A Gecko for Luck: 18 years in Indonesia

happiness.

General Map of Indonesia The Netherlands for comparison: (not exact in detail)

Deciding for Indonesia

Very soon after completing my studies as a telecommunications engineer in Germany I made up my mind to go and gain experience in the United States. I had inherited the urge to seek out distant lands from my travel-loving parents. Once a year they used to take a major trip, and at the great age of 90 they said, The only place left for us now is the moon. So it is hardly surprising that even at a very early age it was my ideal to combine work with travel and adventure. I had a vision of a life like that in those novels of life in the colonies which glorified the colonial period and which were bestsellers among the young people of my day. The reality was of course somewhat different. During my time at university I had already spent some time in central Turkey under the auspices of the German Academic Exchange Service, and got a sense of what Asia is like. My parents had always been totally supportive of any foreign travel, as they had both travelled widely in their youth. My mother, for example, had already spent a year each in Holland, France and Switzerland before she was twenty, which was a very unusual achievement for a young girl at the beginning of the last century. .

I had chosen communications technology as a subject because I had been interested in telecommunications from my very early youth. Archaeology was actually my first choice for a university course, but because I knew that my prospects of getting a job with a degree in that subject were not very good, I decided on telecommunications. This was a relatively new, fast developing field and graduates in this subject were very much in demand. As a boy I had experimented with crystal receivers and was always delighted whenever a new and distant radio station came through in my earphones. It was my neighbour Hans in Tübingen who opened a new field of interest for me – he had been a Luftwaffe radio operator in the Second World War, and spent his spare time building transmitters. He was one of the first people to get an official amateur radio license after the war and, with his help, I spent every free minute familiarising myself with this technology. I quickly learned Morse code and when I was only sixteen I built my own first simple transmitter. I made the money for this by selling radio receivers.

Shortly after the end of the Second World War the Himmelwerk company, which normally produced electric motors, had also set up a factory producing radio receivers, where they made the ‘Zauberflöte’, a modern radio set in a large and impressive housing. Since this new initiative of Himmelwerk’s proved not to be profitable, they soon closed this branch of the business down, and the mountains of polished wooden radio housings, chassis, loudspeakers and parts which ended up on the rubbish dump were my good fortune. To the great alarm of my parents I dragged home cartload after cartload of these parts and filled our attic with them. Then my mass production began! I built very simple radio receivers in the large housings and sold them at a good profit. It was a great success.

Officially I was still not allowed to transmit with my first station, but when my friend Hans was at our house we tested my equipment thoroughly. As soon as I was old enough – as far as I can remember, you had to be 21 in those days – I took my amateur radio exam and built new and ever stronger transmitters. Now I could contact the whole world. Thus my choice of subject was only a natural consequence of the technical interests I had already developed at an early age.

After I finished my studies my wanderlust was reawakened. I worked in Germany for just a few months to save up the money for a crossing to the USA. I travelled to New York on the flagship of North German Lloyd, the TS Bremen – the fifth ship of that name. It was a large, elegant and fast luxury liner that had started its maiden transatlantic voyage on the 9th of July 1959. A floating 5-star luxury hotel with the world-famous emblem of North German Lloyd, the blue and white flag with the anchor and the keys of Bremen flying on the flagstaff. I was very fortunate to be on it, because when HAPAG and North German Lloyd merged in 1970 to form the HAPAG-Lloyd company this service between Bremerhaven and New York was unfortunately abandoned and the TS Bremen was sold off to Greece.

From the very beginning I worked for a large firm in New York, and after receiving security clearance and swearing an oath that I had never been a Communist and would never become one in the future I was put in charge of the construction of what was at the time, because of its 50 megawatt pulse power, the most powerful radar station in the world. This radar station in the vicinity of Buffalo was to be the first in the American DEW (Defence Early Warning) line. Ultimately these early warning radar stations stretched from Alaska to Greenland, with the aim of detecting possible attacks from the north by the Soviets on the USA and Canada as early as possible. I found the work extremely enjoyable, but after its successful completion I stretched my feelers out towards other regions. I wanted to see a lot more of the world. I had already had an offer of a job in the Caribbean –the Virgin Islands – as sound engineer with a record company: a new field where my training was only marginally relevant. But since I loved calypso, salsa, samba, merengue – in fact, every kind of Caribbean music – I found this offer interesting, and the Caribbean would also have been a pleasant environment.

I also had informal contact with the New York branch of Telefunken. At that time Telefunken was still a daughter company of AEG, but later they merged to form AEG-Telefunken. In the summer of 1961, after two years in the USA, I received from them to my great surprise the offer of a post as ‘Resident Engineer’ to build up a Telefunken branch in Indonesia. This was obviously a much more interesting prospect, as this was a region I was totally unfamiliar with, and also a new challenge. .

