Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  When young Eduard Dekker arrived in the archipelago in 1838, he became a cog in the now fully functioning culture system. He had a lengthy career there, working his way up from a clerk in Jakarta to district officer in Natal, in western Sumatra. As he experienced the exploitation of peasants firsthand, Dekker developed a righteous ardor and evolved into a whistle-blower. More than once he took the side of a local against the Dutch. He seems to have been alternately intensely devoted to his work and wildly erratic in his behavior. He received commendations and promotions but also got into fights and was suspended for a year for irregularities in his accounting. In his free time he developed a passion for gambling, based on a (mistaken) conviction that he had concocted a foolproof system for beating the roulette wheel. He fell madly in love with a Dutch girl and converted to Roman Catholicism to appease her and her parents, but she broke the engagement at her father’s insistence, writing to Dekker, “He has heard such bad reports about you.” Later, on an R & R excursion in Europe, Dekker gave much of his money to a French prostitute to enable her to leave her profession, then lost the rest of his money at roulette, whereupon he went back to the woman and asked her to return his gift, which she did.

  In 1856 Dekker was transferred to Java Island—in fact, to the province of Bantam, the very place where Cornelis de Houtman initiated the first Dutch encounter with the Indies. He took up the position of assistant resident, which meant he was second in command of the region. Reading through the paperwork left behind by his predecessor, who had died, Dekker discovered that the man had been documenting “the gross exploitation of the people” by their Indonesian overlords, with the complicity of the Dutch. Dekker’s sense of righteous indignation was now fully inflamed. He threw himself headlong into his predecessor’s work, and only weeks after arriving in the province (his haste seems partly to have been motivated by a belief that his predecessor had been poisoned and that he might be next), he launched a public inquiry into the conduct of the Javanese nobleman in charge of the area, a man named Karta Nata Negara, who in the Dutch system held the title of regent. He charged the regent with extortion and systematic abuse and demanded that the resident, his immediate Dutch superior, take action. When this man refused, Dekker went directly to the governor-general of the whole colony. He too refused to act, whereupon Dekker resigned his position and determined to return to the Netherlands and try to make the Dutch aware of the abuse taking place within their system.

  Back in Europe, in a white heat of creativity (writing three hundred published pages in three weeks), Dekker produced the book for which he would become famous, Max Havelaar, a fictionalized account of his stay in the East Indies. He got the manuscript into the hands of a famous Amsterdam lawyer and writer named Jakob van Lennep, who was dazzled by it and found a publisher. Dekker chose the histrionic pseudonym Multatuli (Latin for “I have suffered much”), and it became a sensation.

  On opening the novel, even today, you experience a rush of delight. The prose is immediate, wild, almost bizarrely modern—as if it appeared not in 1860 but more like a century later. The narrator who opens the story, for example, an officious Amsterdam coffee trader, hands the reader his business card at one point. And in the latter stages of the book, Multatuli sets his fictional alter ego aside and enters the story himself in order to comment on all that he has just written. Which is not to say that the book offers a perfect reading experience. It has long, meandering passages typical of nineteenth-century novels. And Dekker’s “self-portrait” goes on for a maudlin six pages, in which he compares the character based on himself to both Socrates and Jesus.

  An instant best seller in the Netherlands, Max Havelaar was translated and read around Europe, and it echoed throughout the Dutch government. “There has been of late a certain shudder passing through the country, caused by a book,” one politician intoned in the parliament, and he named the feeling it aroused: “indignation.” For the first time, many Europeans saw that their relatively comfortable lives were built on the misery of people in faraway places. It must have occurred to some Dutch readers that, in milking a foreign populace to alleviate their own government’s financial distress, they were now doing precisely what the beleaguered Spanish empire had done to them, which had led to their revolution and independence. British reviews took special delight in using the novel to highlight the inhumanity of the Dutch colonial system, though for the most part the feelings of guilt and indignation the book aroused seem to have been collective. The first English edition of Max Havelaar, which appeared in 1868, three years after the end of the American Civil War and five years after the Emancipation Proclamation, contained an introduction that compared it to Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the way it awakened a society to its systemic abuse of a whole people.

  Max Havelaar appeared at a curious moment in the development of liberalism not just in Amsterdam or the Netherlands but more broadly. Over the course of the nineteenth century, liberalism underwent a titanic change: it swelled in every direction, and then, like an amoeba, it subdivided. As kings and churches lost the dominance they once had as political forces, liberalism—meaning here a system that puts ultimate significance on the individual human being—became the new norm. This transformation became clear right in the middle of the century, when, in 1848, the so-called year of revolutions (and the year, not coincidentally, when Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto was published), at least a dozen countries experienced political upheaval, as old monarchic orders buckled under pressure from the new forces. The Industrial Revolution, further, put a motor behind liberalism and drove it in two different directions. New industry meant new potential to make money, and thus economic liberalism rose to the status of ideology. Economic liberals all over Europe pushed to end trade barriers and otherwise keep government out of the way of business. In the Netherlands, King Willem II, facing a threat of revolution, acceded in 1848 to a new constitution, which was crafted by a liberal lawyer named Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, who soon after became prime minister. Once it was in place, power shifted from the monarchy to the parliament and to the economic liberals.

