The Voorwoord (foreword) of De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh was a short polemical essay by G. B. Hooijer on the silence of Dutch art and letters concerning the Atjeh-oorlog, prefixed to his album of twenty-four plates on the abandoned Dutch posts of Groot-Atjeh. It is one of the more explicit contemporary statements of the Dutch metropolitan reluctance to acknowledge the war in Sumatra.
The argument
Hooijer opened with the figure of the Nederlandsche maagd — “the Netherlands maiden,” described as een bescheidene jonkvrouw van goeden huize (“a modest young lady of good family”) standing with her lion in her little garden — which the Dutch nation had chosen as a fitting symbol of itself. The nation, he wrote, boasted that its literature found translators abroad, that its paintings were known in every part of the world and that its music was mentioned with honour in foreign countries. Yet its voice was not heard in the Europeesch Concert, although it was called the second colonial power; its naval flag was rarely displayed, although its merchant ships ploughed every sea; and its bearing among the kingdoms of the earth remained hoogst eenvoudig (“extremely plain”), although it was blessed with a great fortune.
The war on North Sumatra, which the nation had been waging for a quarter of a century and which devoured men and money, was regarded, Hooijer complained, als een huishoudelijke onaangenaamheid — as a domestic unpleasantness about which it preferred to speak as little as possible in public. He asked whether such modesty was not somewhat exaggerated.
The catalogue of absences
Hooijer enumerated what the war had failed to produce in Dutch culture:
- the soundest existing work on the Atjeh-krijg dealt only with the first nine years of the conflict;
- beside that military study stood only one further work, a study of the land, people and customs of the Achehnese — a reference understood to be Snouck Hurgronje’s ethnography;
- no literary work of art and no powerful poem had appeared to celebrate the struggle;
- the only painting relating to the war had been made by a Frenchman;
- in music, the Dutch remained confined to eenige soldatendeuntjes (“a few soldiers’ ditties”).
Granting that it was out of fashion to write great poems on subjects touching a whole people, and that the Netherlands possessed no battle-painters, he asked whether there were then no composers in the country who could find motifs in so lofty a subject.
The proposed symphony
Hooijer sketched the programme of the composition he had in mind, and in doing so summarised his own periodisation of the Aceh War: the mysterious beginning, full of anxiety and fear of the European great powers; the fearful war-music with which the first expedition departed, passing into violent battle-noise and then suddenly dying away; the stately advance of the second expedition, rolling broadly along the shores of Atjeh; the dissonances that followed Van Swieten’s departure, with the shrill sound of the Allah il Allah, first drowned by the war- and victory-song under Van der Heijden and thereafter again dominant; then dull, muffled music expressing the Dutch concealment behind the geconcentreerde linie; and finally the peculiar song developing out of it, in which the patriotic anthem Wien Neêrlands bloed attempted to harmonise with the war-music of Toekoe Oemar, ending in a suddenly breaking, confused and violent sound out of which the Dutch war-song rose ever clearer and higher, to pass at last into a prophetic vredelied (“peace-song”).
The motif of that peace-song, he argued, could truly serve as the thread through the whole, becoming ever more distinct, while the war-song could be repeated with new settings and stronger chords — for the restoration of order and peace had always been the Dutch aim, and the whole war showed a continual repetition of the same thing in ever mightier forms.
The unrepeatable episode
Hooijer identified one episode within the war that he said had found no repetition and never would: die periode, waarin Hollander en Atjeher samen optrekken tegen den Moslemin, en de Nederlandsche soldaat moet marcheeren op Toekoe Oemar’s gefluit — “that period in which Hollander and Achehnese advance together against the Moslemin, and the Dutch soldier must march to Toekoe Oemar’s whistle.” That period, he wrote, was for this reason doubly interesting, and it was this period that he would try to hold fast in woord en beeld (“in word and image”), so that it might also serve as instruction to the poet, painter or composer who should one day be inspired by the Dutch struggle on North Sumatra, and prove that the Netherlands maiden knew how to overcome her timidity and to feel greatly where she appeared as a great colonial power.
See Also
- De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh (Hooijer, 1897)
- G. B. Hooijer
- Lijst der Platen of De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh
- Geconcentreerde linie
- Teukoe Oemar
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- General van der Heijden
- Aceh War
Source
De verlaten posten in Groot-Atjeh, door G. B. Hooijer, Gep. Luit.-Kolonel O. I. Leger, met 24 platen (Haarlem: De Erven F. Bohn; Batavia: G. Kolff & Co., 1897). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Centrale Boekerij, Amsterdam. OCR-filename: 20260719_140140_DLP-134-De_verlaten_posten_in_Groot_Atjeh_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt, Voorwoord (unpaginated, pp. 7-8).