This isn’t a joke, there really is a Nazi, Hitler themed cafe called Soldier Cafe (Soldaten Kaffee) in Indonesia. This oddly furnished cafe resides in West Java’s provincial capital of Bandung. It sounds nuts, but I guess they don’t know that much about WWII over there. It’s probably not on their syllabus at school, and lets be honest, Nazi uniforms do look pretty cool if you can tear away your preconceptions for a while.
I’m not pro-Hitler or pro-Fascism of course, please don’t get me wrong. The owner of this Nazi cafe -Henry Mulyana – is also non-Fascist. He was summoned to the mayor of the region’s office to explain himself, people were complaining that he was inciting racism and hatred. Mulyana said he was just trying to attract trade. Well, I’m pretty sure his cafe wouldn’t have been featured on global news if he’d gone for a standard theme, so I suppose it is working.
The cafe has been running for a while but it’s only since Western media picked up on it that there’s been a big fuss. I’m not sure where I stand on it really? Idolising something so evil seems pretty weird, but they weren’t effected by it and aren’t offended by it so should we just pipe down?
One of the cafe’s customers is quoted as saying: “We’re living in Indonesia and Indonesians weren’t tortured in the Holocaust, so we don’t really care,” which seems a bit cavalier, but there’s worse things going on in this world to get worked up about. Choose your battles.
The owner says this on his FB page:
…… I hope the world understands that we’re just reenactors who likes reenactment and war history as interest only. Not glorifying hatred or violence.
Authorities are still deciding what to do about the matter, Mr Mulyana says he will change the theme if he is asked to, but he hopes he won’t be asked.
Medieval battle reenactors that conduct mock battles aren’t really royalists, actors in films aren’t really murderers. This is OK isn’t it?
