nederland: Westerling gearresterd,” Limburgsch Dagblad, 17 April 1952; “Westerling gearresterd en weer in vrijheid gesteld,” Leeuwarder Courant, 17 April 1952; “Westerling gearresterd en weer vrijgelaten,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 17 April 1952; “Westerling gearresterd en weer vrijgelaten,” Gereformeerd Gezinsblad, 19 April 1952. 231 “Geen reden tot Westerlings uitlevering,” Nieuwsblad van Sumatra, 10 June 1952; “Geen uitlevering van Westerling,” De Java-bode, 11 June 1952. 232 “Evipan onderweg naar Engelse haven,” Het Vrije Volk, 11 June 1955; “Westerling naar Indonesië,” Leeuwarder Courant, 21 September 1955; “Vertrek van Westerling,” Leeuwarder Courant, 15 November 1955; “Weet U het allemaal nog,” Het Vrije Volk, 13 December 1955. 233 “Nieuwe groepering van Westerling,” Friese Koerier, 25 May 1953; “Westerling sticht eigen Partij: De Nederlands Conservatieve Partij,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 19 September 1955; “Raymond Westerling voelt zich geen avonturier,” De Tijd, 22 June 1955; “Rustig parlementair jaar kreeg door kabinetcrisis einige beroering,” Leeuwarder Courant, 31 December 1955. 234 “Westerling wordt operazanger,” Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, 24 December 1956; “De Kleine Wereld,” Nieuwsblad van Sumatra, 3 January 1957; “Westerling wordt operazanger,” Algemeen Indisch Dagblad, 4 January 1957; “Westerling als opera-tenor,” Het Vrije Volk, 17 February 1958; “Raymond Westerling maakte zijn opera-debuut als Cavaradossi,” Algemeen Handelsblad, 9 June 1958; “Westerling kan niet capituleren: ‘ik blijf op zangles,’” De Telegraaf, 29 September 1962. 235 Peter Schumacher, “Raymond Westerling en de jungle van het verleden: zelf-rehabilitatie van een eenling,” NRC Handelsblad, 18 September 1982. 236 Reinjan Mulder, “Het leven van kapitein Westerling in een opera,” NRC Handelsblad, 7 June 1995. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 113 Hague in 1954, the war seemed to belong to the distant past. The cabinet, in a clear example of unremembering, quietly shelved it.237 This did not mean that Westerling’s use of violence had been hidden by some sort of cover-up. After all, Van Mook freely admitted that he had ordered the pacification of South Celebes and this involved excesses.238 More forcefully, Captain Raymond Westering himself had publically shared the details in a colourful, boastful account. Westerling’s Mijn Memoires (My memoirs) was published in 1952. From the first page, we know that we are dealing with no ordinary autobiography. Westerling quickly informs the reader that he was a “miracle child.”239 By the age of f ive, he could tame wild animals and snakes, by the age of six he could read bloody crime novels, by the age of seven he had become an excellent shot and by the age of eight he regularly disappeared into the mountains on long hikes (9-11). After joining the Dutch army in exile in 1941, he became an instructor “in silent killing” (28). As an instructor for the Dutch resistance, he boasted that he occasionally slipped across the lines to practise on German enemies (37). Eventually he was shipped to the East, where the real adventure began. Westerling argued that the average Indonesian wanted the Dutch to restore order. Like Van Mook and Gerbrandy, he blamed the Japanese for stirring up hatred of the Europeans, viewed the Indonesian revolution as an example of the USSR’s expanding influence and blamed the British for failing to stop the disorder and the Australians for betraying the Dutch (40-75). Parachuted into Sumatra in 1945, he claimed that the Indonesian peasant was pleased to see his uniform, as it meant the end of terrorism. Meanwhile, fanatics terrorized the population (51-54). He gladly fulfilled his task of restoring order. He described how, almost single-handedly, he rescued hundreds of civilians from three internment camps (61-63). He related that, because of a wager for a bottle of whiskey, he snuck into the camp of a nationalist leader, abducted the terrorist, interrogated him, had him decapitated and returned to camp with the terrorist’s head in a biscuit tin. He got his bottle of Black & White whisky. He admitted his astonishment at his reputation for bloodthirstiness, arguing that this escapade saved lives, as it did not necessitate an all-out attack on the terrorist camp (78-89). He claimed that his way of killing earned him a reputation among the natives, and so the Westerling legend began (91-93). 237 Scagliola, Last van de oorlog, 106-107. 238 Van Mook, Indonesië, 171. 239 Westerling, Mijn Memoires, 9. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 114 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES In July 1946 he was offered a position in the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, followed by special orders “from my superiors” to pacify South Celebes (119). He set about executing corrupt police officers publically and ostentatiously, and within days peace was restored in the regional capital (130-131). He described how he walked up to one official who was lunching at the crowded European Society, and simply shot him dead (134). Westerling argued that he always worked with local informants, gathering information, then entering a village, collecting the villagers together, calling for terrorists to be identified, then executing them on the spot. He maintained that these methods brought about the pacification of the island in less than two months, with only 600 terrorists killed. This led the local people to refer to him, as the “East Indies Robin Hood,” and earned him thousands of friends (140-155). Westerling claimed that the numbers had been exaggerated, concluding that, in total, 3,000 to 4,000 were killed by both sides during the pacification. Meanwhile, he became a scapegoat for the Dutch, who refused to publish the military, judicial and parliamentary reports about his operation (157-165). He complained that his name was brought up at the UN as if he was “a bloodthirsty monster” (185). He resigned his commission because the treachery of politicians disgusted him. Attempting to enter civilian life on Java with his Indo wife, natives came seeking his advice, pleading for protection from nationalist violence (188-199). With the support of General Spoor, he decided to create a private army of 22,000 men (201-206). The locals called him Ratu Adil or “Just Ruler” (206-208). Westerling described his attempted coup d’état of 1950. He justified this, arguing that he was defending the rights of the federation and the welfare of the natives against tyranny (229-238). He described his escape from Indonesia, his incarceration in Singapore and, having given the authorities the slip, his arrival in Brussels (269-289). Asserting that he was now world famous, he decided to use his fame to warn the world of the global danger that a Moscow-inspired Indonesia constituted (291-299). Westerling’s claim of world fame is only slightly exaggerated. In his own country, his adventures were followed in regional and national newspapers. Yet the Dutch press ignored the publication of his memoir. One journalist did report how shocking it was to read of Westerling boasting of his bloody deeds, but then added that the press has properly reacted to the publication with complete silence.240 240 F.S., “Buiten-parlementair,” Friese Koerier, 3 June 1953. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 115 Descriptions of summary executions and mass killings were not something that the Dutch public or journalists seemed to have much stomach for. Moreover, historians showed little interest in an area that might provoke controversy. Westerling was correct. He was made a scapegoat. He avoided prosecution for war crimes, but his name became synonymous with brutality. In 1966, Het Vrije Volk reported that his mass killing of 40,000 people was remembered in South Celebes.241 Thus, Dutch society perpetrated the myth that Westerling was an individual adventurer whose hard methods were the exception. A placid press, an inert historical profession and a disinterested public, combined to engage in systematic unremembering. The Soldier In 2013, Annegriet Wietsma and Stef Scagliola broke new ground with the publication of a study on Dutch soldiers and sex during the Indonesian War of Liberation. Their purpose was to inscribe what had remained a blank page in the history of decolonization – how, upon returning to the Netherlands after the cessation of hostilities, the Dutch military left in its wake thousands of abandoned children, as well as the children’s mothers, most of whom had traded sex for money. The courageous historians hoped to expose a “well-kept secret” that had been preserved for over 60 years.242 The issue of European soldiers having sex with local women had long been problematized by Dutch public opinion. In his study of concubinage in Dutch East Indies, Reggie Bray notes that the colonial army was unique in permitting soldiers and women to live together in an unmarried state within the barracks. Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, protests were being voiced and Dutch parliamentarians were concerned that concubinage contributed to the spread of venereal diseases among the soldiers. Furthermore, a serious social concern was the children born from mixed relationships. The presence of such children was widely held to be an indication of the moral collapse of European society. Consequently, by the late 1920s, official toleration for concubinage within the military hand ended.243 Ann Laura Stoler agrees that the view that the European colonial 241 “Doden van actie-Westerling herdacht,” Het Vrije Volk, 13 December 1966. 242 Wietsma and Scagliola, Liefde, 7. 243 Baay, De njai, 129-174. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 116 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES population was in danger of racial degeneracy was widespread and the abandonment of métis children invoked a “social death.”244 Wietsma and Scagliola’s book, unlike that of Baay, focused on the war of decolonization. However, it was not the first to deal with this topic. In 1957, Job Sytzen’s fictional trilogy of novels, Niet Iedere Soldaat Sneuvelt (Not every soldier dies), Gods Ravijn (God’s ravine) and Landgenoten (Compatriots), was published in a single volume. The first two books were set squarely against the background of decolonization. Yet, this work has long lain unremembered. Furthermore, until very recently there was limited information regarding the author. Gert Oostindie has marshalled the basic facts for the authors of nearly 700 egodocuments published by veterans of the conflict, but for Sytzen