ThinkShop

Tinguely's Heureka Returns to Zurich

2012-05-20T15:28:00.002+02:00

Irony, fantasy and fun are words that easily come to mind when viewing the works of Niki de Saint Phalle, like her Guardian Angel in Zurich's main railway station; but these words also describe the giant, kinetic sculptures of her husband, Jean Tinguely.

A couple of weeks ago I walked along the promenade on Lake Zurich's sunny right bank, admired Henry Moore's Sheep-Piece, but was disappointed to discover that Tinguely's "Heureka" was missing. It had been standing here at the Zurichhorn since the 1960s, and it's not the sort of sculpture that could easily be stolen. Some time spent distractedly searching on Google revealed that Heureka had been removed, for the first time since its installation in 1967, and loaned to the city of Amsterdam for its ArtZuid exhibition. But that exhibition had ended nearly a year ago. What a mystery. Then, purely by chance, I picked up a newspaper in a train a few days ago and discovered a short article describing how Tinguely's massive sculpture was in the process of being reassembled at its home in Zurich.

And so I set off, once again, along the promenade, passed the ice-cream stands and skateboarders, passed the Le Corbusier house and the Museum Bellerive. As I walked through the maze of flowers and shrubs, there is was, silhouetted against the sky, gleaming in its freshly painted black splendor.

Heureka was commissioned as an exhibit at the Swiss State Exhibtion in Lausanne in 1964. It was bought by an industrialist and donated to the city of Zurich. Tinguely's kinetic works are often described as parodies of the consumerist, industrial society. The parts all move, but they achieve nothing. Like Facebook, the blogosphere and the frenzied traffic of Twitter, the pieces work together, aimlessly making a lot of noise; there's a lot of huffing and puffing and loud banging. But the mountains beyond take no notice. They simply stand in their white splendor.

Sometimes described as a surrealist, Tinguely was certainly influenced by the Zurich born Dada art movement. At 5:00 pm every afternoon his machine comes alive and bursts into useless, Dadaist activity.

Tinguely constructed Heureka in 1962-1963. The pace of our lives has accelerated quite a bit since then. A lot of movement, a lot of noise, a continual series of Eureka moments that, for the most part, distract us from what we should be doing. As Pascal wrote: "All of man's misfortunes comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room." While poking fun at us in an ironic way, this is what Tinguely's art teaches us.

Henry Moore's Sheep Piece by Lake Zurich

2012-05-09T09:18:00.003+02:00

Just a short walk beyond the Museum for the Cultural History of Coffee (I couldn't do without a museum of coffee culture, could you?), a few steps from the yachts berthed on Lake Zurich, two bronze shapes graze upon a green hillock: Henry Moore's beautiful "Sheep -Piece".

Moore himself recorded:

I have always liked sheep, and there is one big sculpture of mine that I called Sheep Piece because I placed it in a field and the sheep enjoyed it and the lambs played around it. Sheep are just the right size for the kind of landscape setting that I like for my sculptures, a horse or a cow would reduce the sense of monumentality. Perhaps the sheep also belong to the landscape of my boyhood in Yorkshire.
Henry Moore quoted in Henry Moore’s Sheep Sketchbook, Henry Moore and Kenneth Clark, Thames and Hudson, London 1980.

There are no sheep sheltering under the Zurich piece, though children, instead of lambs, cannot resist its charm.

The sculpture, from 1971/'72, was put on display here in 1976 for a Moore exhibtion at the lakeside that attracted 74,000 visitors. A private person bought it and gave it to the city. And here it still stands, large and brooding, soaking up the sunrays, or heaped with snow, or rain running off its sleek surface. Day and night, everyday, it suffers whatever the elements throw at it, whatever indignity humans inflict upon it, its gentle, curved forms a reminder of the silent animals that we admire but choose to eat.

NOVA in Zurich Main Railway Station

2012-05-07T21:57:00.002+02:00

Is it art or is it science?

Hanging from the ceiling of Zurich Main Railway Station, just in front of Mario Merz's The Philosopher's Egg and caught by the gaze of Niki de Saint Phalle's Guardian Angel, we find the NOVA. Designed in 2006 by scientists at Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the founding of this world class university (ranked in the Times Higher Education Supplement as the best in continental Europe), NOVA provides a sort of dialogue across the frontiers that lie between art, science, mathematics and society. At least, that's the theory.

NOVA consists of 25,000 luminescent spheres, each equipped with 12 light emitting diodes, capable of generating 16,000,000 colours. I don't know how many combinations can be generated, but I'm pretty sure its an awfully big number - probably bigger than can fit on any regular calculator. NOVA can refresh itself at a rate of 25 pictures per second. I have no idea what that really means, but it certainly wowed me when I first heard it.

And here is the neat thing: you, the spectator, can participate in this work (hence the society part). At the group meeting point in the station stands a large, very tall glass box with a touch screen embedded into the glass. You can draw your finger across the screen, then stand back and watch the effet on NOVA. These days you can even hold your mobile phone (if you have one - I don't) to the screen and scan your text message onto the NOVA. Funnily enough, I've tried this, using a friend's phone, when looking for a student who was late at the group meeting point. The student's name appeared on NOVA, but the student himself never turned up. Maybe it's a good way of making students disappear!

NOVA reacts to sound, especially music. When it turned five, in 2011, a 50 piece brass band played in the station and generated eletrical fireworks. Alas, NOVA is destined only to reach the age of 6. It is supposed to be dismantled sometime in 2012.

Zurich City

2012-05-06T17:00:00.000+02:00

Since 2006 Zurich is consistently rated among the top two cities of the world for its quality of life. The survey is carried our by Mercer consultants of London. The rankings are based on 39 criteria divided over 10 categories, including things like: availability of musical and theatrical perfromances, quality of water and air, access to nature and recreational facilities, level of crime and freedom of expression. Many governments and corporations use Mercer's Quality of Living Survey in order to determine the level of renumration to be paid to those destined for hardship posts. Being sent to Zurich certainly does not qualify as a hardship posting.

In 2011 Zurich was again rated number 2, with two other Swiss cities in the top ten. Switzerland may not be at the top when it comes to things like football, but when it comes to making their city's livable, no other country performs so well. This film clip might be a piece of propaganda, but it does give an impression of what makes this city so livable.

Mario Merz's The Philosopher's Egg

2012-05-02T09:52:00.001+02:00

At 55,000 square meters, Zurich Railway Station is one of the largest covered spaces in central Europe. Not just a busy terminus, it is a place that is rich in works of modern art. In a previous post I briefly discussed Niki de Saint Phalles' Guardian Angel.

Mario Merz: The Philospher's Egg

High above the commuters, we have Mario Merz's The Philosopher's Egg. The work is inspired by the Fibonacci progression, that famous mathematical sequence, discovered in the 13th century by Leonardo of Pisa (Leonardo Fibonacci). Fibonacci's infinite progression (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, etc) which is built by adding a number to the following number (1+1=2; 1+2=3; 2+3=5; 3+5=8: etc) apparently reveals the hidden mathematical design that underlies most natural growth, especially spirals. It defines the growth of snail shells, plants and leafs, pine cones, pineapples and the skins of reptiles; it describes the number of petals in a flower, the geometry of seed heads, the arrangement of leaves along a stem, the lumps on a cauliflower, the way a pineapple fits together. As the mathematician Ian Stewart writes in his new book The Mathematics of Life (New York, Basic Books, 2011) "Marigolds typically have 13 petals. Asters have 21. Many daisies have 34 petals; if not, they usually have 55 or 89." (p. 39)

Leonardo of Pisa first discovered the Fibonacci sequence when he was studying animals in 1202 - specifically the reproductive rates of rabbits. (Mind you, although it is generally claimed that he discovered the progression, it was known to Indians scientists at least a thousand years earlier.) Merz has chosen to focus on animals in his work of art, composed of spirals of neon tubes punctuated with birds and a large reindeer.

In an obituary for the artist that appeared in the New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote that Mario Merz's work was "permeated with ideas of growth and fecundity and spreading across floors, walls and ceilings -- had an exuberance that could be alternately carnivalesque or spare, pastoral and populist."

It is said (by some) that Merz's construction enhances natural and spiritual energy. I'm not sure. I would describe this work as being spare and populist, without being popular. I must admit, the first time I saw it was one July and, for the life of me, I thought the good Swiss hadn't bothered to remove their Christmas decorations. Perhaps it was the reindeer.

Mario Merz: The Philospher's Egg

I've been looking at The Philosopher's Egg, on and off, for eleven years. I would like to say it is growing on me. Perhaps it is, but only very, very slowly. The increase of my appreciation certainly does not parallel the Fibonacci progression.

Niki de Saint Phalle's Guardian Angel at Zurich's Main Station

2012-04-24T09:08:00.001+02:00

In 1847 the first rail connection opened in Switzerland, running from Baden to Zurich. And in 1871 a new main station opened in Zurich. It still stands, like a Prussian neo-renaissance palace, astride the prestigious (and world's most expensive) main street, the Bahnhofstrasse.

But let us step inside the Hauptbahnhof, and discover the treasure that hangs from its ceiling, protecting the travellers.

In 1997, in order to commerorate 150 years of Swiss railroads, one of the world's leading artists was commissioned to produce one of her easily recognisable gigantic and powerful women. Over 11 metres long, and weighing 1.2 tons, it was made in the USA, shipped to Rotterdam in three pieces, brought by boat up the Rhine to Basel, then transported by low roader to Zurich and reassembled. And here it hangs, Niki de Saint Phalle's Guardian Angel.