The title of ‘Resident’ was a survival from the time when the Dutch were represented at the courts of the princes, who were still actually ruling. When the principalities ceased to play a political role and the princes, with very few exceptions, had become paid puppets of the colonial government, the Residents became practically provincial governors representing the Dutch supreme power to the native population, and were thus the actual authorities. A Residency could include an area with a population of several hundred thousand, and the Resident had almost unlimited authority within his district. A whole series of Dutch officials worked under the Resident, such as the Assistant Resident, inspectors, overseers, tax collectors and so on. Later the British introduced the title of ‘Resident’ for the representatives of their crown in their colonies. The duties of the Resident had naturally changed in the mean time, and today the title is hardly used: ‘Area Manager’ or ‘Chief Representative’ are the more usual terms. While I was in Indonesia AEG-Telefunken had other Residents stationed in the region in Thailand, India, Pakistan, Iran and later even in China.

Initially my area of responsibility for Telefunken included the whole Indonesian archipelago. At first, AEG had their own Resident Engineer stationed in Jakarta. A few years later, when I became responsible for the merged AEG-Telefunken concern, Singapore, Malaysia, the Sultanate of Brunei and the Philippines were added to my area. As Resident Engineer I was supposed to build up contacts with all important potential clients in the area so as to hear about calls for tender as early as possible, and, when opportunity arose, to influence these in the interests of the home company. As well as this, tenders had to be written, orders secured, contracts negotiated and closed, and so on. Just as an ambassador represents his country, a Resident represents his company. One important responsibility was creating demand. One had to know as early as possible where something needed to be improved or rebuilt. This would be pointed out to the relevant government office, with recommendations for action and if it did then come to the call for a tender, we would be well ahead of the competition. In Indonesia one had to have, as well as the relevant technical knowledge, a certain degree of flexibility to fit in with the Indonesian mentality and to recognise and understand relationships within the native business world. Although, as I have already mentioned, my area of responsibility expanded to other South East Asian countries in the course of the years, Jakarta remained my main base, as Indonesia was the most important market for AEG-Telefunken in the region.

The very names set me dreaming: Indonesia and Insulinde, or the island of Java, earlier known as the ‘Queen of the Tropics’ or, during the colonial period the ‘Jewel in Holland’s Crown’, or Borneo, now Kalimantan, ‘land of rivers, gold and diamonds’ (Kali = river, Mas = gold, Intan = diamond) and Celebes, today called Sulawesi! I also wanted to leave the USA anyway, as I was about to be drafted into military service even though I was not a US citizen and only had a green card. This I obviously wanted to avoid at all costs, especially as I, as a wartime child in Germany, belonged to one of the ‘white year-groups’, that is, the year-groups that were spared military service. This was because they were among those who, as children and young people, had lived through the terrible events suffered in all their severity by the civilian population. I had also grown up in a period when post-war Germany was still not allowed to have its own army.

For example, at the age of six I was separated from my mother and siblings when I was evacuated from the city of Stuttgart, which was endangered by allied bombing raids. Because these happened almost daily, regular schooling was hardly possible. On my way to school I often had to seek shelter in ditches or behind trees from bomb shrapnel or low-flying aircraft that shot up everything that moved. But as a child I watched with fascination the aerial duels between the Luftwaffe and the Allies, and also collected bomb and shell shrapnel from the streets and fields. We boys collected and swapped shrapnel, just as we later did with stamps. When the bombing raids on Stuttgart became ever more serious, the whole first year of my primary school, the Prag-Volksschule, was evacuated to a safer rural environment, together with its teachers.

I had to spend the entire four year primary-school period, as well as the first year of grammar school, in the homes of various foster parents in Böttingen, Gundelsheim and Marbach on the Neckar. This was not always easy since we children were simply billeted compulsorily anywhere possible, and since this meant an extra mouth to feed, we were usually not very welcomed by our foster parents. In one strictly Catholic household I was constantly – as a Protestant child – reproached for bringing great misfortune on the family. They even blamed me for the son of the family’s fatal car accident. As a child, I could not understand this at all and suffered bitterly because of missing my family, and especially my mother (since my father was also away from home during the war). How often I wept for hunger and homesickness in my bed. I then used to creep out of the house at night to a nearby field to steal and eat the sugar beet that was grown as animal food or for the production of synthetic petrol. During the war years sugar beet was grown on any spare patches of land for this purpose, which was so important for the war machine. I well remember one evening when the village forester and hunter of Böttingen on the Neckar caught me stealing. When I told him my story he took me home with him: He had shot a raven, and we had a delicious raven soup. I still have bad dreams about this time of hunger and separation from my mother and family. I spent my first grammar-school year in Marbach: by now I was almost eleven and was still away from family and home.

When I sensed and heard that the end of the war was near, I ran away from school and, with my little basket-work case, made my way by train and hitch-hiking, since I didn’t have a pfennig in my pocket, to Schwäbisch Gmünd, where my mother and my younger brother had ended up, since my parents’ home in Stuttgart had been totally destroyed in a bombing raid. Fortunately my mother and younger brother had survived the raid in a nearby bunker and had been taken in by my mother’s brother, my uncle Karl, in Schwäbisch Gmünd After the end of the war I then continued to go to the grammar school in Schwäbisch Gmünd until five years later my whole family moved to Tübingen, where my father had found an interesting job. This makes it quite understandable why, after all these experiences, the idea of doing military service – and in the USA at that – was unthinkable.

