From Jail to Jail. Tan Malaka
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[29] When I started to read meaningful books, my admiration for the unity of spirit and organization of the Germans attracted me to Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who had strongly influenced the young German fighters of that time.
On the corner of Jacobin Street was a bookstore, which I would pass on my way to and from school. My interest in this bookstore rose together with the tumult of the war in the battlefields of Europe and the whole Sturm und Drang atmosphere that affected my generation. No significant book escaped my eye and my lightning reading. But my ability to buy was very limited and could be exercised only by closing my eyes to everything but books, and pulling my belt a little tighter. The series De groote denkers der eeuwen38 was displayed behind the window as were books like Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zoo spraak Zarathustra and another of his essays that was no less popular among German youth at that time, De Wil tot Macht.39
If ever I was attracted to language, it was to Nietzsche’s terms, such as Die Umwertung aller Werten (the transvaluation of all values). Yet it was apparent to me that Nietzsche’s philosophy was centered on one nation, Germany, and one class of Germans in particular, the Junkers, the aristocracy allied with the wealthy. The iron will, the desire that was reflected in the Übermensch at the time of the First World War, manifested itself in the Wilhelm-Hindenburg-Stinnes alliance. In the Second World War, this iron will appeared as an alliance among Hitler, Goering, and Krupp. I quickly came to understand the German nature of Nietzsche’s philosophy when I tried to enter the German army to receive German training. I was told that the German army did not accept any foreigners and did not have a volunteer foreign force.40
After that I was attracted to the deeper Umwertung aller Werten (revaluation of all values) inherent in the movement for Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Thomas Carlyle’s book De Fransche Revolutie (or De Groote Fransche Omwenteling) long lain buried among a few others in my trunk.41 had When we were parting, my teacher Horensma lent me several of his former textbooks. The above-mentioned book had already gone back and forth several times between his trunk and my own. Finally he put it into my trunk, saying, “Now go to it!”
Politics was a terra incognita for me then.42 I neither hated nor liked it, for I knew absolutely nothing of its existence. But in that time of Sturm und Drang, when ideas were leaping about, hiding, turning left and right, and breaking through like dammed-up water, the book De Fransche Revolutie suddenly appeared as a resting place for my weary, questing thoughts.43
[30] One proof of the “liberty, equality, and fraternity” of the French nation was their hospitality toward the colored peoples who were in their country at that time. Was it not a fact that the Arabs, Senegalese, and Annamese were faithfully and firmly defending “France” in the European battlefield? Just like the Gurkhas, whose courage and fidelity alongside the English were admired by the whole world, the soldiers from French Algeria were faithful to France.
At that time, my thoughts had not yet developed to the stage of dialectical materialism and to an analysis of the slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité in the context of capitalism and imperialism. My outlook did not yet include an image of bourgeois and proletarian classes alongside colonized and colonizing nations. Such a development came only as a byproduct of my search for a satisfactory understanding of the Russian communist revolution, which shook the world like a bomb in October 1917. It was only then that the old books on Marx and Engels’ philosophy came alive for me: Het Kapitaal in a translation by Van der Goes, Marxtische [sic] Ekonomie, by Kautsky, and others, as well as the many pamphlets being published on the Russian social revolution of October 1917.44
The circle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis had reached its first stage. “Affirmation, Negation, Negation of the Negation” secured a garden of happiness in which to reign. It was an age of passion and tumult. Material conditions stimulated ideas, which moved like a mountain stream—leaping, lying still, flowing and surging through to the ocean.45
Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—in the field of philosophy, this process took the following form: Nietzsche as thesis, Rousseau as antithesis, and finally Marx and Engels as synthesis. In the field of politics, it took the form of Wilhelm-Hindenburg-Stinnes as affirmation, Danton-Robespierre-Marat as negation, and the Bolsheviks as the negation of the negation.
In the turbulent life I led during those six years in the Netherlands, I experienced for myself the first stage of the immutable process, “reality as the source of all ideas.” The second stage of the process, “ideas being able to transform reality,” was what I felt to be my life’s responsibility, which I had to carry out regardless of the difficulties I might face.
[31] It is true that will, skills, and the emotions develop under good physical conditions: Mens sana in corpore sano.46 But it does not work the other way: that one’s spirit is destroyed by a deterioration in health. Frequently illness is not even felt if the will to struggle provides a clear and firm understanding, with a great hope of victory. The new society, though still an unrealized desire, has a spirit which seems not to recognize the obstacles of bodily or societal sickness. It is as if the struggle becomes the soul of life and the life of the soul.
Doctor Jansen, who was treating my pleurisy, was already fairly old. He was friendly and used to mixing with the common people. But pleurisy is extremely difficult to cure. Because of insufficient medical examinations, inadequate equipment, and cheap medicine, the water around my lungs would not dry up. After my teacher’s examinations, my temperature remained high.
I do not know what Horensma managed to do, but while I was still sick, sometime in 1916 or 1917, I was unexpectedly approached by a representative of a Netherlands scholarship fund under the patronage of former governor general Van Heutsz.47 This fund gave loans to Indonesian students at an interest rate of 5 percent. The manager of this fund, Tuan Fabius, got in touch with me directly; he was a prominent person in Holland, a former major general in the artillery section of the Amsterdam Defense Force and a writer of books well known for their outspokenness.48 His political views were strong too, like those of his friend, former governor general Van Heutsz, who was well enough known for the destructive attacks on the people of Aceh.
I moved to a new place in Bussum, a small town with many large villas. The house I lived in was average in size for a middle-class teacher’s family.49 The air was always fresh, the sunshine freely entered the veranda, the food was full of vitamins and well cooked, with no lack of vegetables and fruit. With such a climate and food, I recovered half of my strength. And electrical treatments by a well-known doctor, Clinge Doorenbos, dried up the water around my lungs in one or two months and brought my health back to more or less what it had been when I was in Indonesia.50
[32] Such fine food, drink, and accommodation as I had in Bussum could have lulled me to sleep and tied me body and soul to the bourgeois world. Fortunately, my thoughts were already in a process of change that was close to becoming revolutionary. My experience in Haarlem in the home of an unfortunate proletarian family was enough to remind me of the huge distance between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat even in a leading imperialist and capitalist country such as the Netherlands. I was still in the bourgeois town of Bussum in 1917 when the Bolshevik revolution broke out. It gave certainty to my spirit, which was still caught up in the struggle between thesis and antithesis, that society was moving toward the era of socialism. For a while, socialism may perhaps be beaten back here or there, but in the world as a whole, society must go beyond capitalism and move toward socialism. With recovered health and with a clear political understanding and world view, I faced up to bourgeois life.
One day I heard that Van der Mey had gone to visit Tuan Fabius to ask that I move back to Haarlem, to his mother’s house. Money was not the only reason, for she already had a temporary lodger; Nyonya van der Mey, that simple, honest woman—of whom there are so many in the Netherlands—was lonely after the death of the elder Van der Mey, and she thought of “Ipie” as her own child. The younger Van der Mey reminded Tuan Fabius of the promise made before I went to Bussum, that I would be brought back to Haarlem as soon as I was well again. I don’t know