there are a number of blanks.245 Some of these blanks have been filled in, in a short work by Harry Poeze.246 At first sight, Niet Iedere Soldaat Sneuvelt is a superficial story of a love affair between newly married Captain Willy Besoyen and a young Dutch widow in Java, Laura Dusart, mother of two young children and a survivor of a Japanese camp. Likewise, the second story, Gods Ravijn, is a doomed love story between a Dutch volunteer soldier and a Dutch nurse, but also a story of spiritual redemption. All the main characters in the trilogy are Dutch. Indonesians are invisible and silent. The Japanese are cruel, Indonesian nationalists are bloodthirsty fanatics. Besoyen and Dusart are near perfect specimens of humanity. Java forms the tropical, languid backdrop to love affairs, an Orientalist fantasy. A closer reading reveals that the first two stories represent the final years of the Dutch East Indies with some frankness. We learn of soldiers who banish women from the camps, especially “the whores.” Entertainment consists of visiting friendly families, cinemas and restaurants, which is “cheaper than whores.” Venereal diseases is one of the greatest problems for the Dutch military. Condoms are unavailable and the only way to stay healthy is to stay away from local women.247 Dutch authorities carry out raids against infected prostitutes and force them into hospitalization (57). Beyozen offers a beautiful girl a ride in his jeep but is upset when she then offers him sex (88-89). During a night out, he witnesses a slim Chinese girl dancing naked for his drunken comrades (104-107). He admits that if he did not have Laura, he too would pay for sex and probably contract syphilis. He 244 Stoler, “Sexual Affronts,” 27-31. 245 Oostindie, Soldaat, 372-373. 246 Poeze, Dominee. 247 Sytzen, Soldaat, 15-31. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 117 compares the sexual behaviour of Dutch soldiers with that of the Germans as well as the Canadians in the Netherlands (171-172), a comparison repeated in Gods Ravijn (295). With soldiers lying in hospital beds with sexually transmitted diseases, he seizes one girl who has been a source of infection and forces her at gunpoint to flee naked from her home (266-270). In Gods Ravijn, the main character causes a scandal when he has a relationship with a Dutch nurse, the scandal being that he infected her with venereal disease (295). We are told that if a soldier has a girlfriend and she becomes pregnant, he is immediately transferred (240). Laura and Willy break up, but Willy discovers that she had been pregnant and, back in Holland, had given birth to their baby girl (278). In Gods Ravijn, we find a reference to Dutch soldiers having sexual relations with their maids, and a number of these relationships result in babies being born in the kampongs (376). The fact that the Dutch army left the by-products of their war making and lovemaking in their wake was not such a “well-kept secret” after all. The book offers examples of the brutality of life for the Dutch soldier. Having killed Indonesian nationalists, it is considered advisable to not fill in a report, in case it falls into the wrong hands (245). Soldiers sell anti-malaria pills on the black market (24-25). Soldiers are guilty of plundering and confiscating goods (237). One soldier explains the relationship between fighting and sex: “Once you’ve […] killed someone with your submachine gun, […] a woman is no longer something you avoid hurting, […] but something that you’ll take if you feel like it.”248 Oostindie writes that little immoral behaviour can be found in the nearly 700 soldier’s egodocuments that he has studied. Open references to sex hardly occur. He quotes from a number of egodocuments that give the impression that Dutch soldiers withstood the temptations of prostitutes. He then quotes from a select number that give details of soldiers paying for sex.249 Although he references Sytzen’s trilogy three times,250 he fails to reference him in this passage. Instead, he quotes from seven documents published in the twenty-first century, five from the 1990s and three from the 1980s.251 This gives the inaccurate impression that veterans only wrote about this topic decades after decolonization. But Sytzen’s work demonstrates that secrets were never hidden. In the 1950s, a book was available that represented an army with widespread problems. In later decades, we come across frequent 248 Ibid., 58. 249 Oostindie, Soldaat, 246-260. 250 Ibid., 91, 133, 299. 251 Ibid., 261-264. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 118 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES references to a cover-up, but early in the process of (un)remembering, we have a document that attempts to activate remembering, but eventually becomes unremembered itself, even by historians of the twenty-first century. In June 1960, Sytzen’s volume was the second biggest selling book of the month.252 Sytzen’s publisher claimed that the trilogy “appeals to a large public.”253 However, the popularity did not last. In 1961, an advertisement for the trilogy claimed that the book provided the reader the opportunity to acquire “understanding for the extreme difficult problems of the lads during the police actions.”254 Sytzen writes that his story tells of the men who volunteered to fight “the Jap” in