Charismatic Leaders in the Hitler Cafe

The Timeout cafe at the mall around the corner makes a decent cup of ginger coffee. It's got a huge screen in the back that plays soccer games, & the baristas wouldn't care if you hung out all day.

The only striking thing about this cafe is its poster selection. One in particular. Along one wall: sports heroes. Lots of them, mostly Americans. Along the other: heroes of a different sort. From left to right, observe: Albert Einstein, Che Guevara, Bob Marley, 2 of Soekarno (first Indonesian president / founding father), & one of Mussolini & Hitler.

This time the swastika isn't Hindu or Buddhist, it's an actual Nazi swastika. At least the owner had a the good taste of putting Einstein at the opposite end.

The owner wasn't there when we asked & the barista so accustomed to the posters that they'd become invisible to him. He opined that these were a set of great leaders. Bob Marley? He shrugged. They weren’t his. Hitler? He shrugged again.

Youth shrugging off Hitler. The whole future tumbles forward so.
Indonesia spent WWII occupied by Japan. What does Hitler mean to the average kid here? We are left to play the armchair anthropologist, to speculate about motives: Hitler & Mussolini finishing a public line-up of admirable men.

Is it because the owner actually liked Hitler’s ideals?
Could be, but I doubt it. Though last month we saw an entire front shelf devoted to Mein Kampf in translation, in an Indonesian bookstore. Hard to know what that’s about without more information, but there it was.

There’s a case to be made here for a dire future of Indonesian-Chinese, not entirely incomparable to how Jews were regarded in Europe. The Chinese, only 3% of Indonesia but controlling a disproportionate wealth, have never had a fully secure existence here. Given the bloody precedent of the 1998 riots following the money crisis, there are real things to fear. Even this week we heard allegations that the papers in Surabaya, Indonesia’s 2nd largest city, tend to report good things about Chinese citizens using their Indonesian names, but scandals & crimes involving Chinese-Indonesians using their Chinese names.

Or is the owner just doing some provocative kid thing, posting a monster like some teens put up pictures of Marilyn Manson? I don’t think so. The place is too clean & earnest, the posters much too matter-of-fact.

One thing I do know: Several times at least, Soekarno (2 posters of him), who was “a modern Indonesian leader most generally regarded in the West as a prototypical charismatic Third World luminary” [Benedict Anderson, Language & Power], famously invoked Hitler in his speeches on charismatic leadership.

Soekarno defined charisma as “an extraordinary quality of a person, regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged or presumed. ‘Charismatic authority’, hence shall refer to rule over men…to which the governed submit because of their belief in the extraordinary quality of the specific person. The magical sorcerer, the prophet, the leader of hunting & booty expeditions, the warrior chieftain,…the “Caesarist’ ruler….the legitimacy of charismatic rule thus rests upon the belief in magical powers, revelations, and hero worship….Charismatic rule is not managed according to general norms, either traditional or rational…& in this sense is ‘irrational.’. It is ‘revolutionary’ in the sense of not being bound to the existing order.” [translation from H. Stuard Hughes, Consciousness & Society: the Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930.]

Soekarno also publicly lauded Hitler as “extraordinarily clever” in his successful depictions of Third Reich idealism to his people, but also as an example of charismatic leadership that he wanted to avoid. Not because of Hitler’s actions, though. Those don’t even come up in the speech. Rather than accepting him as a Hero or Infallible, a Charismatic Leader in the mold of Hitler, Soekarno wanted the students listening to his speech to accept his leadership by affirming “to Indonesian society the need for leadership in the Revolution, in the State,…simply as an enunciation of a principle of history.”

That is, in contrast to Hitler’s supernatural authority, Soekarno styled himself more as a man of the People.

This is my current hypothesis on why that poster of Hitler is on the wall of a homely cafe: I suspect that President Soekarno brought Hitler into the public consciousness as a forceful, effective leadership figure completely removed from his actual actions or policies. The operating regard for Hilter, in this case, doesn’t have anything to do with Jews or Germany or genocide or ethnicities. There's a different conception of History at work here, different than we're accustomed to allowing for the likes of Hitler.

Instead, well-respected Soekarno invoked & in doing so validated Hitler to the general public, not as the instigator of the holocaust, but merely as an example of a leadership Type (charismatic), a leadership Style (forceful & effective), & a Mythic Figure belonging not to the 1930s & 40s but to the abstract Past, to History In General. One man in a large, political pantheon.

In some ways it frightens me to see how easily that's done. I have to wonder if this won't, one generation soon, happen in the US & even in Europe. With enough remove & just the right slant, one might coolly compliment the devil himself for his admirably effective tactics. With even more remove & just the right slant, the young audience to that speech could nod & even admire him.

By & by, here’s one more fact:

Driving along a strip of roadside shack-shops, some of them selling baskets, other shoes, badminton & tennis rackets, wheel-chairs & crutches, luggage, juice, we saw a tiny, framed poster shack. Right there on the sidewalk were all the exact same black & white posters. All of them: Einstein, Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Soekarno, Hitler & Mussolini. A couple different ones of each.

The Timeout café owner? What are the chance he just went out & bought the whole set, merely the closest posters to the road. Did he even look at them? It doesn’t answer the question of why Hitler posters are for sale at all, or why of all the sets he could have gotten, the café owner bought that one, but it does make the question a much bigger one.

I still favor my hypothesis about Soekarno making it possible to regard Hitler as a neutral Leader. Still, you think you've cleverly figured the answer to something, until you just happen to notice this little thing by the side of the road, this tiny detail in a shack that you so easily might have missed, & all over again the whole inquiry turns on its head.