My contract with Telefunken was initially intended to last three years, and so I decided to take on Indonesia as my new field of activity. I was only 28, and said to myself that I could always come back to the Caribbean after my three years in Indonesia. But then I discovered my love for Indonesia, and stayed there for 18 years!

On my voyage to the USA on board the TS Bremen I experienced the pleasurable life of a transatlantic crossing, and so it was only natural that I wanted to travel back to Europe by ship. I travelled on the SS Constitution, on which a few years earlier Grace Kelly with her entourage of 300 journalists had travelled for her wedding to Prince Rainier III in Monaco. I arrived back just as the Wall which divided Germany was being put up.

Preparation

In Germany I now began an almost two-year long period of collecting information in preparation for my new job in Indonesia. I was on the road a lot, in Ulm on the Donau, Backnang, Essen, Munich, and Hamburg as well as six months in Berlin, to get to know the whole spectrum of Telefunken’s telecommunications products. They made everything, from a miniature transmitter in the form of a pill, the ‘Heidelberg Capsule’, which was swallowed to examine the stomach and intestines, from small radio sets for the police, the army and private users, through directional transmitters, communications transmitters of all grades of power, commercial receivers, radar equipment, television transmitters to major radio transmitters. At that period Telefunken produced the whole range of wireless communication. I had nothing to do with what were called ‘brown goods’ (radios, televisions, tape recorders). In the company we somewhat superciliously called that our toy department.

Telefunken was already well-known as a brand name before my arrival in Indonesia. In Semarang, on Java, there was, even before my time, a radio factory that assembled and even produced Telefunken radio sets. These sets could be found all over Indonesia and were regarded as the number one. What people actually called these sets was, however, ‘Telepunken’ and the factory in Semarang was known as the ‘Pabrik (Fabrik = factory) Telepunken’, since the Indonesians cannot pronounce ‘F’. Because of this there are very few words which contain an F in the Bahasa Indonesia, and all of them are loan words, mostly from either the medical field or from Arabic. In the 1960s every Indonesian knew ‘Telepunken’ as a brand for radio sets, just as German knives and scissors from Solingen, with the brand name ‘Tjap Mata’ and an eye as trade mark, were well known as German quality products. Unfortunately, nothing remains of this today: Japanese and Chinese products rule the market.

During the Dutch colonial period AEG and Telefunken had been very active in Indonesia. Around 1900 AEG supplied, through its branch in Java, the ‘Algemeene Nederlandsch Indische Electriciteits-Maatschappi’, the first electric tram system for Batavia, today’s Jakarta. These trams are often shown on old postcards of Batavia as a great attraction of the day. In 1905 Telefunken installed spark gap and high frequency machine transmitters for the first wireless telegraphy connections within the archipelago. In 1910 AEG built transformer stations and energy distributors for the towns of Surabaya, Malang and Semarang. In 1912 Telefunken had founded the Deutsche Südseegesellschaft für drahtlose Telegraphie (German South Sea Wireless Telegraphy Company) in concert with the Deutsch-Niederländischen Telegraphen-Gesellschaft (German-Dutch Telegraph Company) which built what was called the South Sea Network. Its main objective was to make possible wireless telegraphy contact between German possessions in the South Seas from Samoa to New Guinea. The company was also active in the Netherlands Indies and by 1913 had already built seven land stations there. Between 1917 and 1922 the major transmitter station at Malabar on Java, near Bandung, which had a 400 kilowatt Telefunken high frequency transmitter, was built. This transmitter was responsible for the first wireless connection between East Asia and Europe – it was destroyed by the Japanese in the last World War. Many Dutch cargo and passenger ships which sailed between their homeland on the North Sea and their colony in South East Asia were already at that time equipped with Telefunken marine transmission and reception equipment. Around 1920 AEG delivered the first electric locomotives to Indonesia for the rail connection between Batavia and Buitenzorg – after the colonial period, these cities became known as Jakarta and Bogor. I therefore already had a good foundation to build upon.

I now began to read literature about Indonesia every day, discovering that Indonesia was much bigger and more important than I had at first assumed: it is not only the largest Islamic country in the world, but also has, after China, India and the USA, the fourth largest population in the world and is the biggest country in Southeast Asia in terms of economy, surface area and population. Next only to India and the USA, Indonesia is the third largest democracy in the world – all these facts were previously unknown to me.

In the meanwhile in Germany I was expected to take care of visiting Indonesian clients from both the civilian and military sectors. This made it possible for me to gain experience of and insight into the Indonesian mentality and way of doing business. Since the hospitality often continued over the weekend, so that I took these guests on trips to see the local sights and dined them with oriental opulence, this was not always exactly cheap. Once I seem to have taken this a bit too far, because when the management saw my expenses claim I was carpeted and somewhat crudely asked if I had been trying to choke the Indonesians with a surfeit of langoustes.