order to liberate the Indies but that this became a struggle against misunderstanding back home.255 In the third work of the trilogy, Sytzen links the narrative of resistance against the German occupier with the narrative of volunteering to fight for the liberation of the Dutch East Indies.256 In other words, the audience for the book is the home front and the purpose, to set the record straight. Jennifer Foray argues that the immediate post-World War Two period saw various political actors in the Netherlands producing an effective rhetoric, centred around simple binaries of “correct” (Dutch patriots) versus “wrong” (German occupiers and their Dutch collaborators), and “the German occupation of the metropolitan Netherlands and the Japanese occupation of the East Indies were cloaked in the same rhetorical mantle.”257 Scagliola writes that World War Two was the “exemplary war” and its “‘good’ and ‘evil’ would provide the main referential framework for post-war Holland.”258 Foray agrees that “memories of World War II overlapped and informed understandings of the decolonization process” and very quickly both sets of events “morphed into one cultural trauma.”259 Within this framework “Sukarno was a traitor, a Japanese puppet, comparable to the Dutch Nazi leader Anton Mussert.”260 Foray argues that by September 1945 division between the Dutch began to complicate this simple vision. By late September, the Dutch Communist 252 “Pearl Buck, Hella Haasse en Hans Martin thans op de lijst-van-vijf,” Het Parool, 15 July 1960. 253 “Uitgevers over eigen en andermans boeken – De best verkochte titels,” Friese Koerier, 5 January 1963. 254 De Kampion: Officieel orgaan van de Koninklijke Nederlandsche Touristenbond (January 1961): 39. 255 Sytzen, Soldaat, 8. 256 Ibid., 445. 257 Foray, “The Trauma,” 82. 258 Scagliola, “De lange schaduw,” 36. 259 Foray, “The Trauma,” 85-86. 260 Ibid., 87. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 119 Party demonstrated solidarity with the Republic of Indonesia, leading to the predominantly royalist and Protestant Community of Former Resistance Workers expelling communist resistance veterans from its ranks.261 Similarly, the group around Vrij Nederland, under the leadership of Henk van Randwijk, began to take a critical approach and fostered cooperative ties between Dutch progressives and Indonesian nationalists. Therefore, a majority of Dutch felt that a firm line against Sukarno could prevent a catastrophic event, similar to the German occupation, while a smaller group on the left took a more critical approach to Dutch colonialism and its attempts at reconquest.262 Sytzen’s narrative is consistent with that of the royalist, Protestant members of the resistance who volunteered to liberate the Dutch East Indies after the Allies had liberated the Netherlands. Thanks to Harry Poeze, we now know that Sytzen was in fact the pseudonym of Jacob Jonker, a pastor in the strict Dutch Reformed Church who served as an army chaplain in the Dutch East Indies from 1946 until 1948.263 He was also a member of Gerbrandy’s conservative Anti-Revolutionary Party.264 Lieutenant Besoyen is a practising member of the Dutch Reformed Church.265 Gijs Kotting is the son of a Protestant reverend and the work in which he is the protagonist, Gods Ravijn, is a work of spiritual redemption. Many of the male characters in the trilogy have been involved in the resistance during the German occupation, like Kotting, who had risked his life against the Germans and had been hunted by the Gestapo (306). In the third story, we learn that a student at the Protestant university led a resistance group that forms the background of many of the characters in the previous two novels (454). One soldier explains that they “volunteered to fight against the Japanese to liberate the Indies” (160-161). Another explains that young men in the former resistance felt obliged to volunteer to liberate Indonesia (316). However, they became disillusioned quickly. Kotting writes to his English girlfriend, “I’ve wanted all the time to go to the Indies and to fight the Japs. But […] now I’m here it’s just a rotten business” (319). Later he adds that by helping to ensure that Queen Wilhelmina’s lands will be liberated by the Dutch, he would be liberated “from the Jerrys, from the wretches and murderers, who hunted us like vermin” (360). A character who appears in all three novels, 261 Ibid. 262 Ibid., 87-89. 263 Poeze, Dominee, 7-9. 264 Ibid., 45. 265 Sytzen, Soldaat, 136-137. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 120 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES Piet Verkerk, admits he has to volunteer because, “I’ll die of shame if I stay here” (532). Most soldiers see Indonesian nationalists as being “poisoned by fanaticism,” something learned from the Japanese (42). In other words, they see the conflict as one of those who are “right” against those who are “wrong.” However, Sytzen’s work also articulates how the soldiers became disillusioned when they discover that they were defending the rights of bigoted colonialists. Besoyen argues against one colonialist: “If you had thought about the people rather than the billions earned by your companies, we wouldn’t have the mess that we now have” (144). Similarly, like Gerbrandy, his books criticize a Dutch government that gives in to American