During the decade between 1990 and 2000, Czech-born historian Rudolf Mrázek visited Indonesia annually to conduct interviews with elderly people who had come of age in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s in the Dutch Indies. His subjects, mostly now deceased, included prominent Indonesian writers, artists, and musicians; university professors; politicians and their widows; and princes and princesses. Interviewees were Javanese, Sundanese, Sumatran, and a sprinkling of Chinese and Dutch, a broad cross-section of the educated elite, many who played important roles in the formation of Indonesian national culture. Mrázek's aim was to recollect the social fabric of late colonial modernity from the perspective of urban elites, detailing the intimacies of home life, the pull of tradition, and the excitement of modernity, interethnic relations, colonial discipline, and political aspirations.
The book he has produced is made up of long extracts of translated transcripts with interspersed comments; theoretical reflections drawn from Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Le Corbusier, and other figures of European modernism; asides about the political conditions in 1990s Indonesia; and the author's own memories of Czechoslovakia. Mrázek's finely textured oral history, with its topographically organized chapters (“Bypasses and Flyovers,” “The Walls,” “The Fences,” “The Classroom,” “The Window”), resembles in feeling, if not precisely in structure, Benjamin's Arcades Project, with its “convolutes” of quotations and aphorisms clustered around topics relevant to nineteenth-century Paris.
Mrázek's interviewees have sepia-tinged memories of their childhoods’ porous and flexible homes. Houses were not clearly partitioned into rooms, houseguests transformed with ease into permanent residents, servants were as likely as parents to bring up children, spirits haunted spooky trees. Furniture and household trappings, particularly for civil servants and their families, were not permanent encumbrances but sold at auction with each move. Changes were underfoot. The salon, replete with the latest magazines, a radio, a piano, a telephone, and decorated with Mooi Indië paintings in gilded frames and ornately carved wooden furniture, was becoming the spiritual and intellectual heart of the modern house—though no Indonesian word was ever coined for this space.
Houses were not only porous within, they were also porous to the world outside, separated from the streets by only the scantiest of fences, allowing the sounds and sights of street vendors and wandering kroncong musicians to be audible and visible. (Mrázek here contrasts this openness to the real security worries of Chinese Indonesians in the 1990s.) Children raced the streets on bicycles, adults toured in gleaming cars. “Native” Indonesian, Chinese, and European elites socialized across ethnic borders without anxiety; more troubling were disorderly mixed-race “Indos,” stigmatized as brawlers and illicit lovers.
Dutch-language schools instilled work discipline, cultivated camaraderie through sports, and sharpened the mind and awakened political consciousness through open debate. Malay, the contact language of the streets, was taught as a second language. Students took on distant attitudes to their “kitchen languages” and associated cultures. There was nothing “awkward” about Dutch scholar Jacob Kats teaching Javanese language to Javanese students, as he “knew so much about the Javanese culture. And he was such a good man” (p. 238)—in the words of an ex-pupil. Paintings, newspaper clippings tacked up on walls, and other representations of the world created and consumed by elites are analyzed as “propositions” that reduce life's complexities in the manner of cinema to enframe modern citizens and colonial subjects. Two striking interviews with former inmates of Boven Digul reveal the need to participate in modernity as so pervasive among elites that even though the prison colony did not possess a sound film projector and newspapers arrived only every six weeks, an intellectual culture flourished through lessons and arts clubs.
The book succeeds like no other before it in portraying the colony's intellectual elites as contemporaneous with modern citizens of Europe and around the world. It is a generous book, involving the sharing of inspiring philosophical texts, literature, and memories, and lengthy quotations that do not simply illustrate analytical points, but animate social scenes. The author's resistance to providing life histories for the people interviewed (even though some are very famous indeed) and the lack of inclusion of interviewees in the book's index, however, limits to some degree the book's usefulness for intellectual historians, even if these antibiographical textual strategies do serve to underline the experience of modernity they share.
This is a polysemic and multivocal oral history, meaning different readers will make different things of it. What emerges for me, as a student of Southeast Asian performing arts, are the performative aspects of Mrázek's project. Nearly all the interviews recorded are “one-off” affairs, thereby stressing the “performance of self” of interviewees before a strange but sympathetic interviewer—with “sensitive” topics such as sex being avoided. We are reminded constantly of the performance frame of Indonesia in a bubbling crisis, the circumstances of interviews, the abilities of speakers as storytellers and narrators of social dramas. Nothing gets the author more excited than witnessing the exaggerated re-creation of a kerosene lamp being pumped. “Yes, this is a child pumping recalled!” (p. 43). Scholars of reminiscence theater speak about such work empowering the elderly people who co-create and watch it. One can only imagine how meaningful it must have been for the intellectuals approached by Mrázek in the midst of the 1990s political and economic upheavals to reminisce together with the senior historian.
