AT the end of the summer of 1929, a brown-skinned youth took his first step in Amsterdam. Just arriving from the Dutch East Indies, Sutan Sjahrir, the young man, was readily attracted by the lively atmosphere of Dutch society, as if moving without any pause. “There’s nothing more surprising when I arrived in the Netherlands,” he writes in Renungan Indonesia (Reflections on Indonesia). “The first months are always memorable.”

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