It is, of course, wild and daring in its madness. She sweeps above the tiny, busy commuters, heavy but wonderfully nimble, a gloriously overdressed female Sumo wrestler (which might explain de Saint Phalle's incredible popularity in Japan.)

I was first introduced to the work of Niki de Saint Phalle by a girlfriend during a trip to Paris in 1985. We sat in a cafe near the Pompidou Centre, at the Place Igor Stravinsky, listening to the rain and laughing at de Saint Phalle's wonderfully cheery fountain. I fell in love and married the girl.

Today de Saint Phalle's angel of the station still casts her protection over us.

Winter Tales

2012-04-21T12:51:00.000+02:00

Paris, 2012

I've certainly noticed some weirding of the weather in recent months. First there was Europe's seemingly endless mild autumn, with balmy temperatures that ran right into December. Even Switzerland experienced a drought - seven weeks without precipitation. Then, suddenly the great freeze descended on most of northern Europe, enveloping the continent in sub-zero temperatures for seven or eight weeks - literally, a cold that killed. I don't think I ever experienced such a prolonged period of sub-zero temperatures in my life. It was followed by what seemed like an early summer in March. For weeks we dined on our patio every evening, enjoying temperatures of over 20 degrees. Spring had been skipped. And then, along came now - a reversion to early spring - in late April! Some sunny spells, lots of scattered showers, and I'm wearing my overcoat again. Of course Chaucer had written of this over 600 years ago:

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote

And T.S.Eliot, writing in the shadow of the 20th century's Great War, had warned us that:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But neither mentioned that March is hot, and late April is cold.

In February, during the great freeze, I took the train to Paris for a history conference. It was so cold, they even had to cancel the Ireland-France rugby match because the pitch was frozen - no joke for the 10,000 Irish fans who had made the journey. But what struck me were the homeless in Paris and the soup kitchens on the street. The Canal Saint Martin looks pretty when it is frozen, but the homeless huddled in blankets in doorways showed how brutal urban life can be. On a Saturday night I mixed with the revelers on the Place de la Bastille and noticed an entire family, mother, father and two children, huddled inside a telephone box, wrapped in sleeping bags.. As I returned to my hotel that night I shuffled past a couple of dozen muffled and silent men and women eating soup that had been handed out by volunteers; the temperature was around ten degrees below zero.

Paris, 2012

A couple of days after returning to Zurich I visited the exhibition in the Kunsthaus "Winter Tales". The exhibtion has been organized in collaboration with Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. I enjoyed it immensely. Not only can the exhibition boast of a number of startling and surprising works, but it possesses a great narrative power that carried me along. Winter was once a time to be feared, with freezing temperatures and food supplies imperiled, but this exhibition lets us see how the dark season was tamed and, especially among the democratic Dutch, how the winter became a time for all, rich and poor, high and low, adult and child, to hit the ice and enjoy skating, either as a participant or just as an observer enjoying the spectacle.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 1601

During the Enlightenment the act of skating had become a symbol of freedom. The bourgeois citizen could enjoy his leisure time, but it is with the onset of the French Revolution (that brings the middle class burgher to power), that he can really swing his arms in freedom as he skates away on the thin ice of a new age, like a living, dynamic and daring statue of liberty, top hat and all.

Pierre Maximilien Delafonteine, 1798

Of course the spectacular ferocity of the Russian winter that ravaged Napoleon's army ignited the interest and retained the attention of the romantics for some decades.

Boissard de Boisdenier, 1835

However, by the end of the 19th century winter seemed to have been tamed, providing Monet simply with an excuse to challenge himself and create a study in white, a study of the act of painting itself - white on white, with the single black object, "The Magpie".

Monet, 1869

And winter provided Munch with the opportunity to paint, well, what else, but Munch (did he ever paint anything else?); the gnarled Norwegian winter landscape as a self portrait, a mirror of the anguished state of mind of the self-obsessed artist.

Munch, 1900

Of course history is never linear. No true narrative travels in a straight line. Winter had not been tamed for everyone. Winter had not become simply a playground, or or an excuse to experiment in painting or to indulge in self-analysis. As always, they still had the poor.

Fritz von Uhde, 1890

In Fritz von Uhde's painting "A Difficult Walk (Walking Towards Bethlehem"), we are reminded that in late 19th century Europe, after decades of industrial progress, Mary and Joseph still walked the streets of winter looking for a place at the inn.

And the poor are still in our midst in the glitzy, consumerist and technologically smart 21st century. In many of Europe's large urban areas this winter, like on the streets of Paris, places at the inn were limited.

Heroic Africans in Zurich

2012-04-17T20:31:00.000+02:00

Last week I took a couple of hours and enjoyed the current exhibtion at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich, "Heroic Africans: Legendary Leaders, Iconic Sculptures".

The exhibtion was orginally in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum. It was reviewed in The New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl. In the New York Times Holland Cotter wrote:

"If you still think that African art is not your thing, there’s an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum that may change your mind (...) it’s as beautiful to look at as a show can possibly be."

I can verify, he was not exaggerating. Cotter goes on to say:

"It’s a perception changer in other ways too, as it argues, through demonstration, against basic misunderstandings surrounding this art. African art has no history? No independent tradition of realism? No portraiture? All African sculpture looks basically alike, meaning “primitive”? African and Western art are fundamentally different in content and purpose? Wrong across the board."

Entrance to the Rietberg Exhibition

It certainly threw a new light on African art for me. The works in this show range from the 12th to the 20th centuries and, for the most part, are sculptures that memorialise eminent leaders and other heroic figures in African history or mythology. One of the pieces, a wooden sculpture of a dancing priestess, caused a sensataion when it was first exhibited in 1930s Europe and was photographed by Man Ray.

Photograph by Man Ray

The pieces are beautifully displayed in the new exhibition space that lies below the 19th century villa where Richard Wagner once carried out his love affair with Mathilde Wesendonk.

These works were inevitably made as part of a complex system of collective memory, closely linked with religion and death rituals, providing an essential bridge between the living and the dead. But they stand today behind glass vitrines, far from home, to be enjoyed for their purely aesthetic pleasure alone, by New Yorkers and Swiss. The works come from the Rietberg's own collection, as well as from collections in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Portugal and the United States. None, of course, have a home in Africa anymore. That ravaged continent long ago lost its most precious works to the predatory colonizers of Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, London and Paris. If anyone, African or otherwise, wants to contemplate some of the finest sulptures created in Africa, they will have to travel to Zurich.

I was particularly moved by a small number of Yoruba terracotta faces, from Ife in Nigeria, made some time between the 12th and 15th centuries. They looked incredibly fragile but lifelike; their remarkable individualism and naturalism predates any contact with Europeans.

Ife, Nigeria: 12th to 15th century

Ife, Nigeria: 12th to 15th Century

Some sculptures from the 17th century onward border on the abstract. It is easy to see how such works would entice and excite the likes of Picasso and Kirchner.

Ghana: 19th century

We don't know the names of the artists who created these great works. Thanks to the destruction wrought by colonialism, we have lost a great deal of the stories that provide the context of what these works originally meant. Most of all, perhaps, for ages Europe's sense of superiority blinded us to the individuality and beauty of African art. Even those, like the artists of the European avant-garde, who were truly inspired by African art, could only find in it a dynamic form of primitivism - it provided an escape from the industrialised and mechanised landscape that surrounded modernity. This exhibition reveals the manifold brilliance of African art. We may not know the stories, but we can stand in awe.

D. R. Congo: 19th Century

Historiography of the Indonesian War of Independence: Early Beginnings

2012-04-15T15:14:00.003+02:00

It is often commonly believed that history is written by the winners. Would that be so, there would be no German histories of World War Two, no British histories of American or Indian independence and no Dutch histories of their final conflict in Indonesia. Of course nothing could be further from the truth. Not only did the Dutch get to write histories of their lost colonial war, they even began writing histories during The Indonesian War of Independence (1945-1949) itself. One of the first such histories was penned by no one less than former Lieutenant Governor-General Hubertus J. van Mook. His Indonesie, Nederland en de Wereld, was published in February 1949, ten months before the Dutch accepted Indonesian independence. For years van Mook had been at the helm of the Dutch government in the colony, he had lead the Dutch government-in-exile in Australia during the Japanese occupation and returned to Batavia in 1945 to pick up the pieces after World War Two. An enlightened moderate among the colonials, van Mook had devoted his life to the betterment of the colony in which he had been born. As a member of a group of intellectuals associated with an Indies periodical De Stuw, he had advocated throughout the 1930s for the development of the colony until the point when an Indonesian Commonwealth could be accepted into the league of independent nations.[1] During the 1945-1949 conflict he had, despite some personal misgivings, opened negotiations with the Indonesian nationalists, but he had also ordered the first of two military “police actions”. The diplomatic failures led to his being removed from power in late 1948. What he had dedicated his adult life to achieving – a democratic Indonesia equal to and united with the mother country under the Dutch crown[2]– was about to be destroyed before his eyes. As such, he must qualify as a loser. Indonesie, Nederland en de Wereld was his attempt to tell the true story.