At the invitation of Telefunken two young officers of the Indonesian navy spent a few months on a German language course at the Goethe Institute in Blaubeuren. I looked after them as well: for example, these two young men (like many other Indonesians) were frequent guests at my parents’ home in Tübingen, where they always kept open house for foreign visitors. Some of them later rose to important posts in the army, the navy or government ministries, so that the expense of entertaining them turned out to be well worthwhile, as I later had very good contacts with almost all of them.

My parents had taken these two young officers especially into their hearts, because it was the first time either of them had been away from Indonesia. My parents therefore wanted to show them as much as possible of what life in a German family is like, and took them around everywhere with them at weekends. This led to some amusing conclusions on the part of the young officers:

My parents were very keen on nature, and loved to take the Indonesian guests mushroom picking in the forest, where they also occasionally collected pieces of wood for the stove at home. A friend of my father’s, who was a hunter, also took the pair of them hunting with him, and occasionally a deer would be shot – and a choice cut of it given to my parents. The two young Indonesians were delighted and fascinated.

Many years later in Indonesia, after I had long been friends with the parents of one of the young officers, the father took me aside and said with amusement that he must show me what his son had reported about his time in Tübingen. He showed me the letter his son had written home: Herr Geerken’s parents and brothers and sisters are all very hospitable and polite. For the winter, the family collects wood from the forest, the father looks for mushrooms and berries, and a friend of the family shoots deer in the forest and brings them meat. But they do at least have an electric stove and a television.

In 1963 the time finally came. Shortly before my departure for Indonesia, I married my girlfriend Hannelore, who also worked for AEG-Telefunken. Since at that time it was regarded as dangerous to send unmarried men to Indonesia – and that was probably true of all other exotic countries – my decision was very pleasing to the management, especially as my future wife, as secretary of the head of the export department, knew her way around the firm very well. Given her knowledge of foreign languages, her love of travel and many shared interests, we were a good team to send abroad.

In the Dutch colonial period things had, however, been different: they wanted to save money and married couples were not wanted. For subordinate positions in the plantations in particular, they only sent out bachelors, who even had to commit themselves in their contracts to remaining unmarried for at least five years. The general opinion was that they would, because unencumbered, settle more quickly into their new jobs. With the help of their native ‘housekeepers’ they would also automatically learn the Malay language more quickly.

After the wedding the preparations for the voyage out went full speed ahead. I had managed to persuade the management to allow us to travel to Jakarta by sea: a wonderful substitute for a honeymoon! Since I was going to have to start everything from scratch in Jakarta, there was a great deal of baggage, including both office equipment and personal items. For my part, that seemed a good argument for being allowed to travel by sea. As I was told again and again, that was the first and only time AEG-Telefunken allowed an employee business travel by sea. In those days even flying (by propeller aircraft) took at least four days, with overnight stops in Cairo, Karachi and Bangkok. On a later occasion, I made the journey in the legendary Super Constellation and the DC 6, spending the night in the famous (and infamous for discomfort, dirt and noise because the rooms were simple wooden sheds right next to the runways) Midway Hotel at Karachi Airport. There were very few aircraft at that time, and if one of the flights was delayed, the runways were lit with petroleum lamps. Karachi was an important intermediate stop on Far East flights, and as there were no night flights on this run at that time, passengers spent the night in this primitive accommodation and continued on their way at dawn. The flights were long, but full of variety and interest: the relatively slow propeller aircraft rarely flew above 6000 feet, so that passengers could see the landscape, with its villages, fields and roads, rolling out beneath them like a map. You could even see caravans in the desert, and peasants working their fields.

A little later BOAC began the first scheduled jet passenger service to Southeast Asia. The aircraft was the 36-seater de Havilland Comet IV. It looked as if the Midway hotel at Karachi Airport would now become less important, but since the Comet IV had continual technical problems, and there were crashes in Ankara, Cairo, Karachi, Calcutta, Singapore and Bangkok, interest in this speedy connection to the Far East declined and long-haul flights using this first jet airliner were abandoned. As a result, it was possible to enjoy the ‘luxury’ of the Midway Hotel right down to the end of the 60s. Everywhere in the world air travel developed at an amazing rate – only about ten years later, in 1972, the first jumbo jets were in service on the Far East route via Bangkok.

Crates began to pile up in the company’s despatch department, personal as well as official, since we had to buy quite a lot to take with us: furniture, crockery, a refrigerator, kitchen equipment, air conditioning, a washing machine and a drier, an emergency generator and many other things. There was also a car – for my wife’s personal use, since I would have a company car in Jakarta. At first, the dryer gave rise to a lot of amusement among the western expatriates in Jakarta, but later, in the rainy season, we became the object of general envy, because our washing was dry after only an hour, while even after three days on the line other people’s washing still ended up damp, smelly and musty.

So that I would be properly dressed in the tropics, I tried to buy a pith helmet from a tropical outfitter’s in Hamburg. However, a sales assistant there, who had never actually been to the tropics but seemed to embody an encyclopaedic knowledge of tropical manners and behaviour, informed me somewhat condescendingly that pith helmets were not only an extremely English item of clothing (and therefore in his opinion totally unsuitable for Indonesia with its Dutch background) but also totally out of fashion now that the colonial age had come to an end. Properly chastened, but with a heavy heart, I abandoned the idea of buying this exotic headgear.