  But the other variety of liberals—social liberals, who believed government had to protect individuals and who saw peril in the way modern industrialized companies could devour workers—was also on the rise. Max Havelaar became a rallying point for both liberal camps. So did Multatuli himself. He immediately capitalized on the fame of his book by writing others that promoted issues he was passionate about, which were related to the social liberal causes that were just beginning to stir. In 1861 he took on voting rights. At the time, only male citizens who earned a certain income, and paid a certain amount of tax, could vote. Multatuli advocated universal suffrage, at first for all adult male citizens; shortly after, he expanded his appeal to include women. Then he championed workers’ rights—he connected their plight to the colonial situation, calling working people “Europe’s Javanese.”

  And he took on established religion. He was a passionate atheist who believed that education should have the objective of weaning people off religion and leading them instead to the use of reason. Echoing Spinoza, he rejected the standard view of God and held that “Nature is everything.” Going beyond Spinoza, he called faith “a plague” and “a forced substitute for knowledge.” A genuine secular movement was just then in its infancy in Europe, and Dekker’s writings—so public and so insistent—gave it oxygen.

  In the course of the 1860s, then, a host of activist groups adopted Multatuli as one of their own—indeed, as their champion—and he became a driving force in bringing their causes into the mainstream. And yet, Eduard Douwes Dekker was a very strange, complicated man who by and large disowned these associations. Once, as socialists were in the process of championing him, he took out a newspaper ad to declare that he was not a socialist. In fact, at a time of increasing focus on individual rights, he advocated strengthening the monarchy and weakening democracy, which he did not trust. One might wonder how someone who opposed democracy could advocate u
niversal suffrage. It was the illogic of the then current system that irritated him: I don’t like democracy, he argued in effect, but if you’re going to have it then by definition it should include everyone.

  Indeed, Dekker was a vital but contorted presence in virtually every important cause of his time, simultaneously exciting and then locking horns with one group of activists after another. This applied above all to the anticolonial cause that would slowly unfold, which Max Havelaar helped to launch but from which, true to form, Dekker quickly distanced himself. For, as it turned out, Dekker did not write the book to bring down the colonial system—he actually considered himself a colonialist. Rather, it was the failure of the Dutch overlords to implement the system fully that bothered him. Colonialism, he felt, had to follow and enforce Dutch law. Dutch law forbade the kinds of abuse that he had witnessed in the East Indies. Yet the Dutch administrators there had allowed that abuse to continue. Dekker wanted not to overturn the colonial system but to strengthen it.

  This fact was completely buried by the tidal wave that the book helped to create (and it remains buried to this day, as Dutch socialists and other leftists continue to hold him up as their forefather). Dekker’s odd, self-contradictory beliefs were pushed aside, as society took from his writing what it wanted. Indeed, both varieties of liberals used his work, particularly Max Havelaar, for their own ends. Economic liberals used the book to drive their insistence that overseas colonies be opened up to private companies. Social liberals pushed for ethical reconsideration of the whole colonial system. Both sides were involved in creating the new approach that came into being, which was named the “ethical policy.” Companies would be allowed into colonial territory, but with certain guidelines in place, among which were obligations to build schools and roads, to provide irrigation and other technology to locals, and to establish a Westernized local elite. The ethical policy had the same basic flaw as the culture system—it was still colonial exploitation—but it did envision, way off in the future, independence for the lands that the Dutch now ruled.

  Dekker’s book was a prime force in bringing about this change of thinking. And it had another wave of influence in the early twentieth century, when a new generation of Indonesian leaders, who had grown up in Westernized schools and for whom Max Havelaar was required reading, decided it was time for independence. The Dutch in the 1940s, however, were not so ready for it, and on top of this resistance was the complication of the Japanese occupation of the archipelago, so that Indonesian independence came only after years of warfare and tens of thousands of deaths. But it did come and, according to the celebrated Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Dekker/Multatuli was thus doubly, or even triply, influential. “The Indonesian revolution not only gave birth to a new country,” he wrote in 1999, “it also sparked the call for revolution in Africa, which in turn awakened ever more of the world’s colonized peoples and signaled the end of European colonial domination.” In Toer’s reckoning Max Havelaar is nothing less than “the book that killed colonialism.”

  My first act after reading Max Havelaar was to ask my friend Virginia Keizer to meet at an Amsterdam café. Among the book’s many indirect legacies was the eventual rooting of a substantial Indonesian community in Amsterdam, which became the foundational layer of the intensely diverse immigrant population the city has today. In 2005, when I first arrived in Amsterdam, immigration was the big issue in the city, and in Europe as a whole. After years of relative openness, Amsterdam, and Europe, now wanted to close the doors. People with white skin were talking bluntly and angrily about the unwillingness of nonwhite newcomers to integrate. I noticed, however, that they made an exception for Indonesians. When I pointed this out, I always heard the same response: “Oh, but they’re Dutch.” People saw them as fully assimilated. The problem these same people had with other immigrant groups, then, did not have to do with skin color. The anti-immigrant talk has since died down, but the underlying issue—how and to what extent Western societies should welcome immigrants—remains. So, I wondered, what was different about the Indonesian influx that made their integration successful?