Not surprisingly, he didn’t blame himself for all of the bloodshed. Nor did he blame the government in The Hague, though he did point out some of its miscalculations, as well as the shortcomings of his more conservative fellow colonials. More than anything, van Mook blamed the interference of inexpert foreigners – the British and the naïve Americans, the unreliable Australians, the newly independent Indians, the calculating Russians and their communist satellites, and the do-gooders at the United Nations. Already at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 he had rejected the notion that the Dutch East Indies should become a trusteeship of the UN: “When the prerequisites are on their course to completion: political and economic stability, a common citizenship and a common language, and an assured succession of ever better educated generations, the realization of self-government needs no trusteeship, no commissions and no time-table as long as the intentions of both parties remain unsullied by greed, or bad faith or tyranny.”[3]Some months after his book’s publication he still echoed this belief in an article in Foreign Affairs: “Its [The Indonesian problem] solution was and is primarily the concern of the Netherlands and Indonesia themselves. Unfortunately (…) it came to be treated internationally as a problem to all for debate and interference.”[4]He argued that the government of the Netherlands had defended the best interests of Indonesians: “The Netherlands Government was quite prepared to grant self-government and independence to Indonesia (…) But it wanted to go about the grave business of setting up a nation in an orderly and efficient way. It could not hand over its responsibility to an illegally constituted organization that showed hardly any capacity to provide justice and stability for millions of suffering people.”[5]

Van Mook began his book by reminding the reader of the new, totalitarian form of imperialism, the “police terror” of the Soviet Union.[6]The Soviets, he claimed, preyed on the poor and weak but their ultimate aim was not liberation but driving out the West.[7]They are helped, he added, by fellow travelers such as Australia, "which in various votes over Indonesia in the Security Council stood on the side of the Russians.”[8]

An initial error of perception, according to van Mook, was for the new Labour government in Britain to give in to “liberation mania” and accept all Asian liberation movements at face value.[9] More grievous still was the Allies’ change in the policy with which they had been tasked – to disarm the Japanese and take them into custody - and the “over hastiness” with which the British began to deal with and semi- officially recognize the Indonesian republican movement.[10]He repeated the point at a lecture at Chatham House in March 1949, that: “in recognizing a Republican Government as a semi-legal authority, both the British and occupying forces, and later on the world at large, went, in my view, much too fast”, though, recognising that British troops saved the lives of countless Dutch citizens, and in incredibly difficult and dangerous conditions, he added: “we are extremely grateful for what the British did.”[11]One thing, according to van Mook, is certain: had the British quickly disarmed the Japanese, rather than permitting the latter to hand over their weapons to Indonesian nationalists, “a lot of misery would have been spared the Indonesians and Dutch.”[12]

The situation in 1945 was further complicated by the strike by Australian dock workers, inspired by the Australian Communist Party,[13]as well as the British refusal to allow Dutch troops to return to Java and Sumatra.[14]

Although van Mook was repelled at the idea of negotiating with Sukarno, a man who, during the Japanese occupation, “had placed himself so completely behind Japan” that he must be considered to be a “collaborator”,[15]he did begin personal negotiations with the nationalists, including Sukarno, in October, 1945.[16]But this first meeting caused widespread negative reactions among the public in The Netherlands and began a rift between van Mook and the authorities in The Hague.[17]Indeed an urgent meeting of the Dutch cabinet was called and the minutes reveal that the ministers considered van Mook’s behavior to be “incorrect and not acceptable to the government” and they immediately began discussing the process of replacing him.[18]A week later the Minister for the Colonies, Logemann, wrote to van Mook, accusing him of doing a 180 degree about face, and furthermore letting him know that among important sections of the Dutch public and parliament, his meeting with Sukarno was considered to be an act of “national treason”.[19]

Shortly thereafter van Mook visited The Netherlands and was alarmed by some of the strong sentiments that he encountered there, as well as by the stridency of some voices who refused to recognize the difficulties of the new and ever changing situation in Indonesia.[20] Likewise, when in April 1946 the Dutch authorities did sit down with the Indonesian nationalist leaders at a conference in the Hoge Veluwe in The Netherlands, van Mook was disappointed, firstly by the exaggerated security measures at the conference, secondly by the refusal of the Dutch government to allow van Mook to make any public statements, and thirdly by the negative attitude of the Dutch press towards negotiation.[21]He informs us that from this time onward he became the target of a continuous orgy of criticism and lies in the Dutch press and, what is more, the government failed to defend him adequately.[22]

Nevertheless, negotiations between the two sides continued in Indonesia itself, culminating in van Mook and a Dutch delegation visiting the rebel controlled zone and, in November 1946, signing the Linggadjati Accord. According to van Mook, at this point many believed that the conflict was over.[23]Feelings of optimism seemed even more justified when the news reached Indonesia in December that a majority in the Dutch parliament in The Hague had voted to ratify the accord.[24]Alas, it soon became clear that what the Dutch authorities had accepted was a truncated version of Linggadjati; an interpretation of the original agreement of their own devising which, unsurprisingly, was rejected by the Indonesian republicans.[25]

The Infamous campaign on South Celebes

Van Mook next mentions that around this time he ordered a special military action in South Celebes, in order to put an end to the nationalist regime of systematic terror that had been unleashed on this island. He admitted that during the pacification of the island, the Dutch had committed some “excesses”.[26]Many decades later what had happened on South Celebes would come back to haunt Holland. Van Mook also tells us that the Dutch soldiers within their own zone had become the daily targets of the nationalists and that the breakdown in law and order had gradually become “near unbearable”.[27]At last, van Mook, the Commission General and the government in The Hague concluded that there was no other option than a military solution.[28]He described the first Police Action as being a military success, with Dutch soldiers being mostly greeted “with a sigh of relief”.[29]It seemed logical that the cleansing of the republican areas should be set forth to the end,[30]but it is at this point that the UN intervened, with India and Australia sponsoring a Security Council resolution on July 31^st , calling for a ceasefire. It was passed and accepted immediately by the Dutch government.[31]Van Mook obviously felt betrayed; with the conflict’s end in sight, he had been forced to stop with the job only half done.[32]Speaking of the Security Council’s resolution at his Chatham House lecture some years later, he would admit “I myself think that that was a calamity.” [33]Not only that, but The Netherlands also accepted the presence in Indonesia of a UN appointed Commission of Good Services, thereby allowing what van Mook considered to be “international interference”,[34]or even more strongly worded “inexpert international meddling.”[35]What followed was a year of futile, failed negotiations, terror and counter-terror.

Van Mook tells us that the communist influence among the republicans now grew much stronger and that even non-communist nationalists began to draw nearer to the Soviet Union as they awaited a third world war, which they expected Russia to win.[36] He informs us that the members of the Commission of Good Services were blind to the true nature of the republican government and that the American in the group had concluded that a communist takeover of the republican area could only be avoided by giving far reaching concessions.[37]His sense of betrayal was deepened when it became clear that by mid-1948 the authorities in The Hague had come to consider him to be an obstacle that had to be removed. On October 5^th 1948 Prime Minister Drees informed van Mook that his services were no longer required.[38]On November 3^rd he left his office and departed from Indonesia the next day, never to return to the place where he had been born and raised and to which he had devoted his entire working life. The following month the Dutch began their second military “Police Action”, setting forth what van Mook had started in June 1947. Like the first Police Action, this one too was brought to an abrupt end “by an inevitable new action of the Security Council.”[39]

Sukarno reading The Declaration of Independence, August 17th 1945

Van Mook concluded his book in February 1949 with a call for the Indonesians and the Dutch to together build something great, something that could serve as a beacon for South East Asia. He concluded: ”But then all of us who can contribute, must bring together, and offer the leadership, to people who love both the Netherlands and Indonesia and who can see for both countries such a great, common future”.[40]One cannot help but think that what van Mook has in mind is a collection of people like van Mook. Ten months later The Republic of Indonesia was recognized by The Kingdom of the Netherlands. There was to be no common future and van Mook’s dream had come to nought. Van Mook has gotten to write his own history, but few were listening.

Van Mook’s work was just hot off the press when, in May 1949, a counter-argument appeared. The author was the social democrat parliamentarian Jacques de Kadt. In his De Indonesische tragedie: Het treurspel van gemiste kansen he accused the Dutch government of following a policy whose goal was to deny Indonesia real freedom. Van Mook’s aim, according to de Kadt, had been to create a federation composed of a “completely powerless and chaotic collection of puppet states” over which the Netherlands could continue to exert its control.[41]According to H. W. van den Doel, most Dutch historians fell into line behind Kadt’s general analysis.[42]

[1] H. W. Van den Doel, Afschied van Indie, (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2001) p. 43-44

[2]He explained his goal: “Firstly the national liberation of the country [Indonesia], by which it can take its place, under its own government, among the nations as an equal. And also, a permanent relationship with the Netherlands such that cooperation - now voluntary and abased on equal footing – can be perpetuated.” H. J. Van Mook, Indonesie, Nederland en de Wereld. (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1949) p. 12

[3]Quoted in H. J. Van Mook, Indonesie, Nederland en de Wereld. (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1949) p. 45

[4]H. J. Van Mook, „Indonesia and the Problem of Southeast Asia“. Foreign Affairs, vol. 27, no. 4 (July, 1949) p. 561

[5]Ibid., p. 571

[6]Van Mook, Indonesie, p. 7

[7]Ibid., p. 11

[8]Ibidem.

[9]Ibid., p. 90

[10]Ibid., p. 91

[11]H. J. Van Mook, „Indonesia“. International Affairs, vol. 25, No. 3, p. 274

[12]Van Mook, Indonesie, p. 77

[13]Ibid., p. 88

[14]Ibid., p. 95

[15]Ibid., p. 102

[16]Ibid., p. 104

[17]Ibid. P. 104-105

[18]Minutes of the cabinet meeting 1 November 1945: Officiele Bescheiden betreffende de Nederlands-Indonesische Betrekkingen 1945-1950, KS 36: 282. Archive A.Z.