For several decades a big black steamer trunk (called Überseekoffer – ocean-going trunk – in German) belonging to my travel-loving maternal grandfather had lain in my parents’ attic. This was a massive piece of luggage, handmade of grained leather and strips of oak with brass fittings, which contained all kinds of storage possibilities. This almost wardrobe-sized monster was the kind of thing that had been used for travel at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. You laid it on its side and opened it like a book: on one side there were drawers for small items and pigeonholes for underwear, shoes and similar things; the other side was meant for hanging trousers and suits – and there was even a place for a bottle with the usual drink for the voyage. With its status-symbolic multicoloured labels from America and many European countries it looked like the property of a real man of the world. When it was full, it took two strong men to carry it. This old trunk had already accompanied me on my voyage to the USA, and now it was packed for the far longer voyage to Indonesia. This was to be its last trip: in the warm, damp equatorial climate it finally fell apart and found its final resting place, as its German name would suggest, on the other side of the ocean.

In 1963 Indonesia was still relatively unknown territory for the Germans. When I told people I was going to spend a few years on the island of Java, they usually answered, Oh, yes, Jaffa: that’s where the oranges come from. The young nation of Indonesia seemed not to exist in terms of German general knowledge, even though it is a vast island state, stretching nearly 5,500 kilometres from west to east, the distance from Berlin to eastern Mongolia. But even I had some clichés fixed in my mind: ideas that came from my youthful reading and adventure comics, the main one of which was tiger hunting in the jungles of Sumatra. Because of my pleasant and stimulating geography teacher at Parler-Gymnasium in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Dr. Schurr, I did however already know something about the Indonesian archipelago. In his fascinating lessons he returned again and again to the subject of Celebes, now called Sulawesi, the island which thrusts its four arms far out to sea to the east in the shape of an orchid. He also talked about the plantations on Sumatra and the cigars that he loved so well with their world famous Sumatra wrappers. He seemed to be fixated on Indonesia, and even then aroused my interest in that part of the world. On my first leave in Germany I tried to visit him – with a box of Sumatra cigars in my pocket – to find out what had given rise to his especial interest in this archipelago. Perhaps he had even been there himself. Unfortunately he had died in the meanwhile, and I was unable to solve the riddle. But even today I still clearly remember those geography lessons which I found so exciting.

Although German-Indonesian relations go back many centuries, the country was known to only a few people at the beginning of the 1960s. As early as the 16th century the first German explorers visited the Netherlands Indies, and in the 17th century several thousand adventurous young German-speaking men undertook the voyage out there to work as sailors, artisans, merchants or officials for the Dutch. At the end of the 18th century Duke Carl Eugen of Württemberg, for the price of 300,000 gulden, sent a mercenary army of 2,000 soldiers and officers to support the United Netherlands East India Company in the colony. By the terms of the contract, replacements were constantly sent out as well. Most of these soldiers married Javanese women and remained there. The duke even sold off his own sons to the Dutch, though this was at least as officers. None of them came back. The chroniclers do not tell us whether they fell in battle, or whether – like most of the ordinary soldiers – they simply settled down with a pretty Javanese woman. There are some historians who claim that because of the private activities of these soldiers at least five per cent of all Indonesians have Württembergish blood in their veins: today that would be a good 12 million! The Duke of Württemberg made a great deal of money out of the deal anyway, what with the sale of the soldiers, the money paid for those who fell in combat and the savings on pensions for them.

It was even a German, the ship’s doctor and scientist Adolf Bastian (among other things, he wrote a 5-volume work Indonesia or the Islands of the Malayan Archipelago), who coined and established the name ‘Indonesia’: as the archipelago was near India, he coined the term from a combination of the Latin word indus for India and the Greek word νήσoς (nessos) for island. This word, which applied to the whole archipelago, was taken up by the Indonesian independence movement. During the Dutch colonial period the word was strictly forbidden and could not be pronounced in public, because the Dutch saw it as an attack on their rule. Every attempt to unite the archipelago’s inhabitants beyond the limits of tribal allegiance, race and language was hindered by the colonial government by all the means in their power: the watchword ‘divide and rule’ was important for maintaining their hegemony. Unlike the word ‘Malaya’, which is a customary anthropological term for the whole area, and defines its inhabitants as Malays, Indonesia is a political and cultural concept, which thus strengthens the sense of national identity

A whole series of German writers and poets, such as Goethe, Schiller, Chamisso, Gerstäcker, Fontane, Haeckel, Kleist, Schubart (who wrote, among other things, a fine tragic poem about the despatch of the 2,000 soldiers to Java by Duke Carl Eugen), Helbig, Vicki Baum and many more, have written about the island nation and its millennia of culture. A name to be particularly emphasised is that of Walter Spies, who arrived in Java in 1923 and settled on Bali in 1927. He founded a group of painters and attracted a colony of native artists and civilisation-weary European Bohemians. It is therefore surprising that at the beginning of the 60s so relatively little was known about Indonesia in Germany. Another contributory factor is that the Indonesians themselves tend to see their history as beginning only after the bloody struggle against the Dutch and the declaration of independence in 1945, suppressing their history before independence.