pressure and agrees to a ceasefire, betraying the soldiers (234). Kotting reflects that having been hunted by the Gestapo, and having been moved by patriotism to liberate Indonesia, he is betrayed by his government to the Americans and British (371). He has “no thrust in The Hague anymore” (420). Indeed, even within the former resistance group in Amsterdam, there are critical voices who claim that the Dutch will be playing the role of the SS among the Indonesians (536). The same character, a communist, warns the volunteers that they are servants of world capital (554). Furthermore, the Dutch government avoids fulfilling its responsibility of paying to widows the salaries of husbands who had been killed by the Japanese, and by 1947, the Tour de France received more attention than the war in Indonesia (608). Sytzen’s works received some positive reviews.266 However, most were not generous. The Algemeen Handelsblad accused Sytzen of writing a superficial love story.267 Het Vrije Volk wrote that the second volume was only marginally better than the first.268Another reviewer stated that the first volume was too confrontational and reckoned that Sytzen was trying to sweeten his bad conscience by blaming others.269 We have seen that by the late 1940s leading publications on the left had become critical of the prosecution of the war. By 1949, the futility of the war had become evident. The largest army ever mobilized in Dutch history now had to return, in defeat. Meanwhile, authorities in the Netherlands were intent on rebuilding the country. The framework of “right versus wrong” provided the rhetoric from which the trauma could be (mis)understood. 266 “Notities over boeken,” Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, 30 November 1955; “‘Landgenoten’ van Job Sytzen,” De Tijd, 24 December 1955. 267 “Het boek ‘Niet Iedere Soldaat Sneuvelt,’” Algemeen Dagblad, 1 December 1954. 268 “Ordonnans Gijs Kotting duikt in Gods Ravijn,” Het Vrije Volk, 27 December 1954. 269 “Soldaatenleven met ‘n korreltje zout,” Het Vrije Volk, 15 August 1954. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 121 Returning soldiers were met by an indifferent public. The veterans believed their exertions and sufferings had served an acceptable goal. However, the society that they returned to did not share this view.270 The Dutch public had suffered under the Germans, but had little time for the suffering of Jews and next to no interest in the lot of repatriated Indische people. They had even less sympathy for soldiers who had lost a war. Oostindie tells us that the returning soldiers feared being misunderstood. A number remember the public calling them murderers. More frequently, the response was indifference, leading some to refer to themselves as “the forgotten army.”271 Sytzen’s early popularity did not reach those of the left of the political spectrum. For them, the adventure in Indonesia had already become an embarrassing aberration, best ignored. By the mid-1960s, this disinterest became widespread. Thus, the experience of the Dutch soldier during the war of decolonization in general, and Sytzen’s trilogy in particular, was unremembered. Jonker/Sytzen immigrated to Australia, where he continued to work in the Calvinist church.272 Tens of thousands of Dutch men and a smaller number of women, military veterans, lived with their memories in their minds, sometimes written on their bodies, in a society that was not interested. Their representations did not fit into the neat binary “right versus wrong” schema. When society eventually did express an interest in the late 1960s, it focused exclusively on the issue of their war crimes. The Historian Dutch colonial historiography had been the handmaiden of imperial power, with colonial ideology spoon-fed to future practitioners.273 Into the late 1960s, Dutch historians denied that the Dutch had ever been involved in “anything that could be called ‘imperialism.’”274 Hugenholtz argues that colonial history had failed to develop into a separate discipline, so close did its ideology resemble that of government power.275 Yet there were exceptions. In the 1920s and 1930s, B.J.O. Schrieke made strides in developing an Indocentric historiography, but this placed him “outside the traditional 270 271 272 273 274 275 Scagliola, “De lange schaduw,” 36. Oostindie, Soldaat, 280-301. Poeze, Dominee, 73-81. Vogel, De Opkomst, 182. Bloembergen, Colonial Spectacles, 19. Hugenholtz, “Nederlands-Indië,” 20. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 122 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES framework of colonial historiography.”276 In the 1930s, J.C. van Leur made substantial contributions to a postcolonial approach to Indonesian history, rejecting Eurocentric periodization.277 Blaut ranks Van Leur alongside the likes of W.E.B. DuBois and Eric Williams as forming the “first serious critique of Eurocentric historiography.”278 This postcolonial perspective developed further during the 1950s in the work of G.J. Resink.279 Nevertheless, these academics produced work far from the centre of Dutch academia. Van Leur never held an academic post. Resink, who choose Indonesian nationality after decolonization and lived in Indonesia, wrote from what he described as “the periphery.”280 Within days of the end of the war in Europe, a newly founded organization