  Virginia was thirty-three and lived in the Watergraafsmeer section of Amsterdam. She worked for British Telecom, where she managed the company’s outsourcing to Budapest and São Paulo. She was born and raised in the Netherlands and is ethnically Indonesian.

  Or not: the first thing she did was correct me. “We’re not Indonesian,” she said. “We’re called Indisch, or Indo-European.” Or Indo: that is the most common English term for people of mixed Dutch and Indonesian ancestry. After the Indonesian revolution, hundreds of thousands of such people, who held Dutch passports, were given a choice: renounce Dutch citizenship and become Indonesian or go. Most left Indonesia and settled in the Netherlands. Virginia’s grandfather was an Indo: half Dutch (hence the name Keizer) and half Indonesian. Her grandmother was Indonesian. Both were born on Java and became part of the mass migration. In the Netherlands, they raised their family as Indo: that is, they were fully Dutch—speaking Dutch at home, celebrating Dutch holidays, keeping a picture of the queen on their wall—but also Indonesian. “Most of all, Indisch means food,” Virginia said. When she was growing up her mother would make “normal” food during the week—stamppot (mashed potatoes mixed with vegetables), pea soup, spaghetti—but weekends would be all rijsttafel, the Indo version of an Indonesian multicourse feast.

  The Indo experience, in Amsterdam and elsewhere, contrasts with that of other immigrant groups from former Dutch colonies. People from Suriname and the island of Curaçao, for example, have had a harder time: they have been less likely to integrate, and, they would say, the Dutch have shown more prejudice against them. My thinking was that this had to do with timing: the first Indos came into an overwhelmingly white, European society; they stuck out, but at the same time they had no choice but to learn the language and customs. Virginia saw it differently. In the case of Indos, she said, both the Dutch in the Netherlands and they themselves were ready to think of them as Dutch. “At the start, on the street they’d hear, ‘Hey, Bruine (Brown)!’ But that was that. They didn’t let it escalate because they felt like they belonged here too.” What mattered was not skin color or language skills but the fact that both the ethnic Dutch and the newcomers themselves were ready to see them as “Dutch.”

  Since Indos are of mixed ancestry, many look European; a lot of well-known and typically Dutch-looking Dutch people—actors, artists, politicians—are in fact Indo. One that stands out is Geert Wilders, the golden-haired far-right politician who has led the anti-immigrant, anti-Islam movement in the Netherlands in the early part of the twenty-first century. Wilders infamously compared the Koran to Mein Kampf, called for it to be outlawed and for anyone caught with a copy of the Muslim holy book, whether “in the household or in the mosque,” to be punished. The fact that someone who claims to speak on behalf of “real” Dutch people, and against would-be infiltrators, is himself of a mixed-race, immigrant background says something about both the success of integration and some of its downsides. For one thing, with assimilation, ethnicity fades. “What upsets me is we are a dying subculture,” Virginia said. “My kids won’t have the feeling of the culture that my grandparents brought here.” Then too, maybe this is an ironic benchmark of how well a country processes immigrants: you know you’re succeeding, at least in some ways, when someone of a mixed-race, immigrant background becomes your culture’s self-appointed defender of purity who preaches a gospel of intolerance of outsiders.

  The group of thirty people who got off the train at the Willems-poort station in Amsterdam, together with another twenty who had been waiting for them on the platform, walked peacefully along the Haarlemmerdijk—“not in a procession,” noted the policeman who had been assigned to keep an eye on them, “but in small groups.” The date was September 7, 1872. Had I been around then I could have watched from my office window in the West India House, for they walked right past. I would have seen, in their midst, a man with
a great bush of gray-white beard that met his shock of white hair. He was fifty-four years old, looked older still, but possessed the vigor of a man who had the world’s attention. The Amsterdam police had gotten word from their colleagues in The Hague that, following the conclusion of the congress of the International Workingmen’s Association there, Karl Marx would be heading their way. Agents were assigned to shadow his every move; the police wanted no trouble.

  The next day, Marx spoke at an Amsterdam dance hall. He started by explaining the choice of the site for the workers’ congress: “In the eighteenth century, the kings and potentates were in the habit of meeting at The Hague to discuss the interests of their dynasties. It is precisely in this place that we wanted to hold our workers’ meeting, despite attempts to arouse apprehensions among us. We wanted to appear amid the most reactionary population, to reinforce the existence, propagation, and hope for the future of our great association.” He expressed solidarity with “our emissaries in Amsterdam … workers, laboring sixteen hours a day,” and concluded with a vow that the movement and its ideas “will lead to the world domination by the proletariat.” After the meeting, another police officer filed a report on it, which sounded a bit bored: “The speakers all argued to the same purpose: exaltation of the worker, destruction of capital, reminder to cooperate to achieve their goals.” When it was over, the people sang some songs, then everybody went home quietly.