[19]Logemann (Minister of the Colonies) to Van Mook (Lt. Governor General), 9 November 1945: Officiele Bescheiden betreffende de Nederlands-Indonesische Betrekkingen 1945-1950, KS 37: 1. Archive Ministry of Colonies, I.A. 178

[20]Van Mook, Indonesie, p. 111-112

[21]Ibid., p. 132

[22]Ibid., p. 141

[23]Ibid., p. 157-161

[24]Ibid., p. 162-163

[25]Ibid., p. 167- 169

[26]Ibid., p. 171

[27]Ibid., p. 165

[28]Ibid., p. 182

[29]Ibid., p. 185

[30]Ibid., p. 186

[31]Ibid., p. 187

[32]Ibid., p. 188

[33]van Mook., “Indonesia”, p. 278

[34]van Mook , Indonesie, p. 190

[35]Ibid., p. 212

[36]Ibid., p. 210

[37]Ibidem

[38]Prime-Minister Drees to Lt. Governor-General Van Mook, 5 okt. 1948: Officiele Bescheiden betreffende de Nederlands-Indonesische Betrekkingen 1945-1950, KS 66: 160. A.R.A. Archive Van Mook 269, no. 155

[39]Van Mook, Indonesie, p. 220

[40] Ibid. , p. 229

[41] Jacques de Kadt, De Indonesische tragedie: Het treurspel van gemiste kansen. (2nd edition, Amtserdam: 1989) p. 117

[42] van den Doel, p. 14

World Poetry Day

2012-03-21T09:21:00.000+01:00

Happy World Poetry Day.

To celebrate, here is a new poem from one of my favourite poets.

afternoon nap

by Esther de Vries

our knees breathe in sync
her leg wrapped around mine
the hole in her jeans a reminder
of work I should have done
her ink stained fingers touch
my rough dry cheek

while she naps
my thoughts swing from folding
clothes to hurts that can befall
this trusting girl
I can only shake them
where her head dips
in time with my breath

I store this closeness

guard it, feed it slivers
of certain love
for those inevitable times
when the pendulum
will swing to the other side

Will the Physical Classroom still be around in 2030?

2012-03-18T17:34:00.003+01:00

I attended a think-tank this weekend on the future of education. My involvement included particpating in a debate. The propostion was: "The Physical classroom will no longer exist in 2030". I argued against, and here is my speech.

Wade Davis informed us that among the 670 dialects native to Australia, not one had words to differentiate between the past, present and future. Instead, the Aboriginal people lived in a never changing dreamtime. But when it comes to predicting the state of education nearly twenty years hence, I wonder, who exactly is dreaming?

We have a present that is present and we call it now; we had a present that once was but no longer is, and we call it the past; we have a hypothetical present that has yet to be and we call it the future – only this last has never been experienced and is consequently entirely uncertain.

I have a great deal of certainty about the present that is now. For instance I know that I am typing these words and I am hoping that you will enjoy and agree with them. I know this because I am experiencing it and this gives me subjective certainty. I have some certainty about the present that is past. For instance I know with some certainty that I attended the musical “Annie” last night. In this case, my knowledge is based on experience and memory. But of the future I have no certainty at all. Because it has yet to be, because it has never yet existed and has never been experienced, my knowledge of this hypothetical realm cannot be more than expectations, hopes and wishes. Indeed often our predictions of the future are the consequence of little more than wish fulfillment. And yet, we have people who will tell us with certainty that the physical classroom will no longer exist in 2030.

Such hubris reminds me of a book I picked up just yesterday, The Japanese Century by Thomas R. Zengage and C. Tait Ratcliffe. The authors, experienced members of the corporate world with MBAs, predicted in 1988 that the 21^st century would belong to Japan. The following year Japan’s economy began its long slip into recession. No one is making that prediction anymore. Zengage and Ratcliffe’s predictions look embarrassing, though they had good company at the time.

The fact is, we don’t know very much, even about the present, and especially not about the future. Certainly there are trends. But that’s the problem – there’s more than one – there are thousands of trends, and which will last, and which is the one, or the combination of 101 to watch – it’s impossible to say. But far worse than our ignorance is that, rather than acknowledging our limitations, we deceive ourselves into thinking that we know a lot with a great deal of certainty, and we end up fooling ourselves and others.

I’m reminded of a remark that was made by KlausWellershoff, the former Chief Economist at the UBS, at an economics conference I attended a couple of years ago. Describing some of the factors that led to the financial crisis of 2007, he admitted: “We lacked the courage and modesty to say ‘I don’t know’. This led our audience to believe that we did know and created false confidence. To deal with uncertainty is the fundamental fear in a management culture that demands certainty.” He concluded: “We need to be more humble”. I recommend that those who are confident that they can see the future of education eighteen years hence should practice some humility.

The idea that the classroom will no longer exist by 2030 is based upon the view, (or wish fulfillment) that education will be delivered by machines and online teachers. It is a commonly held belief of neophiliacs – those who suffer from an unhealthy obsession with the new. They find the work of Mark Zuckerberg more interesting than that of Leo Tolstoy. Working with short bursts of attention, continually checking their online reputations, they are likely to use their newest obsession, like Wi-Fi technology, and as baseline and predict an over-technologized future that is heavily populated with their newest electronic pets. In other words, the future is what is new in the present, just a lot more of it. But, while a characteristic of the old is that it will endure for a long time more, a characteristic of the new, is that most new things disappear rather quickly. Remember the Sony Mini-Disc? They were all the rage in Japan during the 1990s. I have a collection of Miles Davis on Mini-Discs that I purchased in 1993 but never play anymore. But last year Sony announced they will no longer ship Mini-Discs. Twenty years from now the Mini-Disc will be just a memory, but we’ll still be listening to Kind of Blue.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written: “To understand the future, you do not need the techno-autistic jargon OR obsession with killer apps or the sort. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders – in other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived”. And lo and behold, the classroom has survived. The physical classroom has been around a long time. Indeed, with its invention in ancient Babylonia, the classroom is as old as the Egyptian pyramids. In 3100 BC one grateful student in an Egyptian classroom wrote. “Thou didst beat me and knowledge entered my head”. The classroom has survived, the methods have changed.

The neophiliacs often use the term “the factory classroom” or “the industrial model” when slamming current education and calling for radical change – a straw man if ever there was one (they are also fond of referring to teachers as being “conservative”, though that doesn't stop them from voting for the Republican or Conservative Party). But what “industrial model” are they referring to - that of Pestalozzi, or Frobel, Montessori, Harkness, Dalton, or Dewey? And what has this “Industrial model”, which apparently was invented in order to feed obedient workers into the factory system, has ever given us? Well, 100% literacy for the first and only time in human history, for a start. Indeed, the only countries that have successively achieved this feat, have done so by implementing some variation of the so called “industrial model”.

But what else has it achieved (as if that is not enough). Well, the modern classroom has been the place of education for many of the minds that have given us the technology of today, like Daguerre and the photograph; the Lumiere brothers and the motion picture; Roentgen and the X-ray; Edison and the phonograph; Fleming and the telephone. And if that isn’t enough, East Lancing Public High School was the place where Larry Page, of Google fame, was educated. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was educated at Philips Exeter Academy. Founded in 1781 this high school uses the Harkness plan – teaching takes place seminar style, with the teacher having a conversation with a small group of students. Zuckerberg learned the sciences, but also French, ancient Hebrew, Latin and ancient Greek. Which reminds me, if the “industrial model” trained the mindless workers for the factory, why did so many of them insist on teaching Latin and ancient Greek? Were these the languages spoken in the 19^thcentury factories of Europe?

There was no one “industrial model” indoctrinating obedient factory workers. Such a view is a one dimensional simplification of the past, an instrument used by those who want us to focus on 21^st century skills – the skills that (it is perceived) will be needed in the corporate world. The real authoritarianism in education today is the view that we must provide 21^st century skills in order to feed the modern day techno-serfs into an economic system based on corporate greed, where the one and only moral imperative is to maximize the profit of the share-holder. That, with all of its techinical skills, is the true factory model.

On 17 May, 1993, Richard Gott, Professor of Astrophysics at Princeton, published an article in Nature magazine in which he claimed he could predict with 95% confidence how long 44 Broadway and off-Broadway plays would run. With no information except how long each play had been running, his prediction turned out to be over 95% accurate. His calculation, which involves simple math, is based on the principal that what is old will outlast what is new (except, of course, for the life expectancy of plants and animals, including humans). He had earlier predicted that the Pyramids will outlast the Berlin Wall which, he claimed, will fall before 1993. (It fell in 1989).

I might be wrong, but I suspect that Twitter, Facebook and perhaps even the mighty Google will be gone, but the physical classroom will still be around.

International Holocaust Memorial Day

2012-01-28T16:07:00.001+01:00

Yesterday was International Holocaust Memorial Day, a date chosen because it marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. In Berlin the day began with a televised special assembly of the German parliament, including prime-minsiter and president, listening to an adress by Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a survivor of the Warshaw ghetto. Turkey became the first ever muslim country to mark this day by broadcasting the nine hour documentary Shoah on state television.

In Teheran, on the other hand, a number of Holocaust denial cartoon films have been made and have been freely available on youtube. They reflect the crudest type of anti-semiticism, images straight out of German Nazi propaganda. This is another stain on the reputation of President Ahmadinejad, a man who not only has the blood of thousands of his own citizens on his hands, but has become the world's most reknowned Holocaust denier, having organised a state sponsored conference for holocaust deniers in 2006. His antics are simply the most absurd form of political shenanigans.