The former German Ambassador to Indonesia, Heinrich Seemann, who knew Indonesia particularly well, wrote a book about German traces in Indonesia and early German-Indonesian relations: Von Goethe bis Emil Nolde, Indonesien in der deutschen Geisteswelt (From Goethe to Emil Nolde. Indonesia in the German Imagination), a book that is to be highly recommended.

Outward Bound on the MS Victoria

After we had made all the preparations for our voyage out, writing lists of all the things we were taking with us for the transporters, the insurance and the Indonesian customs; when we had our clearance certificates and visas; when we had been examined at Tübingen for medical fitness for life in the tropics and had all our vaccinations; a railway goods wagon was reserved and filled right up to the roof. We then travelled to Genoa in a sleeping car, with our goods wagon and another wagon with our car on it coupled to the back of the train. In October 1963 we embarked for Jakarta on the Lloyd Triestino ship, MS Victoria. The ship’s sirens hooted, and the mooring lines were cast off. A four-week sea voyage and unknown lands lay before us: a great new adventure was beginning!

It was a delightful voyage: MS Victoria was a proper passenger liner – 11,700 tons and three classes – which sailed regularly on the route from Genoa to Hong Kong and back. Thanks to AEG-Telefunken we travelled first class in a small company of 60 people, with our own deck, our own pool and our own five-man band. We felt really privileged, and enjoyed every single day: it was, after all, our postponed honeymoon. Very soon we formed part of a small clique which included an Australian and a German diplomatic couple, a few French and Italian people, and another German couple from Offenbach who made this voyage every year to sell German leather goods in Asia. Before arriving at every port, the goods were displayed in the lounge and the customers came on board to place their orders. A few months later they travelled the same route and delivered what had been ordered. An enviable job, which also had its positive side for us: if the leather business went well, there were free beers for all in the bar.

Our voyage took us first to Naples, past the active volcano, Stromboli. As we passed through the Straits of Messina in bright sunlight, the snow-capped peak of Etna came into view: it was the last snow we were to see for many years. Then on over the mirror-calm Mediterranean to Port Said.

In the very first days at sea we were struck by two men who sat opposite each other at a table for two and who, apart from greeting each other, never said a word. The older man was a Frenchman and the other a German called Ackermann. Each of them spoke only his own language. In the morning at breakfast they greeted each like this: the Frenchman came to the table and greeted Herr Ackermann with Bonjour. Ackermann stood up, said, Ackermann and nodded his head. This procedure was repeated the next few days at breakfast, lunch and dinner, until we took the opportunity to tell Herr Ackermann that bonjour meant ‘good day’ and was not the Frenchman’s name. Herr Ackermann thanked us for this information, and the next morning we all waited expectantly to see what the two men would say to each other. The Frenchman was first at the table, Herr Ackermann arrived a little later, and with the benefit of his newly learned language skill, proudly said, Bonjour – whereupon the Frenchman stood up, bowed and said, Ackermann. This destroyed any attempt to keep a straight face, and the whole group of us fell about with laughter.

We continued through the Suez Canal and the Bitter Lakes to Suez. Where dress was concerned, Suez was a turning-point, and we had prepared ourselves for this in Germany: I had a black evening suit and a white dinner jacket with me, and my wife Hannelore had a fine selection of evening dresses. Even today it is an old British tradition, dating from colonial times that the tropics begin at Suez and that ‘East of Suez’ one can only wear white. The whole crew from the captain down, who had worn black uniforms until then, from now on appeared only in white. The male passengers also wore white dinner jackets from here on: the rules aboard liners were very strict. There were also a few very conservative and very British former colonial officials who, from Suez on, wore ‘Red Sea Rig’: a combination of black dinner trousers, dinner shirt and red bow tie and cummerbund. It looked as if it might take some getting used to, but the British seemed to be comfortable with it. This mode of dress had been introduced by the Royal Navy around 1800, and was later taken over by the Americans as ‘Gulf Rig’, though with black tie and cummerbund; nowadays, in the age of air-conditioning, it is hardly seen any more.

The word ‘posh’ also derives from sea-travel in the colonial period: if you were travelling to India by P & O liner, it was a privilege to have a cabin on the shady side of the ship for the hottest part of the journey through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, as there was no air-conditioning at that time. You therefore travelled POSH, Port Outward (to India) and Starboard Home: these were the best cabins, reserved for the upper class, and to have this stamped on your ticket was a status symbol. In our air-conditioned times this is no longer necessary, but the word itself has survived.

We enjoyed life on board the MS Victoria, with its pleasant everyday routine: days and nights, feasting and drinking, dancing and games, sun and bliss. The sun and the moon rose out of the sea and then sank back into it. Foreign landscapes slid calmly and slowly by.