was tasked with gathering materials about the German occupation. Its director, Loe de Jong, was eventually tasked with writing a complete history of the war in the Netherlands. Yet, during the 1950s, Dutch historians all but ignored the war in Indonesia. In the 20 years between 1949 and 1969, no Dutch historian of repute made a serious attempt to analyse the process of decolonization. The University of Leiden was the self-styled world centre of expertise for all things Indonesian, especially the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV, now the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies), yet its esteemed faculty avoided the topic. In 1952 C. Smit published a short study of decolonization, De Indonesische Quastie (The Indonesian question), followed in 1962 by De Liquidatie van een imperium (The liquidation of an empire). His death in 1991 earned him a sympathetic obituary in the NRC Handelsblad, written by a professor of diplomatic history at Leiden. The title of Smit’s book De Indonesische Quaestie is misspelt in the obituary and earned a single sentence, in which he is complimented for his businesslike description of the conflict.281 Yet, this misrepresents the work. Smit’s first book offers an analysis of the failures of Dutch policies. It follows a similar line of argument as De Kadt’s De Indonesische Tragedie. Indonesian nationalism was not invented by the Japanese but grew out of the Dutch economic exploitation of the 276 Vogel, De Opkomst, 105. 277 Ibid., 231-232; Wertheim, “Early Asian Trade,” 168; Van der Kroef, “On the Writing,” 355. 278 Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model, 55. 279 Vogel, De opkomst, 14-16; Van der Kroef, “On the Writing,” 364-371; Mrázek and Resink, “Coughing,” 161-162. 280 Mrázek and Resink, “Coughing,” 161. 281 A.E. Kersten, “Historicus van buitenlands beleid en de dekolonisatie,” NRC Handelsblad, 21 September 1991. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 123 Indonesians.282 During the 1920s the Dutch missed the chance of integrating Indonesians into the colonial government due to a lack of imagination (8). They reacted to Indonesian aspirations with executions, arrests and banishment to internment camps (12-17). Like De Kadt, Smit argued that the Declaration of Independence was not a Japanese construction, but was shaped by the nationalist youth movements (46). Most damaging was the inaccurate view that Sukarno was simply a former collaborator with the Japanese (64). The actual fighting only takes up a few lines in Smit’s work, but, like De Kadt, he does suggest that the so-called “police actions” were an attempt to solve the problem, “in the old-fashioned, colonial way, with weapons” (140). In short, a couple of years after decolonization, a work of history appeared that provided an argument countering the Dutch myth – Sukarno was a Japanese puppet and the international community betrayed the Dutch. To refer to such a work as “businesslike” belittles it. Alas, the work inspired few new historians. We have seen how Bouman studied the development of Indonesian nationalism in West Sumatra. In 1953, J.M. Pluvier’s doctoral dissertation on Indonesian nationalism between 1930 and 1942 was published. Leftist sociologist Wim Wertheim of the University of Amsterdam argued that it covered a “forgotten” chapter of the history of the Indonesian revolution.283 Wertheim claimed that for most scholars, the period remained a blank page, allowing them to blame everything on the Japanese occupation.284 Pluvier argued that “extreme Dutch chauvinism” had been growing in the colony since the mid-1920s, and in the early 1930s fascist ideas found wide support among Europeans and Indos.285 Indonesian nationalist organizations were confronted with a series of repressive measures (41-42). However, peasant and ethnic organizations with a local character became increasingly oriented towards the idea of great Indonesia (79-85). Moderate groups directed their energies towards social and economic works, but the idea of Indonesian independence remained alive (97-107). Repression meant that radical groups made a tactical decision to reorient themselves as cooperative groups (107-130). But by the early 1940s, repression of radical and moderate groups intensified and Indonesians were wondering if their home would remain a colony for centuries (143-146). Although many Indonesian nationalists sympathized with the Dutch after the German invasion of the 282 Smit, De Indonesische Quaestie, 1. 283 Wertheim, preface, v. 284 Ibid., vi. 285 Pluvier, Overzicht, 36-40. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 124 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES Netherlands in May 1940, the following years saw them confronted with government intransigence; the chasm between the authorities and the nationalist movement widened (167-193). Pluvier concluded that by the time of the Japanese occupation, trust in European promises had diminished, and Dutch authority left the legacy of Indonesian aspirations ignored (204). Pluvier’s work offered a representation in which colonial rule, not Japanese propaganda or international conspiracy, was at the root of the Indonesian revolution. The Dutch had sown the seeds of their own downfall. In 1959, a promising article entitled “The Indonesian Declaration of Independence: 17th of August 1945” was published by Leiden historian H.J. De Graaf, in which he attempted to unravel the events surrounding the days and hours before Sukarno and Hatta’s declaration of independence. His undertaking suggested a preliminary effort to initiate an academic discussion of decolonization.286 Alas, the attempt to initiate a debate failed. The loss of Dutch West New Guinea in 1962 and its incorporation into Indonesia led Smit to write De Liquidatie van een Imperium. But as Henk Hofland wrote, this work remained “safely on the surface.”287 Compared with his earlier volume, it marked a regression towards unremembering. Firstly, it was a purely diplomatic history of the conflict, a history from above, in which events are the result of decisions taken by political leaders. Secondly, it provided a Eurocentric analysis. Indonesians are represented as being reactive. We get to hear a great deal about the uneasy relationship between Dutch coalition partners, while the political machinations between Indonesian nationalist factions are only alluded to. This Eurocentric focus is deepened by the fact that the book begins with the Indonesian Declaration of Independence.288 The prelude to decolonization is unremembered. Smit admitted that he cut out any account of Indonesian nationalism and the period of the Japanese occupation. No explanation is given for this unremembering (5). Thirdly, Smit all but ignored any actual fighting. We learn that during the first “police action,” “Dutch losses were very slight” (81) and that during the second “the losses on the Dutch side were minimal” (141). Indonesian losses are never mentioned. Westerling’s use of extrajudicial killing on South Celebes receives one sentence (51). On the other hand, Indonesian gangs are blamed for terrorizing the rural population (75, 130), Indonesian 286 De Graaf, “The Indonesian Declaration,” 305. 287 Hofland, Tegels lichten, 21. 288 Smit, De Liquidatie, 9. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 125 nationalists are accused of “murder, burnings and intimidation” (89), as well as plundering, running amok and sabotage (92, 104). Nevertheless, Smit’s work includes criticism of the Dutch. We are told that the politicians in The Hague were narrow-minded and would have done better allowing Van Mook a freer hand in Batavia (10). Van Mook is blamed for the failure of the Hoge-Veluwe Conference in 1946 (35). The Dutch parliament is criticized for not accepting the Linggadjati Agreement in its “naked” form (50). Smit claimed that the obstinacy of the Dutch parliamentarians caused open military conflict in 1947 (79). Despite its shortcomings, the publication of De Liquidatie van een Imperium meant that Smit had published two representations of the decolonization conflict by 1962, while most Dutch Indonesia experts had published none. In 1964 journalist Paul van ’t Veer wrote the first Dutch biography of Sukarno. Van ’t Veer suggested that the term “collaborator with the enemy” was a misnomer, because the Japanese were not an enemy of the Indonesians.289 Furthermore, Sukarno was not a puppet of the Japanese, because Indonesian independence was the “product of autonomous Indonesian thought.”290 But this biography was a slight work. It had little to say regarding the years from 1945 to 1949. With just one passing reference to “atrocities” committed under the command of Westerling, no attempt was made to analyse Dutch military actions.291 The following year saw the publication of an eye-witness account of the fall of the Dutch empire by someone who had spent most of his working life in Dutch overseas service. Daniel van der Meulen had risen to the position of Minister of Education in the Dutch East Indies after World War Two. The main message of his volume was that the Dutch and colonial authorities failed to see the rise of Indonesian nationalism as an unstoppable force. His first encounter with Indonesian nationalism occurred when he attended a meeting in Leiden in 1912 of three nationalist exiles – Raden Suwardi Suriadiningrat, Dr. Tjipto Mangunkusumo and Douwes Dekker. He quoted the latter warning the socialist audience: “If all Javanese spit at the same time, the Dutch will drown.”292 As a young government administrator in Sumatra, he witnessed the arrogance of colonial rulers, and how this blinded them to the fact that resistance to colonial authoritarianism was becoming systemic (48). Furthermore, he recognized that the “fanatical Muslim” of western 289 Van ’t Veer, Soekarno, 40. 290 Ibid., 47. 291 Ibid., 61. 292 Van der Meulen, Ik stond erbij, 17. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 126 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES Sumatra, while having been bloodily suppressed by the Dutch, remained inwardly a people who had never been conquered (96-97). The virulence of Islamism emanating from Cairo and the rise of Indian nationalism produced twin forces that influenced a growing anti-colonialism in Indonesia, but the response of the Dutch colonial authorities was to turn Indonesia into a police state (99-111). He added that few in the colonial leadership want to remember the enthusiasm with which they greeted Mussert, the Dutch Nazi leader, when he visited the colony before World War Two (112). The sudden collapse of the colony, soon after the Japanese invasion, was something which “we as Dutch people should be ashamed of,” while the military and civilian leadership, “had no leadership qualities” (130-131). He refused to condemn Indonesians who had served under the Japanese, asking, Who dares to use the word “collaborator” when, practically without putting up a fight, Dutch authority turned these people over to the merciless power of the Japanese? He showed understanding for the Indisch and Indonesian civil servants and military personal who, with the outbreak of the Indonesian revolution, found themselves in the dilemma of feeling double loyalty to the colonial authority and to the new Indonesian government (146-150). The hero in Van der Meulen’s book (if we discount the author himself, who we never witness making an error) is Van Mook. He is described as a “strong, courageous, tireless character, who clearly was the leader” (164). Although Van Mook was blinded by optimism in his attempt to forge an Indonesian federation, “he retained until the end […] my full respect” (260). The fundamental errors were those of political leaders in The Hague (240), especially the right-wing leaders (260). The consequence of these mistakes were the two “police actions,” which are described in just two pages (261-262). In other words, like in the works of Smit, Van Meulen gives us an account of a war shorn of any fighting. His rosy-coloured representation of Van Mook reflects his own view that Indonesia could have transitioned into independence under the tutelage of enlightened colonials like himself; a late colonial – but nevertheless a colonial – point of view. The 1960s saw discussions concerning the nature of Dutch imperialism, sparked by the crisis around West New Guinea. Arend Lijphart’s The Trauma of Decolonization: The Dutch and West New Guinea (1966) had only a little to say about the period from 1945 to 1949. He argued that in the case of West New Guinea, “subjective and psychological factors can be sufficiently powerful to constitute by themselves the driving force behind colonialism and the obstacle to decolonization.”293 Lijphart accounted for what made the 293 Lijphart, The Trauma, 5. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms pOST-DECOLONIzATION: THE FIRST 20 YEARS, 1949-1969 127 Dutch withdrawal from the Indies traumatic. Firstly, the colony was by far the biggest in the Dutch empire, which made its loss deeply felt. Secondly, Dutch ignorance of developments during the period from 1942 to 1945 and their strong desire to return to the normalcy of the pre-war period led to a deep sense of shock when confronted by Indonesian mass nationalism, compounded by the conviction of the Dutch that “they were one of the most enlightened and progressive colonizing states in the world” (106-107). Thirdly, the metropole felt a sincere attachment to the colony (108). Fourthly, the Dutch had a sense that they had been betrayed by the rest of the world, especially by their allies Britain and the USA (108). Finally, the “proverbial stubbornness” as well as the “intensely legalistic outlook” of the Dutch (109) played a role. These five factors accounted for the intense pain of decolonization, according to Lijphart. In both 1945-1949 and the period around the loss of West New Guinea in 1962, Lijphart concluded that the Dutch “acted with an intense emotional commitment, manifested in pathological feelings of self-righteousness, resentment and pseudo-moral convictions” but this had now transformed into “a compulsive urge to forget” (285-286). A small number of other influential works did appear in the 1950s and early 1960s, but as Henk van den Doel pointed out, they were all written by foreigners.294 Jan Bank, recommended that if one wanted to search for historical works that gave a balanced account of the Indonesian revolution, one needed to look to the works of American and Australian historians, adding that Dutch historiography on the subject “has made little progress.”295 Andrew Goss wrote, “During the 1950s, the history of colonialism was not forgotten, but certainly was institutionally ignored. For historians and other scholars, […] the Netherlands East Indies was an embarrassment and of little relevance to building a new Dutch culture.”296 Henk Wesseling agreed that the Dutch war in the Indies […] received virtually no attention at all: no institute, no television series, no scholarly articles, official or unofficial, […] only a few unread novels and some forgotten memoirs. […] In short there existed no historical view of colonization and decolonization.297 This situation of historiographical inertia was about to change abruptly, though not thanks to any historian. 294 Van den Doel, Afscheid, 12-13. 295 Bank, Katholieken, 11. 296 Goss, “From Tong-Tong,” 36. 297 Wesseling, “Post-Imperial Holland,” 139. This content downloaded from 62.2.114.162 on Wed, 03 Nov 2021 11:17:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 128 COLLEC TIVE MEMORY AND THE DUTCH EAST INDIES Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. extended ed. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Assmann, Aleida. Formen des Vergessens. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017. Auge, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. London and New York: Verso, 2008. Baay, Reggie. 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