Meanwhile, an intersting and sensitive art exhibition, This Storm is What we call Progress opened this week in London's Imperial War Museum. Part of the exhibtion, entitled Will You Dance For Me? depicts an 85-year-old dancer rocking back and forth in a chair, slowly recounting her experiences as a young woman in Auschwitz. Her punishment for refusing to dance at an SS officer’s party was to stand barefoot in the snow, and she pledged that if she survived she would dedicate her life to dance. The artist, London based Israeli Ori Gersht, speaks about this work, as well as two others, in this short film:

Ori Gersht: This Storm is What We Call Progress from Photoworks on Vimeo.

A Short Stroll in Hemingway's Paris

2012-01-09T09:00:00.000+01:00

I spent the last days of 2011 in Paris, France. My third visit within a year and my seventh or eighth time staying at the same little friendly hotel in the heart of the Latin Quarter, steps away from the Boulevard Saint Michel and Boulevard Saint Germain, the Sorbonne University and the Museum Cluny and only a few minutes stroll to Notre-Dame Cathedral and the Luxembourg Gardens.

Early one morning, equipped with Noel Riley Fitch’s wonderful and indispensable Walks in Hemingway’s Paris: A guide for the Literary Traveler (New York: St. Martin’s Grifin, 1989) (a gem which I was lucky to stumble across in the incredible Shakespeare and Company a few years ago), we walked to the Luxembourg Gardens, quiet at that time of the day, except for a few mothers with the small children, the inevitable elderly men bowling and a half dozen practitioners of tai chi. The pond with the fountain was deserted of boats. I last walked here in October, and it felt like it was the height of summer then. Now, in late December, the weather was mild and it felt like fall. Ernest Hemingway described the gardens, in Islands in the Stream, far better than I could ever do: “I can remember afternoons with the boats on the lake by the fountain in the big garden with the trees. The paths through the trees were all graveled and men played bowling games off to the left under the trees as we went towards the Palace and there was a clock high up on the Palace. In the fall the leaves came down and I can remember the trees bare and the leaves on the gravel. I like to remember the fall best."

We were on our way to the Palace, originally built on the orders of Maria de Medici, now the home to the Senate but also one of the city’s leading exhibition spaces. We were luckily able to skip the line for tickets to the exhibition “Cezanne and Paris”because we had booked ahead online, something I recommend. Hemingway used to come here too, specifically to view the Cezanne pictures that were kept here (they have all been since moved to the Museum Orsay). He remembered learning from Cezanne that it wasn’t enough to simply express the truth: “I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.”

I enjoyed the exhibition, though like many things in Paris around this time of year, it was too crowded. I shudder to think of what it must have been like later in the day. I walked on, exiting the Gardens though the entrance directly opposite the one we had entered by. I immediately stopped to enjoy this view of the former home of Malcom Cowley, the American writer who became the spokesperson for the American expatriate literary community of the 1920s.

He famously formulated it like this: “Paris is like Cocaine”. His former apartment is, appropriately, above a book shop.

Some hundreds of meters along the same street I came to Gertrude Stein’s home and famous salon. A plaque to the right of the entranceway reminds us that she once lived here for over twenty years with her partner Alice B. Toklas. Their apartment was on the ground floor, facing the courtyard. Alas, although I loitered, I failed to find an opportune moment to enter the building and a cleaning lady barred the way. This is the best I could manage:

Gertrude Stein Home in Paris

Hemingway first visited Stein here in 1922 and was stunned by the paintings of Picasso, Gauguin and Matisse that hung on the walls. He wrote: “It was like one of the best rooms in the finest museums except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums, or wild raspberries. Hemingway loved the warmth, the paintings and the great conversation. He became a regular visitor and referred to Stein as his brother! In 1925 he brought F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was living nearby, to meet Stein. Woody Allen’s recent film Midnight in Paris attempts to tell the story and gives a positive impression of Gertrude Stein. Alas, Hemingway and Stein later had a serious falling out and in his memoirs he describes her as an ‘old bitch”. One contemporary commented that Hemingway ‘could never forgive a favour”.

My loitering in vain had cost me precious time and I had an appointment on the nearby Place Saint-Sulpice. I quickly loped past former homes of Ernst Hemingway, James Joyce, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford. I crossed the sun drenched square in front of the great church.

Saint Sulpice, the biggest church on Paris’ Left bank, provides the setting for a William Wharton novel and a now very famous scene in The Da Vinci Code takes place here. But during the 1920s a great number of modernist novelists convened here. This is where both Faulkner and Hemingway attended Sunday services. Stein and Toklas briefly lived in a little hotel on the square, as did Djuna Barnes; the hotel formed the setting for the opening scene of Barnes’ novel Nightwood. In his memoir, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway described the palce as a: “quiet square with its benches and trees, a fountain with lions, and pigeons walking on the pavement and perched on the statues of the bishops.” My appointment was in the only café on the square, the Café de la Marie. Although the interior of the café is plain, today it is a meeting point for writers, artists and film directors. In the past Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Barnes, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett and many others came here to drink.

This time round I had my three teenage daughters in tow. Enough of nostalgic walks among the ghosts of famous writers. The rest of the day was given over to shopping. Of that I have little to say.

Twenty Years Hence

2012-01-07T13:00:00.000+01:00

Someone asked me the other day if I had an opinion as to how the world would look in twenty years' time. Well, in my last post I wrote about the enormous difficulty of making predictions for the coming year, never mind twenty years. But let me offer a historical analogy.

Between the years 1933-1945 the world slipped into a sort of black hole of barbarism and destruction, the likes of which had never before (or since) been experienced. This period saw hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of Nanjing butchered to death by Japanese forces; tens of thousands of civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki vaporized by American atomic bombs; hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in Tokyo and Dresden burnt to death by American and British bombers; a million inhabitants of Leningrad starved to death by the German army; the same fate befell three million Russian Prisoners of War under the gaze of the German army; the city of Warsaw destroyed, block by block, by German forces; nearly six million Jews from all over the continent brought by train to death camps in Poland and Belarus to be murdered by the SS; 14 million defenseless and unarmed civilians murdered by the German and Soviet governments in an area of Eastern Europe named by Yale Professor Timothy Snyder as “The Bloodlands” (Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York, Basic Books, 2010). In the final years of this period the German government brought murder to a frenzied pace never before equaled.

The German government was, obviously, that of the Nazi Party. It is worth pointing out that the Nazis won just 2.6% of the national vote in the 1928 elections. Two years later they won over 30%. Their incredible gain in just two years almost defies belief and was, in 1928, expected or predicted by no one. It is the eruption of the totally unforeseen that often has the greatest consequences.

The consequences of 1933-1945 were great: the emergence of the USA as a global superpower, the onset of the Cold War, the creation of the United Nations, the strengthening of Chinese communism, the beginning of the end of the European colonial empires. The period that began in 1933 was one of great destruction in itself and we still live with its momentous consequences today.

The innocence of 1913

So, for our analogy, let us step back twenty years before the period that I have described above, which brings us to 1913. Let us suppose we can ask someone in 1913 to forecast what the world will look like twenty years hence, in 1933. Is it likely that they will answer “The world will be at the dawn of a period of destruction the likes of which have never before been experienced and the consequences of which will be the emergence of USA….etc”? Somehow I doubt it, not least because Nazism had yet to be invented and there had never been a communist revolution. 1913 lacked both a Nazi and a Communist government.

For the most part Europeans were still supremely confident in 1913. Literacy and standards of living were rising, , pensions and social welfare were becoming common, the power of steam and electricity had been conquered and the automobile invented, scientists were revealing the secrets of the atom, a communications revolution was taking place involving photography, film, telegraphy, radio and the telephone, industrialization was bringing creature comforts to the ordinary citizen, international trade had been liberalized, the British and French colonial Empires covered most of the world and were still growing, the British navy still ruled the waves, the German Empire was young and vibrant, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires were centuries old but still expanding. For the most part the western world was incredibly optimistic, present trends were positive and few could argue against a positive prognosis regarding the coming twenty years.

Of course there were some clouds on the horizon and there were a few dissenting voices, though they were tagged “pessimists”. A small cohort of young intellectuals had become enamoured by the pessimistic philosophy of Nietzsche. In Vienna, Freud was exposing the irrational roots of the human condition. An increasing number of British policy makers were worried about the aims and objectives of Germany; some were worried about the “Yellow Peril”, though they referred to China, not Japan who was a British ally. Science fiction writer H. G. Wells wrote a novel involving destruction raining down from the air (the airplane had just been invented ten years earlier).

A year later there was a world war. Not the war that anyone was expecting, a “home by Christmas war”. History had taught Europeans that wars between industrialized nations promised to be brutal but blessedly short. Alas, as is so often the case, history taught the wrong lessons (or half wrong in this case). No one in 1913 had expected the type of war that they got. But far worse was to come.

Twenty years on from 1933 and two new phenomena are in power: the Nazi and Communist single party states. Stalin has already unleashed a politically motivated famine in Ukraine that will kill over three million peasants; Hitler is taking his first cautious steps that will lead to the Holocaust. The stage is set, the clock is ticking. Millions of ordinary, innocent people in Poland and Belarus are about to experience an unimaginable and totally unpredictable savagery, carried out by the German and Soviet governments. Europe’s Jews are on a precipice of a hard to imagine genocide, created and orchestrated by Germany but a true Pan-European undertaking, with the collaboration of French police, Dutch train drivers, Latvian nationalists, Polish informers, Ukrainian guards. Japan has already commenced the destruction of China.

None of this was inevitable. None was the simple result of long-term trends. Human agency played the crucial role along each step of the way. Decisions were taken by individuals and groups, circumstances were fluid and changing, opportunities arose and were taken, ignored or were missed, misunderstandings arose and persisted. It was the complex interplay of thousands of personal and non-personal factors that led to the twelve years of destruction and its global and persistent consequences.