We travelled gently on through the Red Sea to Aden, where we had a half-day stop that I wanted to make use of to buy a duty-free film camera. In those days the normal 8mm film camera was still a hit, Super 8 lay far off in the future. In one of the shops I chose a good camera, paid and was given the wrapped package. For some reason, my wife and I became suspicious, and we unwrapped the camera while we were still in the shop. Just as well, because the salesman was trying to palm us off with a simpler and much cheaper camera. We quickly put things to rights, and left with the right camera. In the evening, shortly before the MS Victoria got under way, the goods which some passengers had bought and were having delivered to the ship for convenience’ sake were delivered. And, lo and behold, many of them had been swindled: some of the packages only had worthless things in them, or even stones.

The journey continued to Karachi, where we met AEG’s Pakistan representative. In Bombay we then had two days’ stopover, enough time for a couple of trips in the surrounding area, and then the MS Victoria headed south again, along the Pepper Coast, as the south western coast of India used to be known. When we got to Colombo on Ceylon, we also had time to drink cocktails in the famous colonial-period hotels, Mount Lavinia and Galle Face.

Because of the excellent Italian food on the MS Victoria (five meals a day!) almost all the passengers had put weight on massively. There was just one of us, an Austrian diplomat on his way to his new post in Singapore, who ate only the smallest of portions and remained fit and slim. When we talked to him about it, he just said, Look around you in the dining room: you’re all committing suicide by knife and fork.

We had now reached tropical waters. It was blissful to bathe in the ship’s pool, which was filled with warm seawater every morning. As the moon sank beneath the sea and only the stars shone in the sky, you could see the trail of phosphorescence left by the disturbance of the plankton by the ship’s wake. For hour after hour, as if hypnotised, I watched this wonder of nature which I was seeing for the first time.

Before we got to Jakarta we crossed the Equator. Every passenger who had not crossed the Equator before had to take part in the traditional ritual – and that included us. Neptune broke an egg over my head, smeared me with tomato ketchup and flour paste and ducked me in the swimming pool. Then, newly christened ‘Marconi’, I was allowed to continue my voyage: Marconi (radio pioneer, Nobel Physics Prize 1909) because I had made friends with the ship’s radio officer and was occasionally allowed, as a radio ham, to use the ship’s radio equipment.

In the early morning of 22 November 1963, the day of President J F Kennedy’s assassination, we passed through the Sunda Strait, past the massive, still active and threatening-looking volcano, Krakatoa. To starboard, through the haze, the palm groves and mangrove forests of the north coast of Java came into view. The journey was coming to an end – far too quickly: we had got used to the amenities of life on board ship.

About midday we reached Jakarta and announced our presence to the harbour of Tanjung Priok with loud blasts of our sirens; but we still had to lie in the roads for hours, and wait for all the procedures that had to be gone through. The immigration officials came on board and checked passports, visas and immunisation certificates. Although only a few passengers were debarking at Java, it took hours before the ship was finally released and allowed to berth.

Several fishermen and traders, who rowed around the ship in their narrow little boats loudly crying their wares, helped us to pass the time. There was everything: carvings, leather goods, fruit. One Javanese man with two parrots and a little boy with tropical fruit even managed to reach the promenade deck. Children in the boats looked up expectantly at us passengers lining the ship’s railings, until we threw a coin out into the oily harbour water in a wide arc. Calmly and surely they then dived after it, and surfaced, laughing, to show their booty. Brightly painted cargo sailing ships, Bugis schooners, floated past us through the oily sea with slack sails. It was a different, exotic world that was welcoming me. I felt like a second Humboldt, and it was just as I had imagined in my bold, boyhood dreams. With a feeling of melancholy, I disembarked.

First Impressions and First Acquaintanceships

By this time twilight had set in. The glowing tropical air of Jakarta wrapped itself around us like a hot wet towel. We were welcomed by two men from PT Guna Elektro, which represented AEG and Telefunken: during my whole time in Indonesia I always worked well with this company. Fortunately, these two locals knew what the customs procedures were, since our cabin luggage was released quite quickly. The pier and the harbour area were crowded with natives in bright sarongs and Europeans clothed in white. Even at this time, I noticed the sweet, spicy smell that is typical of the whole of Indonesia: it was the scent of the Kretek cigarettes, a speciality beloved of the Indonesians which can only be found in that country. The tobacco in these cigarettes is mixed with cloves, and since Indonesians are heavy smokers, the cloying scent of burning cloves hangs over every gathering of people, a scent that still haunts my memory.

As darkness fell, we went through the streets of Jakarta beside the canals. It looked magical. The huge yellow-shimmering moon was floating almost horizontally in the dark sky like a boat. Women were sitting on the edge of the street selling fruit, drinks, sweets and pottery from their open shops. There were lots of little food stands with mobile stoves, pedlars crying their wares, everything lit by the flickering flames of countless little petroleum lamps. Coolies, gleaming with sweat and naked to the waist, loaded with heavy burdens, ran through the confused crowds. Brightly coloured horse-drawn carriages tried to fight their way through the traffic with shouts that were almost drowned by the clatter of the horses’ hooves and the tinkling of the bells hanging from the carriages. Half-naked children ran by, beggars asked for alms. Street traders skipped lightly over the street in front of our car, carrying their bobbing pikuls, bamboo sticks supporting a bundle both in front and behind. I felt as if I was in a swarming ant-hill.

