There are many ways of writing history

If you consider this to be a satisfactory explanation for jettisoning basic a scholarly apparatus, then you might enjoy Mrázek’s work. If you expect to learn a great deal about colonial Jakarta from this book, you might be in for a surprise. Firstly, the lack of dates regarding the scenes described, makes using it as a historical source problematic. Many of the interviewees describe the conditions under which they grew up, but whether this refers to the 1920s, the 1930s or 1940s we rarely get to know. Secondly, the title of the book is deceptive, as many of the interviewees didn’t grow up in Jakarta at all. Instead we have descriptions of life in “a small town” (p. 101), in Surabaya (p. 97) in East Sumatra (p. 130); indeed a host of interviewees seem to have no memories at all of colonial Jakarta.

It is almost as if the subtitle of the work was manufactured by somebody who never read, never mind wrote the book. Mrázek is fond of the affix “post”. We learn that “postcolonial (and postrevolutionary) Jakarta has become a postmodern metropolis” (p. 1) and we discover that Jakarta is a “post-Palladian, postcolonial and almost postmodern metropolis” (p. 2) To wonder how Jakarta went from being “postmodern” to “almost postmodern” is perhaps splitting hairs. More difficult, is Mrázek’s attempts to stretch the meaning, or meaningless, of language. I was stumped by sentences like “Highways came forth into becoming” (p.9) and “Rational driving, by the force of the riots, came into becoming at last.” (p. 10) There are the numerous enigmatic paragraphs, like this description of the salon: “Not so mechanical, handle-prone and knob-full, yet instrumental and furniture-like enough, another kind of music, newly fitted in, filled the space and did it still more in the modern salon way. More instruments, some with a handle, knob, pedal, others without, playing and on display, made the house shut, open, sound and turn around – around the salon.” (p. 50). Here is a description of shop-fronts: “Shops in the front of houses, like the memories of the rice fields ‘back in the village,’ even if never really seen, and like the cries of hawkers, are recalled to draw the line between the house and the street, to make the neighborhood and the city passable, or at least to quiver, to get blurred, or, best of all, to be lively as an echo or as in a moment of waiting”. (p. 79). It is certainly not Leopold von Ranke. In traditional historiography the historian, like a Goddess, remains hidden behind her work, in an attempt to create the illusion of objectivity. Professor Mrázek bravely inserts himself into his tale. He tells us how he noticed homeless children in Jakarta and how he “ tried to get over the impact of the toddlers on the streets, and so on, and so on, by having, for instance, a cold beer or five at a sixteenth-floor bar” (p. 180). He describes tailors in Jakarta: “Very much of the street, they exude a velvet intimacy in the public space (let me recall in this place my mother sitting in our kitchen, darning the heaps of my father’s, my brother’s, my and her socks and underwear”. (p. 80) It’s an unusual work of historical scholarship that mentions the author’s drinking habits and his mother’s underwear. Strangely, while it is meant to be about colonial Jakarta, the entire work is saturated in quotations from European intellectuals. I counted no less than 30 references to Walter Benjamin, but Proust, Kafka, Mies van de Rohe, Andre Breton, Heidegger and Adorno are all frequently cited, as well as deconstructionists and postmodernists like Rem Koolhaas, Paul Virilio and Avital Ronell. Mrázek seems most fond of Le Corbusier, but I wonder how familiar he is with the work of the Swiss architect; he refers to Le Corbusier’s greatest work in “Rochamp in the Alps” (p. 123) and to Le Corbusier’s “masterpiece, the chapel of Notre Dame de la Rochelle” ( p. 270). In fact it is Notre Dame-du-Haut, it is in Ronchamp (with an “n”), and it lies between the Vosges and the Jura, quite a distance from the Alps. To give two example of Mrázek’s method: he quotes an interviewee describing a window (we are never told what window precisely). The quote is preceded by references to Andre Breton and Rene Magritte and then immediately followed by a double reference to Benjamin, two quotes from Fritz Neumeyer, a quote from and reference to Mies van der Rohe, a couple of references to Le Corbusier, quotes from Heidegger, Rosalind Krauss, Koolhaas, Virilio, Guy Debord, Wittgenstein, Kurt Tarkovsky, and on and on, for nearly three pages. All of this flowing from the innocent remark: “Lead glass, beautiful design.” (p. 202). This, in order to prove Mrázek’s point “that a window, like a picture, and like a proposition, could rarely be a mere transparency, and rarely a mere opening in the wall”. (p. 202) The second example is a paragraph in which Mrázek claims that Indonesians visited parks. The paragraph contains five descriptive quotations but the end note reveals that they refer to the Woodstock Rock Festival and Wagner’s Bayreuth Festival. In Professor Mrázek methodology, anything goes. Why should a book that claims to give a voice to Indonesian intellectuals be supersaturated with the aphorisms of Central European intellectual heavyweights? Mrázek provides an explanation in an endnote: “they [the European intellectuals] fell in (and sometimes with a thump) and they remained in the book by the force of their fragility, their will or inability to resist their temptation to join in” (p. 253, 5n). If you can accept that, you might like this book. Mrázek’s thesis (he spells it out near the end) is that the colonial “signaled the modern clearly and often ahead of the West.” (p. 197) I was not convinced. He certainly dares to take risks and he offers us a unique work, but selective citations from European modernists, juxtaposed with decontextualized quotations from interviews with Indonesians, do not constitute an argument. Nevertheless, I do admire his refusal to tell it “as it really was”.