In The Complete Lives of Camp People Rudolf Mrazek presents a sweeping study of the material and cultural lives of twentieth-century concentration camp internees and the multiple ways in which their experiences speak to the fundamental logics of modernity. Mrazek focuses on the minutiae of daily life in two camps: Theresienstadt, a Nazi "ghetto" for Jews near Prague, and the Dutch "isolation camp" Boven Digoel-which was located in a remote part of New Guinea between 1927 and 1943 and held Indonesian rebels who attempted to overthrow the colonial government. Drawing on a mix of interviews with survivors and their descendants, archival accounts, ephemera, and media representations, Mrazek shows how modern life's most mundane tasks-buying clothes, getting haircuts, playing sports-continued on in the camps, which were themselves designed, built, and managed in accordance with modernity's tenets. In this way, Mrazek demonstrates that concentration camps are not exceptional spaces; they are the locus of modernity in its most distilled form.

In The Complete Lives of Camp People Rudolf Mrazek presents a sweeping study of the material and cultural lives of twentieth-century concentration camp internees and the multiple ways in which their experiences speak to the fundamental logics of modernity. Mrazek focuses on the minutiae of daily life in two camps: Theresienstadt, a Nazi "ghetto" for Jews near Prague, and the Dutch "isolation camp" Boven Digoel-which was located in a remote part of New Guinea between 1927 and 1943 and held Indonesian rebels who attempted to overthrow the colonial government. Drawing on a mix of interviews with survivors and their descendants, archival accounts, ephemera, and media representations, Mrazek shows how modern life's most mundane tasks-buying clothes, getting haircuts, playing sports-continued on in the camps, which were themselves designed, built, and managed in accordance with modernity's tenets. In this way, Mrazek demonstrates that concentration camps are not exceptional spaces; they are the locus of modernity in its most distilled form.

Based on close reading of historical documents--poetry as much as statistics--and focused on the conceptualization of technology, this book is an unconventional evocation of late colonial Netherlands East Indies (today Indonesia). In considering technology and the ways that people use and think about "things," Rudolf Mrazek invents an original way to talk about freedom, colonialism, nationalism, literature, revolution, and human nature.

The central chapters comprise vignettes and take up, in turn, transportation (from shoes to road-building to motorcycle clubs), architecture (from prison construction to home air-conditioning), optical technologies (from photography to fingerprinting), clothing and fashion, and the introduction of radio and radio stations. The text clusters around a group of fascinating recurring characters representing colonialism, nationalism, and the awkward, inevitable presence of the European cultural, intellectual, and political avant-garde: Tillema, the pharmacist-author of Kromoblanda; the explorer/engineer IJzerman; the "Javanese princess" Kartina; the Indonesia nationalist journalist Mas Marco; the Dutch novelist Couperus; the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer; and Dutch left-wing liberal Wim Wertheim and his wife.

In colonial Indies, as elsewhere, people employed what Proust called "remembering" and what Heidegger called "thinging" to sense and make sense of the world. In using this observation to approach Indonesian society, Mrazek captures that society off balance, allowing us to see it in unfamiliar positions. The result is a singular work with surprises for readers throughout the social sciences, not least those interested in Southeast Asia or colonialism more broadly."

A comprehensive biography of the Indonesian nationalist leader and Prime Minister of the Indonesian Republic, Sutan Sjahrir. This work is both a study of an individual and the social conditions that shaped him. The author has conducted extensive research and interviews with those who knew Sjahrir personally, politically, and by reputation.

"A Certain Age" is an unconventional, evocative work of history and a moving reflection on memory, modernity, space, time, and the limitations of traditional historical narratives. Rudolf Mrazek visited Indonesia throughout the 1990s, recording lengthy interviews with elderly intellectuals in and around Jakarta. With few exceptions, they were part of an urban elite born under colonial rule and educated at Dutch schools. From the early twentieth century, through the late colonial era, the national revolution, and well into independence after 1945, these intellectuals injected their ideas of modernity, progress, and freedom into local and national discussion.

When Mrazek began his interviews, he expected to discuss phenomena such as the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism. His interviewees, however, wanted to share more personal recollections. Mrazek illuminates their stories of the past with evocative depictions of their late-twentieth-century surroundings. He brings to bear insights from thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht, Le Corbusier, and Marcel Proust, and from his youth in Prague, another metropolis with its own experience of passages and revolution. Architectural and spatial tropes organize the book. Thresholds, windowsills, and sidewalks come to seem more apt as descriptors of historical transitions than colonial and postcolonial, or modern and postmodern. Asphalt roads, homes, classrooms, fences, and windows organize movement, perceptions, and selves in relation to others. "A Certain Age" is a portal into questions about how the past informs the present and how historical accounts are inevitably partial and incomplete.

Indonesia is a semi-annual journal devoted to the timely study of Indonesia's culture, history, government, economy, and society. It features original scholarly articles, interviews, translations, and book reviews. Published by Cornell University's Southeast Asia Program since April 1966, the journal provides area scholars and interested readers with contemporary analysis of Indonesia and an extensive archive of research pertaining to the nation and region.