Of course we have to prepare for the future. But convincing ourselves that we know what to expect is the worst possible way of doing this. Accepting the humbling state of uncertainty is far more realistic, and offers protection from the rantings of demagogues. We cannot expect the citizen of 1913 to have foreseen what was in store. Why should we expect anything else of ourselves?

On Bankers and Astrologers

2012-01-06T12:34:00.001+01:00

It is that time of year again when some of us engage in the pleasant and harmless game of answering “What will the coming year bring?” There are a few things that we feel we know with some certainty. For instance there will be earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan and some of these will claim fatalities. But such a prediction is trivial, as Japan experiences thousands of quakes a year and a handful cause a handful of casualties. But no one, not even the experts, will dare to predict the next Big One. There are some global trends that seem to be inescapable – the earth is heating up, it is very likely to continue and, as a species, we seem to be entirely incapable of getting our act together and doing something about it. We simply blame our leaders. Meanwhile, the annual increase in greenhouse gas emissions during 2011 was the highest ever. But the consequences of global warming are difficult to predict. They are likely to be catastrophic, but in what ways exactly – that is the question.

Some things appear to be fairly safe bets for the coming year, and mostly they concern continuities rather than changes. For instance, regardless of an increase or decrease of political turbulence in the Middle East, it is highly likely that the great Pyramid of Giza will remain standing, simply because it has a good record – it has been standing for over 5,000 years; it has presided over the ages of the Pharos, the Romans and Greeks, the Kingdoms of the Arabs and Ottomans, the very brief British Empire. Its survival for millennia means it is unlikely to disappear in 2012.

Similarly we can make an educated guess to distinguish between the continuities that are more likely to survive the year and those that are less likely to survive. For instance it would seem more likely that the Great Wall of China will still be standing at year’s end than the Israeli wall that wraps itself around the Palestinian territories, simply because the former is much older and generally it is the new that disappears quickly rather than the old. The Great Wall of China has already outlived the walls that surrounded ancient Rome and the wall that separated Berlin, and it is likely to outlive the Israeli wall as well as Wall Street and our various firewalls.

Irrationally, we tend to think that those things invented during our own life times will last. I remember a student trip to Berlin and an expert from the West Berlin Information Service informing us that she would be long dead, that we would be long dead and forgotten, but the Berlin Wall would still be standing. It was March, 1989. Eight months later the wall came down.

Our myopic obsession not only with the new, but with the illusion that our contemporary innovations possess incredible historical significance, borders on fetishism. Will Google or Twitter really outlast the Great Wall of China, not to mention the Great Pyramid of Giza? This is what makes games of predicting the future so hilarious and difficult. I would guess that it is extremely unlikely that Facebook will still be around in a hundred years’ time, though of course I might be wrong.

But making meaningful predictions is difficult. A leading British politician in 1974 predicted that it would take years before the country would have a female prime minister and added “not in my time”. The politician was called Margaret Thatcher and she became prime minister five years later. The parlour game of predictions becomes most entertaining when participants begin to take their predictions seriously, the point when participants mix up their fantasies with a reality that has yet to materialize. The equivalent of today’s fortune tellers often go by the title economists or bankers. Their predictions are as likely to be true as those of astrologers. Indeed I fancy that the occupation of the astrologer will survive that of the economist. Some economists and bankers today believe they can anticipate the future – a logical fallacy as, by its nature, the future is unknown and a future anticipated would already be present in the present and consequently not be the future.

Dante, in his Inferno, positioned soothsayers deep within the bowels of Hell. For trying to divine the future their terrible punishment was that “each was marvelously twisted between the chin and the beginning of the chest for the face was turned towards the kidneys, and they were forced to walk backwards, since seeing forward was taken from them”. (Canto 20;10-15). He describes: “the tears of their eyes were bathing their buttocks down the cleft” (Canto 20; 37-39.

Today we don’t condemn our soothsayers to hell, we pay them big bonuses instead, even when they get it wrong, which they do frequently. As the world economic system totters on a precipice, they are left in charge And they get it wrong, again and again and again. Here are examples of predictions made by some leading economists/bankers last year. They come from the Swiss newspaper the Tages-Anzeiger.

As stock-markets crashed in the affluent West, many economists suggested investing in the emerging markets of the East. On January 25^th 2011 Philipp Baerstschi, Chief Strategist at the leading Swiss private bank Sarasin, stated that the Chinese stock market would rise “by about 20% by the end of the year”. Instead, by the end of 2011 the Chinese stock market decreased by 21.7%, one of the biggest losses of the year.

David Kostin, Chief Strategist at Goldman Sachs stated on January 22^nd 2011: “We expect that the S&P 500 will rise to 1500 by the end of the year”. Instead, on the last day of 2011 the S&P stood at 1,261 points.

The influential American Hedge Fund manager John Paulson predicted in late 2010 “The price of gold will reach 2,400 dollars, a doubling by the end of 2011”. Last Friday, the end of 2011, the cost of gold was 1,581 dollars per ounce, an increase of just over 10%, not a doubling.

In January 2011 Nick Beecroft, Senior Consultant to the Saxo Bank, predicted that in the second half of 2011 the Euro would recover against the Swiss franc “we can reckon on a clear increase to between 1.35 and 1.40”. Instead the Euro nose-dived in late 2011 and only intervention by the Swiss National Bank stabilized the exchange rate (for now at least) at about 1.20.

Astrologers base their predictions on the positions of the stars. Economists base their predictions on the much more ethereal concept of “present trends”. But which trends will be of significance? How will they interact? What will be the consequence of the unforeseen? And what will be the influence of what John Maynard Keynes termed “the animal spirits” – the irrational dreams and hates of the human psyche? Economists, plotting out their graphs and pie-charts, convince themselves of their own certainties, like the astrologists with their cosmic maps and horoscopes. As the philosopher A.C. Grayling has put it: “All around us we see developments which, naturally enough, we project linearly into the future, taking too little account of interactions between those developments, changes in moral and political fashion, the unexpected and unforeseen, and the unforeseeable.” (Ideas That matter: a personal guide for the 21^st Century. London, 2009, page 159).

Economists who believe they can see into the future are guilty of hubris. They project a feeling of certainty. They need to nurture a sense of humility. And before they do even more damage, they need to learn how to say and mean the important words “I do not know”.

Farewell to Iraq, Remember Camp Ashraf

2011-12-18T14:30:00.000+01:00

I suppose we should be celebrating. US troops have just about finished withdrawing from Iraq. Mission accomplished. Oh, but what was the mission again? Oh yes, find and destroy the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had hidden away so slyly, those weapons that posed such a threat to the entire region’s security, indeed to the security of western civilization. But they never were found, were they? Oh well, mission not accomplished in that case.
So what has been the cost? In human terms: 4,500 American dead and thousands of Iraqi dead. How many thousands of Iraqi? Well, while we count every American causality, the best we can say regarding Iraqi causalities during this war is that lots were killed. According to the conservative estimate of Iraq Bodycount, one of the few western organisations that shows any interest in maintaining an account of the human damage inflicted by the Blair/Bush invasion, the number of documented killings of Iraqi civilians since the joint US/UK invasion now stands at 113,755.

Otto Dix: The Flare

And what does the USA leave in its wake, beyond thousands of fresh graves and gutted buildings and a society torn by sectarian strife and violence? Well, the government of Nouri al-Maliki is not only Shi'ite Islamist, but becomes more pro-Iranian by the day. Most appalling is the situation of Camp Ashraf, where 3,400 members of an Iranian mujahideen opposition group is facing a possible massacre as their protectors, the United States, walk out and leave them high and dry. Their new “protectors” are the Iraqi government of al-Maliki, who earlier this year attacked the camp, killed 34 and injuring hundreds. The camp has been in Iraq since the early 1980s and has been a thorn in the side of the Iranian leadership. American troops disarmed the camp’s fighters in 2003 and in return promised the camp’s residents protection under the Geneva Conventions. But the US turned control over to the Iraqi government. Iran has been putting pressure on Iraq to close the camp and al-Maliki has promised that the camp will be closed by the end of this month. The camp’s residents claim they will move, but only if they are collectively granted asylum in a third country, a demand supported by the United Nations.

The US has classified the leadership of the camp as a terrorist organization. How convenient. Just like ‘weapons of mass destruction” was a convenient ploy. The United Nations refutes the US designation, as does the European Union, just like the situation of WMDs back in 2003. In fact the application of the terrorist tag by the United States is illegal under international law and has been condemned by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. If Iraq moves against Camp Ashraf this will be a true act of terrorism. Yesterday the Vice-President of the European Parliament took the unusual step of placing a half-page advertisement in the New York Times and Washington Post calling for Hillary Clinton to demonstrate moral courage and for the US to assume responsibility for the protection of the 3,400 Ashraf residents who are facing a possible massacre. You can email President Obama via the Camp Ashraf website.

This morning I’ve been listening to the new album of Tom Waits, Bad as Me. I’ve always found that there is something Weimaresque about Waits’ music. It always puts me in the mood of the great anti-war paintings and drawings of Dix and Grosz. The work of these brave Weimar artists says all there is to be said about the futility and vulgarity of war. They dared to hold up truth to counter jingoist myths. And now Waits, has summed up my feelings towards the war in Iraq:

“ how is it that the only ones responsible for making this mess

got their sorry asses stapled to a goddamn desk”.

Georg Grosz: The War Veteran

And Waits finishes his song "Hell Broke Luce" with the words
"now i'm home and i'm blind
and i'm broke
what is next?"

