Much has been written after Jeroen Brouwers’ death about his feud with Rudy Kousbroek, which degenerated into one of the most vicious polemics in Dutch literature. But who was actually right? I never saw that question asked, let alone answered.
I myself had also turned a blind eye to it when I wrote a column about this case four years ago. I had my doubts and only noticed that Kousbroek in a 2005 reprint of his controversial book The East Indian Camp Syndrome had to withdraw his understanding of the Japanese Emperor Hirohito to a large extent on the basis of new information: “So Hirohito was in reality less innocent and peace-loving than I have described him here […]†
Brouwers had previously called Hirohito a war criminal in the same breath as Hitler – and therefore Kousbroek a “war criminal friend”. Did he win the day in this polemic? Kousbroek didn’t think so, because he continued to attack Brouwers fiercely in that reprint. Justly? I decided to re-read everything they had written on this subject.
The core of this polemic concerned a differing view on the conditions in the Japanese camps during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia. Both Brouwers and Kousbroek had been in such a camp as children. Brouwers had experienced it as hell, while Kousbroek thought it was not that bad. He saw Brouwers and others as suffering from the ‘East Indian camp syndrome’, that is to say, “the unwillingness to find out what it really was like and prefer to cling to an untrue representation of things, to a myth.”
Brouwers objected that he had written a novel and not a historical report, but continued to maintain that ‘the brutal behavior of the Japs during their warfare in Asia […] that of the krauts […] led by Hitler”.
Here we touch the most sensitive nerve of this polemic. Kousbroek repeatedly warns that the misdeeds of the Japanese should not be compared with those of the Germans, who had the character of systematic extermination. “The Japanese never killed six-and-a-half million people. There was no ‘systemic crime’ among the Japanese. There were excesses, but that is something of a completely different order.”
What strikes me afterwards is that Brouwers has little rebuttal to this argument that is difficult to rebut. He calls “Japanese equivalents of the German torture methods and gas chambers” that he has read about, but he hardly elaborates on Kousbroek’s observation that the Holocaust had a unique industrial character. Kousbroek also mentions figures: 120,000 Dutchmen returned from the Indies captivity (out of 140,000), less than 6,000 from the German camps.
In a review of Kousbroek’s book, writer Hans Vervoort, who also grew up in a Japanese camp, did not drop out of Kousbroek at the time, but he did think that he could have shown more patience and understanding ‘for the emotional unreasonableness of his opponents’.
My conclusion: Kousbroek put the suffering in the Japanese camps into perspective too clinically, but Brouwers exaggerated that suffering when he made comparisons with the German extermination camps. And so: the polemic between Brouwers and Kousbroek can go down in the books as an undecided battle.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 25, 2022