In many nations, history seems to be covered up so that its narrative never progresses.

History seems to want to close wounds. As though wanting to wipe trauma, the past begs for forgiveness.

La Vita è Bella cannot help but inspire. Maybe because we are living at the end of the 20th century with a number of questions that haunt us both before and after we enter the cinema: in a world with millions of Giosuès, is it true that life, also beauty and cruelty, are in the end a matter of how they are interpreted for us?

Imperialism is not over: imperialistic prejudice still lurks behind enemies of fascism. It is dimly perceptible in Euro-centric views.

These days, following Putin’s attack on Ukraine and the world seeming to be once again split in two, people are talking about the new ‘Cold War’. But times have changed.

Ukraine, since February 2022, will perhaps be destroyed, burned, but still it will not die.

GERMAN author Horst Henry Geerken follows the trace of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi ideology in Indonesia through the third and fourth volume of his book Hitlers Griff nach Asien. These two newest editions, published last year, continued what Geerken started in his previous volumes with the same title. In his recent books, Geerken delved into the diaries of Otto Coerper, which gave detailed descriptions on some 300 Germans who had been jailed in the Dutch Indies. According to Coerper’s notes, those prisoners were released after the Japanese entered the territories in 1942. They then settled in Sarangan by Mount Lawu in East Java, and set up a German school, or Deutsche Schule. Coerper also formed an officer’s training academy for military police.

The president at the time, Sukarno, sent navy cadets from Yogyakarta to learn German at the Deutsche Schule, so that they could understand military equipment, many of which originated from Germany. Among alumni from the Deutsche Schule are Raden Eddy Martadinata dan Donald Isaac Pandjaitan.

Flesh, eyes, skin—the physical and the psychic—have shaped the language of racist violence. In Indonesia, too.