the room next to mine lived a Belgian refugee, Herman, a youth who worked in a jam factory in Haarlem.33 This young man had left Belgium after it was attacked by the Germans. The landlady was a working woman—honest, simple, and in everything filled with a humanitarian spirit at a time when the world showed no humanity toward her. Her husband had been sick with a lung disease for a long time and was being nursed in a hospital. He was really only waiting to meet his death. Formerly, Van der Mey (the name of this poor sick man) had been an ironworker in a workshop in Haarlem. Since falling sick, he had received no pay, pension, or any other kind of assistance. Like a sick mule he was just abandoned. Nyonya van der Mey lived by renting rooms to us and by the little bit of help she received from her grown child, who worked as a lowly clerk in an office in Amsterdam. What she got from Herman and me didn’t really amount to much at all because the food she provided for us used up almost all of our rent. From this small income and the help she got from her child Nyonya van der Mey had to pay her husband’s hospital expenses every month. I need not describe her poverty any further. I should only add that the patience of this simple working woman was far from insignificant.34
The young Van der Mey was sympathetic to the Allies (England, France, and Belgium) and was a faithful reader of De Telegraaf, a fiercely anti-German newspaper that spoke of the Germans as “dirty Krauts.”35 At that time I could see no difference between German, English, or Dutch imperialism, and because of this we often had disagreements. During one of these debates, which had gone on for some time and was rather spirited, Herman suddenly chimed in, saying, “You’re right, Ipie (that was my nickname).36 I agree. As far as I’m concerned they’re all a bunch of filthy, thieving swine.” Hot-blooded as all Belgians, Herman already had a knife in his hand. I tried to calm him. Fortunately, Van der Mey was sensible and gave in.
It seems that Herman, a reader of Het Volk, the newspaper of the Social Democratic Workers Party in the Netherlands, had waited a long time to get Van der Mey, reader of De Telegraaf.37 When Herman came home from work with a shining face and put his hand into his pocket, I knew what he would pull out. It would be a magazine, brochure, or essay, burning with anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist sentiments. Herman enjoyed reading fiery things, and when necessary could act strongly.
Step by step, pushed by circumstances within and around me—influenced and illuminated by the books I was reading, in accordance with the laws of quantity being transformed into quality—suddenly in spirit and in understanding I was in a state normally termed revolutionary.
[29] When I started to read meaningful books, my admiration for the unity of spirit and organization of the Germans attracted me to Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who had strongly influenced the young German fighters of that time.
On the corner of Jacobin Street was a bookstore, which I would pass on my way to and from school. My interest in this bookstore rose together with the tumult of the war in the battlefields of Europe and the whole Sturm und Drang atmosphere that affected my generation. No significant book escaped my eye and my lightning reading. But my ability to buy was very limited and could be exercised only by closing my eyes to everything but books, and pulling my belt a little tighter. The series De groote denkers der eeuwen38 was displayed behind the window as were books like Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zoo spraak Zarathustra and another of his essays that was no less popular among German youth at that time, De Wil tot Macht.39
If ever I was attracted to language, it was to Nietzsche’s terms, such as Die Umwertung aller Werten (the transvaluation of all values). Yet it was apparent to me that Nietzsche’s philosophy was centered on one nation, Germany, and one class of Germans in particular, the Junkers, the aristocracy allied with the wealthy. The iron will, the desire that was reflected in the Übermensch at the time of the First World War, manifested itself in the Wilhelm-Hindenburg-Stinnes alliance. In the Second World War, this iron will appeared as an alliance among Hitler, Goering, and Krupp. I quickly came to understand the German nature of Nietzsche’s philosophy when I tried to enter the German army to receive German training. I was told that the German army did not accept any foreigners and did not have a volunteer foreign force.40
After that I was attracted to the deeper Umwertung aller Werten (revaluation of all values) inherent in the movement for Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Thomas Carlyle’s book De Fransche Revolutie (or De Groote Fransche Omwenteling) long lain buried among a few others in my trunk.41 had When we were parting, my teacher Horensma lent me several of his former textbooks. The above-mentioned book had already gone back and forth several times between his trunk and my own. Finally he put it into my trunk, saying, “Now go to it!”
Politics was a terra incognita for me then.42 I neither hated nor liked it, for I knew absolutely nothing of its existence. But in that time of Sturm und Drang, when ideas were leaping about, hiding, turning left and right, and breaking through like dammed-up water, the book De Fransche Revolutie suddenly appeared as a resting place for my weary, questing thoughts.43
[30] One proof of the “liberty, equality, and fraternity” of the French nation was their hospitality toward the colored peoples who were in their country at that time. Was it not a fact that the Arabs, Senegalese, and Annamese were faithfully and firmly defending “France” in the European battlefield? Just like the Gurkhas, whose courage and fidelity alongside the English were admired by the whole world, the soldiers from French Algeria were faithful to France.
At that time, my thoughts had not yet developed to the stage of dialectical materialism and to an analysis of the slogan Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité in the context of capitalism and imperialism. My outlook did not yet include an image of bourgeois and proletarian classes alongside colonized and colonizing nations. Such a development came only as a byproduct of my search for a satisfactory understanding of the Russian communist revolution, which shook the world like a bomb in October 1917. It was only then that the old books on Marx and Engels’ philosophy came alive for me: Het Kapitaal in a translation by Van der Goes, Marxtische [sic] Ekonomie, by Kautsky, and others, as well as the many pamphlets being published on the Russian social revolution of October 1917.44
The circle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis had reached its first stage. “Affirmation, Negation, Negation of the Negation” secured a garden of happiness in which to reign. It was an age of passion and tumult. Material conditions stimulated ideas, which moved like a mountain stream—leaping, lying still, flowing and surging through to the ocean.45
Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—in the field of philosophy, this process took the following form: Nietzsche as thesis, Rousseau as antithesis, and finally Marx and Engels as synthesis. In the field of politics, it took the form of Wilhelm-Hindenburg-Stinnes as affirmation, Danton-Robespierre-Marat as negation, and the Bolsheviks as the negation of the negation.
In the turbulent life I led during those six years in the Netherlands, I experienced for myself the first stage of the immutable process, “reality as the source of all ideas.” The second stage of the process, “ideas being able to transform reality,” was what I felt to be my life’s responsibility, which I had to carry out regardless of the difficulties I might face.
[31] It is true that will, skills, and the emotions develop under good physical conditions: Mens sana in corpore sano.46 But it does not work the other way: that one’s spirit is destroyed by a deterioration in health. Frequently illness is not even felt if the will to struggle provides a clear and firm understanding, with a great hope of victory. The new society, though still an unrealized desire, has a spirit which seems not to recognize the obstacles of bodily or societal sickness. It is as if the struggle becomes the soul of life and the life of the soul.
Doctor Jansen, who was treating my pleurisy, was already fairly old. He was friendly and used