The scent typical of Indonesian towns – a mixture of Kretek cigarettes, frying in coconut oil, hot spices, garlic and dried fish floated in through the open window on a cloud of damp, muggy air, an exciting mixture of smells that seemed to come from an earlier century. My ears were also assailed by many unfamiliar sounds: a gamelan orchestra was playing in the distance, the muezzin called the faithful to prayer, pedlars and cooks praised their wares with loud shouts, wooden carts creaked, becaks (cycle-rickshaws) and bicycles rang their warning bells and cars hooted importunately. There was also a layer of lung-searing smoke over Jakarta: at every edge of the city, rubbish was burned, whose smell continually overpowered the pleasant scents. Even so, our first impressions were of a fairy tale, something out of the Arabian Nights.

On the new, six-lane motorway we passed the Sarinah department store, which was only partially finished. The Indonesians were proud of this first department store, but what it had to offer was limited: batik cloth and Indonesian crafts. The lane markings on the motorway appeared to be merely decorative, since none of the drivers kept to their proper lanes. Next to the Welcome Monument, in the middle of a big, circular pond, stood the Hotel Indonesia, at the time the only luxury hotel in Indonesia: it had been opened only a few months before, and was one of the best in South East Asia. One meal there would have cost the average Indonesian a whole month’s salary. As they told me straight away, not everything there was quite right yet: when the water system had been installed, they had mixed up the hot and cold pipes, so that the toilets were flushed with hot water, for example. They were very modern toilets with an integral bidet, that is, there was an extra stream of water from beneath. Unfortunately, however, the knobs had been exchanged, so that a new guest, who was not familiar with the system, used what he thought was the flush mechanism, only to be squirted in the face by the full stream of the bidet. Many guests had to go straight under the shower…

The journey continued to the suburb of Kebayoran, past the new Senayan sports complex, with the showpiece of Soviet development aid to Indonesia, a roofed stadium for over 100,000 spectators. There was bunting flying all along the streets. Greatly as this would have honoured us, we immediately realised that this had nothing to do with our arrival in the country. The IVth Asian Games and the GANEFO Games were just coming to an end. The Games of the New Emerging Forces were meant to take the place of the Olympics, which in Indonesian eyes had become discredited and decadent because of commercialisation and politicisation. 51 nations were taking part, but sports people who competed here were excluded from the Olympics which were to follow by the IOC.

We continued directly to our AEG colleague in Kebayoran Baru, where a welcome party for us had just begun. We did not even have time to change before we were thrust into the party round, where we were met by many new faces. This was our first appearance in Jakarta.

Among the people I met at this party was Dr. Westrick, a man I was to see again a few days later at my colleague’s house. He was the son of one of Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard’s parliamentary secretaries. He was in Jakarta as the black sheep of the family, something that became obvious as a result of his shady dealings. No one knew what he really did, but he always had plenty of money, piles of rupiahs. He would always exchange deutschmarks for Indonesian rupiahs for you at an advantageous black market rate. His little house was simply furnished, but everything else had been stolen from the newly opened Hotel Indonesia: bedclothes, towels, plates, cups, glasses, cutlery, and even pretty little table lamps with a pewter base and a conical red glass shade, which provided romantic candlelight. He boasted all the time about how easy it was to get full bags past the hotel’s boys and security personnel and then carry them to the car. At that time there was still that mixture of servility and fear that the Dutch had instilled in the Indonesians over the centuries that kept them from checking the ‘white man’: during the colonial period no Indonesian could address a Dutchman, they could only speak when spoken to. The only thing still lacking in Dr. Westrick’s house was a bathtub, but even for him it would have been too much to disconnect one in the Hotel Indonesia.

But there was one thing one had to grant Dr. Westrick: he was a connoisseur of intoxicating perfumes. He claimed to be able to name the perfume of any of the ladies present. We were all on tenterhooks, and after dinner the ladies, ten in number, all queued up. He was very successful, getting all of them right – Vent Vert, Chanel No. 5, Dior, Hermes and so on – until it was the turn of the lady of the house. He sniffed, hesitated, sniffed again, and then said in a loud, determined voice, Washing soap. That was the end of the party – and he was never invited back there again! Not that there would have been much of a chance to invite him, since very soon afterwards he had to flee the country. As the story went, he had swindled a high Indonesian official in a financial deal and was about to be arrested the next day. Nobody heard the exact details. He was seen leaving Kemorayan airport for Bangkok with only two small cases as hand luggage. His loot from the Hotel Indonesia stayed behind, as did his many antiques. Like many irresponsible foreigners he had ordered rare pieces from the state museums from dubious traders, which the latter then ‘acquired’ from the museums and sold to him. It was later reported that Dr. Westrick had moved his sphere of activity to Central America. Years later he was found stabbed there: he had presumably continued his underhand dealings there as well.

On the very first morning – it was a Sunday – we were taken