The Nahmad Collection at Zurich's Kunsthaus

2011-12-12T20:59:00.000+01:00

If you’ve never heard of the Nahmad Collection, don’t worry, you can be forgiven. After all, although it is one of Europe’s most prestigious private art collections, it is not greatly known, never having been exhibited in public. That is, never until now. The exhibition currently showing at the Kunsthaus in Zurich is quite a coup, being the first ever exhibition of a portion (nearly 120 paintings) of this enigmatic collection. Zurich’s Kunsthaus is now firmly on the path of building a reputation for exhibiting the works of private collectors. Beginning with A Feast of Colours in 2006, which featured the Merzbacher-Mayer collection, and continuing with the incredible Buehrle Collection (which has now been donated to the Kunsthaus and will reappear in a permanent exhibition in the new David Chipperfield wing in 2015), the presentation of the Nahmad Collection, entitled Monet, Mattise , Miro, is the third such exhibition in recent years. We picked a Sunday afternoon in late November. The sun radiated unseasonable warmth from a brilliant Japanese winter blue sky. We guessed correctly that most Swiss would strap on their hiking boots or saddle up their mountain bikes and head for the hills and forests on such a beautiful day. It could have been a Monday morning – one could contemplate the seven Modigliani’s in silence, stand before the Toulous- Lautrecs without being elbowed, view the single Bonnard portrait without having to first wait in a line. The exhibition begins with late 19th century Post-Impressionism and then takes us through a selection of highlights from most of the major modernist movements – Fauvism, Cubism, Abstractism, Constructivism and Surrealism. The Monets mostly are southern scenes, for instance of Venice, like this one of The Contarini Palace that evokes the city’s frayed splendor.

One room contains five Kandinskys, all of which are interesting, most of which are abstract, though I must admit my favourite is this still (just about) figurative “Study for Improvisation 3”, though I do find the title an oxymoron – can one have a study for an improvisation?

The Modiglianis are superb and it is a special experience seeing seven of his portraits on one wall, facing a half dozen works of Mattisse. But if seven Modiglianis seems like a lot, the exhibition contains no fewer than 13 Miros, all of them major works and spanning the artists entire career, and 30 Picassos from the early 20th century until the year of the artist's death in 1973, including his famous “Portrait of the Artist’s Son, Paulo, as Harlequin”, a painting that hasn’t been seen in public for decades.

But this is simply the tip of a hidden iceberg. The Nahmads are a Jewish family, originally from Aleppo, Syria. They moved to Beirut in the late forties and to Milan in the late fifties, accumulating fortune of well over 3 billion dollars through art dealing. The family currently resides in Monaco, for tax reasons I suspect, and have art galleries on Madison Avenue in New York and Cork Street in London. The family’s entire private collection consists of about 3,000 paintings and includes hundreds of works of Picasso. They keep their collection hidden away in an underground storage facility in Geneva where it is rarely viewed by any human eye. This might seem obscene to you. Perhaps the exhibition in the Kunsthaus in Zurich can be considered the secretive family’s “coming out”.

The exhibition runs until January 15th when, presumably, all of these fine works disappear again.

Forest Kindergarten

2011-12-07T20:10:00.000+01:00

For two years my little girl went to kindergarten in the forest. Not a school in the forest, just the forest. No walls, no roof, no heating, only the forest, a few tools, and incredibly dedicated teachers. In the heat of the summer, in the lashing rain and even in the sub-zero temperatures of the Swiss winter, she would meet her class at the bus stop outside our house and they would trek for twenty minutes into their clearing in the forest, free to indulge in the savagery that is unfettered childhood, no computor, or plastic or chalk board in sight. One day she came home from a day of particularly vicious downpours, her feet inevitably soaked, her eyelashes caked in mud, her cheecks ruddy with the cold and her eyes sparkling with fire, and I said to her it must have been tough being outside all morning in such weather. She looked at me in genuine incomprehension, looked out the window: "What weather?" she asked. An American film director has now made a documentary about our village kindergarten. Here is a preview.
School's Out: Lessons from a Forest Kindergarten from Rona Richter on Vimeo.

Glass Doors

2011-11-29T21:21:00.002+01:00

Last month in Birmingham, England I attended a reading by the extraordinary novelist Will Self. A bit early, I decided to drop into a café for a quick coffee. Although I know Birmingham city centre quite well, I don’t know a single independent café. Like independent bookstores, they’ve all gone to the wall. So, it had to be a Starbucks lookalike, Café Nero I think – couches, forgettable music, customers locked behind laptops. I stood in line, ordered my espresso macchiato, then shuffled obediently sideways, waited in line again until my drink arrived then walked like I knew what I was doing to the island with the sugar and water, and having filled myself a glass I made my way towards an empty couch. Sometimes I feel like a robot, though without really knowing how robots feel.

From my seat I had a view of the door. I couldn’t resist it, and on impulse I got up and took a photograph of the door. That’s one way of drawing attention to oneself, I must say. From behind the counter a kid darted forward, clad in uniform that included the regulation baseball cap, and asked me could he be of assistance. Apparently taking photos of glass doors is considered aberrant behavior in controlled, risk-free environments, like Britain. And by the way, when did British waiters, or baristas, start wearing baseball caps? Does it have anything to do with Blair’s attempt to become the prime minister of the USA?

Anyway, what attracted my attention was the signs on the door. I guess it’s an obsession of mine, though I do think it is a symptom of the nanny state that Britain has become. It’s also an indication of the growing ugliness of public spaces. If there is a wall, slap a warning sign on it; a glass door, cover it with stickers that say “Glass Door”. I once got in a train to Birmingham airport and counted seventeen safety signs in the carriage, including one that said “Please take the time to familiarize yourself with our safety signs”. After deboarding my plane in Zurich I got in a Swiss train. The carriage had one small sign, a sticker, indicating “no smoking”. How do the Swiss manage? I would venture, they are grown up.

Well, back to the glass door. Luckily my photo wasn’t confiscated by the pimply waiter. As you can see, there is a sign over the door that tells you this is the exit - always helpful. Then, each glass door has a sticker prominently warning you that this is, well, glass, just in case you’re stupid. And then, alongside each door there are big exclamation marks, warnings that these are sliding doors, just to save you from being crushed between the door and the wall, though really, if you happen to have squeezed yourself between the glass door and the wall then, as far as I’m concerned, you deserve to be crushed. Off to one side of the doors you have some gadget ot other with four signs telling you when and how to use it and the penalty that you'll pay if you abuse it. Maybe its my deep Irish peasantry, but such nonsense stirs the vandal in me. I remember a time when entering and exited through doors was a simple affair.

Some people will argue all these signs are simply to cover the business from being sued. Think of all the people who would otherwise be jamming themselves in between the door and the wall in an attempt to become millionaires. But, my musing done, it was time to go. I had warned Will Self that I was coming, but he wasn’t going to wait for me. As I walked towards the dangerous exit, would you belief it, the doors jammed. An electronic malfunction; a door engineer had to be called. He arrived within a minute, in regulation uniform, including baseball cap. At last, the obnoxious doors sighed open. I was almost late for the reading. I should have sued.

Love-locked in Paris

2011-11-05T13:06:00.001+01:00

While recently walking back to the Left Bank by way of the Pont de l'Archevêché in Paris I was surprised to find the railing of the bridge festooned with thousands of padlocks. Paris is supposed to be the city of love, but this is a relatively new addition to that reputation. Just under the tower of Notre-Dame, on the little bridge that links the Ile de la Cite with the Left Bank, lovers inscribe their names on a lock, fasten it to the railing of the bridge, and then toss the keys into the dark Seine.

It's a way of declaring love, a romantic gesture and, perhaps, an attempt at gaining immortality. Whatever happens in the future, our love-lock will always remain, and our names will always be entwined on a bridge in Paris.

I can't help but smile at the simplicity of the gesture. Apparently the authorities have tried to quash this habit, but have had give in to public pressure - people's power. Yet the symbolism of using a lock to express your love is ambiguous. In fairy stories, a door that is padlocked implies something that is hidden, even forbidden. And of course, humans being humans, we are irresitibly drawn to the forbidden, often with fatal consequences. Bluebeard kept a chamber of his castle under lock and key and warned his wife never to venture into the forbidden space. Of course one day she did, to find the bloodless corpses of his former wives. Terrified, she realised her mistake, but too late; she had fallen into her husband's morbid trap and and quickly, horrifyingly, met the same fate as her predecessors. According to Jungians, Bluebeard represents the animus or male personification within woman - in the words of Jungian pyschoanalyst M-L. von Franz, Bluebeard "personifies all those semiconscious, cold, destructive reflections that invade a woman in the small hours, especially when she has failed to realize some obligation of feeling." Hmmmm. Let me just say, I'm not a Jungian.

On the other hand, we keep things under lock and key in order to deny change, which denies growth. A love that is kept under lock and key is a love which is bound to putrify and die. Didn't the medieval crusader lock his wife's forbidden zone in a chastity belt, in an attempt to deny entry to others into his property. To be locked in, has all sorts of stifling connotations. Neil Young once sang "You lose the word love when you say the word mine". Well these days plenty of young lovers in Paris are shouting to the world "He or She is mine forever".

Keys without the locks have all sorts of meanings in western art. An old man with a key, or a set of keys, is probably St. Peter with the keys to heaven, or he might be a prophet or simply a member of the church who carries the key to salvation; a bird with a key in its beak usually symbolises salvation.

A key put into a lock has a clear erotic connotation, and thousands of examples can be found in art and popular imagery. Of course in erotic imagery the key being inserted into the lock is about to carrying out the action of unlocking rather than locking, yet the newset romantic gesture in Paris involves locking rather than unlocking. And a logical extrapolation would mean that if the lock represents the female genitalia and the key the male, then the many keys tossed daily into the River Seine would represent some form of joyous castration, an uncomfortable thought.

