"Wouldn't It Be Smarter to Let the Malay Colonize Europe?": Postcolonial Critique, Antiglobalism, and Racism in the Travel Books of the Bohemian- German Author Richard Katz (1888–1968)

Abstract:

The travel books of the Bohemian-German author Richard Katz (1888–1968) were once among the most popular publications in German literature but have since been forgotten. This essay intends to reread, from a postcolonial perspective, Katz’s work from the interwar period. It focuses on his book about the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia, Heitere Tage mit braunen Menschen (1930), in order to explain how and why the early form of postcolonial and antiglobalist critique we find in Katz’s writings could coexist with other ideas that reiterated nineteenth-century colonialist and racist conceptions about the indigenous Other and people of mixed race. The latter is all the more intriguing considering that Katz himself, being Jewish, was soon to become the victim of a political ideology marked by ideas similar to some of the ones he defended when writing about Southeast Asia.