A famous example of the lock and key as a sacred symbol is found in the Merode altarpiece from the early 15th century Flemish artist Robert Campin where the door represents the entrance to heaven, the lock represents charity and the key the desire for God.

Robert Campin: detail

The locks that now grace the bridges of Paris in the vicinity of Notre-Dame are certainly not altarpieces, but they do have something ritualistic about them. On the one hand we have the great cathedral providing the ancient symbol of a religious faith of a bygone age; on the other the spontaneous gesture of the locks demonstrating a symbol of contemporary profane love. I wonder which will last longer.

Robert Campin: Merode Altarpiece

Ruins in Paris

2011-10-30T13:20:00.002+01:00

Earlier this month I spent a long weekend in Paris. Paris in the autumn, but 28 degrees centigrade everyday. It was heavenly.

One morning we paid a visit to the Louvre to view one of my favourite rooms, the big hall with 19th century French paintings, where one of our students gave a presentation on David's Coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte. It is a huge painting, but the audience that crowded around the painting as the student gave her presentation was fairly big too, as you can see in the photo below. Sometimes it is difficult to see the art among the crowds.

Because I had written something on my blog recently about Delacroix's horses, I took the opportunity to take this photo - a detail from his The Death of Sardanapalus.

I am a creature of habit, and I always take a light lunch at one of the restaurants in the beautiful and peaceful Tuileries Garden. This is where the French Royal Family were finally deposed in August 1792. After the mob had taken the palace the unfortunate Swiss Guards had to be scraped from the curtains and ceilings.

Nothing of that terrible violence remains today, but I did spot a new work of art that provides a warning for the future. As we strolled through the garden I spotted (well, how can one really miss it,) a reclining, giant white column, reminding us, after all we had just come from Switzerland, of an oversized Alphorn. One of the things about contemporary art in public spaces is, your never quite sure what it is. You're presented with a dilemma: what is this? Is it a piece of rubbish? Something that has just fallen out of space? An unfinished piece of roadworks? A gigantic joke? Or is it a work of art? I decided to risk making a fool of myself and prompty pronounced "O look, a work of art".

Like most works of public art, it simply begged to be climbed upon. But the good, respectable Parisians relaxed on the green caste-iron chairs or walked primly past, ignoring the unignorable. After all, how can you not notice a giant column 100 meters long that is lying on the floor, tipping into the pond, like an oversized cigarette, or even better, a gigantic joint resting on an ash tray.

As I said, works like this are simply asking to be climbed upon. But not being the brave sort, I suggested to a student who had accompanied me that she should. And so she did.

Admittedly, she didn't get very far.

So, you are no doubt bursting to know what this long white piece of plaster is. It is called Poems for Earthlings and it is the creation of the Argentinian artist Adrian Villar Rojas. It is, I suppose, a reminder that our civilization will also some day come to an end, that all that will remain of our proud towers and gadgetary will be ruins that aliens will clamber upon. It is apt that this piece has come to lie where the ancien regime came to its bitter end in 1792.

Perhaps Poems for Earthlings is meant to depress us and it certainly reminded me of one of my favourite poems, Shelley's Ozymandias:

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

However, despite rising temperatures and news of floods in New Zealand and the Philipines, Italy and Thailand, despite news of rising seas and glacier meltdown in Greenland and the Alps, despite the catastrophe of tsunami and nuclear contamination in Japan, it was hard to feel depressed in the warmth and sunshine of Paris in October, even if that unseasonal heat is a harbinger of things to come.

Wagner Article in History Today Magazine

2011-10-23T20:22:00.000+02:00

My article on Richard Wagner and the historical background to his composing of Tristan und Isolde has just appeared in the November issue of History Today, now available in shops like Borders and W.H. Smiths. You can read the introduction of "Richard and Mathilde" online.

The magazine has also published this video of Leonard Bernstein conducting Tristran und Isolde to coincide with my article.

Urban Knitting in Zurich

2011-10-03T21:32:00.000+02:00

Using the slogan "Wool in the City" a bunch of creative people treated the city of Zurich to a new type of friendly graffiti this weekend – Urban Knitting. Ignoring warnings from the police, teams of knitters hung their works from lampposts, sculptures, park benches, even fire hydrants, in what must be one of the most inoffensive mass illegal actions ever. The phenomenon started in Austin, Texas in 2005 and has since spread to the likes of New York and Berlin. Unlike traditional graffiti it causes no damage at all.

Modes of Transport and Classical Music

2011-09-29T23:47:00.003+02:00

Listening to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony this morning, I had an image of a man, Schubert I suppose, riding a galloping horse. And I wondered could early 19th century romanticism be linked to the main form of transportation at the time - horse riding? Romantic painters like Delacroix and Gericault certainly loved to give us graphic images of horses straining at the bit, eyes enlarged in fear, nostrals flaring. Could these wild horses be present in romantic works like Schubert's symphonies as well?

Delacroix: Lion attacking an Arab on a Horse

And now that I think about it, is it a coincidence that the jittering movements and improvisations of jazz coincide with the onset of our modern obsession, the darting automobile, again reflected in the visual arts in the late works of Mondrian, such as "Broadway Boogie-Woogie".

And what of today? Do not Steve Reich's tedious works of repetition reflect the barley perceptible coughing motion of the modern high-speed train? I can imagine enjoying them on my iPod while riding the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto, but surely not seated on a saddle. Do not the pared down and depersonalised sounds of the works of Philip Glass reflect the atmosphere of airports and commercial flights? And if I need a parallel from the visual arts, let me pick the abstract works of Robert Nymann, as white and featureless as the atmosphere through which we fly, broken only by the turbelence of his rippled surface.

Robert Nymann

Marx said something like - show me your technology and I'll show you your government. Doolan now says, show me your means of transport and I'll show you your music. Just a thought.

History Comes Back to Haunt Holland

2011-09-18T16:25:00.002+02:00

It is commonly asserted that one ignores the past at one’s peril; that a history suppressed will return to haunt you. Such is the case in the Netherlands, where a court verdict last week revived disturbing memories that had long been buried. On Tuesday a court in The Hague found the Dutch state responsible for carrying out a massacre in 1947 in Rawagede, Indonesia, and furthermore called on the Dutch state to award compensation to the plaintiffs – seven elderly widows of those massacred. The court decided to ignore the fact that this crime is beyond the statute of limitations, a move that is normally only made to deal with Nazi war crimes.

Memorial to the victims at Rawagede

The Dutch had ruled most of Indonesia for 350 years, but found themselves prisoners of the Japanese from 1942 to 1945. With the defeat of Japan, Indonesian nationalists declared independence. The Dutch tried, with great difficulty, to reassert their control of the archipelago. After over four years of bitter conflict The Netherlands was forced to concede independence to Indonesia in December 1949.

By the end of the war numerous cases of military excesses had come to the attention of the Dutch public. Massacres by Dutch special forces on the island of Celebes had been the subject of parliamentary debate. The massacre in Rawagede had been the subject of debate at the United Nations Security Council in 1948. Such incidents gradually led much of the Dutch press to turn against the war. In February 1949 De Groene Amsterdammer published a letter from an unidentified officer. He wrote:

"KNIL [Royal Dutch Indies Army] officers (…) defend with passion and conviction the assertion that, for instance, if you are shot at from a kampong [village] than this kampong should be set on fire from four sides before the inhabitants have the chance to run away. And whoever then tries to escape (…) you shoot with a machine-gun, preferably not bothering with if these include women of children.”

The officer then drew a comparison with Putten, a village that had become infamous as being the site of one of the worst Nazi atrocities perpetrated on Dutch soil. The officer also wrote of summary executions of prisoners who are “simply shot behind the head and then buried.” He described the Indonesians as living under “military terror.”

The graveyard at Rawagede

After Indonesian independence a great exodus of Dutch citizens, perhaps 300,000 in all, left the new republic, where they were unwanted, and most found themselves receiving a cold welcome in their fatherland. They discovered that there was no audience for their complaints. Few people in the Netherlands were interested in their stories of hardship in Japanese prison camps, and they could count on very little sympathy for their losses during what was now considered a futile colonial war that had ended in defeat. With the experience of World War Two and the Nazi occupation still very fresh, the equalitarian Dutch nation settled into a collective memory which stressed the sameness of the citizen’s experience. The little, plucky Dutch had been occupied by their nasty German neighbor and all had suffered equally. Finally they had been liberated, thanks to their government in exile, led by Queen Wilhelmina, their heroic resistance and the invaluable help from the Allies – the USA, Great Britain and the Canadians. This was the national past and calls for alternative narratives were treated like calls for exceptionalism.

While the ex-colonials found their stories buried in silence, the 120,000 soldiers who had been drafted into the Dutch army to fight a futile war in the tropics, arrived home to a country that, shamed by defeat, had lost interest in them. Not only that, but, as we have seen, there were some who believed that the actions of certain soldiers had been disgraceful, even comparable to the behavior of German soldiers on Dutch soil. But with the former colony lost, the need for further official inquiries was quietly allowed to lapse, including the official investigation surrounding the massacre at Rawagede. Better to simply put a lid on it.

And so the atrocities of the 1945-1949 war years were allowed to slip out of the national memory. During the past few decades this memory lapse has been undergoing a gradual correction, and the verdict last week is yet another episode in the historical dialogue that the Dutch nation has been engaging in regarding its recent past. We are certain to hear more in the future.

You can read my article from History Today Magazine "Time for Dutch Courage in Indonesia" here.